Been meaning to contribute to this thread for a while. I looked at it years ago when I was trying to figure out the lyrics to this song, and still couldn't make sense of it. After a couple of years of listening to the song, and NOT trying to focus so hard on the "I was lookin' for my good gal..." lyric, it dawned on me one day. To my ears, it sounds like:

"I was lookin' for my good gal, thinkin' she might be deemin' us drowned."

Obviously, with a combination of record scratches/tempo/Green's accent, the last syllable of "deeming" yields what sounds like "deemn".