“Ebony and Ivory” by Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder (1982)

One person’s view:  “An important lesson I learned as a kid, watching the video for this awful awfulness, was that people you love, or simply admire, always let you down.” – blackmore4 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.40 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1982  

Paul McCartney isn’t known for his protest songs.  He’s just not the type of person who gets angry enough to write or sing them effectively.  Even when he focuses on animal rights and vegetarianism, causes that he cares passionately about, he usually winds up with something like “Meat Free Monday”.  That song leaves me with the impression that I could take a bite out of a live calf right in front of him, and he’d be fine with it as long as it’s on a different day of the week.

Let’s look at a few of his efforts at angry music.  There’s “Big Boys Bickering”, in which he literally cusses about politicians but doesn’t specify who he is mad at or why.  There’s “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”, which may be his most potent and direct political song but not one that he followed up with any notable action.  Many people expected him to join the I.R.A. or assassinate a member of the Royal Family after that, and he never did.  One time he made a song called “Angry” that had some angry lyrics, but he sounded like he was having too much fun on it to really be upset.  Let’s face it:  Paul McCartney is not Rage Against the Machine.  He’s more like the Machine.

So, it’s no surprise that “Ebony and Ivory” is one of the least angry songs about racism ever written.  It’s so blasé about the issue that the apartheid government of South Africa didn’t bother banning it until Stevie Wonder antagonized them over something else a couple of years later.

With that in mind, I’m going to judge “Ebony and Ivory” on its musical merits rather than all of the social progress that didn’t happen after it was released.  It’s a cute but repetitive song with one of those unintentionally hilarious videos that were so common in 1982.  It deserved to hit #8 on the Hot 100 and get some moderate airplay for a couple months.  It did not deserve to spend 7 weeks at #1 and be heard every 15 minutes on the radio in every godforsaken family station wagon that was driving 13 hours to Myrtle Beach that summer.  And yes, I speak from having lived this trauma.

But the legacy of “Ebony and Ivory” is more damaging than just a ruined road trip.  It set the stage for the primary duet formula of the 1980s:  1) Get two superstars together, often two people who have much less chemistry with each other than what we heard from Paul and Stevie.  2) Have them record material that is far inferior to anything that either of them would have come up with on his own.  3) Watch it soar up the charts before anyone gets the chance to say, “You know, that really wasn’t such a great idea.”

I’ll cite a particularly egregious example of this type of pairing.  In 1984, I began hearing excited talk on the radio and on MTV that Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger had worked on a song together.  My brother and I tuned in as one of the local radio stations premiered the highly awaited track.  After listening to four and a half minutes of a repetitive guitar riff and the most amateurish rhymes imaginable, both of us spontaneously burst into laughter.  “State of Shock” was the least amount of effort anyone had put into a record all year, and yet we knew it was going gold.

“Ebony and Ivory” is not as bad as many of these later duets.  But in a year that saw major successes by the J. Geils Band, Joan Jett, John Cougar Mellencamp, Men at Work, and the Go-Go’s, there was no need for a trite bit of adult contemporary to become the biggest song of the summer.

My rating:  4 / 10

“The One That You Love” by Air Supply (1981)

One person’s view:  “The music is uninteresting at its best, but usually it’s actually bad or annoying.” – ListyGuy @ Rate Your Music (reviewing the The One That You Love LP)

The public’s view:  2.12 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1981

Radio programming expert Guy Zapoleon theorizes that pop music radio (and, by extension, the Hot 100 chart) is locked into a never-ending cycle that repeats itself roughly once every ten years.  There’s a boom period in which everyone and their uncle is listening to top 40 radio, and everybody knows and tolerates the songs that are topping the charts.  After a while, the music industry starts pushing the genre boundaries and stations are forced to play more divisive records that many people dislike.  Ratings begin to fall.  Eventually, some pop stations splinter off into other formats while the remaining ones lapse into a conservative, defensive posture.  This leads to a period known as a “doldrums” in which top 40 radio is dominated by dull ballads and older, overplayed records, while only a few newer tracks are able to break onto the airwaves.  Eventually there is some kind of stimulus, perhaps a new source of competition, that forces radio stations to snap out of their trance.

Although the Zapoleon Cycle had not yet been discovered, it is clear in hindsight that the storm clouds were gathering in 1979.  That was the year that one of my local pop music stations, in a fit of comically bad timing, switched to an all-disco format.  This station had been the American Top 40 affiliate, and now there was no way for me to hear Casey Kasem.  Two new broadcasters arrived soon afterwards, but they failed to fill the gap.  They played a freshly invented format that was marketed under various names:  “adult contemporary”, “soft rock”, “lite rock”, and “auditory torture”.  My parents bought into the hype and I was made to hear these new FM stations often.  Meanwhile, the remaining top 40 outlet desperately tried to retain older listeners by playing the same wimpy songs as these upstarts.  By the time 1981 arrived, listening to the radio was as much fun as being stuck behind someone going 50 m.p.h. in the passing lane on the freeway.  We were in the depths of a doldrums.

You could make a strong case for Christopher Cross as the poster boy for the doldrums, but he at least had some critical acclaim and Grammy-winning gravitas.  Lionel Richie probably made more money off of the crisis than anyone else, but he hadn’t yet completely squandered the R&B credibility that he had earned from the Commodores.  In my opinion, no act symbolizes the 1980s doldrums more than Air Supply.  The success of Air Supply depended entirely on the soft rock dominance of the radio dial.  The band’s record sales soared along with that dynamic in 1980, and then collapsed when stations revitalized their playlists in 1983 and 1984 after realizing that they were losing out to MTV.

Although the group is forever linked to that dark era, I don’t think that Air Supply is nearly as bad as the history books say.  Their songs usually had a strong melody and a decent hook which made them more palatable than the truly sleepy ballads that were so pervasive in the early 1980s.  (I’d rather hear literally any Air Supply record than Kenny Rogers singing “Lady”.)  Air Supply mixed things up by using two lead singers, and unlike most bands with multiple lead singers the members weren’t constantly threatening to punch each other in the face.  Admittedly, they followed a formula:  start with the word “love” and then string related stuff around it.  If there is an Air Supply song about a topic other than love, I’ve never heard it.  But they were masters of this formula, and they didn’t attempt a half-assed pivot to some other genre when the adult contemporary gravy train dried up.  I respect them.  That being said, “The One That You Love” reached #1 only through the capriciousness of the chart gods.

“The One That You Love” was composed by guitarist and co-lead singer Graham Russell before outside writers commandeered most of the band’s output.  The song features some inelegant lyrics about a couple that is on the verge of splitting up.  “We have the right, you know,” is probably the most political statement that Air Supply has ever made, but we never learn which right they are referring to.  Freedom of the press?  Indictment by grand jury?  And when Russell comes in on the bridge, he sings his one and only line in an absurdly high voice that doesn’t fit with anything else.  I think he’s supposed to represent a supernatural presence who warns the other singer that time has run out to convince his woman to stay.  Maybe she invoked her right to a speedy trial and is getting the hell out of the song.

As muddled as it is, it’s no surprise that Rate Your Music users have given “The One That You Love” the lowest rating of any of Air Supply’s major hits.  Yet Russell also wrote two of Air Supply’s very best songs:  “Lost in Love” and “All Out of Love”.  (Did I mention that these guys really liked singing about love?)  Either of these would have represented the band honorably in the pantheon of #1 singles, but both fell just short of that chart position.  I especially like “Lost in Love”, though I cringe at some aspects of the production.  Were those whooshing noises added deliberately, or did someone keep flushing the toilet in the studio while the band was working?

We’re now up to the point at which music videos play a role in how we remember each #1 hit.  At 1:22 of “The One That You Love” there is a slow motion scene of singer Russell Hitchcock watching a woman go down a playground slide.  If you could sum up the 1980s doldrums with one ridiculous visual, this would be it.  Air Supply has complained that MTV never played their videos, but maybe the network did them a favor on this one.

My rating:  5 / 10

“Do That to Me One More Time” by the Captain & Tennille (1980)

One person’s view:  “This song is such a failure that it makes ‘Afternoon Delight’ sound like ‘Let’s Get It On.’” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.30 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1978 to 1980

It’s little wonder that I latched on to the Billboard charts when I did, because 1978 and 1979 were a pretty good time for hit music.  Unfortunately, that means I’m hard pressed to find any stinkers from those two years to highlight on this blog.  There were a few slow-moving ballads that get mediocre retrospective reviews, but there’s no consensus that any of them is a genuine outrage against humankind.  And Rupert Holmes nearly achieved “bad #1” status with “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”, but that song still has something of a fan base.  This is disappointing, because it would have been more fun to pick apart Holmes’s bizarre infidelity tale than to analyze the record I’m covering today.

“Do That to Me One More Time” took a long while to climb the charts to #1, probably because radio programmers and the public needed time to warm up to its overtly sexual theme.  No one should have been surprised by the lyrics, however, because the Captain & Tennille had been hinting at this for years.  They’d already reached the top 10 with “The Way I Want to Touch You” and “You Never Done It Like That”.  If the husband and wife team had continued their recording career, Toni Tennille might have next written a song called “I’m Gonna Jump Over That Piano and Straddle You”.  Good thing that they decided to go in a different direction in the 1980s, with Tennille hosting a talk show and singing big band music while the Captain apparently did a whole lot of nothing.  Perhaps he finally worked on getting that boating license.

There are a lot of bad reviews of this song, and some of them stress just how repulsive it is to contemplate the Captain & Tennille being intimate with each other.  Yet this was an actual married couple – not an artificially assembled couple like Peaches & Herb or Daryl Hall & John Oates – so there was really nothing disgusting about it.  In fact, many of the people of their time seemed to think that Toni Tennille and Daryl Dragon looked really cute together.  The comments sections of their YouTube videos are populated by middle-aged fans who say they had a crush on one or the other when they were kids in the 1970s.  This trend must have missed my city.  My peers admired the beauty of Linda Ronstadt and Donna Summer, but no one ever put up posters of Toni Tennille except maybe at dental offices that were advertising teeth whitening procedures.

Some of the criticism is probably ageist.  The Captain & Tennille were already in their mid 30s by the time they became famous, and nobody wants to hear about people over 30 having sex.  We all know it happens occasionally, but it doesn’t need to be scrutinized.  I can think of only one other singer from that era who recorded a lot of sexual songs despite starting her career late:  Roberta Flack.  She was often singing about making love or celebrating her love, and then at age 54 she had a hit duet about setting the night to music.  I never thought that Flack was too old for this material, but as a kid I was always grossed out when Casey Kasem reminded me that she had once been a schoolteacher.  I really didn’t want to know what went on in teachers’ bedrooms, especially because I attended Catholic schools and many of my teachers were 80-year-old nuns.  Why couldn’t Roberta Flack record a less libidinous song like “The Safety Dance” or “Rock Me Amadeus” so that I could enjoy her music for a change?

The production and arrangement of “Do That to Me One More Time” are legitimate targets for critique.  The duo enlisted the respected saxophonist Tom Scott for the track, and a sultry saxophone would have been perfect for a record like this.  Instead, Scott played an electronic horn known as a Lyricon.  From what I can gather, he owned the first Lyricon ever sold and it was a very expensive instrument.  I can understand why he would want to get his money’s worth out of it, but this wasn’t the best venue.  The Lyricon comes into the song like a toddler wandering into the bedroom at exactly the wrong moment.  It reminds me of how the kazoo noises help defuse any sexuality on Ringo Starr’s “You’re Sixteen”.  That was a positive for Ringo’s record, but on “Do That to Me One More Time” the Lyricon kills whatever mood might have been there.

Most people were happy that “Do That to Me One More Time” did not have a long shelf life on top 40 radio in the 1980s.  It did, however, shape the Captain & Tennille’s legacy.  When the notorious Parents Music Resource Center formed in 1985, it named the duo as one of the industry’s bad influences on children – even though no child had voluntarily listened to their music in years.  Sadly, the Captain & Tennille didn’t use this opportunity to line up an opening slot for W.A.S.P.  They could have called it the “Do That to Me Like a Beast One More Time” tour.

My rating:  3 / 10

“You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone (1977)

One person’s view:  “In short, vast overplay completely eliminated anything positive the song had to offer.” – DonKarnage @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.76 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1977 and many years thereafter

The summer of 1978 was my great awakening.  This was when I discovered that the songs I heard on the airwaves weren’t just an alternating series of joy and pain, delivered in three-and-a-half-minute bursts.  The relative popularity of these songs was intended to be measured, analyzed, and debated endlessly, just as sports enthusiasts did with the performance of their favorite athletes.  The fountain of all music data was a magazine called Billboard and its feature known as the Hot 100.  And a man named Casey Kasem – an infallible hero on par with Abraham Lincoln – fought his way through the radio static each week to play the 40 records that were atop the Hot 100 chart.

In those pre-Wikipedia days, information wasn’t always straightforward to obtain.  If a sports fan wanted to know how many RBIs Joe Morgan produced last season, he might have to buy dozens of packs of random baseball cards.  He’d get six Biff Pocorobas before his first Joe Morgan.  Music fans didn’t have it much better, because Billboard was prohibitively expensive and it didn’t even come with bubble gum.  I listened to Casey’s American Top 40 program when I could, but it was impossible to make a consistent commitment to it.  I was eight years old, you know, so I had other responsibilities.

One day, a record store manager noticed my intense fascination with the copy of the Hot 100 that was displayed above the bin of 45 RPM singles.  Probably assuming that I had autism, she offered me a stack of old Billboard issues that were set to be thrown out.  I absorbed many important facts from these magazines, including the legend of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life”.  That song had recently occupied the #1 spot on the Hot 100 for an astounding ten weeks, becoming the most successful record in history.  I knew that its achievement would likely never be equaled in my lifetime, because even the great Andy Gibb could only manage seven weeks on top with “Shadow Dancing”.

As the holidays approached, Casey Kasem announced that he was going to count down the top 100 songs of 1978!  The spectacle was set to start on New Year’s Eve at 9 AM and continue for the next eight hours.  This was one of the most exciting things that had happened in my life up to that point, and I had no intention of skipping it.  Unfortunately, New Year’s Eve fell on a Sunday.  Shortly after the show began I heard the three most dreaded words in the English language:  “Time for church!”  I protested mightily, but was forced to put on my most uncomfortable clothes and miss the next hour and a half of Casey.  My brother was deemed too disruptive to attend church, so he got to stay home with my mom.  They assured me that they would write down the songs in my absence.

Church dragged even more slowly than usual that week.  How could this man blather for so long about things that happened two thousand years ago while such a major cultural event was taking place?  When I got home, I looked at the list of songs I had missed.  “Flash Light” by Parliament?  “Get Off” by Foxy?  “Native New Yorker” by Odyssey?  What the hell?  I accused my brother of pranking me, but my mother insisted that these were real songs that Casey had played.  The records must have sold lots of copies, as evidenced by their placement on the year-end countdown, but they had never aired on any of the local radio stations.  It would be many years before I got to hear any of them for the first time.

“You Light Up My Life” ranked at #3 on the 1978 countdown as a hold-over from 1977, but it already seemed like an artifact of the Pleistocene Epoch.  I had stopped hearing it on the radio months ago.  Player’s “Baby Come Back”, the song at #7, was barely any newer yet it was still glued to the turntable at every station.  Boy, was I sick of “Baby Come Back”.  The only good thing about going to church was that they never once used “Baby Come Back” as the communion hymn.

In the space of a year, Debby Boone’s record-setting hit had gone from ubiquity to pariah.  And it wasn’t just the gatekeepers at radio – the people who had arbitrarily deprived us of Foxy and Parliament – who were to blame.  Nobody wanted to admit having bought one of those two million copies of “You Light Up My Life”, and it has never had a comeback.  Today its Rate Your Music score is hardly any better than “Disco Duck” and Donny Osmond’s “Go Away Little Girl”, and is well below that of “Torn Between Two Lovers”.  What’s going on here?  I mean, it really isn’t that bad of a song.

I think “You Light Up My Life” tried to be too many things to too many people.  It could be a love song.  It could be a religious song.  It could be an ode to the Sun.  And Debby Boone’s voice was adequate, but not particularly memorable.  It didn’t help that she was ordered to exactly imitate another woman’s vocals after that other singer had a disagreement with the composer and was dropped from the project.  (Apparently, the guy who wrote “You Light Up My Life” wasn’t the most pleasant individual to work with.)  As a jack of all trades and master of none, ten weeks at #1 was enough to burn the song out so badly that few people ever wanted to hear it again.

I’d rank “You Light Up My Life” in the middle of the pack of 1970s ballads – or even slightly ahead.  It’s not a great pack to be in, but at least Debby Boone had her one big moment in the spotlight.  And, unlike the guy who sang “Baby Come Back”, she didn’t emit an eardrum-exploding high-pitched yelp near the end of her song.  That dude from Player must have gotten his underwear painfully twisted.  I know how it is, buddy.  I’ve had to wear church pants too.

My rating:  5 / 10

“Da Doo Ron Ron” by Shaun Cassidy (1977)

One person’s view:  “Cassidy’s hollow, breathy tone makes a classic Wall of Sound single sound like utter garbage.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.90 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1977

The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” originated from one of the legendary recording sessions produced by Phil Spector and featuring acclaimed studio musicians like Hal Blaine.  Sonny and Cher were even in attendance for it.  The song is considered an all-time girl group classic, but it only reached #3 on the Hot 100.  When 18-year-old Shaun Cassidy boldly recorded a cover version, his remake outperformed the original and went all the way to #1.  Let’s look at why music critics have never been pleased by this turn of events.  I don’t think we’ll need the Hardy Boys to solve this mystery.

If there were a factory to make teen idols – and I’m not so sure there isn’t – it would base all of the specifications on Shaun Cassidy.  (Today, though, the factory would probably make a Korean version.)  I didn’t watch Cassidy’s TV show and only occasionally heard his music on the radio, so my main exposure to him was via magazine covers.  Whenever I went to the drug store to read the latest Song Hits without buying it, he would be grinning at me from the Tiger Beat on the next rack.  He was presented as the ideal of male attractiveness, but I never saw any guys in my town trying to emulate him.  Those who did were probably in the hospital after being beaten up for wearing an outfit that was half overalls and half bell bottoms, as Cassidy did on one of the “Da Doo Ron Ron” picture sleeves.

Although Cassidy was a pinup boy, that doesn’t necessarily mean that his music sucked.  In fact, there are some areas of “Da Doo Ron Ron” in which he arguably improved on the Crystals’ version.  I know we’re not supposed to criticize Phil Spector for anything other than his handling of firearms, but his Wall of Sound could stand to be dialed back a bit.  An Armoire of Sound or a Bookcase of Sound might have been better than all of the instruments that Spector crammed into “Da Doo Ron Ron”.  Cassidy’s remake has the benefit of 15 years of advances in studio equipment and production techniques, and there’s nothing wrong with preferring his well-polished record to Spector’s innovative one.

Then again, the cleaner-sounding backing track on Shaun Cassidy’s version comes with a heavy price:  Shaun Cassidy.  In “Da Doo Ron Ron”, he sounds like he’s trying to get a dog excited about going for a car ride.  “Somebody told me that her name was Jill.  Yes they did, boy!  Now who wants to get a distemper shot?”  It’s the type of singing that might work in a commercial for Knott’s Berry Farm, but it’s a significant downgrade from the Crystals.

If this was the only Shaun Cassidy record, I might dismiss him as just another actor who should have stuck with acting.  But his other two top 10 hits – “That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Hey Deanie” – show that he knows what to do with an Eric Carmen power pop tune.  I can’t say that his versions of these songs are objectively better than the ones Carmen recorded, but Cassidy is definitely in his wheelhouse.  Not so for his remake of “Do You Believe In Magic”, in which he uses his super fun amusement park jingle voice once again.  Someone should have told him to stop doing that.

We’ve explored the mystery of why a remake of a beloved song is one of the most poorly regarded #1 hits of the 1970s.  Now let’s see if the Hardy Boys can figure out what happened to Nancy Drew when ABC kicked her off of her own TV series so that Shaun Cassidy could have more screen time.  I hope the trail doesn’t lead to Phil Spector’s house.

My rating:  6 / 10

“Torn Between Two Lovers” by Mary MacGregor (1977)

One person’s view:  “Pathetic and gross.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.47 / 5.00, in the bottom 25% of #1 hits from 1977

Here’s an amazing statistic:  We’re up to the 20th entry on this blog and yet “Torn Between Two Lovers” is the only one so far to feature a female on lead vocals.  That’s because I haven’t found any pre-1977 #1 songs by women that are considered awful by overwhelming consensus.  Even the Singing Nun has earned enough grudging respect from critics and listeners to stave off a sarcastic write-up here.  While we can venture a few guesses as to the reason for the gender imbalance, it probably boils down to sexism in the music industry.  It’s far easier for a terrible song by a man to hit #1 than a terrible song by a woman.  This shittiness gap (as the experts call it) persists into the 21st century, thanks in part to Maroon 5, but it is less noticeable than it once was.

“Torn Between Two Lovers” was written by two male songwriters, but it is sung from a woman’s vantage point.  She confesses to her husband that she is having an adulterous relationship.  In songs of this nature, the cheater almost always grovels for forgiveness and tells their partner how much they regret their own actions.  One of the best and most obvious examples of this is Usher’s “Confessions (Part 1 to N)”.  More rarely, there will be a song by a Shaggy who unconvincingly denies all of the evidence of infidelity.  “Torn Between Two Lovers” takes an entirely different tactic:  telling the partner to simply accept the cheating.

Lyrics like this can work if they are accompanied by some defiant justification of the philandering.  For example, the woman might point out that her husband has been screwing around too, and that she’s only doing what is fair.  Or maybe the cheater is the type of person who needs lots of partners to stay happy, and the husband should have known that when he married her.  “Torn Between Two Lovers” is too wimpy to succeed in this way.  It’s mostly just a subtle but emasculating put-down of the spouse.  The singer says that her husband has been an adequate one, but that the other guy is great too and she is not going to give him up.  She hints that the other man is the only one who can satisfy her in the bedroom.  She then tells her husband that she hopes that this unexpected revelation doesn’t cause him to leave her.  I guess she still needs him around to do the dishes and mow the lawn.

Let’s contrast Mary MacGregor’s rendition of “Torn Between Two Lovers” with Amy Winehouse’s similarly themed “You Know I’m No Good”.  Winehouse sounds like a bad-ass, and her attitude makes the scenario more acceptable.  She probably would cheat on any guy, and her boyfriend shouldn’t feel bad because there’s nothing that he could have done any differently.  But MacGregor has a particularly sweet voice that exudes kindness with every note.  Hearing these words from her is like Mister Rogers telling you that he’s moving just so he doesn’t have to be your neighbor anymore.  Oh, but he still wants to come back every few weeks to borrow some of your tools.

To her credit, MacGregor knew that the song was disgusting.  She resented that it became the central focus of her career, and that many people wrongly assumed the lyrics were autobiographical.  But if it wasn’t for her well above average singing talent, I’m skeptical that this would have been a #1 hit.  Were there really that many women who could relate to this storyline and bought the record?  I doubt that any men bought it.

On the other hand, men seem to be driving the views for the performance video I embedded above.  (NOTE:  This clip has since been removed from YouTube and I had to replace it with the studio version of the song.  You can find poor quality clips of the same performance here or here.)  I know this because YouTube says that the most replayed parts of the clip are in its second half, which is when somebody apparently turned up the air conditioning way too high in the room where MacGregor was singing.  I’m more intrigued by the large neon lighted letters that spell out her name.  How much money went into this prop that probably got used only a few times before she faded away as a one-hit wonder?  Were the letters then repurposed for use by another entertainer?  It’s too bad that “Mary MacGregor” can’t be rearranged to spell “Yvonne Elliman” or “Walter Egan”.

You’ll be glad to know that I’ll be spotlighting another female vocalist soon.  Here’s a hint:  the letters in her name can be rearranged to spell “Bob boned ye”.

My rating:  4 / 10

“Disco Duck” by Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots (1976)

One person’s view:  “This song is to baby boomers what LMFAO’s ‘Sexy and I Know It’ is to millennials – an unholy mixture of shameless trend-hopping and lazy hack comedy that most people would rather just forget ever existed.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes The Year

The public’s view:  1.74 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1976

It used to be quite common for comedic novelty songs to reach #1 on the Hot 100.  In 1976, there were two that managed this feat:  “Convoy” and “Disco Duck”.  There have been none in the 48 years since, unless you count near-novelties like “I’m Too Sexy” and “Thrift Shop” or unintentionally funny songs such as “Sussudio” and “Kokomo”.  Evidently, “Disco Duck” was the novelty hit that ended all novelty hits.

While doing this project, I’ve been surprised by the amount of unvarnished hatred that is now directed at these novelty singles that once filled our lives with so much mirth.  One of the reviewers I rely most heavily on, dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music, even calls “Disco Duck” the absolute worst #1 of all time.  Given the vitriol that he’s employed against other records, this is quite the statement.  But my view is that novelty songs need to be judged by their own standards.  A man turning into a duck on the dance floor is a stupid idea for a song, but “Disco Duck” is supposed to be stupid.  This record was made by Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots – not Dr. Linus Pauling & His Faculty of Ivy League Professors.

Let’s give the Cast of Idiots credit for how well the backing track to “Disco Duck” turned out.  Dees hired some quality Memphis studio musicians for this effort, and you can hear their work as an instrumental on the flip side, “Disco Duck (Part 2)”.  I think the instrumental version could have been a hit on its own.  Remember, this was the mid 1970s and we had stuff like “Fly, Robin, Fly” floating around.  As long as it was disco, someone would buy it.

Unfortunately, Dees – a radio personality with no apparent musical training – decided to sing the A-side of the single himself.  Remember when I wrote that Ringo Starr is often labeled a terrible singer?  Dees makes Ringo sound like Pavarotti by comparison.  His lead vocals on “Disco Duck” may be the most amateurish of any #1 hit.  This doesn’t mean that the song would necessarily be improved by substituting a world-class performer in his place.  Barbra Streisand would have no idea what to do with a line like “Flapping my arms I began to cluck.”  However, Isaac Hayes or Tom Jones might have been able to elevate the vocal to a new level while maintaining the appropriate demeanor.

The bigger problem with “Disco Duck” is that the lyrics never fully develop the concept and leave too many questions unanswered.  Why does the gentleman periodically turn into a duck?  Was his DNA altered when he was bitten by a radioactive duck?  Is this some kind of ironic cosmic punishment for running over a duck with his car?  Who knows?  And who really cares?  It’s not like anything interesting happens as a result of this transformation.  The guy does the same things he was already going to do – dancing and chasing women – but now does them as a duck.

There’s nothing about waterfowl feeding patterns, biology, or social behavior in “Disco Duck”.  Dees could make a couple superficial changes to this song and turn it into a disco record about any other kind of animal, like an ocelot or an earthworm.  Please, no one tell him how easy this would be for a quick cash-in.  Aw, shit.  Too late. 

My rating:  4 / 10

“Afternoon Delight” by Starland Vocal Band (1976)

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.

My rating:  9 / 10