You and Me and Leslie

"Who's Leslie?"

I wondered for years. Every time I heard the song, Groovin' by the Rascals. Then, out of the blue, I realized they were singing, "You and me endlessly groovin'." What a maroon!

There are plenty of examples of times when I've misheard lyrics, or simply could not understand them, so I hummed or added the wrong word. These days, through the miracle of the Google, I can look up a lyric I don't understand.

Sometimes, that is difficult to do when I can't even figure out the title of the song. Some bands are notorious for naming their tunes based on no particular lyric. One day, I had this conversation with my husband:
 Me: I heard Led Zeppelin on the radio.
Him: Which song?
Me: The one where they're singing something like "your distant eyes."
Him: Not helpful. What did it sound like?
Me: (Humming badly)
Him: I have no idea.

I know I'm not the only one who gets the lyrics wrong. According to legend (or the internet) the song In a Garden of Eden became In a Gadda da Vida, when the latter title was written on the demo tape by a drunken(?) guy in the studio. A record company executive thought it sounded all Eastern philosophical (very chichi at the time) and kept it.

And those of us who came of age in the 1970's remember the lyric in Blinded by the Light as "Wrapped up like a douche" instead of "deuce." (Well, okay, maybe that one was intentional.)

Speaking of intentional, there are many of those, too, created after listening to the same song over and over. My friend, Peggy, and I started doing this after playing Steely Dan's Royal Scam album about 500 times. "Luckless pedestrians" became...well, you get the idea.

Mr. Ginley is the master of lyric-changing -- who knew "Schrimpf" rhymed with "nymph"? -- as well as mixing and matching tunes. I will have the songs Mandy and Fernando inexplicably intertwined in my head for the rest of my days.

So much of the music we experience is heard but not listened to. It's everywhere...in stores, at work, at sporting events. And even when I've made a conscious decision to put in a CD or listen to iTunes, much of the time I'm only hearing on a subconscious level while I'm doing something else.

I guess music really is the background of our lives. I wonder what my theme song would be. I like to think it would be something along the lines of, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun or Born to Run.

But I suspect it's more like, Still Crazy After All These Years.