Three from me:
“It’s strange what desire will make foolish people do.”
“People tell me it’s a sin to know and feel too much within. I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring.”
“I think when it’s all over, It just comes back in flashes, you know?
It’s like a kaleidoscope of memories. it just all comes back. But he never does.”
Any other suggestion?
Black Celebration says
I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving – England is mine and it owes me a living.
Pizon-bros says
“Virgil Kane is the name, and I served on the Danville train ’till Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again”
Pizon-bros says
When you see two women : always running hand in hand, you can bet your bottom dollar : one’s got the other one’s man.
policybloke says
Oh, ‘Stoneman’s’. That makes more sense, than ‘so much’. Personal mondegreen, there. Anyway. How about:
I could have been most anything I put my mind to be, but a cowboy’s life was the only life for me.
Pizon-bros says
Misheard Lyrics was a pest in my youth as Internet wasn’t there (in its actual form) and rock group didn’t care “so much” to be understood, if Joan Baez could misunderstand some words, imagine a young frenchman!
duco01 says
In 1649, to St George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’ s will.
Campo says
I was just listening to this song while clicking on this thread:
“I met three different men who claimed they were Christ in the streets of Milwaukee on the 4th of July”
Rigid Digit says
Back in ’68 in a sweaty club
chiz says
So she woke up, woke up from where she was, lying still. She said, “I’ve got to so something about where we’re going.”
Rigid Digit says
Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
Pizon-bros says
He met a ho(e).
Sitheref2409 says
Ice picks, man.
hubert rawlinson says
Look out, Mama, there’s a white boat comin’ up the river
With a big red beacon and a flag and a man on the rail
I think you’d better call John
‘Cause it don’t look like they’re here to deliver the mail.
paulspud says
‘The screen door slams……’
Artery says
The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68
Fin59 says
Heatwaves on the runway as the wheels set down. He takes his baggage off the carousel and takes a taxi into town
Spotcheck Billy says
I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
chiz says
I didn’t know what day it was until you walked into the room.
Kid Dynamite says
It took fourteen hours to hitch from London to Portsmouth.
Spotcheck Billy says
lightweight, it took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
Kid Dynamite says
The time I think most clearly, the time I drift away, is on the bus ride that meanders up these valleys of green and grey.
Kid Dynamite says
It’s another heroes’ sunset. I’m riding on the Great North Road, coiled and tense in wonder as the land turns burning gold.
Kid Dynamite says
Lit up like a Christmas tree, the oil refinery glows in the night; and down by the shoreline the seagulls fly white against the black.
Kid Dynamite says
(that’s enough – Ed)
Pizon-bros says
90 percent of Stan Ridgway’s song are like the beginning of a book:
I was a PFC on a search patrol huntin’ Charlie down, It was in the jungle wars of ’65
The room was dark. It looked like someone had to get out fast
A window open by the fire escape
“How long have you been following this guy?”
The bell boy asked
“Not long enough, ’cause we got here too late.”
Sittin’ right behind me, I could smell her perfume, It was somethin’ I’d smelled before
Went through a red light While I spilled my drink I could feel somethin’ sticky on the floor
I said “miss, you’ve gotta tell me Where you wanna go to I can’t keep drivin’ round the same block” So I crumpled my cup And pulled the gum off my shoe And then she told me “just shut up
And keep your eyes on the road”
Rigid Digit says
We’d hit the bottom, I thought it was my fault. And in a way I guess it was.
Fin59 says
Mama said to me:
“We gotta have your life run right. Off you got to school where you can learn the rules they write. Be just like your dad lad. Follow in the same tradition. Never go astray and stay an honest lovin’ son”
The Chicory Tip
dai says
“I never thought it would happen, with me and the girl from Clapham …”
Mike_H says
There was I, digging this hole. Hole in the ground, big and sorta round, it was…
GCU Grey Area says
That’s actually quite creepy when spoken, rather than sung. A pulp crime novel?
Mike_H says
Another, far darker crime novel:
Long about an hour before sunrise, she drags his body down to the edge of the swollen river, wrapped in a red velvet curtain stolen from the movie theater where she works.
Quiet as a whisper, under the stanchions of a washed-out bridge, she cuts him loose… and watches as the flood waters spin him round once, then carry him away…
Uncle Mick says
There was a man named Jim who walked everywhere he went
Cause he could never quite seem to keep his mind on the road
One day it occurred to Jim that he’d taken a wrong turn
Cause he was standing in a place he didn’t know
Jim spun on his heels thinking he’s backtrack for a while
But before he knew it the sun was sinking
And the landscape in the dark
Well, it could have been New Zealand or New York or New Mexico
So what else is new, Jim was thinking
Because see for a while now Jim felt like things were changing for him
Like the skin of the earth was stretching or the continents were adrift
Jim didn’t know if it was so or if it was just him although
He suspected that it was a bit of both he was dealing with
Rainmakers – A Million Miles Away
Carl says
There once was a man from the old stone age and he used to follow the weather…
Roy Harper – The Lord’s Prayer
Fin59 says
She ain’t got no money. Her clothes are kinda funny. Her hair is kinda wild and free.
To The Edison Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf
retropath2 says
If we should meet in Glasgow, by chance on a rainy day, let’s sit and drink in a damn good bar, till evening comes out to play.
(Jackie Leven/Single Father
MC Escher says
Most of these don’t work, folks. How many books (apart from Dr Suesseseses) are set out in rhyme?
Fin59 says
This is a good point
fitterstoke says
On Tuesdays, she used to do yoga, while I’d sit and watch the box in a vegetable way,
but always ready to say to myself that I was an artist,
implying that she was not.
fitterstoke says
Julie said we drink far too much coffee, wine and cigarettes and we never get no sleep
I first met them at a riverboat party: both of them were speeding I would say….
fitterstoke says
She’s here now, perfume coiled like a thuggee scarf: such a powerful drug to make you so naked and clean.
Sitheref2409 says
He came into the shop and looked me straight between the eyes. And said “You know I’m Jesus”, and I must have looked surprised.
Mike_H says
Far across the ocean in the land of look and see, there once was a time for you and me.
And then, of course..
Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing. News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in.
dadwardo says
Me and my best friend Lillian, and her blue tick hound dog Gideon. Sittin’ on the front porch coolin’ in the shade. Singin’ every song the radio played.
Baron Counterpane says
Weird. I heard that song for the first time just yesterday on a show on Blues and Roots Radio.
Mousey says
Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train
Mousey says
Did a vehicle come from somewhere out there just to land in the Andes?
mikethep says
When they poured across the border I was cautioned to surrender, this I could not do; I took my gun and vanished.
Johnny Concheroo says
Pistol shots ring out in the bar room night, enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall. She sees a bartender in a pool of blood, cries out “My God, they killed them all!”
Dave Ross says
Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…..
Gatz says
Townes Van Zandt is cheating as so many of his songs are stories, but here’s Pancho and Lefty
Living on the road my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean. Now you wear your skin like iron, your breath as hard as kerosene.
Freddy Steady says
According to my calculations it oughta be around here somewhere.
duco01 says
With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home.
Archie Valparaiso says
I spent all my money in a Mexican whorehouse across the street from a Catholic church.
Gatz says
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
duco01 says
When I was a young man I carried my pack and I lived the free life of a rover, from the Murray’s green basin to the dusty outback …
MC Escher says
Stop getting Lyrics that should be the first lines in a book wrong! /Partridge
Junior Wells says
Wasn’t Stormy Monday Blues
originally
“It was a dark and stormy night blues”
Sitheref2409 says
I went home with a waitress the way I always do
How was I to know she was with the Russians, too?
ganglesprocket says
I paid the cost to be the boss…
One summer evening, drunk to hell, I sat there nearly lifeless…
She said “I know what it’s like to be dead…”
I was born in a beauty salon, my father was a dresser of hair…
retropath2 says
Ay ay ay Moosey
welshbenny says
Punctured bicycle, on a hillside desolate.
DrewToo says
By the way that you picked up the phone – I could tell that weren’t going to die….
Wayfarer says
He was a drinking man with a guitar problem
or:
She lost her mind and she never missed it.
James McMurtry – Fast as I Can
Lando Cakes says
She was born in November 1963, the day Aldous Huxley died.
Lando Cakes says
Or:
“There’s a threat approaching from the stars; all the horrors from Venus and Mars.”
count jim moriarty says
I bought a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a flannel for my face.
I met her in a barroom, her name I didn’t catch.
There’s a stain om my notebook where your coffee cup was.
And virtually every other lyric Chris Difford has ever written.
BigJimBob says
One more from me:
On a morning from a Bogart movie In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre Contemplating a crime
Davidg says
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
Fin59 says
Desmond wheels a barrow in the market place. Molly is a singer in a band
Yet more evidence of The Beatles’ ability to fix a moment in time, to give a sense of place, but in a seemingly throwaway line. To be both purely descriptive and yet allow for a hint of something playful by the symbiosis of imagery. Desmond, a man, given one suspects a deliberately workaday name, going about a workaday task, contrasted with the seeming glamour of a female chanteuse, Molly. Yet that glamour is undercut by its very juxtaposition to Desmond’s wheeling of his barrow. It is not hard to imagine Desmond a modern day Sisyphus. Forever condemned to repetition, to a simple action which attains the status of the absurd. Why carry on? Why indeed? And yet he is as the hero of Becket’s The Unnamable who says finally “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”
———————-
I *could* go on
minibreakfast says
I always thought it was “has” a barrow in the marketplace?
Fin59 says
“Wheels” or “has”. Somehow that confusion itself, yet more fertile ground for simple conjecture on one level, and yet on another, indicative of The Beatles profound genius in acknowledging that confusion itself is perhaps the only apt response in a world riven by shifting geo-political paradigms, simply and beautifully articulated in the notion that one while person toils, another sings. And the refrain of Ob-la-di, ob-la-da with its pertinent echo of the French to forget, oublier. Suggestive of the notion of forgetfulness. An all too human response, perhaps, given the societal fault lines brilliantly counterpointed against the jaunty rhythmic momentum that gives the song …..
minibreakfast says
Just what I was about to say.
Beany says
The road to Venezuela took me forty thousand miles. I’ve seen so many people wearing multi-coloured smiles.
slotbadger says
I might be moving to Montana soon, just to raise me up a crop of dental floss
andielou says
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.
Rigid Digit says
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
Gatz says
You saw him too?
Uncle Mick says
Shady politician in my bed……..
Junglejim says
I left you on the debris, at the Sunday morning market
You were searching through the odds and ends
You was looking for a bargain
fitterstoke says
Ripped off and run out of town, had my guitar burned when I was clownin’
Haven’t slept in a bed for a week and my shoes feel like they’re part of my feet
(one for @Twang …)
Twang says
Ahhh that, Fitter my friend, is a lyric.
slotbadger says
I don’t like cricket. I love it.
Twang says
“The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar. I am following the river down the highway through the cradle of the Civil War.”
Cue Cormac McCarty-esque Southern Gothic novel. I want to read it.
**thanks @feedback_file, whose favourite lyric this is**
fitterstoke says
I said blow away, blow away this cruel reality, and keep me from its storm
Suspicion has crept in, and ruined my life: I’m messed up, and hassled, and worn
fitterstoke says
Mannheim: rainy Saturday with no money nor friend…only tequila can end the boredom.
Skirky says
She was a party girl, stayed up ’til the small hours, now she’s embarrassing and everybody laughs
at the girl with the face that could drive her baby wild. Now, wasn’t she the child with everything?
ChrisRand says
Pulling the ice axe from my leg, I staggered on, spindrift stinging my remaining eye. I finally managed to reach the station, only to find that the bus replacement service had broken down.
davidks says
Summer night in Harlem / Man it’s really hot / Well it’s too hot to sleep and too cold to eat / I don’t care if I die or not.
molesworth says
It’s the kind of night that’s so cold when you spit, it freezes before it hits the ground
Badlands says
I was born from love,
And my poor mother worked the mines,
I was raised on the Good Book Jesus,
Till I read between the lines,
Now I don’t believe,
I want to see the morning.
Badlands says
Workin’ night and day
I try to get ahead
But I don’t get ahead this way
Workin’ night and day
The railroad and the fence
Watch the train go roll ’round the bend.
Over The Hillside – Blue Nile