Our 27-year-old son was in town from Vancouver for the holidays and while we were driving around doing some last-minute shopping, Innocence, a smash hit in 1980 for Winnipeg band Harlequin, came on the radio.
The two of us had a grand time singing along, but when the tune was through, I turned to Jakob and asked if he knew what Innocence’s opening line — “One dime is all it cost me / and I found out for sure, you know / that you’d double-crossed me…” — is alluding to.
He thought about it for a sec before replying, “Uh, I got nothing.”
Funnily enough, one of the members of Harlequin was also flummoxed by the dime reference, shortly after lead singer George Belanger, the song’s lyricist, presented it to the group for the first time 44 years ago.
“We always taped our rehearsals and afterwards, (bass player) Ralph James was driving me home when he put on the tape,” Belanger recalls when reached at home.
“As soon as it was over, Ralph looked over and said, ‘I think that’s going to be a hit,’ but he was curious about the dime lyric. I had to explain the old adage of how when a criminal fed information to the cops anonymously from a phone booth, it was called dropping the dime on someone. I think I first heard it in the TV series Naked City (1958 to 1963) because, yeah, that’s how old I am.”
One of the beauties of pop music is its immediacy, its ability to capture moments in time.
What that ultimately means, however, is that a verse that made perfect sense to listeners however many years ago is likely to draw blank stares from a person who wasn’t around when, say, Jim Croce was trying to track down a lost love with the assistance of a telephone operator in 1972’s plaintive Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels).
Or when Prince was instructing the world “You don’t have to watch Dynasty to have an attitude,” in the 1986 dance-floor smash Kiss. (Dynasty? Was that anything like Succession, my son wondered?)
With a nod to Belanger’s childhood predilection for bygone crime-drama terminology, here is a look at some other songs with references that may require carbon dating for generation Z and the like.
Beechwood 4-5789 by the Marvelettes (1962)
Co-written by R&B legend Marvin Gaye for Motown girl group the Marvelettes, Beechwood 4-5789 is about a gal praying she receives a phone call from a guy she’s sweet on.
The Beechwood, or BE, portion of her phone number refers to her city’s telephone exchange name, a long-defunct system of connecting parties through a central operating system.
Sure, Gaye could have dubbed the catchy tune 234-5789 — BE translates to 23 — but we like to think he was channelling Glenn Miller and his Orchestra, which had a monster hit in 1940 with the similarly titled Pennsylvania 6-5000.
Back in the U.S.S.R. by the Beatles (1968)
It was 33 years ago this week that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state.
Plus, it’s been an even 50 years since British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) merged with British European Airways to form British Airways.
Add the two together and young ’uns hearing the Beatles’ Back in the U.S.S.R. for the first time might be left scratching their head, as the Fab Four go on about catching a flight from “Miami Beach, BOAC,” to the former Soviet Union. (Still with silver birds: that 707 Steve Miller boards in Jet Airliner? It was decommissioned a few years after that particular track flew to the top of the charts in 1978.)
Kodachrome by Paul Simon (1973)
Kodachrome, the lead single from Paul Simon’s third studio album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, is a sentimental ode to a long-defunct brand of camera film.
Interestingly, the song, which reached No. 2 on the American and Canadian pop charts, was banned by the BBC owing to its trademarked title, a set of circumstances that likely wouldn’t have occurred had Simon gone with Goin’ Home, which was the song’s working title before he settled on Kodachrome.
Heaven on the 7th Floor by Paul Nicholas (1977)
“Goin’ up, she said, uh huh, just as we had started to climb together.”
In addition to chimney sweep, lamplighter and town crier, elevator operator was cited in an article in Good Housekeeping magazine touching on occupations that no longer exist.
Don’t tell that to British artist Paul Nicholas, who falls head over heels for an elevator operator in the disco era’s Heaven on the 7th Floor.
In the song’s final verse, Nicholas is over the moon when the lift he’s on gets stuck between floors (“We’re alone, I said, oh yeah, looks like we could be here all night together”); that is, till the elevator operator points to an emergency line on the wall and dials for assistance.
Hanging on the Telephone by Blondie (1979)
The 1970s were rife with songs revolving around telephones: Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s sorrowful Sylvia’s Mother (“And the operator says 40 cents more for the next three minutes”), the Electric Light Orchestra’s equally piteous Telephone Line (“I’d tell you everything if you’d pick up that telephone”) and ABBA’s Ring Ring (“Ring, ring, why don’t you give me a call?”).
For our money, though, Blondie’s Hanging on the Telephone takes the cake when it comes to antiquated lines about, well, land lines.
We mean, when’s the last time you dialed somebody from “The phone booth … across the hall?” Or, when nobody answered, you let it “Ring … off the wall?”
When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around by the Police (1980)
Lead singer Sting launches When the World Is Running Down…, from the Police’s Zenyatta Mondatta, with the line, “Turn on my VCR, same one I’ve had for years.”
RIP VHS: the last video-cassette recorder was manufactured in 2016.
Later in the same song, he plugs in his MCI, “To make records on my own.”
We can’t be sure, but it’s our guess the Police frontman means a Music Center Incorporated (MCI) reel-to-reel tape recorder, a commonly used home-recording device in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Money for Nothing by Dire Straits (1980)
Sting again.
In October, MTV Canada announced it would be ceasing operations, effective Dec. 31.
That means that somewhere down the road, listeners won’t have a clue what Sting is clamouring for, when he wails “I want my MTV” during the long, slow buildup to Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing, far and away the biggest hit of the British group’s career.
One Week by the Barenaked Ladies (1998)
In the second verse of One Week, singer Ed Robertson raps about watching TV show The X-Files with the lights off, hoping the Smoking Man’s in that week’s episode.
Alas, the sci-fi drama that followed the x-ploits of FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully went off the air four years after One Week topped the Billboard chart for — that’s right — one week. (One Week also name checks Bert Kaempfert, a German orchestra leader whose lone Top 10 hit was 1961’s Wonderland by Night.)
Mix Tape by Brand New (2001)
Back in the ’80s, this writer ran a business called Dave’s Tapes, which consisted entirely of supplying restaurants and bars with mix tapes (“What are those, Grandpa?”) of music culled from my own personal record shelves.
I’ll freely admit that Dave’s Tapes wasn’t the world’s most imaginative moniker, but you have to agree it sounds a whole lot better than Dave’s Spotify Algorithmic Playlists.
Hey Ya! by OutKast (2003)
Surely American hip-hop duo OutKast was being purposely ironic in Hey Ya! when they implore everybody to “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.”
No surprise, online searches for a technique once employed by photographers to speed up the drying of still-wet instant-film photos shot up in the days and weeks following the release of Hey Ya!, ranked No. 10 by Rolling Stone magazine in a list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, obsolete lyrics or not.
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