Righting A Song

Lou Reed was a genius. The elder statesman of punk, he was making beatnik poetry into rock and roll when Andy Warhol was painting soup cans. There are not a lot of sing-along songs in Lou's catalog, but we all know "Walk on the Wild Side." It tells the story of the superstars from Andy's Factory, and the wanton and wayward path these once upon a nobodies took to become somebodies. It is so cool, with its slippery bass line and sonorous sax, a tale of sex and grit that could even be played on the radio. Well, mostly. The radio edit, without the reference to oral sex could. And it is this line that sticks with me not because it was determined too filthy to be heard on the radio, but rather because it was lazy. Lou Reed may have been a genius and all, but the fact that he chose to rhyme the word "head" with "head" grates on me. With all that songwriting acumen, why couldn't he have taken one more pass at that verse? I suppose you could argue that it is the line that sticks out, the one that I remember more than all the rest, but really?
It's not unlike the way people piled on Alanis Morissette when she released a song titled, "Ironic." How is rain on your wedding day ironic? How about a black fly in your Chardonay? Sure, it's icky, but is it ironic? Some critics have suggested that, while not ironic by dictionary definition, maybe Alanis is describing "situational irony." So when she sings, "ironic, isn't it?" it's not a rhetorical question. Is it? Maybe she should have called the song "Rhetoric."
But the one that continues to bother me, especially every year around Halloween, is "Werewolves of London." I love just about every word Warren Zevon ever wrote, God bless his departed soul. It includes one of my wife's favorite lines from any song ever: "Little old lady got mutilated late last night." It presents just the right mix of menace and fun for a novelty song written originally for the Everly Brothers. With all that talent and wit, how can we explain the fact that Warren goes on to tell us that he saw "Lon Chaney Jr. walking with the Queen" when we all know that Lon Chaney Jr. was The Wolf Man, not The Werewolf of London? That was Henry Hull. I can appreciate that I may be the only person who makes this distinction, or that Werewolf of London came out five years before Lon Chaney's turn as a "hairy handed gent," but I have to imagine that a guy who wrote "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner" would have a pretty solid grasp of the Universal horror film canon. I guess I can comfort myself with the idea that he didn't try to rhyme "headless" with "headless" in that one.
Yeah. That probably is just me.