As for drug songs, why bother with veiled references?
Eric Clapton - "Cocaine"
Well, it’s a brief fantasy. 
I heard an interview with Tom Petty where he said that his record company pressured him to bowdlerize the line “You think you’re gonna take her away/ With you money and your cocaine.” They though champagne would work just as well. At least they said they thought that. I don’t believe that a record company executive in the 70s wouldn’t know better from firsthand experience.
I don’t think I’ve heard the song enough to check & see if it’s accurate, but supposedly in Madonna’s Open Your Heart, at the end she chants “come on, baby” and “open your heart to me”, and the two phrases are overlaid in such a way as to come off sounding like “come on me”.
Simon & Garfunkel’s Cecilia- which I still hear on the classic rock stations- contains the right-out-there-and-in-your-face line “Makin’ love in the afternoon with Cecilia, up in my bedroom… I got up to wash my face…” As a kid I used to listen to my parent’s album and think, why would his face be dirty if he was in bed? Didn’t get it. Now I do.
A lot of ZZ Top’s songs are openly filthy, like “Tubesteak Boogie” and “Pearl Necklace,” but they get tons of airplay.
Speaking of which - Late in the Evening’s “I went outside and smoked myself a jayyyyyyyyyyyy.”
Although I still maintain the next line would be better if he had said “so I went back in and blew that joint away”.
Back in 1958, *I Got A Rocket In My Pocket * by **Jimmy Lloyd **
I didn’t come here to listen, so cut the scene
I got a rocket in my pocket and a roll in my jeans
Let’s go some place so we can rock a bit
I got a rocket in my pocket and the fuse is lit
That’s more likely a reference to the frozen cod delicacy popular in Britain back in the dark ages.
I’ve always thought that seventies hit “Afternoon Delight” is remarkably rude if you look at the lyrics in the cold light of day. “Rubbin’ sticks and stones together”?
In one of my Beatles biographies, I think it’s Paul who explains that “finger pie” is what they’d call what they did with their girlfriends, riding home late at night on the top level of the double-decker bus. Digital stimulation, as it were. The “four of fish” is food. The other…not so much.
When I was a kid in a private Christian school, they held an assembly to talk to us all about the e-e-evils of rock music, and this was one of the “dirty” songs they spoke of. All of us little grade schoolers were really surprised…we thought it was about skyrockets or something.
For years Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” had the line about “funky shit going down in the city”. Now it’s “funky kicks”.
Yep, that one’s been widely acknowledged. Another one that John Lennon once pointed out is the backing vocals going “tit-tit-tit-tit” on “Girl.”
No, she says Lewis Carroll did that, not her. 
They’ve always existed in tandem. The LP version says “funky shit,” the single version says “funky kicks.” It doesn’t help that they frankensteined a version together with the synthesizer opening of the LP grafted onto the single version, for release on his first Greatest Hits album.
I don’t see why these should be censored
Even people who grew up in the 60s weren’t aware of most of the history of rock ‘n’ roll. I know that it was much later that I started doing serious reading about "black’ music - once an actual record category, except where it was called “race” music or even “nigger” music - r&b, blues, and all the variations. These records were not played on the radio or sold in mainstream white record stores. You had to live in the black part of town to hear them on the jukeboxes, or go to the live performances. The lyrics were forthrightly about sex, coded or straight. Some of the euphemisms were done for record play, some to get them past local censors, some just because they were funnier, funkier, or more suggestive that way.
There are, literally, whole books about when and what the first rock and roll record was, but everybody agrees that it evolved out of black music in the late 1940s. That’s one major reason it was so vilified by adults in the 1950s.
Rock became acceptable when whites started toning down the frank sex of the lyrics and blacks saw how big the white market could be. There are a million stories about famous songs being rewritten to make them playable.
Too much of a good thing is never enough is America’s motto, so eventually rock became cretinized and infantilized by the late 1950s. Even so, people then as much as today saw a sexual subtext in everything, no matter how innocent.
I happen to be reading Tim Riley’s Fever: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Transformed Gender in America and he argues that every song that sounded sexual was sexual. I didn’t mind when he applies this to early Presley or to Tina Turner, but he takes it too far in places in his girl group chapter.
He can argue until he’s blue in the face that “Chapel of Love,” by the Dixie Cups is code for “we did it” (as in “we’re going to the chapel” means “we went all the way”) but I think it’s hogwash. You can’t hear that song as anything other than “I’m holding out until you put a ring on my finger.”
If you want to extend “dirty words” to mere sexual metaphor, you can take your pick of 100,000 songs at any time in rock’s history or prehistory. And you can extend it to another 100,000 songs if you decide to interpret black as white, in any of several many ways.
Back to the thread. What about Hoyt Axton’s “The Pusher,” done by Steppenwolf on their first album?
Steppenwolf also has a song titled “Ball Crusher.” Wonder what that’s about? 
How many times have I heard that song and only now did I get that?! :smack: Of course I just recently realized that when Springsteen wants to ramrod with his honey till half past dawn, he may not mean just dance around. :o
I think I just decided what it meant as a kid and explored it no further.
An amazingly strong ping pong player?
Don’t feel bad about not getting the “Cecilia” reference. I look for stuff like this and I never even thought of it that way until this thread.
As far as “Ramrod,” just remember that all songs about cars are really songs about sex. Always.
So-called “race music” was definitely being heard on the airwaves, at least in the South. Nat Williams, a black DJ at WDIA started airing this music in Memphis in the 40s. Cite. Dewey Phillips, a white DJ at a rival station in Memphis started spinning these records in 1950. Cite. That’s where all those future rockabillies like Elvis and Carl Perkins picked up the sound.