There's a bathroom on the right

What are the lyrics to that CCR song?

Apr 30, 2023

One of the charms of the twentieth century I miss most is arguing over song lyrics. Not the meaning of song lyrics—those arguments are eternal—but the actual lyrics themselves, the verbatim poetry of pop music. Back in the day, everyone had these arguments, I think. But since the World Wide Web was in its infancy and so few of us were online, we didn’t talk—not at scale, anyway—about the shared experience of misquoting the lyrics to our favorite songs. And unless we had access to a specialized music library, we didn’t have anywhere to go for authoritative answers to settle our pop music debates.

As near as I can tell, the best thing we had was a 1996 episode of the sitcom Friends. The episode is called The One With The Princess Leia Fantasy, and it’s probably best remembered for another pop culture epiphany—namely that many heterosexual men of a certain age share a sexual fantasy inspired by the gold bikini Princess Leia wore in Return of the Jedi. But that Friends episode also included an unrelated joke where Phoebe insists that the chorus to Elton John’s Tiny Dancer is actually, “hold me closer, Tony Danza.”

As it turns out, these kinds of misunderstandings weren’t just comical, they were common. But we wouldn’t discover how common they were until we networked humanity. Case in point: in 2013 Spotify published a list of the most commonly misquoted music lyrics. I found the list on the internet (where else?) on The Hollywood Reporter website.1 The article, which is essentially content marketing for Spotify, is titled: ‘Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza,’ Plus 9 More Hilariously Misquoted Lyrics. Here’s a sampling of our collective misunderstanding:

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Blinded By the Light
Wrong: “Blinded by the light, wrapped up like a douche when you’re rollin’ in the night”
Right: “Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night”
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze
Wrong: “‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy”
Right: “‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky”
The Clash, Rock The Casbah
Wrong: “Rock the cat box”
Right: “Rock the Casbah”

The misquotes sound silly, and they were! But we believed in a lot silly shit in the twentieth century. Here’s a sampling of the silly shit we actually believed in the 1990s:

The information superhighway would only produce enormous benefits for humanity.2
The end of the Cold War wasn’t just the end of a contest between two super powers, it was the end of ideological conflict, and therefore, the end of history itself.3
Y2K, in addition to providing the premise for the Mike Judge movie Office Space, would return humanity to the Stone Age.4
Blockbuster Video would always be there for us, assuming we paid our late fees.5
Our investments in compact discs were wise because that format would last forever, unlike cassettes, 8-tracks, and records, which were obviously intermediary formats on the way to the CD.6

Obviously, we were pretty stupid back then. But you can’t blame us. We couldn’t turn to the internet to correct our mistakes. Instead, we sat with our mistakes, but because we didn’t realize we were wrong, we’d pass along bad information, and when someone confronted us about being wrong, we’d dig in and insist that we were right. Actually, now that I think about it, that’s pretty much how we behave in the twenty-first century too. But this post isn’t about the mistakes we’re making today, it’s about the silly mistakes we made back in the day.

I was reminded about one of those silly twentieth century mistakes after a recent SNAFU here at Situation Normal. Without rehashing the series of fuck-ups that led to the so-called “AI ram-a-lama-ding-dong fiasco,” let’s just say that I ended up owing multiple situation normies a rain check on selecting a song to quiz ChatGPT with. The last of those situation normies was KdD. After my AI ram-a-lama-ding-dong fiasco, KdD had the right to select the next song lyric for a game we call Hypothetical Picnic. But instead of picking a song, KdD wrote the following:

I’m choking on song names to hassle ChatGPT with. When I was a teen and for a long time after, I listened to radio stations that didn’t really announce the song titles, so I had no clue as to actual song titles. And usually no clue as to the real lyrics. As such, I always wondered why Jimi was asking me to excuse him while he kissed this guy, or CCR was giving us directions to the bathroom.

After purchasing CCR cassettes and CDs and subscribing to Spotify to listen to CCR on-demand (without commercials), I bought CCR on vinyl. I’m currently looking for a CCR 8-track, because why not?

The moment I saw that comment, I knew I had to take a screen shot and text it to my sister, Allison. Throughout the 1990s, Allison and I argued over the lyrics to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Bad Moon Rising. Like KdD, we heard that song on the radio, and for reasons that remain a mystery, the disc jockeys spinning records in Los Angeles in those days weren’t great about announcing song titles either. Allison and I both liked the song, but her take was different from my take.

“I think he’s saying there’s a bad moon on the rise,” I’d say.

“No, that doesn’t make any sense,” Allison would insist. “He’s saying, take the bathroom on the right.”

“Who writes a song about finding the bathroom?” I’d ask.

“Creedence,” Allison would say. “That’s who.”

We’d argue some more, and I’d point out that the lyrics that preceded the lyrics in dispute were a warning not to “go around tonight” because it was “bound to take your life.” On that point, Allison agreed. But to her, the warning about going around tonight was a matter of life and death because it was—somehow?!—related to a gastrointestinal issue that would require knowing precisely where the bathroom was at all times.

“That makes zero fucking sense, Allison.”

“It’s poetry, Michael. It doesn’t have to make sense.”

For the rest of the 1990s, we argued about the “bathroom on the right.” Then one day, our CDs became obsolete. Like everyone else our age, we stole our music off the internet, and when we weren’t downloading stolen music, we “surfed the Web,” which was a little like “channel surfing,” except there was way more content to consume. So much content, in fact, that it eventually became normal, and even somewhat profitable, for some people to create websites around really narrow topics that never would’ve been viable content plays in an analog world. One example of this phenomenon are the music lyric sites that proliferate on the internet. Here’s a sampling of the websites that rank high in a Google search:

Genius.com
LyricFind
AzLyrics
Lyrics.com
SongFacts

I don’t remember sending Allison a link to one of those websites and saying, toldja! In fact, I’m pretty sure I never did that because I would’ve remembered the sweet feeling of proving to my sister that she was wrong. After all, saying, “I told you so” is one of the joys of having a sibling.

But at this point Allison knows she was wrong. Like everyone else, she has the internet to tell her the truth about CCR’s Bad Moon Rising—specifically, that there are no bathrooms mentioned anywhere in that song! And the internet is never wrong about stuff like this. Because as Billy Joel famously sang, “You may be right, I may be lazy, but it just might be that Google has the answers you’re searching for.”

Stick around and chat!

I’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.

What’s your favorite rock band, and why is it CCR?
What’s something you believed in the 1990s that seems silly today?
Are there any song lyrics you’ve gotten wrong? Explain.
Why hasn’t Weird Al Yankovic parodied Elton John’s Tiny Dancer with a song about Tony Danza?
It’s wrong to steal music, but it’s also wrong to change the format / business model every few years and force your fans to pay for the same songs over and over again. What I’m asking is, how many times have you paid for CCR (or your favorite band)?

Situation Normal

There's a bathroom on the right

What are the lyrics to that CCR song?

Stick around and chat!

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