I loved the Moe Hair visual pun! No firearms necessary!
As for this thread, I am grateful that others have admitted to not knowing the lyrics as they heard the song.
The only thing I could think of was that this tied into a gang, like someone mentioned above, from WSS, with the Jets and the Sharks. So, with that in mind, I tried to decipher the lyrics from the song, not the album liner.
I got.
Hey Kids.
Benny and the Jets
and I read it in a magazine.
All of the other lyrics were guessed at. mostly missed, and totally confusing. So when I went to the web to get the lyrics, I read through them and had no context at all to make any connection.
It’s one of the only Elton songs I can still listen to. I will probably forget the lyrics immediately after this thread dies, and go back to my ignorance. But I appreciate the answers in the thread.
The biggest surprise to me was the song being made in the studio and the crowd noise added afterward. Was it an urban legend that this was recorded live and put on the album? I heard that as a kid, and everyone seemed to believe the same story. That’s truly ignorance fought.
I once sang this song at a live-band karaoke thing and towards the end I sang “OOh Archie, she’s a-really keen” in a screechy Edith Bunker voice and got a huge laugh.
I woke this thread up because I was listening to the radio (99.1 in DC), a station that is playing several days of “The History of Rock & Roll” while they are waiting to switch to an all-news format.
When they covered Elton John, they mentioned that Benny[ie] and the Jets was recorded live in France. But ever since that song came out it sounded fake-live to me. The crowd noise sounds digitally simulated, and the reverb/echo on the performance also sounds post-production. Other posts above agree that the hit single was a studio cut that was live-ified.
Did this series just get it wrong, assuming like so many that it was live? (I did find several sites that said it was recorded in a *studio *in France.)
I think the radio station got it wrong. From my long-ago reading of the notes on my LP, I was always knew that it was recorded in a studio in France. Wikipedia confirms this:
Little know fact: Elton John and Bernie Taupin didn’t actually write the song…they stole it from legendary blues singer Bruno Radolini, who originally wrote it as “Bruno and the Jets”
The puns were first-rate. The song analysis was way off and we are all less smart now having read them. How does one find a place to post questions, type all that crud out - with bullets mind you - and not just google mohair? Also, and this is super important for anyone’s musical knowledge - the song is by Bernie Taupin, as are almost every song John ever performed. The Brown Dirt Cowboy - and he’s a freakin’ genius.
verse 1 - batj are in concert and it’s a super cool party ya gotta go
verse 2 - its ok if we don’t care about sht - it’s rock and roll so fck the police and the parents. We’ll survive it.
turn - back in the day, pop stars filled the pages and covers of thousands of magazines -Tiger-Beat, Teen Idol, Seventeen, etc.
And yea, the line in rocket man is “burning out his fuse up here alone”. Also by Taupin.
There are two things that get on my nerves about this song (she said, carefully ignoring the zombie):
The way he sings the line “You know I read it in a magazine.” It came out when I was little, and it took me years to figure it out because of the way he sang the word , “maga-zEEEN-ah”
Among the crowd noise near the end, someone whistles in an odd way. It takes me out of the illusion that a cheering crowd is present. No one whistles like that at a concert! At least, not at any concert I’ve attended.
