I have heard that some young couples have chosen to play Pearl Jam’s “Betterman” at their weddings. As anyone who has ever listened to the words of the song knows, it is about a woman who is afraid to leave a bad marriage because she thinks she can’t do any better (Eddie Vedder wrote it about his mother and stepfather). Not exactly the sentiment I’d want at my nuptuals.
As for a song not about drugs, I always figured (well, for the past two years or so) that “Rainy day Women #12 and 35” (you know–“Everybody must get stoned!”) is referring to the biblical version of stoned, as in "He who is without sin. . . "
A search turned up this link which supports the “Knowing She Would” story, and this link which lends a more likely story, that there is no historical evidence whatsoever to document it. The second link states that the working title was actually “This Bird Has Flown”.
I’m so sorry about the quadruple post. When I hit submit, I got the “Connection time out” window. Instead of exiting the window and and reloading the whole SDMB, I just kept hitting the refresh button, and apparently, kept posting. Sorry. =(
In other news, “Knowing She Would” is within the realm of possibilities, but in five years of reading/researching, I have never heard that explanation.
The Violent Femmes song “Blister in the Sun” is supposedly about masturbation. Of course, their song “Kiss Off” is about suicide.
“Crash” by the Dave Matthews Band…come on…it’s sex.
Allegedly, “Happiness is a Warm Gun” (the Beatles) is about heroin addiction.
I’ve always heard that “Hotel California” was about cocaine addiction. Anyone know for sure?
Does anyone know what the Live song “Pain Lies on the Riverside” is talking about?
Shock the Monkey was supposedly Peter’s try at a Motown song!!!.. and against animal experimentation, which makes more sense. Don’t like it but I guess I’m learnin’ refers to mastrubation?
Damn! Teach me to jump to conclusions. When I see the name Spector associated with a girl group song of the 60s, I make the logical (and totally incorrect) assumption to infer it was our man Phil. In checking my sources, Bigstar303 was dead on right again. Abner it is.
And no, I’ve never heard “Snowman, Snowman, Sweet Potato Nose,” or “Chicken, Chicken, Crane or Crow” or “Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar” or “Winky Dink,” other reported Jaynetts singles. Maybe we should start a thread for the worst rock song titles…
And as far as the **Norweigan Wood/Knowing She Would ** thing, I’ve seen that somewhere in Spider Robinson’s work. I’ll try to look that up at home tonight and pass on the cite tomorrow.
Anyone have a clue as to who “The man from Tennessee” is in Please Come to Boston? It’s been driving me nuts for years.
On the anthology tapes, there’s a piece of an interview with John (I think, but possibly George) in which he says that the lyrics for “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide. . .” (“The deeper you go, the higher you fly,” etc.) were all pretty much what the Maharishi had been telling them. Doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what the song is about, per se, but that’s all I meant to imply. In any event, John was always rather inconsistent with his explanations and opinions about his music. In spite of this (or perhaps because of it) I’m a die-hard John person.
I too have never heard it, but it’s certainly not inconceivable. In any event, I don’t think that it would change the meaning of the song much (it’s obviously about a guy being led on). “This Bird Has Flown” wasn’t just the working title. The full title is always listed as “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”
Throughout the song, John describes the cabin by saying “Isn’t it good norwegian wood.” The closing stanza of the song is:
And, when I awoke, I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good norwegian wood?
Taken by itself, one assumes that the wood he refers to is kindling for the fireplace. In the context of the rest of the song, however. . .
I concur. Besides, that sounds like it would be way too overheated a topic for Paul.
That first link doesn’t really say that, though; it says “One might even speculate that, given Lennon’s flair for amusing wordplay as demonstrated in his two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, he made up the term
‘Norwegian Wood’ to stand for the phrase ‘Knowing she would’.” It certainly doesn’t claim that that phrase was ever in the song or was a working title.
This is, quite literally, the first time I have ever heard this asserted. I have never come across this in anything, and anyone who knows me knows I am a meticulous freak about Beatles lore. I’d be dumbfounded if it were true. The Internet Beatles Album doesn’t say anything, nor does the rec.music.beatles archive.
Haven’t you heard that “Hey Jude” was about shooting up heroin?
You haven’t?
Just listen:
It’s obvious, isn’t it? Well, anyway that’s what a girl told me on a date once. She seemed convinced.
I read the “knowing she would” interpretation on “Norwegian Wood” in a book years ago – it might have been Twilight of the Gods by Wilfrid Mellers, I can’t really remember, it might have been Creem Magazine.
How come no one has mentioned the drug interpretation of “Norwegian Wood”? When he sings “I lit a fire” that means he lit up a joint.
The song I’ve always wondered about was “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic. I know it sounds sort of gay, but what does it really mean? I have no idea.
According to Paul McCartney (Who has no reason to lie) “Hey Jude” is about John’s son Julian Lennon. I always thought, and John thought too, that it was really about John. John claimed that it was Paul “giving him permission” to be happy with Yoko. Paul has never verified that. FTR, Paul was never a herion addict, though John was. (That’s what “Cold Turkey” is about.) Paul’s drug of choice was either pot, or during those crazy days of 67/68, cocaine. That is verified in “Many Years from Now”.
“Norweigon Wood” is a very straight forward song. It is semi-autobiographical, he has an affair. At the end of the song, he sets the house on fire. Paul has stated (I’m not sure where. There are so many Beatles references scattered around this house) that it is not about drugs.
I pretty much accept Paul’s and John’s word. They were always pretty up front about any drug use/references, and really had no reason to lie about it.
It seems very unlikely that it would have been Mellers, as he was concerned, IIRC, strictly with the music of The Beatles, relating it to classical motifs, etc.
If he started messing with lyric interpretation, I would think it would have been out of his league. But then it’s been many years since I read the book. Has anyone read it more recently?
Here’s what “The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders” has to say about it:
"'Sally Go ‘Round the Roses’ is a timeless wonder of a song, featuring an odd, hypnotic rhythm and soft voices seductively rising and falling. The lyrics seem to portray Sally in an alluring field of roses, catching an eyeful of her lover with another.
"But differing interpretations abound. Some listeners read the roses and the hushed throbbing of the music as expressions of a young woman’s troubled acceptance of homosexuality. Others think that the song is about a religious experience, or possibly a mental breakdown. Still others remember ‘Sally’ as nothing more than a silly nursery rhyme.
“Zell [Saunders, who owned the label it was released on] and Abner [Spector] are gone now, so we’ll never know what it all meant, or even if ‘Sally’'s creators knew what it all meant.”
Sorry not for replying sooner, but work has a habit of getting in the way of my posts!
I think the other posters have pointed out some useful sources already, but I heard the “Knowing She Would” hypothesis somewhere different again.
A DJ on BBC’s Radio 2 was interviewing this guy 3-ish weeks ago (and if I’d have known this thread was coming up, I would have remembered his name). However, I remember it was a man (good start)and he had worked with the Beatles on the production of records. The DJ is a guy who prefers to answer e-mail questions and his details can be found here, including his e-mail address. I’ll contact him if you like, or if you prefer you can do it direct. I think you can listen over the internet too, so you could even hear him give his explanation. His show goes out between 5pm and 7pm (approx) English time.
Either way, just let me know.
This is purely a guess on my part, but I always took “I’m the number one fan of the man from Tennessee” in this song as a reference to Elvis (who was actually from Tupelo, Mississippi, of course, but moved to Memphis before his teen years).
The singer wants her to move to Boston, Denver, and L.A. – relatively exotic locales – to be with him, while she’s more of a down-home girl who says “No…boy, would you come home to me?” I just figured the Elvis reference was a way to identify her as a more down-to-earth person who would not feel comfortable with the glitz of these other places and the pace of the singer’s life.
But I could be totally off about this.
Thanks BigStar303. It’s a better explanation than anything I’ve been able to come up with.
By the way, I looked through my Spider Robinson collection last night, but my son’s been reading them, so I couldn’t locate the one I wanted with the specific Norweigan Wood/Knowing She Would reference so that I could cite it.
IIRC, Spider wrote a short story in which Paul, George & Ringo had John cryonicly (sp?) preserved and reawakend some years later (when he would be chronologicly 64). The story is laden with Beatles references of all sorts, so much so that Spider provides an afterword which explains them all. I think that is the source for my “knowing she would” belief.
Actually, according to John Lennon, the song was inspired by seeing a hunting magazine in a friend’s apartment that actually had “Happiness is a warm gun” as a slogan.
I’ll get the exact source later tonight; I’ve got a huge book where the Beatles explain (through interviews with them and with associates) exact what inspired all of their songs (as well as hidden meanings), and I’m kind of annoyed that I’ve missed most of the other discussion on the Beatles songs here.
Couldn’t the “Number 1 fan of the man from Tennessee” mean the narrator? The narrator is asking her to come to all these places, and she’s saying “No, I wanna stay here. I wanna be with you, I’m your number 1 fan, but I’m not traveling all over the country.” I thought that was just the writer’s way to identify to the listener where the narrator is from, and how much he means to her.
Pepperlandgirl’s alternate explanation, which I’ve also considered, is equally viable, assuming the singer really is from Tennesse, which we have no way of knowing from the song.
I have this story and know it well. It was entitled “Rubber Soul” and appeared in one of the Beatles magazines sometime in the 1980s.
In the story, it is Paul alone who undertakes to preserve John until such time as technology finds a way to bring him back to life. Though the premise is admittedly outrageous, the story itself is quite movingly written, and presents a John and Paul I think we all in our hearts would like to believe were/are the way they’re portrayed.
You’re right about all the footnotes explaining the various references throughout the story. I don’t specifically remember the “knowing she would” bit being a part of it, but I’ll try to scare up my copy tonight and double check.