Rod Stewart’s album Blondes Have More Fun has quite a few. Among them, the song Dirty Weekend:
“I’ll bring the red wine you bring the ludes
Your mother’s doctor must be quite a dude
We’ll hang the ‘Don’t Disturb’ outside our door
I’m gonna rock you till your pussy’s sore”
Yeah, he’s big with the retrospective explanations of song lyrics. He also claims that “Got to Get You Into My Life” is about marijuana, which just makes no sense. Anyway, I bet when he wrote the “fish and finger pie” line he was thinking of the ubiquitous Fish Fingers rather than some memory he claims to have of manually stimulating girlfriends on 1950s Liverpool buses, something so shocking that it would probably have got him deported in those straight-laced times.
I had figured this out about '50 rock and blues songs. I also knew of this fairly innocent number by the Beatles called “Drive my Car”. I never connected the two until a couple years after I learned that classic blues had a major influence on them.
The song is full of double entendres, most of which seem intentional given the Fab Four’s grounding in blues. :smack:
Similar radio shows originated in Nashville in the 50’s and later. We used to sit out in the gravel pit in our cars and listen to WLAC and hear Hoss Allen and others play R&B stuff. Randy’s Record Rack was a big sponsor.
Sure, some of these records were played on some stations in some locations. And the closer you get to the present the more of them you heard.
But race records go way back in time, long before the late 1940s. And even by the 1960s, the overwhelming majority of white Americans had never heard them. Or even heard of them. Rock music had no written history, and compilation LPs were scarce to nonexistent. Early history was rediscovered very late in the game.
Paul’s line about the origin of “finger pie” probably isn’t some retro revisionism, though. It goes back a long ways, at least 30 years, and maybe into the 60s. I can’t remember when I first heard it, but it was early enough that they still had a “nice” image despite some known drug use.
Another song that was unstoppable, but had to be censored first, was The Knack’s “Good Girls Don’t.” Parts of the vocal were changed for the single: from “wishin’ you could get inside her pants” to “wishin’ she was givin’ you a chance” and “‘til she’s sittin’ on your face” to “'til she puts you in your place.” (“and it hurts!”)
How are you defining “race music”? Because the industry used the term to describe R&B. And if you are claiming that an “overwhelming majority of white Americans” hadn’t heard R&B by the 60s, well, that’s an indefensible statement.
I remember the first time my dad heard that song - he was driving the car, and almost wrecked it. He was amazed (back then) that they could say Voulez-vous couchez avec moi? on the radio, since it translates as “Would you go to bed with me?”.
I think Paul has also said that “Got to Get You Into My Life” is about marijuana. I don’t have a cite though. Maybe fishbicycle knows…
It was either said in “Anthology”, or maybe his book, “Many Years From Now.”
“Well I make her pussy burn with a stroke of my hand…”
Nope. Nothing dirty there.
Speaking of The Beatles, I heard that **Come Together ** was John Lennon’s fantasy about a group simultaneous orgasm in which he was the recipient, if you will.
“Come together, right now, over me.”
That’s new to me. To quote him from the “One To One” concert before they played it, “We’re gonna go back in the past just once. You probably remember this one better than I do…I’ve gotta stop writing these gobbledygook lyrics…”
He was strung out on smack for most of 1969, and had little or no memory of what he’d done then. “Come Together Right Now” was originally conceived as a slogan for Timothy Leary’s failed run for office. John promised to write him a song for it. After one thing or another, that idea fell by the wayside, and culminated in possibly the most interesting record they ever made. I’ve never read anything to suggest what you suggested he was suggesting.
I guess I don’t see how my suggestions are any different from anything else being discussed in this thread?
You’re talking to a girl who doesn’t believe anything should be censored. 
From that same album, a minor hit called Reelin’ and Rockin’.
It’s in the same vein as Rock Around The Clock.
Remember the lyrics:
Looked at my watch and it was quarter past one,
I said "Come on baby, let’s have us some fun
…
Looked at my watch it was a quarter past two,
You know, she said she didn’t but I know she do!
The last verse went:
We boogied in the kitchen
We boogied in the hall
I got some on my fingers
So I wiped it on the wall!
I could not believe that Los Angeles stations would play that last verse in 1971! Chuck Berry was a nasty little duck-walker!
I think the Beatles song “Daytripper” contains the line “She’s a prick teaser.” I believe it’s usually transcribed as “big teaser,” but I’m fairly certain I read in some Beatles biography that John was actually saying “prick” in the studio.
Nobody had used race music as a genre term for a decade by the 60s. Billboard, among the first, dropped use of the name for its charts of that music as of June 17, 1949 and used r&b instead. By the end of the 50s I don’t think anybody was publicly using the term as a genre label.
It’s come back since as an overall term for black popular music in the title of a couple of historical books, but race music was its own field for perhaps two or three decades.
It’s that late 40s/early 50s music that was, I believe, exclusively black, that is considered the forerunner of rock and roll (and indeed often had those words in their titles) I was referring to. Although some of the names of the people who made it would become better known later, few Hit Parade listeners would have recognized any of them. And would have been scandalized by their music.
OK, given that definition, I would agree with you that most white folks weren’t hearing that music at the time it was produced. However, it was on the radio, and white kids in the South were listening to it.
And that was a problem. White kids started showing up at Little Richard shows. And more to the point, white girls were showing up at Little Richard shows. And ::harumph:: we just can’t have white girls watching this gyrating negro and getting ideas. Maybe we can distract them with this nice clean-cut kid, Pat Boone. Here, Pat, try singing “Tutti Frutti” for us:
*Got a gal named Sue
She knows just what to do
She rock me to the east
she rock me to the west *
Hmmm. Wait a sec. Better scrub those lyrics a bit. How about:
I’ve been to the east
I’ve been to the west
Yeah, that’s the ticket! Nice and safe. And Pat, no gyrating.
It’s not like you had to tell Pat not to gyrate. The thought would never pop into his head.
And while I’m here, another lyric that got cleaned up:
‘At My Front Door (Crazy Little Mama)’ as done by the El-Dorados:
“If you got a little mama and wanna keep her neat
Better keep your little mama off my street”
As done by Pat Boone:
“If you got a little mama and want to get along
Better teach your little mama right from wrong”
Yep, and when they came to the lyric, “and you do your best to get balled and high,”
RCA bowlderized it to read “and you do your best to get bald and hi.”
Seriously pathetic.