Darkside of the Sun: The horror, the horror

Mike Corrigan

Mike Corrigan

By Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

Kids today, you’re so lucky, you could have been born decades earlier and grown up with 70s “music.” I was thinking of doing a Worst 10 Songs of All Time story and realized if I held the list to the decade of the 70s that would create a list of bad music so truly execrable it might require a Papal exorcism just to rid the world of all the demons driven out of their graves by these horrors. Look up the lyrics to some of these beauties, but DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM.

10. Bobby Goldsboro, Watching Scottie Grow. Dreck.

9. Disco Duck, by some random collection of drunks at the bar.

8. Horse With No Name, America. Guy wanders around the desert for nine days, singing in a monotone, and still can’t find time to name the horse?

7. Eddie Murphy, Party All the Time. Poop.

6. (Any random disco: Yes, it was the Disco Decade, too! In Cleveland they had Disco Night at the baseball park and a full-scale riot broke out and the place almost burned down. That was one of the more civilized reactions to disco.)

5. Morris Albert, Feelings. 1975 was a good year for music mainly because it wasn’t 1974 anymore. “Feelings” was No. 1, and it should have TAKEN a bullet. What was WRONG with people in that decade?

4. Paul Anka(!), You’re Havin’ My Baby. Balderdash. Sexist balderdash.

3. C.W. McCall, “Convoy.” A faux ad for CB radio. Say what?

2. Bobby Goldsboro, Honey. A completely unfathomable saccharine concoction about a neck-rubbing (you had to be there, I guess) dead girl — the 60s and 70s were full of dead girls in songs — that actually had lines like, “Honey I miss you, and I’m feeling good/And I’d like to be with you, if only I could.” What? Please, Bobby, don’t stand on ceremony, join her. Girl probably committed suicide just to get away from this song.

1. Richard Harris, MacArthur Park. You had to have heard this one, a melodramatic disaster that actually knocked the world off its axis, it was that powerfully wrong. “Someone left the cake out in the rain and I don’t think that I can take it ’cause it took so long to bake it and I’ll never have the recipe aga-a-a-in, oh no… oh NO.” “Oh no” a couple more times, but however many it was it wasn’t nearly enough of an apology for this thing. Summary execution of all involved in the production of this disaster piece should have followed. No, it should have preceded the recording. All in all, Honey was lucky; she died before MacArthur Park came out.

As for me, I lived through the decade. But I was psychologically crippled for the rest of my life. We all were. Seventies “music” completely explains why the world you see around you today is so totally messed up. We’re sorry, kids. Believe me, we’re really, really sorry.

Mike told us he plans on singing karaoke again soon. Uh-oh!