I confess that I am old enough to remember life before the Internet, children, when there were no lyrics sites to find out what the idiot on the radio was singing. If the album didn't come with lyrics written on the liner notes, as they usually did not, you had to take your best guess, rock singers not being known for their exacting pronunciation.
I recall many nights with the lads trying to resolve conflicts along these lines.
"Wait -- did he sing 'paperback' or 'paper bag'?"
"Paperback."
"I heard paper bag."
"That can change the whole meaning of the verse. In one version he's reading and in the other he's sneaking alcohol."
"Let's listen to it again, loud and careful."
[rewind rewind rewind]
[listen listen listen]
"You're right, it's paper bag."
"I was gonna say it's paperback and you were right."
This kind of thing went on all the time.
So Mondegreens were plentiful back then, but we can't blame rock 'n roll entirely. In fact, the term dates back to 1954 and a reading of a 1765 poem from Thomas Percy. Misheard lyrics even inspired not just one but two series of books, one by Gavin Edwards (example below) and one by Martin Toseland. There may be more.
But there's no excuse for this anymore, right? We have sites online like lyrics.com, azlyrics.com, lyricsfreak.com, and even -- if you must -- Google Play. So we can find out whether it's paperback or paper bag at the touch of a phone, right?
Well, yes, but that's no help when you're driving and singing along. Don't research and drive. Besides, you can't even trust the lyrics sites. How would they know the lyrics of a song if they've never been printed? Scouring the copyright offices? Nope. They just do the same thing you do -- make their best dumb guess.
I'll give you an example. Roy Wood with the Move wrote "Turkish Tram Conductor Blues," a great bluesy rocker with incomprehensible lyrics. Two different sites have two different lyrics for some of the lines, and they have lines written like "Along the western (middle?) line" and "Once on a time the...kids..." In other words, they couldn't decipher it either. Roy Wood is still around, but seems determined to take his secrets to the grave.
But I think my main problem is that, since childhood, whenever I could not quite understand what a lyric was, my mind would supply its own words, stupid as they might be. So I can read the correct lyrics of a song that I knew when I was 11, I can read them several times, but when I'm tooling around in my automobile and the song comes up, which do you think I'm going to remember? That's right, my own stupid version, complete with all the "mmuuhhh bluh blurg"s that cover the areas where I couldn't even make a poor guess what the words were.
So I guess Mondegreens will always be with us, or at least with me, because my brain is essentially gone. Or as Ozzy Osbourne sang in "Crazy Train":
Ankle ghouls still squeezing
Driving me insane
I'm goin' off the rails on a crazy train
(P.S.: Big No-Prize to whoever can guess the paperback / paper bag song.)
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