Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (73 page)

“I put it on the radio as a going away present for my wife,” he continues. “I called her up and played it for her, and the phones started going crazy: ‘What is that song?’” So many people asked for it at local record stores that the stores finally demanded the station stop playing it.

When Columbia Records got wind of the uproar in Louisville, they got the two stars together to duplicate Guthrie’s recording. The “official” duet version reached #1 in five weeks. Guthrie ended up without a wife...or a song. Claiming he’d been wronged by the company after selling them the idea for the duet, he filed a $5 million breach of contract lawsuit against CBS.

2 —a

The session in which Led Zepplin recorded “Stairway to Heaven” was pretty spontaneous. Drummer John Bonham worked out his part on the spot...and singer Robert Plant made up the lyrics as he was getting set to record them. Although he later cited a book called Magic Arts
in Celtic Britain
by Lewis Spence as the inspiration for the words, Plant also admitted that he didn’t really know what they meant. They were just words he put together in a hurry. “Really,” he
said, “I have no idea why ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is so popular. No idea at all. Maybe it’s because of its abstraction. Depending on what day it is, I still interpret [the song] a different way—and I wrote those lyrics.”

How do people turn that into devil-worship? Simple—“automatic writing.” The reason, some people say, that Plant doesn’t know the meaning of his own song is that Satan guided his hand when he was writing it, and if you play it backwards (who’d want to play a record
backwards
?), you can hear evil messages.

For the Record:
It wasn’t released as a single—a decision which boosted the sales of the album by an estimated 500,000 copies.

3 —c

The group, four Americans from Rockford, Illinois, had been trying to get some recognition in the U.S. for several years. They’d released three albums, all of which bombed. They couldn’t make it in Europe, either. In fact, the only place they were popular was Japan.

There, they were heroes with hit singles and tremendously successful tours. When the group’s third album flopped in the States, they headed for Japan to tour again. Their record company, Epic, decided to tape their performances in Osaka and Tokyo and come out with a quickie “live” album exclusively for the Japanese market. “Some of the songs,” their lead singer said, “were single takes.” But for some reason,
Live at Buddokan
—which wasn’t released anywhere except Japan—caught on in America, and the live version of “I Want You To Want Me,” complete with screaming, became Cheap Trick’s first hit. It was a twist on a classic rock ‘n’ roll story. Jimi Hendrix and the Stray Cats had to go to England to become popular in America; Cheap Trick went to Japan.

4 —a

It seemed so tailored to The Captain and Tennille that no one thought to ask what it was really about. Actually, it had a very different origin. For over twenty years, Neil Sedaka had co-written songs with his high school buddy, Howard Greenfield. Their hits included “Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” But by 1973, their Midas touch had worn off and they decided to break up the team. “Our last song together was called ‘Love Will Keep Us Together.’ says Sedaka. It was actually written about us and our collaborating.”

5 —b

“Brand New Key” was banned from some radio stations for being “too suggestive.” It was interpreted as promoting drug use (a “key” being a kilo of marijuana) or sexual freedom (a wife-swapping club in L. A. used it as a theme song). Actually, the inspiration was an impulsive visit to McDonald’s.

Melanie’s search for enlightenment and purification had inspired her to go on a twenty-seven day fast in which she drank nothing but distilled water. Coming off the fast, she was eating transitional food—grated raw carrots, a sip of orange juice—when suddenly she felt an incredible urge, like an “inner voice,” telling her to go out and get a McDonald’s hamburger and french fries. After three years of following a strict vegetarian diet and a month spent cleansing her body, she gave in to what she “assumed to be the voice of spiritual awareness.” “I ran down,” she says, “and got the whole meal. And then on the way home, in the car, I started to write ‘Brand New Key.’ So if you are what you eat... (laughs)... I totally connect the McDonald’s meal and the song.

6 —b

The Bee Gees had a #1 record in 1972. But by 1974, they had released two stiff albums in a row and two years passed without a single in the Top 40. They had fallen so low that they were relegated to the oldies circuit when they toured.

Arif Mardin, Atlantic’s superstar producer, had produced their “Mr. Natural” album. It flopped (peak: #178 on the charts), but the band developed a good rapport with him and requested that he produce their next album as well. Mardin accepted. His first advice to the band this time was to listen to the radio and get back in touch with what was happening in pop music. Open their ears. Then he said, “I’m going away for a week. I want you to write while I’m away.” It was a “do or die” situation.

Luckily, Barry Gibb’s wife, Linda, took Mardin’s advice and kept her “ears open.” “We used to go over this bridge every night on the way to the studio,” she told a critic later. “I used to hear this ‘chunka-chunka-chunka’ just as we went over the railroad tracks. So I said to Barry, ‘Do you ever listen to that rhythm when we go across the bridge at night?’ He just looked at me.” That night, as they crossed the Sunny Isles Bridge headed for Miami’s Criterion Studio, Linda brought it up again.
“I said, ‘Listen,’ and he said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ It was the chunka-chunka. Barry started singing something and the brothers joined in.” It became “Drive Talking,” which became “Jive Talkin’,” which became a #1 record and the first step in the Bee Gees’ astounding comeback.

7 —a

The song was originally written as “Le Moribund” (literal translation: “The Dying Man”) by Jacques Brel in 1961, and adapted to English by Rod McKuen in 1964. Jacks heard it on a Kingston Trio record, and in 1972, he took it to a Beach Boys’ session he was involved with. The Beach Boys recorded it but didn’t release it, so Jacks, who was distraught over a friend’s death, decided to do his own version of it. He rewrote the last verse.

One day a year later, he was playing his recording of it when the boy who delivered his newspapers overheard it; the boy liked it so much that he brought some friends over to Jacks’ house to listen to it, and their enthusiastic response inspired him to release it on his own Goldfish label.

1.
Utopia

2.
Nymphs

3.
Nausea

1. They were at a drive-in movie.

2. The poison was in the ice cubes. When the man drank the punch, the ice was fully frozen, but as it melted, it poisoned the punch.

3. The twins were born while their mother was on an ocean cruise. The older twin, Terry, was born first—on March 1. The ship, traveling west, then crossed a time zone and Kerry, the younger twin was born on February 28. In a leap year, the younger twin celebrates her birthday two days before her older brother.

4. Not a single word in this paragraph uses the most common letter in the alphabet: “e.”

5. It’s the bottom of the ninth. The score is tied; a runner is on third—and the batter hits a foul ball. If the right fielder catches it, the runner will tag up, score and win the game.

6. John.

7. The math does add up—the question is just worded in a misleading way. Look at it like this: The $27 spent by the men
includes
the $2 kept by the bellhop. Thus, the men paid $27 (the bellboy kept $2, and $25 went to the desk clerk).

8. The women paid $28 (the bellboy kept $3, and $25 went to the desk clerk). You
subtract
the bellhop’s tip from what the guests paid; you don’t add it.

9. The “bicycles” are Bicycle playing cards. The guy was cheating; when the extra card was found, he was killed by the other players.

10. Alice is a gold fish; Ted is a cat.

11. The blind man says, “I’d like to buy a pair of scissors.”

1 — c)
“The real-life sexual harassment problems the Army was having kind of spilled over onto us,” Walker told reporters. “Some editors felt that although we weren’t condoning it, we were on the edge. So Halftrack went off to a training course. When he returned, he apologized to the women in his office: “Y’know, I never meant to offend you with sexist remarks....I like and respect both of you.”

2 — a)
The ACLU and NOW each informed the school board that the move was illegal and would probably threaten their federal funding. The board decided to deal with it on a case-by-case basis. What we at BRI are curious about is this: if 25% of your cheerleaders are pregnant, doesn’t that suggest some lack of sex education?

3 — c)
In 1998, a group of meat shop owners in France announced they were “hurt by reporters who routinely refer to vicious murderers as butchers.” The group insists that butchers are “gentle, peace-loving artisans.”

4 — b)
It’s not an issue anymore, because Sears is out of the catalog business. But because of the letter, all the maternity models wore rings the following year.

5 — b)
In February, 1996, a guy named John Howard opened an apparel store called The Redneck Shop, in Laurens, South Carolina. The problem was that he sold Ku Klux Klan apparel. Also in the store: a Klan museum. When a reporter asked how people in town had responded, he said: “The only people I’ve had a problem with, who took it as an insult and a racial situation, have been blacks. I didn’t know blacks here were so prejudiced.” It didn’t last long. Someone rammed the store with a pickup truck and closed it down.

6 — b)
Apparently it made sense to the women to discriminate in the name of anti-discrimination. The director of the University of Pennsylvania Women’s Center, which co-sponsored the event, told reporters: “[Racism] is a white problem and we have a responsibility as white women in particular to do what we can to eradicate [it].”

7 — b)
What can we say?

F
ELLOW BATHROOM READERS:

The fight for good bathroom reading should never be taken loosely—we must do our duty and sit firmly for what we believe in, even while the rest of the world is taking pot shots at us.

We’ll be brief: now that we’ve proven we’re not simply a flush-in-the-pan, we invite you to take the plunge: Sit Down and Be Counted! Become a member of the Bathroom Readers’ Institute. Send a self-addressed, stamped, business-sized envelope to: BRI, PO Box 1117, Ashland, Oregon 97520. You’ll receive your free membership card, receive discounts when ordering directly through the BRI, and earn a permanent spot on the BRI honor roll!

Well, we’re out of space, and when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. Tanks for all your support. Hope to hear from you soon. Meanwhile, remember:

Keep on flushin’!