A wave chicane; or, the authority of the lyric sheet

Back in the days of vinyl, one of the great joys of listening to an album was to read along with the lyric sheet. On the radio, the chorus to CCR's "Down on the Corner" might sound like "Well, Napoleon and the baby," but with the album's lyrics in front of you, it suddenly became clear that John Fogarty was singing, "Willy and the Poorboys are playin'." It wasn't always a physical "sheet"; sometimes they were printed on the actual record liner (a paper or plastic jacket in which the record was placed so the cardboard jacket wouldn't scratch it) or on the outside jacket. The fanciest albums might have a whole separate booklet with words and photos and, in the case of some Pink Floyd records, posters or decals. Nowadays, lyric booklets, if they exist, are small and the typeset even smaller, and I wonder how many of the dwindling number of consumers of the physical artifact that is the CD bother to read them anymore.

At any rate, the lyric sheet always seemed to be the ultimate authority for figuring out the words and perhaps figuring out what the song meant--not to mention knowing who played what, as band members and session musicians were often listed song by song with the lyrics. It never dawned on me to question the lyric sheet; after all, wasn't it official, right from the horse's mouth via the record company? On Sunday, "Can't Get It Out Of My Head" by Electric Light Orchestra came on my iPod for the upteenth time. It was their first top 40 hit, back in 1975, and though it doesn't get as much oldies airplay as songs like "Mr. Blue Sky" or "Don't Bring Me Down," it's still one of my favorites.

The first lines in the song, according to the lyric sheet that comes with the album Eldorado, are as follows: "Midnight on the water/I saw the ocean's daughter/Walking on a wave chicane/Staring as she called my name." I remember as a teenager wondering, what the hell is a '"wave chicane"? I looked it up in several dictionaries and never found it. I decided that it was some part of a wave and let it go--what else could it be, since the lyric sheet must be right. Plus, it kinda sounded mysteriously cool. On Sunday, however, I realized I was singing, "Walking on a wave she came..." That makes more sense, and "came" is a more precise rhyme for "name." But still, the official lyric sheet says, "chicane." Would the InterTubes be able to solve this dilemma for me?

The short answer is, no. Almost every day of my life lately, I am moved to mutter to myself, "Geez, I love the Internet." But it hasn't been much help here. Typically, the Internet is a wonderful place to find song lyrics, but one must always be on the watch for sloppy transcriptions, typos, or just plain wrong guesses that are posted as authoritative lyrics. Some sites say "wave chicane"; some say "on a wave she came"; one site says "wave's chicane." An entry about the song at the Jeff Lynne Song Database makes the dubious claim that a chicane is "the frothy tip of a cresting wave," which is kinda what I had decided when I was 18, but as I did some surface digging, I found no other source, authoritative or otherwise, that gives this definition. The most common meaning of the word ties it to "chicanery," which is "deception by artful subterfuge." I'm sure Lynne (pictured) didn't mean that the wave was being sneaky.

So where does that leave me? My universe is slipping its moorings; I can no longer automatically trust in the Lyric Sheet, and the Internet has let me down (though it is thanks to the Net that I know I'm not the only person in the world who has wondered about this lyric fragment). I suspect that Lynne is singing "on a wave she came," but part of me would like to believe that there is some strange arcanity to that line that will never be be made clear.