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
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