The other night while washing dishes I turned on the radio, hoping to find a few good songs to play in the background. The local Oldies station was playing Gary Puckett & the Union Gap‘s “Lady Willpower”. Those of you who know me know that I despise that song – even while finding it unintentionally hilarious (a characteristic that usually carries a lot of weight with me). I quickly changed the station.
I switched over to the local Classic Rock station, which was playing ZZ Top‘s “Sharp Dressed Man”. That song makes me nauseous! There was nothing else on the radio. I couldn’t bear to go back to “Lady Willpower”, yet I had the chilling thought that I disliked the ZZ Top song more than the Gary Puckett song. I had identified my personal benchmark of disdain: to truly say I have disdain for a song, I must despise it more than “Lady Willpower”.
On a personal level, this is a powerful conclusion I thought I’d share. Perhaps you have identified your own benchmark of disdain.
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.
I can imagine many similarly terrifying trips around the terrestrial radio FM dial!
Classic Rock Disdain Benchmark: China Grove
“static….”
Oldies Disdain Benchmark: Sugar Pie Honeybunch
“static….”
Alt Rock Disdain Benchmark: Losing My Religion
“static….”
Hard Rock Disdain Benchmark: any of those countless bands with a Yarling lead singer.
and around and around we go…..
Hey, Sat — how much of your disdain for those tunes stems from incessant over-playing? Not that that doesn’t decrease their disdain-worthiness; just askin’. I have a feeling that if “Sugar Pie Honeybunch” was an infrequently played “deep cut,” you’d love it — as would I. As it stands now, I can barely stand the sound of the thing.
My benchmark for classic rock disdain (at least the first one that pops into my head): “25 Or 6 to 4.”
For the record, I quite like “Lady Willpower.” Hey, all you hipster know-it-alls: is there any kind of label to describe that style of heavily arranged, near-big band pop song from the mid-late 60s? The prime (and I do mean PRIME; it’s one of my fave songs ever) example is “More Today than Yesterday” by the Spiral Starecase.
HVB, I hear ya. But I specifically chose songs that didnt’ require incessant overplaying axiom for me to hate them. There’s something about “Sugar Pie” that has always, from an early age, provoked a rage in me that goes WAY beyond any rational explanation. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Let’s just say it’s too sweet.
I don’t have that much disdain for “Lady Willpower” either. To each his own.
My wife and I have a gesture for the music you describe, Hrrundi. We call it “this” type of music, while pretending to hold a mic in one hand and raise our other hand out to the heavens, fingers stretched out and palms facing upward.
Yes, mod…..Tom Jones, Neil Diamond, even Johnny Halliday come to mind.
hell, nancy and I have figured out that Neil Diamond probably even *wrote* that gesture INTO some of his songs to accommodate that pose: “play it now…play it now…PLAY IT NOW, my BABY…”.
China Grove’s a pretty good pick for this. For some reason, hearing that on the radio makes me think I’m listening to WKRP or something. And that’s also a song that, for reasons I’m not sure of now, I assumed was some kind of filthy double entendre growing up. It really should be.
I think just about any Chicago song might qualify in this category for me. I’m sure there are a few I have less disdain for than others, but the start of a Chicago song usually triggers an innate hand-to-radio-dial response.
I can’t think of Gary Puckett now without thinking of Tom Scharpling’s strong argument that Puckett is the sleaziest rocker of all time.
For what it’s worth, because I wouldn’t want to dispute anyone’s personal benchmark of disdain, I don’t mind “China Grove”. I’m a sucker for the sound of dueling power chord riffs played by guys who’ve probably got guts hanging over their big belt buckles. That Chicago song, however, is despicable. I think I dislike “25 or 6 to 4” more than I dislike “Lady Willpower”.
“Give me the beat boys and free my soul,
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll.
And drift away.”
Whatever the fuck THAT song is called, i despise that.
For hard rock, it has to be worse than Fugazi.
yes, kilroy, that song was heinous from the beginning for me, too. ugh.
“Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s.
I never liked the song. But when it was being played every hour on the “alternative” radio station my colleagues like to listen to at work, I prayed for death for me, plain white t’s, clear channel, whoever. One of us had to go.
I always kind of liked the Union Gap records, and I always mix them up with the Buckinghams, another of those ‘bands’ whose records were the product of studio pros.
And the subject matter of Lady Willpower is really amazing for a hit record in an era when you couldn’t even say ‘pregnant’ on tv.
Moddie: we REACH!
Sat: your comment about “PLAY it NOW!” was the first thing to make me laugh out loud in these parts in a while.
You guys are both okay in my book.
HVB
Hey — this isn’t the first time I’ve heard an RTHer point the sleazeball finger at Gary Puckett. Howcum?
hvb asked:
I seem to remember an article where this was called ‘goatee rock.’ (Note that one of the Union Gaps in this clip has a goatee.) If I recall the band the Brooklyn Bridge (The Worst that Could Happen) were the example used in this article. All google gives me is that the writer Eddie Gorodetsky coined the term.
Glad I could make you laugh, HVB. I have this crazy theory that since Neil was writing in the days before lazers and big screens, he wrote these big moments into his songs as the venues he played got bigger and bigger. He was, as someone put it so blithely in yesterday’s MC5 thread, swinging for the fences, quite literally.
As far as this big band stuff goes, don’t forget those lovely, splashy arrangements for Lulu, and ESPECIALLY for Petula Clark. Along with “Downtown,” “Sign of the Times,” “Who am I?” and even “Colour My World” are all suitably huge songs that express big sentiments about big things.
Also, Jack Nitsche (i butchered that spelling, yes i did) is someone to consider where the BIG arrangement is concerned.
I have searched far and wide for the issue of Musician magazine that had the Goatee Rock piece. Andyr and I were big fans of that, feeling a spiritual connection to that style of music. The Gary Puckett stuff represents the worst impulses of that scene, which with a base of Italian- and Jewish-American musicans rooted in the dinner theater/lounge entertainment scene (eg, The Rascals and Four Seasons were prime examples of Goatee Rock at its best): too much Latin Casino (a once-thriving Rat Pack-directed nightclub in South Jersey) and not enough Peppermint Lounge.
How about that REO song “Heard it from a friend…
The Puckett sleaze connection is in the subject matter and lyrics of his songs. Not just Lady Willpower and Young Girl but This Girl Is a Woman Now, where you get the incredibly specific, creepy: “She cried a single tear, a teardrop that was sweet and warm/Our hearts told us we were right/And on that sweet and velvet night/A child had died, a woman had been born.” Ugh.
Wow, alexmagic; that *is* something.
For me disdain begins and ends with a group named Supertramp. Go ahead name a song – I’ll disdain it.
Busy day to catch up on here at RTH but I’ll ask a rhetorical question – is it possible to disdain a song if you don’t know the title? As in the Four Tops “I Can’t Help Myself”?
(Where are all the other pince-nez wearing townsfolk today?)
I’ll bet I’ve heard that song 1,000s of times and I’ll never tire of it, so it’s beyond me to comprehend disdaining it…
For me, disdain, thy name is Billy Joel.
Although I do think it was cool of him to bring out Macca the other night and let him be the one to play the last songs ever to be played in Shea Stadium.
Hey — this isn’t the first time I’ve heard an RTHer point the sleazeball finger at Gary Puckett. Howcum?
I’ve lived in San Diego since 1976, Gary Puckett is a native son. I can tell you he’s slept with about as many gals as Wilt Chamberlain claims to, I know quite a few that he’s bedded. He usually picks up in cocktail bars, he’s about as sleazy as they come. I’m not surprised his lyrics reflect this.
I was considering mentioning Supertramp yesterday, too. Goodbye Stranger, Logical Song, Take the Long Way Home, Breakfast In America…they all annoy the shit out of me. And that’s all just one album, right? Anybody willing to go to bat for them?
Billy Joel falls into some dark level below disdain for me. I don’t know if I could properly express my opinion on him.
Maybe I’m late to this party, but one song I have never understood in any form:
“Inna-Gadda-Davita” or whatever. I HATE that tune.
“In the Garden of Eden” by I. Ron Butterfly.
Blech.
TB
Alexmagic, I kind of like that Supertramp album, Breakfast in America. To my ears it sounded like Jon Anderson fronting late-period Traffic. For some reason I didn’t mind that combination and still don’t today – IN SMALL DOSES!
I actually saw Supertramp. It was my first day at a landscaping job, and I was six hours late and had to leave early and take two guys with me because I was the ride. I like Supertramp a lot more than raking dirt. It was a fun concert, but I think the year before they’d have played a bar, and the year after they’d have been back in that bar. I don’t think I have any of their albums, though.
I like Drift Away even though the year it came out every girl with a baton or dance routine in the school talent show did their thing to that song. It got old, but I still like it. The Stones did it too, but Ain’t Too Proud to Beg made the cut instead.
My Benchmark of Disdain is on my Sirius remote, which has buttons 4, 5 and 6 as Classic Rewind, Classic Vinyl and The Vault in some order. I’ve heard a Led Zeppelin song on every one of them, at the same time, and that just bums me out cuz I never liked that party. It’s bad enough that they have to split Classic Rock into three stations, like it’s so important that it needs to simulcast on three channels.
My other Benchmark of Disdain is borrowing my wife’s car on a Sunday. College stations are playing polka’s, NPR is talking about pets or something and the rock radio stations here are all playing whatever they played in 1981, and I forgot to grab a cd. That ten minute trip to the gas station seems like an eternity in hell.