Doug: Today's a day for telling us those times, and some of these could be funny stories, that you thought life was "as we know it", and then had a little bubble burst later on. One quite-humorous aspect of this conversation could be song lyrics. My younger son, as a waif, was notoriously famous for singing what he thought he heard. We used to tease him, saying "sounds like/really is" about his lyrical revisionism. I think his best one was mistakenly hearing "Livin' in the swamp" for "Eminence front"... I have no answer. This entire idea of hard-to-decipher song lyrics was handled quite smartly in the recent ads for Volkswagon, using Elton John's Rocket Man lyrics as the centerpiece.
18 comments:
One I'll tell on myself has to do with not getting some of the fun pun names that Jack Kirby gave to many of his Fourth World creations.
I don't when it dawned on me, but sometime long after the whole run, I finally figured out that Mokkari and Symian were puns on the words "Mockery" and "Simian". Why that didn't click is beyond me, but it didn't.
Dolt slapping my own self.
Rip Off
Rip, speaking of Kirby's 4th World, It took me some time to realize that Darkseid was pronounced Dark-side and not Dark-seed. When I did get it, I was like "oh, that makes much more sense."
As for song lyrics, the example I remember about myself the most concerns the Police song "Every Breath You Take". For years I thought the lyric "how my poor heart aches…" was "I'm a pool hall ace…". Don't ask me why.
I have 2 buddies that were singing "Do the calculator" to Aerosmith's Dude Looks Like A Lady.
They were singing this to the song while at a party.
They were trying to dance with some ladies, and had invented a dance where they would pretend to be jumping on the keypad of a giant calculator. Needless to say, they struck out.
David in Wisconsin
@David: "Do the calculator" -- LOL!! C'mon man, you made that up right? That is too funny!!! I'm gonna use that someday.
Hey David, I was at that party ~ Those ladies were sooo snooty, I tried to hook up with them too.
Didn't dance 'the calculator', though...
Hmm, the only thing that comes to mind is 'Penny Lane' and it's 'fish and finger pie' line.. Many years later, I discovered in a Macca interview what he 'supposedly meant'.
That, along with some of Julie Newmar's lines in the '60s Batman series, certain nuances were obviously over my head.
And probably for others here as well, a lot of Englehart's and Starlin's cosmic stuff in the pages of Doc Strange and MarVell (respectively) made a lot more sense after reading 'Untold Story'...
I wish I had made that up. I actually tried disassociating myself from them the rest
of that night. But I didn't tell them the true
lyrics until several weeks later. And not until
after another buddy of mine goaded them into
showing off their Calculator dance steps a
couple of times for everyone's amusement.
And William, my wife informs me that she and
her sister thought Eminence Front was, "Livin'
in a butt ..."
sigh...
David in Wisconsin
Sorry, I meant Doug, not William, about Eminence Front.
David in Wisconsin
What is it about that Aerosmith song? When I was in college a friend came up to a group of us to tell us about the new Aerosmith song he'd just heard, called "Do Me Like A Lady."
Yeah, he was a wee bit embarrassed later on.
Back in 1980, a friend of mine thought 'Another One Bites The Dust' was "A number one doctor doctor"! I heard him singing it before I'd heard the actual Queen song, so it took me years to "hear" the proper lyrics. It sort of makes sense, considering the way Mercury sings "dust,ah". It sort of songs like "doctor".
A more obscure I misheard was Springsteen's 'Lost In The Flood':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h9Zki_4e98
If you don't know the song,each verse tells a story, one deals with an ill-fated race care driver named "Jimmy the Saint". The lyric that threw me was "He leans over the hood tellin' racin' stories". For years I heard "he leans over the hood tellin' racist stories". Very different.
In comics, the kid who introduced me to Annihilus always pronounced it "Ann-ul-is. I finally tracked down his first appearance, where Stan Lee explains that he "annihilates", ergo his name.
My story is about abusing my friends. I do love them so. (-;
Before the internet, I convinced a friend that Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" was actually "Swede Emotion."
That Steven Tyler was in love, but was spurned by Agnetha Fältskog from ABBA. That's where "Swede Emotion" came from.
On the spot I invented a complicated backstory. I topped it off with "I had just found out most of this stuff from a 'Behind the Music' episode."
Perfect.
He repeated the story a couple days later at a Bar. They laughed him out of the place. He said he yelled my Last Name like "Khan!!!"
Teresa: oooo, yer mean! But that's actually hilarious. If I tried something like that, I think I'd have trouble keeping a straight face.
Not related to song lyrics or anything, but I remember for the longest time, until I was in about the third grade, I thought wheelbarrow was wheel barrel.
In comics, I actually got Darkseid right away, but I remember mispronouncing a few others. For example, until the movie came out, I thought the first syllable in Conan was pronounced like the word con; and I pronounced the first 'a' in Ka-zar short, like in cat or hat.
Otherwise, like Doug, I recall being surprised when I heard the Who's version of "Pinball Wizard." Similarly, I initially didn't know that "You Really Got Me" was by the Kinks, and not Van Halen. Also - and this came up in another thread recently - I remember being completely floored in college when I learned that "Black Magic Woman" was actually a minor hit for Fleetwood Mac before Santana turned it into his signature song.
As I mentioned a few days ago, I hadn't heard 'Working in a Coalmine' before DEVO..., so I thought it was just one of theirs..
My brother thought the Van Halen song "Panama" was "Animal" and sang it accordingly, until I heard him and put a stop to it.
I still think of "Sub-Mariner" as "Sub-mureener"...I just can't help it...that's how it sounds in my head.
Yeah, Sub-Mariner was "Sub-Mareener" for my buddy and I for many, many years.
Annihilus was "Anna-HILL-us".
KAMANDI was one of those Kirby homonyms, too. What building did the Last Boy on Earth make his fateful escape from? Command "D"--! Heh, I always liked that one.
The Lone Ranger? Before he was ever any movie or television show or comic book, he was an ENORMOUSLY popular radio program. He was, in fact, created from whole cloth as a radio western/adventure-- there's no earlier source material whatsoever for that character. Cool tidbit? The Green Hornet is- now, let me get this straight- the son (or maybe grandson) of the Lone Ranger's dead brother. It's allllll connected. . .
HB
Wait -it's pronounced Dark-SIDE and not Dark-SEED? :)
- Mike from Trinidad & Tobago.
When I was a kid I thought the Lone Ranger was the Long Ranger...no dirty jokes, please.
Wait a sec, what's this about Kamandi? How the hell do you pronounce that, anyway? M.P.
It's just "command" with an "ee" sound added. "Commandee" or "Commandy". kuh-MAN-dee, I guess, would be the more phonetical approximation.
HB
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