“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” by Andy Gibb (1978, #9)

One person’s view:  “I sincerely hope Andy’s legacy ends up being his more lively, catchy stuff like ‘Shadow Dancing’ instead of mediocre scraps foraged from his brothers’ wastebin.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.89 / 5.00

The Bad Top Ten Hits blog is not usually a place for hero worship and hagiography, but I have to make an exception for the Gibb family.  The Bee Gees and little brother Andy were veritable hit machines, and together they achieved near-total command of the music world for a two-year period in the late 1970s.  And their music was not just commercially successful – it was pretty damn good.  The melodies were instantly pleasing, the vocals were perfectly executed, and most of the songs survive as fondly remembered classics.  It’s unusual to see the brothers on any lists of bad music, but logic dictates that one of their hits has to be the worst.  So today we are gathered to debate whether “(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away”, the rare Gibb song that does appear on multiple lists of bad music, deserves that designation.

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” was originally a Bee Gees song, but the older Gibb brothers were blessed with a surplus of excellent material and didn’t need a ballad with a clunky title.  They decided to pawn it off on Andy.  I perfectly understand their behavior, because I also once disposed of an unwanted item by foisting it upon my younger brother.  It was my Fritos T-shirt.  My mom had ordered this shirt for me from the textiles division of Frito-Lay.  It was supposed to have depicted Frankenstein’s monster consuming a bag of Fritos while ominously declaring, “I’ll munch to that.”  I was crushed to learn that the Frankenstein shirts were sold out, and that the Frito people had instead sent a T-shirt with Napoleon on it.  I didn’t know who Napoleon was, and I was sure that other kids would mock me for having this big-hatted chip-chomping nerd on my chest.  So I convinced my mom that I had outgrown the shirt while waiting 4 to 6 weeks for its delivery, and that my brother had grown into it during that time.  Lucky him.  When he was made to wear it, he threw a monumental tantrum that culminated with the shirt being flushed down the toilet.  Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, and was defeated again by the water in our loo in 1977.

Andy Gibb did not flush his brothers’ hand-me-down song down the toilet.  He dutifully recorded his own version, with big brother Barry helping out on backing vocals, and released it as the third single from his Shadow Dancing album.  “(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” is a weepy plea to a woman to stay in a romance which, truth be told, she has pretty much already checked out of.  It’s an example of the sunken cost fallacy.  Andy has certainly bought presents for this girl and invested time in learning stupid trivia about her family, and all of that is for naught if they break up.  However, there is little future benefit to be derived from a relationship with someone who will no longer talk to him or even look at him.  Any economist would tell Andy to walk away and cut his losses, but he just won’t listen.  Again, the Napoleon T-shirt is illustrative.  My family had eaten a lot of Fritos to get the proofs of purchase that were needed for that garment, so my mom insisted that someone must wear it despite its negative marginal utility.  My brother understood the sunken cost fallacy, however, and demonstrated it with a sunken shirt.

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” might be the weakest top 10 single to emerge from the Gibbs’ foundry.  The toothless musical arrangement borders on easy listening, the singer’s chances of reviving the romance are nonexistent, and Andy’s normally exquisite falsetto comes across as whiney in this context.  I can’t fault the critics who place this record in the ridicule bin with Player’s similarly themed “Baby Come Back”, but I hear just enough of the Bee Gees’ songwriting brilliance to keep me from tuning out.  Just barely enough.

My rating:  5 / 10

Napoleon and Andy Gibb.  Both men nearly conquered the world, but each experienced a catastrophic downfall.  One was exiled from Europe, and the other was exiled from Solid Gold.

“Summer Nights” by John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John & Cast (1978, #5)

One person’s view:  “If there is any saving grace to this song, it’s Olivia Newton-John, who is the only one who sounds like she can sing.  She’s not great, but she’s at least passable, which is more than can be said of anyone else.” – Valeyard’s Music Corner

The public’s view:  2.94 / 5.00

This project has forced me to reassess many beliefs that I once firmly accepted.  For example, I had always assumed that everyone of all demographics loved Grease – the top-grossing film of 1978 – and most of the songs from it.  Today I’m hearing for the first time that Grease is dominated by bad acting, terrible singing, flimsy character development, and a plot that requires our suspension of disbelief at every turn.  Its script is also now deemed “troubling” like so many artistic works of its unenlightened era, and the same is true of the Grease soundtrack single “Summer Nights”.  So I guess we have to make room for another “bad” top ten hit.  Wella, wella, wella, hmmph.

Part of Grease’s appeal is the plentiful sex banter that amuses adults while going straight over children’s heads, enabling the whole family to enjoy the movie on different levels.  I can remember a girl bringing the soundtrack album to school when I was 8 or 9 years old, along with a lyric sheet that had been censored to delete a few risqué lines.  She asked our class to listen to “Greased Lightnin’” and help her figure out the missing words.  (I don’t know what our teacher was doing during all of this, but I presume that she was too hungover to object.)  We were stumped on one of the lyrics in the chorus.  John Travolta was saying “the chicks’ll cream”, but none of us could understand why this phrase would be considered objectionable.  We incorrectly concluded that the line must be “the shit’s a dream”.  We also correctly concluded that whoever had censored the lyric sheet was a “dickweed”.

“Greased Lightnin’” demonstrates how Grease weaves sex into an otherwise G-rated storyline.  It is superficially a song about fixing up an old car and winning a race with it, but it’s clear that Travolta’s character Danny doesn’t give half a poo about the thrill of racing.  He is only using the racecar to attract chicks who put out on the first date.  If he discovers that girls prefer guys who drive practical and efficient vehicles, he’ll happily push Greased Lightnin’ off a cliff and buy a Nash Rambler.  “Summer Nights” offers a similar blend of innocence and lust, but the concept is not as strong.  The song is built around a background chorus of “teens”, all of whom evidently did diddly-squat with their summer break.  They must live vicariously through the tale of Danny’s brief fling with Olivia Newton-John’s character Sandy, which isn’t exactly a Shakespearean love story for the ages.

The male background singers in “Summer Nights” are interested solely in how much backseat action that Danny got.  The female singers are the complete opposite, and they don’t ask Sandy about sex at all.  They want to hear only about her cute little crush on a nice guy who probably bought ice cream for her and protected her from bees.  In the real world, however, ladies have at least as much of a depraved obsession with sex as we gents do.  This is evident from the types of TV programs that they watch.  Women gravitate to soap operas full of sex, “reality” shows full of sex, true murder stories involving sexual jealousy, and game shows in which the host (usually Steve Harvey) is perpetually exasperated by contestants’ lewd answers.  Meanwhile, cable networks can hypnotize male viewers for days without relying on sex.  Men watch endless poker tournaments, old westerns, documentaries about Hitler, and panel discussions in which Stephen A. Smith debates two other people about which current junior high players will be selected in the 2032 NBA draft.  So, we see that “Summer Nights” is not just based on a gender stereotype.  It is based on a wildly inaccurate gender stereotype.

In fact, Grease is full of such shockingly outdated biases and behaviors.  The T-Birds wantonly spew carbon into the atmosphere during their drag races.  Principal McGee never apologizes for Rydell High’s location on stolen Native American land.  The only example of diversity in the student body is the Australian immigrant Sandy, but even she flaunts her white privilege at every opportunity.  And in “Summer Nights”, some creepy dude asks Danny, “Did she put up a fight?”  This is one of the few interjections by the background chorus that can be clearly discerned amid the obnoxious accents and overpowering music, and it’s also the most indefensible.

Clearly, the characters in Grease are all sociopaths who should not be emulated in any way.  And “Summer Nights” is a missed opportunity to explore truthful gender stereotypes, like why men can’t wrap presents and women can’t read road maps.  There are worse crimes than making a politically incorrect pop record, however, and the song’s catchiness almost outweighs its multiple annoying attributes.  So please don’t throw moldy cabbage at the folks who brought us “Summer Nights”.  We will cover other songs that are far more cabbage-worthy over the coming weeks and months.

My rating:  6 / 10

“Get Off” by Foxy (1978, #9)

One person’s view:  “Sex songs work when they’re subtle, not blatantly disgusting.  And it’s not just the lyrics that makes this song so punishing.  The musical content is even worse.  ...  In fact, every part of this song is pure sensory abuse.” – JudaiKitsune @ Deviant Art

The public’s view:  3.02 / 5.00

For every massively overplayed song like “Sometimes When We Touch”, there were five or ten other hit records that I rarely heard on the radio at all.  Foxy’s “Get Off” is a prime example.  I never once encountered it on my local stations in 1978.  I even missed its appearance on Casey Kasem’s New Year’s Eve countdown of the biggest singles of the year, as I mentioned on my other blog, due to a badly timed bout with church.  By the time I finally did get to experience “Get Off”, many years later, I didn’t at first recognize it as the top ten hit by Foxy that had evaded my eardrums for so long.  I thought maybe it was a new record by Rick James, and that its creation was the result of an especially potent batch of drugs.  I was wrong about “Get Off” having anything to do with Rick James, but wasn’t too far off about the drugs.

Foxy was a Miami disco-funk band led by a man named Ish Ledesma.  The average Miami disco-funk band tends to party pretty hard when given the chance, and Foxy was above average.  Although “Get Off” has been condemned as being too explicit for the 1970s, the band was simply singing about the lifestyle that they knew.  If anything, the line about “peeking under the sheets with two lovelies” describes a slow night for these guys.  Also, nowhere in the song do they mention the huge joint that Ledesma and his temporary bandmate Carl Driggs smoked while writing it.  In my opinion, the Moral Majority should have given them a medal for the restraint that they showed with these lyrics.

We know about the genesis of this song, and the magical fat doobie that contributed to it, because of a monologue that Ish Ledesma posted on YouTube.  In this video, Ledesma confirms what many people have suspected:  “Get Off” was deliberately engineered to be annoying.  Specifically, the police-siren-like whooping noises were intended to aggravate a rude Maryland nightclub owner named Pete.  Pete had stated that he did not wish to hear any such irritating sounds while Foxy was playing at his establishment.  When the group defiantly launched into its debut performance of “Get Off”, Pete’s bouncers carried Ledesma off the stage after the first whoop.  He was dumped unceremoniously on the ground outside the building, along with Foxy’s gear, narrowly avoiding an unwanted baptism in a nearby bay.  It was then that he knew he had a hit, and that the band needed to get into the studio right away to record it.

The racy lyrics and the whooping are not the only parts of “Get Off” that push people’s anger buttons.  The song is a non-stop barrage of sonic weirdness, and it isn’t even a particularly original brand of weirdness.  The whooping was nothing new, having already been done in the Michael Zager Band’s “Let’s All Chant”.  There’s also a talk box solo that sounds like Peter Frampton having a very bad day, and a repeated synth noise that is like the duck from “Disco Duck” quacking into a kazoo.  All of it somehow comes together to make a usable party record, but not in my town.  We were still partying to “Sometimes When We Touch”.

There was no MTV in 1978, but that didn’t stop Foxy from making two videos for their hit song – both of which are far funnier than anything I could possibly write here.  Many of the vocals in “Get Off” were provided by a trio of ladies called Wildflower, but the label apparently didn’t want to pay these women to appear anywhere with the rest of the group.  Thus the men in Foxy were forced to lip-synch the female parts in the videos, with unintentionally hilarious results.

Ish Ledesma and Carl Driggs also failed to coordinate their attire for one of these video spectacles, as seen below.  Ledesma wore his usual “Florida man” tank top while Driggs showed up in dress clothes, a poorly sized necktie, and heavy makeup, looking and dancing like a slightly less awkward version of Donald Trump.  Yet, Foxy does not win the award for Most Embarrassingly Humorous Musical Stage Production of 1978.  Barry Manilow snags that trophy for his outlandish performance in the video for “Copacabana”.  He was singing about a showgirl and he just about tried to be one too.

My rating:  6 / 10

“Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill (1978, #3)

One critic’s view:  “Hill, who wrote these words to ruin a perfectly good melody by Brill Building legend Barry Mann, bends over backwards in an attempt to make failure to commit seem somehow noble and romantic.” – Robert Fontenot @ About.com

One comedian’s view:  “Top Ten Headlines That Would Start a Panic  ...  Number Three:  ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ Made National Anthem”, David Letterman, The “Late Night with David Letterman” Book of Top Ten Lists (1990)

The public’s view:  1.96 / 5.00

We’re up to 1978, the year that I first became aware of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and its often tenuous connection to the songs that were played on the AM radio in my mom’s car.  If the Hot 100 was to be believed, the most popular tunes of the era were “You Light Up My Life”, “Night Fever”, and “Shadow Dancing”.  Those three hits combined to hog the #1 position for nearly six entire months, but there were three others that I heard far more often:  Pablo Cruise’s “Love Will Find a Way”, Player’s “Baby Come Back”, and Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch”.  I grew to detest these three overplayed songs, at least one of which was guaranteed to sully the speakers on every single ten-minute ride to school or to Grandma’s house.

My hatred for these records eventually dimmed after other tracks replaced them in heavy rotation on the air.  Today I look back at them with nostalgia, and can admit that “Love Will Find a Way” is actually a pretty good song when I don’t have to hear it every goddamn moment of the day.  “Baby Come Back” is still not something I would voluntarily listen to, but I at least see the humor in its absurd level of pathos and the dude’s ridiculous high note near the end.  My view of “Sometimes When We Touch” is more nuanced and complicated.  Sort of like Dan Hill’s feelings.

I recently wrote about Kenny Nolan’s “I Like Dreamin’”, a ballad so bland that it passes right through the brain without making any lasting impression.  “Sometimes When We Touch” may be the polar opposite of “I Like Dreamin’”.  Everything about it is memorable:  a beautiful melody written by Barry Mann, dramatic orchestration that would make Manilow jealous, Dan Hill’s earnest vocals, and – most of all – the lyrics.  Sweet merciful crap on a diving board, those are some memorably bizarre lyrics.  Even as an 8-year-old kid, I knew that something about them was a little off.

“Sometimes When We Touch” is not a romantic devotional; it is a song about an unhappy relationship between two people who keep hoping that the other will eventually change.  Hill won’t tell his girlfriend that he loves her because he just isn’t feeling it.  Maybe someday things will be different, but don’t hold your breath.  He justifies his unwillingness to say the L-word by calling himself a “hesitant prizefighter”.  (If you’re going to rationalize your faults, you might as well do it in a way that makes you sound athletic.)  Hill’s reticence is not the couple’s only problem.  The woman can be kind of a handful herself, so there are times that the singer would like to break her and drive her to her knees.  The pleasant music masks all of this turmoil, causing “Sometimes When We Touch” to rank up there with “Every Breath You Take” and “You’re Beautiful” as a song that should never be played at weddings but sometimes is.

I like that “Sometimes When We Touch” is not an obsequious ode of worship for a lady, as is so annoyingly common in soft rock.  Lionel Richie would rather shave his head than sing lyrics like these, and I see that as a plus.  On the other hand, the grandiose piano, strings, and vocals all add up to very little in the end.  This is not a call to action, nor is it a promise that the singer will ever make the kind of commitment that is expected of him.  It’s just an expression of emotions and excuses that, at very best, might placate a woman for a day or two.  More likely, it is going to piss her off.

We don’t have to speculate as to how a female will react upon being fed these lines.  Like a doctor who injects his family with his own experimental vaccine, Dan Hill bravely tried out “Sometimes When We Touch” on his girlfriend before singing it to anyone else.  She then immediately left the country with another man.  Let that be a warning to anyone who treats this as a love song.

My rating:  5 / 10