Sinatra's Canine Accompanist and Other Musical Disasters

A friend asked me on Wednesday if I wanted to write about bad songs. Who doesn't want to write about bad songs? So here are the ones that I would most want on a desert island -- without me.

First off, there are three reviled songs that I think have gotten a bad rap. Get ready to throw your tomatoes at me. I like "Muskrat Love." I know I might be the only person over the age of five who does, but it's not even a guilty pleasure with me. I like it, and I'm proud. I also like "Feelings." This was a big hit, which mystified me considering how vocal its detractors were. But I liked it. I never understood the naysayers, especially when Morris Albert gets to the "whoa, whoa whoa" part. Kills me every time. Finally, and this comes with a big proviso, "You're Having My Baby." The proviso is, I don't exactly like this song -- I just think all the vitriol toward it could have been better spent over, say, anything by Helen Reddy. I understand why people -- mostly women -- would like to strand Paul Anka in the Bermuda Triangle. He's saying, after all, "you're having my baby," not "our baby." But I always thought that since "our" implied him as well as the woman having the baby, it would already be a given. Well, clearly not. Let's move on.

There are two songs I liked listening to the first time until someone told me what they were about. "Ben" featured a young Michael Jackson singing a tender love song . . . to a rat. The other, "Timothy," is a catchy tune about cannibalism. You can never hear too many of those.

"You Are So Beautiful" by Joe Cocker and "She's Out of My Life" by an older Michael Jackson -- both of them moving love songs, until someone broke into the studio and throttled them just as they were hitting their last notes. Would one more take have been so difficult?

"Sunglasses at Night" by Corey Hart. I think Tom Cruise's sunglasses in Risky Business might have inspired this one. I haven't heard anything from Hart since then, so maybe he was crossing a freeway at the time.

Three country songs make my list (out of gazillions). "I Love" by Tom T. Hall is a laundry list of things Hall loves. "I love little baby ducks, old pickup trucks. . . ." There's nothing edgy about it; everybody loves little baby ducks. Now if he'd sung, "I love mudslides in the spring, extramarital flings," that at least would have been memorable. Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy, Breaky Heart" almost goes without saying here. But it's a tossup as to which Billy Ray gift to the world is worse, that song or Miley. Finally, Brad Paisley, whom I otherwise like, sang a love song that might or might not be meant in good fun. I don't think it is. Even if it's meant to be a total goof, any song that includes the line "I'd like to check you for ticks" (from the song "Ticks") deserves to be laughed at, but probably not in the way it was intended.

Chicago, back when it was cool to dismiss time as a creation of the Establishment, sang, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" Well, yeah, if you're trying to get someplace, like far away from you guys. Plus, it makes no sense. The lead singer says that "a guy walked up to me and asked me what the time was that was on my watch." So you have a watch on? Are you being a rebel by not winding it or something? That song drove me crazy in the 70s (where admittedly a lot of these songs come from). I think the whole time thing and its hypocrisy was immortalized at the beginning of Easy Rider, when Peter Fonda, getting ready to hit the road as Captain America, takes off his watch, looks at it, and throws it on the ground. I learned later that the watch in his hand was a Rolex, but what he actually threw was a Timex. I don't know whether that story's true, but it ought to be.

"Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas.  Enough said.

Justin Bieber's first hit, "Baby," rivaled the songs of Cole Porter with its witty wordplay and cosmopolitan sophistication:

"And I was like baby, baby, baby, oh
Like baby, baby, baby, oh
Like baby, baby, baby, oh

Like oy.

Back in the 1950s, when Frank Sinatra was in a slump, Mitch Miller got him to record a song with a blond bombshell named Dagmar called "Mama Will Bark," complete with someone yelping like a dog in the background. Sinatra later said that it was the low point of his career and hoped the record would be forgotten. If only he could have foreseen the miracle that is YouTube. . . .

In the wake of American Graffiti's enormous popularity, the Canadian group Guess Who came out with the song "Clap for the Wolfman," featuring the Wolfman himself occasionally commenting on the storyline. Had that song been part of the film's extraordinary soundtrack, John Milner would have driven into a wall.

I have two dreaded Christmas songs, and I take these personally because I love Christmas music. There was a horrid little movie years ago called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It's as bad as it sounds. It came with an equally sorry theme song -- "Hooray for Santy Claus." What always makes me laugh when I remember the movie is the song's reprise at the end, where the words appear onscreen with a bouncing ball following along -- as if kids were actually supposed to sing it! (That was Pia Zadora's first appearance pretty much anywhere.) The other Christmas song is from another vehicle, this one a stop-motion TV special of the same name: "Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey." The first time I heard the song on the radio, the DJ came on afterwards and said in a voice rich with sarcasm, "Oh, yeah, you hear that one all the time around our house."

OK, just two more before I reveal what I won't even call a matter of opinion: it is the worst song ever recorded.

First there's "Telephone Man" by Meri Wilson. Lots of songs were full of sexual innuendos in the 1970s, as if composers wanted to titillate but still remain on the airwaves. What they produced was mostly just embarrassing. This one takes the cake. A woman makes an appointment for a telephone installer -- male, of course -- to come to her house and install her phones. When he arrives, no opportunity is wasted in turning a service call into a "service" call. This line is typical: "You just show me where you want it and I'll put it where I can."

I think what I dislike most about "I Dig Rock and Roll Music" by Peter, Paul, and Mary is just how difficult it is for me to accept that they're the ones singing it. It's like Patti Page singing "Anaconda." But when I think to myself that maybe someone in the real rock and roll trenches could do it justice, I realize, nope, nobody could save it.

I didn't even have to waste a nanosecond picking this song as the all-time worst ever, and I mean since cave men and women invented percussion by beating on animal skins. It's "D.O.A." by a band called Bloodrock. The premise is this: There's been a plane crash. Everyone's dead except the guy singing with his last breath. Here's the most upbeat line in the song: "The sheets are red and moist where I'm lying/God in heaven, teach me how to die." This was not a big request at weddings.

OK, I've done my part. Feel free to comment and let me know if you have a song that puts "D.O.A." to shame. (Good luck with that.)