You only get a single chance
The rules are very plain
The truth is well concealed inside
The details of the game

You can hear it coming
You can see it from afar
It's pale and it flickers
Like a faded movie star

And up there in the castle
They're trying to make us scream
By sticking thumb tacks in her flesh
And canceling the dream

Can you find the Valium?
Can you bring it soon?
Lost Johnny's out there
Baying at the Moon

The time has come for you to choose
You'd better get it right
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 back yard

And underneath the city
The alligators sing
About how the puppets cannot dance
Since someone cut the strings

Run and get the morphine
For God's sake make it brief
Lost Johnny's out there
Looking for relief

Now Simon looks so evil
And you know he really tries
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

Then here inside the waiting room
The radio still screams
And we're all taking Tuenol
To murder our young dreams


Lyrics submitted by ButNeverOutgunned, edited by Gumballthechewy

Lost Johnny Lyrics as written by Mick Farren Ian Kilmister

Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Lyrics powered by LyricFind

Lost Johnny song meanings
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  • +1
    General Comment

    Wasted lives

    steven7784on December 01, 2013   Link
  • 0
    General Comment

    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 tour 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...

    madscijron June 19, 2020   Link
  • 0
    General Comment

    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.

    felpershamon December 11, 2021   Link

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