The old Three Dog Night hit “Eli’s Coming” came on the radio the other day, and I found myself hearing it for the first time in a long time. Written by Laura Nyro, it really is a tasty song and a magnificent recording.
It really gets intense in the middle eight — you know, the part where “you’ll never get away, no, you’ll never get away from the burning heartache” — and then I realized I never quite understood the next line.
It sounds like “I want to Apollo by the Bay.” I thought, that can’t be right, it must be one of those misheard lyrics that people laugh about, like “Sweet dreams are made of cheese.” I wondered what they could possibly be really singing, but I was driving along a highway at 70 mph, so it would have to wait.
I was puttering around the house later, and I remembered my conundrum. What did they really sing that sounded to me like “I want to Apollo by the bay”? I grabbed the laptop and opened DuckDuckGo, searching for “Eli’s Coming lyrics.”
Here we go — Eli’s coming, hide your heart, yeah yeah yeah. Scroll down … here we go.
“But you’ll never get away, no, you’ll never get away from the burning heartache …”
And the next line is:
I walked to Apollo by the bay — Everywhere I go
WHAT?!?!?
I was (mostly) right?! What the bejeebers is Apollo by the bay? And why would you walk there? And how could you walk to a specific somewhere everywhere you go??! This time, DuckDuckGo led me to Answers.com:
It’s a place by the water in Australia. Actually, the Temple of Apollo by the Bay of Baiae (now the Bay of Naples) was in ancient times considered to be one of the entrances to the Underworld. So Nyro may have meant nothing more by “I walked to Apollo by the Bay” than “I walked to the very end of the earth.” At this temple, visitors could ask the Sibyl (the priestess of Apollo) about their fate. So perhaps Nyro’s lyric is invoking such a pilgrimage.
I guess that’s the something new I learned today. But I still think it’s a weird line.
Not as weird as “No one heard at all, not even the chair,” though. That’s the weirdest line ever.
I couldn’t imagine what the worst line would be, but I was a definite winner in the “and who wrote it” category. Neil Diamond…it just has to be. There have been some real stinky lyrics sung over the centuries, but Diamond takes it as Worst Lyricist of All Time, and no one else is a close second at all.