“MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris (1968, #2)

One writer’s view:  “Although there are many songs I hate more than ‘MacArthur Park,’ it’s hard to argue with survey respondents who chose it as the worst.  All the elements are there:  A long song with pretentiously incomprehensible lyrics that was popular enough to get a huge amount of air play and thus was hammered deeply and permanently into everybody’s brain.” – Dave Barry in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, noting that “MacArthur Park” was voted the worst song of all-time by his readers

The public’s view:  3.38 / 5.00

What’s worse than a Bad Top Ten Hit?  A Bad Top Ten Hit that’s so long that your fingernails visibly grow during it.  But at least songwriter Jimmy Webb put some unusual metaphors into “MacArthur Park”, helping to distinguish it from the millions of other excruciating compositions about lost love.  Let’s take a look at some of the imagery:

Someone left the cake out in the rain – Couples split up all the time and no one cares, but a dessert going to waste can bring listeners to tears.  “MacArthur Park” would probably be forgotten if not for this viscerally compelling lyric.  I’d just like to know why Webb chose such an unappetizing color for the “sweet green icing”.  Green is nature’s warning that an object might be a vegetable and probably isn’t going to be very tasty.

Old men playing checkers by the trees – Webb and his ex-girlfriend Suzy Horton frequently witnessed these geriatric battles of wits while picnicking together in L.A.’s MacArthur Park in the 1960s.  I imagine that they also heard the geezers wisecracking to everyone between games.  “Is that your cake or did the Jolly Green Giant have an abortion?”

I will drink the wine while it is warm – This is the narrator’s way of saying that he will seize the moment.  It is precisely the wrong moment to seize, however, because wine is supposed to be consumed while it is chilled.  He is evidently the kind of guy who will grab the bull by the legs, dive into the shallow end, and strike while the iron is cold.

[We] were pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants – The meaning of this line is not clear, but I have a theory.  When I think about striped pants, which isn’t often, I think of a vintage New York Yankees uniform.  I believe that Webb is analogizing his ill-fated courtship of Suzy Horton to Babe Ruth’s trousers:  it was a dirty, sweaty, and smelly affair, and it wasn’t always an appealing sight, but it deserves an exhibit in the Hall of Fame.

Some people consider these lyrics brilliant, while others believe they are pompous and absurd.  I lean toward the latter opinion, but the song is melodically interesting enough to have some merit regardless.  It’s unfortunate that Webb enlisted Richard Harris to bring it to life.  Harris was an actor, and he sings as if he’s auditioning for the Dubuque Community Theater’s musical production of Death of a Salesman.  This has prevented his rendition of “MacArthur Park” from being accepted as the definitive version, and has prompted dozens of more capable vocalists – ranging from Liza Minnelli to Donna Summer to Frank Sinatra to Carrie Underwood – to try to improve upon it.  Weird Al Yankovic even chose a parody of this 25-year-old relic as the lead single for his 1993 Alapalooza CD, which is one of very few times he has been woefully out of synch with the cultural zeitgeist.

Notwithstanding the results of Dave Barry’s poll, “MacArthur Park” is nowhere near the worst song ever.  As we shall soon see, it might not even be the worst song about the breakup of Jimmy Webb and Suzy Horton.  However, it doesn’t need to be reincarnated every few years with a new performance.  Let’s leave it in 1968 where it belongs.  Preferably in the rain.

My rating:  4 / 10

“Yummy Yummy Yummy” by the Ohio Express (1968, #4)

One person’s view:  “As far as bubblegum goes, this is definitely NOT ‘Sugar, Sugar’, but rather a joyless stomp sung by someone who sounds like he was forced to perform this at gunpoint.” – darth_tyrannus_rex @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.57 / 5.00

Ohio was on top of the world in the late 1960s.  The Buckeye State’s economy was booming because it produced the highest quality soap, car tires, and astronauts.  Then something terrible happened that would reverse the state’s fortunes and trigger an inexorable decline.

Ohio’s long downfall began around the time that a band called the Ohio Express scored its biggest hit:  “Yummy Yummy Yummy”.  This was almost certainly not a coincidence.  The tune had perhaps the worst central lyric of any song up to that point:  “Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy.”  The singer’s voice, which sounded as though he had inhaled a couple of Legos that were now blocking his sinuses, made the record even more unpleasant.  It was a cringeworthy listen and a pox on the reputation of the group’s apparent home state.

Shortly after “Yummy Yummy Yummy” completed its reign of terror on the airwaves, a fire erupted in the polluted Cuyahoga River.  River fires had long been a source of merriment for locals, and a great way to roast marshmallows, but this particular blaze attracted unwanted attention and turned Cleveland into a national punch line.  The Kent State massacre soon followed, giving Ohio another black eye.  In the ensuing decades, factories closed, businesses fled, and most of the major cities suffered steep population losses.  Ohio’s woes have only worsened in recent years, as its government has been rocked by massive corruption that would put New Jersey or Louisiana to shame.  It’s hard for voters to pay attention to the scandals anymore.  When an electric utility was caught bribing several top officials to secure a billion-dollar bailout, and two of the suspects committed suicide, the entire state let out a synchronized yawn upon hearing the phrase “electric utility”.  Everyone knows that Ohio tax dollars are supposed to be stolen more creatively than that, by funneling  them into quixotic ventures such as “charter schools” or “rare coin funds” or “Cleveland Browns stadiums” that are designed to enrich political donors while bringing no joy to anyone else.  Meanwhile, people of talent and good taste are no longer opting to be born in the state.  The land that once yielded Ulysses Grant, John Glenn, and Dean Martin is better known today for Jake Paul, Traci Lords, and JD Vance.  Consequently, many Ohioans now try to minimize their embarrassment by employing an Indiana accent whenever they travel.

All of this can be traced back to “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and the damage that it did to the state’s image.  But it was in fact a cruel hoax; no one from Ohio had anything to do with that record or any of the other four Ohio Express tracks that reached the top 40.  These annoying singles were churned out entirely by studio musicians in New York, but you wouldn’t know this if you went to an Ohio Express concert and saw five young men from Mansfield, Ohio performing them.  This was actually a group called Sir Timothy & the Royals, which had been recruited to go on tour under the Ohio Express name.  Audiences were falsely told that Sir Timothy and the other Ohioans were the same group that had made the hit songs, and the record sleeves even featured their picture.  It was this band that showed up to do “Yummy Yummy Yummy” on American Bandstand, and Dick Clark never figured out that he had been hoodwinked.  The scheme almost unraveled when the Royals were unable to play the latest Ohio Express hit, “Chewy Chewy”, at one of their shows because they had just learned of it that day after hearing it by chance on a car radio.  Say what you will about Milli Vanilli, but at least their manager kept them up-to-date on all of the songs that they didn’t sing.

The comparison to the Vanilli twins is a little unfair, because the Royals were a real band that had genuine talent.  There was nothing that tied them to the music from New York, however, and their singer stubbornly refused to jam anything up his nose to sound more like the guy who had done the vocals on the singles.  The producers could have hired a band from any state to take the blame for “Yummy Yummy Yummy”, and it’s Ohio’s misfortune that the song wasn’t credited to the Vermont Express or the Manitoba Express.

Almost every bad top ten hit has something good that can be said about it, and “Yummy Yummy Yummy” is no exception.  Its innovative sequence of opening chords helped inspire the first few notes of “Just What I Needed”, a song that was crucial to the early success of the Cars.  Without “Just What I Needed”, the members of the Cars might have had to pursue careers outside of music – and that is a bizarre thought.  It’s tough to imagine Ric Ocasek as an insurance salesman or a kindergarten teacher.  So was it worth destroying an entire state to bring about the creation of a classic song and the prominence of one of the all-time greatest rock bands?  Yeah, probably.

My rating:  3 / 10

“An Open Letter to My Teenage Son” by Victor Lundberg (1967, #10)

One critic’s view:  “It is hard in a mere magazine – short of rolling this page into a tube and orating through it – to convey the sanctimonious roundness of Lundberg’s voice.  ...  The minute he says ‘Dear Son’ you know he hates the kid.” – William Zinsser, “The Pitfalls of Pop’s Pompous Pop-Off”, Life, Jan. 5, 1968

The public’s view:  1.06 / 5.00

An Open Letter to My Teenage Son
Regarding “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son”

Dear Son.  You ask my reaction to Victor Lundberg’s “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son”.  First of all, I do not know how you learned of this obscure record that was released 40 years before you were born.  Perhaps it was included in one of those Guitar Hero games that you youngsters play?  It is the most poorly rated top ten hit of the 1960s, but some great men made poorly rated top ten hits in the 1960s:  Ray Stevens and Bobby Vinton.  If you believe that Victor Lundberg is a symbol of our nation, and that our heritage is worthy of this display of pride, you have my blessing to listen to him.

Some will unfairly judge you for being a Lundberg fan, just as I have been unfairly judged for my fondness of Men at Work.  Your mother told me that it is inappropriate to bribe a church organist to play “It’s a Mistake” during someone else’s wedding procession.  However, such transactions are part of our free enterprise system in the United States and are worth protecting, even if they displease your mother and her new husband.

Just as your mother has no right to judge me, you have no right to call your sister a glue sniffer merely because she spends her allowance on glue every week.  We must judge every human being on his own individual potential, and your sister has more potential than a glue sniffer has.  With her potential, she may someday be a telemarketer or perhaps even an unlicensed dentist.  You must accept responsibility for losing your last four bottles of glue rather than blaming your sister every time one disappears.

You ask whether you should order the riblets at Applebee’s.  This is a question each individual must answer within himself.  But are you to tell me that these pieces of bone, surrounded by barbecue sauce and tiny but delectable specks of meat, just happened?  That they simply fell off of a pig one day?  God is love, and He makes himself known through His glorious creation that is available only at Applebee’s.  If you reap the rewards commensurate with your own efforts, you will be eatin’ good in the neighborhood.

Remember that the menu at any restaurant is a guide and not a storm trooper.  Realize that many of the past and present generation have attempted to legislate whether you can substitute a salad for one of your sides, or even to tell you that a baked potato is available only after 4 PM.  This created your generation’s need to rebel against our society with fast casual dining, Uber Eats, and tapas.  All of these go against the principles upon which our country was founded.

You ask my opinion of the teacher who plays Victor Lundberg to her class every morning after the Pledge of Allegiance.  You ask my opinion of the factory owner who purchases copies of “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son” to give to his employees as their Christmas bonus, along with pamphlets titled Labor Unions:  Communism’s Foothold.  You ask my opinion of the disc jockey who locks himself in the radio studio and plays Lundberg’s record non-stop for 7 hours until he is tased by the police when he comes out to poop.  Well, maybe you didn’t ask any of that, but I’m going to tell you what I think anyway.

Each of the aforementioned individuals is employing the record as Victor Lundberg intended.  We all sometimes need to yell invective at a hippie peacenik, or at an impressionable person who is being swayed by that amoral lifestyle.  It is tempting to litter our off-the-cuff comments with insults directed at minorities, but that would detract from our core message.  We might also forget to muse about the existence and nature of God while condemning the treasonous bum.  Lundberg’s recorded speech helps us avoid these difficulties.  It appeases the enemy on the less impactful issues, like civil rights and male hairstyles, while allowing no room for disagreement on the sanctity of the Selective Service System.  It is a tirade that we can proudly broadcast to our unwilling audience.

This does not mean that people will enjoy hearing it, but that is not the point of “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son”.  It is not a record to be enjoyed.  It is one to be inflicted.

Yours truly,

Your infinitely wise and patriotic father

P.S.  I apologize that this letter is open.  I cannot seal it because the glue flaps are missing from all of my envelopes.  I must have lost them somehow.

My rating:  1 / 10

“Please Love Me Forever” by Bobby Vinton (1967, #6)

One critic’s view:  “[H]is light, ingratiating manner, applied in the same way to every song, was pleasant without ever becoming really involving.” – William Ruhlmann, in his AllMusic review of the Please Love Me Forever LP

The public’s view:  2.21 / 5.00

Bobby Vinton is the man who became massively successful by being oblivious to the changes in the world around him.  I wonder what his life is like today at age 90?  I bet he still has a Diners Club credit card.  He probably drives a Country Squire station wagon.  His friends told him there were some good movies being streamed, so he hooked his Betamax machine up to a creek.  And now he’s being made fun of on a blog, like it’s 2004 or something.

In the era of guitar rock, Motown, protest songs, and psychedelia, Bobby released an album with covers of bygone ballads like “It’s All in the Game”, “Young Love”, and “Who’s Sorry Now”.  This was out of touch even by Vintonian standards.  Nonetheless, the title track “Please Love Me Forever” somehow earned a prime spot at the 1967 musical dining table and pushed the Polish Prince back into the top 10 after a three-year absence.

Vinton was the third act to bring “Please Love Me Forever” to the Hot 100, following versions by Tommy Edwards in 1958 and Cathy Jean & the Roommates in 1961.  Edwards’s rendition is the best of the three, because it focuses our ears on the singer’s rich voice and not on the blathering sentiments that he is expressing.  These lyrics have less intellectual heft than a Valentine’s Day poem written by a 6th-grader, and it is best not to ponder them too deeply.  One of Bobby Vinton’s trademarks, however, is his clear diction that places the words of every chorus and every verse out in the open to be scrutinized.  In Bobby’s iteration of “Please Love Me Forever”, each line is conveyed with accuracy and sincerity, much in the way that his fellow Pittsburgh native Mister Rogers would speak.  This forces us to pay attention to the schmaltzy content.  When he gets to the bridge, I think:  “He’s alluding to the ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ prayer.  He isn’t going to recite the whole thing, is he?  Aw crap, he is.”

I also object to this line:  “You’re in my dreams nightly.”  This sounds romantic until you realize just how freaky and weird dreams are.  If you’re in a relationship with someone, and it’s progressed to the point where you’re asking them to love you forever, they will not be in your dreams nightly.  They will show up only rarely, and even then they will be miscast as a supporting character.  Your girlfriend might play the role of Annoying Classmate in your dream about repeating the 10th grade at age 36, or appear as Horrified Spectator #3 in your recurring nightmare about using a toilet that is inexplicably installed in a restaurant’s dining area.  When you finally get to enjoy an erotic dream, the star of it will be the scary bald woman with the face tattoos who you see gesticulating and cursing at random people at the bus stop by your office.  Too bad that the phrase “scary bald woman with the face tattoos” never fit into the meter and rhyme scheme of any of Vinton’s songs.

One common criticism of Bobby Vinton is that he didn’t grow as an artist despite having a long career.  His fans would say that was a good thing.  They didn’t want any surprises, and – aside from the scandalous use of foreign language lyrics in his 1974 hit “My Melody of Love” – he didn’t deliver any.  Most of Vinton’s songs were sappy love ballads, and he performed them all in that same Fred Rogers tone.  He embraced his identity as the Polish Prince without ever changing the “Prince” part of his nickname to an unpronounceable symbol.  He deserves credit for not chasing every trend that came along, or really any trend that came along, but I wish he hadn’t picked the crooner days of the 1950s to get stuck in.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Little Ole Man (Uptight – Everything’s Alright)” by Bill Cosby (1967, #4)

One person’s view:  “What’s supposed to be funny about this?  ...  There’s absolutely nothing in this song to enjoy.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.88 / 5.00

Before I begin today’s write-up, I want to mention that it is sometimes hard to separate opinions of a song from people’s feelings for the performer behind it.  This is especially true when a hit record was made by someone who now has an odious reputation.  Anita Bryant’s “Paper Roses” attracted some of the lousiest reviews of any top 10 hit from 1960, but I chose not to feature it here because I suspected that much of the criticism was directed at her personally rather than the song.  I expect I’ll face a similar dilemma when I get to Chris Brown.  Anyhow, in a totally unrelated development, Bill Cosby’s “Little Ole Man” is often listed among the worst hits of 1967.  I have to agree that it’s a bit of a stinker.

“Little Ole Man” is the tale of a senior citizen who complains about being run over by a train and by a herd of elephants, and who then later admits that neither of those catastrophes actually occurred.  We are never given a reason why he would lie about something so serious.  Maybe it is a Jussie Smollett-style hoax intended to slander the Elephant-American community, or perhaps the man is hoping that the railroad will pay him a quick settlement without asking why he still has all of his limbs.  Most likely, though, this is simply an elderly person who is very confused and should not be allowed outdoors by himself.  Someone probably stepped on his toes in 1918, and the addled old man now misremembers this incident and exaggerates it into something more recent and far more threatening.  Likening a minor foot-stepping to an elephant stampede is a stretch, even if the perpetrator was Fatty Arbuckle.

This is sometimes classified as a comedy recording because Cosby is a comedian and he tells the story as if it’s a joke.  However, “Little Ole Man” is only slightly funnier than Ray Stevens’s “Ahab, the Arab”, and in some ways is an even more disappointing experience.  For all its many faults, “Ahab” is at least kind enough to let us know right away what we are getting into.  “Little Ole Man” toys with us for a bit before letting us down.  The setup is promising and Cosby’s pacing is good, but then there is no payoff at the end – unless you think that an individual’s senility qualifies as a punch line.  If laughter is the best medicine, Dr. Cliff Huxtable is lucky he didn’t have his prescription privileges revoked.

The use of Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” as accompanying music is almost as baffling as the old man’s fibs.  Wonder’s song had reached #3 on the Hot 100 a year earlier, and Bill Cosby wisely realized that he couldn’t improve on it.  Nonetheless, he should have at least transformed it in some way instead of hiring a band to recreate it note-for-note.  The target demographic for “Little Ole Man” was people whose copies of “Uptight” had gotten broken or lost in the preceding year, and who were now willing to settle for an inferior version with a rambling story about dementia where Stevie’s singing used to be.  Somehow, there were enough consumers in this predicament for Cosby’s single to peak nearly as high on the charts as “Uptight”.  I hope this served as a good lesson for everyone to take better care of their Stevie Wonder records.

My rating:  2 / 10

“I Dig Rock and Roll Music” by Peter, Paul and Mary (1967, #9)

One person’s view:  “It’s sad actually because in the shallow well of songs actually written by Peter, Paul or Mary this is one of their more memorable melodies.  It just happens to be attached to a really pretentious set of lyrics.” – Remtiw @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.80 / 5.00

Peter, Paul and Mary built their brand around acoustic folk music and enjoyed only a brief time on top before the public moved on to other genres.  Many people can sympathize with this.  One day you have a vibrant career in coal mining, Visual Basic programming, or giving DEI seminars, and then the world changes and you are left fighting for relevance.  You can either reinvent yourself or else you can cling to the old ways for as long as possible while complaining bitterly about everyone and everything.  I guess another possibility would be to embrace your status as a nostalgia act, but that only works for musicians.  There isn’t a lot of nostalgia for Visual Basic.

The three folksters had too much integrity to abandon their roots, and they weren’t ready to go out on the oldies circuit opening up for Tennessee Ernie Ford.  That left bitterness and complaining as the most appealing option for them in 1967, and the result was “I Dig Rock and Roll Music”.  Many critics derided this record as an elitist jab at the rock bands that had usurped Peter, Paul and Mary’s popularity.  Being called elitist by a music critic is like being called ugly by Shrek, but the characterization has stuck with this song over the years.  It continues to be one of the more divisive hit singles of its time.

If “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” was intended as a vicious attack against rock ‘n’ roll, it didn’t succeed.  The song’s satires of the Beatles, the Mamas & the Papas, and Donovan come across as playful style parodies much like those later perfected by Weird Al.  The imitations are too well-studied to be taken as mean-spirited, and the performers that the trio chose to mock were popular and highly regarded.  I get the impression that PP&M really did dig rock ‘n’ roll music, but were too embarrassed to admit it without using light sarcasm as a cover.  If Peter, Paul and Mary had truly wanted to make a snobbish point about music becoming overly commercial or devoid of any serious meaning, I think they would have picked on easier targets like Tommy Roe or the Monkees.

While the song is more of a good-natured roast of rock ‘n’ roll than a pointed insult, it is sincere in its criticism of the media environment that discouraged music with overtly political messages.  However, Peter, Paul and Mary were about to demonstrate the weakness in their argument by recording a song called “Eugene McCarthy for President (If You Love Your Country)”.  Radio stations had good reasons not to touch unsubtle material like this, otherwise they would be stuck giving equal time to eight other candidates.  Listeners would tune out after hearing “The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Deems Hubert Humphrey Tolerable” back-to-back with “Bobby Kennedy Has 11 Kids Who Will All Grow Up to Be Non-Insane People Who Treat Animal Carcasses with Respect”.  Meanwhile, DJs would be double-checking themselves constantly to ensure that they didn’t play a Motown record adjacent to “George Wallace Is a Groovy Guy”.

“I Dig Rock and Roll Music” wasn’t particularly effective as a protest, because any of the outcomes that might have been acceptable to PP&M were not going to work for anyone else.  Nobody wanted preachy music that told them who to vote for.  No radio stations were going to drop the Beatles in favor of Pete Seeger.  The Mamas & the Papas weren’t going to take a break from their drug binges to offer thoughtful observations on Thurgood Marshall’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  Nonetheless, Peter, Paul and Mary’s upbeat and entertaining song can be appreciated despite the unreasonable expectations they had for society.  The resentment that went into it only makes it more intriguing.

My rating:  7 / 10

“Somewhere, My Love” by Ray Conniff and the Singers (1966, #9)

One person’s view:  “How did this sh*t ever get so popular?  You see these albums everywhere but no one wants them.” – ottoshutoff @ Tapeheads.Net, inquiring as to the appeal of Ray Conniff

The public’s view:  2.57 / 5.00

I could write a long essay about “Somewhere, My Love”, but reading it would be almost as boring as listening to the song.  Instead, I’m going to use most of this entry to tell you about a superior Ray Conniff record that I encountered in my childhood.

The story begins on a Christmas morning in that decade we like to call the 1970s.  Santa Claus had been duly apprised of my need for a Kenner Close ‘n’ Play, a children’s phonograph that was frequently advertised during my Saturday morning cartoons.  Judging by the TV commercials, a Close ‘n’ Play was the main ingredient of a happy life.  Simply close the lid to play music and open it to stop.  Hours of fun!

But there was no Close ‘n’ Play under the tree on that day.  Instead, there was a note from Santa.  This was highly unusual; lots of kids wrote letters to the old guy but this was the only time I heard of him writing back.  The note informed me that Santa was unwilling to tarnish the North Pole’s strong brand by delivering low quality junk such as Close ‘n’ Plays.  He had brought me a different record player which he believed was better.  It was trickier to use than Kenner’s model, but Santa said that I was a big boy now and could handle it.

This was a clear breach of my contract with Santa.  I had foregone many opportunities for mischief over the preceding months with the expectation that I would get a Close ‘n’ Play.  But before I could grab the Yellow Pages and look for a lawyer, my parents told me that Mr. Claus was right.  Kenner’s product might be a hot item at the moment, but this fad was doomed to oblivion in another 5 or 10 years.  I wouldn’t impress any ladies in 1995 by inviting them to my apartment to hear the latest Neil Sedaka single on a Close ‘n’ Play.  Modern, urbane men were expected to know how to operate a tone arm, so I might as well learn while young.

Santa gave me a couple of kids’ records along with the record player, and my parents soon augmented those with about three dozen 45s that they or other relatives had acquired.  Some of these were older hit songs that, even at my tender age, I rightly recognized as quality material.  B.J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a Feeling” was one of the best, as was the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak”.  I also enjoyed Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia”, though it was many years before I figured out why Paul Simon was so keen on washing his face.  A few of the records had a more mysterious origin, as they didn’t seem like anything that would be voluntarily purchased.  They had likely been distributed free in cereal boxes or given to my grandfather as promotional items at the store that he managed.  The most curious of these singles was Ray Conniff’s “Begin the Beguine”.

This record was unlike the others.  It had only a small spindle hole in the middle and was designed to be played at 33 1/3 RPM, despite being the same 7” diameter as the 45 RPM singles with the gaping centers.  It was the musical arrangement, however, that made the record truly special.

The frenetic rumbling rhythm of Conniff’s “Begin the Beguine” sounds as though a cavalry brigade is stampeding past the listener on its way to a battle.  After a few seconds of this, singers join in with berserk war cries of “Fi-yah!  Fi-yah fi-yah!”  Some of the members of the chorus prefer diplomacy to fighting, however.  One of them calmly responds to the opposing horsemen with:  “Bah dah bah doo dah.  Bah dah doo dah.”  It’s tough to argue with a reasonable proposal such as that.  After a couple minutes of these negotiations, it seems as though war has been averted – but the lull is misleading.  The horns grow louder and more urgent as the détente ends and the battle rages in a brief but dramatic finale.  One of the horses releases a tremendous burst of flatulence, and it is over.

I didn’t fully appreciate how transformational Conniff’s arrangement was until I heard different versions of “Begin the Beguine” and learned the song’s history and original lyrics.  It began life as a wistful Cole Porter composition about the memory of a romantic dance.  Every other performer has treated it this way, as in the vocal renditions by Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, and Julio Iglesias and the well-known instrumental by Artie Shaw.  Porter’s melody is pretty, to be sure, but it is ultimately just a mundane love ballad to be enjoyed a few times and then forgotten.  Conniff creatively gave “Begin the Beguine” new life as the soundtrack for the human imagination, and it was on the agenda almost every time that my brother and I fired up the record player.  Sometimes we played it at 45 RPM and pretended that the Ray Conniff Singers were high on amphetamines.  I no longer envied the brats in the Close ‘n’ Play commercials, who spent much of their time playing a juvenile game of musical chairs while alternately lifting and closing the lid of their fad toy.  I was now a serious audiophile.

Conniff knew that his reworking of “Begin the Beguine” was amazing.  He produced several versions of it over the years, including one that used Cole Porter’s lyrics in place of some of the “bah dah bah doo dah” dialogue.  “Somewhere, My Love” isn’t in the same league.  Conniff and his chorus recorded this latter song for the film Doctor Zhivago, and it is perfectly fine within that context.  If your spouse has dragged you to a theater to watch a three-hour-long romance set during the Bolshevik Revolution, “Somewhere, My Love” is not going to make your bad day any worse.  It is, however, a run-of-the-mill easy listening song.  I guess the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer people told Conniff that they wanted some of his music for their movie, but they didn’t want any of his ingenuity.

When it came to the singles charts, Conniff was a victim of what I call Cheap Trick Syndrome.  Cheap Trick missed the top 40 with their beloved signature tune “Surrender”, only to later reach #1 with the forgettable ballad “The Flame”.  Similarly, “Begin the Beguine” never found its way onto the Hot 100 despite its importance to Conniff’s legacy.  It’s a travesty that the formulaic “Somewhere, My Love” was his only top 40 hit.

My rating:  4 / 10

“Don’t Just Stand There” by Patty Duke (1965, #8)

One person’s view:  “Let’s remember Patty for her incredible acting career and her work in helping remove the stigma from mental health issues.  And not for this.” – GuncleMark @ YouTube

The public’s view:  2.86 / 5.00

Why is there so much pressure on actors to branch out into singing when they are doing just fine as it is?  This rarely happens to people in other jobs.  No one ever says, “Ted, you’re the best forklift operator in the warehouse.  Hardly any accidents last year.  How’d you like it if we wrote you a pop tune and put you on American Bandstand?”  Judging by the short duration of Patty Duke’s music career and the minimal enthusiasm she had for it, she might have preferred to drive a forklift.

When I was a young child, Patty Duke was one of those vaguely important individuals in the same category as Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Mao Zedong.  These were celebrities who never did anything Muppet-adjacent, so it was a mystery why they were famous enough for me to keep hearing their names.  Maybe Patty Duke was in a movie once, or maybe she had caused a deadly famine while forcibly industrializing an agrarian society.  There was no way to know.  She continued to make no impression on me as I grew older, and almost every bit of knowledge I have about her was acquired just now while researching this post.

Duke’s best known song, “Don’t Just Stand There”, inhabits a special place of mediocrity in what was otherwise a pretty good year for music.  There’s a consensus that it’s among the worst major hits of 1965, but no one says it is the very worst.  You could play it 20 times in a row on the jukebox at a diner, and it might make all the food taste bland but it wouldn’t provoke anyone to violence.  It isn’t much fun to write about records like this, but they are a big part of the Bad Top Ten Hits ecosystem so I don’t have much of a choice.

Most of the reviews of this song compare Patty Duke to Lesley Gore, who I am only slightly more familiar with.  Patty’s handlers tried to position her as the new Lesley, which set up one of the more uninteresting rivalries in pop music history.  People of my age and younger know what a real music rivalry is:  Kendrick vs. Drake, Brandy vs. Monica, Neil vs. Barbra, Barbra vs. Megadeth.  But Gore’s career had already peaked by the time Duke began dabbling in singing, and there’s little indication that either of them paid much attention to the other.  There aren’t any stories about Lesley Gore’s bodyguards shooting a member of Patty Duke’s posse in a strip club parking lot, and if there was any bad blood at all between the two young women it didn’t linger.  Gore didn’t even bother to disrupt Duke’s acceptance speech when she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series at the 1977 Primetime Emmy Awards.

Duke’s “Don’t Just Stand There” and her follow-up, “Say Something Funny”, share a common lyrical theme with Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”.  In each of these three records, the singer is trying to salvage a dying romance by lecturing her boyfriend on what he needs to do to fix it.  Although I enjoy a lot of “angry woman” music, I prefer not to hear about the phase of a relationship that is dominated by nagging.  Music is supposed to be an escape from unpleasant everyday realities, not a reinforcement.  I would rather have Patty or Lesley skip ahead to the inevitable break-up record, or to the five-years-post-break-up song about what a jerk the ex is and how he and his sleazy new wife and their arrogant infant child all deserve to get tetanus.

While “Don’t Just Stand There” is one of the better compositions of the boyfriend-being-scolded genre, that is somewhat faint praise.  Meanwhile, Duke’s vocals do very little to make themselves appreciated – much like the guy she is whining at.  Today she is probably better known for the three guest appearances she made on Touched by an Angel than she is for her two top 40 hits.

My rating:  4 / 10