Member-only story
No, Puff, the Magic Dragon, Did Not Collect Wax for His Ceiling
On misunderstanding band names and lyrics
An excellent post about the pop duo Hall and Oates from Kevin Alexander triggered thoughts about a woman I dated many years ago. She was American, from a rural background, and was convinced the band was called Haulin’ Oats.
I did not mock, primarily because she was wonderful, but because I also have had some classic misunderstandings of music-related words.
For a while, I wondered whether Jimi Hendrix was gay. After all, in “Purple Haze” he does say “Excuse me, while I kiss this guy.”
Er, duh. The lyrics actually go:
Purple haze, all in my brain
Lately things they don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
Excuse me while I kiss the sky
My excuse is that I was a young teenager when the song came out and was relatively naive about drugs, to which the line poetically refers. (It is close to the famous quote attributed to comedian and addict Lenny Bruce: “I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.”)
I realised my mistake pretty quickly. Not so with another (arguably) drug-referencing lyric, this time in the song “Puff, the Magic…
