The weekend! Sweet, idling days of nothingness, with laziness expected if not actively encouraged in all things. Including this site. In other words, a clip job.
And this one comes with a bonus--pain! Deep, soul-battering pain! Yes, I want you to hurt like I did back in '82 when I first heard this thing. And my agony had a name: Charlene.
The most amusing thing about this record is that it was released by Motown. The second most amusing thing is that it was recorded and initially released in the mid-seventies, but didn't become a hit until the early eighties. It's whiny tone, lugubrious arrangement and repeated non-ironic use of the word "lady" certainly marks it more as a relic of the seventies than eighties. Maybe if it had seen more chart action in '77 it would have seemed like just another of that year's overscaled weepers, somewhere between When I Need You and Don't Cry Out Loud. By '82, it was an anachronism. Yet it became a hit. Go figure.
In any event, a truly awful song. And despite all that crap about "subtle whoring" and "unborn children" and seeing "things that a woman ain't s'posed to see"--GAAHH!!--the damned thing was originally written from a man's point of view. And you can hear the even worse original lyrics in this jaw-dropping version performed by Howard Keel.
Let me just say--I really, really like Howard Keel. He made a series of B westerns for producer A.C. Lyles back in the sixties that ran on TV a lot when I was a kid, he gives a great, underrated comic performance in Kiss Me Kate, and of course, he was a pretty amazing singer.
But boy, that last-mentioned talent is nowhere in evidence here. He seems to be going for a crusty Old Man Of The Mountain vibe here, which...well, it's worse than Charlene, quite frankly. But at least it manages to be laughably bad instead of gnash-your-teeth-and-pray-for-death bad. So, and I use this word advisedly: Enjoy.
