45 virgins and a pelican

I always wondered why in the hell Huey Lewis wanted a new truck.  And why he specified one that wouldn't keep him up all night.  Did the alarm on his old one inadvertently go off at odd times?  And how could it possibly make his head feel three feet thick? 

I just didn't get it.

Ohhhh!!!!  A new drug! 

Right.

We have all of us exposed ourselves, or more accurately our ignorance, when driving thither and yon in our vehicles, belting out the lyrics to a favourite song on the radio with the volume turned way up; and belting them out horribly incorrectly.  This also, by the way, happens just as frequently in the shower as on the road.

I'm sure there was most of generation scarred by the admission of the greatest guitar player ever born that he needed a minute to go and kiss a guy.  Of course, what Jimi Hendrix would have you believe, were he still around that is, is that he really said, "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky".

These sorts of misheard lyrics have come to be known as mondegreens.  The term stems from a Scottish ballad titled, 'The Bonny Earl of Murray', containing the refrain:

They have slain the Earl of Murray/And laid him on the green.

This was misheard by a newspaper columnists for years as: They have slain the Earl of Murray and the Lady Mondegreen.  Taking the 'cha' out of her grin, the columnist foreswore embarrassment and instead coined a new term for which we are a little richer in vocabulary.  (Almost always a good thing.)

Thinking back to a post I made a short while ago, my brief stint of singing in church was interspersed with exhortations of, "Peace is flowing like a river / setting all the cactus free!"  I can justify this to myself now in that cacti are indeed rather 'captive' considering their state of rootedness in desert sand and such.

I also used to wonder who, exactly, Steve Miller was referring to when he sang about "Big Ol' Jed and Liza".  Did just Jed need to go on a diet, or was Liza kinda fat too?  He never did say.

There are many, many others.

I look back at these enthusiastic errors I've made with a great deal of fondness and wonder who would also have made the same mistakes, or perhaps even interpreted the lyrics in a more amusing manner.  I still mumble my way through near incomprehensible songs on the radio and then turn my vocal chords up to ten when the more familiar chorus comes on.

But the truth of the matter is, if I have to be honest, and I really normally almost always am, this whole post is simply a contrivance to give me a plausible reason to use the title that I did.

One of my favourite bands is Pearl Jam.  Their debut album, TEN, stands out to me still as one of the greatest alternative rock achievements in the history of ever.  Well, one of their subsequent albums (none of which ever matched the freshman achievements of TEN, lamentably), contains a song titled, 'Glorified G'.  One of the lyrics in that song, I discovered a very long time after I had been singing (and picturing) it quite differently, is sung thus:

...glorified version of a pellet gun...

I still like my interpretation a whole bunch better.

Comments

[Marc]

Ah yes, the mondegreen (thanks for adding that to my vocab). I used to spend quite a bit of time in the university bookstore humour section, flipping through various "misheard lyrics" books. Of course, much the same was as one forgets what one is looking for the second one steps into a bookstore, my mind has gone completely blank when it comes to other examples. Blast it all.

Anyway, great post.

By the way, that song is from Pearl Jam's second album, Vs. (which is possibly my favourite album of theirs).

[Paula]

Going back to my early teens, my tendency towards moderation was in evidence by thinking KISS wanted to 'rock and roll all night and part of every day'. My husband loves that one.

A few years ago a radio station tried to deconstruct a REM song with a line that sounds like 'going to Las Vegas'. People called in from all over to give their interpretations - an absolute hoot! Of course, even when you do get the lyrics right, REM rarely makes sense.

[Marc]

Speaking of REM, that reminds me of another one: I always thought the chorus lyric on "The Sidewinder Sleeps" (from Automatic for the People) was "Call me Jamaican". I'm still not sure what it is exactly, but I've been told it's "call me when [or once] you wake her up."

[Paula]

Marc, THAT's the line I was talking about! It's like the Rorschach Ink Blot of lyrics -everyone hears it differently.

[Simon]

It was bugging me so I had to Google it.

The lyrics are:

"Call me when you try to wake her up.
Call me when you try to wake her."