Har har har! You thought a boy liked a BOY! What a great joke that was!
I grew up in that era, and I have to police myself. I watch NFL games with fellow teachers, and one septuagenarian think it’s just “high-LAR-i-ous” to refer to “the Dallas Cowgirls”…
I’ve warned him not to do that, because he canNOT misgender anyone in the classroom.
But he hasn’t learned yet. Still thinks it’s a knee-slapper.
s i g h . . .
I used to be sure it was:
What a “fool” believes he sees, the “wise man” has the power to reason away
Meaning, an ordinary man recognizes self-evident truth, but we call him a fool because he’s unsophisticated. Meanwhile overeducated “wise men” have the dubious power of reasoning anything away, even things that are true.
This is not in the least what that particular song is getting at (nor what the correct lyric is) but would be an interesting theme.
I have always had a hard time “getting” that song, even still now with available lyric sites. I’ve always thought since it was new that he actually had a relationship with her, that was long over, but the fool refused to believe, vs that “it never really was” is taken literally, not figuratively.
“She had a place in his life”, OK, they were together, but “he never made her think twice”, he was much more invested than she was. She was his love, he was her plus one.
That’s nothing, I played it at a funeral last year.
It’s as much about religion as Take Me to Church.
Hallelujah is not about Christianity, that’s for sure - it’s about Judaism. I mean, it’s about sex and love and heartbreak and sorrow and alienation and lots of other things, but it’s also about Cohen’s complex approach to Jewish faith, history and tradition. I don’t think we should be denying that aspect of the song.
SHRANK!
It’s about a boy with a joint rolling gadget and a girl with a kilo of weed to make joints with.
Pull the other one. They’re ALL about orphaned dogs at this point.
Although those who actually wrote the song disagree (or at least claim to disagree) the song certainly seems to be about heroin addiction.
“She lit up a candle and she showed me the way” – which way? the way to use heat to dissolve heroin for injection. (A candle might also be used with a pipe.)
“We haven’t had that spirit (marijuana?) here since 1969” – it was about 1969 that many hard-core hippies switched their drug of choice to heroin.
I too got the wrong message, but that was because I didn’t understand any of those words nor did the stations tell me the name of the song, or that might have been a clue.
The only lyrics I could “understand” was the last line of the chorus which I thought was “anybody else would surely die”, which I took to mean that their love was so strong that any other attempt at love with other people would surely not succeed. Which is also completely contrary to the song’s meaning but in a different way.
I always thought it was a concertina…
A Capital Ship is unmistakably about smoking weed.
The cook was dutch and behaved as such
For the diet he served the crew
Was a couple of tons of hot cross buns
Served up in sugar and glue
Hotel California.
I thought it might be about the Manson family.
1969, stab it with your steely knife, etc.
I thought it was a metaphor for the drug addict trying to beat their drug addiction.
Aside: It’s been 50 years and I’m still bothered by Don Henley’s choice of the word “steely” here. Who ever uses the word “steely” to describe something made of … steel. I get that he needed two syllables, with the accent on the first. OK, he could have said “they stab it with their wooden knives” and it would have made even more sense, as it demostrates the futility of trying to “kill the beast” even better.
It was a nod to Steely Dan, who had mentioned the Eagles in one of their songs.
The lyric “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast” from the Eagles’ “Hotel California” is a playful reference to the band Steely Dan, reflecting a friendly rivalry between the two groups who shared a manager. The word “steely” in the line is a direct nod to the band Steely Dan, who had previously mentioned the Eagles in their song “Everything You Did” with the lyric “Turn up the Eagles”.
Except that the line immediately preceding that is
So I called up the Captain
“Please bring me my wine”
One really has to work to ascribe a line to mean drugs that is specifically says wine.
And when the “spirit” really means metaphorically the willingness, the spark, the social consciousness of the pre-1969 rock scene, not wine . It about Altamont, not Woodstock.
TIL Don Henley was in the Eagles. I love his song Boys of Summer, and yeah, I guess those two singers sound the same.
Oh. Did not know that. I always wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Steely Dan.