I was 9 years old when I started listening to the Beatles.  My mom bought me some of their albums, and others I purchased with lawn-mowing money.  I would study the lyrics as I played the records over and over again, since precision was important to me for some reason.  Even difficult and intricate lyrics like this one from "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" remain a part of my memory vault:

Picture yourself on a train in a station,
With plasticine porters with looking glass ties,
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile,
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes...

As a side note, yes, this song is about LSD.  Don't let anyone convince you differently. 

At some point, lyrics must have become less important to me, or they stopped providing lyrics to read along with while listening.  For example, R.E.M. used to be notorious for never putting any lyrics with their CD's. 

Recently, I realized that there are some other tunes that I have enjoyed for many years, even though the lyrics in my mind don't mesh with reality at all.  In fact, while I was writing this post, I even discovered some new ones that I didn't even know about before.

One example comes from my junior high days, from Van Halen's exceptionally popular "1984" album.  Yes, I said album, not CD or even cassette tape.  I have the vinyl album (somewhere).  So, the song "Jump" came out when I was 13 or 14 years old, and it was among my favorites.  However, I later realized that one portion of the song had utterly eluded me, and it seriously changed the meaning of the verse in question.  Here's the real lyric, which appears just before the chorus:

Oh can't you see me standing here,
I've got my back against the record machine
I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Oh can't you see what I mean ?

And here's the Jason Crouch version:

Oh can't you see me standing here,
I've got my back against the record machine
I eat the worst things you've seen.
Oh can't you see what I mean ?

As you can clearly see, this is a bit different from the original.  I always wondered why in the heck that line was in there, since it was such a cool song.  I learned the real lyric later, but I still stubbornly sing along about eating junk food.  Incidentally, I just learned TODAY that in "Hot for Teacher", they are singing "I've got it bad" rather than (my version) "I've got it made".  Just another example of my auditory ineptitude.

With apologies to my friend Paul Slaybaugh, who is a big-time fan of reggae and Bob Marley, I must admit that over the last couple of days I learned that Marley was actually singing "Stir it Up" in his early 70's hit rather than "Still in Love".  I even managed to mess up the title in this instance! 

I actually like my version better, so I think I'll just stick with it rather than changing.  I guess I am getting more set in my ways as I age.  As the reader, you have the benefit of knowing the lyrics already, but here's the song I am referring to:

I wrote another post back in October about my "lazy ear syndrome", if you are interested:
MORE song stuff - Am I hard of hearing? My Lazy Ear Syndrome

P.S. I still maintain that the most widely misunderstood song ever written is Manfred Mann's "Blinded by the Light", and even though I included this link back when I wrote on this topic in October, I think it bears including it again, partially because I have more people reading my blog now, and partly because it is hysterical.  I won't go into all of the variations that I have heard, but these guys did, and it is probably one of the funniest and most memorable sketches that I have EVER seen (give it time - the funny part starts at around 0:50 on the video):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U29S--wn8