Wednesday, 4th May 2005.

"Can't stop this thing we started"

Somewhere just outside of Ascot, Saturday afternoon.

"There! Did you hear that?"
Emily raised an eyebrow. "Hear what?"
"He sang 'Me and my baby had a '69.'"
"Are you quite sure?"
"I'm positive. Hang on, let me rewind."

Doing my utmost to keep both eyes on the road and grateful for the fact that the traffic was heavy and our speed was thus limited, I reached out one hand to the radio frontpiece, and pressed the 'scan'. I'd forgotten, of course, that it's impossible to scan through MP3 files on our car stereo. A less anal person would have put it down to experience and left it at that, perhaps making a mental note to check it again the next time the song came up on the shuffle selection. Unfortunately, I am not that person, and I found myself irresistibly drawn towards the repeat button.

"We're listening to it again, then?" Emily said.
"Yes. I have to know, darling. I'm positive that's what he said."

Bryan sang for a few minutes, the whimsical nostalgia cutting through the guitar's triumphant power chords. When I think about it, it's no wonder that Summer of '69 is one of my favourite songs. At a simple aesthetical level, it's fantastic for eighty-mph journeys down motorways on sunny mornings - although it can admittedly be frustrating when you're stuck in traffic, unable to obey the simple impulse to put your foot down. But if you delve deeper, it becomes obvious that the rose-tinted things-will-never-be-this-good-again approach is the way that I chose to live my life until a few years ago, when I first ran into Jon. These days, it's more of a reminder of the person I used to be - the whiny student obsessed with old diaries and dwelling in the past, weeping over lost friendships, as opposed to the whiny twenty-something obsessed with the mediocrity of Pop Idol and the hypocrisy of The Sun. Strangely, I look back on that earlier period not with embarrassment and regret but rather with a kind of pleasant afterglow, almost as if I'm reminded that being that person was a necessary journey in order to get here. A nostalgia song that makes you nostalgic for nostalgia. How very post-modern.

At the moment, though, such overwrought analysis was far from my mind. Instead, I was listening out for the lyrics. And there it was again - as the session musicians swept through the two-chord jam that makes up the song's closing moments, I'm sure I heard "Me and my baby had a '69..."

"I heard it this time," said Emily. "But don't you think it sounded like 'Me and my baby in a '69'?"
"All right," I replied. "I'm willing to concede that it sounds a lot more like that. But still."
"Why would he do that?"

That's a good question. Musical in-jokes in supposedly serious songs are pretty common. You know the sort - a line that jumps out at you from the back of nowhere, that changes the whole mood of the piece, and establishes the fact that the whole song was just a laugh, and that you're not supposed to take it too seriously. Anthrax's Attack of the Killer 'B's, for example, closes with NFB, an emotional, heartfelt ballad in the More Than Words / Bon Jovi tradition, full of love, lost love and then the rekindling of love - and even the use of the words 'honey child'. If you didn't know it was Anthrax (and therefore designed as a joke, given the rest of their catalogue) it's almost possible to take it seriously, until halfway through, when the band sing "Then I played the fool / I never meant to hurt you / Or sleep with all your friends". One guitar solo later, you're still trying to figure this out when the song re-establishes its apparent seriousness - and just as you're getting used to that, this happens:

"Then we fell in love again
This time forever
True love prevails over all
She got hit by a truck."

Other examples of in-jokes abound, but perhaps the most famous in recent history occurs at the end of the gloriously overstated One Vision, where Freddie Mercury - having ranted for five minutes over May's guitar about one religion, one life, one heart, one direction etc. suddenly finishes the song with "Gimme gimme gimme fried chicken". While this wasn't printed in the original lyrics, a glance at the transcript of the score - not to mention a closer listen to the record - reveals that this was certainly the case. Typical of the late Mr Mercury's unabashed sense of humour: I'll save the world, darlings, but I must order lunch first.

What's more likely, of course, is that the ambiguity present in Summer of '69 was nothing more than a simple slip of the tongue. Legend has it that Neil Armstrong's first words upon his faked moon landing (which coincidentally took place in the same year as the events of the very song we're discussing) were actually "That's one small step for a man" - only to find that the 'a' had been lost in the less-than-perfect transmission, thus rendering one of the most famous sayings of the twentieth century nothing more than an unfortunate misquote. In this scenario, the reverse applied: our friend Bryan Adams probably said "Me and my baby in '69", which of course makes more sense, and the slight ambiguity of his Canadian drawl meant that it was easy to mishear him. It makes a lot more sense than the musical in-joke theory, but nonetheless I wasn't prepared to let this one go.

"When you think about it, the whole song is rude."
"Do you think so?" said Em.
"It's just the fact that he chose that particular year. It seems to be too much of a coincidence."
"And there's also the fact that it can't be that autobiographical," she said. "Because he'd only have been...what?"
"Let's see...nine or ten," I said, working it out. "It's therefore more likely that if the events of the song happened to him at all, it would have been in the late seventies. Seventy-seven, or seventy-nine at the latest."
"But Summer of '69 sounds much better," she said. "Summer of '79 doesn't work quite so well."
"No, it doesn't scan. So either he's making it up, or it really happened and he just happened to move the year for the sake of getting a better hook, which is fair enough."
"I agree with you there. It is pretty catchy."
"Nonetheless, it does seem a little weird that he happens to have chosen the year that corresponds with a sexual position. And that in the song he's just met a girl. So maybe it's a thinly-veiled reference to that. Perhaps it ought to have been called Summer of '69s."

We shared a couple of knowing glances - the conversation had once more been saturated with sex and innuendo, and once more it was entirely my fault. Anxious to redeem myself somewhat, I did what any sensible person would have done - I changed the subject. And who says it's all we think about?