I remember hearing a parody of the John Anderson song “Swingin” called “Stinkin” back in the 1980s, can’t find a copy of it anywhere but distinctly remember part of the lyrics. Had the same “twang” as the original song.
There’s a little girl in our neighborhood, her name is Charlotte Johnson and she is really smellin’ good. I had to go and see her so I called her on the phone, walked over to her house and this what’s going on.
Her brother was on the sofa eatin’ sister’s pie, her mamma was in the kitchen smokin’ gettin’ high. Her daddy was in the backyard playing with his garden hose, I was on the front porch with Charlotte feeling her through her pantyhose.
And we were stinkin’, yes we were a stinkin’…that’s about all I can remember.
Released around 1995, not much notice, totally forgotten, unavailable, then around 2005 somebody put up an mp3, the records were re-released, and it turned out that I wasn’t the only one who had heard the song or played the record, and had remembered it for 30 years.
A truly baffling one to me is Dean Friedman’s “Ariel” (1977). It wasn’t a big hit, but it was unusual enough and common enough in radio play that I would expect it to have stuck in some minds here and there. I’ve mentioned it to quite a few people, primarily because I learned the bass guitar part fairly early taking lessons, and every single person has said, “Huh? You learned to play what?”
I wouldn’t consider it a great song or anything, but I can’t see how you could listen to major market pop/rock radio in 1977 without having heard it at least a few times. Even if I play a few bars and sing a few (easily recognizable) lines, I still get blank stares.
Wow! Where’s our thread on unbelievable coincidences when we need it?
I had heard about the censorship, but I lived in Chicago at the time and WLS never did anything like that. From what I understand, “Ariel” was pretty popular in Chicagoland, in spite of being a NYC-based song.
And it’s a really good song for bass + vocals. It’s basically a folk song, with simple chord progressions and a story. But it can be tricky to get the lyrics to fit. I’ve played it a couple times when someone has said, “Are you just making this up as you go along? Is this a real song?”
I was a listener of the radio station that’s in the line, the friends of BAI (which meant I knew what that line was referring to) but it never got airplay, that I was aware of, on any other NYC station.
I can’t say that I heard it in NYC, but I heard it in Boston and Richmond (VA) while traveling. I just sort of assumed that it was played in the NYC area.
It’s novel/unusual enough that I would have expected it to stick in people’s minds. Maybe I just do a really bad job of playing and singing it.
I’m guessing that since the big NYC AM stations, ABC and MCA, were top 40, and the big FM stations, PLJ was AOR, NEW was free-form progressive rock, and WNBC was pop and rock, it just didn’t fit in with any of the play lists.
I remember the song. The station I worked at (and II think its competitors as well) considered it a “novelty” song and didn’t put it into regular rotation. We might have played it two or three times over a day for a couple of weeks.
Around the same time there was Sammy John’s Chevy Van which was essentially the same thing (hippie guy, even more hippie girl, and a van) except it was totally serious.
I was going to mention “Ariel” last week, but I guess I figured it was more popular than it really was.
I believe there were two slightly different versions of the song: In Baltimore, the second verse began “ Her name was Ariel…” years later, I heard a version that went, “She was a Jewish girl…” Did someone not want to potentially piss off the Balto Jewish community?
Yes, of course! Although I always thought it was de-Semitized to possibly more appeal to the goyim, but we’d have to ask Dean.
Trivia note about “Ariel.” It never charted higher than 26 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it still ended up making it to the top 100 songs of 1977. Very few songs that fell short of the top 20 could do that back in the day, let alone ending the year as high as #69. The Billboard charts are behind a pay wall, but I know it appeared on AT40 for a few weeks, dropped off, then redebuted, so a modest chart hit that stuck around for a *while. But since I can’t access the charts, I can’t determine whether the peak position was on it’s first AT40 run or the second.
*22 weeks total on the Hot 100, which was extremely unusual for a song not breaking the top 10.
