what would i say? how about what the fuck, for starters?

please dear Lord above, i do not mean to be unkind to the dead, as we lost norman hurricane smith only this year. but please, explain to me how a man who engineered nearly 100 Beatles songs, produced early Pink Floyd; and even produced one of the first rock concept albums by the Pretty Things, tell me: how did he also produce this saccharine piece of shit?

better yet — how on EARTH did it hit the Billboard Top 5?

i used to think this was Buddy Hackett on a dare. it wasn’t. apparently, the british mr. smith wrote this for another artist and ended up singing it himself. lucky for us, it was a major transatlantic hit.

luckier for us, the rest of his hits never made it across the pond.

G-d help anyone who rocks us like a hurricane. at least, like this one, who mostly rocks us to sleep.

it is who?

in 1973, the magical kingdom of spain hit second place in the annual crappiest song in the world contest eurovision contest with basque group mocedades and the song eres tu. (apologies; i haven’t yet figured out how to type accents. somewhere, my spanish-speaking college roommate is wagging her finger at me. somewhere, my old AOL localization folks are throwing dung my way.)

what the hell is the song about? some brilliant english scholars translated this as touch the wind, which mystifies little old, literal me. i may have muddled my way through the Zayres near Little Havana circa 1984 looking for a flea bomb (thanks to a girl in my dorm who brought in a stray cat), only to be greeted by employees who only spoke spanish (and to whom i only became understood once i said, and i quote: por matar los insectos — insectos, which may not even be a spanish word, i suspect) and who didn’t understand my initial query: como se dice Raid?;my daughter, a product of three years at a spanish immersion elementary school, may still be wildly embarrased by my american accent when i attempt to pronounce terms. but !caramba! i know eres tu is not about wind, unless someone is pointing a finger and implicating someone who recently tooted.

i especially loved learning about other translations of the song:

The song was re-released in English as “Touch The Wind” in later years. It was subsequently released in German: Das bist Du (“You are that…”), French: C’est pour toi (“It is for you…”), Italian: Viva noi (“Long live us”), and Basque: Zu zara (“You are…”).

it’s like an odd game of telephone.

any song entered into the annual eurovision contest is usually not something i want forcefed into my ears. i don’t know what the hell happens in the world each year when the worst in music somehow rises to the top of the eurovision experience. surely, all the best in music cannot be centered here in the US of A, right? luckily, we in america are often shielded from that. sadly, eres tu broke through that happy little iron curtain — i blame francisco franco, who was not yet still dead at that juncture, not sure — and became a hit in america.

and it has been haunting elevators ever since.

hold on to your genitals hats: it’s one of them there novelty songs.

in the fine tradition of benny hill and all those other comics who live for double entendres, meri wilson employed naughty little phrases to talk about her time with the guy who was supposed to putting in her phone. (i’ll spare you the need to listen to the song: the lyrics are here. gawsh.) apparently, it was based on a true experience. (and who says those penthouse letters aren’t true?)

now you may ask yourself: how does a song like this end up so popular? well, if david hasselhoff can be popular in germany; if the three stooges are actually considered funny, well, there’s a market for anything, i guess. this song is so many colors of awful; i can’t even bring myself to write about it. out of respect for the dead, i won’t go off on ms. wilson.

but you bet your ass i’m glad i live in times when the telephone man isn’t necessary when the phones go awry.

hey. i have a great idea. let’s write a top 40 smash hit. the topic?

a dead dog.

from the what the hell were they THINKING file: henry gross, a founding member of Sha Na Na, struck it out on his own and made an album. one of the songs on it was titled skin king. well, where do you go from there?

you change record companies, of course.

gross moved over to another record company, where he wrote this little ditty about the passing of beach boy carl wilson’s dog, shannon. i guess once you write a song with a title that might sound like a film vehicle for ron jeremy [warning, kids: don’t open that last link up at work or the bells will go off], where else do you go? as we learned as english majors reading john donne, there’s nothing closer to sex than death. so of course, in the classic tradition, gross made the leap… into an irish setter’s demise.

you old folks might remember the long distance dedication moment on kasem’s american top 40? well, someone wanted kasem to dedicate shannon to the requestor’s deceased dog snuggles. apparently, all hell broke loose when his coworkers programmed something upbeat before the doggy downer:

…I want a goddamn concerted effort to come out of a record that isn’t a fucking up-tempo record every time I gotta do a goddamn death dedication! It’s the last goddamn time; I want somebody who uses his fucking brain to not come out of a goddamn record… that’s up-tempo and I’ve got to talk about a fucking dog dying!

nothing like a dead-dog song to bring us all together.

yes, dear brother larry: this is my hunky heartthrob from the ’70s. thanks for the email request. how. did. you. know?

wherefore art thou now, defranco family? thy matching bell-bottom pantsuits, thy coordinated dance routines, thy canadian attempts to emulate the osmond / partridge / jackson family? where are thee, tony… marisa… nino… merlina… and benny?

well, look no further: they’re here.  tony’s selling real estate and apparently managing the family’s image.  and as for the others, well, not exactly clear from the website what they are doing, other than hopefully coasting a little bit from this monster hit of 1973. if no one ripped them off, that is.

in 1973, when i wasn’t basically still crying about the beatles breakup (which i did for about 10 years or so — did i mention i was a weird kid?), my little-girl-self was busy watching the partridges. i’ve bravely broken my silence about my well-known crush on keith partridge david cassidy. i read my tiger beat and 16 magazines, and i was damn well mad when tony defranco took up any real estate away from my man, especially when he was playing a watered-down version of a partridge song — playing along with hal blaine and the others who also backed the partridges, i believe!

oh, the humanity!

this song is better suited as a tv sitcom theme song. whenever i hear it, i think it should have ended up on love, american style. yep. i can handle about 30 seconds of it and then my head goes numb.

my hunky heartthrob. feh! big brother, you’re probably still pining away for marie osmond.

who is david geddes, and why did he assault the airwaves with this?

it’s bad enough he’s also responsible for the awful tearjerker the last game in the season (blind man in the bleachers).  but run, joey, run is one of the worst songs i have ever had the non-pleasure of hearing. and oh, i heard it a ton in 1975, when it became a hit.

so who is david geddes? well, there’s not a ton about him on the internet. i can’t seem to locate much beyond birth dates and nominal info on wikipedia. so i have a theory: this man is currently involved in an artist protection program. there’s no other explanation for his disappearance: his songs were so incredibly dismal, sacharrine, and painful, he simply chose to honorably not inflict them on people again lest he end up a real-life character in one of his musical melodramas.

in this one, the singer, aka joey (not to be confused with a kinder, gentler, and possibly dumber joey), is distressed. to make a long story short, he has been caught with his girlfriend by her father in a compromising position. the father goes after him. eventually, the father goes after him with a gun, only too bad for dad: his daughter gets in between joey and the bullet. and so ends our short-attention-span shakespearean theater. cue the tissues.

what kind of asshat lets his apparently-pregnant girlfriend take a bullet that was meant for him?

the music sounds like something out of a mid-1970s drama.

in short, this is a musical car crash. run from it.

this one’s for you, on the curb.

i remember hot child in the city for so very many reasons. for starters, i could not figure out whether nick gilder was a man or a woman. to me, that voice sounds awfully feminine. could nick be short for nicole, or nicolette? if i had only stayed up long enough to see gilder on a show like don kirshner’s rock concert, i might have had a chance at seeing a video and might have discerned his gender. but this was the 1970s, when MTV was merely a twinkle in mike nesmith‘s eye. chances of seeing a rock video in 1978 were pretty slim. (in hindsight, gilder looks a little bit like a tranny tom petty to me in the video; my 13 year old self would probably still have been confused had i seen him on film.)

i later found out that this song is about fashion runways and the young models who love them. (today, on jerry springer!) however, at 13, i thought this was a disturbing song. i couldn’t understand why a grownup person (who i suspected was male, but, as i mentioned, i wasn’t entirely certain) would want to sing about a hot child in the city, running wild and looking pretty. i didn’t know the word pedophile yet, but by gum, i knew creepy when i heard it. and this song, to my young, wild, and pretty ears, was c r e e p y with a capital C. i was perpetually mystified that it became a hit. didn’t other people know this was just so wrong on so many levels, i wondered.

the last wrong in my book? the song is musically uninspiring. gilder has gone on to write songs for a lot of other artists (hey, anyone remember this one? it’s his! and its definitely on my list should i ever go after songs that drive me batty from the 1980s!), and i suspect that some of them must be good. but this one? it’s difficult for me to get jazzed about a song that pretty much has two chords. it’s not impossible, of course, but it sure is tough.

and it would have to be a song with lyrics that don’t make me shudder in a dark alley.

ah, you young, misguided people born in the 1980s and beyond. you can’t imagine a world where phones have cords, where if you missed a television show, you missed it (thanks to no recording devices), where records played on record players with needles.

and you think dreamweaver is a song from wayne’s world.

i can’t begin to explain why on earth i loathe this song. but i’ll try. it could be the freaky, masturbatory overuse of synthesizers? (oh, are those sounds of nature i hear? stars colliding? unicorns chasing rainbows? dung beetles rolling around in dung?) is it the cryptic nature of the lyrics? i mean, why would a dreamweaver drive a train? was he a sub for casey jones? and how the hell does he make it to an astral plain?

wow. if i were a boomer, i’d be wildly embarrassed if i wrote poetry too awful for a high school creative writing magazine, with flowy, clichee-ridden phrases perhaps inspired by smoking marijuana — pot i’d point out which had potency of bongwater compared with the stuff the boomers’ kids are toking these days.

ah well. the song does remain with you for days. years. sometimes, it comes out at the weirdest moments. f’rinstance, eight years ago, we remodelled our house. the poor, beleagured project manager of the goat rodeo was a man named dave weaver. one day, BS pointed out something i had to bring up to dave, something that needed remediation. i don’t know what possessed me: the spirit of gary white? the exhaustion of being a mom to a non-sleeping one year old? the fact that i was on major percocet thanks to shingles?

but i looked at BS, and i burst into song:

oh-hhh, DAVE WEAVER, i believe you can fix my kitchen si-ink!

i think it was at that point that BS thought it best that he do all the communicating with the remodelling team.

i’m telling you, people. friends do not let friends listen to dreamweaver. (which i suppose means that i’m a crappy friend now that i’ve provided it to you. you’re welcome.)

i love a good challenge. and every year, as november rolls around, its time for national blog posting month, aka nablopomo. (some people liked blogging daily so much, they decided to create themes for every. single. month that’s a little too hardcore for a free spirit like myself.)

last year, i picked a crazy theme: media mom month. you can read more about these reviews of books and music i loathe or love for kids simply by taking the wayback machine and plugging in november 2007. (kidding.) or, you can simply click here, start at the bottom, and work your way through..

this year, i pondered and pondered: what on Dog’s Green Earth can i write about consistently for a month? i know so many people (3) who are fascinated by the minutae that takes up space in my cranium, but what is something i adore (besides my family) and something i could rant about for 30 days… at least?

and my inspiration came from a least expected place: a recent heated email discussion with my brother larry, AKA the man politically to the right of Atilla the Hun. i don’t remember who started it, though i suspect i was the instigator; i always was, my brother will tell anyone within earshot. you see, my brother is the Dean of All Bad 1970s Music.  no one i know (including myself) has a more encyclopedic knowledge of bad 1970s music.

so there we were, flinging youtube videos back and forth, each song getting worse and worse. and it came to me: write about Blatantly Bad 1970s Music! It will be hard to pick the firm favorites, but someone has to do it.

thus, i’m suspending guilty pleasure mondays this month; probably writing little about the election (unless i achieve nirvana after the election is over); and certainly not telling any tales from Hellboy’s Realm. i’m focusing on the awfullest of the awful.

and i take requests, so bring them on.

so pull on your polyester. we’ll get down. we’ll get funky.

and then we’ll get back up again.