Oh, don’t lean on me, man,
'Cause you can’t afford the ticket,
I’m just somewhat conceited!
Oh, don’t lean on me, man,
'Cause you ain’t got time to check it,
You know I’m somewhat conceited!
-David Bowie, “Suffragette City”
Saturday night I went downtown
Working for my eff dee eye (whatever that means)
Sitting with a nasty Batman
Whiskey bottles by my sigh
Bootlegger mumble on my left side
Mumble mumble… people were doing wrong
Just about to call up the DA, man
When I heard this woman singing a song
A pair of butterflies made me open my eyes
My temperature started to rise
She was a long cool woman in a black dress
Just to find our beautiful song
With just one look I was a bad mess
'Cause that long cool woman had it all
La la la la… and so on. I finally Googled the lyrics the other day.
She’s actually “five-nine, beautiful tall”, and there is no occurence of Batman in this song.
And now that I Googled it, I find I’m completely wrong,
I actually have a pretty good ear for hearing the correct lyrics to songs. Hey the “Bruce, Groose, Ruce” thing is an honest mistake.
I was baffled by Deep Purple’s lyrics in “Highway Star” for a while in my youth. It always sounded like “No body’s gonna take my girl, she drinks cole slaw every day” when in fact it was “No body’s gonna take my girl, she stays close on every bend.” Apart from that, my record’s clean. 
You too, huh? I always pictured it as Toucan Sam singing a sweet love ballad to his beloved, after putting in long hours as the spokesbird for a bunch of Froot Loops!
Is that by Iggy Pop or The Monkees?
Behind these hairy lies - Kelly Clarkson
I always heard the line in ABBA’s “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do” as
No hard feelings between you and me
If we get naked, but just wait and see.
It’s actually “If we can’t make it.”
And in Joseph: You naked, sordid group
is actually: You make a sordid group.
Huh. I just realized that in the first verse of that song, he isn’t singing “The smell of fat chicks puts my spine out of place.”
I couldn’t believe the apparent sexism in Jethro Tull’s Aqualung when I thought the line was "Sittin
Oops.
I couldn’t believe the apparent sexism in Jethro Tull’s Aqualung when I thought the line was “Sittin on a park bench/NINE little girl swith bad intent” instead of “EYEING little girls with bad intent”.
In the Spinners “One of a Kind (Love Affair)” I thought the line “makes a blind man talk about seeing again” was “makes a blind man talk about sin again”.
I always thought that Madonna was singing “I’m gonna kiss Don Pardo” instead of “I’m gonna kiss some part of” in “Die Another Day.” I guess I just really wanted that sentence to be complete.
As much as I love Interpol, it’s very rare for me to be able to understand what the hell Paul Banks is singing about. “A Time to Be So Small” has some truly fantastic Mondegreens in it. I’ve always heard “Nursing an erection” instead of “Rehearsing interaction,” “The Pope will not stop moving” instead of “The boat will not stop moving,” and “When the cadaverous mob saves its drawers for the Thin Man” instead of “When the cadaverous mob saves its doors for the dead men.”
I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Even the real lyrics don’t make a hell of a lot of sense.
For twenty years I thought the last line of “Werewolves of London” was “His hair was purple.”
I knew it was wrong the first time I misheard the line
“Hell is worth all that”
as
“Hell is Football Bat”
in Metallica’s “Mastre of Puppets”.
But when I spent the next 3 hours trying to work out what the hell you would do with a bat on the football field, I came to realise that while obiously wrong lyrically, there was a sliver of truth to the phrase.
The game Fallout 2 made reference to this- when your character is talking to a character nicknamed “Rocketman”, one of the dialogue options involves asking if “Rocketman” has heard the song, and if so, does he know what the lyrics actually are, since they’re kind of hard to understand… 
For years, I thought “Werewolves of London” had lyrics about “Werewolves Asunder”, that “Billy and the Footballs” had “Big time happy feet” in “Down On The Corner”, and that the chorus to “Rock The Casbah” was “Cherie don’t like it, Rock the Casbah!” :smack:
And I just realized that I have no idea what they are saying. Actually, that whole song is a blur for me. Rock the Casbah, though, woo!
Last week I saw a jeans ad which opened my eyes about the Stevie Wonder song, “Sir Duke.” You have to understand, my entire knowledge of the song was hearing snippets of it as a child, while Mom was listening to the radio. So I never really listened to the lyrics, just kind of got the chorus. To me it was,
“You can feel it, our love, ah
you can feel it, our love for people”
Turns out “you can feel it all over.” D’oh!
But *nothing * beats my mother’s interpretation of “Invisible Touch”:
“She seems to have that invisible touch, yeah”
Became
“She’s a half-pint physical toucher”
Sounds like Laura Ingalls hit the skids or something. My mother has never lived this down.
I sing song this fairly regularly at the karaoke club (I’ve even had requests for it–how cool is* that*?). The mondegreen is pretty widespread, for even the karaoke lyrics include it! I’m glad to say that I’d already heard the proper lyrics and sing “groos,” as is correct! 
Oh, and one more. I was singing the ABBA song Waterloo, and the way the lyrics came up on screen should’ve gotten the name of the song changed to Mondegreen. I can’t remember all of the wrong words, but one of the lines stands out clearly:
“Waterloo, knowing my baby’s been meeting you.”
The proper lyrics are, of course:
“Waterloo, knowing my fate is to be with you.”
It was a good thing that I already knew all the words to the song, because that karaoke version had hardly any of them correct. I had to stop looking at the monitor, because I was having to keep from completely cracking up!
“Well my soul checked out missin’
as I sat listenin’
To the Eise & Nix ticket away.”
I thought Bruce was remembering back when he was a kid and the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket was barreling to the presidency. Oh well.
I remember an ad for a prescription drug which featured Louis Armstrong singing What A Wonderful Day. The closed-captioning of this ad interpreted “The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night” as “The bright blessed day, the dogs say good night.” Since the visual on the screen on the screen at this time was a yawning dog, I’m guessing whoever captioned the ad was thinking the song matched the visuals.