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Post by tarobe on Jul 2, 2014 17:31:23 GMT -5
Has anyone ever heard the original 1971 AT40 broadcast with "D.O.A"? I'm curious as to how Casey treated that one (especially so early into the show's existence). I would love to hear that song in the middle of hits by the 1910 Fruitgum Company or the Osmonds! He simply introduced it, played it and backsold it like any other record. No extra comment.
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Post by tarobe on Jul 2, 2014 17:35:26 GMT -5
These next two songs are from the pre-AT40 era--the first is Jimmy Cross's minor pop hit "I Want My Baby Back," a death rock parody song that has the protagonist missing his dead girlfriend so much that he ends up exhuming her body.! And crawls into the casket with her! Although a minor hit, it did its job . Coming right on the heels of "Leader of the Pack" and "Last Kiss," it put an end to that "death pop" sh*t once and for all!
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Post by tarobe on Jul 2, 2014 17:37:34 GMT -5
I think one of the reasons "sick" songs are not in vogue anymore is because most are novelties and novelty records have been missing from radio playlist for over thirty years now.
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Post by Mike on Jul 2, 2014 18:05:52 GMT -5
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Post by pgfromwp on Jul 3, 2014 7:12:39 GMT -5
"Run, Joey, Run" by David Geddes (1975). It mentions the father of an unexpectedly pregnant (I.e., unmarried) daughter taking a gun and shooting the daughter's boyfriend, named Joey. Hence, run, Joey, run. Unfortunately for Joey, he didn't make it out alive. The heck he don't! The girl's daddy shoots her when she steps in front of Joey and takes the bullet. Joey apparently is doing fine, since he's the narrator of the song. Listen to that crap song again! Can't we by now just accept the song as a sickie and accept the fact that I wrongly stated that the boyfriend was shot, as has been clarified by a previous post? Perhaps I should have checked my information before originally posting.
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Post by cursereversed on Jul 3, 2014 12:42:11 GMT -5
I've actually been meaning to start a similar thread for a couple of months and just never got around to it.
The song that made me think about it is one that I can't believe nobody has mentioned yet. "Walk On The Wild Side" by Lou Reed. Don't get me wrong, it's a great song and we share an alma mater-in fact SU flew their flag at half-staff in his honor the day after he died-but even the clean parts of that song are dirty!
Another great song with fairly nasty lyrics is "We're An American Band" by Grand Funk, although that one you have to really be paying attention to said lyrics to realize just how bad they are.
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Post by dougbroda on Jul 3, 2014 17:22:14 GMT -5
Has anyone ever heard the original 1971 AT40 broadcast with "D.O.A"? I'm curious as to how Casey treated that one (especially so early into the show's existence). I would love to hear that song in the middle of hits by the 1910 Fruitgum Company or the Osmonds! He simply introduced it, played it and backsold it like any other record. No extra comment. It didn't get placed between bubblegum, but, rather... on its first AT40 appearance, it was between One Less Bell to Answer and, per handwritten notes on Charis, Chubby Checker's Pony Time. On its second and final week in the 40, it was between Precious Precious by Miss Jackie Moore (a song I don't ever recall hearing) and Wild World by Cat Stevens.
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Post by chrisinmi on Jul 21, 2014 16:53:38 GMT -5
These next two songs are from the pre-AT40 era--the first is Jimmy Cross's minor pop hit "I Want My Baby Back," a death rock parody song that has the protagonist missing his dead girlfriend so much that he ends up exhuming her body.! And crawls into the casket with her! Although a minor hit, it did its job . Coming right on the heels of "Leader of the Pack" and "Last Kiss," it put an end to that "death pop" sh*t once and for all! British listeners were more fortunate as many of those "death discs" were actually banned by the BBC! "Last Kiss" has taken on a life of its own, though, via the '70s Wednesday and '90s Pearl Jam remakes (both of which were announced by Casey as current hits). Interestingly Wednesday, the Canadian band that covered "Last Kiss," had a minor Hot 100 and moderate Canadian hit with a remake of another "death disc" - in this case "Teen Angel." The story in the Wednesday version is a little different, as in this version the dead girl's boyfriend also gets killed in the same manner as his girlfriend (while trying to retrieve the girlfriend's high school ring) and the song is sung by a group of the boyfriend's friends. That makes it not quite as nauseatingly ghastly and maudlin as the original.
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Post by chrisinmi on Jul 21, 2014 17:14:08 GMT -5
Another one from before the AT40 era is "What Now My Love" (at least in the English version). Sonny and Cher had the biggest U.S. hit of this French song. In the English version, it's about a man on the verge of committing suicide. Of course the Sonny and Cher version sounds not that different from "I Got You Babe," so the dark lyrics probably went over the heads of record buyers in 1966.
Speaking of suicide songs and the pre-AT40 era, there's also "Patches" by Dickey Lee from 1962, which ends in "Romeo and Juliet" style with boyfriend declaring his intent to commit suicide after girlfriend drowns herself. And Tom Jones' "Delilah," in which the narrator describes stabbing his unfaithful girlfriend (the titular Delilah) to death.
Then we have Olivia Newton-John's "Banks of the Ohio" (her version of a 19th-century murder ballad), about a woman who stabs her boyfriend for refusing to marry her. Maybe record buyers and radio programmers in 1971 weren't ready for a murder song with a woman as the killer, because it barely dented the Hot 100 and AC charts.
Gotta love those memos sent out by the AT40 producers whenever a song with questionable lyrical or thematic content was in the countdown - I have both of Pete Battistini's AT40 books and those memos are fascinating. One such song - Rod Stewart's "The Killing of Georgie," based on a true story about the murder of a young gay man who had been a friend of Rod's band, Faces - was in this past weekend's 1977 countdown.
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Post by OldSchoolAT40Fan on Jul 21, 2014 18:44:33 GMT -5
Monifah's "Touch It" circa 1998 sounded awful. I'm glad AT40 played the clean version, as the original lyrics "Do you really wanna (bleep) with me tonight" sounded very suggestive and disgusting. No wonder OZ FM where I live refused to play the song before midnight (unless it was on AT40)!
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Post by dougbroda on Jul 21, 2014 19:36:00 GMT -5
I have to disagree re Clair -- what the child he's babysitting (his manager's daughter) is saying is a cute sign of affection from a child who doesn't know better, which Gilbert (aka Ray) finds, well, cute. The song is intended to misdirect then deliver the actual relationship as a punchline, similarly to Jim Stafford's My Girl Bill. I wholly agree with Judy Mae, aka the Woody Allen National Anthem, on the other hand. In fact it's a double doozie, with sex with stepmom followed immediately by dead daddy.
Banks of the Ohio was indeed an odd choice for Lovely Livvie, though it comes from the early period where half her songs were real country music. (And it does have a bass vocal contribution from Mike Sammes, just as does Let Me Be There, so points for that.)
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Post by jlthorpe on Jul 22, 2014 5:22:38 GMT -5
I have to disagree re Clair -- what the child he's babysitting (his manager's daughter) is saying is a cute sign of affection from a child who doesn't know better, which Gilbert (aka Ray) finds, well, cute. The song is intended to misdirect then deliver the actual relationship as a punchline, similarly to Jim Stafford's My Girl Bill. I suppose, but in today's society, if someone were to say that to a kid, there's a certain registry they'd end up on.
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Post by mstgator on Jul 22, 2014 19:51:24 GMT -5
I have to disagree re Clair -- what the child he's babysitting (his manager's daughter) is saying is a cute sign of affection from a child who doesn't know better, which Gilbert (aka Ray) finds, well, cute. The song is intended to misdirect then deliver the actual relationship as a punchline, similarly to Jim Stafford's My Girl Bill. I suppose, but in today's society, if someone were to say that to a kid, there's a certain registry they'd end up on. Sure, if you take that line out of context. Read the lyrics of the entire song and it's perfectly innocent. Speaking of Gilbert, his huge smash "Alone Again, Naturally" opens with a guy pondering suicide.
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Post by johnnywest on Jul 8, 2018 10:22:21 GMT -5
“Pumped Up Kicks” was told from a school mass shooter’s POV.
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Post by at40nut on Jul 8, 2018 11:35:06 GMT -5
In April 1991, the rock band Warrant released a song called "Uncle Tom's Cabin" from their 1990 album Cherry Pie which peaked at #78 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart-By far their best song IMO. It contains the line "I know who put the bodies in the wishing well." Sadly, record executives forced "The Cherry Pie" thing which became a stigmatization of the band. Originally, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was supposed to be the album's titled instead of "Cherry Pie".
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