Suzanne Tobias: Misheard lyrics make entertaining family folklore

It’s hard to think back that far, I know, but there used to be a time when we didn’t have Google in our hands to answer every question or settle every argument.

In a way it was terrible. The older folks in our sports department remember regular late-night calls from half-drunk guys trying to settle a bet, slur-shouting above the din of some local sports bar to ask who won the 1968 World Series or what college Bo Jackson attended.

But also, in a way, our Google-free days were simpler. They were a time of charming, humble innocence, when not being sure of something meant keeping your mouth shut until you could make it to the library or at least ask someone more knowledgeable.

Back then – before you could plug “John Fogerty ‘Bad Moon Rising’ lyrics” into your cellphone and instantly see all the words – you turned on the radio and sang along the best you could.

Which is why, as a child, I could have sworn Fogerty was singing: “There’s a bathroom on the right.”

And then there was that Genesis song from 1986:

She seems to have an invisible lawn chair!

She reaches in and grabs right hold of your heart …

What is the significance of the invisible lawn chair, my 17-year-old self wondered? I supposed it was part of that “something you just can’t trust, something mysterious.”

I also marveled at how Dire Straits got their money for nothing and their chips for free. Free Doritos must be another of the countless benefits of the rock-and-roll lifestyle, I thought. Rock on.

Misheard lyrics make funny stories, and thank goodness they seem to continue despite the internet’s ubiquitous hold on our lives. My children, like me, have sung happily and confidently along with some song on the radio or Pandora, only to discover that they had it all wrong.

Hannah thought the old Deniece Williams tune, “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” was “Let’s Hear It for Des Moines.” (Take note, Iowa. There’s marketing potential there.)

She thought Sheryl Crow, in addition to soaking up the sun, planned to “tell everyone to lie tonight.” And Taylor Swift’s hit, “Blank Space,” wasn’t about her “long list of ex-lovers,” but rather “all the lonely Starbucks lovers.”

My son, Jack, has his own history of misheard lyrics. Among them, R.E.M.’s “Let’s pee in the corner, let’s pee in the spotlight …” and Prince’s “It don’t hurt to be rich to be my girl, it don’t hurt to be cool to rule my world.”

A family favorite happened years ago, when Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” came on the car radio:

It seems like yesterday,

But it was long ago.

Janey was lovely, she was the queen of my nights …

But my son, an innocent 7-year-old at the time and charmingly oblivious to any possible double entendres, didn’t hear the third line quite right. Instead he sang, “Janey was lovely, she was a-cleanin’ my nuts …”

I submitted that one to late-night host Jimmy Fallon a couple of years ago, when he issued a call for #MisheardLyrics on Twitter.

It didn’t make it onto the television show, but I have to believe it made some Twitter readers smile at least as much as “I wanna rock and roll all night – and part of every day.”

This story was originally published June 17, 2016 at 4:46 PM with the headline "Suzanne Tobias: Misheard lyrics make entertaining family folklore."