{"id":355,"date":"2008-04-14T18:23:14","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T01:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/2008\/04\/14\/8-songs-inspired-by-real-women\/"},"modified":"2008-04-14T18:23:14","modified_gmt":"2008-04-15T01:23:14","slug":"8-songs-inspired-by-real-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2008\/04\/14\/8-songs-inspired-by-real-women\/","title":{"rendered":"8 Songs Inspired By Real Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was written by Maggie Koerth-Baker<\/a> and originally appeared in mental_floss<\/a> magazine.<\/p>\n

Songwriters have found inspiration in all sorts of places, from transvestites to team tennis titans. Maggie Koerth-Baker has read between the liner notes to find out for whom 8 famous songs were written.<\/p>\n

1. \u201cPhiladelphia Freedom\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

\"elton-billie-jean.jpg\"

\n Written by:<\/STRONG> Elton John & Bernie Taupin<\/p>\n

Written for:<\/STRONG> Billie Jean King, as a thank-you for a tracksuit she gave Elton. And what a tracksuit it must have been! The 1975 song remains one of the most popular disco hits ever, leaving thousands of Hustle enthusiasts wondering just what Billie Jean King had to do with Philadelphia, anyway.<\/p>\n

Turns out, the song was a reference to King\u2019s pro tennis team, The Philadelphia Freedoms. Prior to 1968, tennis players were all considered \u201camateurs\u201d and weren\u2019t eligible to receive prize money. So, if you didn\u2019t have the wealth to support yourself, you couldn\u2019t play. Billie Jean King fought against those constraints, ultimately founding Professional World Team Tennis in 1974 and turning tennis into a paid league sport. [Photo courtesy of EltonJohn.com<\/A>.]<\/p>\n

2. \u201cLola\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

Written by:<\/STRONG> The Kinks\u2019 Ray Davies<\/p>\n

Written for:<\/STRONG> A transvestite. But the question is, which one? According to Rolling Stone<\/EM>, \u201cLola\u201d was inspired by Candy Darling, a member of Andy Warhol\u2019s entourage, whom Ray Davies briefly (and cluelessly) dated. If that\u2019s the case, then \u201cLola\u201d is just another notch on Darling\u2019s song belt\u2014she\u2019s also referred to in Lou Reed\u2019s \u201cWalk on the Wild Side.\u201d (\u201dCandy came from out on the Island\/ In the backroom she was everybody\u2019s darlin\u2019.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But, in the Kinks\u2019 official biography, Davies tells a different story. He says \u201cLola\u201d was written after the band\u2019s manager spent a very drunken night dancing with a woman whose five o\u2019clock shadow was apparently obvious to everyone but him.<\/p>\n

3. \u201c867-5309\/Jenny\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

\"tutone.jpg\"Written by:<\/STRONG> Jim Keller (of Tommy Tutone) and Alex Call<\/p>\n

Written for<\/STRONG>: Unknown, as the songwriters apparently make up a different story about its inspiration every time they\u2019re asked. While the woman continues to remain a mystery, however, the phone number is all too real. In fact, it\u2019s been wreaking havoc ever since 1982\u0014the passage of time hasn\u2019t quelled of the number of crank calls. In 1999, Brown University freshman roommates Nina Clemente and Jahanaz Mirza found that out the hard way, when the school adopted an 867 exchange number for its on-campus phone system. Immediately, the girls\u2019 innocuous Room No. 5309 became a magnet for every drunk college kid with a 1980s fetish.<\/p>\n

Other unfortunate phone customers have fought back with creative and profitable solutions, like the holder of 212-867-5309, who put his phone number up for auction on eBay in 2004. Bids approached $100,000 before eBay pulled the item at the request of Verizon, the number\u2019s actual owner.<\/p>\n

4. \u201cF\u00fcr Elise\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

Written by:<\/STRONG> Ludwig van Beethoven<\/p>\n

Written for<\/STRONG>: Some girl probably not named Elise. In fact, as far as most historians can tell, Beethoven didn\u2019t even know an Elise. Instead, the song was originally titled \u201cBagatelle in A minor\u201d based on some handwritten notation a Beethoven researcher claimed to have seen on a now-lost copy of the sheet music.<\/p>\n

Further complicating things, Beethoven had hideous handwriting\u2014to the point that some scholars speculate the song was actually written \u201cfor Therese,\u201d as in Therese Malfatti, one of several women who turned down a marriage proposal from the notoriously lovesick maestro.<\/p>\n

5. \u201cOh, Carol\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

\"oh-carol.jpg\"Written by<\/STRONG>: Neil Sedaka<\/p>\n

Written for:<\/STRONG> Carole King, naturally. Sedaka and King actually dated briefly in high school \u2014 a romance Sedaka was able to successfully milk with \u201cOh, Carol,\u201d a then top-10 (if now somewhat forgettable) 1959 pop song.<\/p>\n

However, the real success of \u201cOh, Carol\u201d came a few months later, when it inspired King to write a rebuttal entitled \u201cOh, Neil.\u201d At the time, King and her husband, Gerry Goffin, were fledgling songwriters in need of a hit tune. \u201cOh, Neil\u201d wasn\u2019t that, but it did pay off. After Sedaka gave a tape of the song to his boss, King and Goffin landed jobs at the legendary Brill Building pop music factory, where the duo went on to write chart-toppers like \u201cWill You Still Love Me Tomorrow\u201d and \u201cThe Loco-Motion.\u201d<\/p>\n

6. \u201cIt Ain\u2019t Me, Babe\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

Written by:<\/STRONG> Bob Dylan<\/p>\n

Written for:<\/STRONG> Joan Baez, though it clearly wasn\u2019t the nicest gift Dylan could have given her. The two met in 1961, when Baez was an up-and-coming folk singer and Dylan was a nobody from Minnesota. Desperate to make his break in the music biz, Dylan worked like crazy to get Baez\u2019s attention. He eventually ended up going on tour with her, which is how he first became famous, and also how the two began dating. For a while, they seemed like the golden couple, but things soon went downhill.<\/p>\n

During a European concert tour together in early 1965, they had a huge fight and parted ways. That May, Dylan was holed up in a hotel after being hospitalized with a virus, and Baez, hoping to remain friends, decided to bring him flowers. Sadly, that\u2019s how she found out that her ex was already dating someone else. That someone else was Sara Lownds, whom Dylan married a mere six months later.<\/p>\n

7. \u201cOur House\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

Written by:<\/STRONG> Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)<\/p>\n

Written for:<\/STRONG> Joni Mitchell. In December 1968, Nash and Mitchell moved into a cozy little house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Though commonly left out of the hippy pantheon, Laurel Canyon was sort of a commune-home away from commune-home for San Francisco society \u2014 not just CSN&Y, but also Jim Morrison, the Eagles, Frank Zappa, and more.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur House\u201d was directly inspired by a lazy Sunday in the Nash\/Mitchell household. The couple went out to brunch, hit an antiques store, and then returned to find the house just a bit chilly, at which point Nash literally \u201clit a fire,\u201d while Mitchell \u201cplaced the flowers in the vase that she bought that day.\u201d No, really. The whole tableau seemed so ridiculously domestic to Nash that he immediately sat down and spent the rest of the day writing about it.<\/p>\n

8. \u201cDear Mama\u201d<\/H4><\/p>\n

\"2pac.jpg\"

\n Written by:<\/STRONG> Tupac Shakur<\/p>\n

Written for:<\/STRONG> Afeni Shakur, who is, obviously, Tupac\u2019s mama. A fascinating character in her own right, Afeni Shakur was born Alice Fay Williams, but changed her name while working with the Black Panthers in the 1960s. In fact, Tupac (named after the Peruvian revolutionary leader Tupac Amaru II) was born in 1971\u2014just a month after Afeni was acquitted of bombing conspiracy charges. (She had spent most of her pregnancy behind bars.) As the song implies, she and Tupac didn\u2019t always get along, particularly during his adolescence, when Afeni was addicted to crack. But, by the time of Tupac\u2019s death in 1996, she was clean and the two had patched things up long enough for Tupac to write that she \u201cwas appreciated.\u201d Today, Afeni runs a charity in her son\u2019s name and is (somewhat controversially) responsible for Tupac\u2019s multiple posthumous CD releases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was written by Maggie Koerth-Baker and originally appeared in mental_floss magazine. Songwriters have found inspiration in all sorts of places, from transvestites to team tennis titans. Maggie Koerth-Baker has read between the liner notes to find out for whom 8 famous songs were written. 1. \u201cPhiladelphia Freedom\u201d Written by: Elton John & Bernie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}