You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory

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"You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" is a song originally composed in 1978 by the New York Dolls' Johnny Thunders. It is essentially a rewrite of the song "Lonely Planet Boy" from the Dolls' eponymous first album, New York Dolls, but with lyrics about the emptiness of life and Thunders' drug habit. Thunders lived almost a decade and a half after writing it, only succumbing to his addiction in 1991, after many of his contemporaries were long since dead; but he never outlived or escaped its message.^{[citation needed]} The title was taken from a line in "Better Living Through TV", an episode of the TV sitcom, The Honeymooners.

[edit] Covers

Guns N' Roses covered the song on their album, The Spaghetti Incident?.
The Mighty Wah! recorded an edited version of the song, featuring only the opening four lines of the first verse and the chorus.
Manic Street Preachers Singer & Guitarist James Dean Bradfield played the The Mighty Wah! edit of the song on several dates of the 2004 Lifeblood tour as intro to Cardiff Afterlife, dedicating the song to the band's missing lyricist Richey Edwards.
Giant Sand covered Thunders "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" on the album Ballad of a Thin Line Man [1986]