Lost Johnny Lyrics
The truth is well concealed inside the details of the game
You can see it coming you can hear it from afar
It´s pale and it flickers like a faded movie star
By sticking thumb tacks in our flesh and cancelling the dream
Lost Johnny´s out there baying at the moon
Berlin girls with sharp white teeth are waiting in the night
But you oughta really get some it surely can't be hard
There's always trouble waiting when you leave your own backyard
Of how the puppets cannot dance since someone cut the strings
Lost Johnny's out there looking for relief
But every time he makes a play that vital number dies
And Sally buys her underwear from a store where no one goes
She makes it big in photographs on the strength of what she shows
And we're all taking Tuenol to murder our young dreams
Lost Johnny's out there trying to turn a trick
Wasted lives
My friend who majored in psychopharmacology went out for a PhD program in some kind of anthropology of folk lore, wrote a paper based on all these interviews with Lemmy. They put everything together and somehow interpreted that this song was an allegory about Christmas in World War 1, where everybody’s waiting for their number to come up, and how suspending their belief from the reality of war and going out on Christmas day to play football with the enemy, is like believing in Santa Claus.
The “girls with sharp teeth” are Santa’s elves, only you don’t see their teeth are sharp unless you’ve been naughty (like people are in a war) and due to get “coal” in your stocking.
The line about the morphine is someone crying out for the medic for their friend who is wounded out in No Man’s Land, representing that place inbetween being an innocent child who can still hear Santa’s sleigh bells (the “good guys”), and an adult firmly rooted in “reality”, for whom no magic or salvation exists (“the enemy”).
The lady buying underwear is the real winner, because they know about the black market and can find clean underwear and socks (which was hard to find, and much sought after in the muddy trenches). Their knowledge allows them to “make it big” (they could trade it for extra furlough time) and also could trade socks to enemy soldiers for photos from behind their lines that they could pass on or trade to observation posts.
Somewhere there is some other hidden metaphor or maybe the original verses (before being edited down for the album version) had something about discovering these photographs that actually showed the real Santa Claus in his sled being pulled through the sky by real reindeer, taken by the Red Baron or the Blue Max or whoever.
Anyway, they wrote a whole thesis on this one song being some kind of modern folk allegory on the psychological needs that the horrors of war impose on your mind, and the mysticism of belief when powered by that pressing need, coupled with commerce, and blind luck or chance (that Santa Claus actually does objectively exist) and the economics of possessing unknown details (ie knowing that the elves can be dangerous for someone who had been “bad”).
It’s all beyond me. I just think Lemmy and the boys wrote a rockin’ song...
[Edit: fixed typo]
The WWI allegory theory is a bit overcooked. It doesn\'t really stand up to the evidence in the text. If one accepts it, that interpretation renders references such as "the radio still screams" and "faded movie star" completely anachronistic. The product references "Tuinal" and "Valium" are similarly unknown before the 1960\'s, more than 40 years after the end of WWI, and even further than the alleged references, since the Xmas football match between opposing the trenches only occurred in 1914, after which officers on both sides curbed any attempts to repeat it.