“Sing” by the Carpenters (1973, #3)

One person’s view:  “I don’t know what I dislike more, the slushy-pups lyric, gormlessly simple tune, the godawful children’s chorus but mostly I think it’s the utter waste of Karen Carpenter’s voice on such an undeserving song.” – Lejink @ Rate Your Music 

The public’s view:  2.88 / 5.00

When we examine the Bad Top Ten Hits of the early 1970s, we find the germ-laden fingerprints of children all over them.  Children were the subjects of questionable hit songs such as “Clair” and “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast”.  Youngsters, usually those with names like “Donny” or “Marie”, sang on some of the era’s most reviled records.  And as if that wasn’t enough, several of the critically disparaged top tens first appeared on kids’ TV shows.  This is the lasting legacy of Little Big Time (“Gimme Dat Ding”) and Groovie Goolies (“Chick-A-Boom”), but those two obscure programs must now yield the floor.  We’re about to hear from the 800-pound gorilla of children’s television – or, more accurately, the 800-pound yellow ostrich.  “Sing” emanated from the land where everything’s A-OK, clouds are swept away like last week’s toenail clippings, and Mr. Hooper has been forced by one deranged blue-furred individual to keep all of his store’s cookies locked up behind the counter with the cigarettes and the condoms.  I am of course talking about Sesame Street, which was beamed into billions of kids’ eyeballs every day on PBS.

The debut performance of “Sing” by the Sesame Street cast must have been a fine spectacle, but I can’t find any footage of it to share with you.  You’ll just have to imagine Big Bird’s beak opening to its full extent as the notes pour out of it.  However, the tune did not go directly from Sesame Street to the pop charts.  It first made a stop on an ABC variety special emceed by Marcus Welby, M.D. actor Robert Young and featuring several celebrity guests.  The network decided that the show’s subject matter should be based on the host’s name, so they titled it “Robert Young and the Young” and built the entire program around the theme of youth.  (Good thing the host wasn’t Dick Butkus.)  To drive home the point, they assembled a generic group of children as co-stars.

ABC knew very little about people under the age of 20 who weren’t part of the Partridge Family, and they struggled with how to utilize the kids on Young’s special.  They snuck a peek at archrival PBS’s programming for ideas, but overlooked the obvious approach:  hiring the host of PBS’s Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr., to engage the children in a lively discussion of the failures of Keynesian economics.  It is unclear why they didn’t do this.  Perhaps Buckley demanded that a working model of the Federal Reserve be built for the set, and the network couldn’t afford it.  Instead, ABC did the next best thing.  They borrowed “Sing” from Sesame Street and asked Laugh-In regular Arte Johnson to lead the little tykes in a sing-along of the tune.

Another of the show’s guests – the Carpenters – was impressed by the song.  The duo enthusiastically volunteered to take it into the studio and record a version for all of the people who never watched ABC or PBS.  There was a whole demographic who didn’t know how to get to Sesame Street and still hadn’t been subjected to “Sing”.  Many of these same individuals didn’t realize that there was a difference between Marcus Welby and Marcus Garvey, at least not until they tried to see the doctor for a sore throat and wound up on a ship to Liberia.

Karen and Richard Carpenter didn’t just believe in “Sing”’s potential to be a hit; they wanted it to be the lead single from their new album.  Richard has since remarked that their label wasn’t happy about this, and that “most of our associates thought we were nuts.”  He and his sister were correct that their rendition would sell some copies, but it did so by undercutting the song’s premise.  The message of “Sing” is that you are supposed to sing even if you stink at it and no one wants to hear you.  It’s a simplistic tune that works best in a lackadaisical TV skit with a group of untrained children, a Laugh-In comedian, or a guy in a giant bird suit.  Sesame Street proved that “Sing” can even be babbled in Spanish or signed to the deaf, and the lyrics will have just as little significance as they do in English.  The only thing that “Sing” isn’t intended for is a slick production featuring one of the best soft rock vocalists of all time.  And thus it became perhaps the least admired gold record in the Carpenters’ catalog.

You may think that we’ve hit the nadir of childish hit music of the 1970s.  Nothing could be more juvenile than a song from Sesame Street, right?  Wrong.  Stay tuned.

My rating:  4 / 10

“Clair” by Gilbert O’Sullivan (1972, #2)

One person’s view:  “Come on, you think he didn't know [the lyrics] sounded perverted?  Of course, he did.  Why he or his manager, Clair's dad, or her mom allowed this I do not know except to say that greed rules.” – Glinda47 @ Songfacts

The public’s view:  3.17 / 5.00

Gilbert O’Sullivan was bursting with a happy feeling of naïveté during his brief moment in the spotlight, having blissfully failed to anticipate the inappropriate meanings people might ascribe to his lyrics.  To use his terminology, he was cheerful, bright, and gay.  When he wrote a tune about a man who was unlucky with women, and called it “Underneath the Blanket Go”, he was genuinely surprised that everyone incorrectly assumed the title referred to masturbation.  “Clair” was even more misunderstood.  It was a tribute to his manager’s three-year-old daughter, with whom O’Sullivan had developed a close friendship.  Certainly, Gilbert thought, no one would misconstrue this beautiful song about the bond between a babysitter and a babysat?  As it turns out, he thought wrong.

The controversy might have been avoided if the lyrics were more direct.  The first verse of “Clair” lulls the listener into the belief that Clair is the singer’s girlfriend, and we don’t learn until later in the song that she’s actually a small child.  It’s an uncomfortable twist, but not an inherently disgusting one like in Billy J. Kramer’s infamous “Little Children”.  “Little Children” deliberately leads us to believe that the narrator is a pervert, and the surprise at the end is that he’s a different kind of pervert.  “Clair” is pure sugary sweetness, by contrast, except for the part where O’Sullivan complains about the girl becoming a monstrous terror in the evenings when told to go to bed.  If you hear anything untoward in it, it means you have a problem on your end.

Although I disagree with those who say “Clair” is obscene, I have to acknowledge that it’s pretty weird.  The song never explains why a man in his 20s has formed such an instant attachment to someone else’s toddler who he has been told to supervise.  It would be less bizarre if he had grown fond of his manager’s pet snake and had written lyrics praising Fluffy the Burmese python.  At least snakes are interesting and you can put them down people’s pants as an amusing prank.  You can’t use three-year-old children in this manner and instead have to intentionally lose games to them to prevent them from throwing tantrums.  The brats can’t even play Stratego at a competent level, and yet we are all expected to massage their fragile egos.

Gilbert O’Sullivan hasn’t had a hit in many decades, but his brand of oblivious innocence might be refreshing to today’s beleaguered citizenry.  Here are a few song premises that he can try out if he wants:

“Epstein Was My Friend (R.I.P.)” – an ode to the late actor Robert Hegyes, who played the beloved character of Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter

“Now I’ve Joined the Clan” – about the day that O’Sullivan’s in-laws finally accepted him as a member of their extended family

“She’s Gonna Find My Big Snake in Her Pants” – a musical guide to harmless practical jokes with a pet reptile

“Keep Our Dark Secret Forever (Clair Pt. 2)” – a reminder to Clair never to tell anyone about the time O’Sullivan dozed off while he was supposed to be watching her and she ate a cigarette butt

I promise not to sue O’Sullivan if he uses any of the above ideas.  I probably wouldn’t win anyway, as he has a pretty good track record in court.  He sued his manager, Clair’s father, and was awarded millions of pounds for unpaid royalties.  (I don’t know whether he also won back wages for babysitting.)  He later sued Biz Markie for an unauthorized sample and forced an entire album to be recalled from stores in December 1991, resulting in lots of disappointed rap fans who had expected to find some Biz under the Christmas tree.  You can call him Gilbert O’Scrooge if you like, but when it comes to any interpretations of “Clair” that aren’t cheerful, bright, and gay – don’t go there.

My rating:  4 / 10

“Convention ‘72” by the Delegates (1972, #8)

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

“Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” by Wayne Newton (1972, #4)

One person’s view:  “I don’t think Sinatra could have saved this turkey.” – hanspostcard @ slicethelife

The public’s view:  2.05 / 5.00

There are few things that can boost a city’s civic pride and tourism appeal like an association with an amazing musician.  San Antonio was once known mainly for a tired old fort, but today’s visitors are more interested in seeing the high school that Christopher Cross attended.  Columbia, South Carolina will someday honor its hometown heroes Hootie & the Blowfish in the way that South Carolina honors everything:  by erecting a statue of a Confederate general at the spot where the band formed.  And can you imagine what Las Vegas would be like if Wayne Newton had never existed?  It would be little more than an I-15 truck stop with twenty gas pumps, a couple of slot machines, and one bedraggled hooker.

The 83-year-old Newton has done over 30,000 concerts in Vegas, and continues his residency at the Flamingo even as he mysteriously morphs into a wax mannequin.  This is an impressive streak, but I should mention that Vegas shows aren’t always known for their tight quality control.  If you’re going to screw up as a performer you should always try to do it in front of tired drunks who are thinking more about how to recoup their gambling losses than they are about your inadequacies.  I recall seeing a well-known magician on the Strip in the 1990s.  The show began badly, with dancers tripping on a coat hanger that had accidentally been left on the stage.  Then, having neglected to load up on alcohol beforehand, I could easily discern how several of the illusions were accomplished.  Imperfectly aligned mirrors were used to conceal parts of the set, objects “levitated” with the aid of wires that glinted in the light, and the star employed a body double who looked more like a step-cousin than an identical twin.  It was the most unconvincing magic act I’ve witnessed – and I’ve seen cruise ship magicians.

Wayne Newton’s Vegas shows are still widely praised, but recent reviews suggest that his voice might no longer pass quality control.  As a young man he was capable of an oddly high pitch, leading many listeners to erroneously assume that tunes such as “Danke Schoen” were performed by a schoolmarm.  Eventually he grew a wisp of a mustache, and this caused his voice to deepen to match his more masculine appearance.  He was no longer as distinctive of a singer, but was still a hard-working and highly talented lounge act.  Today he is in the third and possibly final phase of his career, and his concerts rely more heavily on crowd interactions and storytelling than on his legendary pipes.  I suppose we can forgive Newton if his larynx is showing signs of wear and tear after 30,000 shows.  A man’s vocal abilities might also suffer if he were to inject his facial muscles with enough Botox to take the wrinkles out of a shar-pei.  There is absolutely no proof that Newton has undergone cosmetic procedures, however, and I refuse to entertain any scurrilous rumors of that nature.

“Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” came along as Newton was turning 30 and his voice was in the latter stages of adolescence.  The song is about a guy attempting to flee his wife, who is evidently an unmitigated horror to live with.  His escape is thwarted when his manipulative young daughter guilts him into staying in the oppressive marriage for her own selfish reasons.  And yet, some folks inexplicably describe this as a heart-warming ditty with a happy ending.  These people also think that “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” depicts a pleasant and relaxing day of boating.

Despite the maudlin subject matter and the morose lyrics, the singing and musicianship is so proficient that it’s impossible for me to thoroughly hate this record.  The piano accompaniment is nice, and I especially like the second chorus when Newton does his own thing and wanders away from the orchestra for a moment.  Good for him.  The Mafia, however, was apparently not a fan of Newton’s performance and later threatened to kill him.  That seems like a bit of an overreaction.  I would have loved to hear how the mobsters reached that decision:

Mr. Gravano:  This meeting of the Italian-American Nontraditional Commerce Society shall come to order.  Thank you for your attendance here at the Hoboken Hilton.  First on the agenda is a proposal to purchase asphalt footwear for Wayne Newton as a token of our appreciation for “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast”.

Mr. Gotti:  So I guess we’re music critics now?  Maybe we should sell our high-interest loan venture and start a stupid blog about top ten hits.

Mr. Khomeini:  Speaking of music, I’d like to put a fatwa on Donny Osmond.  “Go Away Little Girl” offends Allah, as well as everyone else.

Mr. Gotti:  You’re in the wrong place, pal.  Ayatollahs Anonymous is in Conference Room D.

Mr. Gravano:  Hey, wait a minute.  Beardy-face here is the one who took all the bacon at the breakfast bar this morning.  Maybe our Iranian friend would enjoy a refreshing swim in Lake Mead with Mr. Las Vegas?

Mr. Khomeini:  I would like that very much.  The hospitality in this country is as amazing as the bacon.  Long live America!

My rating:  4 / 10

“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