Obvious mistakes on recordings

Alex Chilton comes in too early singing the first line of "Boogie Shoes" on his "Like Flies on Sherbert" LP. Which is one big mistake that works, in my opinion.

Last week on Leno, The Dead played "Touch of Grey" and, despite having played the song regularly for close to 20 years, Phil Lesh sang "I will get by" on the last chorus when the rest of the band sang "WE will get by" (the correct lyric)

and I know we already did a 'laughing in songs' thread, but Plush, Beck, and Syd Barrett to thread

I love mistakes in songs

on the leadoff track of dylan's "nashville skyline," his duet with johnny cash, they occasionally sing different versions of the chorus when they're supposed to be harmonizing. it also sounds like someone came in a bit late at the beginning, and the backing musicians spread out a few more bars than they had expected.

And the infamous "Just look over your shoulders, honey!" on the J5's "I'll Be There."

this thread makes me very happy... that people are actually paying attention enough to notice these things.

I always love hearing singers screw up while double-tracking their vocals. In Motorhead's "Limb From Limb", Lemmy sings "Gonna tear ya" and "Gonna rip ya" simultaneously at one point. Weirder than that is Alice Cooper's "Apple Bush", in which one Alice sings "My house doesn't notice" while the other sings "My house doesn't worry" - nice to have meaningless lyrics that you can alter for no reason. And in the Stones' "Street Fighting Man", Mick and Keith sing the title, and then one of them ad-libs a "Yeah!" while the other does "No!" But those two were always disagreeing anyways, so maybe it's not really a mistake.

But I actually really like that song - it's just there's this one point where it seems like the sequencer is manually restarted or something.

I'm kinda thinking 'no,' at least most of the time. They might have been mistakes originally, but once they become part of the "official" recording of the song, they're just part of the song. A lot of the best things I've done musically have come out of mistakes.

Favorite vocal blunder: R.E.M.'s "Shaking Through" -- Stipe starts out horribly flat, adjusts the pitch as he goes along.

I love this thread.

I like that version too.

Lots of interesting things, some "mistakes," some just weird bits that you can hear.

And don't forget Ween. Besides bursting out laughing in a bunch of their songs, you can clearly here the amp mic picking up one of their voices right after the guitar solo in "I Saw Gener Crying in His Sleep." The voice yells "You fucked it up!" and they just keep playing.

C/D mistakes in posts about mistakes in songs

2. U2 - Love Rescue Me, uber bass-donkey Adam Clayton could have a book (okay, well maybe a small pamphlet) written about his incompetence, esp concerning the live side of things. But the poor lad can't even handle a basic 12-bar change, cuh, it's GLARING too!

3. Low - Mimi's timing is all over the place on some tracks, beautiful voice though.

Archie Bell & the Drells, "Tighten Up": the handclaps wander back & forth between the beats and the offbeats, and Archie has to ask his band twice to "make it mellow" the second time through.

But it's probably incorrect to have included a live performance in this thread, though.

But I'd still like to know why everything else is louder than Ray Davies vocal on Ape Man.

I was wondering the same about Hotlegs' "Neanderthal Man" !

Too early to be a 'leak spoiler'

On "Beggars Day" by Crazy Horse, you can hear Nils Lofgren coughing before the opening lines.

on last year's New Pornographers album "Brill Bruisers," Neko Case comes in early on a vocal part, and then you can hear her whisper "fuck" into the mic as a reaction to her mistake. they left it in.

you can hear it at 1:22-1:24 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msRbJW_rmFU

mmm, sorry, didn't mean to embed that

Is the intro to The Smiths - Some Girls are Bigger Than Others a mistake? I heard a theory that things like that are done deliberately to "spoil" a mix, making it impossible to leak, and that this mix accidentally made it to the final master. Or it could also be an inspired studio engineer?

The recording was given a distinctive intro by engineer Stephen Street, who increased the reverb on the drums, faded the track in then out again, and took the reverb back off when reintroducing the song: "A bit like opening a door, closing it, then opening it again and walking in". (wikipedia).

is this the thread to ask about that harmonica on galaxie 500 'leave the planet' where the harmonica is obviously in a different key than the song

Velvet Underground, "Who Loves the Sun", throat clearing followed by two coughs on backing vocal track, right channel, between 1:04 and 1:07 approx.

Stranglers - walk on by : there's an edit mistake right before the long keyboard solo. A small bump in the keyboard sound.

I wonder if Phife Dawg was supposed to say "Do you like the clothing that we way-yer?" instead of "wear"

REM The Wrong Child where Stipe comes in early *twice* with "Hey (very faint).. Hey those.. Hey those kids are looking at me"

Was gonna say The Amps "Pacer" it always seemed like "Just a just a kid never learned..." may have started this way, with her coming in early, and she decided to just repeat it twice and now it's another hook in a song full of them.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Saturday, 14 March 2015 17:01 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's "Just a twisted kid" not "Just a just a kid"!

Obvious mistakes in posts

Beefheart stumbles over the word 'licorice'in that one song on trout mask replica, which has always annoyed me. (Orange Claw Hammer)

But then, on the radio the other week, they played a live version from a radio show with Zappa doing backing guitar and he doesn't stumble.

ok, i know the pauses between lines aren't as obvious as on "the dust blows forward and the dust blows back", but he kind of did record it on a home tape recorder (was it a webcor, or was it some other kind?) on the fly, pausing the tape between lines. i'd think that his stumbling over a word would be the thing of least concern!

(it's also funny that he did it "right" live because the man was notorious for fucking up his lyrics in concert... i'm not sure i've ever heard him do "my human gets me blues" without fucking it up!)

Any time Peter Hook sings.

Prefab sprout - life of surprises, that weird master-track fuckup at the end :,(

Beck, "Loser" - there is (what sounds to me like) a very obvious edit at the start of the "get right if you can't relate" stanza. If I had to guess, this actually went "How you gonna get right if you can't relate?" but they realized the start of it would overlap with the previous stanza's "...pigeon wing," and just slid the volume knob up real quick. So it just goes "...gonna get right if you can't relate," which doesn't make any sense.

The line is 'can't write if you can't relate' though.

or rather 'You can't write, if you can't relate'

Hmmm. My ears are unconvinced! But maybe the beat is creating a ghost syllable or something.

Jesus Christ Superstar - On the film version of 'Heaven On Their Minds' at 2'19" there is a really noticeable sour note on the piano.

The vocal flub in the Who's "Eminence Front." No idea why they left that in. They didn't replicate it when I saw that tour.

REM The Wrong Child where Stipe comes in early *twice* with "Hey (very faint).. Hey those.. Hey those kids are looking at me"

This is interesting... I've heard that song a zillion times and never really processed that as a "mistake," but I guess it was!

Ween's first 3 albums have a lot of stuff like this but I guess it fit their M.O. to leave it in. It's really prominent on Pure Guava, sometimes you can even hear bits of the tapes they were recording over

On 'She Sings Hymns Out Of Tune', Nilsson comes in too soon on the last chorus and also slows down the harmonium part.