The lyric "O Dana, O Dana, come on" has not yet been explained.

been on a big Big Star kick lately, and this one's always puzzled me (beaucoups??) at the same time as being really dumb and fun and obvious. hopefully you have something to add to these thoughts?

Explainers, do your worst!

(thread title courtesy of RapGenius)

Read the comments, take with grain of salt.

^^^http://www.bigstarreference.com/cgi-bin/bsrboard/bsrboard.cgi?board=lyrics&action=display&num=993872240

I wonder why "over Boulder Dam"

that's an interesting link but I was hoping for elaborate fan-made conspiracy-theory rather than "STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH" internet exposé *which I can't even appreciate anyway due to constitutional skepticism :(

I wonder why "over Boulder Dam"

overboard and down

neither one strikes me as exactly parsing the sounds that I hear on the record; but good critical principles would seem to exclude "archaic name of a national landmark, changed prior to the author's birth" as implausible without some other contextual evidence

"overboard & down" seems a bit redundant* but I can at least extract some kind of concrete image from it (over the board of the boat, descending thru the body of water, perhaps carried downriver?) + the redundancy possibly echoes "strung out twice"/"two illusions" a little later on... unless "down" is supposed to have its modern slang sense??

* then again, this is a verse in which the singer appears to misuse the word "forevermore", so pure syllabic padding would not be out of the question