Hit Me With a Wet Sock, or I Don’t Think Those Are The Right Lyrics…

My sister was a small, impish person as a child. She is two years younger than I am, darker skinned and darker eyed, a slender, mischievous girl with a penchant for animals and children. Always bringing home one or the other home for dinner, she was a mystery to us.

She has taught me many things in my lifetime, and some of the things she taught me are even right.

But it is because of her that most of the song lyrics I know are wrong.

“Pearl! Pearl! You know what song I’m gonna sing at the bus stop today?”

I did not know. I never knew.

“Magic Bus!” Karen might’ve been 8, but she was into The Who. “I waaaant it I waaaaant it.”

And this was all fine, except that from there, rather than singing “Too much, magic bus!” she sang “Toothbrush! Magic bus!”

She also insisted that Creedence Clearwater Revivals’ “Sweet Hitchhiker” was “Swedish A’Hiker”. I tried to explain to her that ‘Swedish A’Hiker” made no sense, but she insisted that she was singing it with a Swedish accent.

“Don’t go around tonight” she’d bawl at the top of her lungs to “Bad Moon on the Rise” “for it’s bound to take your life! There’s a bathroom on the right!”

She had a million of ‘em.

To this day, I can’t hear those songs without singing them with Karen’s words.

I spoke to her on the phone the other day.

“You know it’s because of you that I can’t sing most of the Creedence Clearwater Revival songs without using your goofy lyrics,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?” she said. “You’re the reason I can’t listen to most of Led Zeppelin anymore!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Really? You’re going to make me sing it? Fine. Remember “Stairway to Heaven”? You ruined it for me! “And as we wind on down the road, I shout, a-squallin' like a toad...”

“I never said that!” I laughed.

“Oh, you did too you big liar!!”

OK. So I can’t listen to CCR anymore, and she can’t listen to Zeppelin.

We’re about even.