Ditzy, blonde, and busty...she was a young SoCal fella's ideal. One evening she told me she had a new favorite song, "Canada Dry". She deduced that the singer was saying that when your baby says good-bye, you need Canada Dry to mix with the booze you're gonna drink to forget her...or something like that. It was a couple of days later when I heard the Buckingham's singing "Kind of a Drag" for the first time. As my buddy Pat used to say, "She's shiny but not too bright".
But we've all misheard lyrics before. I even posted an article similar to this on JU a couple years ago. Some of the comments I got left me baffled because I didn't have a clue about the songs...anything newer than about 1980 is lost on me. But a conversation with MamaCharlie the other night brought back a memory from our dating days concerning a song that was popular in '67. The Young Rascals had a song called, "Groovin' " and it contained a phrase, "you and me and Leslie". Several of us in our tiny circle of friends got real curious about, "Who the heck is Leslie?" and why would they want her involved in their "Groovin' on a Sunday afternoon" ?
One evening outside the Taco Bell on Speedway, when the song came on the radio, I posed the question aloud. My best buddy at the time, Gordy, responded without hesitation, "He's the frog." Blank stares all around. Gordy kept his smile to the absolute minimum as he said, "You know, the one Billy Joe put down her back at that picture show." For a couple of weeks the question had been circulating, "What happened to the frog?" (Little Whip has given the best answer to this question on another thread) We still didn't know what happened to the frog, but now we had a name for him. Honestly, it was years later that we learned that the line in the song is, "you and me endlessly..."
On his Eagle album, Saint Waylon had a song about old church hymns and nursery rhymes that had the phrase, "...splintered wood and rusty chains" about an old porch swing. I listened to that song more than a hundred times before I found the lyrics and realized that it wasn't "Leonard Wood and rusty chains"...I couldn't figure out what Fort Leonard Wood was doing in that song.
Of course, everyone has heard the most famous ones...Hendrix didn't want to kiss "this guy"...he wanted to "kiss the sky"...CCR was not giving us directions to the loo when they sang "there's a bathroom on the right" (there's a bad moon on the rise). You could probably remember and share more than I could.
And it doesn't have to be in song. I was teaching a class once to adults...subject was duty and responsibility. I asked the question: "So why did these people do this ?" Someone in the back said, "Because they were cannibals". I was stunned. First of all, they weren't, to the best of my knowledge. Second of all, I had no idea why cannabalism would even enter into this at all. I exclaimed, "They were Cannabals !!" At which point everyone else busted into laughter...the person had said, "They were accountable."
So have fun with it, if you care to, share your favorite.