There's a bathroom on the right.

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Don't go around tonight. Well it's bound to take your life. There's a bathroom on the right.

That's a misinterpretation of a lyric in Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising."

With many of CCR's fans asking John Fogerty what the real lyrics are, he would sometimes belt out the wrong ones during live concerts just for fun.

I love looking at misheard lyrics on the Internet.

in the song "in the summertime" (mungo jerry) there is a line, "a ton or a ton and twenty-five" that whenever i hear it sounds to me like "a toilet training five." in The Beegees song "jive talkin'" i kept hearing "chive" instead. my mom, god bless her heard The Beatles song "let it be" and thought they were singing "tennessee." at the end of The Doors' "touch me" there is a line, "stronger than dirt!" that i tend to hear as "strumpet of death!"

"Twenty-five or six to four."

Cryptic, huh?  Must be about drugs ... or sex ... or communism ...

Not really.  The entire song is about song-writing late into the night and into the wee hours of the morning.

Twenty-five to four is 03:35 a.m., and twenty-six to four is 03:34 a.m.

The lyrics "Three-thirty-four or three-thirty-five" neither rhyme nor fit the rhythm of the song.

part of it is poor reception on the radio, part of it is downright poor AM tone quality, or poor microphones or microphone technique or vocal technique or less than transparent electronics in the studio, or crappy vinyl pressings. part of it is poor reception in the brain due to the front end [ears, the brain's microphones] being addled with tinnitus or notchy response, part of the poor reception might be dodgy nerves running from the inner ear to the auditory centers, poor processing in the auditory center or in the frontal lobes [the back end]. in any case, thank you Fnord for that interesting and entertaining bit about how the rest of us heard [but simultaneously failed to properly hear] "25 or 6 to 4."

Part of it also seems to involve people hearing what they want to hear, or extracting unintended meaning from from the lyrics they do hear.

For instance, the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" struggled against radio airplay limitations in 1966 for allegedly dealing too explicitly with drugs, when it was actually about the group's flight to London in August 1965 and their accompanying English tour, as hinted at by the opening couplet: "Eight miles high and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known".  Although commercial airliners fly at an altitude of six to seven miles, it was felt that "eight miles high" sounded more poetic than six and also alluded to the title of the Beatles' song "Eight Days a Week".

i could see you writing a profitable book about that kind of music etymology.

There are many songs which have at least double meanings.

“Eight Miles High” could very well be about a real flight...but it could be about a symbolic one as well.

The radio stations certainly overreacted to the song through censorship.

it has been said that censors have dirty minds.

Of course one could be mistaken...especially since one didn’t write the song.

If a songwriter says they wrote a song about something, I won’t contradict that songwriter.

Censors can have as dirty a mind as what they are censoring.

Hence, the impact upon the censor.