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"When it gets a little dark...We'll find a place to park..."
At least that's what the official lyrics say. But there's a consensus that Huey didn't say "park."
I remember when this song was a hit and everybody agreed that, instead of "park", the word Huey sang was a four-letter vulgarity denoting sexual intercourse. And it couldn't possibly be any clearer. It isn't buried in a swirl of guitars and keyboards. It's right there staring the world in the face. So many lyrics in hit songs are completely incomprehensible, but this was unambiguous.
The only people who disagreed were radio programmers. They were naive enough to trust the lyric sheet. They couldn't possibly believe that a clean-cut everyman like Huey Lewis would drop an f-bomb. That's why every top 40 station that I remember played this record without any trouble.
I remember hearing it on Q-102 one weekend in early 1989 as we were zipping down Columbia Parkway. That wasn't long after we saw Rain Man, part of which was filmed in Cincinnati and featured Columbia Parkway. Also, as we were on this road, we tested whether we could pick up 97-X, as this station was heard in the Columbia Parkway scene in the film. This test was unsuccessful. We don't talk about 97-X much, because this station - which had a highly regarded modern rock format - hardly ever reached where we lived. We were denied a good signal from 97-X because some of the major Cincinnati stations got an allocation for another station on the same frequency at the opposite end of town from it. This protected big stations from competition from 97-X.
That tidbit about local radio has nothing to do with the topic of this entry though. And Huey's dabbling with one of the "7 dirty words" only filled our airwaves for a few weeks before becoming yet another lost hit.
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