Jojo Thought He Was a LONER

Photo of a wall with wood paneling and three framed Beatles posters on it.

Because our basement used to be Ron’s parents’ basement, and because we have yet to do any basement remodeling, the room is decorated as if it’s a shrine to The Beatles. (There’s just a taste of the Beatles memorabilia in the photo above.) So, when last week we had some workers here for a home improvement project, inevitably one of them broke into song. Ron who overheard the basement Beatles tribute reported to me that the song in question was “Get Back.”

This inspired me to sing what I had always thought was the opening line of the song , “Jojo was a man who thought he was a woman.” Ron thought I had the words wrong, but I knew with certainty that he was the one who was mistaken. So, imagine my surprise when I hunted down a lyrics video on Youtube and learned that “Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner.” What? For Real? I found myself reading the comments, and found my people quickly. Apparently there were a number of us out there who heard this as “woman” and not “loner.” Jojo, all this time I had your story wrong. As for Sweet Loretta Martin, well that line I had been hearing correctly all along.

I’ll sound like my usual old geezer self here, but back in my day we didn’t have the internet to tell us the lyrics to songs. Back then, you just listened to the song and tried to figure out the lyrics to the best of your ability. Maybe if you were lucky you owned the album and they were nice enough to include the song lyrics with the liner notes. Otherwise you had to rely on your own sense of hearing and intuition.

A few years back one of the car companies (I think it might have been Volkswagen, but I’m not positive.) had a commercial that was showing off how good the stereo sound quality was in their vehicles by having people finally understand that the lyrics to the song “Rocket Man” went “burning out my fuse up here alone.”

Dave Barry used to do a thing on misheard song lyrics. One I recall him referencing was hearing “There’s a bathroom on the right” as opposed to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s actual lyrics “There’s a bad moon on the rise.”

So what about you? What song lyrics have you misheard? Maybe, if you’re like me you don’t even know how wrong you are, and you’re about to have your mind blown.

—Alissa