Published Wednesday, July 13, 2011 4:55 PM
Updated Wednesday, July 13, 2011 4:55 PM
The classic illustration is that scene in the movie “Naked Gun,” where the late great Leslie Nielsen is trying to impersonate a famous opera singer and has to sing the granddaddy of all songs everyone loves but no one knows how to sing: “The Star Spangled Banner.”
I suppose the first time I ever heard anyone ruin the lyrics, unknowingly or not, was way back in the Pleistocene era, my junior or senior year in high school. I don’t recall the context, other than a bunch of my buddies and I were obviously out too late riding around and getting into trouble, when a Billy Joel song came on the radio, his classic, “You may be right.”
Upon hearing that first riff, someone in the car shouted out, “I LOVE that song,” then proceeded to sing the following line: “You make the rice; I’ll make the gravy; but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for …”
I think that someone may have been me.
A couple of decade’s worth of useless consumer technology later along came the Internet, and with it the ability to instantly research all manner of utterly banal, trivial information, like botched song lyrics.
Here are a few gems I have run across over the years:
• Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Down on the Corner.” The correct lyrics are, “down on the corner, out in the street, Willie and the Poor Boys are playing, bring your nickels tap your feet.”
But a lot of moro – uh, people out there over the years have been singing the following: “Down on the corner, outie in the street, singing a poke for the pain, bringin’ new felt happy feet.”
Well alrighty, then.
That’s quite a stretch but frighteningly enough, I can see it. Nonetheless, while it apparently takes a really convoluted brain freezes to come up with that version of Down on the Corner, how about something simpler, like that classic ’80s anthem, “Oh, Sherry?”
The correct first line is, “You should have been gone.” But a lot of people, including yours truly, heard Steve Perry sing, “Cinnamon gum.”
My all time favorite, of course, is the Rolling Stones classic, “I’ll never be your pizza burning.” You figure it out.
One would think that after 20 some years of playing music, I would have a veritable Library of Congress in my head stuffed full of nothing but song lyrics. And I do. The problem is in the retrieval system. Sometimes songs I have done since I was 12 mysteriously disappear. Error message. Bad command or file name. Gone.
The most embarrassing moments are those occasions when I forget the lines to songs I have written.
The great Jimmy Buffett, who is not only a genius but also a really cool guy, solved this one a long time ago; he just has his band play the song while he holds the microphone out to the audience. I don’t know that the man has actually had to sing an entire song in 25 years.
But that’s Jimmy Buffett, icon and genius.
Jimmy Tatum, half-fast, over-the-hill barroom rock star can’t quite pull that one off.
Fortunately, in America, most audiences are either clueless or forgiving – I suspect a combination of the two. But you better be careful in some places.
A friend of mine, a blues player from way back, told me he was on tour in Europe and learned the hard way that purists do not appreciate a quick ad lib; making do with a concocted line on the fly because you just had a brain freeze is looked upon in some of those places as a more severe form of heresy. They apparently don’t burn heretics at the stake anymore, but a lot of them apparently are not above throwing beer bottles, which seems to be the modern barroom form of stoning.
In the meantime, always remember that I’ll never be your pizza burning.