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?
I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving – England is mine and it owes me a living.
“Virgil Kane is the name, and I served on the Danville train ’till Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again”
When you see two women : always running hand in hand, you can bet your bottom dollar : one’s got the other one’s man.
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.
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!
In 1649, to St George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’ s will.
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”
Back in ’68 in a sweaty club
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.”
Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He met a ho(e).
Ice picks, man.
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.
‘The screen door slams……’
The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68
Heatwaves on the runway as the wheels set down. He takes his baggage off the carousel and takes a taxi into town
I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
I didn’t know what day it was until you walked into the room.
It took fourteen hours to hitch from London to Portsmouth.
lightweight, it took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
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.
It’s another heroes’ sunset. I’m riding on the Great North Road, coiled and tense in wonder as the land turns burning gold.
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.
(that’s enough – Ed)
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”
We’d hit the bottom, I thought it was my fault. And in a way I guess it was.
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
“I never thought it would happen, with me and the girl from Clapham …”
There was I, digging this hole. Hole in the ground, big and sorta round, it was…
That’s actually quite creepy when spoken, rather than sung. A pulp crime novel?
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…
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
There once was a man from the old stone age and he used to follow the weather…
Roy Harper – The Lord’s Prayer
She ain’t got no money. Her clothes are kinda funny. Her hair is kinda wild and free.
To The Edison Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf
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
Most of these don’t work, folks. How many books (apart from Dr Suesseseses) are set out in rhyme?
This is a good point
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.
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….
She’s here now, perfume coiled like a thuggee scarf: such a powerful drug to make you so naked and clean.
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.
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.
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.
Weird. I heard that song for the first time just yesterday on a show on Blues and Roots Radio.
Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train
Did a vehicle come from somewhere out there just to land in the Andes?
When they poured across the border I was cautioned to surrender, this I could not do; I took my gun and vanished.
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!”
Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…..
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.
According to my calculations it oughta be around here somewhere.
With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home.
I spent all my money in a Mexican whorehouse across the street from a Catholic church.
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
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 …
Stop getting Lyrics that should be the first lines in a book wrong! /Partridge
Wasn’t Stormy Monday Blues
originally
“It was a dark and stormy night blues”
I went home with a waitress the way I always do
How was I to know she was with the Russians, too?
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…
Ay ay ay Moosey
Punctured bicycle, on a hillside desolate.
By the way that you picked up the phone – I could tell that weren’t going to die….
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
She was born in November 1963, the day Aldous Huxley died.
Or:
“There’s a threat approaching from the stars; all the horrors from Venus and Mars.”
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.
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
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
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
I always thought it was “has” a barrow in the marketplace?
“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 …..
Just what I was about to say.
The road to Venezuela took me forty thousand miles. I’ve seen so many people wearing multi-coloured smiles.
I might be moving to Montana soon, just to raise me up a crop of dental floss
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
You saw him too?
Shady politician in my bed……..
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
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 …)
Ahhh that, Fitter my friend, is a lyric.
I don’t like cricket. I love it.
“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**
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
Mannheim: rainy Saturday with no money nor friend…only tequila can end the boredom.
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?
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.
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.
It’s the kind of night that’s so cold when you spit, it freezes before it hits the ground
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.
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