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
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