Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs (Backlist eBook Program) (5 page)

Teen Death Songs

GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE!

M
any, many voters in the Bad Song Survey felt that the worst songs of all are the ones concerning hormone-crazed teenagers who wind up going, through some tragedy or another, to that Big Prom Up in the Sky.

Although most of the classic teen death songs were produced in the ’50s and ’60s, this theme has been popular in music and literature for hundreds of years, dating back to when William Shakespeare wrote
Romeo and Juliet
, a play about two teenagers from enemy families who fall in love and try to run away, only to die in a car crash.

This is similar to the theme in one of the most famous teenage death songs, “Teen Angel,” which received many survey votes. It’s about a couple whose car stalls on the railroad track with a train approaching, and the girl gets killed. What makes this song
really
tragic is that it didn’t have to happen. As the singer sings:

I pulled you out and we were safe

But you went running back.

The singer doesn’t explain why his date had to be “pulled” out of a car that had merely stalled; perhaps she was an unusually large teenager who tended to get wedged between the seat and the dashboard. But the singer does explain why she “went running back”:

They said they found my high school ring

Clutched in your fingers tight.

That’s right: She placed herself directly in the path of a moving railroad train
for a high school ring
. Because of this, a lot of survey voters argued that “Teen Angel” is not so much a tragedy as it is an illustration of how the law of natural selection improves the gene pool. Nevertheless, I feel that, to prevent this kind of incident from happening again, we should all write to our congresspersons and demand passage of a new federal law requiring that the following warning signs be posted at railroad crossings:

Another leading teenage car-crash death song is “Last Kiss,” which was performed by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers. In this song, the singer (presumably J. Frank Wilson) wails:

Where oh where can my BABY be?

The Lord took her away from me!

She’s gone to heaven so I got to be good

So I can see my baby when I leave this world.

Frankly, if I were the Supreme Being, I would have a rule that you could not get into heaven if you had ever deliberately rhymed
good
with
world
.

The best version of “Last Kiss” I ever heard was sung by Stephen King, who’s in a rock band, consisting mostly of authors, which I also belong to, called the Rock Bottom Remainders. (No, we have never made an album and for an excellent reason: We suck.) Stephen occasionally modified the lyrics to “Last Kiss.” One time, describing the tender moment just following the car crash, he sang:

When I awoke, she was lying there

I brushed her liver from my hair.

If
that
doesn’t bring a lump to your throat, I don’t know what would.

Other motor-vehicle teen-tragedy songs include “Tell Laura I Love Her,” sung by Ray Peterson. This is about a guy who enters a stock-car race so he can buy Laura a wedding ring, and
of course
, he crashes in a seriously fatal manner, but he still manages to sing “Tell Laura I LO-OVE her! Tell Laura I NEE-ED her!” approximately 153 times before finally shutting up. (I suspect that the ambulance crew turned off the oxygen.)

And, of course, there is “Leader of the Pack,” performed by the Shangri-Las, which features a motorcycle accident (
VROOM
“LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT!”
CRASH
) and ends with the Shangri-Las singing:

GONE...

The Leader of the Pack! And now he’s gone!

GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE!

Tragic-song teenagers do not always die in vehicle wrecks. Sometimes they jump in rivers. A good example of this genre is “Patches,” sung by Dickey Lee, which is about a guy whose girlfriend, distraught that they can’t be together, is found

Floating face-down

In that dirty old river

So naturally, the singer decides that he’s going to handle this tragedy maturely and sensibly by
also
jumping into the river. (“Patches, I’m coming to you!”)

The ultimate teenage-river-jumper song—and in my opinion, one of the worst songs ever made—is “Running Bear,” sung by Johnny Preston. This is the song wherein background singers make what they apparently believe are Indian noises—“OON-gah oon-gah OON-gah oon-gah”—while the lead singer tells the story of Running Bear and Little White Dove, who belong to enemy tribes but love each other “with a love big as the sky” (maybe Shakespeare wrote this song). So they jump into the river and drown to resolve this problem and get away from the background singers going “OON-gah oon-gah.”

One of the Bad Song Survey participants, Joan Kozlowski, said that when “Running Bear” comes on her car radio, “I just stick my head out of the car window and hope a semi gets it, just like my mother always said.”

Sometimes the teenagers in these songs do not stay permanently dead. A fine example of this phenomenon is the song “Laurie (Strange Things Happen),” also sung by Dickey Lee, in which the singer meets a girl, lends her his sweater, and walks her home. The next day he goes back to her house to get his sweater, and the girl’s dad tells him that
she died exactly a year before
. So he goes to the cemetery, and there, on the girl’s tombstone, he finds—you guessed it—the high school ring from “Teen Angel.”

No, seriously, he finds his sweater, and it is very thought-provoking. “Strange things happen in this world,” the singer points out a number of times.

I want to close this chapter by revealing that I, personally, once wrote a tragic, teenage death song, called “Oh, Loretta.” Unfortunately, it was never recorded, but I’d like to share the chorus with you here:

Oh, Loretta

Why did I let ya

Stand unattended

Near the threshing machine?

Songs People Get Wrong

Everybody Join In! “A weema-wacka weema-wacka...”

O
ne of the definitive characteristics of popular music, particularly rock music, is that the lyrics are often unintelligible. Of course, as we’ve seen in this book, this is often a good thing.

But it can drive you crazy trying to figure out the words to a song, especially if you like it. For example, I really like “Help Me Rhonda,” by the Beach Boys, but I’ve never been able to figure out the opening lines. It sounds as though the singer is singing:

Well since she put me down

There’s been owls pukin’ in my bed

I hope these lyrics are wrong because if they’re
right
, the singer’s not going to get Rhonda to go anywhere
near
him.

Often the reason we don’t know what the singer is singing is that the singer does not enunciate clearly. Elton John, for example, often sounds as though he’s singing in a foreign language, possibly Welsh. James Brown routinely sings entire songs without making a single intelligible statement other than “Hey!”

Sometimes the problem is that the singer himself doesn’t know what he’s singing. As I mentioned elsewhere in this book, I sometimes play in a literary rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. As I also mentioned elsewhere in this book, we suck, but our musical director is an actual talented rock legend, Al Kooper, who at one time used to risk his reputation by playing with us. Al did one solo number—a long, slow, powerful blues song called “Caress Me Baby”—and although I understood all the other lyrics he sang, there was one line I could never get. Al sang it with what appeared to be tremendous passion, and it sounded like he was singing: “Goan rare-ro hah-dee-nah.”

Finally, after hearing him perform the song dozens of times, I asked him what he was singing in that one part, and he said: “I’m singing ‘Gonna railroad high tonight.’ ”

“Gonna railroad high tonight?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

It turned out that Al didn’t know what the lyrics were, either. He had listened repeatedly to the original recording of “Caress Me Baby,” and the closest thing he could come up with was “Gonna railroad high tonight,” and so when he sang the song, he just slurred that part.

For all we know, a lot of singers are doing this, which could explain why so many people have trouble with the words to certain songs. The example cited most often by people who responded to the Bad Song Survey was Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.” A great many people firmly believe that Bruce sings these words:

Wrapped up like a douche

Another runner in the night

Those are not, of course, the real lyrics. The real lyrics are

Wrapped up like a douche

There’s been owls pukin’ in my bed

Many people also reported that they could not understand the chorus to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was a big hit for The Tokens. As you know, this is the song wherein the singer, after telling his “darling” to hush because the lion is sleeping, suddenly starts shrieking in a high, piercing voice loud enough to shatter crystal twenty-five miles away, while a chorus of deep male voices chants in the background, making enough noise to wake up a
dead
lion. Technically, the chorus is chanting the African word
Wimoweh
¹
but the Bad Song Survey voters who objected to this song—and there were quite a few of them—had many different interpretations of the lyrics, including:

A whemma weepa whemma weepa

A weena whack a weena whack

A-wing go-way

A-wing-a-WEP

Ahweemowet, awheemowet

Oh-we-mo-wet oh-we-mo-wet

A weema whip

Weema-wepah

A weem away

A-weem-o-wack

Weema-wacka weema-wacka

Wingle whip

Weenie wrap

Speaking of weenies, many voters mentioned the song “Good Morning Starshine,” as sung by Oliver; these voters definitely hated this song, but they were not at all sure how the chorus went. Among their interpretations were

Nibby nib nuby, nibby nobby nuby

Gliddy gloob glooby, nibby nabby nooby

Glibby glop gloopy, nibby nobby nooby

Yiby do diby, diby do bidy yadda yadda

Nibby nibby nibby, glibby globby glooby

Subba sibba sabba, subba sibba sabba, ho-ho, yo-yo

Gliddy glup gloopy, oobie flobba noobie, lie lie, low low

Glimmy glop glubby, wam alama looby, sha la la la low

Nitty bloop bloopie, nibby nobby newbie, la la la, low low

Ippy moopy wa-wa, dinky soppy da-da

There were also some votes for the sappy Wayne Newton
²
hit “Danke Shein,” or possibly “Donkashane,” or possibly “Dunkashein,” or possibly “Duncashane.”

Some survey voters’ memories of certain lyrics were not 100 percent accurate. For example, there were voters who cited:

• The part of “Billie Jean” where Michael Jackson sings “The chair is not my son.” (We don’t know if this is the same chair that refused to listen to Neil Diamond.)
  
• The Procol Harum song about “Sixteen vested virgins.”
  
• The Patti LaBelle song that goes “Voo lay voo coo shay, a vic mwa, cyst wa.” (As we say in France: “Mare see!”)
  
• The part of “I Am the Walrus” where John Lennon sings “I am the walrus, boo boo bi do.”
  
• The beginning of “Annie’s Song,” where John Denver sings “You filled out my census.”
  

Other voters had trouble remembering the titles of the songs they hated. We received votes for:

• “I’m Nothing but a Hound Dog”
  
• “One Toe over the Line, Jesus”
  
• “Goombayah, My Lord”
  
• “Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Pops”
  
• “She Wore a Yellow Polka Dot Beguine”
  
• “Anagotalavita”
  
• “The Wrapper”
  
• “Woodchuck Love”
  
• “Ain’t No Woman Like the One-Eyed Gott”
  
• “One Ton Tomato” (The person who nominated this—and no, I don’t think he was kidding—said it was a song “by some Spanish-speaking group” and that “all the words were in Spanish except the ‘I ate a one-ton tomato’ refrain.”)
  

These are actually just a few of the many song titles and lyrics that people got wrong, but I’m not even going to try to list them all. Instead, I’m going to end this chapter, and then I’m going to—you guessed it—rare-ro hah-dee-nah.

¹
Which means, literally, “Yo no soy marinaro.”

²
Speaking of whom: One survey respondent said that for years, when he heard Wayne singing “Daddy, Don’t You Walk So Fast,” he thought the words were “Daddy, Don’t You Wash Your Pants.”