“Puppy Love” by Donny Osmond (1972, #3)

One person’s view:  “Anka’s original from 1960 wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, but Osmond manages to make it even worse.” – Joe @ ILoveClassicRock

The public’s view:  1.48 / 5.00

I didn’t start following the pop charts until the late 1970s, so I never developed the intense lifelong hatred for the Osmonds that afflicts those who experienced the family’s music first-hand.  Therefore, my first instinct is to defend them.  I’ve lived through “Separate Lives”, Bryan Adams movie themes, and Soulja Boy.  Certainly the Osmonds couldn’t have been any worse?  After investigating this matter, however, I have come to understand the criticism.  I now feel that the Osmond siblings, and especially Donny, deserve their notoriety as the most prolific purveyors of Bad Top Ten Hits in all of history.

This is not to say that they are bad people.  Far from it.  Alan, Wayne, Merrill, Jay, Donny, Marie, and Little Jimmy have never been caught in a scandal.  You might occasionally read a tabloid story about one of their children or grandchildren doing something unbecoming, like parking in front of a fire hydrant or experimenting with caffeine, but that can’t be avoided when you have hundreds of lineal descendants.  (It is estimated that one-third of all Americans will be part Osmond by the year 2075.)  The Osmonds have also mostly avoided divisive politics, except for Donny’s public opposition to same-sex marriage in 2008.  I’m sure that gay couples appreciated being lectured about deviant relationships by a guy known for singing love songs to his sister.

Tallying up the Osmond family’s many hit singles is like counting the number of casualties from a gruesome choir loft explosion.  The Osmonds had four top tens as a group, Donny had six solo, Marie had one, and Donny and Marie had two as a duo.  Most of these records are eligible for inclusion on this blog; i.e., they are widely regarded as painful listening experiences.  If I were to give each one the attention that it deserves, I would be stuck writing about our dentally gifted friends from Utah almost every week until Thanksgiving.  I need to select one top ten hit to serve as the scapegoat for all of the Osmonds’ musical sins, and Donny’s rendition of “Puppy Love” gets the honor.

I chose “Puppy Love” partly because it has the lowest Rate Your Music score of any of the family’s top tens, but also because it exemplifies the questionable handling of the siblings’ career.  This crew was talented in many ways, and the Osmonds’ most highly praised hit, “Down by the Lazy River”, was written by two of the brothers without any outside help.  But when their management wasn’t trying to market them as a less menacing version of the Jackson 5, it was mostly feeding them remakes of songs that should have been left in the dustbin where they were found.

Of course, there were other ‘70s acts that relied heavily on redoing other people’s old records.  Linda Ronstadt famously made a vocation out of this.  The difference is that Ronstadt had the good taste to cover Martha & the Vandellas, Chuck Berry, and Warren Zevon, while Donny and Marie were rehashing Dale & Grace, Steve Lawrence, and Anita Bryant.  This was the artistic jetsam of the early 1960s, the music that had been cast overboard at roughly the same time that the Beatles set Pete Best adrift on a raft in the North Sea for refusing to adopt an ugly hairstyle.  Hearing these forgotten songs again was like taking a time machine backwards and mentally undoing all of the scary progress of the preceding 10 to 15 years.  The Moon was now unspoiled by human footprints.  The Civil Rights Act was no longer in force.  Father Knows Best was back on the air 24/7, replacing all the shows that made jokes about birth control and toilets.  Osmond fans ate up this perverse nostalgia like the masochists that they were.

The choice of source material raises an interesting question of causation.  Did the siblings’ producers deliberately seek to remake songs with poor critical reputations, or do the older versions now have bad reputations because they were remade by Donny and/or Marie?  Philosophers continue to debate that, but either way there is general agreement that the Osmonds’ cover tunes were inferior to the originals.  No matter how accurately Donny and Marie hit all the notes, there was something forced and insincere about their work.  The children were ordered to sing about romantic situations that they had not yet experienced, and woe be to them if they did a half-assed job.  Mike Curb never threatened them with physical violence, but the brother and sister knew that a lack of effort would bring disgrace to their family, their church, and the bell bottoms that they were wearing.

While none of the cover singles were timeless treasures, some were decidedly worse than others.  My other blog highlighted Donny’s “Go Away Little Girl”, a song whose rise to #1 was achieved only through the direct personal intervention of Satan.  “Puppy Love” is not nearly so offensive.  For one thing, it is not literally about a romantic fixation on a puppy as most listeners incorrectly believe.  Paul Anka wrote it for his teenage love Annette Funicello, and his original recording from 1960 has some authentic charm to it.  There was absolutely no need to remake it in the 1970s, nor to extend it by half a minute in its new iteration, but at least 14-year-old Donny wasn’t a thoroughly inappropriate choice to sing it as he had been with “Go Away Little Girl”.  And at least he wasn’t singing it to Marie.  Or Marie’s dog.

Donny Osmond has something of a love-hate relationship with “Puppy Love”.  He once tried to distance himself from it, even mockingly performing a heavy metal version at a concert, but relented when a fan told him that he was disrespecting her childhood memories.  That wouldn’t have stopped me.  Disrespecting childhood memories is a big part of what I do here at the Bad Top Ten Hits blog.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Chick-A-Boom (Don’t Ya Jes’ Love It)” by Daddy Dewdrop (1971, #9)

One person’s view:  “God, this is stupid.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.53 / 5.00

Last week we pondered “Gimme Dat Ding”, a novelty-like tune that clawed its way out of the cesspool of children’s television to become a mainstream hit.  Daddy Dewdrop’s “Chick-A-Boom” has a similar origin story, as it was first foisted upon the world in an episode of the kids’ TV show Groovie Goolies.  In “Chick-A-Boom”, the singer tells us of a dream in which he witnesses a woman in a bikini strolling past him.  You cannot expect a man named Daddy Dewdrop to be content with merely admiring this fine sight.  He proceeds to make a pest out of himself by chasing the woman through the oneiric world that his night-time imagination has conjured up.

The bikini-clad lady has disappeared behind one of three doors, and Daddy Dewdrop must guess which one.  He is not very good at guessing.  He tries the first door, but it leads to a generic social gathering that is entirely unremarkable.  The second door is a portal to Africa, where Dewdrop encounters a man who speaks in the form of Little Richard lyrics.  The beautiful woman is behind the third door, just as 100% of listeners predicted from the outset.

The woman’s bikini falls off during the pursuit, so she is presumably naked by the time that Mr. Dewdrop finally locates her.  (This detail was omitted from the Groovie Goolies cartoon, for some reason, but is present in the hit version of the song.)  The listener feels no excitement from the suggestion of nudity, however, and mostly there is just a sense of embarrassment that the guy barged through the door without knocking first.  And like the proverbial dog who catches the car, Dewdrop has no idea what to do next.  My suggestion would be to go back to the second door, because the Africa portal is the only slightly interesting part of this tale.  Naked women are plentiful, but it isn’t every day that you meet a guy who is off his meds and thinks he’s Little Richard.

The only common thread of the three behind-the-door settings is that the same meaningless mantra is uttered in each:  “Chick-a-boom, don’t you just love it?”  There’s nothing wrong with using a nonsensical saying as the basis for a nonsensical song, as in “Mony Mony”, “Wooly Bully”, “Iko Iko”, and “Say You, Say Me”.  The problem with “Chick-A-Boom” is that it tries to build a story song around the silly lyric, and the repetition of a dumb saying isn’t a strong foundation for a work of fiction.  Hemingway could spin a pretty good yarn about the mundane act of catching a fish, but even he would struggle to make something out of this vacuous “chick-a-boom” concept.

When Dewdrop opens “Chick-A-Boom” by announcing that he had a dream, and a crazy one at that, it is an excuse for the lack of a coherent plot and the lazy effort that is forthcoming.  He is like an athlete visibly limping onto the field at the start of a match, or a president beginning his State of the Union speech by declaring that he just drank five beers.  Don’t blame Daddy Dewdrop that this story sucks.  Blame his subconscious.

So, to answer the question that is hanging over all of our heads:  Chick-a-boom, don’t you just love it?  No, I don’t love it.  Nor do I particularly even like it very much.  And I refuse to dwell on it any further, because I still have a lot of ground to cover in the early 1970s.  Scholars of bad music classify this era as “Peak Osmond”.  As the gentleman behind Door #2 would say, good golly Miss Donny.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Gimme Dat Ding” by the Pipkins (1970, #9)

One person’s view:  “Complete crap from beginning to end.  ...  Destroy this album if you come across it.” – gotofritz @ Rate Your Music, regarding the Pipkins’ Gimme Dat Ding! LP 

The public’s view:  2.59 / 5.00

Media outlets generate massive amounts of video, audio, and text every day, and not all of it will be preserved for future generations to ponder.  Much of it is already disappearing, thanks to the recent proliferation of paid digital subscription services.  Archaeologists will be facing a big problem 1,000 years from now:

Flinders:  Hey Claude, this newly unearthed article might give us fresh insights on 21st-century life.  It’s titled “9 Things I Wish I Knew Before Staying at the Super 8 in Laramie, Wyoming”.  But there’s only one sentence and then it says I need a subscription to Business Insider to read the rest.  Can you help?

Claude:  Sorry, buddy, that’s what those primitive anthropods called “clickbait”.  No one actually paid for Business Insider, so that article has been lost if it ever existed in the first place.

Flinders:  Oh, so it’s like that Celebrity Cat Sitters of West Covina reality series that was supposedly aired on the Peacock channel in 2026?

Claude:  Yeah, just like that.  I think we’ll dig up Noah’s Ark before we find evidence of a Peacock subscriber!

Paywalls can sometimes be overcome via the clever application of copyright infringement techniques.  When researching the origin of the Pipkins’ “Gimme Dat Ding”, however, I ran into a more insurmountable obstacle:  the recklessly wasteful practices of the British broadcaster ITV.  Not even the miracle of piracy can allow me to see the source material that I would like to peruse.  It has vanished forever.

The Pipkins’ hit was written for a children’s program called Little Big Time.  This show starred Freddie Garrity, the goofy dancing guy from Freddie & the Dreamers, whose jovial personality did not prevent the series from taking a dark turn.  Beginning with the second or third season, the action moved to a surreal setting called the Overworld which was almost exactly like the Neighborhood of Make-Believe from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  It had puppets, a king, and a grandfather clock.  There was only one slight difference between the two milieus:  the Neighborhood of Make-Believe was a friendly, welcoming place in which conflicts were peaceably mediated, while the Overworld was a dystopian hellscape populated by dangerous pieces of machinery that had come to life.  For example, Hungry Drains rampaged through the Overworld while seeking to devour everyone who they encountered.  “Gimme Dat Ding” was born out of this bleak environment.

From what I can gather, the episode that contained “Gimme Dat Ding” centered on the theft of a bell from a metronome.  The metronome warbled the tune as a musical demand for its “ding” to be returned.  This plea was evidently ineffective, as the bell was instead repurposed to repair the Overworld’s grandfather clock.  I would love to tell you more about the ding larceny and whether it was satisfactorily resolved, but virtually all of the tapes of Little Big Time were erased by ITV.  Just a handful of short clips survive, and the remainder of the series exists solely in the distant recollections of those who saw it on the telly when they were toddlers.  The only characters who are remembered clearly are the Hungry Drains, and that is because the Drains gave many young viewers a lifelong fear of plumbing.  Little Big Time set British potty training efforts back by a decade.

We now have no way of watching the Little Big Time cast’s initial performance of “Gimme Dat Ding” in the Overworld.  Without this context, it is difficult to comprehend that the song concerns a metronome’s calamitous anatomical loss.  It sounds more like a meaningless drunken argument between Wolfman Jack and Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.  As such, “Gimme Dat Ding” is only slightly more intellectually gratifying than a Ben Shapiro podcast.  But even though it is hardly a work of academic rigor, I consider this unusual record to be a fun break from the status quo.  The critics who rank it among the worst songs of its era should be put behind a paywall.

My rating:  7 / 10

“Hey There Lonely Girl” by Eddie Holman (1970, #2)

One person’s view:  “You could wring every ounce of possible comedy from every birdbrained novelty single of the entire 1960s combined and it still wouldn’t be half as genuinely, laugh-out-loud hysterical as the moment Holman’s squeaky, mickey-mouse falsetto comes in on ‘Hey There, Lonely Girl’.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.78 / 5.00

If there is any type of music that is not made for me, it’s slow-tempo ballads consisting of men trying to convince women to go out with them.  The unabridged speeches of Walter Mondale are more exciting than the wimpy begging and listless crooning in these lullabies.  Asking me which song of this genre that I want to hear is like asking which of my fingers I wish to slam in a car door, or which pew I would like to sit in at church.  And yet, Eddie Holman’s “Hey There Lonely Girl” doesn’t rankle me in the same way as its brethren.  It is so bizarre that I forget how much I should hate it.

Until researching this post, I had always assumed that Eddie Holman was the same guy who was in the Stylistics and that “Hey There Lonely Girl” was a rare solo hit.  Nope.  The Stylistics’ falsetto was performed by a different person named Russell Thompkins Jr.  This means that, in defiance of the laws of probability and of nature itself, there were two men singing in this manner on hit pop/R&B songs in the early 1970s.  The Stylistics wisely paired Thompkins up with conventional male singers, preventing him from completely carrying their records off into outer space.  Holman would have benefited from a similar sandbagging.  He’s all about the treble – no bass.  And his voice isn’t just incredibly high-pitched; it also has a squeaky edge to it as if he has ingested a dog toy or a songbird.  This squeak might have sounded amusing as a character in a cartoon or a puppet show, but it’s a little off-putting when it is heard in a love song.

Holman’s unusual falsetto overwhelms every other facet of the song, transcending entertainment and becoming sort of a scientific curiosity.  Exactly how high does this guy’s voice go?  And did he need surgery after singing this?  These are matters of scholarly interest, but I can’t find any published papers that address them.  Even the “Hey There Lonely Girl” sheet music completely dodges the issue.  I would expect the written score to fold out at the top to accurately depict the notes in relation to middle C.  Alternately, it might invent a new Italian word like “castraggio” to indicate that the vocals are to be performed six octaves higher than they are written.  Instead, the notes are placed on the treble staff within the range of a standard tenor, and without any special instructions.  The transcribers are probably just trying to save other singers from exploding their larynxes, but it feels like they are rewriting history and erasing Eddie’s achievement.

Most R&B ballads of this variety have some macho bragging in the lyrics, but “Hey There Lonely Girl” has only desperation.  This is an incel with a ridiculous voice, and he is singing to a girl who just got royally dumped.  The two of them have nothing to lose by hooking up, so they might as well settle for each other.  The mutual despair is one of those things – like the humorous falsetto – that makes the song almost bearable to me while ruining it for normal listeners.  I don’t love “Hey There Lonely Girl”, but I do love that it annoys the folks who usually enjoy this type of tune.

My rating:  4 / 10