Perhaps you have never mashed potatoes with an old-fashioned potato masher. In the dance, your feet make the same kind of rotary grinding motion that you use when mashing potatoes. The sixties were before the days of food processors.
Kids these days…
Here’s another “groovy” reference from Sammy Davis Jr’s “The Candy Man”:
Who can take a rainbow (who can take a rainbow)
Wrap it in a sigh (wrap it in a sigh)
Soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie…
What part do you find hard to believe, that bars might close early on Christmas Eve, or that you can buy beer 6 at a time in a liquor store?
Both seem totally reasonable to me.
Actually, rereading this post, the title of the song is also outdated. The MTA has long been superceded by the MBTA.
I think he’s referring to the line “and we drank it in her car”. These days cops are far more likely to crack down on people consuming alcohol in a vehicle. There is little or no tolerance for DUI and for open containers in a car.
I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55” yet. I can’t believe I didn’t mention it myself. People still want to drive fast, but when Sammy wrote the song, the nationwide speed limit was 55 mph.
That’s it. I don’t think Fogelberg could do that today.
Well, he’s dead, so of course not, but you know.
It is a song protesting a fare increase. When he got on it was a dime, and they raised it to 15 cents while he was riding. Some MBTA trains made you pay when you got off when I was living in Boston - Green line.
What I never understood was why Charlie’s wife didn’t give him that nickel with his lunch…
And if that wasn’t enough, you have
You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’
which dates “Eve of Destruction” even more.
That begs the question why you didn’t quote that line.
The problem is my crystal ball is in the shop for routine maintenance this week. I can’t read your mind.
He quoted it. (Embiggening mine)
I picked it up right away. I didn’t need a crystal ball.
I know this one! It means that a page boy will run/walk through the lobby/lounge, shouting/announcing “Beyonce” “Beyonce” “Beyonce”
My grandfather was a page for a while.
He also mentioned “Mrs Sweeney”, a famous beauty of the day in London society. Later she married the Duke of Argyll and featured in a divorce case in the early 1960s featuring the kind of salacious evidence the tabloids pounced on, including a photo of her favouring a man whose head wasn’t in the picture. This was a time when it was open season on stories of sexual shenanigans in high places, and there was much speculation as to who it was (in the end, I believe Douglas Fairbanks Jr owned up to it). Eventually, someone wrote an opera about her decline as a reclusive old lady living in the Savoy Hotel.
Then there’s a large part of the original lyrics on Puttin’ On The Ritz, which would be utterly non-PC today, as deliberately patronising to black people.
I know the story behind the song. I was referring to the fares as being outdated, not the payment method. On the Red Line, Quincy, Quincy Adams and Braintree stations also made you pay upon exiting at least until the nineties.
Well, give it a decade or two, and it’ll be fashionably relevant again. :mad: Or maybe we’ll retitle it “Chinese”. But then why would the song be quoting Prokofiev?
I heard a live rendition of the song from an 1983 concert where John Wetton changed that lyric to “And now you find yourself in '83, those disco hotspots hold no charm for me”… but I suspect that had to have gotten tiring, trying to find relevant rhymes for every year you might have to do a performance.
So, did Charlie ever get off the train??
I thought that the first time I heard it, too.
Yet, what I really don’t get how such an illogical song can be so good. 
His fate is still unlearned…
Well, since the 30’s used ‘dough’ as slang for money, the 60s and 70s used ‘bread’, today it’s probably ‘Stone-ground, spelt-and-sunflower (with rye highlights), low-GI, free-range, hand-teased-by-artisan-virgins, based-on-a-14th-century-Persian-recipe-found-in-a-tomb, baguette/blini/bap’.
Considering what time of year’s coming up, the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” has a reference to 1981. I’m guessing that nobody thought people would still be listening to it almost 35 years later.
“…most of '81 passed along those lines…”
I had the idea today to start a thread along these lines after thinking of this example, but since there’s an existing one I figured I’d zombify it.
Blink-182’s “What’s My Age Again?”, which since it was recorded in 1999 now counts as an “older song”, features this verse;
Then later on, on the drive home
I called her mom from a payphone
I said I was the cops and your husband’s in jail
The state looks down on sodomy…
What the hell is call ID?
Calling someone on a payphone is a very old-fashioned concept in this day and age, caller ID is ubiquitous to the point that most people won’t answer calls from blocked numbers, and “sodomy” has been legal in all US states since 2003 so there’s no reason the singer’s ex’s mom’s husband would have been arrested for it.
