Dunno how I remembered this thread - thought it was just a couple weeks old at least since I posted some Dylan.
I’ll happily be the last poster in a thread (as another thread addresses).
I was youtubing some David Bowie last night and watched several eras of him (Ziggy to Glastonbury) doing the song “Life On Mars”. It was years ago I sort of arrived at the realization that the song of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of “Is there life on Mars?” I mean, it’s practically the point of the song that it’s all irrelevant.
Just to add, a couple years back I saw Rick Wakeman live, whom I know contributed to and perhaps plays on that song (he does play Mellotron on the similar era ‘Space Oddity’). He’s a bit of a raconteur and was playing solo with just like a Roland and a Grand Piano and did both songs on the piano.
There’s that Britney Spears song “If U Seek Amy” which borrows one of the more cunning Shakespearian puns (no wait, it was a blues song…Shakespeare had the one about the “focative root,” but anyway…).The line in the song is “Everybody wants to if you seek Amy” which may fulfil the pun but utterly mangles the actual syntax of the sentence.
I was surprised the the thread was a month or so old and reckoned we figured out all the songs that are wrong according to their lyrics"
Dylan never sings “Positively 4th Street” (even if that means something) or “My back pages” which would would be 24 verses at least. Bowie’s “Life on Mars” is so positively far away from 4th Street and is never really earnest about the presence of life on mars. It’s just “Is there something else …” kind of thing.
Oh, ETA: Rick Wakeman does play the beautiful piano melody on “Life on Mars”.
I( thought there was a similar thread more recent than this, but this one isn’t quite a zombie yet)
Last week my wife and I were walking around a park in Poole (UK) and saw ducks, common geese, Canada geese, loons (which I’ve not seen before) and of course swans.
I sang a bit of the second verse in Cream’s “Badge”
I told you not to wander 'round in the dark
I told you 'bout the swans that they live in the park
These lines come just before the bridge in the song, and Clapton and George Harrison were writing it together (Harrison’s guitar style/sound is unmistakable in that bridge)
I kind of chuckled and said to my wife I don’t see why Clapton & Harrison would go for such an easy (and non-sequiter) rhyme with ‘dark’ till I read that during this session a drunken Ringo Starr walked in and was talking about the swans he’s just seen in a nearby park. So into the lyrics it went.
I also remarked to my wife (and thought of this or the similar thread) that I have no clue why the song is called “Badge”. Apparently, George had written “bridge” and that was misread and taken as the song title or at least it stuck.
For that matter, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” off the same album is a story about how its protagonists did get fooled again - yesterday’s radicals become today’s conservatives, the status quo stays the same, and the little guy who breaks his back fighting for change gets nothing out of it.
I always liked the long pause Daltrey puts between these two lines:
For I know that the hypnotized never lie
Do you?
Yet yeah, the Townshend outro:
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
is Roger Waters 101 type cynicism.
So okay, As I resurrected this not-quite zombie and my ‘Badge’ bit above is more fitting there, wherever there is. Baba O’Riley was also mentioned in that thread by someone. I know (in the other thread) I threw out a bunch of Bob Dylan songs where not only are the title never comes close to being mentioned in the lyrics - yet that’s quite commonly his thing and he stopped explaining anything in the 60’s.
Here’s one I just learned: The first song Micky Dolenz of The Monkees wrote in 1967, was/is initially named “Randy Scouse Git” and I am sure few in the USA would (and likely would still not) have known any of those words. Yet essentially, to the British (esp. Liverpool area) the slang infers “horny Liverpudlian jerk”. Yet the song seems to be about attending a Liverpool party where the Beatles are in attendance
The four kings of EMI are sitting stately on the floor
and while there might be some mild satire about the UK in there (an apparent cocaine allusion), it’s a rather whimsical song. It was his first commercial release.
So no randy scouses (Scouse is a more generic term for people of that area and/or their accent and depending on context is generally not offensive) in the song – there was no way the song was going to be released with that title in the UK. So it was released as “Alternate Title” which I’ve just got to attribute to Micky’s sense of humor.
You would think that “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” by Billy Joel would be about Billy the Kid. Unfortunately he gets every detail of his biography wrong, so it’s really just the ballad of Billy Joel’s fevered imaginings.
I’ve Been Everywhere (Hank Snow, ~US version). Obviously the lyrics aren’t going to really mention everywhere in the USofA. Mentioning Oklahoma, for example, covers a lot of territory (and yet also gives Tulsa). But there are several states that are skipped entirely. And not just Hawaii, which was a state for 3 years at the time, c’mon.
He was born in the Irish section of NYC and lived there with his mom till he was 18 and they moved to the New Mexico territory
New Mexico and Arizona are they only places he commited any crimes in
Never robbed a bank
Did rustle cattle
Did kill 8 men
Was shot dead by Pat Garrett
Joel himself was born in the Bronx and his family moved to Hicksville, which is known as a “hamlet” of the Town of Oyster Bay. Yet In the liner notes to his album “Songs in the Attic” he says the latter-day Billy was a bartender in the hamlet of Oyster Bay which is part of the Town of Oyster Bay.
I was born in the neighbouring Town of Hempstead yet not in the “village” of Hempstead. Towns (at least on Long Island) are basically about garbage collection, snow plowing and some parks.
I forget where he stands on whether “Piano Man” is a straight-up 3/4 waltz or 6/8 yet he won’t argue either way. Also he has agreed with some fan theories that some of the characters are gay. The guy playing Piano is called “Bill” so could be him, yet I’m guessing (song is too old for me to apply gaydar to) the matchbook novelist (who never had time for a wife) and the career navy guy.
I’ve seen him in person out in Amagansett. Didn’t say anything or double-take or anything. He and De Niro (in Greewich Village, NYC) were easy spots, though I’ve probably past dozens of celebs. Richard Gere (from Philly) was at the same protest in the village yet my brother had to point him out (and he was amidst a bunch of fan-girls)
Huh, not sure where I conjured up “match book novelist” as the song says “real estate novelist” and even there I’d have assumed he wrote up the copy for real-estate ads, yet Joel claims he was based on a (real) real estate broker who claimed to be working on a novel (not Glengarry Glen Ross as that was written by David Mamet)
I reckon I was thinking of whatever kinds of ads were on the back of match-book covers, yet mostly I recall drawings of pirates and asking people to copy it and send it to some address.
Or the REM song The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight. Given that this is Michael Stipe we are talking about, the mondegreen in question (“Call Me If You Try To Wake Her” is scrunched from 8 syllables down to 5 and sounds more like “Calling Jamaica”) wouldn’t surprise me if it was intentional.
