True Confessions, Music Dept.

Okay, if I’m going to weigh in on the worst songs of all time (pop division), I’m going to have to confess that there are some truly awful songs that I just desperately love, and that you’ll pull these 45s from my cold, dead fingers. Go ahead, slag me if you must, but these are true classics that I’d play right now if I could (and don’t push me, or I will):

• “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” by Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods. Actually, my favorite of theirs was “Who Do You Think You Are,” which had a neat kind of groove to it, as well as something funky going on in the 45 pressing that made it just a little out of round and sounding slightly off. But this one was guaranteed to send my then-future-wife completely off the edge if I so much as threatened to play it, which made it a very useful tool in my arsenal.
• “Clap for the Wolfman” by The Guess Who. I didn’t understand how the ring tone industry could be worth billions until just now, when I learned that this deliciously awful, lame and somehow intriguing tribute to Wolfman Jack could be my ringtone. I actually wasn’t a Wolfman Jack fan when this song came out, and it has little to do with him other than offering his voice in the breaks, but years later his syndicated show was the only thing that kept me from using the pasteup knife to slit my wrists on lonely Sunday afternoons waxing newspaper dummies (don’t ask), and I thought he did a stunning turn in “American Graffiti,” so I’ll admit this song even shows up on my iPod.
• “Run Joey Run” by David Geddes. Everything about this song about teenage pregnancy and murder is creepy. Once I found the album in a thrift store and bought it as a goof, but the album was even creepier than the song, which hit number 4 on the Billboard charts in 1975. Number 4. The singer was a standard ’70s issue long-haired babyfaced teenager, and the back cover featured liner notes by the songwriter, who gushed about having found his singer in a way that was, again, creepy. This kid also charted something called “The Last Game of the Season (Blind Man in the Bleachers)”, a big steaming pile of ’70s crap — the kind of song that was very common then but that we’ve completely forgotten about now. Time doesn’t wash away all sins, but it does tend to get rid of things like this. And yet, I’d play this awful thing right now if I had it still . . . like a scab I have to pick at.
• “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris, or, frankly, by anyone except Donna Summer. God, what a squeezed-out gob of nonsense. Is it a drug song by someone who’s never done drugs? But god help me, I love to listen to Harris taking this giant hunk of cheese and throttling it to death. (It also always puts me in mind of Dave Thomas’s SCTV spoof on Harris in “A Man Called Horse”)
• “Get Dancin'” by Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes (aka Monty Rock III). “My chiffon is wet, darling, my chiffon is wet.” Need I say more?