Just double checked on some lyrics from Dude Looks like a Lady by Aerosmith... boy was I wrong on them . I thought that: Then she whipped out a gun Tried to blow me away Was: She wiggled good And it blew me away Way different interpretation.
From Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue": We drove that car as far as we could Abandoned it out west Split up on a dark sad night Both agreeing it was best I used to hear it as "Split up on the docks at night." Which does make sense -- if the two of you are running away from something, the docks are a good place to split up and catch separate boats! I've heard that one before, and if you ask me, it sounds suspiciously made-up. The Beach Boys always clearly enunciated their lyrics. But it is funny.
I'd be surprised if there's any song Bob Dylan ever recorded that WASN'T misheard. Dude's harder to decipher sometimes than the Kingsmen's version of "Louie, Louie".
Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire..." I heard... "Children of the little mind." Actual lyrics... "Children of thalidomide."
I was watching Team America World Police yesterday with the captioning turned on, and I had no idea a line about Aladdin's Lamp was in the lyrics of Magic Carpet Ride. As a matter of fact, 75% of the lines in that song are unintelligible to me.
Here's a rather obscure one I just remembered. In Tom Lehrer's satirical song "I Wanna Go Back to Dixie," he sings: I'll go back to the Swanee Where pellagra makes you scrawny And the jasmine and the tear gas smell just fine Oh, I really have a fixin' To go back where there's no mixin' Down below that Mason-Dixon line. I used to think he was singing " . . . and the jazz men and the tear gas smell just fine." Eewwww . . . .
Sorry to bump this thread again, but another one I remember is from the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love." The line is: "And you come to me on a summer breeze." For years I thought it was "And you come to me on a submarine"!