One person’s view: “Just a horrible, obnoxious single release from beginning to end. The vocals are childlike and sickening sweet. The lyrics are beyond redemption.” – owsh @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.24 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1976
I’ve now reached a personal milestone with this blog. All of the previous #1s are historical relics to me, but “Afternoon Delight” is one that I can remember hearing before it topped the charts. And I heard it straight from the Starland Vocal Band itself, as the group was performing on a stage literally ten feet in front of me at my city’s biggest concert arena.
How was I in such an enviable position to see this talented young band and hear its future #1 hit? The road to this moment unfurled a couple months earlier when I heard a scream from my family’s kitchen. My mom had just opened the envelope containing our tickets to see John Denver – and our seats were in the front row! I know that this story is difficult to believe, but I swear it is true. A middle class household with no connections to organized crime was able to send a check for a modest amount and, by the pure luck of the draw, receive front row tickets to one of the hottest acts of the decade. No one stole our tickets from the mail. Ticketmaster didn’t add $67.50 in service charges to each one. We didn’t have to load an app onto our phone to use our tickets, which would have been very difficult considering that our phone had a rotary dial and was permanently affixed to the wall. And when we got to the arena, no one rummaged through my mom’s purse or stuck their hands down my pants to see if we were smuggling in a switchblade. OK, now that I think about it, maybe this story does seem kind of crazy. I must have dreamed it, but it was a vivid dream so I will continue telling it as if it really happened.
John Denver’s opening act was the Starland Vocal Band, which consisted of two married couples. Before performing “Afternoon Delight”, one of the Starland men, Bill Danoff, told us the song’s origin story. He had been eating lunch at a diner and noticed that one of the menu items was called an Afternoon Delight. He then came home and demonstrated to his wife what that phrase really meant. The crowd roared in laughter at this anecdote, and I laughed along with everyone else. I assumed that he had proceeded to fix a sandwich that was far better than anything the crappy restaurant was offering. It wasn’t until I was 25 or so that I realized, to my horror, that the song actually wasn’t about food.
It also wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that “Afternoon Delight” wasn’t the universally beloved perfect pop song that I remembered. I should have deduced this by the way it had faded from existence. Sure, the 1970s weren’t the cool thing anymore, but not every chart-topper from 1976 had been wiped so cleanly from our collective memory. One of my local top 40 radio stations still inexplicably played Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” as much as it played many new hit records, but no one ever played the Starland Vocal Band. It’s crazy to think that “Afternoon Delight” somehow tested more poorly with listeners than Peter Cetera’s mournful yowling.
“Afternoon Delight” has been criticized as both too explicit and too tame. Some of the lyrics, particularly those that analogize sex to fishing, fail to reach Shakespearian heights of eloquence. Nonetheless, I think the song and its music video serve as the ideal time capsule for the 1970s. The imagery of fireworks – “sky rockets in flight” – evokes the U.S. Bicentennial, which occurred the week that the song reached #1. And Bill Danoff even looks a bit like Greg Brady with glasses. When I see this video, I almost expect it to be intercut with a scene of Gerald Ford tripping down the steps of Air Force One.
The Starland Vocal Band were briefly given their own TV show in which they co-starred with an aspiring comedian named Dave Letterman. Unfortunately for them, this was before television franchises were industrialized as delivery mechanisms for hit songs. The Glee assembly line eventually turned out approximately 3,258 Hot 100 singles that no one asked for or wanted, but things didn’t work that way in the 1970s. The Starlanders never had another top 40 hit again, both couples divorced, and life became slightly worse for all of us. But hey, at least we still got to hear “If You Leave Me Now” on the radio every three hours until 1992.
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