THE YEAR IS 1989!
- While coming up with the song lyrics, Cindy Wilson stated “I personally was thinking about this bar that was out in the country [the Hawaiian Ha-Le]. It was a really cool place – a run-down love shack kind of thing, but it was a disco. It was a really interesting place.”
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One of the most famous breakdowns in pop music comes near the end of this song, when the music stops and Fred Schneider asks, “You’re what?”
Cindy Wilson replies with one of the most famous misinterpreted lines in pop music, as she wails, “Tin Roof, Rusted.” The line is commonly misheard, often as something like, “Hennnnn-ry, busted.”
This section came from a happy accident: the track stopped as Wilson was doing her vocal, and she just kept singing, which gave them the idea to stop the music in this section. As for the line itself, there were rumors that “tin roof, rusted” meant a pregnant woman. According to Wilson, it’s just her recollection of the rusty roof at the Hawaiian Ha-Le.
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The album was recorded at Dreamland Studios near Woodstock, New York, a town famous for giving off lots of love vibes (although the Woodstock Festival took place 50 miles away in Bethel). According to Fred Schneider, he was driving up there, there thinking of song titles when “Love Shack” popped into his head. When he, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson worked on the lyrics, they thought about what the “Love Shack” meant. For Schneider, it was the Hawaiian Ha-Le.
- This introduced The B-52s to a mainstream audience. They had a strong cult following, especially in the lgbtq+ community and on college radio, but “Love Shack” broke them big. Many listeners who discovered them through this song had no idea they had been around for over a decade and had released four previous albums.
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Kate Pierson told Q magazine that it was Keith Strickland who came up with the band’s name. She explained: “Keith thought of the name. He had a dream, like a vision of a little lounge band and they all played organs and had bouffant hairdos, and someone said, ‘Look, it’s the B-52s.’ B-52 was slang for a nosecone-shaped hairdo, named after the bomber. We thought, This is a great name: It’s a number and a letter, it’s really different and snappy. But now there’s this plan to prolong the life of the B-52 bomber, and we’re lending our name to a campaign to stop it.”
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