“Little Woman” by Bobby Sherman (1969, #3)

One person’s view:  “Imagine a song so dripping with entitlement that it makes you question the singer’s upbringing.  ...  The lyrics are a masterclass in audacity, as the singer attempts to convince a woman to abandon her life for his.” – Joe @ I Love Classic Rock

The public’s view:  2.33 / 5.00

What would pop music be without mindlessly fun, catchy bubblegum tunes by teen idols who look better than they sound?  Sadly, however, these types of songs generally get low scores from reviewers and are not fondly remembered by most listeners.  Many of them feature a woefully substandard vocal performance.  (See New Kids on the Block.)  Many have exceptionally bad instrumentation.  (See New Kids on the Block.)  Many include phenomenally stupid lyrics.  (See Kenny G.  No, just kidding, see New Kids on the Block.)  Bobby Sherman’s “Little Woman” doesn’t exhibit any of these three problems, but it still manages to gall some critics with the singer’s condescension toward the title character.

The lyrics are indeed obnoxious if we take them at face value.  This man is admonishing a female to stop chasing rainbows and come down from the clouds because he thinks her goals are crazy and are not worth pursuing.  To be fair, he may be completely justified in doubting her.  This is a little woman, after all, and she might harbor pie-in-the-sky ambitions of becoming a pro basketball player or of shopping in the grown-up section of the clothing store.  Still, he should at least pretend to be more supportive.  If she wants to be an airplane pilot, he should help her find some extenders so that her feet can reach the rudder pedals.  Instead, he belittles her – quite literally – by repeatedly referencing her Lilliputian dimensions.

Scratch beyond the surface, however, and you will find that “Little Woman” is a spoof of chauvinism and that the male is in fact the butt of the joke.  The singer mocks the diminutive woman’s lofty dreams, but then admits that nothing is going on in his own life aside from his unrequited obsession with her.  He sees her in his mind constantly.  He asks if she has similar visions of him when she walks down a busy street, but she’s just trying to avoid drowning in a puddle or getting licked in the face by a dachshund.  She’s not thinking of that loser at all... and therefore he’s the one living in a fantasyland!  Who would have thought that a Bobby Sherman song could contain an ironic twist worthy of an O. Henry story?

And who would have thought that a whole bevy of musicians would be needed to make a bubblegum record targeted at adolescent girls?  According to Wikipedia, this song features five horn players, six violinists, and even a cello.  It’s too bad that similar production values weren’t applied to the teen-oriented music that raged across the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Imagine Yo-Yo Ma playing a centuries-old Stradivarius cello while Donnie Wahlberg and Jordan Knight prance around in front of him.  That would have blown through the New Kids’ $8.52 studio budget in a hurry.

All things considered, I have to take the minority view on “Little Woman”.  Aside from the surprising depth in the lyrics and the quality work by the musicians, it clocks in at the ideal length for a teenybopper song:  2 minutes and 22 seconds.  I give it credit for not overstaying its welcome.

My rating:  6 / 10

“This Girl Is a Woman Now” by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap (1969, #9)

One person’s view:  “Seriously, was there no one at Columbia records telling Gary Puckett to knock it off with all this ‘barely legal’-type shit?” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.74 / 5.00

The Bad Top Ten Hits radar screen has recently been picking up lots of little blips from Yakima, Washington and the neighboring city of Union Gap.  I tried to ignore these signs of trouble, but then I listened to “This Girl Is a Woman Now”.  Now I realize that I must finally delve into the controversial oeuvre of the musical Yakiman named Gary Puckett.

Puckett’s best known single, “Young Girl”, describes an adolescent girl who misleads the singer about her age while unsuccessfully attempting to lure him into an illicit tryst.  (This is the type of problem that only a rock star could have.)  In the follow-up record “Lady Willpower”, the female is the one who is balking as the man begs to be allowed to teach her the facts of life.  Thankfully, “Lady Willpower” does not suggest that the woman is underage – only that she is inexperienced and seems to like it that way.  I get the impression that she might be a nun.

Both of those songs were written by Puckett’s producer, Jerry Fuller, and both of them did the job they were supposed to do.  Puckett realized, however, that Fuller was following a formula and that all of his band’s music was starting to sound the same.  He needed a refresh, so he turned to other songwriters for his fourth studio LP.  This album was dubbed The New Gary Puckett and the Union Gap Album.  It may not have been the most creative album title in history, but it was perhaps the most truthful.

“This Girl Is a Woman Now” was the biggest single from the new LP.  Although it doesn’t plumb the depths of degeneracy like, say, Billy J. Kramer’s “Little Children”, it is cringeworthy enough that I would feel uncomfortable analyzing its lyrics in any detail.  It also unfairly hurt the reputation of Puckett’s earlier music that had done nothing to merit condemnation.  “Young Girl” was not realistic, but it was a perfectly good song that told of a man doing the right thing under difficult circumstances.  Likewise, “Lady Willpower” was fairly inoffensive on its own.  Who among us hasn’t flirted with a nun at some point?  Taken collectively, however, “Young Girl”, “Lady Willpower”, and “This Girl Is a Woman Now” formed a trilogy that seemed to straddle the line between wholesome fun and lechery.

Despite the inferences that might be drawn from these three records, Gary Puckett has apparently led a scandal-free existence.  The worst I can find about him is that he would sometimes display a Confederate battle flag on stage.  The flag was intended to appease audiences in the South who might otherwise have been upset by the Union Army garb that he and his band were wearing.  This utter ambivalence about slavery, and the trivialization of a bloody conflict, jibes with the lack of moral clarity in his music.  Exactly how old is the subject of “This Girl Is a Woman Now”?  Was the teary-eyed surrender of her innocence ultimately a good decision for her?  Don’t ask Gary Puckett those questions, because he’s just the messenger.  We shouldn’t expect him to fully comprehend the meanings of songs he didn’t write, just like we shouldn’t expect a guy from Yakima to have a consistent stance on the Civil War.  As for my view of “This Girl Is a Woman Now”, I would have preferred to hear Puckett sing another sound-alike Jerry Fuller composition.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Jean” by Oliver (1969, #2)

One person’s view:  “What we have is yet another boring ballad with acoustic guitars and a harp and generic love song lyrics that might as well have been written in the 50s.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.56 / 5.00

Individuals named Oliver have been undermining the establishment since the time of Cromwell.  The most famous Olivers of my lifetime are a filmmaker known for his unorthodox conspiracy theories and a Marine Corps colonel who was the central figure in an actual conspiracy.  Then there was Cousin Oliver, the duplicitous tyke who infiltrated the Brady Bunch as part of an evil conspiracy.  He forced the cancellation of the sitcom, thereby ending the TV empire of Sherwood Schwartz and ushering in the age of Garry Marshall.  A singer named Oliver might be expected to have a similar revolutionary impact on popular music, but his sleepy ballad “Jean” was perhaps the most boring hit song of 1969.  You have to dive into the surrounding context to find anything controversial about it, and that’s just what I intend to do.

“Jean” was the theme song for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  This film was set in Scotland, so the music needed to have a British feel.  The task of writing the theme was nonetheless given to poet and composer Rod McKuen, who was about as British as In-N-Out Burger.  He surmised that the song should use the word “meadow” to achieve the necessary level of Britishness, because England and Scotland are absolutely teeming with meadows.  (Meadows are less common in other countries.  Anybody who spots one in the U.S. is encouraged to report it to the local zoning board so that it can be paved.)  McKuen also needed to date the song to the era in which Miss Jean Brodie was in her prime:  the 1930s.  I bet he listened to “Danny Boy” a bunch of times before writing this lesser version of it to fulfill his contract.

The lyrics are vague enough that we don’t really know the narrator’s intentions with respect to Miss Jean.  Maybe she truly is young and alive, and he is attempting to wake her out of her half-dreamed dream so that they can have sex in the meadow.  Or maybe she is now well past her peak years, with her mind possibly fading, and he is trying to remind her of better days in which she frolicked in the meadow (and probably had sex in it too).  Either interpretation is plausible, as the Jean Brodie in the film was both a vibrant, attractive woman and a tragic figure whose hubris ultimately led to her downfall.  And here’s what makes her truly special:  she was a Fascist with a capital “F”.

Miss Jean Brodie proudly displayed a picture of Mussolini in the classroom where she taught, and told her students of her fondness for his policies.  She encouraged one young lady to travel to Spain and fight in the civil war on behalf of Franco, resulting in the girl’s death.  In the Muriel Spark novel on which the film was based, Miss Jean eventually decided that the Italian and Spanish Fascists weren’t effective enough and that the German ones were more to her liking.  Maybe that’s why the singer implores Jean to come out to the meadow.  He is corralling people there to send them to the camps, and he wants her help.  Just watch where you goosestep, Jean, because the sheep like to graze there too.

In all fairness, a lot of working class people believed in Fascism in the 1930s.  Mussolini famously made the trains run on schedule, unlike his less competent imitators of today who are more apt to clumsily break the Newark airport.  Some folks were willing to barter away their freedoms as long as they got to Rome in time for Pius XI’s acoustic set at the Vatican Troubadour.  In Scotland, however, Fascism never took root except among a handful of individuals who were motivated more by anti-Semitism than by any legitimate concern for the railroads.  It was not a good look for Miss Jean Brodie, nor for Muriel Spark’s real-life teacher who inspired the character.

It is also not a feather in the cap for “Jean”.  This may be the only top 10 hit in history that expresses fondness for a Nazi sympathizer (except, of course, for Kanye West’s odes to himself).  Perhaps it does so only satirically, but the meaning is so ambiguous that any attempt at irony is going to be lost on most listeners.  It’s probably for the best that it isn’t a very good song, so it has not survived into the age of social media.  We really don’t need any memes involving “Jean”, Roman salutes, and Cousin Oliver.  However, I can imagine an entertaining Brady Bunch episode in which the Brady family invades and annexes Poland so that they can have enough living space for a second bathroom.  Heil Marcia.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Worst That Could Happen” by the Brooklyn Bridge (1969, #3)

One person’s view:  “[A]n ex-girlfriend who you explicitly do not want to marry getting married is quite possibly the least appropriate situation to make all about your stupid hurt feelings, and it shitsure doesn’t deserve the garish, wailing delivery and straight-faced trumpeting fanfares this song delivers.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  3.02 / 5.00

The nine-member Serendipity Singers probably thought they would be the largest conglomeration to be featured on this blog, but today they are topped.  The Brooklyn Bridge consisted of eleven people, which is what happens when you merge a doo-wop vocal trio with a seven-member horns-and-keyboard band.  (The combination still wouldn’t have added up to eleven musicians, except that one of these two ensembles was called the Rhythm Method.  As anyone who has used the rhythm method can tell you, an extra unwanted person always appears at some point.)  With such a large group, a Brooklyn Bridge tour must have been a logistical nightmare.  They needed one bus for the musicians and a whole other bus for their sideburns.

The Brooklyn Bridge’s biggest hit, “Worst That Could Happen”, was a Jimmy Webb composition inspired by the demise of Webb’s romance with his high school sweetheart Suzy Horton.  (Webb may not have been able to find his cake recipe from “MacArthur Park” again, but he knew how to reuse a song recipe.)  However, this is more than just your standard mopey ballad about heartbreak.  In “Worst That Could Happen”, the narrator bemoans his ex-girlfriend’s impending marriage to another man – while at the same time admitting that he didn’t want to marry her anyway!  He is like a kid who loses interest in a toy, but then throws a tantrum when another child starts playing with it.  Not only that, he describes this predictable turn of events as the worst thing that could possibly happen to him.  Given the severity with which he perceives it, we must assume that he is desperately working on a plan to prevent it.  Everyone will know who to blame when a suspicious fire consumes the wedding gazebo at Hugh’s Hitching Hollow on the morning of the ceremony.

The song’s premise is narcissistic to the point of delusion, as the guy thinks he’s the main character in this tragedy.  It’s “the worst that could happen to me.”  Dude, nothing is happening to you.  I don’t think you were even invited to the wedding.  I’m more sympathetic to the groom’s coworker who waited too long to buy a gift and now the only item left on the registry is a $200 set of spaghetti forks.  Or the bride’s sister’s boyfriend, who is missing his Saturday poker game for this boring shit.  Jimmy Webb should have written a song from that man’s perspective:

I have to go all the way to Toledo
It’s 400 miles by car
They’re making me wear a goddamn tuxedo
My reward is a crappy cash bar
It isn’t the worst that could happen to me
But it’s the worst thing that’s happened so far

Now that we’ve ripped this song apart in a tedious manner, let’s ponder the Brooklyn Bridge’s performance of it.  I have to wonder if their rendition of “Worst That Could Happen” was some sort of government works project designed to give jobs to as many musicians as possible.  If so, the three horn players and three male backup singers would make an excellent target for DOGE.  They serve mainly to add melodrama to a situation that calls for none.

The most enjoyable aspect of the recording is the lead singer, the fortuitously named Johnny Maestro, who should have been a bigger star than he was.  He singlehandedly salvages this production with vocals that are powerful and expressive but which don’t completely comport with the unjustified envy and anguish of Webb’s lyrics.  Imagine if this had been a more upbeat composition titled “Best That Could Happen”, in which the man welcomes the ex-girlfriend’s marriage and gleefully enters into a throuple arrangement with her and her new husband.  Johnny Maestro wouldn’t have needed to emote much differently.

We never got to hear how the Brooklyn Bridge would have doo-wopped and trumpeted their way through that delightful three-way scenario.  They might have turned the throuple into an eleven-uple if given the chance.  Although polyamory was not yet something that could be discussed in a top ten hit in the 1960s, you know what wasn’t too controversial for pop radio?  A ballad dedicated to a supporter of the Nazis.  We’ll be covering it shortly.

My rating:  4 / 10

“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