Care; more or less....

April 18th – “A-well-a come along and be my party doll…”

Anyone?

Offers?

Can you sing the next line…without checking for the lyrics on the Net?

OK, put you out of your misery, it’s, 

“Come along and be my party doll” 

as is line three… Line four, however, neatly breaks the tradition...but then loses courage and becomes a repetition of its original sentiment 
‘And I’ll make love to you, to you,

And I’ll make love to you’

Huh?

Astounded?

You should be.

This was a time (1957) when they really could write lyrics… What has this to do with anything? Well, just this.

There are levels of lazy greed in society that transcend the norm. You know; those things that we see as everyday avarice. For instance; a true story. A husband walks into a sitting room of a Saturday evening (telly on, his wife of thirty years sat in an armchair) with a Wall’s Arctic Roll…a whole one. He sits and eats the whole thing…never an offer to said wife of thirty years of even so much as a lick of ice cream left on the plate…she says to him;

‘I’m out of fags, have you got any?’

He replies;

‘Yes. Have you got a sixpence?

She says;

‘Yes’, takes a sixpence out of her purse, gives it to him and he exchanges it for a fag: true story.

Well, the management team of any given pop star are much like that Arctic Roll-scoffing douche-bag. Let’s expand.

If you were promoting a singing star and, of a sudden he/she/it was called into the U.S.A. Army Reserve you would, you’d think, be concerned as the employer; if not concerned then at least indulge in some shared commiseration and support…sorry, got sidetracked listening to Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit…FM that’s some rendition of commitment by Ms. Slick! Just excellent…sorry… Right, onward, star being called up/employer empathy… right. Well, when this happened to Buddy Knox, the guy who recorded the single, Party Doll, that one with the lyrics directly lifted from a passage from Homer’s Odyssey? Well, when Buddy Knox was inducted into the armed forces and not the Hall of Fame, his record company showed their concern for this young man’s plight, this young man who'd just made them a packet with his rendition of Party Doll, by scrambling him into the studio to record twenty (that’s as in 20) follow ups to that hit before he was shipped off to boot-camp so they could capitalise on his popularity…all heart, see? They all failed miserably, the follow-ups which doesn’t seem fair, does it, for a man born and reared in the town of Happy, Texas… Maybe if he’d been born in Turd City, Arkansas his recording company’s scramble for lucre would have fared better, then they could have run with the advertising headline;

“Buddy Knox ‘Em for Shits”.