Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs (Backlist eBook Program)
Page 5
THE SURGEON GENERAL AND THE SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION have determined that if your car stalls upon the railroad tracks and somebody pulls you out, you should not go running back because this could be harmful to you as well as (if you are pregnant) your unborn child.
Another leading teenage car-crash death song is “Last Kiss,” which was performed by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers. In this song, the singer (presumably J. Frank Wilson) wails:
Where oh where can my BABY be?
The Lord took her away from me!
She’s gone to heaven so I got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world.
Frankly, if I were the Supreme Being, I would have a rule that you could not get into heaven if you had ever deliberately rhymed good with world.
The best version of “Last Kiss” I ever heard was sung by Stephen King, who’s in a rock band, consisting mostly of authors, which I also belong to, called the Rock Bottom Remainders. (No, we have never made an album and for an excellent reason: We suck.) Stephen occasionally modified the lyrics to “Last Kiss.” One time, describing the tender moment just following the car crash, he sang:
When I awoke, she was lying there
I brushed her liver from my hair.
If that doesn’t bring a lump to your throat, I don’t know what would.
Other motor-vehicle teen-tragedy songs include “Tell Laura I Love Her,” sung by Ray Peterson. This is about a guy who enters a stock-car race so he can buy Laura a wedding ring, and of course, he crashes in a seriously fatal manner, but he still manages to sing “Tell Laura I LO-OVE her! Tell Laura I NEE-ED her!” approximately 153 times before finally shutting up. (I suspect that the ambulance crew turned off the oxygen.)
And, of course, there is “Leader of the Pack,” performed by the Shangri-Las, which features a motorcycle accident (VROOM “LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT!” CRASH) and ends with the Shangri-Las singing:
GONE...
The Leader of the Pack! And now he’s gone!
GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE!
Tragic-song teenagers do not always die in vehicle wrecks. Sometimes they jump in rivers. A good example of this genre is “Patches,” sung by Dickey Lee, which is about a guy whose girlfriend, distraught that they can’t be together, is found
Floating face-down
In that dirty old river
So naturally, the singer decides that he’s going to handle this tragedy maturely and sensibly by also jumping into the river. (“Patches, I’m coming to you!”)
The ultimate teenage-river-jumper song—and in my opinion, one of the worst songs ever made—is “Running Bear,” sung by Johnny Preston. This is the song wherein background singers make what they apparently believe are Indian noises—“OON-gah oon-gah OON-gah oon-gah”—while the lead singer tells the story of Running Bear and Little White Dove, who belong to enemy tribes but love each other “with a love big as the sky” (maybe Shakespeare wrote this song). So they jump into the river and drown to resolve this problem and get away from the background singers going “OON-gah oon-gah.”
One of the Bad Song Survey participants, Joan Kozlowski, said that when “Running Bear” comes on her car radio, “I just stick my head out of the car window and hope a semi gets it, just like my mother always said.”
Sometimes the teenagers in these songs do not stay permanently dead. A fine example of this phenomenon is the song “Laurie (Strange Things Happen),” also sung by Dickey Lee, in which the singer meets a girl, lends her his sweater, and walks her home. The next day he goes back to her house to get his sweater, and the girl’s dad tells him that she died exactly a year before. So he goes to the cemetery, and there, on the girl’s tombstone, he finds—you guessed it—the high school ring from “Teen Angel.”
No, seriously, he finds his sweater, and it is very thought-provoking. “Strange things happen in this world,” the singer points out a number of times.
I want to close this chapter by revealing that I, personally, once wrote a tragic, teenage death song, called “Oh, Loretta.” Unfortunately, it was never recorded, but I’d like to share the chorus with you here:
Oh, Loretta
Why did I let ya
Stand unattended
Near the threshing machine?
Songs People Get Wrong
Everybody Join In! “A weema-wacka weema-wacka...”
One of the definitive characteristics of popular music, particularly rock music, is that the lyrics are often unintelligible. Of course, as we’ve seen in this book, this is often a good thing.
But it can drive you crazy trying to figure out the words to a song, especially if you like it. For example, I really like “Help Me Rhonda,” by the Beach Boys, but I’ve never been able to figure out the opening lines. It sounds as though the singer is singing:
Well since she put me down
There’s been owls pukin’ in my bed
I hope these lyrics are wrong because if they’re right, the singer’s not going to get Rhonda to go anywhere near him.
Often the reason we don’t know what the singer is singing is that the singer does not enunciate clearly. Elton John, for example, often sounds as though he’s singing in a foreign language, possibly Welsh. James Brown routinely sings entire songs without making a single intelligible statement other than “Hey!”
Sometimes the problem is that the singer himself doesn’t know what he’s singing. As I mentioned elsewhere in this book, I sometimes play in a literary rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. As I also mentioned elsewhere in this book, we suck, but our musical director is an actual talented rock legend, Al Kooper, who at one time used to risk his reputation by playing with us. Al did one solo number—a long, slow, powerful blues song called “Caress Me Baby”—and although I understood all the other lyrics he sang, there was one line I could never get. Al sang it with what appeared to be tremendous passion, and it sounded like he was singing: “Goan rare-ro hah-dee-nah.”
Finally, after hearing him perform the song dozens of times, I asked him what he was singing in that one part, and he said: “I’m singing ‘Gonna railroad high tonight.’ ”
“Gonna railroad high tonight?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
It turned out that Al didn’t know what the lyrics were, either. He had listened repeatedly to the original recording of “Caress Me Baby,” and the closest thing he could come up with was “Gonna railroad high tonight,” and so when he sang the song, he just slurred that part.
For all we know, a lot of singers are doing this, which could explain why so many people have trouble with the words to certain songs. The example cited most often by people who responded to the Bad Song Survey was Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.” A great many people firmly believe that Bruce sings these words:
Wrapped up like a douche
Another runner in the night
Those are not, of course, the real lyrics. The real lyrics are
Wrapped up like a douche
There’s been owls pukin’ in my bed
Many people also reported that they could not understand the chorus to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was a big hit for The Tokens. As you know, this is the song wherein the singer, after telling his “darling” to hush because the lion is sleeping, suddenly starts shrieking in a high, piercing voice loud enough to shatter crystal twenty-five miles away, while a chorus of deep male voices chants in the background, making enough noise to wake up a dead lion. Technically, the chorus is chanting the African word Wimoweh1 but the Bad Song Survey voters who objected to this song—and there were quite a few of them—had many different interpretations of the lyrics, including:
A whemma weepa whemma weepa
A weena whack a weena whack
A-wing go-way
A-wing-a-WEP
Ahweemowet, awheemowet
Oh-we-mo-wet oh-we-mo-wet
A weema whip
Weema-wepah
A
weem away
A-weem-o-wack
Weema-wacka weema-wacka
Wingle whip
Weenie wrap
Speaking of weenies, many voters mentioned the song “Good Morning Starshine,” as sung by Oliver; these voters definitely hated this song, but they were not at all sure how the chorus went. Among their interpretations were
Nibby nib nuby, nibby nobby nuby
Gliddy gloob glooby, nibby nabby nooby
Glibby glop gloopy, nibby nobby nooby
Yiby do diby, diby do bidy yadda yadda
Nibby nibby nibby, glibby globby glooby
Subba sibba sabba, subba sibba sabba, ho-ho, yo-yo
Gliddy glup gloopy, oobie flobba noobie, lie lie, low low
Glimmy glop glubby, wam alama looby, sha la la la low
Nitty bloop bloopie, nibby nobby newbie, la la la, low low
Ippy moopy wa-wa, dinky soppy da-da
There were also some votes for the sappy Wayne Newton2 hit “Danke Shein,” or possibly “Donkashane,” or possibly “Dunkashein,” or possibly “Duncashane.”
Some survey voters’ memories of certain lyrics were not 100 percent accurate. For example, there were voters who cited:
The part of “Billie Jean” where Michael Jackson sings “The chair is not my son.” (We don’t know if this is the same chair that refused to listen to Neil Diamond.)
The Procol Harum song about “Sixteen vested virgins.”
The Patti LaBelle song that goes “Voo lay voo coo shay, a vic mwa, cyst wa.” (As we say in France: “Mare see!”)
The part of “I Am the Walrus” where John Lennon sings “I am the walrus, boo boo bi do.”
The beginning of “Annie’s Song,” where John Denver sings “You filled out my census.”
Other voters had trouble remembering the titles of the songs they hated. We received votes for:
“I’m Nothing but a Hound Dog”
“One Toe over the Line, Jesus”
“Goombayah, My Lord”
“Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Pops”
“She Wore a Yellow Polka Dot Beguine”
“Anagotalavita”
“The Wrapper”
“Woodchuck Love”
“Ain’t No Woman Like the One-Eyed Gott”
“One Ton Tomato” (The person who nominated this—and no, I don’t think he was kidding—said it was a song “by some Spanish-speaking group” and that “all the words were in Spanish except the ‘I ate a one-ton tomato’ refrain.”)
These are actually just a few of the many song titles and lyrics that people got wrong, but I’m not even going to try to list them all. Instead, I’m going to end this chapter, and then I’m going to—you guessed it—rare-ro hah-dee-nah.
1 Which means, literally, “Yo no soy marinaro.”
2 Speaking of whom: One survey respondent said that for years, when he heard Wayne singing “Daddy, Don’t You Walk So Fast,” he thought the words were “Daddy, Don’t You Wash Your Pants.”
Conclusion
I’m tempted to apologize to you, because if you have actually read all the way through this book, your brain is now an infected, festering, oozing mass of irritating melodies and pathetic lyrics.
But it’s your own fault. I warned you, right at the beginning, remember? And you kept right on reading, didn’t you? So don’t blame me if, at this moment, the Greatest Hits of Mac Davis are echoing in your cranium.
Besides, it could have been much worse. There are a WHOLE lot of bad songs that aren’t even mentioned in this book. For example, consider the lyrics to “Ball of Confusion,” performed by the Temptations. The Temptations are without doubt one of the greatest singing groups ever, but in “Ball of Confusion,” which is supposed to be a protest song, they sing, with great sincerity:
Great googa mooga
Can’t you hear me talkin’ to ya?
Now, those are some terrible lyrics, but they weren’t included in this book. At least until now.
And there are many, many other bad songs that I left out. I know this. I know that—among many other shortcomings—this book barely even scratches the surface of the early work of Wayne Newton. But a person reaches a point where he simply cannot write about any more bad songs, and I have reached that point.
But before I leave you, I want to say a few things. First, I don’t personally think that all of the songs in this book are bad. I actually like some of them, but I felt I had to include them if they got a lot of Bad Song Survey votes. So if I mentioned a song that you love and you’re really angry at me and you want to track me down and kill me, remember this: I love that song, too!
Also, I want to say this to the many artists whose work was mentioned in this book: You should feel good about being in here. Really! Your presence in this book means that a large sector of the public still remembers your work! You made an impression; you made a difference. How many people can say that? Not many! Some really top musicians—and here I am thinking specifically of Handel—never wrote anything memorable enough to be mentioned in the Bad Song Survey. So I hope you respond to this book in a restrained and gracious manner that does not involve lawsuits.
Finally, let me say that music is subjective. There is no “good” or “bad”; there is only individual preference, which varies from person to person. If person A likes the song “My Sharona,” and person B hates it, who is to say which one is right?
I am. Person B is right. “My Sharona” sucks. In fact, a tremendous number of songs suck, more songs than could ever fit in any book. And there are new ones coming along all the time. Even as you read these words, some young musician, somewhere, could be working on a song that will be worse than any of the ones in this book. Think of it!
And pray for nuclear war.
Credits
The following information was obtained from research and inquiries to those believed to control the lyrics from which the excerpts in the book were taken.
A. Permission was granted for use of the excerpted lyrics from the following songs, and those giving permission requested that information about the excerpts be set forth as follows:
Excerpts from “Wives and Lovers” first appearing at page 63, written by Hal David and Burt Bachrach, Copyright 1963 by Famous Music Corporation.
Excerpts from “Rose Garden” first appearing at page xiv, written by Joe South, believed to be owned by Lowery Music Co., Inc. Copyright 1967, renewal 1995.
Excerpts from “That’s Amore” first appearing at page 13, written by Jack Brooks and Harry Warren, Copyright 1953 (Renewed 1981) by Paramount Music Corporation and Four Jays Corporation.
B. Permission was granted for use of the excerpted lyrics from the following songs, and those giving permission did not give any instructions regarding how the information about the excerpts should be set forth:
Excerpts from “In the Year 2525” first appearing at page 34, written by Rick Evans, believed to be owned by Zerlad Music Enterprises.
C. Correspondence was exchanged with those believed to be the owners of the following songs. No agreement was reached on the terms by which permission would be granted. Therefore, permission was not granted:
Excerpts from “Teen Angel” first appearing on page 70, written by Jean D. Surrey, believed to be owned by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
Excerpts from “Last Kiss” first appearing at page 72, written by Wayne Cochran believed to be owned by Trio Music Co., Inc. and Fort Know Music Inc.
Excerpts from “Yummy Yummy Yummy” first appearing at page 21, written by Arthur Resnick and Joe Levine believed to be owned by Trio Music and Alley Music Corp.
Excerpts from “Horse With No Name” first appearing at page xv, written by Lee Bunnell, believed to be owned by WB Music Corp and Warner Tammerlane Publishing.
Excerpts from “I Got You Babe” first appearing at page 11, written by Sonny Bono, believed to be owned by WB Music Corp and Warner Tammerlane Publishing.
Excerpts from “Stairway to Heaven” first appea
ring at page 44, written by Roger Plant and Jimmy Page, believed to be owned by WB Music Corp and Warner Tammerlane Publishing.
Excerpts from “Wildfire” first appearing at page 37, written by Michael Murphy and Larry Cansler, believed to be owned by WB Music Corp and Warner Tammerlane Publishing.
Excerpts from “Wind Beneath My Wings” first appearing at page 42, written by Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar, believed to be owned by WB Music Corp and Warner Tammerlane Publishing.
Excerpts from “Young Girl” first appearing at page xvi, written by Jerry Fuller, believed to be owned by WB Music Corp and Warner Tammerlane Publishing.
Excerpts from “Rubber Ball” first appearing at page 31, written by Aaron Schroeder and Anne Orlowski, believed to be owned by A. Schroeder International LTD.
Excerpts from “Norman” first appearing on page 43, written by John D. Loudermilk, Copyright 1961 (renewed 1989) believed to be owned by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
D. Permission was granted by one, but not all, of those believed to be owners of each of the following songs:
Excerpts from “Magic Moments” first appearing at page 54, written by Hal David and Burt Bachrach, believed to be owned by Famous Music Publishing Corp and Casa David. Famous Music Publishing Corp. granted permission.