One writer’s view: “Although to the record’s credit it does sample (a term that was not in use in 1972) a couple of good songs by groups such as the Bee Gees, Three Dog Night, and the O’Jays, most of the sampled music is [as] bad as the premise behind the song itself...” – Dr. Rick Simmons @ REBEAT
The public’s view: 2.61 / 5.00
Welcome to the great American shitshow known as a presidential election. While all elections are painful ordeals for the citizenry, 1972 was one of the worst because voters that year didn’t really have a choice. The Democratic candidate George McGovern was known for lunatic left-wing positions such as opposing the Vietnam War, favoring the decriminalization of marijuana, and supporting a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions (as long as she doesn’t defy the whims of her state legislators). Due to McGovern’s extreme views, the Republican ticket of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew was the only viable option. The lopsided outcome was evident well in advance, and most Americans tuned out by September. But just a few weeks before Election Day, the Delegates’ “Convention ‘72” hit the airwaves and everyone was forced to pay attention again. A weary people emitted a tremendous national groan.
“Convention ‘72” is a political version of the comedic “break-in” records that had been pioneered by Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan in the 1950s. As an amateur humor writer, I am sympathetic to the difficulties that the Delegates faced when trying to produce a funny novelty song. I’ve spent dozens of hours meticulously crafting jokes that I later discarded after realizing that they were never as hilarious as I first thought. (You’ve seen the material that I’ve kept, so you can imagine how awful the throw-away stuff was.) Plus, some of my best ideas can’t be made to work in the places where I need them. For my post about Bobby Vinton’s Bad Top Ten Hit, I wrote an extended joke involving the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. It was witty and brilliant, and you would have loved reading it, but after I had finished three paragraphs it dawned on me that it had nothing to do with Bobby Vinton and I couldn’t use any of it. I probably should have also stopped myself before referencing the Ayatollah Khomeini in last week’s entry on Wayne Newton.
The creators of “Convention ‘72” understood that it’s the introspection and self-editing that makes comedy writing so tedious, so they decided to skip that step. They kept all of their material whether it was funny or not, and dwelled on some of it for far too long. One bit, in particular, was driven into the ground: the running joke about a horny Henry Kissinger galloping around the convention site while muttering “gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman.” We all know that Mr. Kissinger was quite a ladies’ man. He was a lot more popular with Hollywood starlets than he was with, say, Cambodian villagers. But this snippet of the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “Troglodyte (Cave Man)” wasn’t especially amusing the first time it appeared in “Convention ‘72”, and it didn’t need to resurface twice more – along with three other samples from the same godforsaken song. The “gotta find a woman” line would have worked much better if used ironically by a political figure who no one expects to be chasing women. However, I don’t know who the 1972 equivalent of Lindsey Graham might have been.
Incidentally, all of the “Troglodyte” samples were used without obtaining prior consent from Jimmy Castor. Shortly after “Convention ‘72” was released, the members of the Delegates were heard muttering “gotta find a lawyer, gotta find a lawyer.”
Much of the rest of the material focuses on the choice of vice presidential running mates. This is like someone releasing a similar record in 2016 and devoting 60% of it to those two bland slabs of Oreo filling known as Mike Pence and Tim Kaine. Meanwhile, “Convention ‘72” leaves other potentially humorous topics untouched. There are no lines about Ted Kennedy’s amphibious driving habits, the strange burglary at the Democrats’ headquarters in the Watergate complex, or Nixon’s fondness of pouring ketchup on his cottage cheese. And McGovern’s wacko proposals, which were dictating the entire course of the election, go unaddressed by the Delegates like the proverbial elephant (or donkey) in the room. This record should have concluded with the liberal hippie senator offering Nixon a joint, and the two of them smoking it together while singing “One Toke Over the Line”.
The “break-in” format serves as a handicap to novelty music writers, as it limits them to jokes based on recent hit songs. It’s as if I committed to writing this post without using the letter “a”, or insisted on making each sentence a palindrome. The Delegates were unable to tease McGovern for his love of abortion because there were no major singles from 1971 or 1972 with lyrics that were relevant to this topic. It had been way too many years since the Drifters were on the charts with “There Goes My Baby”.
There is only one moment in this song that gives me a snicker: when one of the reporters is introduced as “David Stinkley”. But maybe the other jokes were funny to people in 1972. This generation was taught to laugh upon hearing “Ahab, the Arab” and the phrase “Sock it to me.” The standards for humor were pretty low.
My rating: 2 / 10