I (mis)heard that!
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Blues Traveler currently reside in the "Where are they now" file, but travel back with me to 1995. Blues Traveler was a cross-format smash, and you couldn't turn around without hearing one of their songs: either "Run Around" or "Hook," both of which were irresistible pop rock gems. I kinda liked the whole meta-songwriting thing going on in "Hook": the whole first verse is about how he can put together a song that means nothing, but the hook will bring you, the listener back.But what I really liked about it was the way lead singer/harmonicist John Popper bravely dealt with the perils of his life-threatening weight. "See what you're doing to me, this MTV is not for free, this obesity is killing me so desperately I sing to thee of love..." Wow. I mean here's a guy at the bottom of a very deep hole singing about what amounts to a taboo subject in pop music.It crossed my mind to buy the album (this was before I heard "Run Around" so many times that it became like fingernails on a blackboard to me), but my friend beat me to it. "Hey," I said, upon spotting the CD at his house. "How is this?""It sucks," he said."Really?" I said. "But those two songs are so good.""You'll see," he said, as he popped the disc into the player. And he was right--the album consisted of two hit singles and a bunch of unlistenable sludge.This wasn't too much of a disappointment to me, since I hadn't bought the thing, but what was a disappointment was when I looked at the lyric sheet and found that my admiration for John Popper's courage was misplaced: the line he actually sang was "it's so PC it's killing me," which is not only not a brave statement about obesity, it's just dumb. Suddenly my appreciation for the song and the band plummeted.All of which is my long-winded way of asking you, just for fun, if you've ever had a similar experience, where you misheard a lyric in a way that was better than the actual lyric. I'm not talking about the "Scuse me while I kiss this guy" or "There's a bathroom on the right" or "She's got electric boobs" stuff, but lines you heard that you thought were so cool, only to find out it that what you thought you heard was way better than what you actually heard.
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