What the hell does that even mean?

Posted on by brucehhackett

It’s a funny thing, how songs we’ve heard a thousand times, songs we’ve sung along to, songs we’ve heard performed in concert, have lyrics that include words we probably don’t understand, but we sing along with them anyway.

There are plenty of examples of songs with lyrics we “mis-hear” — we think they’re singing A when in fact they’re singing B — but I’m talking about lyrics that include words we simply don’t recognize.  They’re unusual, esoteric, rarely used.  But they’re right there in the chorus of a #1 song, so we just go along with them.

Artists didn’t start including lyrics on the album sleeve until the late ’60s/early ’70s, and many bands simply couldn’t be bothered, or wouldn’t pay the extra bucks required to reprint them.  So we simply weren’t sure what we were hearing.  And there was no Internet to check to find out exactly what the words were. Until now.

Today, readers, we’re going to solve some age-old questions.  We’re going to provide definitions for words you’ve been singing since you were young but never really wrapped your head around.

Just so you can hear these words again in the context of their songs, there’s a Spotify playlist at the end.

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“You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte…“

From Carly Simon’s huge hit “You’re So Vain” in 1972, this line perfectly describes the behavior of the vain egotist who is far more interested in how he looks than in anyone or anything around him.  But what of this term “gavotte”?  It’s a French word for a flamboyant folk dance, wherein the dancer holds one hand aloft with the other on the hip in a very showy display that aptly suits the “it’s all about me” attitude of the vainglorious person described in the song.  (And by the way, who is the song about?  For many years, Simon steadfastly refused to say, but recently admitted that the second verse is about her dalliance with actor Warren Beatty.  The rest, she says, is a composite of several other egotists she knew.)

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“On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air…“

When Don Henley was fashioning the lyrics to Don Felder’s melody that became The Eagles’ 1977 signature song “Hotel California,” he chose to employ “colitas,” a term he’d heard a couple of Latino road crew members using.  Not to be confused with the intestinal disorder colitis, the word was at first thought to be some sort of desert flower, and Henley liked the way the word sounded rolling off his tongue.  But he liked it even more when he realized it was a Mexican word meaning “little buds” — specifically, small buds from marijuana plants.  In a song that summarized the hedonistic sex-and-drugs lifestyle of Los Angeles in the late ’70s, it was a clever inside joke.

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“Some people call me Maurice, ’cause I speak of the pompitous of love…”

Steve Miller has made a career of lifting musical and lyrical passages from other songs, claiming “artistic license” to keep the copyright lawyers at bay.  For the #1 hit “The Joker” from 1973, Miller used “pompitous” from an old ’50s tune by Vernon Green called “The Letter” (no relation to the #1 Box Tops/Joe Cocker hit from 1967/1970), which includes this line:  “Oh my darling, let me whisper sweet words of pizmotality and discuss the puppetutes of love.”  Let’s ignore “pizmotality” for now, and focus on how Green has said he coined the term “puppetutes,” meaning “a secret paper-doll fantasy girl who would be my everything and bear my children.”  Apparently Miller mis-heard “puppetutes” as “pompitous,” and it has since become a minor pop culture reference — there’s even a 1996 Jon Cryer movie called “The Pompitous of Love.”

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“It’s no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough, just like the old man in that book by Nabokov…”

Before becoming a founding member of The Police, bassist/songwriter/singer Sting had been an English teacher, and he knew of professors who had unwisely pursued trysts with underage schoolgirls. He thought the topic might generate a provocative set of lyrics for a rock song, and “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” went on to become one of the group’s biggest hits (#1 in England, #10 in the US, in 1980). Sting was also well aware of the famous 1955 novel “Lolita,” written by Russian author Vladimir Nabokov, which covered this same taboo subject, so Sting managed to insert the author’s name into the lyrics.

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“Back to back, sacroiliac, spineless movement and a wild attack…”

Blondie, led by singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein, is considered one of the pioneers of New Wave coming out of New York in the mid-’70s, incorporating a mixture of punk, disco, pop, reggae and funk. In 1980, after they’d registered three #1 singles on US pop charts, Harry and Stein put together their first attempt at hip-hop with “Rapture,” using a disco beat with lyrics delivered mostly in a rap format. The words describe a crowded hip-hip dance floor in the Bronx (“face to face, dance cheek to cheek”), and in the first section, Harry sings the lyrics, mentioning “back to back” and “spineless movement.” Most pop music listeners are perhaps unfamiliar with the term “sacroiliac,” but it’s the name given to a pair of joints connecting the base of the spine to the hip bones, absorbing shock and transferring upper body weight to the legs. Pretty important on the dance floor!

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“He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich, and he said, I come from a land down under, where beer does flow and men chunder…”

I always thought “vegemite” was just a word manufactured by Men At Work songwriter Colin Hay for a verse of his band’s 1983 #1 hit “Down Under.”  But no, vegemite is a real thing, at least in Australia.  It’s a sort of edible paste (think liver paté) made of brewers yeast, vegetables, wheat, and spices.  Aussies regularly slather it on toast, hide it in pastries, or make whole sandwiches out of it.  Sounds questionable to me, but it’s quite popular there.  It’s not a term you’re likely to hear in the States anytime soon… “Chunder,” on the other hand, is a fabulous verb you’d think the college fraternity crowd would have adopted by now.  It’s a synonym for throwing up.

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“I see a little silhouette of a man!  Scaramouche!  Scaramouche! Will you do the fandango?…“

Who, or what, is Scaramouche?  No one seemed to know when Queen first released the epic “Bohemian Rhapsody” on its “A Night at the Opera” album in 1975.  Devotees of Italian opera and comedic theater knew very well, but your average rock ‘n roller didn’t have a clue.  Scaramouche, as it turns out, was a fictional clown character often seen in “Punch and Judy” puppet theater, a simple-minded fop who would be socked in the face or beheaded for his idiotic comments.  Songwriter Freddie Mercury said he chose to include the name in the song because he liked the way it sounded — memorable and bombastic.  (And “fandango,” by the way, is a lively Spanish dance involving castanets and tambourine.)

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“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now…”

Americans were puzzled by this phrase in Led Zeppelin’s 1971 anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” but Brits caught on quickly enough.  Hedgerows are, literally, rows of hedges that were planted intentionally across the English countryside as property borders and, in times of war, as natural barricades to deter advancing armies.  A “bustle” (as in “the hustle-bustle of the crowd”) is simply a commotion. Therefore, if there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, well, you’d best be careful, for it might be an enemy soldier or some sort of angry animal.  On the other hand, perhaps it’s merely what lyricist Robert Plant said in the following line — a servant doing “just a spring clean for the May Queen.”

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“Oleanders growing outside her door, soon they’re gonna be in bloom up in Annandale…”

Steely Dan was notorious for obscure lyrical references, and “oleanders” from the 1973 classic “My Old School” is but one example.  It’s a pretty but toxic flowering plant often used in median strips of highways in the American Southwest because of its hardiness and vivid colors.  Annandale-on-Hudson is a community outside New York City where Donald Fagen and Walter Becker first met while attending Bard College there. Oleanders aren’t likely to grow or flourish in that area, so the songwriters decided to put them there as a sort of absurd contradiction.

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“Colour sky rose carmethene, alazarin crimson, wear your love like heaven…”

From 1965 to the early 1970s, Donovan Leitch enjoyed a very successful career in the US and his native UK as a poet and singer-songwriter, adopting a gently psychedelic flower-child persona. In addition to his skills as a musician and songwriter, Donovan also enjoyed the art of painting. In his trippy single from 1967, “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” (a #23 hit on US pop charts that year), he mentioned a number of dyes and pigments he had run across in his work, deciding “carmethene” and “alazarin” sounded intriguing when used to describe the colors of the sky as sunset approached.

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“Draw me ’round your fruitcage, I will be your honeybee, open up your fruitcage, where the fruit is as sweet as can be…”

When art rocker Peter Gabriel hit his commercial peak in 1986 with his “So” album and worldwide #1 hit “Sledgehammer,” his lyrics were full of double entendres with subtle sexual references.  This lyric is clearly among his most blatant:  “Fruitcage” is, in fact, British slang for female private parts.  So now you know.  And you’ve probably figured out what he means by “sledgehammer” now as well…

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The Beatles — specifically John Lennon — loved to use arcane, vague vocabulary that added mystique and left his songs open to interpretation.  Here are four examples of several he used in his most inventive work.

“Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower…”

“Semolina” are the hard grains left over after the milling of flour.  “Pilchard” is a small, oily herring fish.  In his mostly nonsensical “I Am the Walrus,” Lennon was deliberately writing lyrics that would baffle all the pundits who were trying to find hidden meanings in Beatles songs.  He paired “semolina” and “pilchard” together for no reason other than they sounded interesting to him — although he added years later that “pilchard” is close to “Pilcher,” or Det. Sgt. Normal Pilcher, the London drug cop who zealously slapped drug possession charges on rock stars (including Lennon) in the ’60s.

“Picture yourself on a train in a station with plasticine porters with looking-glass ties…”

“Plasticine,” invented in England in the 1890s, is a type of modeling clay made of calcium salts, petroleum jelly and acids, meant for use by artists who needed their material to stay malleable so they could reshape and reuse it when necessary.  It’s known best in the U.S. as the medium used in stop-motion animation (“claymation”) projects.  Lennon liked it for use in “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” as an adjective describing what some people might look like to someone tripping on LSD.

“Over men and horses, hoops and garters, lastly through a hogshead of real fire…”

A “hogshead” is not a hog’s head at all, but a unit of measure, typically for liquids like wine or distilled spirits but also for food commodities like sugar.  It’s about the size of a large pickle barrel and equals roughly 80 gallons.  In the 1967 “Sgt. Pepper” tune “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” it referred to the size of the barrel ring of fire someone might jump through in a feat of derring-do.

“The man in the crowd with the multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots…”

“Hobnail” is a fastener that was used among cobblers in the design of workboots for the military and farm laborers.  It holds the sole firmly to the shoe and provides traction in uneven soil.  Why “the man in the crowd” in the 1968 song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” might attach multicolored mirrors to his hobnail boots is another matter.  Lennon said he and his schoolmates would sometimes put mirrors on their shoes so they could look up the skirts of unsuspecting females.

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Do you recall any other strange terms used in hit songs that you’ve never quite understood?  Let me know about them, and I’ll see if I can ferret out the hidden meaning behind them.  Although some may have no meaning at all:  Anyone care to take a stab at “Sham-a-lam-a-ding-dong,” “Wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-lop-bam-boom” or “Goo goo g’joob“?

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She left me with nothin’ but my 8-track tapes

Posted on by brucehhackett

When I was 17, in 1972, my best friend had an 8-track tape player installed in his Ford Maverick.  Like me, he was a music lover and album buyer, but when he was driving around, he had grown mighty tired of having to listen to commercial radio in the car, especially the incessant commercials and DJ banter found on AM radio.

As the guy riding shotgun, I enjoyed this too.  Being able to choose your own music seemed like a dream come true. But it didn’t take long for me to see several significant, annoying drawbacks of the 8-track format which prevented me from ever considering investing in it.  

To this day, for reasons I’ll explain, I contend the 8-track tape was an ill-conceived and poorly executed idea.

Perhaps you shared my distaste for 8-tracks and didn’t succumb to the temptations of portability and convenience.  Or maybe you joined the millions of other Americans who embraced 8-tracks in the 1970s, only to rue the day several years later when the entire format went the way of the dodo bird (and rightly so).

Here are the six most obvious defective characteristics of the 8-track tape that, in my view, doomed the format to an early obsolescence:

No rewind or fast-forward options.   At home, when you listened to albums, you could change songs easily.  Simply pick up the needle on your turntable and move effortlessly to another specific song, or put on another album.

Once the decision was made to embrace some sort of tape player, if you chose a reel-to-reel tape deck or a cassette tape deck, you could hit “FF” or “REW” in order to back up or move ahead to the desired place on the tape. With 8-track tapes, you didn’t have that flexibility. Eight-track tapes were configured as four “programs” sharing four parallel portions of the tape bandwidth. If you were listening to a song and decided you wanted to skip to the next song, or maybe go back and listen to the same song again, you were out of luck. All you could do was jump to one of the next programs and listen to whatever song was playing on that program. To listen to the song you really wanted to hear, you had to listen to other songs first before the one you wanted came back around on the program. Man, was this irritating!

Messing with the way the artist sequenced the music.  

Because 8-track tapes are set up as four programs lasting about 10 or 11 minutes each, the order of songs often had to be changed in order to maximize efficient use of the available tape.  For example, if an album’s first three songs lasted more than 10 minutes, one song might be replaced on Program 1 by a different, shorter song from later on the album just so the music would fit the 8-track’s limited format.  This might happen on all four programs, completely altering the flow of the music as intended by the artist.  A particularly egregious example was “Abbey Road” (see tracking below).

Even worse, sometimes there was no mathematical way to make the various album tracks fit in four 10-minute sets, so one or more tracks would actually have to be interrupted midway through.  The tape would then fade out, and several seconds (even as much as a minute or more) would pass before it would automatically switch to the next program, and the song would then fade back in at the point of interruption and proceed to its conclusion. Needless to say, this was an abominable way to listen to a song, and certainly not the artist’s intent.

Physical limitations of the tape.

The movement of the head at the point where it switched between programs could sometimes pull the tape up or down, causing the tape to fold over and start playing the back side of the tape. The tape would continue to play, buy very muffled and barely audible. Continued playing would flip the entire tape over, so the tape would be wound on the reel inside with the backside showing. The program switch point is often the place where the tapes would sometimes be ingested into the player (“eaten”), most often when the tape head moved from program 4 to program 1, its furthest track change movement. At that point, the tape was ruined, and the player could no longer play that tape, or any tape.

Head alignment:  Misalignment resulted in reduced high frequencies and allowed sounds from adjacent tracks to bleed over, an effect sometimes known as “double-tracking.”  Among audio service technicians, there used to be a joke that “the 8-track is the only audio device which knocks itself out of alignment four times every time you listen to it all the way through.”

The sensing foil that allows the tape to switch programs would sometimes dry up, fall off, and the tape would separate, and disappear inside the sealed cartridge. This was especially prevalent on bootleg tapes that typically used cheaper sensing foils.  In general, the 8-track market was flooded with cheaper bootleg tapes, found at truck stops and service stations. Had the tape been reinforced on both sides at this point, the tapes would have been much more reliable.

Capstan wear and buildup was also a chronic problem with 8-tracks.  As tape residue, dirt and lubricant accumulated on the capstan, the tape speed would increase and, since the buildup was uneven, the tape speed would become correspondingly uneven.  Similarly, some units were subject to the capstan wear, causing a decrease in tape speed. Any alteration to tape speed is clearly an unwanted defect that made listening to 8-tracks unpleasant and frustrating.

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I had a couple of other friends at that time who invested in reel-to-reel tape decks as an additional component in their home stereo systems.  These devices, introduced in the 1950s and generally purchased only by serious audiophiles, offered high-quality sound but were relatively expensive and a little tricky to operate for most casual music fans. They became more popular by the 1970s as prices came down and more casual listeners became interested in home recording and assembling customized mixed tapes that collected choice tracks from their album collections.

I loved this concept.  It was like being your own DJ, but without the commercials and talk.  You could put together mixes for every occasion — holiday parties, pool bashes, dances, romantic encounters and more.

But reel-to-reel tapes were not portable.  You could take them to a friend’s house only if he/she also had the necessary reel-to-reel player.  Most important, you couldn’t play them in a car.  So I chose not to invest in this format either.

Enter the cassette tape.  When first introduced in the early ’60s, their sound quality was pathetic, marred by a prominent hiss and muffled sound.  Their use was adequate for use in voice dictation and playback of children’s nursery rhymes and such.  So music lovers shunned the format…until the Dolby Noise Reduction technology arrived in the early ’70s to substantially improve cassette tape sound quality.  This development, combined with newer chromium-dioxide tapes, made cassettes a significantly more attractive format. Decent sound quality, portability, and fast forward-rewind capabilities made them the clear winner as the best music delivery system for your car.

In late 1974, I made the investment in both a home cassette deck for play back and recording, and an auto cassette deck to play tapes on the road. I immediately began compiling mixed tapes (“Hack Tapes,” I called them) and they became very popular among my circle of friends, many of whom requested them at parties and asked to borrow them for road trips. I even took to making custom mixed tapes as birthday or Christmas presents for friends and family.

As more people saw the advantages of cassettes over 8-tracks beginning around 1975-76, the 8-track began its inevitable slide toward extinction.

So what was the thinking behind the 8-track, anyway?

The “Stereo 8 track” cartridge was designed by Richard Kraus while working under Bill Lear for his Lear Jet Corporation in 1963. The major change from the reel-to-reel tape players then available was to incorporate a neoprene rubber and nylon pinch roller into the cartridge itself, rather than to make the pinch roller a part of the tape player, reducing mechanical complexity.

In September 1965, Ford Motor Company introduced factory-installed and dealer-installed 8-track tape players as an option on three of its models, and RCA introduced hundreds of Stereo-8 cartridges from its labels of recording artists’ catalogs.  This push from major corporations helped spark the interest in this new product, despite its drawbacks which would become obvious later.

Hundreds of thousands of car and truck owners took the bait. Those in rural and small-town environments seemed to embrace it the most, as evidenced by the number of country songs that mentioned 8-tracks. Here’s Conway Twitty’s “Red Neckin’ Love Makin’ Night”: “Get ready to go, we’re gonna roll about sundown, I got some boogie-woogie music on the old 8-track, /I got the top laid back and we’ll cruisin’ and foolin’ around, /Here I am baby, ready to play, slide it on in and we’ll slip away…” Or Alan Jackson’s song “1976”: “Eight track tapes were still in style and Elvis was still alive, Wonder Woman sure looked fine, Bionic Man was still Prime Time…”

Some consumers bought 8-track players for their home stereos, but curiously, the manufacturers didn’t offer 8-track recorders, so buyers couldn’t assemble their own mixed tapes like they could with cassettes. I believe that oversight helped contribute to the decline of the 8-track’s popularity, and by 1982, the record labels stopped selling new music in the 8-track format.

Some folks loved the format and defended it to its dying day.  In an article in Stereo Review magazine that collected opinions from music consumers, here’s one viewpoint from a guy who felt the 8-track was superior to the cassette: “Cassettes sound like crap.  They only play at 1-7/8 IPS (inches per second), so even with all the metal tape formulations, and Dolby, etc., the sound quality is limited compared to an 8-track.  If 8-track manufacturers had invested in the metal and chrome tape the cassette had, it would have blown away the cassette, because 8-track plays at 3.75 IPS, twice the speed of a cassette, and with analog tape, it’s all about tape speed.”

Here’s another: “Those who say that not being able to rewind an 8-track is a drawback are crazy.  You could just let it keep playing.  Want to start over again? Just switch from track 2, to 3-4 and back to 1.  There you are, rewound, with just a few button clicks.”

Other observers were merciless in their assessment of 8-tracks: “The primary reason the 8-track became extinct was because it was an unreliable piece of shit.  They simply weren’t built to last and, subsequently, they earned a reputation as ticking time bombs.  Truth be told, brand new eight-tracks often sounded good, and the tapes themselves were virtually indestructible. They rarely melted in the sun or cracked.  It was the internal components that started to fall to pieces over time.  If the manufacturers hadn’t opted for cheap construction, things might have turned out differently.”

“If the heads became misaligned even slightly (a VERY common occurrence), one track would bleed through into another track.  Worst case scenario:  two songs at equal pitch would play at the same time.  Best case:  a faint background of an altogether different track.  Either way, it was a thoroughly miserable listening experience.”

So there you have it.  The 8-track format, while perhaps not all that bad a concept, was shoddily merchandised and manufactured, and nothing was done to combat the onslaught of pirate/bootleg tapes on the market, which helped kill its credibility.

Cassettes, on the other hand, lasted for decades, staying viable as a music delivery option even as vinyl records were outperformed by CDs in the ’80s and especially in the ’90s and 2000s. (Eventually, though, cassettes and CDs both gave way to mp3 files and online downloading.)

Vinyl has since made a remarkable comeback in the past 10-15 years, and CDs too, to a lesser extent. Cassettes? Still hanging on by a thread in some circles, but 8-tracks are ancient artifacts from a bygone era.

If you want to get a chuckle out of anyone who lived through the ’70s, pull out an 8-track tape and ask them to slip it into their player!