I speak of the pompatus of love
It’s a funny thing, how songs we’ve heard a thousand times, songs we’ve sung along to, songs we’ve heard performed in concert, have lyrics that include words we probably don’t understand, but we sing along with them anyway.
There are plenty of examples of songs with lyrics we “mis-hear” — we think they’re singing A when in fact they’re singing B — but I’m talking about lyrics that include words we simply don’t recognize. They’re unusual, esoteric, rare, maybe even made-up. But they’re right there in the chorus of a #1 song, so we just go along with them.
Artists didn’t start including lyrics on the album sleeve until the late ’60s/early ’70s, and many bands simply couldn’t be bothered, or wouldn’t pay the fee required to reprint them. So we simply weren’t sure what we were hearing. And there was no Internet to check to find out exactly what the words were.
Today, readers, we’re going to solve some age-old questions. We’re going to provide definitions for words you’ve been singing since you were 12 but never really wrapped your head around. Until now.
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“You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte…”
From Carly Simon’s huge hit “You’re So Vain” in 1972, this line perfectly describes the behavior of the vain egotist who is far more interested in how he (or she) looks than in anyone or anything around him (or her). But what of this term “gavotte”? It’s a French word for a flamboyant folk dance, wherein the dancer holds one hand aloft with the other on the hip in a very showy display that aptly suits the “it’s all about me” attitude of the vainglorious person described in the song. (And by the way, who is the song about? For many years, Simon steadfastly refused to say, but recently admitted that the second verse is about her dalliance with actor Warren Beatty. The rest, she says, is a composite of several other egotists she knew.)
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“On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air…”
When Don Henley was fashioning the lyrics to Don Felder’s melody that became their 1977 signature song “Hotel California,” he chose to employ “colitas,” a term he’d heard a couple of Latino road crew members using. Not to be confused with the intestinal disorder colitis, the word was at first thought to be some sort of desert flower, and Henley liked the way the word sounded rolling off his tongue. But he liked it even more when he realized it was a Mexican word meaning “little buds” — specifically, small buds from marijuana plants. In a song that summarized the hedonistic sex-and-drugs lifestyle of Los Angeles in the late ’70s, it was a clever inside joke.
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“You consider me a young apprentice, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis…”
These terms are found in Greek mythology to describe two infamous sea monsters that lurked on either side of a stormy channel, creating a perilous route for ships. Sting, The Police’s chief songwriter, is a big fan of The Classics, and he thought himself rather clever to insert a little ancient terminology into his modern rock lyrics, in this case “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” from the band’s “Synchronicity” album. To be caught between Scylla and Charybdis was, essentially, like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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“He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich, and he said, I come from a land down under, where beer does flow and men chunder…”
I always thought “vegemite” was just a word manufactured by Men At Work songwriter Colin Hay for a verse of his band’s 1983 #1 hit “Down Under.” But no, vegemite is a real thing, at least in Australia. It’s a sort of edible paste (think liver paté) made of brewers yeast, vegetables, wheat, and spices. Aussies regularly slather it on toast, hide it in pastries, or make whole sandwiches out of it. Sounds vile to me, but it’s quite popular there. It’s not a term you’re likely to hear in the States anytime soon… “Chunder,” on the other hand, is a fabulous verb you’d think the college fraternity crowd would have adopted by now. It’s a synonym for throwing up.
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“I see a little silhouette of a man! Scaramouche! Scaramouche! Will you do the fandango?…”
Who, or what, is Scaramouche? No one seemed to know when Queen released the amazing “Bohemian Rhapsody” on its “A Night at the Opera” album in 1975. Devotees of Italian opera and comedic theater knew very well, but your average rock ‘n roller didn’t have a clue. Scaramouche, as it turns out, was a fictional clown character often seen in “Punch and Judy” puppet theater, a simple-minded fop who would be socked in the face or beheaded for his idiotic comments. Songwriter Freddie Mercury said he chose to include the name in the song because he liked the way it sounded — memorable and bombastic. (And “fandango,” by the way, is a lively Spanish dance involving castanets and tambourine.)
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“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now…”
Americans were puzzled by this phrase in Led Zeppelin’s 1971 anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” but Brits caught on quickly enough. Hedgerows are, literally, rows of hedges that were planted intentionally across the English countryside as property borders and, in times of war, as natural barricades to deter advancing armies. Therefore, if there’s a bustle (a commotion) in your hedgerow, well, you’d best be careful, for it might be an enemy soldier or some sort of angry animal. On the other hand, perhaps it’s just what lyricist Robert Plant said — a servant doing a “spring clean for the May Queen.”
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“Oleanders growing outside her door, soon they’re gonna be in bloom up in Annandale…”
Steely Dan was notorious for obscure lyrical references, and “oleanders” from the 1973 classic “My Old School” is but one example. It’s a pretty but toxic flowering plant often used in median strips of highways in the American Southwest because of its hardiness and vivid colors. Annandale is a community in New Jersey outside New York City where oleanders aren’t likely to grow or flourish, so songwriters Donald Fagen and Walter Becker put them there as a sort of absurd contradiction.
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“Draw me ’round your fruitcage, I will be your honeybee, open up your fruitcage, where the fruit is as sweet as can be…”
When art rocker Peter Gabriel hit his commercial peak in 1986 with his “So” album and worldwide #1 hit “Sledgehammer,” his lyrics were full of double entendres with subtle sexual references. This lyric is clearly among his most blatant: “Fruitcage” is, in fact, British slang for female private parts. So now you know. And you’ve probably figured out what he means by “sledgehammer” now as well…
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The Beatles — specifically John Lennon — loved to use arcane, vague vocabulary that 
added mystique and left his songs open to interpretation. Here are four examples of several he used in his most inventive work.
“Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower…”
“Semolina” are the hard grains left over after the milling of flour. “Pilchard” is a small, oily herring fish. In his mostly nonsensical “I Am the Walrus,” Lennon was deliberately writing lyrics that would baffle all the pundits who were trying to find hidden meanings in Beatles songs. He paired “semolina” and “pilchard” together for no reason other than they sounded interesting to him — although he added years later that “pilchard” is close to “Pilcher,” or Det. Sgt. Normal Pilcher, the London drug cop who zealously slapped drug possession charges on rock stars (including Lennon) in the ’60s.
“Picture yourself on a train in a station with plasticine porters with looking-glass ties…”
“Plasticine,” invented in England in the 1890s, is a type of modeling clay made of calcium salts, petroleum jelly and acids, meant for use by artists who needed their material to stay malleable so they could reshape and reuse it when necessary. It’s known best in the U.S. as the medium used in stop-motion animation (“claymation”) projects. Lennon liked it for use in “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” as an adjective describing what some people might look like to an LSD user.
“Over men and horses, hoops and garters, lastly through a hogshead of real fire…”
A “hogshead” is not a hog’s head at all, but a unit of measure, typically for liquids like wine or distilled spirits but also for food commodities like sugar. It’s about the size of a large pickle barrel and equals roughly 80 gallons. In the 1967 “Sgt. Pepper” tune “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” it referred to the size of the barrel ring of fire someone might jump through in a feat of derring-do.
“The man in the crowd with the multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots…”
“Hobnail” is a fastener that was used among cobblers in the design of workboots for the military and farm laborers. It holds the sole firmly to the shoe and provides traction in uneven soil. Why “the man in the crowd” in the 1968 song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” might attach multicolored mirrors to his hobnail boots is another matter. Lennon said he and his schoolmates would sometimes put mirrors on their shoes so they could look up the skirts of unsuspecting females.
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“Some people call me Maurice, ’cause I speak of the pompatus of love…”
Steve Miller has made a career of lifting musical and lyrical passages from other songs, claiming “artistic license” to keep the copyright lawyers at bay. For the #1 hit “The Joker” from 1973, Miller used “pompatus” (also spelled “pompitous”) from an old ’50s tune by Vernon Green called “The Letter” (no relation to the #1 Box Tops/Joe Cocker hit from 1967/1970), which includes these lines: “Oh my darling, let me whisper sweet words of pizmotality and discuss the puppetutes of love.” Let’s ignore “pizmotality” for now, and focus on how Green has said he coined the term “puppetutes,” meaning “a secret paper-doll fantasy girl who would be my everything and bear my children.” Apparently Miller mis-heard “puppetutes” as “pompatus,” and it has since become a minor pop culture reference — there’s even a 1996 Jon Cryer movie called “The Pompatus of Love.”
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Do you recall any other strange terms used in hit songs that you’ve never quite understood? Let me know about them, and I’ll see if I can ferret out the hidden meaning behind them. Although some may have no meaning at all: Anyone care to take a stab at “Wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-lop-bam-boom“?
towns throughout the Midwest, the South, the Northeast, the Southwest and all parts in between.
Bowie said he wrote this song based on his friend Iggy Pop’s descriptions of his experiences with revolutionaries during the 1967 Detroit riots. Rolling Stone called the track “a paranoid descendant of the Motor City’s earlier masterpiece, Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Nowhere to Run.'” Sample lyrics: “Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph, he wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone, panic in Detroit, he laughed at accidental sirens that broke the evening gloom, the police had warned of repercussions…”
Guitarist/singer/songwriter Johnston was the mainstay of The Doobie Brothers until ulcers forced his temporary retirement from the lineup in 1976. He worked his way back into the business with a 1979 solo LP, “Everything You’ve Heard is True,” featuring this very Doobie-ish tune about his fond memories of Savannah, Georgia: “He is the King of Savannah nights, the inspiration, the ladies’ delight, you could not catch him if you wanted to try tonight…”
Allentown is one of those hardworking Pennsylvania steel towns that suffered mightily when the US steel industry took a dive in the 1960s and 1970s and never really recovered. The folks who were born and raised there and were expected to work the mills found themselves in a dead-end existence through no real fault of their own. Billy Joel made a hit single about it: “So the graduations hang on the wall, but they never really helped us at all, no, they never taught us what was real, iron and coal and chromium steel, and we’re waiting here in Allentown… and it’s getting very hard to stay, and we’re living here in Allentown…”
Grunge rock, which featured angst-ridden lyrics and punk/metal leanings, was born in the Seattle underground in the mid-’80s, and became popular in the early ’90s with Nirvana, Soundgarden and others leading the way. The Smithereens, who hailed from New Jersey, liked grunge but found its heyday was over when they visited Seattle: “Came here to find me a place in the sun, once was a scene, now it’s already done, thinking of leaving, it’s no longer fun in Seattle…”
Little Feat has a great classic tune with the same title, but I have also always liked Bad Company’s entirely different song, a deep track from their 1979 LP “Desolation Angels.” Country artist Alison Krauss recorded a marvelous cover version in 1995. Guitarist Mick Ralphs wrote the song in tribute to the “capital of the New South”: “Oh Atlanta, hear me calling, I’m coming back to you one fine day, no need to worry, there ain’t no hurry, ’cause I’m on my way back to Georgia…”
Rockabilly/roots-rock singer Isaak, born and raised in Stockton, California, is probably most widely known for his languid 1990 hit “Wicked Game” and for his dreamy voice. His fifth LP “San Francisco Days” is full of great songs, including the title track, which pays homage to the nearby Bay City: “I’m heading for that Golden Gate, hoping I won’t be too late to find the one that I still love, it’s you I’m dreaming of, San Francisco nights, San Francisco days, San Francisco nights…”
Seger is a Detroit native who sympathized with the plight of refugees who are just looking for a better life. For his popular “Like a Rock” album in the mid-’80s, he wrote “Miami,” about Cuban refugees who brave the 90-mile trip to the Florida mainland, looking to Miami just as European immigrants looked to New York City in the early 1900s: “They felt the warm breezes blowing from off the strange new ocean, they reached the end safe, it was a new day, Miami, oh, Miami…”
Newman is known for writing sardonic lyrics, and his tune “Baltimore” from his successful 1977 LP “Little Criminals” got him in trouble (as did that album’s single, the anti-discriminatory “Short People”). Said Newman at the time, “People tend to take my songs the wrong way sometimes. Actually, I think people in Baltimore who objected to that song had a real good case, though, because I didn’t know much about it and had never been there.” Sample lyrics: “And they hide their faces, and they hide their eyes ’cause the city’s dyin’ and they don’t know why, oh Baltimore, man, it’s hard just to live, oh Baltimore, man, it’s hard just to live…”
Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman teamed up to write this rollicking tune expressly for the Elvis Presley hit movie of the same name. Presley’s recording reached #27 in April 1964, and the movie, co-starring love interest Ann-Margret, was a box office hit as well. The lyrics celebrate Las Vegas for its fun and excitement while warning of its risk and danger: “There’s black jack and poker and the roulette wheel, a fortune won and lost on every deal, all you need’s a strong heart and a nerve of steel, viva Las Vegas!…”
Singer-songwriter Jewel was only 21 when her debut album “Pieces of You” made her a star. Included on her third LP, “This Way,” was this deep album track in which the narrator wants to curl up with her boyfriend, but can’t because he’s on the road, this time in Cleveland: “It’s only an inch from me to you, depending on what map you use, I wanna tell you everything, I wanna make your toes curl, you be my only boy and I’ll be your only girl, there’s not much I can say ’cause you’re in Cleveland today…”
One of the first songs in the catalog of famed songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller was “Kansas City,” a great 1952 blues tune that R&B singer Wilbert Harrison took to the top of the charts in 1959. The Beatles chose to cover it in a medley with Little Richard’s “Hey Hey Hey Hey” on their 1964 LP “Beatles For Sale.” The lyrics are barebones simple, but the song is a keeper: “Ah, Kansas City, gonna get my baby on time, yeah yeah, I’m goin’ to Kansas City, gonna get my baby on time, yeah yeah, it’s just a-one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine…”
Elton was friends with tennis star Billie Jean King and wanted to write a single for her and her pro tennis team, the Philadelphia Freedoms. Lyricist Bernie Taupin protested, “I can’t write a song about tennis,” and in fact, the song has nothing to do with the sport. Although Taupin claims it isn’t about flag-waving patriotism either, its release in 1975 and subsequent rise to #1 on the charts dovetailed nicely with the Bicentennial celebrations in Philly in 1976: “Philadelphia freedom, shine on me, I love you, shine a light through the eyes of the ones left behind, shine a light, shine a light, shine a light, won’t you shine a light, Philadelphia freedom, I love you…”
Daniels is a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner from Wilmington, North Carolina, and when his career took him on tour far from home, he found himself writing songs where the narrator was longing for the familiar surroundings of his Southern towns. On his 1975 LP “Nightrider,” he recorded a kickass number dedicated to his woman back in Alabama: “Had me a fine woman down in Birmingham town, took care of my money and she didn’t play around, all I got left now is a bad case of Birmingham blues…”
Robert Johnson wrote this blues classic in 1936 about blacks fleeing the racist Delta areas for destinations with promise, like California, or Chicago. Dozens of cover versions have played fast and loose with the lyrics, but the version I know best was recorded by John Belushi and Company for “The Blues Brothers” soundtrack LP in 1980. Chicago sports teams have adopted the song for use at home games: “Come on, baby, don’t you wanna go, hi-de-hey, baby, don’t you wanna go, back to that same old place, sweet home Chicago…”
This Chuck Berry song, first recorded by Berry in 1959 and turned into a #2 hit for Johnny Rivers in 1964, appears to be about a man longing for his love interest who he left behind in Memphis. Closer examination reveals it’s about his six-year-old daughter Marie, who lives with her mother since a divorce split the family: “Last time I saw Marie, she was wavin’ me goodbye, with ‘hurry-home’ drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye, but we were pulled apart because her mom did not agree, and tore apart our happy home in Memphis, Tennessee…”
The infamous “Chicken Ranch” brothel located on the outskirts of La Grange, Texas, is the subject of this minor hit for ZZ Top in 1973 (it peaked at #41), and also the hit stage play and film “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” in the early 1980s. The track is mentioned among Rolling Stone‘s 100 Greatest Guitar Songs All Time: “Rumour spreadin’ around in that Texas town ’bout that shack outside La Grange, and you know what I’m talkin’ about, just let me know if you wanna go to that home out on the range, they gotta lotta nice girls, have mercy…”
Country artist Don Williams recorded this Danny Flowers tune in 1978 and had his eighth consecutive #1 hit on the country music charts that year. Clapton chose to record it for his “Backless” LP, and a live version released on his “Just One Night” album in 1980 became a #30 single. It tells the tale of a musician who gives up on his Tinsel Town dreams to return to his Oklahoma roots: “Well, there I was in Hollywood, wishin’ I was doin’ good, talkin’ on the telephone line, but they don’t need me in the movies and nobody sings my songs, guess I’m just wastin’ time, well, then I got to thinkin’, man I’m really sinkin’, and I really had a flash this time, I had no business leavin’ and nobody would be grievin’ if I went on back to Tulsa time…”
Barry Buie wrote many of the early songs by his band Atlanta Rhythm Section, who were formed in the Georgia town of Doraville, which was semi-rural at the time but grew into a sizable suburb of Atlanta. Many of their songs were also recorded in a small recording studio there, and although the group went on to national fame with songs like “So Into You,” “Champagne Jam” and “Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight,” it’s songs like “Doraville” that remind everybody of their hometown pride: “Doraville, touch of country in the city, Doraville, it ain’t much, but it’s home…”
Of the many great songs John Fogerty wrote for his band Creedence in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I’ve always been partial to this tune from the “Green River” album about a traveling musician whose plans didn’t work out and he found himself stuck in a podunk town in Anywhere USA. Fogerty decided to pick on Lodi, California, a tiny railroad town not far from his own home town of El Cerrito: “The man from the magazine said I was on my way, somewhere I lost connections, ran out of songs to play, I came into town, a one-night stand, looks like my plans fell through, oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again…”
Among the bleak, introspective songs Springsteen wrote for what ended up comprising his “Nebraska” LP was the haunting “Atlantic City,” which explored the difficulties the Jersey boardwalk town was having with its plan to revitalize through the proliferation of gambling casinos. Despite the song’s dark mood, the lyrics offer a hopeful note: “Down here it’s just winners and losers, and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line… Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back, put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City…”
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