Published Wednesday, January 27, 2010 10:24 AM
Updated Wednesday, January 27, 2010 10:24 AM
It’s time once again to exorcize a few demons and the only way to do that is to write about them. Then I can go to sleep, confident that while I still have them, at least now so do you.
The older I get the more I wonder why I can’t remember such things as whether or not I locked the back door before I took off for parts and hours unknown, or whether I cut off the stove before I went to bed, or if I put my pants on before I went to that important business meeting.
Yet for some reason, I can still instantly remember the lyrics to some of the worst songs ever written, hence the disco demons, although technically, a good many of these melodic nightmares weren’t necessarily disco tunes. Think Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died,” Leo Sayer’s “Long Tall Glasses,” or David Soul’s “Don’t Give Up On Us, Baby” and you can see the distress I go through. At any given time, these and other songs will pop into my head, unwanted and unbidden and will remain stuck there like a mouse on a sticky trap – and making about the same type of noise as that mouse – until I’m utterly driven buggy.
One hit wonder Carl Douglas was probably the person most responsible for transforming one of my grade school teachers from a classic sensitive, kid-and-cat loving, tender, talk-about-your-feelings-and-the-relationship ’70s sensitive man to a foaming, wide-eyed curmudgeonly hater of all kids and the trash they call music. Okay, maybe not, but surely the poor guy was driven to absolute distraction when Douglas’ now infamous classic, “Kung Fu Fighting,” hit the charts in my fourth grade year like the proverbial barnyard substance hitting a fan. That meant that for the entire 1973-1974 school year, in every single class he taught, there were at least 15 kids who wanted to play that record, back-to-back, day in and day out, for the entire180 days we were sentenced to the fourth grade.
That also means that even today, some 35 years later, “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting,” can inexplicably surge through my brain like a nausea tsunami.
The song apparently was wildly popular all over the world. According to Wikipedia, there’s even a Finnish version of the song, “Kung-Fu Taistelee.” That’s one I just have to hear some day.
Of course, there are plenty of folks out there who should stick to what they know, for all our sakes. Leonard Nimoy as a jazz singer, Pat Boone getting into a metal mood, or David Hasselhoff doing anything other than speaking to a set of car keys immediately comes to mind.
Praise the Lord for Steven Seagal. What he lacks in acting skills he more than makes up for with a profound lack of musical talent. Nonetheless, his rendition of the song on Saturday Night Live was truly classic.
There, I feel better now. In fact, “I think I can dance; I think I can dance…”
Buwahahahahaha!