“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