Friday Shuffle, Adolescent Smut Edition

The genesis here being weeding the garden, which included pulling a lot of clover, and finding myself singing "Roll me over/In the clover...." This happens to me a lot. Not with that particular song, but generally. I'm often able to trace a particular earworm to some physical event, and I'm growing more and more concerned that the day is not far off when I'll start singing this stuff out loud, in the grocery store. And probably having forgotten to wear pants.

My interest, aside from using dirty words while pretending to be a social scientist, is that these all had a folkloric quality, even though it turns out most of them were actually commercially recorded efforts. So I'm curious about your own experiences. Did you "have" any of these, or were they time specific? Does Barnacle Bill still introduce himself to Fair Young Maidens on playgrounds across the country, or do kids just download stuff and create an iPod Playground Mix these days? I'd go to the playground myself and ask, but I don't look good in orange.

So here, with notes, were pretty much all I could think of, excepting popular songs where we just added gratuitous fucking or hard-ons to the lyrics:


Bang Bang Lulu This Lulu had a boyfriend named Chuck. Or an uncle, depending on who you asked.

Barnacle Bill the Sailor Hands down (oh, sorry) the most popular, with about thirty verses including some composed by yours truly which involved local education officials.

Put Your Legs 'Round My Shoulders To the tune of the Paul Anka smash, this had no other lyric I was aware of. Although I doesn't really need any.

Louie Louie The Kingsmen. Of course you had to supply your own dirty lyric here, doubly so if you lived in Indiana, which managed to ban the thing for about four months in 1964. It was, naturally, one of two songs on my garage band's set list, and being that I was the only one brave enough to sing (plus, I owned the only microphone) I sang it at the fifth grade talent show, dirty lyric and all, and afterwards fellow students complained that they couldn't understand what I was saying.

If You Don't Blow Me Right Now Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" got the treatment while I was in college (not by me). Included here because, as Einstein said about Jean Piaget, it's so simple only a genius could have recognized it.

Shave 'Em Dry Lucille Brogan. We knew only the line about big nipples and making a dead man come, and didn't know the melody. I thought I must have read it somewhere in the aftermath (sorry) of the Stones' using the latter line, but that was from "Start Me Up" and we definitely had it in high school, so I'm not sure now where it came from. "Lemon squeezing" was current then, too, but only from Led Zeppelin; I didn't hear Robert Johnson until I was in college.

Baby Let Me Bang Your Box Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts. Once I started touring the city playing dances for no money, this one was always requested. I bought a copy at Lyric Record Shop so I could learn it. They carried the whole line of risqué gag items behind the glass at the register. Little white gift boxes with seemingly provocative titles that would have some trinket inside that served as a punchline. Sort of 3-D greeting cards people gave each other in the Fifties. The only one I remember--because someone had given it to my Dad--said "For your High Balls" on the box, and inside was a miniature jock strap sized to fit a cocktail glass. A million yucks.

Roll Me Over WWII holdover. It has a countdown, or rather a running tally, like "This is number seven/ I took her straight to heaven" which was particularly lame. We just sang the chorus.

What'd I Say Ray Charles. The sine qua non of Sixties garage band smut. Concerned girls wearing different colors of clothing--all solids--and their social proclivities. The young lady in pink had poor personal hygiene.

Last Night (I Stayed Up Late and Masturbated) To the particularly annoying tune of "Finiculi-Finicula" which made it doubly satisfying. Plus, as a paean to self-abuse it doesn't objectify women, which was really important to me at the time, as you can well imagine. In fact the chorus expresses a preference for the caress that is truly knowing. Also had about a dozen verses, of which "It felt so neat/I used my feet" was always my favorite.

Okay, what'd I leave out?