I would guess that mishearing of song lyrics must be pretty common. I
can see why Steve Animal - that was the name of the disk jockey -
thought it was funny that someone had transformed Imminence Front into
Livin' in Huts. Being a disk jockey I would guess that he might have a
lot of stories like that. But good grief! I went about fifty years
mishearing that line! How could I have not learned that I was mishearing
it in all that time. Oh, by the way, in that thread where I learned that
I had been mishearing that there was another story that I thought was
funny. Some years back there was a song called Play That Funky Music
White boy. I remember hearing an interview with one of the band members
who said that it came from a time that they were playing in certain
nightclubs that were all Black. That is, the only white people in the
whole club were the band. And so that was a common thing that the
patrons shouted at them. Anyway, the person who was writing this post
said that she would ride in a car with her mother and that song would
commonly come on the radio and she liked it. But something was bothering
her. She finally asked her mother how they were able to put that song on
the radio with that word so prominent in it and even the disk jocky
announced it. It turns out that she thought she was hearing Play That
Fucking Music White Boy.
___
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
On 6/10/2021 12:55 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
That's a fun story, Roger. When I was just entering my teens I heard
a song that caught my fancy, and I thought I'd learned the lyrics. It
didn't make sense, but I liked the tune, so sang what I thought were
the words. "Hey Mister Hayden, Saving All My Love For You
One day, many months later, my mother turned to me and asked, "Who's
Mister Hayden?"
"I have no idea, but those are the words". A few days later, since we
didn't have computers back then, my mother set a book of popular song
lyrics next to my dinner plate. Inside she had marked, "Ain't Miss
Behavin' I'm Saving All My Love For You".
And that was the end of Mister Hayden.
carl Jarvis
On 6/9/21, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is interesting. I really do not pay much attention to music
anymore. I haven't for years. However, because of a recent minor dispute
in an automobile with a guy who was giving me a ride I posted a link
here to a Led Zeppelin song to get your opinions about the subject of
that dispute. That got me started on something. First I posted a link to
a Led Zeppelin song that I thought Carl might like and then I found
myself nostalgia tripping. I started looking up pieces of music that I
remembered from my distant past and listened to them while, I suppose,
reliving my youth. Well, earlier today I was looking for a Black Sabbath
song that I could not remember the name of. I did remember a line from
it though. The line was, Take your body to a copse. I Googled that
phrase. On the whole entire Internet I found only two hits that had web
pages with that phrase in it. One of those hits was a thread in a
discussion list and the subject line was, misheard lyrics in songs. I
started reading the thread and various people were offering anecdotes
about how they had heard lyrics wrong and had thought a song was saying
one thing for years when it was actually saying something else. At least
a couple of people said that even after they learned that they had heard
a song wrong they still thought of it as saying what they misheard and
that every time they thought about the song they thought about it with
the wrong lyrics. I was reminded of something I once heard a radio disk
jocky laughing about in a bar. I suppose he couldn't laugh about this on
the air. There is a song with the title Imminence Front. The title is
repeated several times in the song itself. What he was laughing about
was someone who called in to request the song and had obviously misheard
it. The caller was calling it Livin' In Huts. Anyway, as I was reading
this thread I came to the post that contained the phrase, Take your body
to a copse. She was saying that in the Black Sabbath song, Behind the
Walls of Sleep, there was a that said, turns your body to a corpse
and for years she had heard it as take your body to a copse. Good grief!
Had I been hearing it wrong in that same way all along too? Well, I had
a title now, so I Googled Behind the Walls of Sleep and I found the You
Tube video of exactly the song I had been looking for. Just before the
video, though, there was another hit that had the lyrics to the song.
Looking at those lyrics I saw that, indeed, the line in question did
read, turns your body to a corpse. So then I listened to the video. I am
not going to provide a link to it here this time unless someone asks for
it because I expect that you guys will be saying the same thing about
how you can't listen to that heavy metal music. But I listened to it and
still enjoyed it and I listened very carefully when the line in question
came up. Yes, it was saying turns your body to a corpse and with that
corrected it actually fit into the song as a whole much better and made
the song make more sense. I can see how the mistake was made too. It was
Ozzy Osbourne's British accent. His accent deemphasized the R sounds to
the point that they could hardly be heard and I suppose my mind just
substituted the words that most closely matched the sounds I was
hearing. Nevertheless, I feel stupid now. This means that for about
fifty years now I thought it was saying one thing when it was actually
saying something else. Fifty years! Wouldn't that make you feel stupid?
___
--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept