What's Your Name? George Jetson!

He's got his balls to the walls man!

Some Kind Of Wonderful's recent mention of the band Accept reminded me of something that happened recently. While playing Guitar Hero 3, my wife was playing Accept's "Balls to the Walls" in the game and when the song hits the chorus, I realized I never really knew the lyrics. What I remembered hearing was "What's Your Name?/George Jetson!/Gonna Break the chains!/Yeah!!/You got your balls to the walls man." To me, that's the lyrics and I don't want to know the real words because I like it more this way. Other songs where I found out the lyrics were different from what I thought sometimes made me like the song less.

The time I remember most strongly from this was Eric Clapton's "Forever Man" which used to play regularly on a local radio station in the 80's. For decades, I thought the song was "Four Letter Man" and sang it that way. I thought it was his best song, kind of bluesy and nasty but with innuendo like a good rock star should do. When I sang the song in the car with my wife she cracked up because she knew the real words to the song. I have to admit it was really funny, except now I find the song really boring because there's no edge to it.

Another example is Boston's "More Than A Feeling" where I thought he was singing about drinking a Coke but really was talking about feeling cold. I drink a lot of soda so I thought it was cool for Coke to get a shout out in a song. Prince's "I Would Die 4 U" had a fast talking part and I thought he was saying "I'll be the fire when you come" which made sense because, well, Prince is nasty and would say something like that (the actual line is "Be the fire when you're cold"). I think I have a problem hearing the word Cold. Fortunately, some mishearings persist like Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Zephyr Song" where everytime he says "Zephyr" I hear "Cell Phone" even though I know the real lyrics.

I guess what it comes down to is mishearing lyrics can be fun. My wife still likes the "Four Letter Man" story. Like a Rorschach test it can say something about the person or in the least give a good laugh. In College, I once went to Reno with some friends and a girl insisted that Def Leppard's "Armageddon It" was "Are You Getting It" and the word "Armageddon" was not in the song at all. She would sing along and shout the wrong lyrics which was great. Even showing her the cassette case with the song title couldn't convince her. It was hilarious. I also got a kick out of someone who thought the Eagles were singing "Pussy on the highway" in the song "Take It To The Limit".

Speaking of Def Leppard, years later they had a song called "Four Letter Word" but it still wasn't as exciting as what I thought Eric Clapton's song was. I'll have to try self hypnosis to change the lyrics back. "Four Letter Man, Four Letter Man, Four Letter Man..." It's not working, guess I'll just have to get used to "Forever Man".

Eric Clapton - "Forever Man"