Seventies music was terrible, horrible — and incredibly awesome

By Kelly Kazek
kelly@athensnews-courier.com

August 22, 2008 12:21 pm

— When you tell your teenager hard truths, you have to expect some resistance. This is why, on a recent road trip, my daughter looked at me incredulously, by which I mean the same way she looks at me whenever I dare speak to her in public.
But this time, she was eloquent in her disbelief: “Nuh-uh,” she said, her stare challenging me.
I knew then she would need proof that there was, indeed, a song lamenting the loss of a perfectly good cake that someone had, either unwittingly or as part of some maniacal terrorist plot, left out in the rain.
This time, my word would not be enough.
I have spent many years trying to school Shannon in the terrible awesomeness that was the 1970s, when women were strong, they were invincible despite — or perhaps because of — the invention of Daisy Duke cutoffs, and songs were brilliant in their badness, glorious garbage that managed to get stuck in your head until you would happily use an ice pick to remove it.
Anyone who has ever sung about going to the desert on a horse with no name, or about Muskrat Sam ticklin’ the fancy and rubbin’ the toes of Muskrat Susie without even questioning what they were saying knows how invasive this music could be. It was like being brainwashed into a pop-music cult.
The public’s response to a great many songs of the ’70s was: “Were they droppin’ acid when they wrote that?”
And then: “Cool.”
My most recent example for Shannon was the song “MacArthur Park,” as covered by a gold-laméd Donna Summer in 1977:
“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 that recipe again….oh, no!”
I am guessing it was a rum cake, or at the very least had chocolate amaretto icing. What other cake would be so painful in its loss?
Even then, it is difficult to believe that:
A. Someone wrote these lyrics
B. Someone put them to music
And C. Someone offered to sing them in actual public — and did not even have the decency to look embarrassed.
But even more distressing is the fact that I know all the words.
I played the 45 rpm (for you youngsters, that’s a small black record with a hole in the middle that was played on a machine given the technical name “record player” that did not have the capability of vibrating an entire city block with its bass) until one day it disappeared from my room, leaving me to surmise my mother finally broke down, took it in the backyard and pumped it full of heavy metal from my brother’s BB gun.
Rather than admit to Shannon I spent the better part of my 12th year singing lyrics that could be construed as ravings of a rabies-infected Julia Child, I tried to give them meaning.
Perhaps the writer had been traumatized as a child by a fiendish birthday clown who soaked his cake with a squirting lapel flower.
Perhaps the lyrics were a metaphor for a lost love — one with a serious whipped cream fetish.
Finally, I gave up.
“Fine. It’s a really stupid song, OK?” I admitted to Shannon. “But let’s be clear here: It’s really, really fun to sing in the car with the windows down. Just be sure you NEVER let anyone hear you.”

Submit your nominations for awesomely terrible 1970s songs to Kelly Kazek at kelly@athensnews-courier.com.

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