“Somewhere in the Night” by Barry Manilow (1979, #9)

One person’s view:  “This turns into easy listening that’s too tame even for easy listening radio!!  ...  Is anyone gonna seriously call this their favorite song?” – ImFire11 @ Fire’s Flaming Hot Takes

The public’s view:  2.43 / 5.00

There’s a subgenre of reality TV that depicts people attempting to improve things that desperately need improvement.  Examples of this type of show include Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, and Waiting Room Vomit Mop-Up.  (The last of these concepts is currently the subject of a bidding war between The Learning Channel and the prestige programming division of CBS.)  If there had been a reality series about Barry Manilow’s creative process, it might have been titled Nightmare Song Rescue Mop-Up.  One of his many superpowers was finding songs by others that had failed to live up to their potential, and then reworking them into gold records.  Scott English’s #91 non-hit “Brandy” became Manilow’s #1 hit “Mandy”.  “I Write the Songs” was an obscurity for the Captain & Tennille, and then for David Cassidy, before becoming another #1 for Barry.  “Somewhere in the Night” was another Manilow-engineered turnaround story, but it didn’t quite make it to the top of the Hot 100.  Some would argue that even its #9 peak was much higher than it deserved.

With a few rare exceptions like “It’s a Miracle” and “Copacabana”, Manilow preferred to sing ballads.  He developed a particular style for doing so.  Each of his ballads begins with mournful piano notes and some slow-paced vocals that are tinged with sadness.  It’s kind of hard to tell Manilow’s works apart when they are in this embryonic phase, but the listener’s patience and angst are rewarded after a couple of minutes.  Each performance soars to grandiose heights as it nears its conclusion, and Barry’s vocals become more and more dramatic.  He rounds up everyone within 3 miles who can play a musical instrument, and drafts them all into an orchestra of brass, strings, and percussion to help him end the song in majestic fashion.  The resulting product is a bombastic show tune that has everything except an actual show.

The workmanship is always flawless on Manilow records, but his ballad formula imposes some limits on his creativity.  He applies an identical technique to each track, even though the lyrics usually focus on totally different things.  “Mandy” describes how the singer’s world has ended because he broke off a passionate romance.  “Looks Like We Made It” describes how the singer is doing just fine despite breaking off a passionate romance.  “I Made It Through the Rain” is about the time that the singer absent-mindedly left his umbrella on the subway.  “Ready to Take a Chance Again” is about the singer taking a calculated gamble with the cleanliness of the white slacks he is wearing.  All of these topics are feted and fanfared as if they are the most important piece of information that we need to hear that day.  Manilow is at his most convincing on “I Write the Songs”, to the point that most people incorrectly believe that he really did write that song.  His performance on “Somewhere in the Night” is every bit as powerful, but it doesn’t feel as authentic.  Maybe it’s because it’s 1979 and we’ve already heard his shtick umpteen times.  More likely, it’s because it’s a simple love message that is delivered with the same intensity as a warning of an incoming missile attack.

Part of the problem with “Somewhere in the Night” is that, unlike Manilow’s other fixer-upper jobs, this song wasn’t in need of help.  It had already been a substantial hit for Helen Reddy just three years prior, reaching the top 20 of the Hot 100 and #2 at easy listening radio.  (Another perfectly competent rendition by Batdorf & Rodney had also charted previously, but that dynamic duo had since quit music to concentrate on fighting crime in Gotham City.)  Manilow’s redo felt like a pointless bit of one-upmanship, as if he was trying to provoke a fight with Reddy by implying that her version wasn’t good enough.  Sadly, there is no evidence that there was ever a feud, a spat, or even a kerfuffle between the two.  I was hoping to find a juicy story about Helen retaliating against Barry.  She could have replaced the hair spray in his dressing room with Cheez Whiz, or she could have run over his foot with her Harley.  Instead, she meekly accepted Manilow’s insult.  So much for “I am woman, hear me roar.”

“Somewhere in the Night” is not a badly done record by any stretch, but it is perhaps the most unnecessary of any of Barry Manilow’s major singles.  In 1981, he recorded a different hit ballad that used not just the same shopworn formula, but also a similar title:  “Somewhere Down the Road”.  This helped guarantee that “Somewhere in the Night” would be completely forgotten.

My rating:  4 / 10

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” by Andy Gibb (1978, #9)

One person’s view:  “I sincerely hope Andy’s legacy ends up being his more lively, catchy stuff like ‘Shadow Dancing’ instead of mediocre scraps foraged from his brothers’ wastebin.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.89 / 5.00

The Bad Top Ten Hits blog is not usually a place for hero worship and hagiography, but I have to make an exception for the Gibb family.  The Bee Gees and little brother Andy were veritable hit machines, and together they achieved near-total command of the music world for a two-year period in the late 1970s.  And their music was not just commercially successful – it was pretty damn good.  The melodies were instantly pleasing, the vocals were perfectly executed, and most of the songs survive as fondly remembered classics.  It’s unusual to see the brothers on any lists of bad music, but logic dictates that one of their hits has to be the worst.  So today we are gathered to debate whether “(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away”, the rare Gibb song that does appear on multiple lists of bad music, deserves that designation.

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” was originally a Bee Gees song, but the older Gibb brothers were blessed with a surplus of excellent material and didn’t need a ballad with a clunky title.  They decided to pawn it off on Andy.  I perfectly understand their behavior, because I also once disposed of an unwanted item by foisting it upon my younger brother.  It was my Fritos T-shirt.  My mom had ordered this shirt for me from the textiles division of Frito-Lay.  It was supposed to have depicted Frankenstein’s monster consuming a bag of Fritos while ominously declaring, “I’ll munch to that.”  I was crushed to learn that the Frankenstein shirts were sold out, and that the Frito people had instead sent a T-shirt with Napoleon on it.  I didn’t know who Napoleon was, and I was sure that other kids would mock me for having this big-hatted chip-chomping nerd on my chest.  So I convinced my mom that I had outgrown the shirt while waiting 4 to 6 weeks for its delivery, and that my brother had grown into it during that time.  Lucky him.  When he was made to wear it, he threw a monumental tantrum that culminated with the shirt being flushed down the toilet.  Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, and was defeated again by the water in our loo in 1977.

Andy Gibb did not flush his brothers’ hand-me-down song down the toilet.  He dutifully recorded his own version, with big brother Barry helping out on backing vocals, and released it as the third single from his Shadow Dancing album.  “(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” is a weepy plea to a woman to stay in a romance which, truth be told, she has pretty much already checked out of.  It’s an example of the sunken cost fallacy.  Andy has certainly bought presents for this girl and invested time in learning stupid trivia about her family, and all of that is for naught if they break up.  However, there is little future benefit to be derived from a relationship with someone who will no longer talk to him or even look at him.  Any economist would tell Andy to walk away and cut his losses, but he just won’t listen.  Again, the Napoleon T-shirt is illustrative.  My family had eaten a lot of Fritos to get the proofs of purchase that were needed for that garment, so my mom insisted that someone must wear it despite its negative marginal utility.  My brother understood the sunken cost fallacy, however, and demonstrated it with a sunken shirt.

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” might be the weakest top 10 single to emerge from the Gibbs’ foundry.  The toothless musical arrangement borders on easy listening, the singer’s chances of reviving the romance are nonexistent, and Andy’s normally exquisite falsetto comes across as whiney in this context.  I can’t fault the critics who place this record in the ridicule bin with Player’s similarly themed “Baby Come Back”, but I hear just enough of the Bee Gees’ songwriting brilliance to keep me from tuning out.  Just barely enough.

My rating:  5 / 10

Napoleon and Andy Gibb.  Both men nearly conquered the world, but each experienced a catastrophic downfall.  One was exiled from Europe, and the other was exiled from Solid Gold.

“Summer Nights” by John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John & Cast (1978, #5)

One person’s view:  “If there is any saving grace to this song, it’s Olivia Newton-John, who is the only one who sounds like she can sing.  She’s not great, but she’s at least passable, which is more than can be said of anyone else.” – Valeyard’s Music Corner

The public’s view:  2.94 / 5.00

This project has forced me to reassess many beliefs that I once firmly accepted.  For example, I had always assumed that everyone of all demographics loved Grease – the top-grossing film of 1978 – and most of the songs from it.  Today I’m hearing for the first time that Grease is dominated by bad acting, terrible singing, flimsy character development, and a plot that requires our suspension of disbelief at every turn.  Its script is also now deemed “troubling” like so many artistic works of its unenlightened era, and the same is true of the Grease soundtrack single “Summer Nights”.  So I guess we have to make room for another “bad” top ten hit.  Wella, wella, wella, hmmph.

Part of Grease’s appeal is the plentiful sex banter that amuses adults while going straight over children’s heads, enabling the whole family to enjoy the movie on different levels.  I can remember a girl bringing the soundtrack album to school when I was 8 or 9 years old, along with a lyric sheet that had been censored to delete a few risqué lines.  She asked our class to listen to “Greased Lightnin’” and help her figure out the missing words.  (I don’t know what our teacher was doing during all of this, but I presume that she was too hungover to object.)  We were stumped on one of the lyrics in the chorus.  John Travolta was saying “the chicks’ll cream”, but none of us could understand why this phrase would be considered objectionable.  We incorrectly concluded that the line must be “the shit’s a dream”.  We also correctly concluded that whoever had censored the lyric sheet was a “dickweed”.

“Greased Lightnin’” demonstrates how Grease weaves sex into an otherwise G-rated storyline.  It is superficially a song about fixing up an old car and winning a race with it, but it’s clear that Travolta’s character Danny doesn’t give half a poo about the thrill of racing.  He is only using the racecar to attract chicks who put out on the first date.  If he discovers that girls prefer guys who drive practical and efficient vehicles, he’ll happily push Greased Lightnin’ off a cliff and buy a Nash Rambler.  “Summer Nights” offers a similar blend of innocence and lust, but the concept is not as strong.  The song is built around a background chorus of “teens”, all of whom evidently did diddly-squat with their summer break.  They must live vicariously through the tale of Danny’s brief fling with Olivia Newton-John’s character Sandy, which isn’t exactly a Shakespearean love story for the ages.

The male background singers in “Summer Nights” are interested solely in how much backseat action that Danny got.  The female singers are the complete opposite, and they don’t ask Sandy about sex at all.  They want to hear only about her cute little crush on a nice guy who probably bought ice cream for her and protected her from bees.  In the real world, however, ladies have at least as much of a depraved obsession with sex as we gents do.  This is evident from the types of TV programs that they watch.  Women gravitate to soap operas full of sex, “reality” shows full of sex, true murder stories involving sexual jealousy, and game shows in which the host (usually Steve Harvey) is perpetually exasperated by contestants’ lewd answers.  Meanwhile, cable networks can hypnotize male viewers for days without relying on sex.  Men watch endless poker tournaments, old westerns, documentaries about Hitler, and panel discussions in which Stephen A. Smith debates two other people about which current junior high players will be selected in the 2032 NBA draft.  So, we see that “Summer Nights” is not just based on a gender stereotype.  It is based on a wildly inaccurate gender stereotype.

In fact, Grease is full of such shockingly outdated biases and behaviors.  The T-Birds wantonly spew carbon into the atmosphere during their drag races.  Principal McGee never apologizes for Rydell High’s location on stolen Native American land.  The only example of diversity in the student body is the Australian immigrant Sandy, but even she flaunts her white privilege at every opportunity.  And in “Summer Nights”, some creepy dude asks Danny, “Did she put up a fight?”  This is one of the few interjections by the background chorus that can be clearly discerned amid the obnoxious accents and overpowering music, and it’s also the most indefensible.

Clearly, the characters in Grease are all sociopaths who should not be emulated in any way.  And “Summer Nights” is a missed opportunity to explore truthful gender stereotypes, like why men can’t wrap presents and women can’t read road maps.  There are worse crimes than making a politically incorrect pop record, however, and the song’s catchiness almost outweighs its multiple annoying attributes.  So please don’t throw moldy cabbage at the folks who brought us “Summer Nights”.  We will cover other songs that are far more cabbage-worthy over the coming weeks and months.

My rating:  6 / 10

“Get Off” by Foxy (1978, #9)

One person’s view:  “Sex songs work when they’re subtle, not blatantly disgusting.  And it’s not just the lyrics that makes this song so punishing.  The musical content is even worse.  ...  In fact, every part of this song is pure sensory abuse.” – JudaiKitsune @ Deviant Art

The public’s view:  3.02 / 5.00

For every massively overplayed song like “Sometimes When We Touch”, there were five or ten other hit records that I rarely heard on the radio at all.  Foxy’s “Get Off” is a prime example.  I never once encountered it on my local stations in 1978.  I even missed its appearance on Casey Kasem’s New Year’s Eve countdown of the biggest singles of the year, as I mentioned on my other blog, due to a badly timed bout with church.  By the time I finally did get to experience “Get Off”, many years later, I didn’t at first recognize it as the top ten hit by Foxy that had evaded my eardrums for so long.  I thought maybe it was a new record by Rick James, and that its creation was the result of an especially potent batch of drugs.  I was wrong about “Get Off” having anything to do with Rick James, but wasn’t too far off about the drugs.

Foxy was a Miami disco-funk band led by a man named Ish Ledesma.  The average Miami disco-funk band tends to party pretty hard when given the chance, and Foxy was above average.  Although “Get Off” has been condemned as being too explicit for the 1970s, the band was simply singing about the lifestyle that they knew.  If anything, the line about “peeking under the sheets with two lovelies” describes a slow night for these guys.  Also, nowhere in the song do they mention the huge joint that Ledesma and his temporary bandmate Carl Driggs smoked while writing it.  In my opinion, the Moral Majority should have given them a medal for the restraint that they showed with these lyrics.

We know about the genesis of this song, and the magical fat doobie that contributed to it, because of a monologue that Ish Ledesma posted on YouTube.  In this video, Ledesma confirms what many people have suspected:  “Get Off” was deliberately engineered to be annoying.  Specifically, the police-siren-like whooping noises were intended to aggravate a rude Maryland nightclub owner named Pete.  Pete had stated that he did not wish to hear any such irritating sounds while Foxy was playing at his establishment.  When the group defiantly launched into its debut performance of “Get Off”, Pete’s bouncers carried Ledesma off the stage after the first whoop.  He was dumped unceremoniously on the ground outside the building, along with Foxy’s gear, narrowly avoiding an unwanted baptism in a nearby bay.  It was then that he knew he had a hit, and that the band needed to get into the studio right away to record it.

The racy lyrics and the whooping are not the only parts of “Get Off” that push people’s anger buttons.  The song is a non-stop barrage of sonic weirdness, and it isn’t even a particularly original brand of weirdness.  The whooping was nothing new, having already been done in the Michael Zager Band’s “Let’s All Chant”.  There’s also a talk box solo that sounds like Peter Frampton having a very bad day, and a repeated synth noise that is like the duck from “Disco Duck” quacking into a kazoo.  All of it somehow comes together to make a usable party record, but not in my town.  We were still partying to “Sometimes When We Touch”.

There was no MTV in 1978, but that didn’t stop Foxy from making two videos for their hit song – both of which are far funnier than anything I could possibly write here.  Many of the vocals in “Get Off” were provided by a trio of ladies called Wildflower, but the label apparently didn’t want to pay these women to appear anywhere with the rest of the group.  Thus the men in Foxy were forced to lip-synch the female parts in the videos, with unintentionally hilarious results.

Ish Ledesma and Carl Driggs also failed to coordinate their attire for one of these video spectacles, as seen below.  Ledesma wore his usual “Florida man” tank top while Driggs showed up in dress clothes, a poorly sized necktie, and heavy makeup, looking and dancing like a slightly less awkward version of Donald Trump.  Yet, Foxy does not win the award for Most Embarrassingly Humorous Musical Stage Production of 1978.  Barry Manilow snags that trophy for his outlandish performance in the video for “Copacabana”.  He was singing about a showgirl and he just about tried to be one too.

My rating:  6 / 10

“Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill (1978, #3)

One critic’s view:  “Hill, who wrote these words to ruin a perfectly good melody by Brill Building legend Barry Mann, bends over backwards in an attempt to make failure to commit seem somehow noble and romantic.” – Robert Fontenot @ About.com

One comedian’s view:  “Top Ten Headlines That Would Start a Panic  ...  Number Three:  ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ Made National Anthem”, David Letterman, The “Late Night with David Letterman” Book of Top Ten Lists (1990)

The public’s view:  1.96 / 5.00

We’re up to 1978, the year that I first became aware of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and its often tenuous connection to the songs that were played on the AM radio in my mom’s car.  If the Hot 100 was to be believed, the most popular tunes of the era were “You Light Up My Life”, “Night Fever”, and “Shadow Dancing”.  Those three hits combined to hog the #1 position for nearly six entire months, but there were three others that I heard far more often:  Pablo Cruise’s “Love Will Find a Way”, Player’s “Baby Come Back”, and Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch”.  I grew to detest these three overplayed songs, at least one of which was guaranteed to sully the speakers on every single ten-minute ride to school or to Grandma’s house.

My hatred for these records eventually dimmed after other tracks replaced them in heavy rotation on the air.  Today I look back at them with nostalgia, and can admit that “Love Will Find a Way” is actually a pretty good song when I don’t have to hear it every goddamn moment of the day.  “Baby Come Back” is still not something I would voluntarily listen to, but I at least see the humor in its absurd level of pathos and the dude’s ridiculous high note near the end.  My view of “Sometimes When We Touch” is more nuanced and complicated.  Sort of like Dan Hill’s feelings.

I recently wrote about Kenny Nolan’s “I Like Dreamin’”, a ballad so bland that it passes right through the brain without making any lasting impression.  “Sometimes When We Touch” may be the polar opposite of “I Like Dreamin’”.  Everything about it is memorable:  a beautiful melody written by Barry Mann, dramatic orchestration that would make Manilow jealous, Dan Hill’s earnest vocals, and – most of all – the lyrics.  Sweet merciful crap on a diving board, those are some memorably bizarre lyrics.  Even as an 8-year-old kid, I knew that something about them was a little off.

“Sometimes When We Touch” is not a romantic devotional; it is a song about an unhappy relationship between two people who keep hoping that the other will eventually change.  Hill won’t tell his girlfriend that he loves her because he just isn’t feeling it.  Maybe someday things will be different, but don’t hold your breath.  He justifies his unwillingness to say the L-word by calling himself a “hesitant prizefighter”.  (If you’re going to rationalize your faults, you might as well do it in a way that makes you sound athletic.)  Hill’s reticence is not the couple’s only problem.  The woman can be kind of a handful herself, so there are times that the singer would like to break her and drive her to her knees.  The pleasant music masks all of this turmoil, causing “Sometimes When We Touch” to rank up there with “Every Breath You Take” and “You’re Beautiful” as a song that should never be played at weddings but sometimes is.

I like that “Sometimes When We Touch” is not an obsequious ode of worship for a lady, as is so annoyingly common in soft rock.  Lionel Richie would rather shave his head than sing lyrics like these, and I see that as a plus.  On the other hand, the grandiose piano, strings, and vocals all add up to very little in the end.  This is not a call to action, nor is it a promise that the singer will ever make the kind of commitment that is expected of him.  It’s just an expression of emotions and excuses that, at very best, might placate a woman for a day or two.  More likely, it is going to piss her off.

We don’t have to speculate as to how a female will react upon being fed these lines.  Like a doctor who injects his family with his own experimental vaccine, Dan Hill bravely tried out “Sometimes When We Touch” on his girlfriend before singing it to anyone else.  She then immediately left the country with another man.  Let that be a warning to anyone who treats this as a love song.

My rating:  5 / 10 

“I’m in You” by Peter Frampton (1977, #2)

One person’s view:  “Quite possibly the worst piece of garbage I’ve ever had to listen to.  The cover is surely a clue to the crap that lies within, and yet the crap within almost surpasses the cover for being total shit!” – Drummer1956 @ Rate Your Music, regarding the I’m in You LP

The public’s view:  2.65 / 5.00

“Wah.  Wah wah wah wah wah.  Wah WAH WAH WAH!”  This was a ubiquitous battle cry of my 1970s childhood, courtesy of Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way”.  I always enjoyed hearing Frampton’s unique guitar work on the radio, especially when his six-string sounded like it was talking, crying, or throwing up.  But “I’m in You”, his biggest chart single, was a piano ballad whose brief guitar solo lacked any interesting talk box effects.  Seven-Year-Old Me could find nothing of value in “I’m in You”, and even Fifty-Something Me has had to work hard to find good things to say for this review.  (Eleven-Year-Old Me might have at least gotten an inappropriate laugh from the song’s title, but radio had moved on from Frampton by that time.)  Today, Frampton’s huge hit beckons us to ponder its divisive legacy.

It’s important to consider the context of the I’m in You album.  This was the successor to Frampton Comes Alive!, the biggest LP of 1976 and the best-selling live album ever at that point.  Frampton felt the pressure to deliver another commercial smash, but Frampton Comes Alive! was not part of a formula that could be replicated.  Building another album around the talk box gimmick would be like the Captain & Tennille putting out a second song about muskrats.  Instead, to maximize its sales, Frampton’s follow-up record needed to attract new audiences who weren’t into guitar rock at all.  For this reason, he included a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and released it as the second single.  This was a defensible move, but many fans preferred Frampton’s original music and didn’t see him as an R&B act.  “I’m in You”, the first single, was even more controversial.  It was soft enough to reach the easy listening chart, and that wasn’t exactly a badge of honor.  Maybe the new album should have been called Frampton Goes to Sleep!

I’m in You went platinum, but the alienation of much of Frampton’s fan base might not have been worth it.  Making matters worse, he was in the midst of a terrible streak of bad luck.  First, his shirts all lost their buttons in a laundry mishap and would no longer close properly.  This caused every photo of him to be marred by an unwanted glimpse of his chest, and people began to confuse him with Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett.  Many folks walked into record stores to buy I’m in You and then walked right back out when they saw the album sleeve.  Next, Frampton was badly injured in a car accident.  After recovering well enough to go out on the road again, his South American tour was disrupted by the crash of a plane that was carrying his gear.  He assumed that his favorite guitar had burned up in the disaster, but in fact someone had found it in the debris and taken it home.  It wasn’t reunited with its owner until 31 years later after a guy at a music shop recognized it as the instrument on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive!  It was the most famous talking guitar in the world, yet it never talked when it really needed to.

Then there was the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band project, in which Peter Frampton co-starred with the Bee Gees in a movie based on an old Beatles album.  To explain this to readers under 30:  this is like if Morgan Wallen co-starred with BTS in a movie based on an old Destiny’s Child album.  Or like if you order orange juice and fabric softener from the grocery, and they arrive together in the same jug which the Instacart driver then dumps on your head.  The Sgt. Pepper’s debacle ended Frampton’s second career as an actor just as it was beginning, but it isn’t as though Peter sank the film all on his own.  It was a collaborative effort that squandered dozens of people’s talents to create one of the most enduring cinematic bombs of all time.  Even the 2017 Blu-ray release of Sgt. Pepper’s, which allowed home video enthusiasts to savor Frampton’s toothy grin in high resolution, did not prompt a reassessment of the movie.  Critic Matt Brunson noted that “its standing as a turkey for the ages remains undiminished.”

Although often cited as a power ballad, “I’m in You” sort of plods along without ever generating much power.  There aren’t any poetic lyrics that might justify the effort of listening to it.  I didn’t care for the song until I found a clip of it from a Frampton concert in 2024.  He delivers superb vocals and pleasant guitar pluckin’ in this rendition, and forsakes the heavy synths that marred the 1977 studio version.  This elder statesman’s stamina should give all of us hope that we will still be effectively plying our respective trades into our twilight years.  I bet you’re looking forward to another two decades of reading my inane blog posts.

While “I’m in You” has aged gracefully along with its performer, Frampton is probably better known today for his GEICO commercial.  And for those of us in Generation X, he is still remembered mainly for “Wah.  Wah wah wah wah wah...”  Those are words to live by, and they are a lot more insightful than “I’m in you, you’re in me.”

My rating:  4 / 10  (The live version from 2024 is a 6 / 10.)

“I Like Dreamin’” by Kenny Nolan (1977, #3)

One person’s view:  “This song is by turns sappy and creepy.  It’s like a stalker’s theme song.” – Sheila @ Songfacts

The public’s view:  2.21 / 5.00

You may have heard of the Mandela Effect, which causes inaccurate memories to spread through the population and embed themselves in our culture.  One example is the commonly held belief that Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca urges a pianist to “Play it again, Sam.”  If you watch the film closely, you will observe that Bogie never quite says those words.  His actual line is:  “Luke, I am your father.”  Sam the pianist was very confused after being told this.

Today we’re going to discuss a related phenomenon of the human memory.  A bleak musical event once washed over the United States and disrupted the lives of 200 million people, but then all of them immediately forgot that it had happened.  This was a case of collective amnesia, the reverse of the Mandela Effect.  Let’s call it the Kenny Nolan Effect.

I began investigating this incident a few years ago after perusing Billboard’s official list of the biggest hits of 1977.  I was baffled by the presence of an unfamiliar record all the way up at #6 on the survey, ahead of such famous chart-toppers as “Dancing Queen” and “Hotel California”.  Who in the wide world of hell was Kenny Nolan, and what was “I Like Dreamin’”?  I had been immersed in pop music and the Billboard charts for nearly my entire life, and yet I did not recognize either the performer or the song.  I was determined to find out why this massively successful hit single had completely escaped my notice.

My first instinct was to question Billboard’s data.  Maybe this song didn’t really exist, and the magazine had added a fictitious entry to its year-end chart to trip up plagiarists?  It was doubtful, however, that Billboard would have risked its reputation by putting a bogus tune all the way up in the top ten for an entire year.  When mapmakers place copyright traps in their work, they add imperceptible features like extra squiggles in a river.  Billboard listing Kenny Nolan at #6 for 1977 is the equivalent of the Rand McNally Road Atlas plopping a huge new city of 150,000 people onto the Arizona desert and calling it “Surprise”.  It’s too absurd and outrageous to be a lie, so it has to be real.  Plus, Wikipedia indicates that “I Like Dreamin’” was also a hit in Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand.  I wouldn’t put it past Canada or South Africa to go along with a Billboard stunt, but the good people of New Zealand would never stand for such tomfoolery.  Clearly, “I Like Dreamin’” was a real song that was popular at one time.

I thought of another possible explanation for why I didn’t recognize this record.  Perhaps Kenny Nolan was an avant-garde auteur who gave his songs idiosyncratic titles that had nothing to do with their lyrics?  If so, I might have heard “I Like Dreamin’” a hundred times without knowing what it was.  However, I was forced to reject this hypothesis after listening to “I Like Dreamin’” on YouTube.  The song was not something I recalled ever hearing, and there was nothing pretentious or misleading about its title.  The very first line is “I like dreamin’”, and all of the verses are about why Kenny Nolan likes dreamin’.  Gosh almighty, does he like dreamin’.  If Nolan had wanted to make an unconventional artistic statement, he would have called this song “She Blinded Me with Science” or “Theme from ‘Rocky’”.  He did not.

I finally concluded that I almost certainly had suffered many encounters with the song in 1977, but they had not left any lasting impression.  “I Like Dreamin’” evaporates from the memory shortly after it is heard.  It is like a Snapchat message that disappears upon being read, or a fart that can be smelled only once before dissipating.  Even now, just a couple hours after playing “I Like Dreamin’” on YouTube a second time, I can hardly remember anything about it.  I am evidently not the only one, as modern popular culture is devoid of any references to Kenny or his hit song.  By unspoken agreement, all of society has decided to forget the sixth-biggest record of 1977 and the guy who made it.  It is the Kenny Nolan Effect in action.

Now I am listening to the song again so that I can review it, and I have a revelation:  “I Like Dreamin’” is mostly just an inferior version of Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You”.  Both songs feature a dude pining for a woman, and they have musical similarities as well.  To its credit, “My Eyes Adored You” is sentimental and has some sweetness to it.  Valli’s character lived a good life, and his only regret is that he isn’t still with his childhood crush.  By contrast, the narrator of “I Like Dreamin’” is pathetic.  He keeps dreaming about someone who has either rejected him or who he is too afraid to approach.  I get the impression that he sleeps with a blow-up doll and this woman’s photo is taped to the face.  It’s depressing and a little gross.

“I Like Dreamin’” never wormed its way into our brains because the memory cells that it needed were already occupied by Frankie Valli’s hit.  It’s the same reason why no one remembers Ernest Goes to Africa.  That would require pushing Ernest Goes to Camp or Ernest Goes to Jail out of our heads, and we refuse to do it.  Nonetheless, Nolan can’t be too upset about the situation.  Guess who is listed as a co-writer of “My Eyes Adored You”?  The Kenny Nolan Effect may have wiped away the legacy of his monster hit of 1977, but his finances are probably doing just fine.

My rating:  2 / 10

“Muskrat Love” by the Captain & Tennille (1976, #4)

One person’s view:  “We burned disco records at the end of the decade, but not this?” – music blogger Dr. Nelson Winston

The public’s view:  1.73 / 5.00

There are lots of famous songs about animals, but very few that depict the animal in the act of mating.  The crocodile in “Crocodile Rock” is not having sex.  The chameleon in “Karma Chameleon” is not having sex.  Same for the eagle in “Fly Like an Eagle”, the tiger in “Eye of the Tiger”, and Snoopy in “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”.  “Muskrat Love” is a rare exception.  It describes the lustful romantic endeavors of two muskrats named Susie and Sam, who like to nibble on bacon, cheese, and each other.  The concept alone is enough to put the song on almost every list of bad hit records of the 1970s.

“Muskrat Love” didn’t originate with the Captain & Tennille.  It first appeared on the self-titled album by singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey in 1972, and few people at the time found it to be upsetting or inappropriate.  Whenever you buy a record of gritty modern folk music by some guy you’ve barely heard of, you can’t complain if one of the songs turns out to be about muskrat sex.  It’s the risk that you take.  Some listeners even tolerated the tune well enough that they encouraged Ramsey to make a second album.  He declined, saying, “What’s wrong with the first one?”  He has stood by this decision to the present day.  Whether you respect “Muskrat Love” or not, you have to respect Willis Alan Ramsey.

Unlike Ramsey’s record, which was little known outside of underground Bohemian folkie hipster circles, the Captain & Tennille’s cover version of “Muskrat Love” was impossible to avoid.  Not only did it reach #4 on the Hot 100, it also topped the easy listening chart.  This meant that people in stores and doctors’ offices were bombarded with the tale of Muskrat Susie and Muskrat Sam when they weren’t in the mood for it at all.  Meanwhile, actual muskrats were staying under the radar.  Despite their abundant population and a habitat that ranges over most of North America, they are rarely spotted in the wild.  There isn’t a muskrat exhibit at the zoo, either, because muskrats don’t bring in crowds.  No one is going to spend $30 on zoo admission to see a muskrat, unless it is to see one getting fed to an elephant.  “Muskrat Love” is virtually the entire sum of publicity that Ondatra zebithicus has received in the past century, so now the species is forever linked in everyone’s minds to Toni Tennille and her nautically themed husband.

Aside from having a hit record about them, there is one thing about muskrats that distinguishes them from beavers, otters, and similar riffraff.  Muskrat is one of only two types of meat that Catholics are allowed to eat on Fridays during Lent.  The other is capybara.  I know it sounds like I made this up as a joke, but I didn’t.  You have to accept a lot of really weird and arbitrary shit if you want to be Catholic.  It wouldn’t be surprising for the Pope to decree that all Catholics must wear purple pants on Tuesdays during Advent.  Anyway, because they are exempted from this bizarre rule about meat, muskrats are commonly served at Lenten church barbecues in parts of Michigan.  Just try to imagine yourself enjoying a delicious muskrat-and-pimento hoagie at St. Bobbalitius Church while washing it down with a cup of capybara juice.  Jesus will be smiling down on you for obeying the Vatican’s ridiculous commands, so don’t ruin the moment by humming “Muskrat Love”.  Your festive meal is not the best time to contemplate the past reproductive activities of the rodent in your sandwich, or to think about the other furry critter that is now mourning its lost paramour.

Willis Alan Ramsey’s original is a serious and contemplative musical work, but the Captain & Tennille added some silly sound effects to their version.  They must have picked up some tips from Pat Boone’s Guide to Half-Assing a Novelty Hit.  Let’s just be thankful that The Ray Stevens Manual of Ethnic Generalizations was checked out of the library that day, probably by Bernie Taupin as he was writing the lyrics for “Island Girl”.

Whatever you think of the result, the Captain & Tennille deserve props for taking a chance on a quirky tune.  This wasn’t a lazy cash grab like the Beach Boys single that I wrote about last week.  It was a daring move that could have, and arguably should have, destroyed the duo’s career.  They even audaciously sang “Muskrat Love” for Queen Elizabeth II at a White House state dinner, offending one of the royal attendants and nearly rekindling the War of 1812.  (The Queen herself dozed off during the performance and was unscathed by the bawdy ballad.  We can assume that she was written up for sleeping on the job, and that her pay was docked.)  The song has also given me an idea for a Good Friday road trip up north to grab some dinner.  Muskrat Susie and Muskrat Sam will be doing the jitterbug in Esophagusland.

My rating:  4 / 10