"There's A Bathroom On the Right..."

The title of this post is a misheard lyric from a Wayne's World skit.

The actual lyric(from "Bad Moon Rising") is "There's a bad moon on the rise", but Wayne and Garth had it on their Top Ten List of Misheard lyrics.
For some reason, this came up the other day(segue anyone?), and it got me thinking about lyrics I have misheard in my life. And then i thought, Why hell, that sounds like a blogpost, don't it ?
No ? Well, I'm gonna make it one anyway.

As soon as I started trying to remember misheard lyrics, I of course could only think of a few. Though I am quite sure there have been hundreds.


"A broken nose with laughing eyes"
This is one of my all time favorites.(I think I might actually have written about this before) It's from "Bringing On The Heartbreak" by Def Leppard, and the actual lyric is: "a broken rose with laughing eyes", which of course makes a helluva lot more sense. I never could quite figure out why this woman would have a broken nose and laughing eyes.

"He's dancing with the chicken slacks"

This one is from "Twisting The Night Away" by Sam Cooke. The actual lyric is "He's dancing with a chick IN slacks". Again, makes a whole lot more sense. But what did I know ? I mean girls wore poodle skirts, so I thought this gentleman just happened to be wearing pants that were known as "chicken slacks". It was the '60's.

"Our nation burns a glory as to you"
Now this is the only one that I got "caught" singing. I remember being in the car with my oldest sister, and "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon & Garfunkel, is on the radio, and i sing "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, our nation burns a glory as to you...Whoo-woo-woo" and my sister starts laughing at me. She might actually have pulled the car over. And she asks, "What did you just sing ?" and if you have ever been caught singing the wrong lyric, you instantly know you are wrong, but you also know that there is no way to figure out the right lyrics now. So, I tell her what I sang. Then she asked me what that means. And I say "Well, that they Nation burns for the glory days of the Yankees ?"
Of course, she started laughing again, and informed me that the actual lyric is "Our Nation turns it's lonely eyes to you". Which again, makes much more sense.

"Can't barely hear it."
This is from "The Same Old Song" by the Four Tops. And the real lyric is "Can't bear to hear it", which makes sense, because the whole song is about the pain of hearing a favorite song after you have broken up. But I of course, heard "Can't barely hear it", like the guy was LITERALLY having a hard time hearing the song, and I went so far as to picture this poor guy holding the radio close to his ear, but STILL not being able to hear the song.

That reminds me of another lyrical problem I have sometimes, misunderstanding the point of a particular lyric- i only have one example in my head at the moment, and it is from when I was a kid- It's from "Rhinestone Cowboy" by Glen Campbell(one of my all time favorite songs when I was 5 or 6. I remember we would visit my Grandfather in upstate New York every summer, and we would have to go to the laundromat, and they had a juke box, and I used to torture everyone there by playing "Rhinestone Cowboy", John Denver's"Rocky Mountain High" and Terry Jacks' "Seasons In The Sun" over and over and over and over again.) and it's the line "getting cards and letters from people I don't even know", which of course refers to fan mail, but I pictured this guy in his rhinestone cowboy hat going to get his mail, and looking at his cards and letters, and being confused because he didn't know who they were from.

Now these last two are lyrics that my friend Dave misheard, but he told me about them, and ever since, I can no longer hear the correct lyrics, now all I hear is what he told me he heard.
they are both Bob Marley songs.

"Because all that pizza is cold"
is from "Get Up Stand Up" and the real lyric is "It's not all that glitters is gold", but I will forever now think that ole Bob is complaining about cold pizza in the middle of this rebellious song.


"Hey Sanchez"
is from "Could You Be Loved", and it's the refrain at the end of the song, when he sings "Say something" over an over, but I will now forever hear "Hey Sanchez".


I also remeber my friend Chris thinking that the line "There's a fear down here we can't forget" from "Throwing Stones" by the Grateful Dead was "There's a BEER down here we can't forget"

And one last one, I remember seeing a satndup comic talking about misheard lyrics,and he mentioned thinking that Steve Miller was singing "Bingo Jed had a light on" instead of "big old jet airliner"

Do YOU have any favorite misheard lyrics ??