Back in the day rant

Things were bad back in the olden days when you couldn’t figure out the lyrics to a song. If there were no liner notes in the album or cassette, you had to resort to various creative methods to get the words. If you were lucky enough to own the music, you could rewind and play, or drop the needle and play repeatedly until you figured it out. Sometimes this worked, like the time when I finally nailed “one eye is taken for an eye” from C.C.R.’s Bad Moon Rising. Much of the time though, this just lead to scratched records and dead batteries. (Enter the six sided Bic pen for rewinding)

In the case of a serious offender like Springsteen’s  “Blinded by the Light”, everyone would claim to know the lyrics but few actually did. Cut loose from the juice my mother running in the night? What? If you had a friend in a band that covered the song you could ask them but chances are, they were just faking it anyway.

“Oh yeah, I just kinda slur my way through that part.” Great.

 I can remember huddling around a tape recorder with some friends, rewinding Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” trying to get the second verse. By the way, its:

 It's been a long time since the book of love
I can't count the tears of a life with no love

And don’t tell me you knew the second line either. You just mumbled that bit like we all did. My sister thought the Eagles were saying “Fly’s in the Vaseline” instead of “Life in the Fast Lane” until about sixth grade. My other favourite is “Dirty Jeans…God they’re cheap!”

Don’t even get me started on “Je Sans Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel. “She’s so pop-u-lar” was an accepted version for an entire summer at sailing camp, until someone from French immersion class corrected us.

And yes, some of us experienced having to change the channel by actually going to the television or having to walk seven miles to school in a blizzard every day because we didn’t have technology…and I guess buses weren’t invented in the fifties either according to my mother. However, you really knew your stuff when you had an album that you could play all the way through, reading along with the words in the liner notes. Or how about the friend who had a cassette stuck the car on auto reverse? That was a good way to appreciate an album.

“Hey Jimmy…is Frampton Comes Alive still stuck in your car?”

“Yeah”

“Okay, we’ll ride with Bill.”

There was none of this skipping ahead or scrolling through an entire bands back catalogue in 2 seconds. Revved up like a deuce, my friends…Revved up like a deuce.