The Boss Of Me

 I sent a note out to Mister Bruce Springsteen, thanking him for setting the record straight. Literally. His record. Not the whole drinking and driving thing from last November, but rather the lyrics to one of his best-loved songs, Thunder Road. It seems that a millennia ago, someone wrote down the wrong words that open the song. Instead of singing, "Screen door slams, Mary's dress waves," what we should have been singing was that "Mary's dress sways." 

Not a big deal until you consider how long I personally have been standing amid a throng of people "singing" at the top of our collective lungs about how Mary's dress was waving. Not swaying. For the past forty years or so, I had been under the assumption that the published lyrics were the ones upon which we could depend. You know, the ones that were included with the album Born To Run, on which the song first appeared? 

Jon Landau, chief Springsteen evangelist and the singer's manager, wrote back to the New Yorker magazine's inquiry about this mondegreen: “The word is ‘sways,’ ” Landau wrote. “That’s the way he wrote it in his original notebooks, that’s the way he sang it on ‘Born to Run,’ in 1975, that’s the way he has always sung it at thousands of shows, and that’s the way he sings it right now on Broadway. Any typos in official Bruce material will be corrected. And, by the way, ‘dresses’ do not know how to ‘wave.’ ” Which is all well and good except for the forty-some years of repetition and conditioning that has taken place over that time and excuse us for not being quite able to make out all the words from one of someone with a massive underbite who is prone to challenges in enunciation from time to time.

This comes at a time when I have just begun to understand that Elton John had been singing, regarding the life of a Rocket Man, "burning out his fuse up here alone." 

Decades. And yes, the Sir Elton thing probably should have been cleared up years ago either through Karaoke or a simple glance at the lyrics written by Bernie Taupin and available to the public everywhere for all that time.

Mister Springsteen and his handlers did not choose to make this distinction clear about Mary's dress until just this past week. As if to say, "Oh, I thought you knew." When all those words from his first two albums are taken into account, is it any wonder that we might expect a certain amount of poetic license when it comes to the manner in which he would describe the movement of Mary's dress? This is the man who once wrote, and I quote, "He says, dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, that's where they expect it least." Suddenly, a waving dress doesn't seem so quirky at all. 

So, you'll excuse me if there will be moments in the future where I stumble briefly when that line comes along. I might defer to the text as read for all those late nights and early mornings in which Mary was dancing across the porch as her radio plays. Roy Orbison, by the way was singing "Only the Lonely," not "For the Lonely," but I'm not going to get into that just now. Bruce Springsteen is the man who wrote it, and if he says he was singing "Cranberry Sauce" instead of "Paul is dead," then I'm going to have to believe him.

I'll just be embarrassed about it for forty years.