I can tell you every single detail of that Monday night: the trip form the farm into Perry in Mom's Ford Galaxie, the stop at Fareway for supplies for the evening's entertainment (Shasta cola and an industrial-sized bag of M&Ms), the whir of cicadas sounding from the shrubs on west side of the drive-in, the pink and purple clouds as the soon slowly descended, part of the endless wait for the movie to begin; the flashes of lightning far off to the north, somewhere far away, as the movie finally began.
The movie was The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad. It had been heavily advertised on local TV, the commercials promising monsters and visual wonders aplenty. I didn't know then that the movie was nearly twenty years old; I didn't know the name of Ray Harryhausen, though I noted his name in the credits as "Creator Of Visual Effects", and I knew what it meant: He was the man who made the mosters.
Mostly, I didn't--couldn't--know the profound effect those monsters would have on me. How Harryhausen's cloven-hooved cyclops, with his splayed legs and delicately-curving back, formed an interest in the mechanics of the human body, an appreciation for choreography and dance, or how the slow, painful death of a dragon would haunt my dreams, its stumbling final movements echoed in the sad exits of my own beloved pets.
By the time a skeleton dropped down from the ceiling, grabbing a shield and sword and engaging our hero in a duel to the death (or redeath), my mind was completely blown. I had never seen anything like this before. My mom was an adult, she knew things, so I asked her how this sequence was done. "I have no idea," she answered.
Which convinced me more than anything of the reality my eyes told me: It was real! There was magic in the world!
And there was, once. But no more. Ray Harryhausen, creator of more wondrous sights than any other human ever imagined, died today at the fine age of 92. The world is a sad place for his passing, but an infinitely better place because he lived.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Thursday, March 28, 2013
SHE'S A NUN! SHE FLIES! WHAT DO YOU NEED, A ROADMAP?
Wow! It's been--months? Actual months since I've posted anything here? Things happen, momentous things, in my life and in the wider world, and this space has remained silent. But there are still things worth discussing, like, um, this.
The increasing numbers of entertainment providers desperately needing any type of content--whether online services like Hulu and Netflix or specialty cable channels like MeTV and Antenna--has spurred the rights holders of scores of vintage television shows to haul their products out of the mothballs. Suddenly shows unseen for years are back, and the results are...interesting.
TV has always existed primarily as a way to kill time. In the pre-internet days, the vast majority of programming was the equivalent of Chuck Norris memes and cat videos on YouTube, a way to spend a half hour here and there when you really had nothing else to do. If you were watching The Love Boat and the phone rang halfway through it, you'd go ahead and answer, confident that you weren't really going to miss anything.
And it's still that way. For the last decade or so, many believe TV has entered a golden age of creativity, and the best of what's out there gives that argument some weight. Sure, dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and comedies like Louie and Community, but even animated kids shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and cop shows like Justified are astonishing--fully cinematic, but with a novelistic approach to plotting and detail.
But these are exceptions, and there have always been exceptions: Sgt. Bilko, The Twilight Zone, Route 66, The Rifleman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbo, The Rockford Files. The cream always floated to the top, but then as now, there's a lot of time to fill. TV as a whole is as crappy as it's ever been--have you ever tried sitting through an episode of Rules Of Engagement?--but it's a whole lot slicker. Writing rooms are full of Harvard grads eager to show off their education, which is why even a lowly Disney Channel sitcom will have an occasional reference to Proust. The directors who set the visual style of the likes of Chicago Fire have been to film school and want to show off their skills for composition and editing, in case it might land them a feature film gig.
Which brings us back to The Flying Nun. It's safe to say we'll never see its like again. Sure, we'll see other shows with astonishingly stupid premises--Dog With A Blog is a thing that exists--but there will never again be something this innocent and naive, and by "innocent and naive" I mean utterly incompetent.
Let's look at that intro again.
The opening of a show is meant to get you to watch. It can lay out the premise or establish the characters or simply bombard you with snazzy images and a catchy theme song.
Or, in the case of The Flying Nun, it can be a clumsily edited assortment of available footage. There's no flow between the images, no rhythm, no sense. Ed Wood couldn't have done a worse job. She's a nun, she's flying, OK. Other cast members appear, obviously filmed in a studio. Are they supposed to be watching her? Their eye movement suggests yes, but the clips we've seen show her at a much greater height, and then--wait. Now she's walking across a plank? And suddenly becomes airborne? But we've already seen her fly! Shouldn't this have started the sequence? (I especially love the slide whistle deployed for this bit; that was a hacky comedy device even in Vaudeville.) And now she's...got a dog? And the cable holding her up is incredibly obvious...seriously, they didn't have a better take to use in the title sequence? Another random shot of Alejandro Rey, apparently not realizing the camera was running, then she's crashing through a stained glass window, an image that seems more appropriate for a mid-seventies Italian Exorcist knockoff. Suddenly she's flying again, exec producer credit, and we're out.
The show itself is a pretty typical relic of its era--flat lighting, ABC-simple plotting, uninteresting characters--but that opening sequence has a maladroit charm. It's the type of thing that's hard to believe even exists, but like the dinosaur, its time has gone. TV now is so damned professional.
The increasing numbers of entertainment providers desperately needing any type of content--whether online services like Hulu and Netflix or specialty cable channels like MeTV and Antenna--has spurred the rights holders of scores of vintage television shows to haul their products out of the mothballs. Suddenly shows unseen for years are back, and the results are...interesting.
TV has always existed primarily as a way to kill time. In the pre-internet days, the vast majority of programming was the equivalent of Chuck Norris memes and cat videos on YouTube, a way to spend a half hour here and there when you really had nothing else to do. If you were watching The Love Boat and the phone rang halfway through it, you'd go ahead and answer, confident that you weren't really going to miss anything.
And it's still that way. For the last decade or so, many believe TV has entered a golden age of creativity, and the best of what's out there gives that argument some weight. Sure, dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and comedies like Louie and Community, but even animated kids shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and cop shows like Justified are astonishing--fully cinematic, but with a novelistic approach to plotting and detail.
But these are exceptions, and there have always been exceptions: Sgt. Bilko, The Twilight Zone, Route 66, The Rifleman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbo, The Rockford Files. The cream always floated to the top, but then as now, there's a lot of time to fill. TV as a whole is as crappy as it's ever been--have you ever tried sitting through an episode of Rules Of Engagement?--but it's a whole lot slicker. Writing rooms are full of Harvard grads eager to show off their education, which is why even a lowly Disney Channel sitcom will have an occasional reference to Proust. The directors who set the visual style of the likes of Chicago Fire have been to film school and want to show off their skills for composition and editing, in case it might land them a feature film gig.
Which brings us back to The Flying Nun. It's safe to say we'll never see its like again. Sure, we'll see other shows with astonishingly stupid premises--Dog With A Blog is a thing that exists--but there will never again be something this innocent and naive, and by "innocent and naive" I mean utterly incompetent.
Let's look at that intro again.
The opening of a show is meant to get you to watch. It can lay out the premise or establish the characters or simply bombard you with snazzy images and a catchy theme song.
Or, in the case of The Flying Nun, it can be a clumsily edited assortment of available footage. There's no flow between the images, no rhythm, no sense. Ed Wood couldn't have done a worse job. She's a nun, she's flying, OK. Other cast members appear, obviously filmed in a studio. Are they supposed to be watching her? Their eye movement suggests yes, but the clips we've seen show her at a much greater height, and then--wait. Now she's walking across a plank? And suddenly becomes airborne? But we've already seen her fly! Shouldn't this have started the sequence? (I especially love the slide whistle deployed for this bit; that was a hacky comedy device even in Vaudeville.) And now she's...got a dog? And the cable holding her up is incredibly obvious...seriously, they didn't have a better take to use in the title sequence? Another random shot of Alejandro Rey, apparently not realizing the camera was running, then she's crashing through a stained glass window, an image that seems more appropriate for a mid-seventies Italian Exorcist knockoff. Suddenly she's flying again, exec producer credit, and we're out.
The show itself is a pretty typical relic of its era--flat lighting, ABC-simple plotting, uninteresting characters--but that opening sequence has a maladroit charm. It's the type of thing that's hard to believe even exists, but like the dinosaur, its time has gone. TV now is so damned professional.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
MESSRS. K AND H ASSURE THE PUBLIC THEIR PRODUCTION WILL BE SECOND TO NONE
Sadly, I didn't get a chance to see David Chase's Not Fade Away during its run here in Des Moines. I wanted to, of course--who wouldn't want to see the first theatrical film from the creator of The Sopranos?--but it only played here for a week, the victim of a studio that had no faith in it, destined to be just another obscure red Box rental.
Based on even the most sympathetic reviews, Not Fade Away may not have been a total triumph, but Chase's track record--again: The Sopranos--certainly suggests it would be worth seeing. A personal film that doesn't quite work is almost always more worthwhile than an easy success.
Sadly, easy successes are pretty much the very best we can hope for when it comes to major studio releases: Toothless PG-13 horror movies, raucous comedies, big dumb action movies and endless retreads and sequels. That they mostly can't even do these things well is beside the point. Hollywood's blockbuster-or-nothing mentality is like a diet of nothing but frozen pizza and cheap beer.
To this day, plenty of well-informed people lay the blame for all this at the feet of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The massive success of Jaws and Star Wars ushered in the era of the blockbuster, and we've been going downhill ever since.
This is nonsense, obviously. Yeah, many producers great and small tried to chase the success of those films, much as they tried to rip-off earlier blockbusters like The Poseidon Adventure, The Godfather and The Exorcist. You can't blame them, after all. It's a business. They wanted to make hits.
But that wasn't all they wanted. The studios were perfectly content to produce and release mid-level, mid-budget movies that weren't designed to be blockbusters. Since there wasn't much at stake, they could afford to take chances. Consider something like The Elephant Man: On one hand, as Oscar-bait inspiring story about overcoming physical deformity. On the other hand, Paramount Pictures entrusted this story to David Lynch--whose only feature at that point was Eraserhead, for God's sake--and was perfectly okay with his decision to shoot it in black-and-white, to make it as weird as he wanted. And it paid off: Not a runaway smash, but a solid hit.
Of course, that was when Paramount was an actual studio, as opposed to being merely one vertically-integrated content provider for the Viacom organization. Throughout the eighties and nineties, studios increasingly became slaves to their corporate masters, and the people making creative decisions came from the world of business, not art. This explains a lot of the problems with movies today, but not all of them.
I think the real turning point was the TV debut of Entertainment Tonight in 1981, followed quickly by the print debut of USA Today the following year. This marked the first time weekly rankings of the top-grossing movies became available to the general public. Suddenly there was a horse race quality to judging the week's new releases. Will Movie X succeed? Will Movie Y recoup its massive production costs? Nobody but Hollywood insiders cared about this previously, but now it was a thing. Whereas once something like Howard The Duck would have failed and disappeared, now we could read just how much it cost and how much it lost.
The studios, now aware that people were watching, decided they damn well weren't going to take chances anymore. They commissioned increasing amounts of polling data, and soon organizations like Cinemascore were asking viewers for snap judgements on movies they'd just seen, a practice that didn't exactly encourage nuanced opinion. (The Sorrow And The Pity--thumbs up or down?)
All this, plus the rise of drooling fanboy websites like Ain'tItCoolNews and review aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes, has changed the very way movies are perceived. Consider the recent case of Killing Them Softly. While it has flaws--director Andrew Dominik occasionally strains too hard for significance, and some of his musical choices are thuddingly ironic--it's mostly a very faithful adaptation of a terrific George V. Higgins novel, impeccably made and showcasing an ace cast. And yet upon its release, the only stories written about it stressed its low grosses and Cinemascore rating of F. As if this movie was made to be a blockbuster!
A similar story played out in the press over the "disappointing" audience reaction to This Is 40. Whatever artistic ambition the film may have had is beside the point. It's not making money, and that's all you need to know about it. In that sense, Not Fade Away was lucky--it was so low profile, there weren't even any stories proclaiming it a flop.
It used to be an insult when a movie was described as feeling like a TV show. But I hope the next thing David Chase does is for television. The movies don't deserve him.
Based on even the most sympathetic reviews, Not Fade Away may not have been a total triumph, but Chase's track record--again: The Sopranos--certainly suggests it would be worth seeing. A personal film that doesn't quite work is almost always more worthwhile than an easy success.
Sadly, easy successes are pretty much the very best we can hope for when it comes to major studio releases: Toothless PG-13 horror movies, raucous comedies, big dumb action movies and endless retreads and sequels. That they mostly can't even do these things well is beside the point. Hollywood's blockbuster-or-nothing mentality is like a diet of nothing but frozen pizza and cheap beer.
To this day, plenty of well-informed people lay the blame for all this at the feet of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The massive success of Jaws and Star Wars ushered in the era of the blockbuster, and we've been going downhill ever since.
This is nonsense, obviously. Yeah, many producers great and small tried to chase the success of those films, much as they tried to rip-off earlier blockbusters like The Poseidon Adventure, The Godfather and The Exorcist. You can't blame them, after all. It's a business. They wanted to make hits.
But that wasn't all they wanted. The studios were perfectly content to produce and release mid-level, mid-budget movies that weren't designed to be blockbusters. Since there wasn't much at stake, they could afford to take chances. Consider something like The Elephant Man: On one hand, as Oscar-bait inspiring story about overcoming physical deformity. On the other hand, Paramount Pictures entrusted this story to David Lynch--whose only feature at that point was Eraserhead, for God's sake--and was perfectly okay with his decision to shoot it in black-and-white, to make it as weird as he wanted. And it paid off: Not a runaway smash, but a solid hit.
Of course, that was when Paramount was an actual studio, as opposed to being merely one vertically-integrated content provider for the Viacom organization. Throughout the eighties and nineties, studios increasingly became slaves to their corporate masters, and the people making creative decisions came from the world of business, not art. This explains a lot of the problems with movies today, but not all of them.
I think the real turning point was the TV debut of Entertainment Tonight in 1981, followed quickly by the print debut of USA Today the following year. This marked the first time weekly rankings of the top-grossing movies became available to the general public. Suddenly there was a horse race quality to judging the week's new releases. Will Movie X succeed? Will Movie Y recoup its massive production costs? Nobody but Hollywood insiders cared about this previously, but now it was a thing. Whereas once something like Howard The Duck would have failed and disappeared, now we could read just how much it cost and how much it lost.
The studios, now aware that people were watching, decided they damn well weren't going to take chances anymore. They commissioned increasing amounts of polling data, and soon organizations like Cinemascore were asking viewers for snap judgements on movies they'd just seen, a practice that didn't exactly encourage nuanced opinion. (The Sorrow And The Pity--thumbs up or down?)
All this, plus the rise of drooling fanboy websites like Ain'tItCoolNews and review aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes, has changed the very way movies are perceived. Consider the recent case of Killing Them Softly. While it has flaws--director Andrew Dominik occasionally strains too hard for significance, and some of his musical choices are thuddingly ironic--it's mostly a very faithful adaptation of a terrific George V. Higgins novel, impeccably made and showcasing an ace cast. And yet upon its release, the only stories written about it stressed its low grosses and Cinemascore rating of F. As if this movie was made to be a blockbuster!
A similar story played out in the press over the "disappointing" audience reaction to This Is 40. Whatever artistic ambition the film may have had is beside the point. It's not making money, and that's all you need to know about it. In that sense, Not Fade Away was lucky--it was so low profile, there weren't even any stories proclaiming it a flop.
It used to be an insult when a movie was described as feeling like a TV show. But I hope the next thing David Chase does is for television. The movies don't deserve him.
Monday, December 31, 2012
PREHISTORY
The 1974 Saturday morning series Korg: 70,000 BC is newly available on DVD. I was eight when this premiered as a mid-season replacement, and even though it had a comic book spinoff and everything, I never watched it.
The only reason I remember it at all--heck, the only reason why I'm mentioning it now--is because eight-year-old me thought it would be awesome if it had been called Coug: 70,000 BC, and had been about my beloved cat Cougar, who somehow traveled through time to a prehistoric era. Episodes would follow her as she...well, as she slept, devoured mice and occasionally fought with other cats, which is pretty much what Cougar did. Sure, that doesn't sound very interesting, but come on, we're talking seventies kiddie shows. A half hour of a cat sleeping on a rock couldn't be any less entertaining than an episode of Ark II. At least my show wouldn't feature any guest appearances from Jonathan Harris.
And...this is my last post for 2012: Cats and long-forgotten TV shows. Seems about right, doesn't it?
The only reason I remember it at all--heck, the only reason why I'm mentioning it now--is because eight-year-old me thought it would be awesome if it had been called Coug: 70,000 BC, and had been about my beloved cat Cougar, who somehow traveled through time to a prehistoric era. Episodes would follow her as she...well, as she slept, devoured mice and occasionally fought with other cats, which is pretty much what Cougar did. Sure, that doesn't sound very interesting, but come on, we're talking seventies kiddie shows. A half hour of a cat sleeping on a rock couldn't be any less entertaining than an episode of Ark II. At least my show wouldn't feature any guest appearances from Jonathan Harris.
And...this is my last post for 2012: Cats and long-forgotten TV shows. Seems about right, doesn't it?
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
SHINES AROUND ME LIKE A MILLION SUNS
He curls up beside me, his head on the pillow. His powerful hind legs, kick gently against my chest, his front paws wrap around my wrist on lazily fall on the side of my face. His purr is so loud his whole body trembles, and I feel the vibrations through him.
He seems almost possessive. There's a dog now, and another cat I sometimes seem to favor, and he's maybe unsure of his place in the world. But this is our time now, and he relaxes, some comfort finally available to his troubled soul.
Still, this is Delmar, so as gentle as he tries to be, his claws are perpetually bared, piercing my skin as his paws slide across my arm or my face. I'll wake up with fresh scratches, with dried blood. I'm used to this by now.
After all, he's been in my life for ten years. Sometimes he can be a pain, quite literally, but hey, to live is to feel pain. And joy, which he also provides. Delmar is awesome and terrifying and sweet. His love is ferocious and absolute, and I can't imagine my world without him.
He seems almost possessive. There's a dog now, and another cat I sometimes seem to favor, and he's maybe unsure of his place in the world. But this is our time now, and he relaxes, some comfort finally available to his troubled soul.
Still, this is Delmar, so as gentle as he tries to be, his claws are perpetually bared, piercing my skin as his paws slide across my arm or my face. I'll wake up with fresh scratches, with dried blood. I'm used to this by now.
After all, he's been in my life for ten years. Sometimes he can be a pain, quite literally, but hey, to live is to feel pain. And joy, which he also provides. Delmar is awesome and terrifying and sweet. His love is ferocious and absolute, and I can't imagine my world without him.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
I SHOULD REALLY GO TAKE A NAP
Whenever possible, you're usually better off buying name brands, at least when it comes to, say, things you actually put in your body. Other times. it's okay to go with the dollar store special. Dish soap, for instance. Does it foam up in water? Yes? Fine, I'll take it.
So I had less than a third of my Dollar Tree dish soap left before I even bothered looking at its label, and more to the point, its randomly-chosen brand name: First Force. Huh, I thought. Sounds less like a brand of soap than a cheapo eighties action movie.
Fair enough, but I can't just let it go. I start to imagine a First Force movie in my head. David Carradine would star--that seems obvious enough--but who else? Steve James as Generic Black Guy, whose main job is to get kidnapped by the bad guys at some point so he can be rescued by our hero, because they were buddies in 'Nam. Don "The Dragon" Wilson would be Martial Arts Guy, who does the action stuff Carradine's stunt double doesn't. And the group's lone female? My first thought was Cynthia Rothrock, but since we already have two actors associated with martial arts movies, maybe it should be a onetime mainstream actress who everyone thought would be a second-tier star, or at least have a healthy career. Lisa Blount or Lisa Eichhorn, whichever one would be most likely to do a topless scene, since that's the only reason she's even along. Then there's the Gary Busey question: Does he play a member of the titular Force--The Guy Who Gets Killed Early To Drum Up Sympathy--or is he Generic Bad Guy? Probably Generic Bad Guy, because he could be someone else Carradine knew in 'Nam, but who went bad.
About the time I start speculating about who would've directed such a movie (Joseph Zito, no question), it suddenly occurs to me that I'm spending way too much time thinking about a bottle of dish detergent. Maybe I should just stop shopping at Dollar Tree.
So I had less than a third of my Dollar Tree dish soap left before I even bothered looking at its label, and more to the point, its randomly-chosen brand name: First Force. Huh, I thought. Sounds less like a brand of soap than a cheapo eighties action movie.
Fair enough, but I can't just let it go. I start to imagine a First Force movie in my head. David Carradine would star--that seems obvious enough--but who else? Steve James as Generic Black Guy, whose main job is to get kidnapped by the bad guys at some point so he can be rescued by our hero, because they were buddies in 'Nam. Don "The Dragon" Wilson would be Martial Arts Guy, who does the action stuff Carradine's stunt double doesn't. And the group's lone female? My first thought was Cynthia Rothrock, but since we already have two actors associated with martial arts movies, maybe it should be a onetime mainstream actress who everyone thought would be a second-tier star, or at least have a healthy career. Lisa Blount or Lisa Eichhorn, whichever one would be most likely to do a topless scene, since that's the only reason she's even along. Then there's the Gary Busey question: Does he play a member of the titular Force--The Guy Who Gets Killed Early To Drum Up Sympathy--or is he Generic Bad Guy? Probably Generic Bad Guy, because he could be someone else Carradine knew in 'Nam, but who went bad.
About the time I start speculating about who would've directed such a movie (Joseph Zito, no question), it suddenly occurs to me that I'm spending way too much time thinking about a bottle of dish detergent. Maybe I should just stop shopping at Dollar Tree.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
I WILL CHASE THE BOY IN YOU AWAY
As much time as I sometimes spend here prattling on about all things Muppet related, you might expect me to have something to say about the sort-of-or-maybe-not sex scandal involving Elmo Muppeteer Kevin Clash.
The thing is, it's really too depressing to consider, especially since we don't know what actually happened, and probably never will. Clash was initially accused of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a minor, although the minor in question was 16, not, say, 10, and the unnamed accuser even admitted the relationship was consensual. As a result, Clash lost his regular gig on Sesame Street, but only one day after the story broke, the accuser recanted his story, claiming he was of legal age when the whole thing started, but he'd apparently accepted a financial settlement from Clash, and neither side is talking, so who knows?
Still, it seems likely Clash's Muppet days are over, since an accusation is all that is needed to taint a reputation. If online chatter is any indication, most people are creeped out not so much because Clash might have been getting it on with a minor as the age difference in general. Even assuming the accuser was eighteen when the relationship started, Clash was in his mid-forties.
But as to that age difference, I say what about Bobby Goldsboro's touching relationship with an older woman, as explored in his profoundly not-good song Summer (The First Time)? Society was okay with this sort of thing back in the early seventies, or so I must assume, because the song was a hit, and it sure as hell can't be because people thought it was any good.
If you find yourself wondering whether starting this post by referencing the whole Kevin Clash thing was basically just an excuse for me to post this song, hey, you may be right. But seriously--what a horrible song. "I told Billy Ray/In his red Chevrolet" may be the worst lyric of all time, or at least until Billy Joel came up with "Talking to Davy/Who's still in the Navy" a couple years later.
But aside from its basic awfulness (did I mention rhyming "julep" with "two lips"?), the worst thing about this song is that it forces me to imagine Bobby Goldsboro having sex. We'll never know for sure what Kevin Clash actually did. But the very notion of Bobby Goldsboro banging hot older chicks? That is a crime.
The thing is, it's really too depressing to consider, especially since we don't know what actually happened, and probably never will. Clash was initially accused of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a minor, although the minor in question was 16, not, say, 10, and the unnamed accuser even admitted the relationship was consensual. As a result, Clash lost his regular gig on Sesame Street, but only one day after the story broke, the accuser recanted his story, claiming he was of legal age when the whole thing started, but he'd apparently accepted a financial settlement from Clash, and neither side is talking, so who knows?
Still, it seems likely Clash's Muppet days are over, since an accusation is all that is needed to taint a reputation. If online chatter is any indication, most people are creeped out not so much because Clash might have been getting it on with a minor as the age difference in general. Even assuming the accuser was eighteen when the relationship started, Clash was in his mid-forties.
But as to that age difference, I say what about Bobby Goldsboro's touching relationship with an older woman, as explored in his profoundly not-good song Summer (The First Time)? Society was okay with this sort of thing back in the early seventies, or so I must assume, because the song was a hit, and it sure as hell can't be because people thought it was any good.
If you find yourself wondering whether starting this post by referencing the whole Kevin Clash thing was basically just an excuse for me to post this song, hey, you may be right. But seriously--what a horrible song. "I told Billy Ray/In his red Chevrolet" may be the worst lyric of all time, or at least until Billy Joel came up with "Talking to Davy/Who's still in the Navy" a couple years later.
But aside from its basic awfulness (did I mention rhyming "julep" with "two lips"?), the worst thing about this song is that it forces me to imagine Bobby Goldsboro having sex. We'll never know for sure what Kevin Clash actually did. But the very notion of Bobby Goldsboro banging hot older chicks? That is a crime.
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