I have been wanting to write another story about my mother lately – one that doesn’t involve dead guinea pigs anyway (click HERE) – and lately, most memories of my mom have been coming while listening to the radio, but not necessarily in the way you might think.
My mother loved music – “rock and roll music” in particular. Now by “rock and roll”, I’m specifically referring to the likes of Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Neil Diamond, and Johnny Mathis, which I realize would be questioned by most other music aficionados as even being “rock and roll” in the first place but, alas, to my mother these guys were absolute bad asses. And it’s not like my mother recognized or could even distinguish the different types of rock and roll like, say, Garage, Punk, Glam, New Wave, et al., it was the Big Three or nothing; everything else was referred to as “that crap you listen to”.
Primarily, my mom listened to her rock and roll in the car while driving us around between ball practices, errands, doctor appointments, etc., and periodically we would listen to something else; lest we forget the great Stealing Home soundtrack binge in the summer of ‘88 where it was on repeat in the cars cassette deck for at least three months. But for whatever reason, it always came eventually back to the guy with a weird fascination for sad clowns, the Jewish Elvis and a black, Texas crooner.
Needless to say, I don’t think back on family road trips very fondly.
It was only on very rare occasions where we were allowed to either change the station, or more correctly: eject the God forsaken “Johnny’s Hits” cassette from the cars console for – finally – some sweet reprieve, and listen to the radio instead. Even more rare, was our being granted the opportunity to outright put something on ourselves that wasn’t one of the big three. Honestly, you had a better chance of running into a break-dancing Sasquatch by the side of the road, but we remained hopeful nonetheless.
And it was probably a good thing we didn’t get to choose our own music very often, because “that crap you listen to” was nearly always misheard or misunderstood by my mom and would then be subsequently banned from ever being listened to in the house again. Had we been able to play more of our music for our mom in the car growing up, it’s likely that the only thing that she wouldn’t have been banned would have been Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Neil Diamond, and Johnny Mathis.
The Big Three.
Thankfully, music was something that I explored and enjoyed more or less on my own as a direct influence of what my friends were into, as well as whatever was popular at the time on Casey Kasem’s weekend broadcast of the American Top 40 that I would listen to on my own in my bedroom, so my mother remained largely ignorant of whatever else was popular at the time and more directly, what it was that I actually enjoyed. It’s not like she was absent or uninvolved in my interests growing up, but she sincerely didn’t think of my music as real “rock and roll” and therefore, dismissed it all as, well … “that crap you listen to”
C’est la vie …
Occasionally however, a song would slip past her defences should she, say, walk into my bedroom abruptly while I was listening to something, or more commonly, suddenly opening the door to get back in the car while we were blasphemously listening to the radio, and she would hear something alarming – or rather, think she heard something alarming – and she’d immediately be off on a tangent about the sanctity of decent music versus “that crap you listen to”, and before you know it … there would be another banning.
Think is, what she thought she heard … was very seldom what was actually being said (sung). Now whether she was actually partially deaf*, or it was actually a cleverly crafted ruse by which she could slap a ‘cease and desist’ order against anything that she deemed as “crap”, which was everything, I’ll never really know but a lot of stuff was banned from being played in our house. And often, these songs will come on the radio now and I will be instantly reminded of those moments when she would be on a misguided tirade over something that she had mistakenly heard, or had assumed about what we were listening to and just smile to myself.
The following are but a few of those specific songs that had suffered the inevitable fate of being ultimately banned from ever being playing in our home.
Thick as a Brick – Jethro Tull
Now, don’t get the idea for one second that I was ever a fan of Jethro Tull at any point growing up, or even knew what the hell he (it) was back then. I was into Kermit the Frog, the Oak Ridge Boys and the Transformers at the time, not British progressive rock flautists. I don’t even recall the exact circumstances in which my mom came to recognize this as an inappropriate song to listen to, but for as long as I can remember, if this song ever came on the radio it was immediately shut down. Pronto! And it t wasn’t for some time later as a teenager that I actually got it out of her why this song was held in such disdain.
You see, my mother wasn’t hearing the songs rather simple refrain: “Your wise men don’t know how it feels / To be thick as a brick”. No sir, she was hearing something entirely different. What my mother was hearing definitely rhymed with “Brick”, and it wasn’t “Lick”, “Chick”, “Hick”, or “Rick”. In fact, when prefaced by the words “Thick as …”, what my mother heard was entirely obscene and absolutely not what Ian Anderson was trying to say, like, at all. What she ever thought about what those “wise men” were “feeling”, we’ll never know.
Yes folks, my mother believed she was hearing it as “Thick as a Prick” (or “Dick”, it was never clear), and she just could not work out in her mind why such an obscene thing would ever be allowed to be played openly over the airwaves. I’m pretty sure she even felt like she was protecting us from these vile vulgarities, and preserving our delicate moral fabrics by preventing us from ever listening to the heinous Jethro Tull** – this song in particular – and it wasn’t until I’d made it to university many years later when I even heard the song in it’s entirety for the first time and realized that is was, well, harmless. I never corrected her though, and I continued to allow her over the years to believe in her falsely prefabricated myth that Jethro Tull was all about the bulging phallus’s.
(Sorry mom, but that’s some funny shit.)
So yeah, when Thick as a Brick comes on the radio, you can bet your sweet bippy which version of the lyrics I’m singing in my head.
Paradise Skies – Max Webster
In 1979, I was five years old. It might have been a year or two afterwards, but I know I was young because we were picnicking in a public park along the Niagara River in Fort Erie, Ontario, and we only ever did that early on in my childhood. Anyway, that’s the year this song was released. On this particular occasion I remember our having to sit near another table of picnickers who also had a ghetto blaster cranking out all the popular hits, and by “popular” I mean everything other than Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Neil Diamond, and Johnny Mathis. I remember my mom disapproving but as there were no other tables to move to, we were forced to sit there and listen to the offensive cacophony over our buckets of KFC. Everything was swell. It seemed like the perfect evening … “that crap they’re listening to” notwithstanding.
But then, the mood changed considerably when this particular song came on the radio. To anyone else, it would have been maybe the ideal musical anthem for an otherwise glorious and memorable evening along Niagara River, but to my mom it was something different … something dastardly. Suddenly, our cooler was packed and had been hucked into the trunk of the car along with the bucket of chicken and we were bidding a hasty retreat out of the park, tires squealing.
?
Again, I had no idea what had just transpired and it wasn’t until years later when I had the opportunity to question my mother on this point, this time while I was driving her … in my OWN car … where we listen to MY music …
… and the song came on the radio and, of course, she immediately reached over and deftly turned it off.
Of course I wasn’t going to let that slide, so I decided to poke the bear as to why she didn’t like this particular song, and she happened to bring up that same quick evacuation from the Fort Erie riverside park all those years earlier. No kidding! Apparently, this song had come on the ghetto blaster belonging to our neighbours at the next table and my mom had heard the chorus of “Happiness is beginning to ride / From the streets into paradise skies”, as instead being “My penis is beginning to rise / From the sheets into paradise pies”.
The. Fuck?
In her mind, my mother had turned something otherwise innocent into something dirty.
Uh-mazing.
This time around however, I corrected her understanding of the lyrics but the damage had already been done, her brain had been long since programmed only to hear about the nonexistent dick in the song. There was seeing it no other way. Of course, as a result of this debacle I too can only hear the words penis and paradise pies now, and I am unashamed to sing them at the top of my lungs in the cab of my work truck should it ever come on the radio.
Thanks, mom.
Blinded by the Light – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band
(Yes, yes, I know this is actually a song by Bruce Springsteen. Everyone knows that. But that wasn’t the version of the song that happened to get banned in our house and as far as I know, my mother never even knew that a different Bruce Springsteen version even existed. Regardless, if this little mis-credit annoys you, you can go and start your own blog and re-post my stupid story with the credits being wherever you like. P.S. Bite me.)
In all fairness, my mother never stood a chance the first time we heard this song on the radio. Nobody did, unless you were cool and were already previously familiar with the popular Bruce Springsteen original – which we weren’t. Seriously, it’s practically impossible to decipher what Manfred is actually singing unless you’ve already been previously tipped off, and there are many misinterpretations of the lyrics out there. However, on this occasion when the song happened to come on the radio, in one of those rare instances when I was lucky enough to be allowed to listen to a local (and usually “off limits”) radio station, what my mom heard instead of “Blinded by the light / Revved up like a deuce / Another runner in the night” was “Blinded by the light / Rammed up like a douche / Another boner in the night”.
Again with the dick.
I tried reasoning with her that there was nothing “rock and roll” about douches and it was highly unlikely that’s what the singer was saying, but not being able to really decipher it properly myself and provide a reasonable alternative for her, my argument died a quick and noble death right there on the spot – the song was “sick”, and that’s all there was to it.
End of story … so it was written, so it shall be told.
Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes on You) – Robert Plant
In the Autumn of 1990 Robert Plant played Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, Ontario as part of the “Manic Nirvana Tour” promoting the album of the same name. It was my first “rock and roll” concert and it was my first time getting high as my seat was in the nose bleed section, meaning I was breathing in everyone’s second hand smoke the whole night. I remember the concert less for the music and more for the incessant need to pound back three large hot dogs from a street vendor outside afterwards. However, this was not the reason why my mother ultimately forbid me from ever playing my CD with my bedroom door open (she had since mellowed in later years and had relented on banning songs from the house entirely, and more from just being in her ‘presence’ in general).
It’s because she thought that Robert Plant himself was (and I quote) “rude”.
Not because anything he ever did, particularly anything involving a mud shark …
… but because of his recent single Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes on You) that she managed to overhear while I was listening to my new CD fresh from Columbia House and my mother had somehow misunderstood the rather repetitive chorus as being “I’ve Got My Asshole On You”.
But hey, finally … no dick’s.
Thank Christ.
I tried to rationalize with her that the way she heard it didn’t make a lot of sense (thankfully this was long before there was ever such a thing as an online Urban Dictionary), especially considering it was being performed by a bona ride rock star lyricist who wasn’t necessarily known for making such flippant “rude” comments. I probably even tried to show her the written lyrics in the album’s liner notes but she was having none of it … Robert was “rude”.
Again, her mind was made up.
That was it.
There were lots of others of course, however, funny as it may be, Guns & Roses were never banned in our house. Of course, I just never brought them home, like … ever. You see, as it was back then, it was the kind of guy who wore Guns & Roses t-shirts to school who would most likely torment me in the locker room with vicious tower snaps, swirlies, and the dreaded “purple nurples”, so I did as much as I could to distance myself from all things Guns & Roses. However when Paradise City came on the radio at some point around that time, my mom was … impressed.
“I like these guys”, she said.
Obviously I was dumbstruck.
“Take me to a very nice city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty” she quoted back to me.
(Obviously she had been paying attention.)
“That’s really positive, don’t you think? I think so. Do you have any, wait … who is this again?”, she continued.
If I was dumbfounded before, I probably passed out at this point.
Clearly she had ignored the whole “Just a urchin livin’ under the street / I’m a hard case that’s tough to beat / I’m your charity case so buy me something to eat” part, but that’s okay. Personally, I was just stoked that there was something else – anything else – that she could add to her haloed triumvirate of “rock and roll” … Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Neil Diamond, Johnny Mathis, and Guns & Roses.
God help me.
God Help Me! 