Songs are essentially poetry set to musical components of melody, harmony and rhythm.
Sometimes that poetry comes up with some pretty decent “lyrics”, as they’re more commonly known as.
Some lyrics are so well-known, that it’s sometimes difficult to find someone who hasn’t heard the song and its lyrics — i.e., all of the lyrics.
SOURCE : Generated by AI @ https://boredhumans.com/text-to-image.php
Yet, other songs, people really know only the first verse, and not the subsequent verses.
Why is that?
Because it’s not “radio” music, but rather, “TV music”.
Specifically, in the realm of TV show theme songs, which are usually less than 30 seconds, there’s nowhere near enough time to broadcast all the verses, and choruses, and bridges, and refrains, and solos, and you-name-it, of the full version.
So, after the first verse, they usually will cut to a three-to-five-second chorus, which, generally has the title of the song ( or TV show ) in it, and then go to a series of 30-second commercials, and then, when returning from the commercial breaks, they never finish the song.
Thus, you never hear the rest of the song, or the song in its entirety.
Consequently, the general public isn’t even aware that there are any second verses or third verses to their favorite TV show theme songs — “what they’ve heard, is all there is, and there ain’t no more”.
Wrong!
There is more.
For example, there’s the theme song for a given TV program that was originally on the air from 1978 to 1982, and then again, as a re-boot, from 1991 to 1993.
The show in question : “WKRP in Cincinnati”.
The theme song was unremarkably titled “WKRP in Cincinnati Theme Song” ( I really thought it was going to be something more artistic, such as “Bittersweet Love” or something like that, however, I guess not. But I digress…).
Although sung by the artist Steve Carlisle, he wrote neither the music nor the lyrics.
Instead, the music was written by Tom Wells, and the lyrics were written by the TV series creator, himself, Hugh Wilson, who, unfortunately, passed away, relatively recently, in January of 2018.
TV theme songs, as a general rule, are not broadcasted on radio stations along with the normal fare for whatever genre the station plays.
For example, on so-called “classic rock” stations, no program director is going to suggest playing “WKRP” in between Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; rap stations aren’t going to play the most loved rap songs, and suddenly insert WKRP somewhere in the mix.
As a result of the full version never being heard on the radio, there’s no one who’s familiar with any of the words beyond the first verse.
What a treat, through, to hear those rarely-heard lyrics for the rest of the song.
When I heard the lyrics for the second verse of the theme song for the old TV show, “Cheers”, I got a laugh out of that.
But that’s another story for another post.
For now, though, onward with WKRP…
Hear / Read The Unheard Second and Third Verses
The otherwise never-heard second and third verses for this song’s lyrics can :
[a] be heard in the embedded video below; and
[b] be read in the transcript below the video.
A transcript of the lyrics
[Full version:]
Verse 1
Baby, if you’ve ever wondered,
Wondered whatever became of me,
I’m livin’ on the air in Cincinnati,
Cincinnati, WKRP
Got kinda tired of packin’ and unpackin’,
Town to town, up and down the dial
Maybe you and me were never meant to be,
Just maybe think of me once in awhile.
Verse 2
Heading up that highway, leaving you behind
Hardest thing I ever had to do
Broke my heart in two, but baby, pay no mind
The price for finding me was losing you
Memories help me hide my lonesome feelin’
Far away from you and feelin’ low
It’s gettin’ late my friend, my love, I miss you so
Take good care of you, I’ve gotta go
Solo 1 : Electric Guitar
Solo 2 : Electric Piano
Verse 3
Baby, if you’ve ever wondered
Wondered whatever became of me
I’m living on the air in Cincinnati, Cincinnati, WKRP
Got kinda tired of packin’ and unpackin’,
Town to town, up and down the dial
Maybe you and me were never meant to be,
Just maybe think of me once in awhile.
I’m at WKRP in Cincinnati
Lyrics source:
https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/wkrpincincinnatilyrics.html
Image generate by A,I, @ https://boredhumans.com/text-to-image.php
“The price for finding me was losing you“
Wow! For me, that’s such a powerful lyric.
It’s so incredibly heartbreaking to have to sacrifice your closest companion to live the life you were meant to live; and, if you don’t let go, you can’t advance — stuck where you don’t have what you need, while self-defeatingly clinging onto that which is holding you back.
The idea that one can develop deep feelings for someone they weren’t meant to be with in the first place, just seems like a cruel joke if it were caused by a higher power who should know better than to inflict completely unnecessary pain for the mere enjoyment of watching the suffering.
The relationship becomes metaphorically synonymous with a drug addiction, like, say, morphine.
That is, there is an element of emotional euphoria, to be sure, when the addict is near the person/drug, whose effect is to distract you from the truth that you are dealing with pain, and the morphine is hiding that pain so well, that you actually “feel good”, but once the morphine wears off ( the person or drug is absent ) , the pain comes back with a vengeance, and the urge to stop the pain, at any cost,translates into another dose of morphine ( another rendezvouz of pointlessly futile “intimacy” )
A good example of this principle, I think, is the time I ended up in the hospital for an unimaginably severe back spasm while lifting a refrigerator.
After being ambulanced to the emergency room at Lagrange Community Hospital, I was in agony until one of the ER doctors pumped me with enough morphine to where every muscle was in the exact opposite direction of a spasm, but was, rather, loose as melting jello; I was so peacefully relaxed.
As they rolled me down the corridor to a private room, my eyes felt like two coin slots in a vending machine, as I stared up at all the individual fluorescent light bulbs which looked like one long light bulb. I didn’t have a care in the world ( I can see why many of our soldiers in the Korean and Vietnam Wars were getting hooked on the stuff — to go from nerve-racking machine gun fire in a nested trench to the indescribable peace of sitting by a quiet creek in heaven in the span of a few minutes via a syringe or method of oral ingestion, had to have been a pretty attractive alternative to dealing with the pain constantly ) .
In fact, when I awoke from my first post-ER “nap”, which was more like a deep coma, I was delighted to learn that I had a button I could press that would deliver a shot of morphine, to kill the pain.
Of course, it was mechanically regulated so that it would not just shoot a dose every time I clicked the button, because if it did, patients would be overdosing more often than not, since most people want to cheat pain, not deal with it, head on.
I know. I’m one of those people.
In any case, pressing the button frequently showed that I was willing to lie to myself, by claiming I was not in pain, when, in reality, I was, and all I had to do to convince myself that I was killing that pain, was click that button.
Even when it did not deliver a dose, psychologically, there was still a pseudo-sense of relief in the pressing of that button.
But the pain was still there all along. Not knowing it’s there, doesn’t mean the pain doesn’t exist; or that the relief is “real”.
It doesn’t matter.
It’s convincing : that does matter.
The relief was a pharmaceutically-generated illusion
Hanging onto the wrong lover serves the same function : the companionship stops the feelings of loneliness, but it’s companionship that is not conducive to the goal of being your true self — if there is such a thing
But, in the life of our imaginary Dee Jay — we’ll call him Johnny — I imagine him becoming more and more internally content in his life ( because he’s doing what he loves ).
So much, in fact, that he had been recently, daydreaming frequently of calling up “Dianne” ( the woman that he had to leave behind because she didn’t want to move away from where they were in the first place, since she was solid in her job where she worked, but wasn’t convinced the Dee Jay job was going to yield the same results for Johnny ).
He finally got the opportunity to call Diane and exclaim just how grand life was in Cincinnati, and that he was wondering if she’d be willing to revisit the issue of her possibly moving to Cincinnati and picking up where they left off in their relationship and possibly living together happily-ever-after.
Unfortunately, his mountainously -high emotional elation suddenly came crashing into the deepest pit of despair as he never got a chance to ask her since she interrupted his first few words to excitedly and hurriedly share with him the “good” news that she got engaged to “Bill”, and that life was grand for her, too.
Johnny’s heart was torn in two, but he had to pretend that he was happy for her.
But after they said their bittersweet goodbyes and ended the call, Johnny sat in the recliner in the corner of his living room, perusing his photos of him and Diane when they were together — the parties; the nights out at the bar, or days at the beach; their attendance to formal events like friends’ weddings; their hiking trips and cruise ship vacations, and every other impromptu snapshot in their lives together.
Now, someone else takes pictures with her and holds her close nightly.
Not him; and never again.
Those days can’t be brought back.
Their relationship is over forever.
All he has are pictures of an increasingly-distant past.
He tried fighting the urge to cry, and he closed the photo album, and thought, just before curling up into a ball, and crying himself to sleep, ” The price of finding me was losing you.”
…..