When you were a kid and listened to a song, what did you get totally wrong about it?

Another two:

As a kid, my mom clued me in on the fact that the Beatles had done drugs. Now maybe it was bc I was a child growing up during the massive "just say no" era, but my 5yo self thought this was the worst thing ever. So when I saw the picture on the back of Rubber Soul, where Paul is smoking a cigarette, I thought it was him sitting in the back of a police car going to jail. Don't ask me how I arrived at that, I was a weird kid.

Perhaps not as funny to others as it is to me...but at around that same age, I'd dig out and look at my parents' records. I thought the picture of John on the back of Let It Be was actually him getting shot. Again...weird kid.

 

"Blinded by the light . . . . wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night"

 

Thanks for the video.

 

In 1969 several friends and I were on our way to a football game and a song came on the radio I had never heard. My friend reached over and turned the radio down. I said to him that sounded like the Beatles. He said, yes it is their new song but wouldn't turn of up. He leaned over and said the song is "Hey Jew". And with the Levinson brothers in the back he wasn't going to let them hear it. By the time we heard it again we were all laughing.

 

I thought that "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" was about a dog:

 

In 1967, and probably for several years thereon, I was dead certain that that theremin sound in "Good Vibrations" was a woman singing!

For some reason still odd to my mind, I have never met anybody who also thought that!

 

Oh man, that's cold! She's sexy. Venus trivia: only U.S. number 1 by a Dutch band ever.

 

Aside from the usual mondegreens, I thought Rod Stewart was related to Jimmy Stewart. I have no idea why Jimmy Stewart was singing about someone named Maggie May, but there you have it.

That was my impression, too. Portable AM radios had a way of spawning mondegreens.

 

"Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring, 1982.

 

My mother, Sharon, who was in her late 30's at the time, thought Eric Clapton was singing "I shot Sharon" instead of "I shot the Sherriff".....

When I was very young, I thought all music played on the radio was played live...yep, I thought the Beatles were in my local radio station playing those songs.....

 

When I was really young, I used to not be able to differentiate amongst the Beatles' voices. I thought John sang EVERYTHING and just had a really versatile voice. Exceptions were the "Get Back" chorus right before the keyboard solo, and the "why why do you say goodbye" in "Hello Goodbye." I knew those were Paul, but I didn't realize he sang the whole song!! I also thought "Ob-la-di" was "Oh black me, oh black Bob, life goes on, blah! Barbara, how the life goes on!" (Barbara is my mother's name.)

I also never noticed things like double tracked voices on any tune. If someone ever pointed it out to me, I always thought it was two separate people singing.

Lastly, I had this cassette tape with kid songs on it and one of them was "Jesus Loves the Little Children." There's a line in there that "Jesus died for all the children," but as a kid I thought it was "Jesus DIAPERED all the children!" I pictured him running around Jerusalem, changing babies' underpants!!

 

Huh, you learn something every day. I didn't know it wasn't all Jack Bruce until reading this thread. Cool.

As a kid, I got just about everything wrong with music. I thought for several years that "Layla" was Led Zeppelin and made many other mistakes about various bands and music. Pretty embarrassing, actually.

 

When I used to hear The Standells' "Dirty Water" blasting out of my big brother's room I thought the lyrics were "Houston you're my home". Of course we lived in Houston and I was young enough that I probably didn't know any city names besides Houston. I never knew it was Boston until a few years ago when I heard it on youtube.

But it's one of the songs from my childhood that's certainly responsible for me growing up into a rock-n-roller. I loved it when I was 4 and love it now for the exact same reasons.

 

I thought "On The Dark Side" was Bruce Springsteen instead of John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band (still do at times)

When I was really young, I wondered why CCR sung "there's a bathroom on the right"

 

The version they played Houston radio "KILT" at the time did say "Houston".
Probably an edit done at the station.

 

Ha! So I was a smarter kid than I gave myself credit for.

 

That's not a memory for me - I still have trouble.

 

I used to watch musical performances on my parents TV and wonder what was up with Bass guitar players. It seemed like they were making no sound, yet there they were whenever there was a band performing. It took quite a while before I realized that the TV speakers were simply not reproducing those frequencies.

 

NY radio made a big deal the George was singing it, back then. We all knew.

 

Same here!

 

Really??
http://images.45cat.com/the-shocking-blue-venus-1969.jpg

 

I used to see this band all the time on TV back in 1969-1970, and boy did I think the singer was sexy! Still do, actually. Shocking Blue was part of producer Jerry Ross's "mini-Dutch invasion" of that time period, which I thought was cool because I was born in the Netherlands.

 

I used to think that the bass players were the most important musicians because they couldn't play chords.
they have to play single string notes all the time!Now i know better.

 

I always thought the Doobie Brothers were singing "Whoa, whoa...waltz to the music". I even know they had an album called Listen To The Music, but didn't make the connection.