| Steely Dan – Parkers Band Lyrics | 3 days ago |
| I'm not rokhead, but I'm not aware of any Parker connection with armadillos, and I'm guessing that they loved their line about Camarillo and couldn't find anything else to rhyme with it! | |
| Steely Dan – Parkers Band Lyrics | 3 days ago |
| I've usually heard the "Chinese music" comment attributed to Louis Armstrong. It certainly wouldn't have been Dizzy, who (as others noted) frequently played with Parker until he got tired of dealing with the consequences of Parker's addiction. | |
| Steely Dan – Daddy Don't Live In That New York City No More Lyrics | 3 days ago |
| @[RobbyRipper:55151] Becker and Fagen would be well acquainted with the dramatic rule of "Chekhov's gun": if there's a gun in the first act, it has to be used by the third act. Here, the gun appears in verse 1. By verse 3, Daddy has disappeared. We can take it that Daddy's gun got used after the bridge, and it didn't go well for him. | |
| Blur – Advert Lyrics | 3 months ago |
| I like the little Sex Pistols reference. | |
| Jeff Buckley – Morning Theft Lyrics | 3 months ago |
| @[cuomo:54384] ...which makes a lot more sense. | |
| Cream – What A Bringdown Lyrics | 5 months ago |
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As a teen in the '70s, I owned the published sheet music book for Cream: Goodbye. For better or worse, here's what the lyrics were, at least according to that book. If you read them while listening to the song, you'll see that they sound about right. (Mind you, this is from 50-year-old memory, so one or two lines may be slightly off, but on the whole I think they're what was published.) By the way, I'm no expert on cockney rhyming slang, but it's well known that "take a butcher's" means "take a look" (look = "butcher's hook"). Also, I assume most people know that "old Bill" is UK slang for the police. Danger's in a jam-jar parson's collar in the sky. Water in a fountain doesn't get me very high. Moby Dick and Albert making out with Captain Bligh. So you know what you know in your head. Will you, won't you, do you, don't you know when a head's dead? What a bringdown! Little leader Lou is growing abstracts in the North. Betty B's been wearing daisies since the twenty-fourth. Where's it gonna end there's one more coming forth. And you know what you know in your head. Will you, won't you, do you, don't you want to go to bed? What a bringdown! There's a tea-leaf about in the family Who'll end up in the Bowery and else There's a tea-leaf afloat in the Rosie Lee Help! Ring ding-dong bell! Take a butchers at the dodgy minces of old Bill. Aristotle's orchestra are living on the pill. One of them gets very very prickly when he's ill. And you know what you know in your head. Will you, won't you, do you, don't you want to make more bread? What a bringdown! |
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| Iggy Pop – Dum Dum Boys Lyrics | 6 months ago |
| The lyrics should include the spoken recitation at the beginning. They're essential to the song. | |
| Roxy Music – She Sells Lyrics | 1 year ago |
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@[NomadMonad:49950] I think your lyrics get closer to the correct lyrics than what's posted here, but I have to correct one thing. It's: Off the record you're gliding Your lingerie's a gift wrap Slip it to me One more great pun by Mr. Ferry. |
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| Al Stewart – Post World War Two Blues Lyrics | 2 years ago |
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I first heard this song as a mostly clueless North American teenager in the '70s. I got all the musical references, but the topical British references went completely over my head. (*Who* took the miners' cause to the House of Commons? *Who* sat and laughed at it all? I couldn't even figure out what Al was singing there.) Time went on and I learned enough 20th-century British history to decode all the references in the song that might be obscure to North Americans. I was thinking about the song today, and decided it would be fun to post a user's guide to the lyrics here. "Hard times written in my mother's looks With her widow's pension and her ration books" This is autobiographical. Al' was born just after the end of World War Two. His father was a member of the Royal Air Force who died in the crash of a training flight, a few months before Al was born. "Aneurin Bevan took the miners' cause To the House of Commons in his coal dust voice" Aneurin Bevan (familiarly known as "Nye") was an uncompromisingly left-wing Labour Party MP from coal country in Wales. After the war, in the election of 1945, the Labour Party won a huge majority and set about constructing the welfare state in Britain. Bevan was minister of health, and built the National Health Service, the cornerstone of the UK welfare state. "We were locked up safe and warm from the snow With "Life with the Lyons" on the radio" "Life with the Lyons" was a popular radio comedy in the 1950s on the BBC (and later a TV show). John Lennon and Yoko Ono alluded to it much later when they titled their second album of avant-garde music Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions. "And Churchill said to Louis Mountbatten "I just can't stand to see you today How could you have gone and given India away?" Mountbatten just frowned, said "What can I say? Some of these things slip through your hands And there's no good talking or making plans" But Churchill he just flapped his wings Said "I don't really care to discuss these things" The Labour government appointed Lord Mountbatten (a major figure in the war and a relative of the royal family) to be the last viceroy of India, to assist in helping India transition to independence. Churchill had been prime minister through the war, but had been turfed out of office by the big Labour victory in 1945. Al's lyrics imagine a grumpy conversation between Churchill and Mountbatten in which Churchill expresses his disgust at Mountbatten and the Labour government for "giving India away". Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA in 1979. "1959 was a very strange time A bad year for Labour and a good year for wine" By 1959, Labour was out of power again and the Conservatives had been in government for several years. In the election that year, they won a huge majority, under Harold Macmillan. As for whether it was a good year for wine, Al's a wine expert, so we'll have to take his word for it. "Uncle Ike was our American pal And nobody talked about the Suez Canal" Uncle Ike is of course US President Eisenhower. In 1956-57, he had unpleasantly surprised the government of Anthony Eden by refusing to back the Israeli invasion, backed by Britain and France, of the Suez Canal. The Suez crisis was seen as a major embarrassment for the UK, and Eden resigned, to be replaced as Conservative leader and PM by Macmillan. By 1959, nobody in the UK wanted to talk about Suez. "And all in all it was good There even seemed to be in an optimistic mood" This is likely an allusion to Macmillan's famous comment in the 1959 election campaign that Britons "had never had it so good." Judging by the results, most people seemed to agree with him. "While TW3 sat and laughed at it all Till some began to see the cracks in the walls" TW3 was That Was The Week That Was, a popular weekly satirical TV show on the BBC that poked fun at the political events of the week. (The idea and the title were later copied in the US by NBC, in a show that introduced the brilliant American musical satirist Tom Lehrer to the world.) But despite the mood of happy complacency in the UK, things were starting to change.... "And one day Macmillan was coming downstairs A voice in the dark caught him unawares It was Christine Keeler blowing him a kiss He said "I never believed it could happen like this" In the early '60s, just as Macmillan's government was seemingly riding high, it was brought low by the Profumo scandal. It became known that a (married) junior defence minister, John Profumo, was sleeping with a gorgeous London showgirl named Christine Keeler (age 19), who was, at the same time, possibly sleeping with a naval attache in the Soviet Embassy. To make matters worse, Profumo lied about the affair in the House of Commons. (In those days, lying in the House was considered a very serious matter. How times have changed.) Profumo had to resign, and in short order, so did Macmillan, even though he was personally untouched by the scandal. Perhaps more importantly, a public inquiry into the scandal, along with endless press coverage, exposed a seamy netherworld of sex parties, prostitution, and bad behaviour in high places that fatally undermined the staid, complacent, rule-following image that Britons had developed of themselves and their government and society in the 1950s. The stage was set for the Swinging Sixties...which Al eulogizes in the next verse. "Which way did the sixties go? Now Ramona's in Desolation Row And where I'm going I hardly know" But the Sixties, too, had to come to an end, which Al symbolizes with a reference to two Dylan songs, the justly famous "Desolation Row", and the slightly less well-known "To Ramona". At the end, says Al, all that's left is the post-World War Two blues. |
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