>>>Ah, so you mean this was actually bad English? I wouldn't know - if I hear something that confuses me, I can't know whether it's good or not, only that it's confusing. Besides, such things eventually make their way into the regular language, achieve a sort of a legal status. So, regular or not, imagine if I was to translate this - translator's job is to get the meaning across, not to judge the author's grammar. I'd probably pull my hairs out over this one...
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>>As I said, do not look to rock lyrics for grammar lessons. Even if English is not your first language, I'd hope you could, if required, figure out the gist of what the lyricist is getting at. Or am I, never having been in that position (I don't understand any language other than English enough to be worrying about the nuances), being a naif?
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>When learning a language, one can not choose what to hear and what not. You pick phrases, ways to compose a sentence, unfamiliar words (or, in case of English, familiar words doing work for which you wouldn't expect they would qualify), and if not immediately clear, store them away for later cross-reference. It happened to me many times that an odd word or phrase, absent from what dictionaries I had, would pop up years later in a different context, and then I'd understand the meaning :). And one context was, say, in a song by Lennon, another in a movie.
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>Sidenote: A relatively fresh example of "can't be picky" was while I was learning Hungarian - when buying a burger, I learned what to say to get it simple, without bells nor whistles. Well, the word in use meant "smooth", which I was later told was bad usage. Which I can't be responsible for - hey, it's your language, teach your burger market to speak properly :). On second thought, that must have been a borrowing-by-meaning from German or the Slavic neighbors - smooth is 'glatt' and 'gladak' respectively, and we do say "klot pasulj" (obviously spoiled German word) for 'beans with nothing'.

"...without bells nor whistles" - "Without" is already "negative"

So "without [either] bells or whistles" or "with neither bells nor whistles"

But can't usually teach you owt about our language, and I suspect it was a typo anyway :-)