There’s a new 80’s station in Seattle. My wife and I, in our apparent desire to pretend we’re not getting older, have been listening to it nonstop for the last couple of weeks.
Yesterday, they did something that surprised me: They played the uncut version of “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits. If you weren’t aware, the radio version that was played by most everybody back when the song was popular, and now on “retro” stations, omits the second verse. Below are the complete lyrics; the sanitized version skips the italicized verse and goes on to the third.
In retrospect, it’s obvious why the song was edited. The song is told from the point of view of a working-class character, so the lyrics make sense as a character statement, but you don’t expect the average radio listener to understand something complicated like “context,” do you?
Anyway: How common is this? I know certain longer songs have been trimmed (Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” for one, thereby giving rise to the lyric in “The Entertainer” about “It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long / If you’re gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit / So they cut it down to three-oh-five”), but how many songs can you name that were modified in their popular release strictly for content?
I think that the unsanitised version was usually played in the U.K. at the time (but it could be a confused memory because of also listening to it at home.) Unhelpful answer, or what?
How about “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison? (as cited by missbunny) Up here in Canada, they change the line “Making love in the green grass/ behind the stadium…” to “Laughin’ and a runnin’ hey hey/ behind the stadium…” Given the age of the song, and the different morals of that time, I can understand it, but has always bugged me.
When Moby covered the Mission to Burma tune ‘Reach for my Revolver’, the version that was played on MTV had ‘That’s when I realized it was over’ in the chorus instead of the original’s ‘That’s when I reached for my revolver’.
And of course, there’s “Money” by Pink Floyd. When it first came out, the line: “Don’t give me that goody goody bullshit” often ended up with a split-second of silence when reaching the second half of the bovine feces expletive. Now it usually is played uncut, though I find that I’m always concious of where the edit would go and listen for it.
Actually I don’t think they cut it I believe they actually changed the lyrics. There are two or three versions of this song floating around. Usually the Radio edits are shorter, like 4 minutes. Some bands, like Iron Maiden, actually change the song as well for the radio edit so people like me buy them.
My favorite example of this is The Who’s “Who Are You”. I’ll hear one of two different versions depending on which station I’m listening to.
WDVE (Pittsburgh) will always play the longer ‘album’ version, and the other local stations will play the ‘radio’ version - which is about a minute shorter, and omits the 3rd verse (begins with “I know there’s a place you walk…”) and a couple instances of the “F” word.
I get just a little more annoyed every time I hear the edited version…
I don’t remember ever hearing an edited version of “Money for Nothing.”
My earliest memory of a song that was edited for radio is probably either “A Boy Named Sue” (simple bleep) or “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” (different line recorded for single version).
I too, have never heard the edited version of “Money for Nothing”. How was it changed? Heck, it was the unedited version for the video.
Not necessarily popular, but XTC’s “Respectable Street” was changed quite a bit for its radio version. They did things like change “abortions” to “absorbtion” and “retching” to “stretching”. Also, “Senses Working Overtime” drops a line for the chorus in the radio release, the line about lorries skidding on black ice.
I can tell you back in my radio days we used to slice our fingers to the bone cutting up songs that contained whatever the boss was against that month. But, especially back in the 45 rpm, AM radio, top-40 days that there were an awful lot of records shipped with “artist” and “air play” versions. Sometimes there was a verse or a bridge chopped to shorten the song (I distinctly remember that Light My Fire and Layla – to name just two – had several minutes of their instrumentals cut out to get to the magic 3-minute mark), sometimes offending lyrics were changed or edited, sometimes no one could figure why something was changed.
Of course, the radio stations themselves got pretty creative. Depending on how it affected the beat of a song, we’d take out a word, a line, or even a verse if it was necessary. We might turn a length of tape upside down so the lyric was garbled but the count stayed constant. We had one dj who would always cut on the off beats, never the main beats. When we were on our game we could slice up a song better than the original producer.
I think this depends on whether you’re listening to the live or studio version.
There are huge numbers of songs that have been cut down for the single, radio, or what I call the “cheap” version. There are some songs (Steve Winwood’s Back In the High Life comes to mind) that I can’t even stand to listen to the cheap version, even though I love the original.
Right offhand, I can think of the song “Miracles” by Jefferson Starship. While this song sounds like it was tailor made for the easy listening music station, there Are two versions of the song. The original version contains the immortal lyrics, sung by Marty Balin:
“I had a taste of the real world/
When I went down on you, girl!”
The song is further embellished by Grace Slick singing concurrently singing background lyrics:
“Oh baby! oh baby! Oh yeah, yeah, YEAH!”
Needless to say, this version of the song is not normally the one you hear on lite FM!
Another old seventies song that gets edited a lot for current conservative stations is Aqualung by Jethro Tull.
“Got 'im by the balls!” gets changed to “got 'im by the fun!” Certainly a rarely used euphemism for the family jewels…
Which are the Iron Maiden songs that were changed for radio? Other than the edited Running Free Live, I can’t think of any (at least until I stopped listening in 1992).
A Boy Named Sue is actually edited on the standard LP version - I think they’ve only just rereleased it with a bunch of extra songs, and without the bleeps. Cash actually takes the piss out of this, by saying at one point ‘this is being recorded for television for England, so we can’t say words like Hell or Shit’ (with the last word being bleeped out).
Another song that was edited for the radio was Nick Cave’s ‘Do You Love Me’, where a whole verse was taken out. The verse in question includes lines like ‘Blood runs down the insides of her legs’, etc, so it’s not hard to see where they were coming from.
Oh, one more, the early Pink Floyd single ‘It Would Be So Nice’ supposedly was changed from using the newspaper name ‘Evening Standard’ to the ‘Daily Standard’, but the apocraphyl original version has never turned up, so it’s believed this story was just spread to generate publicity at the time (not that it helped - the song bombed).
In 1963, the Kingston Trio, of all people, got an edit on the line, “Don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar.” The word “damn” was silenced thereby allowing the listeners to insert the four-letter word of their choice!
The “son-of-a-bitch” version of “Devil…” actually played on my local AM station when it first came out. My friends and I (we were about 14) were stunned, but amused.
Not quite the same, but Garth Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls” has an interesting edit history. Originally penned for three verses, the third verse was cut in the studio after somebody having to do with the record company complained it was too violent. The song appeared on the album with only two verses. Garth performed all three verses at live shows and the third verse (as well as a changed line in “Friends In Low Places”*) was performed on the song as released on Double Live, a semi-live album released a year or two ago. In the Double Live version, it’s obviously recorded at a concert and you can hear the crowd in the background.
Well, I don’t know if my local radio station is magic or what, but today I heard a studio version of the song including the third verse. I’m confused. Backwards radio edit. It’s not on any of his albums, so unless somebody mixed the vocals from the live track with the background to the studio track (extended) I don’t know how they done it.
In case you were wondering, here’s the lyrics, with the “optional” verse in italics:
*The original “Friends In Low Places” has the line “Just give me an hour and then, I’ll be as high as that ivory tower you’re living in” and the live version has “Just wait til I finish this glass, then sweet little lady I’ll head back to the bar and you can KISS MY ASS” (holler those last three words)
It’s not a changed line, it’s a whole 'nother verse. On Double Live when he finishes the “album version” and the crowd starts yelling for more, he says “What?..you know what’s coming, don’t you…that mysterious third verse!”
What bugs me is when a piece of a current song is cut for absolutely no reason. In the 3 Doors Down song “Loser,” there is a middle eight section in which the tempo increases dramatically before the guitar solo. The part is pretty short, less than 30 seconds, but WHFS, the local “alternative” rock station in my area has elected to edit the passage out, despite the fact that it makes for an interesting dynamic contrast before returning to the chorus. The AOR radio stations in the area play the full unedited version, and why not? The edit serves no purpose I can gather. 3 Doors Down is one of my favorite new bands, and this just annoys me every time I hear it.
The Charlie Daniels edit was offered by Epic Records. The station could pick whatever version they wanted.
KAUM (an ABC O&O in Houston–long since gone)had 5 different versions of In-a-gadda-da-vida that ranged from 3 1/2 minutes to 18 minutes. The versions were edited at the station and the jock picked the version that would “fit” depending on how many commercial units he had to play.