Turn Me On, Dead Man

The "Paul is dead" story has inspired a number of works of fiction. In 2009, Frayed Edge Films released a short (22 min.) film entitled Turn Me On, Dead Man (sounds strangely familiar...), in which a fictionalized version of the Beatles perpetrates a hoax after the death of one of their principal members. Without revealing the tragedy to the public, they replace "Blake" with the winner of a lookalike contest. The truth is bound to come out, though, particularly after fans become aware of odd "clues" about this deception that have been placed on the band's records. Recently, Andru Reeve (author of the definitive book on the "Paul is dead" story, also entitled Turn Me On, Dead Man) and I watched the film and discussed it.

Dead Man: My initial reaction to Turn Me On, Dead Man is that I understand why they would have to fictionalize the story, but the movie is so short that they're relying on the viewer to already be familiar with the whole "Paul is dead" mythology. The movie feels more like a few images and songs hung on a story that exists completely outside the film. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it felt like there was plenty of room for them to add to the story. What's your reaction to it?

Andru_Reeve: I agree 100% with your assessment. We get it, but that's because we're familiar with the story. Someone coming in cold will not understand it. It was deeply entertaining -- I enjoyed the homages -- and the music is top-notch. Also, the cinematography and casting were way better than I expected. The big disappointment is that I felt they reached an important transitional apex -- then, the credits roll. What happens next? Why place the clues? It felt like impressionism to me. Not that that is bad. The only explanation I can come up with as to why it was scarcely 20 minutes long was their budget.

DM: Yes, and they probably didn't have any extra money for a legal fund to fend off lawsuits from Apple if they had've used copyrighted Beatles material! I enjoyed the homages, too, and the music is sufficiently Beatlesque--some of it reminded me of the Rubber Soul Project. The music effectively captured the Merseybeat/Beatlemania period and the psychedelia of the Sgt. Pepper-era. Interesting contrast in that the music felt completely realized even though the film was just a sketch.

They took a few liberties with the story: the band is American, John is with the Yoko character as early as 1964, the rumor of Blake/Paul's death doesn't hit the public until 1971 and the band has already broken up. Given how deeply the history of the Beatles and the PID story are etched into my brain, those those things didn't sit well with me. I'm willing to believe the filmmakers had legitimate reasons for making those alterations, but given the brevity of the movie it's hard to see what those are. I thought they were sort of getting at something by switching to color when Blake/Paul is killed and throwing in the images of street protests and Vietnam combat, but you're right, other than perhaps John's obvious contempt for the new Blake/Paul there's no explanation for the clues.

AR: I thought that the shift to color was the most powerful moment; I said to myself: "okay -- this is the big turn." And, again, it works impressionistically just that way. But the story just doesn't meet the anticipated emotional and narrative payoff. You make a good point that "John" comes to despise the "Blake Monster" he created, and that seems to be the impetus for the clues. But, again, it's so subtle (no dialog, no big conflict) that I almost missed it.

Yes, the faux WKNR tableau really confused me. The deejay reminded me more of Venus Flytrap than Russ Gibb, and that took me out of the story (as well as it being the wrong year). I'm trying to be objective about it, because spending 30 years with this myth has resulted in it being subsumed into my DNA. However, it's difficult to make peace with the many blatant alterations to the basic premise of the rumor. Lawsuit? I think the Beatles have bigger transgressors to deal with. Certainly, making the band British and getting the timelines correct wouldn't cause writs to suddenly be served.

DM: It seems to me that the media hysteria around Paul's "death" was closely linked to the sense that the Beatles were going their separate ways. In other words, even though the rumors had been in the air for some time, it was no coincidence that they spread rapidly in late 1969, as evidence was mounting that the Beatles were in the process of breaking up. To relocate the infamous call to the radio station to play "turn me on, dead man/Blake is dead" to 1971 after Paul/Blake's third solo album, as they do in the film, makes no sense to me. (Venus Flytrap! Ha! Well, Venus Flytrap is definitely of the 1970s!)

Also, I thought it was strange that the conflict that leads to Paul/Blake's accident is *Paul/Blake's* frustration with the band musically selling out. In the movie it's John who admits that he just wants to give the people what they want and to stay within popular expectations. If John was willing to compromise his music and succumb to what must have sounded like a bizarre scheme to replace Paul/Blake, what exactly was he trying to accomplish by leaving clues about Paul/Blake being an impostor?

Once again, I'm willing to believe that the filmmakers had reasons for making those choices and that those could be explained in a longer film.

AR: Yes -- the rumor of Paul's "death" was really a metaphor for the death of the band. Of course, a significant element of the myth WAS used in the film -- as you pointed out, Paul/Blake storms out of the studio in frustration at the other members and climbs into his sportscar. It's raining, and I guess he picks up "Rita", whose VW Beetle is seen with its hazard lights flashing, evoking the ABBEY ROAD album cover. Rita "recognizes her famous driver"-- to (more or less) quote Joel Glazier's account of the accident -- and excitedly jumps all over him, causing the fatal crash. John either feels guilty, or fears losing all of his accumulated fame, and devises the coverup, utilizing the winner of the Blake Lookalike Contest. Those essential cornerstones of the tale are indeed in place.

The problem is that they are, again, "impressions" that both you and I immediately recognize and appreciate because we know the folklore so well. To someone coming in cold, I'm afraid alot of these images won't register the same way with them as they do with the PID cognescenti.

I agree with you that one of the major problems with the hoax being revealed AFTER the demise of the band is that it blunts the impact. Having the rumor appear in 1969 as the Beatles were themselves dying made the story really resonate with all of the symbolism of graves, churchyards, ceremony, iconography and deep sadness and mourning. The "loss" isn't as profound if the object of one's love and adulation is already gone.

DM: Did it bother you that the band was American? Or that they never gave them a name? To me that presents a real problem. The film made the band seem almost generic, as though any group could have stood in for the Beatles during this era. I would argue that the Beatles' commercial and musical success, as well as their social impact, was because of some very specific qualities the group possessed, and that it might very well be impossible to somehow fictionalize this story. In addition, the whole "Paul is dead" hysteria already has a "stranger than fiction" quality to it, such that trying to fictionalize it actually makes it seem more run of the mill. I don't know how the filmmakers could have gotten around this other than to just make the movie about the Beatles. What do you think?

AR: Yes, Dead Man -- it did bother me that the band was portrayed as a rather generic American outfit (albeit with definitive proxy members for John and Paul). It's true that part of the reason the Beatles "worked" is because of their singular composition. Imagine if just ONE element of their make-up was different -- Stuart Sutcliffe still on bass, for instance, or if they weren't groomed for early success with the suits by Brian Epstein. I know this is all an academic discussion, but I *really* don't think the Fabs would've had the same impact if EVERY element wasn't in place. However, the film is a parallel universe, and we must accept that this unnamed band DID have the impact of the real McCoys in this particular universe. I guess it boils down to just how much suspension of disbelief you are prepared to engage in. I'd rather have the band be the Beatles, but I'm imaginative enough to let that go in service to the overall story. However, the story in this case feels unfinished.

DM: I agree. I should say here that I really did enjoy watching the movie, even though my somewhat arcane criticisms may make it sound otherwise. I hope they do develop it into a full-length feature film. Closing thoughts?

AR: BOTTOM LINE: the film is technically polished and professional in every way. For close followers of the Paul-Is-Dead rumor, it's an evocative "sound-and-light poem", and it will be enjoyed by those who know the overall myth well. Otherwise, it is far too oblique for the casual viewer. I'd really love to see a feature-length treatment of the story -- however, I'd like it to hew more closely to the blueprint we've all been reading for the past 40 years.

When thinking about a title to use, I chose the phrase "turn me on, dead man" because it's memorable and provacative, but the strange thing about this often repeated phrase is that no one actually spoke those words. The phrase "turn me on, dead man" entered popular culture in the late-1960s when people looking for clues about the death of Paul McCartney played the Beatles track "Revolution 9" backwards. When reversed, the repeated phrase "number nine... number nine... number nine..." becomes "turn me on, dead man... turn me on, dead man... turn me on, dead man..." Like other catch-phrase memes, "turn me on, dead man" has now spread beyond its original context and has been used for a variety of purposes. There's this website, of course, and the associated internet-only radio station on Live365.com. The radio station came first, actually. I set up the website and included an article about the "Paul is dead" rumor with the intention of explaining the significance of the name. Only later did I discover that Andru Reeve (now a contributor to this blog) had written a book about the "Paul is dead" rumor using the same title years earlier that went into considerable detail about this strange story. Andru has now written two editions of his book. The first edition was part of the "Rock and Roll Remembrances" series and carried the subtitle "The Complete Story of the Paul McCartney Death Hoax." The expanded second edition is subtitled "The Beatles and the 'Paul Is Dead' Hoax." Another book entitled Turn Me On, Dead Man by Jerald Ford published earlier this year is a fictional account of the "Paul is dead" story. A recent movie called Turn Me On, Dead Man (2009) is also a fictional account of "Paul is dead" but I believe the book and the movie were created independently.

A repackaging of a 1979 radio broadcast about the "Paul is dead" rumor carries the subtitle "Turn Me On, Dead Man." Other Beatles-related uses of the title "turn me on, dead man" include a blog about the Beatles, an episode of Ground Zero TV that discusses Charles Manson's bizarre interpretation of the Beatles' White Album (and adds some "out there" conspiracy theories of its own), and the Beatles bootleg album Turn Me On, Dead Man: the John Barrett Tapes. Most of the uses of the phrase "turn me on, dead man," however, have little to do with the "Paul is dead" rumor. To my knowledge the band Turn Me On Dead Man has never made reference to "Revolution 9" or the "Paul is dead" rumor (although one of their tracks is called "Beatle George"). Also, several songs with little or no connection to "Paul is dead" are entitled "Turn Me On, Dead Man":

	Artist	Album	Year
	Game Theory	Lolita Nation	1987
	Swell Maps	A Trip to Marineville [reissue with bonus tracks]	1989 (original release, 1979)
	The Tear Garden	Last Man to Fly	1992
	Exit	Disco Sucks (compilation)	1996
	23 Degrees	From Here to Tranquility Vol. 5: The Silent Channel (compilation)	1996
	Bill Lloyd	Standing on Shoulders of Giants	1999
	Swifts	Quiet Little Mouse	2004
	The Brettster	Everything But Why	2008
	Tauntaun	Tauntaun	2009
	Ceremony(NL)	Reflections of a Decade	2009
	Spirit of the Matter	Zuble Land	2010

Other variations on the title include "Turn Me On 'Mr. Deadman'" (2000) by the Union Underground, "Turn Me On Again, Dead Man" (2008) by Tape Recorder Three, and "You Turn Me On" (1992) by the Beat Happening, where the line "turn me on, dead man" is repeated several times.

I did some Googling and found several articles that have used the title "Turn Me On, Dead Man." A Scientific American article by Michael Shermer uses the "Paul is dead" rumor as an example of how we make false associations. Our brains are good at pattern recognition, but this capability sometimes leads us to make associations where none exist. According to Shermer, in the search for clues about the death of Paul McCartney, "What we have here is a signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world." Shermer refers to this as "the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not." Also, an article about video game design on the website Game Design Advance uses the "Paul is dead" rumor to put forth the argument that urban legends make for the best alternate-reality games. Once again, however, most of the articles that use this title have nothing to do with the "Paul is dead" rumor. A Screen Rant article describing a recent movie where the Beatles become zombies uses the title "Turn Me On, Dead Man" even though the movie itself has little to do with the "Paul is dead" rumor, except that "Paul is undead" in the movie. The title was also used by the Boston Phoenix for an interview with George Romero. This article put the word "Dead" in quotes, as Romero was the director of The Night of the Living Dead (I see a "turn me on, dead man"-zombie connection building here). An article lamenting the lack of new music in the 2008 Grammy awards used the title "Turn Me On, Dead Man" to make light of the practice of giving the awards to dead musicians over living artists. An article in the University of Toronto student newspaper used the same title to highlight the excessive use of death imagery in the language we use to describe sexuality. Perhaps the most tenuous use of the phrase "turn me on, dead man" is in the Hollywood Elsewhere article about the most overpaid actors in Hollywood.

Like other catch-phrase memes, "turn me on, dead man" has gone well beyond its origins. What makes this unique, however, is that it is a line that no one actually said. Perhaps there are other examples of misheard lyrics or misquoted movie lines that have taken on a life of their own, but none immediately come to mind. Examples, anyone?

                                             

You may recall that I posted an entry last year about Max Gordon Keller's accredited course on the Beatles that he created and taught at UC Berkeley.  The class has attracted attention far outside the confines of the campus.   In fact, if you are in the Bay Area on Friday, May 14th, there will be a news story about the class on KPIX-TV on both the 6pm and 11pm newscasts (and also to be posted online later at www.CBS5.com if you're from afar).

Nobody knows the Beatles with quite the depth of knowledge and fullness of heart as Max Gordon Keller.  Although but 22 years of age, his is a soul both older and younger than his years would suggest.  When I met him in person for the first time on May 4th, we immediately fell into warm conversation as if we'd been friends for years.  Later, when he took the helm before his students, he acquired the air of -- not so much "teacher", but "benevolent guide".   Nevertheless, he commanded -- and earned -- their rapt attention and complete respect as he led them through the final day of the class. 



And speaking of the final day of classes...well, that's why I was there.  At the invitation of Mr. Keller, I was to be the final lecture of the final class.   I guess I was the modest dessert to Max's sumptuous 14-course Beatle banquet.  

Alas, my presentation had an  inauspicious start.   Some equipment I hoped to have at hand was either not present or not in working order.  Then, my first audio sample wouldn't play when I needed it.   Ah, well...roll with the changes, sang Kevin Cronin.  With Max lending a hand on visuals, I gave a tidy "Paul-Is-Dead" lecture, replete with a very very rare showing of the 2005 Netherlands documentary Who Buried Paul McCartney?  My dear sister Vicki was in town for a visit, and was also an invaluable aide.   She took all the photos:



I'll tell you one thing: Max must be one helluva teacher, because NEVER have I had such an engaging and challenging volley of post-lecture questions!  Under his tutelage, Max's students -- freshly-minted, fully-credentialed Beatleologists all -- absorbed what I presented and followed up with smart queries that really kept me on my toes. 

Max Gordon Keller won't be back next year to teach the class.  He's graduating from UC Berkeley later this month and moving on to new phases of his life.  The future of the Beatles course itself is also up in the air -- although its incredible popularity has definitely left an indelible mark on the Berkeley curriculum.  

But that does not mean that The Long and Winding Road: The History of the Beatles (the official moniker of Keller's course) will become a fondly-remembered novelty or a future trivia question for the Beatle cognoscenti.  No.  In fact, Max hints that, like Paul McCartney, his Beatles class is far from dead. 

Any regular visitor to this website is familar with Dead Man's overarching thesis: "Weirdness permeates culture -- and that makes life more interesting".  

Within the entries of this blog (written by Dead Man and myself), the reader has encountered essays about mash-ups, backward masking, myriad conspiracies, cool old TV shows, and obscure musicians. On the radio channel, Dead Man deejays a constant flow of passionate and powerful 60s garage rock.   Elsewhere,  Mr. Dead Man has written features on the "Paul-Is-Dead" rumor, JFK assassination lore in song, the suspicious origins of Led Zeppelin's oeuvre, and how the Beatles may have overreached with their double-LP White Album.   

Naturally, the "Paul-Is-Dead" and backward masking stuff interests me a great deal; I've always been drawn to these particular exoticas.   It combines two disciplines that have always held sway with me: mystery and music.   However, there's a singular "weirdness" that captivates me nearly as much:  it's known throughout the world as The Dark Side Of The Rainbow.




The Constant Visitor of this site is likely familar with the premise: if you play the DVD (or VHS, for you luddites) of The Wizard of Oz with the sound off, and you simultaneously play the CD of Pink Floyd's classic The Dark Side of the Moon, incredible synchronicities await your eyes and ears.   For those unfamiliar, I beg you stop reading right here and click on Dead Man's enlightening essay in the FEATURES queue.  

Okay.  You're back?  Great.   So, yeah -- it really works.  Well, sort of.  In places.   Try it; if nothing else, it beats wasting an hour watching another rerun of C.S.I.   If you don't have the requisite film and album in your possession, a pre-sync'd version of the "weirdness" is likely to be found somewhere on the internet (though Warner Bros. forced YouTube to recently shut down both examples there). 

Of course, there's no REAL reason to believe that any of this is/was intentional.  But, similar to the Paul-Is-Dead Hoax, it's fun to play the game.   

Nonetheless, I would be remiss not to include a couple of observations by two spoilsport music journalists.  First to comment was Rob Sheffield.   He decided to grab a handful of videotapes from his collections and try sync'ing each of them up to the Floyd soundtrack.  The result?   There were synchronicities in all of the films, with the mafia drama Goodfellas being especially fecund.

Rock writer Gavin Edwards also tried an experiment: he chose the Beatles' Abbey Road to be the soundtrack to Quentin Tarrantino's Pulp Fiction.  "Again, there are odd parallels," Edwards writes.  "'Because the wind is high' is sung as [John] Travolta prepares to shoot up heroin; the drum solo during 'The End' seems perfectly in sync with a heated discussion between Travolta and Uma Thurman.  Songs end at about the same time that scenes shift; periodically, people seem to be moving in sync with the music."  

Edwards concludes thusly: "The moral of the story is this: if you put words and music over a set of images, the human brain will strive to make connections, and there will be some interesting coincidences."    While he's being a killjoy, I must confess that I agree with him 100%.  

But that doesn't mean we all can't have a little fun.  




Andru Reeve

Amid all the furor over backmasking in the late LP era, one of the more noteworthy hidden messages in a recording was delivered by Cheap Trick. According to the Peters Brothers, ministers from Minnesota who waged a lengthy campaign against rock music,

Cheap Trick, another Illinois group, lived up to its name with the album Heaven Tonight (1978). the tuneful tricksters recorded The Lord's Prayer at 1/8th speed, then overlaid the song "How Are You" so that the listener would consciously hear only a faint chipmunk-like chirp in the background. Why The Lord's Prayer? A possible answer is found in Mike Warnke's book, The Satan Seller. Warnke says that often in occult worship, the participants chant The Lord's Prayer, either forward or backward, as subtle mockery of God. [Dan & Steve Peters with Cher Merrill, Rock's Hidden Persuader: The Truth About Backmasking, 1983, pp. 41-42]

More likely Cheap Trick were mocking people looking for satanic messages by wearing out their turntables. It used to be that searching for subliminal messages on records was a manual process. You had to spin the record backwards with your hand by putting the turntable in a neutral setting—or just forcing the turntable to go in the wrong direction—and then listen for references to Satan. Cheap Trick took this in the opposite direction in two ways, using The Lord's Prayer and putting it on fast forward. Cheap Trick showed little if any interest in satanic imagery throughout their career. Their rebellion was much more playful, and embedding The Lord's Prayer on fast forward is perhaps the funniest way they could think of to mock the hysteria over evil subliminal messages in rock & roll. The tape effect is embedded between the lyrics "You talk too much/You even scare my friends/What's with you?" and "The words you said/I know you're lying/You lie in bed/you lie you lie", aimed perhaps at self-appointed judges of the moral content of music.

Cheap Trick - "How Are You" [edit] slowed by 72%

Several years later Cradle of Filth used The Lord's Prayer in a more menacing way. The Lord's Prayer is recited in reverse over the entire track "Dinner at Deviant's Palace," which appears on the 2001 release Bitter Suites to Succubi.

Cradle of Filth - "Dinner at Deviant's Palace" [edit - reversed]

Though Cradle of Filth regularly indulged in Satanic imagery, this seems to be played for shock value rather than any attempt at a serious theological statement. The wordplay in the title of the CD, Bitter Suites to Succubi, indicates that these guys don't really take all the Satanic imagery all that seriously either.

   Where it (mostly) all began, at the University of Michigan, the online newspaper has an informative new article about the Paul-Is-Dead rumor.  New interviews with Fred LaBour and some surprise celebrities who happened to be in the neighborhood when all this was going on:

http://michigantoday.umich.edu/2009/11/story.php?id=7565

From the article, a nice then-and-now set of photos of Fred LaBour:

In the early 1980s, the Christian Right became very vocal about a range of social issues, and one of their targets was backmasking in rock music. The argument goes that the brain can somehow hear and decipher the words from reversed audio, and these (often Satanic) messages have subliminal effects. One of the primary targets of these social crusaders was Led Zeppelin, specifically "Stairway to Heaven." In Backmasking Unmasked, Jacob Aranza claimed that when the section of the song with the lyrics "Yes there are two paths you can go by/but in the long run/there's still time to change the road you're on/And it makes me wonder" are played in reverse, the listener will hear:

There's no escaping it
It's my sweet Satan
The one will be the path who makes me sad
Whose power is Satan

"Stairway to Heaven" [edit] reversed

The Peters Brothers, ministers who engaged in a protracted crusade against rock music, had a slightly different interpretation of these reversed lyrics in their book Rock's Hidden Persuader: The Truth ABout Backmasking:

There's no escaping it
Here's to my sweet Satan
No other made a path
For it makes me sad
Whose power is Satan

In Big Secrets, William Poundstone took a more skeptical approach. He listened to a number of tracks that reportedly contained backmasked lyrics to see how clearly he could hear the lyrics when the tape was played in reverse. Poundstone put the following interpretation of "Stairway to Heaven"'s reversed lyrics to the test:

I live for Satan
The Lord turns me off
There's no escaping it
Here's to my sweet Satan
There's power in Satan
He will give you 666

Poundstone finds one complete sentence in reverse in "Stairway to Heaven," namely reversing "And it makes me wonder" yields "There's no escape [plus a non-sequitur syllable]." Poundstone goes on to say that while the "Satan" in the line "I live for Satan" is distinct, the remainder of the reverse lyrics are "unremarkable. All are phonetic reversals of entirely lucid forward lyrics and obviously just accidents." [William Poundstone, Big Secrets (New York: Quill, 1983), pp. 204-205.] Not surprisingly, Jacob Aranza makes the opposite argument. Aranza argues that the backmasked lyrics in "Stairway to Heaven" were not only intentional, but represent the real message of the song. According to Aranza, "Led Zeppelin is on no stairway to heaven but rather, if you pardon the expression, on the HIGHWAY TO HELL!" [Jacob Aranza, Backward Masking Unmasked (Shreveport, LA: Huntington House, Inc., 1983), p. 61. (emphasis in original)]

In the years that followed, this sort of argument diminished as a political rallying cry for Christian conservatives, but the notion that backmasking was evident in "Stairway to Heaven" has never gone away. So often has it been repeated that "Stairway to Heaven" contains backmasked messages that it's become something of a given. In recent years, claims have emerged that backmasked lyrics are not only in the section described above, but run through the entire song. That is, every utterance by Robert Plant delivers a reverse message. This YouTube video has it all covered: backmasked lyrics (with less-than-intelligible words in parentheses), sometimes with multiple interpretations for a word or line, and the forward lyrics below for reference. According to this person, the forward lyrics deal with humanity's choice between spirituality and materialism, while the reversed lyrics are about the struggle of the soul between good and evil.

Another interpretation of the lyrics posted on Jeff Milner Dot Com differs somewhat from the YouTube video above. I suppose it goes without saying (or should anyway) that little of this makes sense--not only the rambling, non-sequitur reversed "lyrics," but the general idea of backmasking itself, which is based almost entirely on suggestion. But it is fun to listen to--playing records backwards just sounds so damn cool. For his part, Robert Plant has always maintained that Led Zeppelin never intended to deliver any backmasked message, Satanic or otherwise. In a 1983 interview with J.D. Considine in Musician magazine, Plant expressed shock and dismay when asked about backmasked messages in Led Zeppelin's music.

MUSICIAN: By the way, I take it there' no truth to the backwards-masking charges?

PLANT: (Looks annoyed) I find that it's sort of an American pastime. There is what they call the in America the College Circuit, where people can lecture on Clearasil, AIDS, homosexuality and the like and get paid $5,000 a night. Somebody decided that poor, defenseless band like Styx and E.L.O., who are indefensible anyway, and masters of No Comment like Led Zeppelin would be good, easy meat for a university tour. I think it just goes to show how sad the world is, that people actually allow themselves to become audiences to other people with nothing better to do. To me it's very sad, because "Stairway To Heaven" was written with every best intention, and as far as reversing tapes and putting messages on the end, that's not my idea of making music. It's really sad. the first time I heard it was early in the morning when I was living at home, and I heard it on a news program. I was absolutely drained all day. I walked around, and I couldn't actually believe, I couldn't take people seriously who could come up with sketches like that. There are a lot of people who are making money there, and if that's the way they need to do it, then do it without my lyrics. I cherish them far too much.