By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Once upon a time there was a land where musicians, songs, and the lyrics to those songs were not readily available to the listener. Historians refer to this era as “You are now old and good luck trying to kid yourself that you are still in midlife.” In that long-ago era, songs would magically pour from car radios that were a series of random numbers, or from clock radios from which random numbers made clicking noises every minute.
Music was consumed without the benefit of a smart phone telling you everything you ever wanted to know about that song in four or fewer helpful bullet points.
There were, of course, other ways to consume music—through albums (or vinyl as the cool kids and Zach Bryan call it), 8-tracks, and cassettes. Unfortunately, oftentimes those media did not come with lyric sheets, so the only way to understand what words were being sung was through repeated listening, which was only helpful if the lyrics you heard were actually what was being sung.
But not all misheard lyrics are funny or ridiculous, despite the cups my sister got for me one Christmas that contain random misheard lyrics that she thinks are hysterical. Some misheard lyrics are actual improvements over the originals, and today I offer those to you:
“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by The Police (1980).
Before I delve deeply into my improved lyric, I would like to give Police lead singer and musical genius Sting some well-deserved appreciation in how he expanded my teenage world. We can start with this song, which references Vladimir Nabokov who was unfamiliar to 10-year-old me. I asked my father what the famous book by Nabokov was, and he delicately told me it was titled Lolita, and then busied himself with finding anything else to do rather than wade into a plot summary that would inevitably lead to questions about the girls in my class who rode the bus and stood at bus stops.
(Sting also conjured songs from mythology which was extremely helpful when I recently saw The Odyssey and knew that the Scylla and Charybdis were rock lobsters and not innocent-looking stones that Matt Damon would have to sail around because I had listened to “Wrapped Around Your Finger” 500 times since its release in 1983)
In “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” the Lolita-like student is standing in the rain at a bus stop when the teacher drives by in a car that is “warm and dry.” This is where I would have offered Sting a lyrical upgrade. In a rainstorm, most non-convertibles are “warm and dry,” but had Sting tried just a little harder, the teacher’s car could have been “Woman Drive,” which would have fit thematically, and which I would have preferred—in the lyrics, and in real life.
Even in my early teens, I was resigned to the fact that I would never be as good looking as the Police frontman. It probably didn’t help that I read a slender biography on the Englishman in which one entire chapter was devoted to the science of whether Sting had the perfect face. However, if my parents had splurged on the addition of “Woman Drive” to the family Subaru package, that might have helped overcome the fact that I was on the Quiz Bowl team.
“Up the Junction” by Squeeze (1979).
My introduction to Squeeze came by way of Sting, which should not be surprising to anyone who read what I just wrote above. Sting could do no wrong in my formative years which meant that anything he put on cassette I had to have and listen to. Such was the case with the soundtrack to the 1982 film Brimstone and Treacle, in which he starred.
I had to look up both words in the dictionary. Though I never saw the movie—I also had to look up definitions for both words in the title—I did find the soundtrack at Listening Booth in the Berkshire Mall and took it home to be terribly disappointed by an album that featured a lot of spoken word narration and not much in the way of musical genius except that it did include this song by Squeeze on Side 2.
“Up the Junction” is stand-alone brilliant, but I do believe that the fact that it was surrounded by such dreck magnified that brilliance in that moment. It’s about working-class Londoners and is sung with an accent and lyrics that were not always clear to a young listener in Eastern Pennsylvania suburbia. When the boyfriend, a soon-to-be father, gets a job with a guy named Stanley, he doesn’t sing about having a “bath” on Sunday. Rather, to my ears anyway, he sings about having a “barf.”
I assumed the protagonist of the song had “baths” every day just like I did, so why would a bath on a Sunday before work be noteworthy enough to make it into a song? On the other hand, this guy is about to have a baby with his girlfriend, and they have to sell the “telly,” so money is obviously tight.
Stanley, meanwhile, doesn’t know if this is going to be a good hire, but merely thinks having the protagonist on the job will come in “handy.” It would be reasonable that our first-person singer is very nervous about the job, given the circumstances, and you know what some people do when they are nervous?
Yes, they barf.
“Overkill” by Men at Work (1983).
This song has no real Sting connection other than it was released the same year as the record-breaking Synchronicity by The Police which should have beaten out Michael Jackson’s Thriller for album of the year. I still remember debating Christine Cieplinski about that in Mr. Schmidt’s music class the day after the Grammys.
Anyway, “Overkill” is about the daily stresses of life and eating vegemite sandwiches (different Men At Work song but I assume vegemite consumption is Australian rather than specific to any Men At Work song). The singer goes for a walk to ease his mind when he can’t sleep at night and can smell the “desperation” in the air. Probably the same thing that Phil Collins could feel in the air two years before that. When I thought of Colin Hay wandering the streets of a big city in a foreign land it made sense to me that he wouldn’t smell odorless “desperation” but rather the “gasperation” which I assumed was an Australian word for air pollution. Much more poetic.
“Africa” by Toto (1982)…by Weezer (2018).
I never bought this cassette or album, but you could not turn on a clock radio or go to a public pool without hearing this song in the summer of 1982. And hearing it a thousand times was no guarantee that I would ever hear the correct lyric—“As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.”
At 12, I had some familiarity with the Serengeti Plain because the American zoologist Marlin Perkins talked about it often on Sunday nights after the NFL games were over. My friend Allyson Poska once said I’m the kind of guy who roots for the zebras in nature specials, and she wasn’t wrong. I still pull for those zebras because of the television show Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and I still maintain that it’s not a mythological mountain chasing those zebras in “Africa.”
Though I had never heard of the word “leopress” back in ’82, I assumed that the members of Toto, who were session men for Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, had a broader vocabulary than me and knew the scientific name for a female leopard. They didn’t, as it turns out. (It’s “leopardess.”) But I was still convinced that it must be “a leopress”—not Olympus—rising above the Serengeti to kill those poor zebras I so dearly loved.
My baby sister has a 1960s good Catholic name, Ann Marie. However, from the time she was 10 years old, she has been teased by friends, and, hmm, family too whenever Clearance Clearwater Revival's 'Lookin' Out My Back Door' comes on the radio, 'Ann Marie's an Elephant a playin' in the band'. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1292987255914552