SHOW-BIZ KIDS

Dear Tim,

I am glad you tracked down “That’s Where I Went Wrong,” and am not surprised that you were evidently a bit disappointed. Thems the perils of nostalgia. The funny thing about this is that I had the same odd desire to track down the song, although I could only remember fragments of the lyrics; then when I was living in Canada it was suddenly playing on the radio and almost fell over. I am very amused that you remember the song’s bus imagery, because I couldn’t make out the word bus. I heard the lyric either as “this house is awful cold,” which didn’t make too much sense, or “this horse is awful cold,” which, although weirder, seemed more likely, since this was the era of incomprehensible drug lyrics. So you pictured her riding a bus and I pictured her galloping across the Canadian steppe! You ought to do an article about the way a misunderstood lyric will never be corrected in your brain unless someone else points it out to you.


In answer to your question, the Poppy Family’s Greatest Hits is in the same vein as that song and the whole album is a living fossil of 1970, and I find it very pleasant to hear. Quite catchy. I only have it in as a cassette (a tiny Canadian issue, I am sure) but I would be happy to loan it or make a copy. No one else I know is the slightest bit interested, especially my wife, who stopped listening to AM radio in 1970 and shares very few musical memories with me. You actually do know the Poppy Family’s other “hit,” by the way, called “Which Way You Going Billy?”, unless this was only played in Pennsylvania, which is entirely possible.


Dear ML,

Yeah the perils of nostalgia, it’s never quite as transcendent as you remember, but at least I knew that going in. I was more interested in learning how much correlated with my idealized memory of it, and I worried for a long time that it wouldn’t live up to my best hopes. But somehow even that doesn’t really matter — the idealized version lives on somehow. “This horse is awful cold…” There’s a series of books called “ExcuseMe While I Kiss This Guy” that is all about misheard lyrics, the guy made a fortune on it and he barely had to lift a finger cos it’s one of the prime pleasures of rock’n’roll. Can you tell me what the backup singers are repeating in Steely Dan‘s “Showbiz Kids”? Apparently its’ “Las Wages,” which is some Mexican slur on “lost wages,” or some such. That one hung me up for a long time. I’ll probably go weak one day and download the Poppy Family’s Greatest Hits from iTunes just because it’s a sentimental curiosity… It’s VERY interesting to compare these charts [from the early 1970s], where are you getting them from? I would certainly dig a CD of however many of these you might have.


Dear Tim,

Ah yes, the embarrassment of garbled lyrics. Two friends of mine once told me that “their” song was “How Deep is Your Love?” by the Bee Gees. I said to my friend Tom, who was then in the navy and stationed on a nuclear submarine, I can see why it means so much to you, because of the submarine reference. He looked at me as if I was out of my mind: what submarine reference?! Well, to my undying shame, I had been hearing the lyric “will you come to me on a sum-mer-breeze” as “will you come to me on a sub-ma-rine. ” Actually, it would have been a much better song if it said that.


How I get the top-100 lists? I had our college library use interlibrary loan to get me Billboard Magazine on microfilm, 1970-72 inclusive, and I printed out the album and singles charts for various months.



Dear ML,


Let me guess: as keyboard player for your band, you were also lead singer.