“Get Off of My Cloud” is a song by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. It was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as a single to follow the successful “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. Recorded in early September 1965 and released that November, the song topped the charts in the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany, reaching No. 2 in Australia and Ireland. (More from Wikipedia)
I often had trouble figuring out the lyrics to songs by the Rolling Stones; they are easy enough to snag off the Internet now, but sometimes it was hard for me to get it from playing the songs back in the day. In some cases, I even went down to Reznick’s Records and leafed through their sheet music for Rolling Stones songs to find out what the lyrics said – occasionally on multiple occasions for the same song.
Some of it was just that they were British – not so much their accents but the idiosyncrasies of English in England. In “Get off of My Cloud” – one of the Stones’ non-grammatical song titles according to what my English teachers told me, as was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (in fact, this second #1 song was their next single) – the chorus was clear enough, like the great line: “Don’t hang around, ’cause two’s a crowd”; but the first verse includes the lines:
Then in flies a guy who’s all dressed up just like a Union Jack
And says, I’ve won five pounds if I have his kind of detergent pack.
I knew about the British currency of “pounds” even when I was a little kid, and around here detergent comes in a “box” though I still knew what they meant. However, it was a while before I learned the nickname of the British flag. Then the final verse ends:
It was so very quiet and peaceful
There was nobody, not a soul around
I laid myself out, I was so tired and I started to dream
In the morning the parking tickets were just like
A flag stuck on my windscreen
I wasn’t driving then of course, and I had no clue about what the last two lines meant – I’m sure I had seen parking tickets on a car before, but not a whole cluster of them. And the British term for a car’s windshield, “windscreen” was totally foreign to me. As a matter of fact, the website on the Internet where I got these lyrics just now didn’t even have it right – they had “window screen”.
(May 2015)
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Items: Get off of My Cloud
