I can’t think of any about myself, although I’m sure I did misunderstand a fair number of songs, but I do remember my younger sister would often whine “This song is stupid! It doesn’t make sense! What is that supposed to mean?” One day I said “Whenever you don’t understand a song, just assume it’s about sex and shut up about it.”
Oh, one came back to me – as a little kid I thought “Hotel California” was a really cool song, but I also thought it was about a creepy haunted hotel. Kind of like the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. (Or more like The Shining, but I hadn’t yet heard of that book/movie.) If you made the mistake of staying at the Hotel California then you could check out anytime you liked but you could never leave, because the ghosts would kill you and you’d become a ghost and you’d have to haunt the hotel forever! Bwa ha haaaaa!
I thought for ages it was “Just like the wild wind [does/blows]”. I think the problem isn’t so much that the line is difficult to make out, but that almost anything would be better than “Just like the white-winged dove”.
The Supremes’ Love Child. I’d hear it on oldies radio when I was around six or seven and knew I liked the way it sounded and thought the lyrics were cool, too, but I didn’t get it. I knew it was about a girl who’d grown up poor, but I didn’t make the connection that her mother having sex early was what led to her growing up as a poor, illegitimate child and that she was saying she wasn’t going to make the same mistake.
Isn’t that what it is actually about? Or is it just an extended metaphor about California life? Yes even now close to 30 years out of my teens I still have a stubborn naive streak…
“That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” by Carly Simon was one of my favorite songs as a child. With its beautiful melody and the most prominent line being “would you marry me”, I though it was a sweet song about a woman finally deciding to get married. When I heard it as an adult, I was shocked to realize how depressing and cynical the song’s view of romance is. Still a great song though.
When I was a kid, I thought Elton John was singing about Star Wars in “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”:
*“Don’t give us none of your aggravation,
We’ve had it with your Death Star plans…”
*
I knew that couldn’t be right, but I had no idea what he was really saying.
$20 was a ton of money in the late 60s, with the minimum wage only $2/hour by 1975. So that’s more than ten hours pay, before taxes, for a working man. I’m calling BS on the Wiki definition, since you can probably still get a BJ from a street ho for $20. Of course there was no crack or meth back then, so I could be wrong.
I’m so glad I amused someone with that story! I am 90% sure that somewhere on a long lost video tape in my parents’ attic there is footage of me announcing that it’s my new favorite song “because I love songs about dragons.”
On the other hand, the song Deuce is from an album released in 1974, and the two dollar bill was reintroduced in 1976, so the $2 theory doesn’t much fit, either.
My personal contribution to the OP: when I was a kid, there was a song about Old MacDonald sitting on a bench, beating his meat with a monkey wrench. In my little kid mind that song was very literal, with some sort of steak.
That’s how I’ve always heard this line, too. I have known the correct words for some time, but my brain keeps trying to interpret it the way I originally thought it was.
WHOA. I have just now for the first time ever read the lyrics and understood what the song is about. Yikes, that’s brutal! I have to hope the woman in the song never got married, moved away from the silence in her parents’ house, and built a happy, fulfulling life for herself free of the chains of others’ expectations. Eeesh.
And one more tentatively raised hand from someone who liked the song ‘Afternoon Delight’ as a child, picturing a pleasant celebration in a park, maybe for the Fourth of July, complete with a picnic and skyrockets in flight overhead.
I think I watched too many monster movies as a kid. I always thought there were lines in Day-O pleading for the (no doubt fearsome) Kong Man to let the singer go home, presumably after filling his banana quota for his dread taskmaster.
Missed the edit window. Wanted to say I like the ambiguity of Lola.
I have misheard songs all my life. One example: there was a song in the 80s that featured the female lead whispering in the bridge. I thought she was saying, “requesting quiet. Requesting quiet.” (I think the song was by 10CC). Turns out she was whispering, “big boys don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry.”
And I thought Barbra Streisand was singing “you gotta be a hero” and she was singing, “it oughta be illegal.” Or maybe it was the other way around. I think that song was about a fight of some kind.
I suck at remembering song titles.
See, my take on it now is that Gene is telling the woman to, umm do her man twice; he’s worth a deuce. In fact I’d be surprised if that isn’t the real intention of the song. “Love Me Two Times” by The Doors is exactly the same.
