Mondegreens, "Louie Louie," and the Thom Hartmann show

(For reasons that, with luck, will shortly become clear, the original title for this post was "El Ka-bong, What's That Flower You Have On?")

As many of you know, I've been writing Spanning the State, a round-up of news items ranging from under-the-radar to over-the-top, at Loaded Orygun every Sunday since late 2007.

The top StS story yesterday concerns US House hearings on legislation that would guarantee that not only record labels and songwriters can collect royalties every time their song is played on the radio, but performers too.

The back story has a Portland connection:

The heirs of Richard Berry, who wrote "Louis Louis," still collect about half a million bucks in royalties every year. But Jack Ely, who fronted for the Portland band The Kingsmen and whose famous vocals are the ones that you inevitably hear in your head when you think of that song--he got $5000 bucks about 50 years ago, and not a penny since.

And you probably know this: Partly because of Ely's vocal stylings, and partly because the lyrics imitate a Jamaican dialect, "Louie Louie" was famous for its supposedly obscene lyrics. (The FBI even opened a file on it.) It's actually just a simple song about a sailor waiting to get home to his sweetheart, but it's the gold standard for popularly misunderstood song lyrics.

Now, I told you that story so I can tell you this one:

Every Monday morning during the second half of the 7am-8am segment of the Thom Hartmann show on KPOJ, Loaded Orygun head poobah TJ is in the studio to chat about Oregon politics with local hosts Carl and Christine, and Paul the producer. It's become a tradition that TJ winds up his weekly visit with a Spanning the State Challenge--a news quiz drawn (sometimes pretty loosely) from items in that week's StS post. Since I write the original posts anyway, I get the fun of prepping the Challenge questions for TJ--although, I hasten to add, what happens when he gets into the studio with them, and Carl, Christine, and Paul, is strictly between them and the gods of live broadcasting.

This morning, as a tribute to Jack Ely, The Kingsmen, and "Louie Louie," the StS Challenge on KPOJ was called "Wait--That's Not How The Song Goes, Is It?

(By the way, there is at least one respectable study out there on the neuroscience of why we get song lyrics wrong. [This is my second post today about neuroscience--what the hell's that all about?]

But I think the literary/anthropological approach is more interesting. There's even a serious, scholarly term for such misunderstandings, not only of song lyrics but of other forms of lyric and prose: mondegreens. The term has its own etymological history that's not too far from "wrapped up like a douche," although by comparison it's one you wouldn't have to worry about explaining to the parson when he comes by for Sunday dinner.

But I digress.)

Here's the challenge: Match the misunderstood lyrics, below, to the famous songs and performers they go with. That's the easy part. The hard part is: Provide the correct lyrics.

We'll start with some easy ones, and then start raising the bar:

Wrong lyric: "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy"
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

Wrong lyric: "Hold me closer, Tony Danza" (Bonus: "Count the head lice on the highway.)
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

Wrong lyric: "Wrapped up like a douche, another roller in the night"
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

Wrong lyric: "There's a bathroom on the right"
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

Wrong lyric: "Since she left me down there been owls pukin' in my bed."
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

Wrong lyric: "The ants are my friends"
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

Wrong lyric: "No ducks or hazards in the classroom"
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

Wrong lyric: "The algebra has a devil for a sidekick, eeeeeeeeee!"
Song: ?
Right lyric: ?

(To hear the answers--or to match wits with Carl, Christine, Paul, and TJ--listen to the podcast of the first hour of this morning's Thom Hartmann show on KPOJ.)