Why, oh why, do I Goo-Goo? Sure, it’s an easy way to find information, but every time I Goo-Goo I expose myself to the possibility of having a cherished illusion shattered.
It was Junior Walker’s Shotgun, as covered by The Burning Bush one night at Spinelli’s in New Paltz, that loosened up a pedal clumsiness that had afflicted me from the time I was a fat eleven year old, and I found myself boogying.
I may have been loose as a goose and stoned, but not stoned out of my mind. I never am stoned – or drunk or worried – out of my mind. It is as if, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m feeling, in a brain cell cubicle, somewhere between my right temple and my medulla, there is a dry, sober clerk, a wordclerk, scribbling and scrabbling (pun intended) away. He’s always there, and he was there then. You listen to the words, I messaged him, I’m not going to: “I say: Shotgun!”
Words in conversation, words that I speak or words that are spoken to me, words I deliberately read in a newspaper or a book or on the screen, words I listen to (rather than simply hear), are my responsibility, not the wordclerk’s. The job of the wordclerk is to take note of extraneous words, gratuitous words, words around me, words in the environment. He spells them out, phoneticizes them (as best he can), interprets them, re-interprets them, then files them away with other words in a Borgesian (in the sense of limitless) library of ideas.
Advertisements (visual and audio), cell phone half-conversations overheard on the train, the blather on NPR (known as “human interest” stories) that fills the time between bursts of real news, these are the kinds of words I pass on to the wordclerk.
(The wordclerk usually enjoys his job, except for that time in Amsterdam, where the words drove him crazy. The problem was not that they were in a foreign language. The wordclerk loves dealing with French, Italian, Spanish, German; even if he cannot dope out a word’s meaning, he takes pride in sounding the word out (virtually, silently, in his little cubicle), turning the Castilian “s’s” into hissed “th’s”, lilting along in Italian as if he were singing a Mozart aria, pursing his virtual lips through the prissy French “eu”, clanging through a long German word like ringing the bell on a firetruck moving at a stately 100 kph down the autobahn. But to the wordclerk Dutch seems like English with spelling mistakes. Supermarkt. Apotheek. Haring broodjes. Bibliotheek. Geopend behalve op maandag. In Amsterdam, he threw up his virtual hands in not so virtual frustration.)
Song lyrics are an interesting case. Generally, the first time I hear a song, after only three or four words the lyrics go straight to the wordclerk, while I attend to the music. Sometimes the words of a song are intriguing enough or are enough of a narrative so that I listen to them right through. The next time I hear the song, or the third or fourth time, once I know what’s coming – been there, heard that – I don’t bother with the lyrics any longer and shoot them over to the wordclerk. Billy Joel’s Piano Man is a case in point: a nice, melancholy tale worth hearing – but not again and again and again. Then there are some songs which, no matter how often I hear them, I never pass along to the wordclerk, any more than I would pass along to him a poem by Donne or Dickinson or Yeats or Millay, no matter how often I’ve read it – Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, for example.
Unlike poems on a page, which I can stop reading once I’ve become bored, song lyrics keep going as long as the music does. This makes for an occasional back-and-forth between myself and the wordclerk. For example, I love the words to Paint it Black, but I’ve listened to them often enough so that as soon as I hear Brian Jones’ twanging sitar intro, I alert the wordclerk: pay attention, because I won’t be. Then, in a moment, the wordclerk reminds me that I – that is, my conscious self – would not want to miss the line, “I see the girls walk by, dressed in their summer clothes.” Its imagist sentimentality, smacking of Prévert and Antonioni and Bonnard, is like a delicious flavor that one can never get tired of. It has never flagged in the pleasure it gives me.
It is the wordclerk who is responsible for mondegreens, fortuitous misunderstandings of heard words. Sylvia Wright coined the term in an essay, "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. In it, Wright describes how, as a young girl, she misheard the first stanza of "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" as
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green".
"The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them,” says Wright, in whose youthful imagination the murdered Earl and Lady bleed to death hand-in-hand, “is that they are better than the original."
With the coming of rock-and-roll, in which, for the most part, song lyrics became a framework for the music, instead of vice-versa, mondegreens flourished. (Not that anyone knew that was what they were called.) Now that our generation has gone into reminiscence mode, lists of mondegreens have become a genre of space filler, which websites and bloggers turn to when they can’t think of anything else to write about.
Not all misheard song lyrics reach the level of mondegreenality, which stipulates that the mistaken line must be better than the original. Some examples which do, are:
Let's move before they raise the fucking rent instead of Let's move before they raise the parking rate. (Bad Company: All Right Now)
Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran instead of Ba ba ba ba ba barann. (Beach Boys: Barbara Ann)
A girl with colitis goes by instead of A girl with kaleidoscope eyes. (The Beatles: Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds)
Perhaps the most common rock mondegreen, which has given me great pleasure over the years is:
There's a bathroom on the right instead of There’s a bad moon on the rise. (Credence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising)
I’d always known, of course, that those couldn’t be the real words, but they rang so true: a noisy bar, a raucous band, and a singer thoughtfully integrating into the music vital information about the location of the facilities for those in the crowd with beer-brimming bladders. It was a funny idea, which both I and the wordclerk preferred to the meaningless and forgettable, “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” It was a real cool mondegreen.
I recently discovered that I had been living with another mondegreen, one just as elaborate as Sylvia White’s (who conjured up not only Lady Mondegreen, in her best dress, with a low neck trimmed in Irish lace and with an arrow through her throat, lying in a dappled clearing beside a yellow-bearded and kilted Earl Amurray, an arrow through his heart, but also the Queen, who had a crush on the Earl, and the Earl’s wife, who resembled a harridan classmate of White’s and had only married the Earl so she could become Lady Amurray).
So (as tedious story tellers like to say), back in 1968, when the Age of Aquarius finally hit me below the knees, as The Burning Bush honked and twanged and popped to Shotgun, I sent the lyrics right on to the wordclerk, who reported on them thusly:
Like most R&B songs, Shotgun is about fraught, passionate love, specifically about the turmoil of a shotgun wedding, with the would-be groom skedaddling and the wood-be bride going after him with a shotgun. Here (according to the wordclerk) are the lyrics:
I said: Shotgun!
Sugar boy run now.
To the church, baby,
To the church, now.
Put on your red dress
And then you go downtown now
I said buy yourself a shotgun now
We're gonna break it down baby now
We're gonna load it up baby now
And then you shoot him if he runs now.
Shotgun!
Sugar boy run now,
To the church, baby.
To the church now.
Put on your high heel shoes
I said we're goin' down to make him play the blues.
He’s gonna dig potatoes.
He’s gonna pick tomatoes
I said: Shotgun!
Sugar boy run now,
To the church, baby.
To the church now.
I said it's cryin’ time.
I said it's cryin’ time.
I said it's cryin’ time.
And so it was and so it ever would have been if, for some trivial reason, I had not Goo-Goo’d Shotgun and, thanks to a link headed “Do the lyrics of Shotgun by Jr. Walker promote gun violence” and a zillion links to the lyrics themselves, I came to realize that the wordclerk had constructed for my delectation a mondegreen as grand, sturdy and compelling as Sylvia White’s.
I mean, after all, compared to the wordclerk’s Shotgun, what is this?
I said, shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he runs, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Put on yo' red dress
And then you go downtown, now
I said, buy yourself a shotgun, now
We gonna break it down, baby, now
We gonna load it up, baby, now
A-then you shoot him 'fore he run, now
Shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he run, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Yeah!
Put on yo' high-heel shoes
I said, we goin' down here
An listen to 'em play the blues
We gonna dig potatoes
We gonna pick tomatoes
I said, shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he run, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Yeah!
I said it's, Twine time
I said it's, Twine time
I said it's, Twine time
The Shotgun, The Jerk, and The Twine were dances; digging potatoes and picking tomatoes were dance moves. Shotgun, along with Roadrunner, may be a Jr. Walker masterpiece, but its lyrics are nothing more than a dance fad compendium – just a few levels up from The Twist and the Hokey-Pokey. Thanks to the wordclerk’s sophistication, his encyclopedic grasp of the culture and its folkways and his reliance on classical forms, Shotgun became, for me, the soundtrack to a Southern gothic vignette:
There she is, a feisty, curvaceous little woman, all dolled up for her wedding, red dress, red shoes, lipstick to match, angry as all get out, urged on by a quartet of brothers and cousins, sashaying down the Main Street (ghettoized) of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning and into a gun store. The bemused gun dealer, perhaps a bit intimidated by the brothers and cousins rhythmically milling behind her, sells her a shotgun, which she pays for with a wad of bills from a red purse that matches her dress and shoes. With the brothers and cousins overseeing, she breaks open the gun and loads it right then and there, marching back out onto Main Street and up a hill in the direction of the white clapboard church where she last saw the man who’d knocked her up – just a kid, really – as he streaked off down a side street. And there he is, she’s found him, lurking in the doorway of a tavern (since it’s Sunday, even though the gun store’s open, the bars aren’t – this is the Baptist South, after all), in a fawn colored zoot suit that he’d borrowed from an uncle. “To the church. Now!” she yells, waving the shotgun at him, her purse dangling from her arm. “To the church. Now!” echo the brothers and cousins. Up the hill proceeds the procession, the woman and her brothers and cousins taunting the hapless husband-to-be with visions of the domestic life that awaits him. Finally, as the cringing groom and the furious bride, poking him in the small of his back with the shotgun muzzle, disappear into the church, the brothers and cousins linger outside. They’ve upheld the family’s honor, their work is done, and now, revealing that they are more than just a cohort of relatives, but play the role of a Greek chorus, they take a moment to express their sympathy for the man in the case, who’s just a kid, really. “It’s cryin’ time,” they sing, “It’s cryin’ time.”
I don’t care what the real words to Shotgun mean – I am not going to abandon my Shotgun. As Sylvia Wright says, “I won’t give in to it. Leaving [Earl Amurray] to die all alone, without even anyone to hold his hand – I won’t have it.”
It was Junior Walker’s Shotgun, as covered by The Burning Bush one night at Spinelli’s in New Paltz, that loosened up a pedal clumsiness that had afflicted me from the time I was a fat eleven year old, and I found myself boogying.
I may have been loose as a goose and stoned, but not stoned out of my mind. I never am stoned – or drunk or worried – out of my mind. It is as if, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m feeling, in a brain cell cubicle, somewhere between my right temple and my medulla, there is a dry, sober clerk, a wordclerk, scribbling and scrabbling (pun intended) away. He’s always there, and he was there then. You listen to the words, I messaged him, I’m not going to: “I say: Shotgun!”
Words in conversation, words that I speak or words that are spoken to me, words I deliberately read in a newspaper or a book or on the screen, words I listen to (rather than simply hear), are my responsibility, not the wordclerk’s. The job of the wordclerk is to take note of extraneous words, gratuitous words, words around me, words in the environment. He spells them out, phoneticizes them (as best he can), interprets them, re-interprets them, then files them away with other words in a Borgesian (in the sense of limitless) library of ideas.
Advertisements (visual and audio), cell phone half-conversations overheard on the train, the blather on NPR (known as “human interest” stories) that fills the time between bursts of real news, these are the kinds of words I pass on to the wordclerk.
(The wordclerk usually enjoys his job, except for that time in Amsterdam, where the words drove him crazy. The problem was not that they were in a foreign language. The wordclerk loves dealing with French, Italian, Spanish, German; even if he cannot dope out a word’s meaning, he takes pride in sounding the word out (virtually, silently, in his little cubicle), turning the Castilian “s’s” into hissed “th’s”, lilting along in Italian as if he were singing a Mozart aria, pursing his virtual lips through the prissy French “eu”, clanging through a long German word like ringing the bell on a firetruck moving at a stately 100 kph down the autobahn. But to the wordclerk Dutch seems like English with spelling mistakes. Supermarkt. Apotheek. Haring broodjes. Bibliotheek. Geopend behalve op maandag. In Amsterdam, he threw up his virtual hands in not so virtual frustration.)
Song lyrics are an interesting case. Generally, the first time I hear a song, after only three or four words the lyrics go straight to the wordclerk, while I attend to the music. Sometimes the words of a song are intriguing enough or are enough of a narrative so that I listen to them right through. The next time I hear the song, or the third or fourth time, once I know what’s coming – been there, heard that – I don’t bother with the lyrics any longer and shoot them over to the wordclerk. Billy Joel’s Piano Man is a case in point: a nice, melancholy tale worth hearing – but not again and again and again. Then there are some songs which, no matter how often I hear them, I never pass along to the wordclerk, any more than I would pass along to him a poem by Donne or Dickinson or Yeats or Millay, no matter how often I’ve read it – Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, for example.
Unlike poems on a page, which I can stop reading once I’ve become bored, song lyrics keep going as long as the music does. This makes for an occasional back-and-forth between myself and the wordclerk. For example, I love the words to Paint it Black, but I’ve listened to them often enough so that as soon as I hear Brian Jones’ twanging sitar intro, I alert the wordclerk: pay attention, because I won’t be. Then, in a moment, the wordclerk reminds me that I – that is, my conscious self – would not want to miss the line, “I see the girls walk by, dressed in their summer clothes.” Its imagist sentimentality, smacking of Prévert and Antonioni and Bonnard, is like a delicious flavor that one can never get tired of. It has never flagged in the pleasure it gives me.
It is the wordclerk who is responsible for mondegreens, fortuitous misunderstandings of heard words. Sylvia Wright coined the term in an essay, "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. In it, Wright describes how, as a young girl, she misheard the first stanza of "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" as
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green".
"The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them,” says Wright, in whose youthful imagination the murdered Earl and Lady bleed to death hand-in-hand, “is that they are better than the original."
With the coming of rock-and-roll, in which, for the most part, song lyrics became a framework for the music, instead of vice-versa, mondegreens flourished. (Not that anyone knew that was what they were called.) Now that our generation has gone into reminiscence mode, lists of mondegreens have become a genre of space filler, which websites and bloggers turn to when they can’t think of anything else to write about.
Not all misheard song lyrics reach the level of mondegreenality, which stipulates that the mistaken line must be better than the original. Some examples which do, are:
Let's move before they raise the fucking rent instead of Let's move before they raise the parking rate. (Bad Company: All Right Now)
Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran instead of Ba ba ba ba ba barann. (Beach Boys: Barbara Ann)
A girl with colitis goes by instead of A girl with kaleidoscope eyes. (The Beatles: Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds)
Perhaps the most common rock mondegreen, which has given me great pleasure over the years is:
There's a bathroom on the right instead of There’s a bad moon on the rise. (Credence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising)
I’d always known, of course, that those couldn’t be the real words, but they rang so true: a noisy bar, a raucous band, and a singer thoughtfully integrating into the music vital information about the location of the facilities for those in the crowd with beer-brimming bladders. It was a funny idea, which both I and the wordclerk preferred to the meaningless and forgettable, “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” It was a real cool mondegreen.
I recently discovered that I had been living with another mondegreen, one just as elaborate as Sylvia White’s (who conjured up not only Lady Mondegreen, in her best dress, with a low neck trimmed in Irish lace and with an arrow through her throat, lying in a dappled clearing beside a yellow-bearded and kilted Earl Amurray, an arrow through his heart, but also the Queen, who had a crush on the Earl, and the Earl’s wife, who resembled a harridan classmate of White’s and had only married the Earl so she could become Lady Amurray).
So (as tedious story tellers like to say), back in 1968, when the Age of Aquarius finally hit me below the knees, as The Burning Bush honked and twanged and popped to Shotgun, I sent the lyrics right on to the wordclerk, who reported on them thusly:
Like most R&B songs, Shotgun is about fraught, passionate love, specifically about the turmoil of a shotgun wedding, with the would-be groom skedaddling and the wood-be bride going after him with a shotgun. Here (according to the wordclerk) are the lyrics:
I said: Shotgun!
Sugar boy run now.
To the church, baby,
To the church, now.
Put on your red dress
And then you go downtown now
I said buy yourself a shotgun now
We're gonna break it down baby now
We're gonna load it up baby now
And then you shoot him if he runs now.
Shotgun!
Sugar boy run now,
To the church, baby.
To the church now.
Put on your high heel shoes
I said we're goin' down to make him play the blues.
He’s gonna dig potatoes.
He’s gonna pick tomatoes
I said: Shotgun!
Sugar boy run now,
To the church, baby.
To the church now.
I said it's cryin’ time.
I said it's cryin’ time.
I said it's cryin’ time.
And so it was and so it ever would have been if, for some trivial reason, I had not Goo-Goo’d Shotgun and, thanks to a link headed “Do the lyrics of Shotgun by Jr. Walker promote gun violence” and a zillion links to the lyrics themselves, I came to realize that the wordclerk had constructed for my delectation a mondegreen as grand, sturdy and compelling as Sylvia White’s.
I mean, after all, compared to the wordclerk’s Shotgun, what is this?
I said, shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he runs, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Put on yo' red dress
And then you go downtown, now
I said, buy yourself a shotgun, now
We gonna break it down, baby, now
We gonna load it up, baby, now
A-then you shoot him 'fore he run, now
Shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he run, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Yeah!
Put on yo' high-heel shoes
I said, we goin' down here
An listen to 'em play the blues
We gonna dig potatoes
We gonna pick tomatoes
I said, shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he run, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Yeah!
I said it's, Twine time
I said it's, Twine time
I said it's, Twine time
The Shotgun, The Jerk, and The Twine were dances; digging potatoes and picking tomatoes were dance moves. Shotgun, along with Roadrunner, may be a Jr. Walker masterpiece, but its lyrics are nothing more than a dance fad compendium – just a few levels up from The Twist and the Hokey-Pokey. Thanks to the wordclerk’s sophistication, his encyclopedic grasp of the culture and its folkways and his reliance on classical forms, Shotgun became, for me, the soundtrack to a Southern gothic vignette:
There she is, a feisty, curvaceous little woman, all dolled up for her wedding, red dress, red shoes, lipstick to match, angry as all get out, urged on by a quartet of brothers and cousins, sashaying down the Main Street (ghettoized) of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning and into a gun store. The bemused gun dealer, perhaps a bit intimidated by the brothers and cousins rhythmically milling behind her, sells her a shotgun, which she pays for with a wad of bills from a red purse that matches her dress and shoes. With the brothers and cousins overseeing, she breaks open the gun and loads it right then and there, marching back out onto Main Street and up a hill in the direction of the white clapboard church where she last saw the man who’d knocked her up – just a kid, really – as he streaked off down a side street. And there he is, she’s found him, lurking in the doorway of a tavern (since it’s Sunday, even though the gun store’s open, the bars aren’t – this is the Baptist South, after all), in a fawn colored zoot suit that he’d borrowed from an uncle. “To the church. Now!” she yells, waving the shotgun at him, her purse dangling from her arm. “To the church. Now!” echo the brothers and cousins. Up the hill proceeds the procession, the woman and her brothers and cousins taunting the hapless husband-to-be with visions of the domestic life that awaits him. Finally, as the cringing groom and the furious bride, poking him in the small of his back with the shotgun muzzle, disappear into the church, the brothers and cousins linger outside. They’ve upheld the family’s honor, their work is done, and now, revealing that they are more than just a cohort of relatives, but play the role of a Greek chorus, they take a moment to express their sympathy for the man in the case, who’s just a kid, really. “It’s cryin’ time,” they sing, “It’s cryin’ time.”
I don’t care what the real words to Shotgun mean – I am not going to abandon my Shotgun. As Sylvia Wright says, “I won’t give in to it. Leaving [Earl Amurray] to die all alone, without even anyone to hold his hand – I won’t have it.”
(I came across this cover of Shotgun – fortunately it is the first number on the 45-minute TV program – and was charmed by the pair of dancers.)
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