[the Red Hot Chili Peppers are about to perform on Krusty's show] Krusty the Clown: The network has a problem with some of your lyrics. Do you mind changing them for the show? Anthony Kiedis: Forget you, clown. Chad Smith: Yeah, our lyrics are like our children, man. No way. Krusty the Clown: Well, okay, but here where it says, "What I got you gotta get and put it in ya," how about just, "What I'd like is, I'd like to hug and kiss ya." Flea: Wow! That's much better. Arik Marshall: Yeah. Everyone can enjoy that.
--The Simpsons, “Krusty Gets Kancelled” (5/13/93)
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I think practically everyone has a story involving misunderstood song lyrics. There’s a web site devoted to this sort of thing (naturally): www.kissthisguy.com, which derives its name from someone mishearing a line from Jimi Hendrix’ “Purple Haze” as being: “’Scuse me, while I kiss this guy.” (Having said that, the website’s founders learned later on that this might not be a misheard lyric after all.)
One of the best ones I heard in real life was my ex mother-in-law, Daughter’s mother. We were in the car and Elvis was on the radio singing “Jailhouse Rock”. She sang along with The King, only it came out as “Everybody in the Old South Bronx, was dancing to the jailhouse rock.” I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. This was not a day when I endeared myself to her family.
For what it’s worth, I did find a couple of photos of Elvis in Queens, but I’m still not sure he was ever in the South Bronx.
I don’t have any clear memories of mishearing a lyric so badly that it turned into something else. Usually I just kind of mumblety-mumble along until it becomes coherent again. I do, however, have a lyric that I remember not understanding when I was a kid. In the fall of 1971 I was eight years old and in the second grade, and Rod Stewart had just released “Maggie May”, which was a huge hit then and still gets a ton of airplay on the oldies stations. I understood the words to the song perfectly well, if the subtext was a little bit over my head.
The part about the song that completely baffled me, however, was the second line: “It’s late September and I really should be back at school.” This fascinated me. I had no idea that school was optional! I was constantly wondering why his mother didn’t just make him go to school. And you know what? Every time I hear that song, the question still comes up, even though I know better.
(UPDATE: My Child Bride, who incidentally was born the same year that "Maggie May" was released, was talking to me this afternoon about this post. As it happened, the radio was on and a song came on. She said to me, "Now, this song I have never been able to figure out what the words are." We were listening to Santana's "Oye Como Va." I had to explain to her that it was because the song is in Spanish.)
What about you? Do you have any good misheard lyric stories?
Pete Hornberger: Getting fired is better than getting killed by my wife, with those big farm-people hands crushing my windpipe. Liz Lemon: Everything okay at home, buddy?
--30 Rock, “The Fighting Irish” (3/8/07)
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If you’ve been with me for awhile, you’ll remember that I was a fan of The Don and Mike Show, a radio program that ran for over twenty years in one form or another, on one station or another. I first heard it when it aired in New York City in early 2001; when I moved to Baltimore later that year I re-discovered it on local radio stations here.
In July 2005, the “Don” part of “Don and Mike” lost his wife in an auto accident. It happened while the show was on a vacation break, and Mike returned to the air to explain what had happened. When Don returned to the show, it was a solo act for the first day and then things started to return to normal. But for Don there really could be no “normal” anymore and he decided to retire from the program in April 2008. The remaining cast continued as The Mike O’Meara Show until the show’s flagship station, WJFK in Washington, DC, decided last summer to change format. Likewise, Westwood One indicated that it would no longer syndicate the program. Mike O’Meara and crew were out of a job…
…until last month. Rejoice, fans, because The Mike O’Meara Show is now available as a podcast. It runs for about one hour (usually just a few minutes longer), with no commercial interruptions. (If you miss the commercials, AND you happen to live in Iowa City, IA, you can tune in there, I suppose.) The podcast is available every day at 2:00 PM, and you can get it either by going to the show’s website or you can subscribe through iTunes. The podcast is still in relative infancy (as of right now there are only thirty-four episodes), so it will be easy to play catch-up. There are a bunch of in-jokes that will take some time for you to get up to speed on, but it’s a hell of a ride. Try it. And then you can thank me later.
Roseanne Roseannadanna: Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey
sent me this Christmas poem that says: [reads aloud from a greeting
card] Dear Roseanne Roseannadanna,
Well, the holiday season is finally here, Bringin' Santa and sleigh rides
and lots of good cheer. Children are laughin', there's lights on the trees.
Everyone's happy except for me. Folks goin' to parties, folks having
fun. I wanna blow my brains out, get me a gun! Christmas is here and I
should feel swell But I'm cryin' in my room and I feel like hell. What
should I do?
--Saturday Night Live, “Elliot Gould/Peter Tosh” (12/16/78)
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, I grew up in the New York
Metropolitan area, and mentally I’ve still got some pretty strong ties. For
instance, I still listen to WCBS-FM a lot, mostly so I can listen to Bob
Shannon, who is one of my favorite DJs.
One of the DJs who left the station awhile back was Harry Harrison, whose NY
radio legacy is vast. Harry did six years of radio in Illinois before coming to
New York City in 1959, where he became one of WMCA’s “Good Guys”. He held the
midday gig until 1968, when WABC picked him up as their new Morning Mayor. He
stayed there until 1979, when WABC’s format began the slow, painful change from
Top 40 to News/Talk that completed in 1982.
By 1980, however, Harrison (seen here at left, with Ron Lundy)had joined WCBS-FM, still in the morning slot.
Incidentally, this makes him the only New York DJ who was on WMCA, WABC and
WCBS, all of which spent some time dominating the ratings for their format. He
remained there until March of 2003, when he left the station, retiring only
briefly and returning in a weekend morning show that lasted until WCBS began
their disastrous experiment as “Jack FM.” When the oldies format came back,
Harrison did not, and he remains retired in New Jersey.
Now, the backstory is a little hazy, but it appears that in 1965 he located a
holiday-themed piece that he liked, so he recorded it with some music and sound
effects. It was released as a single on the Amy label, and it made the Billboard
Christmas charts that year. Some time later, he re-recorded the piece for WCBS, where he'd play it several times during the season. I don't think the station airs it anymore (at least, I haven't heard it), but you can still get it on certain Christmas music collections. Or, just click below to listen to it.
Narrator: In 1966 the Rutles faced the biggest threat to their careers. Nasty, in a widely quoted interview had apparently claimed that the Rutles were bigger than God, and was reported to have gone on to say that God had never had a hit record. The story spread like wildfire in America. Many fans burnt their albums; many more burnt their fingers attempting to burn their albums. Album sales skyrocketed: people were buying them just to burn them.
I've been on a bit of an oldies kick lately. This is not an easy thing to do unless you have a pretty extensive music collection, or a lot of patience with iTunes. Fortunately for me, I have both.
The big problem with iTunes is that the station descriptions aren't always especially accurate. Many times a station will advertise itself as being "Hits of the 50s, 60s, and 70s" and the first thing I hear is something from the late 80s. "Sunshine Radio Network," I'm looking at you. A few stations are pretty cool to listen to, though.
One of them is called HyLit Radio (link goes directly to the streaming audio screen), and it's mostly songs from the 1960s interspersed with radio jingles from that era. If you're a jingle freak you'll like this station. There are also audio clips of Hy Lit himself, who was a big-wheel DJ in Philadelphia in the 50s and 60s. This part was less creepy before I learned that Lit died about two years ago. His son is running the operation, now.
Another favorite of mine is WCBS-FM, mostly because I like their midday guy, Bob Shannon so much. Here's a story: WCBS was a personality-driven Oldies station from 1972 to 2005. Most of the bigger DJs from the 60s were recruited to do air shifts there. In June of 2005, the station's format changed abruptly to the Jack-FM format. The ratings absolutely plummeted, and the station returned to a slightly modified version of its original format two years later. When Shannon's not on, I usually tune out because I'm not in the mood for commercials.
A streaming station that I've recently turned to is the World Wide Radio Web, which plays some pretty deep cuts. This station doesn't do commercials or DJs, but it does occasionally drop in a jingle.
But none of this is the point of my post today. While listening to all this good old stuff, I heard a few songs that I found myself realizing either wouldn't, or couldn't possibly, get made today for one reason or another. Never mind that they were big hits back in the day; they wouldn't happen today. Case in point:
"Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" by Paul McCartney and Wings is such a quirky, weird piece of work that it would never get airplay these days, regardless of Paul's Beatles heritage. Even though this song was on his second solo album Ram, it could easily be a track from the White Album or Abbey Road. And while "Free As A Bird" did well as a Beatles track even though it was rescued from a demo of John Lennon's, it's pretty clear that the experimental noises on it (false ending, backwards audio, applause) were Paul's doing. But "Uncle Albert" would get airplay these days only as a Beatles track, and only as a novelty Hey Look What We Found in the Vaults kind of thing.
Next up:
"Last Dance" by Donna Summer captures not only the music (duh) of the Disco era, but also some of the attitudes of that time and place. Remember, this was before anyone had ever heard of AIDS, and casual sex was pretty easy to come by. Many, MANY people went to the Disco just to hook up with someone, anyone. It sounds like a bad pickup line--and it was--but many people of both sexes would say Hello by asking, "Your place or mine?" Listen closely to the lyrics and you'll realize that this song is about the final opportunity of the evening to get laid. This song wouldn't happen nowadays without a rewrite.
The Streak kind of goes without saying, not just because it's a novelty record and they don't seem to have any traction nowadays, but because it's a novelty record based on specific news events. If you go to YouTube, there's a video that Ray Stevens made several years later, but in my head it's not that funny; what's more it assumes that you're already in on the joke and overpunches the funnier lines. (This, incidentally, is the problem I have with "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer"--the version that we all hear nowadays is a re-recording, which doesn't quite trust you to get the jokes.)
Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music". White boy. Need I say more? Too bad, I'm gonna. This country has gotten waaay too sensitive to racial issues. People have said that the show All in the Family wouldn't get on TV today, but part of that is because the overall attitudes have changed. The shows haven't changed in syndication. Sanford and Son, however, would occasionally break out that "N word", and you're not likely to hear that used unless you're watching the show on DVD. One of my favorite episodes of the show involves Fred challenging a racist cop in traffic court. When the officer testifies that he tickets white people too, Fred points to the gallery and asks, "Where are they? Look at all the [n-word]s in here...you got enough [n-word]s to make a Tarzan movie." It was a convulsively funny moment BECAUSE he said it just like that. It was shocking and hysterical, and it's really too bad that the PC Police would take me down if I typed it correctly. Anyway, Wild Cherry is out. I'm willing to bet that the "Theme from Shaft" would get the boot, too.
I'm going to toss one more out there, even though it wasn't a single. But if it were recorded today it would sound very different. "With a Little Help From My Friends" by The Beatles is a track whose entire charm is in the fact that it was written for someone with a limited vocal range, and Ringo Starr manages to sing slightly off-key. And while he got a lot of coaching from Paul McCartney to do the last note, he clearly warbles a bit. Today, we have Auto-Tune type technologies, this is a song that would wind up getting "fixed" in the mix. In this case, "fixed" is semantically equivalent to "neutered".
Can you think of any songs which have no place in today's world?
Alex Trebek: Sean Connery, why don't you pick.
Sean Connery: Well, the game is afoot. I'll take Anal Bum Cover for $7000
Alex Trebek: That's... [Sean Connery laughs wildly ] Alex Trebek: That's "An Album Cover", NOT ANAL BUM COVER!
Sean Connery: I can read, Trebek! That says Anal Bum Cover! I spent five years of my life trying to invent an anal bum cover! Failure to do so is my greatest regret! Alex Trebek: You have led a horrifying life.
--Saturday Night Live, "Lucy Liu/Jay-Z" (12/16/2000)
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Once in awhile, when I'm feeling in a dopey frame of mind, I'll hear a song on the radio and suggest to Wife that someone else should do a cover of it. For instance, Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" will come on, and I'll say to her, "You know who could do a great cover of this song? Robert Goulet."
OK, that one was a little funnier when Goulet was alive, but you get the idea.
This was brought to mind recently when I heard the Four Tops singing their version of "If I Were a Carpenter." I like this recording, but what a weird song for this group to do, I thought. (And never mind that there are about forty other covers of this song out there, including those by Dolly Parton and Robert Plant.) I started to think about other cover songs that probably didn't make sense on the surface, but worked out well in the end:
Joe Cocker's version of "With a Little Help From My Friends" is probably one of my favorite covers of a Beatles song--The Wonder Years notwithstanding--ever. The long intro, the soulful approach, the different bridge, different tempo and key...everything is all wrong, and yet so right. I love this track. And then there's this cover of the cover (audio isn't excellent, but it's the best I could find):
"Hurt", the Johnny Cash cover of the Nine Inch Nails track, lets the music bring in the emotion while Johnny holds more or less steady throughout. The timing of this recording, not long before he died, gives it some extra poignancy. This song also pairs very well with its video:
lMost people don't realize that Fats Domino's version of "Blueberry Hill" and The Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" are themselves covers (Glenn Miller and Todd Duncan, respectively, were the original artists). And while everyone knows that Soft Cell covered "Where Did Our Love Go" from the Supremes, who really knew that the first half, "Tainted Love" was actually a rather faithful cover of the Gloria Jones song from 1964?
But frankly, adding a techno beat to what's essentially the original arrangement doesn't bring a lot to the song, so I'm not so impressed with Soft Cell in this context. On the other hand, the Run-D.M.C./Aerosmith cover of "Walk This Way" really did something new to the song, and the video was fun to watch, too:
One of the cooler covers of the 1960s was the Beach Boys' 1965 version of the Regents' "Barbara Ann"
One of the things that puzzled me about this song was the fact that Brian Wilson has always been known to be a maniac about things sounding perfect, so why did this recording sound so chaotic and "live"? Was it the group jerking around and they just liked the way it sounded?
As it turns out, the answer is "no." The Beach Boys cut the album Beach Boys' Party! to fulfill Capitol Records' request for a new album. They were about to start on Pet Sounds, they'd already released a concert album the previous year, so they hit on the idea of a "live party" album. The tracks were recorded in a studio and the party chatter, laughter and other noises were added in post-production. This also explains the quotation marks around the word "Live" on the album cover.
There's not much to see in the video link above, but give this one a listen anyway; this is the "full ending" version that is so rarely played on the radio these days. Also, singing lead on this track are Brian Wilson and Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean (hence the "Thanks, Dean" at the end of the track).
OK, one more and I'll stop for now. Eminem recorded "'97 Bonnie and Clyde", which was subsequently covered by Tori Amos. Amos completely transformed the track into a kind of "banality of evil" study and seducing the listener with the strings and the whispered lyrics. The clip below is Tori's voice, but it's part of a film project she's not, to my knowledge, associated with. It's an interesting short film, though, and I have my own idea as to what's going on here, but I'll let you come up with your own interpretation.
There are plenty of cross-genre covers out there, but so many of them either don't work well (Elton John's "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" never impressed me, for instance, although I really liked his "Pinball Wizard"), or they bring nothing--nothing much, anyway--new to the song (Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This"). One of the better examples of the latter would be Nena's "99 Luftballoons", in which she covered herself in translating it to English. The English version is a mess because of the way the lyrics are more or less shoehorned back into the song.
So what about you? What re-recordings are you especially fond of, and why?
Lt. Steven Hauk: Now, that was about as good a polka as you're ever going to hear.
--Good Morning Vietnam (1987)
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Have you ever noticed that, whenever someone's in a car going by and they're blasting the music so that you can make it out even through the closed windows, whatever they're playing almost invariably sucks? I swear, one day I'm going to cruise down North Avenue with my stereo blasting National Public Radio. Dig it, the whole city listening to Bob White and his Mouthful of Spit. SWALLOW already, Bob! Jeez.
So anyway: this evening I had to attend a staff development session, which was staged down at Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School. This school was recently remodeled and let me tell you, it's gorgeous. It's like Digital Harbor High minus the Apple Store accoutrements.
As the session broke up, we all made our way out through the main entrance ("main exit"?), and onto Orleans Street. It was a warm evening, so cars were driving by with the windows open. And, of course, someone was caught at the traffic light, and they're sitting there with the radio at full blast...
Woody Boyd: You know, Rudolph is my favorite guy in the Christmas song. Sam Malone: Yeah. Dr. Frasier Crane: Apparently then Woody, you're unaware that the story of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is one of the most unrealistic and therefore potentially damaging in all of children's music. It gives them a horribly distorted view of reality. Woody Boyd: Yeah, but you got to admit, it's easy to whistle. Dr. Frasier Crane: No, I'm serious. First the other reindeer tease and then ostracise him. And then when his abnormality proves of service, they use him.
--Cheers, "Thanksgiving Orphans" (11/27/86)
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Holy Moley, campers! When you're into December, that means it's time for Courtney's Fourth Annual Christmas Music Countdown. This year she's pairing up with her friend MJ, and since their musical tastes don't always coincide, we may see a few jokers in this year's deck. Every day they'll bring you a new song related to this time of the year (that is, they're not all strictly Christmas tunes). Some of them will have some commentary attached, others will have a "just listen already" air about them. But you can't deny that it's a good list, and not many repeats from one year to the next.
Martin Luther King: Huey, I just don't think I belong in this new world. I don't know if I need the 20 gig iPod or the 40 gig. I tried to download some Mahalia Jackson, but I lost my iTunes password.
I'm just about ready to break down and buy an iPod, for my upcoming road trip.
I'm helping a friend move early next week. My end of it is going to be pretty easy. She's retiring to a town fairly close to my mother. This isn't a coincidence, by the way: my mom helped her out with this. She'd look stuff up on the Internet, then call my mother and give her the details. Mom would go to the place, check it out, take a bunch of notes and report back. After a couple of weeks of this, they found a place which they could rent for the first year and take their time about getting permanent digs.
She and her husband each have a car, and they'll have a moving van full of stuff with which they'll travel. They want to go together in one car. But then, how to move the other car? Their solution was to ask me to drive it down (since, after all, I know the neighborhood), and they'd fly me back to Baltimore. As it turns out, I'm going down about two weeks before they are, so I'm taking down some of their stuff, unloading the car and leaving it parked in the driveway. Then, I'm free to do my thing until the day of the flight. Naturally, not being nearly as stupid as I look, I set things up so that I'd drive down relatively early (they don't really care when) and stay as late as possible.
Now, however, I'm going to need a little entertainment when I'm on the road or at the beach, whether that means music or talking books or whatever else. And while I do enjoy listening to local radio (especially at night, when you can get AM stations from hundreds of miles away), sometimes you just want to be entertained the way you want to be entertained.
So I'm turning to you, Internet, in a kind of Blatant Comment Whoring that hasn't been seen since you last looked in on Yellojkt's site. I do have several hundred CDs, representing thousands of tracks, already ripped onto my desktop computer; these will have to be moved into the new unit. So capacity is a bit of an issue. I'm not married to the idea of an iPod specifically but it seems as though all the world's docking stations, etc. are made just for Apple. Or am I mistaken? I'm not in need of a TV tuner, or the ability to watch videos and all that. I just wanna listen to my tunes and maybe put together some specific playlists for parties, road trips (ahem), reflecting certain moods, that sort of thing.
Any and all suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance for your help.
Brian: [mistaking a police scanner for a normal radio, during a crime report] Is it just me, or is rap music getting lazier?
—Family Guy, "A Hero Sits Next Door" (5/2/99)
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There have been a bunch of changes up and down the radio dial lately, and I'm not sure I get all of them.
The thing about Mark Steiner everyone knows about already. A bunch of listeners are upset, WYPR has managed to entrench themselves on this issue, so Steiner has moved up the dial to 88.9 FM. Last I heard he doesn't have a regular gig yet but they're working on that. Dan Rodericks, in the meantime, is terrible. Soooo, I'm sitting on my membership money. I'd be curious to see if anyone else did as well; at least enough to make a dent in the station's income.
What really confuses me is the changes made over at Live 105 FM. They've actually made matters worse for themselves, as far as I can tell.
It doesn't seem to me that anyone currently in Baltimore radio has heard of the idea of counter-programming. All this means is that, when someone else with a similar format is in a stop set (commercial block), you do your best to ensure that you're not. So many times a station I'm listening to goes to commercials, so I scan through my presets, only to discover that they're ALL in stop sets. The only station that managed to avoid this trap was Live 105. Now, they've become remarkably predictable in that they've got a network news break at the top of the hour, then a local news break, then they have the traffic with its attendant stop set every 15 minutes. So if a station I'm listening to goes to a commerical, I actually know whether or not to bother listening to them as I zip through presets, because nine times out of ten I'll know whether they'll be in a break or a stop set.
Plus, as it happens, I got to listen to a LOT more Ed Norris when he was on middays. However, now that it's Troy Johnson or Brian Wilson, I don't hear nearly as much of that station as I used to. Of course, this is all snippets heard when traveling from one school to another, but still.
The other thing that got to me this week was learning that Bob Waugh on WRNR isn't necessarily in the studio when he's on-air. His show appears to be voicetracked. "Voicetracking" is when a DJ pre-records all the intros and outros to the songs he's playing, and then someone else in the studio plays the DJ's chatter and the attendant records. A couple of days ago, WRNR was playing a song, then Waugh said a few words, then they went to a stop set. During the stop set, we suddenly heard Waugh doing the exact same outro for the song he'd just played. Therefore, Waugh's voice was recorded and his show is likely to be voicetracked. I've liked Bob Waugh since I was younger, listening to him on WBAB on Long Island, so this was a bit of a disappointment.
I've also heard that the Smooth Jazz station at 104.3 is now gone, with a format change to a kind of Adult Alternative. Since their definition of "Jazz" was kind of loose, this isn't a huge loss. But cities should have jazz stations, and not just the Andy Bienstock option.
This post was kind of a ramble, so feel free to add your own thoughts.
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