THREE CHEERS FOR AWFUL SONGS!
HAVE THEY PUT THIS ONE ON ALLY MCB(ig d)EAL YET?

Because, as we all know, eventually they will.  Tres appropriate that gaggy old radio songs end up on a gaggy new TV show.  Yeah, I need to be repeatedly reminded I didn't finish college and I've always carried around -- at my very best -- an extra five pounds (usually, more like fifteen),   that I live in the Midwest which, let's be honest, people on either coast think is one enormous Waffle House restaurant (those who even know what a Waffle House IS, of course).  I need jokes about horrible dates by self-involved SINKs, the singles scene and neurotic, anorectic women who look like they're enduring chemotherapy in thousand-dollar suits and shoes that cost about what I paid for the '85 Camry I used to drive.

Anyways, this was supposed to be about the song.  Good ol' Albert Hammond.  He's responsible for so many wonderful tunes you desperately want to remember.  He apparently wrote songs for Julio Iglesias, so you know they've all gotta be top-shelf.  Let's see, there's (the syrupy harmonic bathos that is) The Air That I Breathe, which was a big hit for the Hollies (but, then, so was He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother ... eww) -- okay, so his oeuvre isn't totally without merit, since 'Air That I Breathe' isn't a total loss.  There was also 'I'm A Train,' that was on my 1974 Dynamite K-tel compilation.  Which I wanted for the Stealer's Wheel tune (Stuck in the Middle), also covered somewhere around here.  Supposedly, I'm A Train was Hammond's take on Cat Stevens's Peace Train.  You could knock me over with a feather -- I wonder if K-Tel's marvelous editing department took all traces of Cat Stevens-resembling stuff out?  I don't remember hearing anything like that all the times I listened to the album for the few songs I did like because I'm a dinosaur, from back in the days of the ancient 'pho-no-graph' and all 'at.

Anyway, this is another one of those songs that made my two older, male cousins groan and hold their kidneys every time it came on the radio.  I'm guessing, for the most part, I set my 'bullshit detectors' by their tastes, which is why even though neither of them was really listening to new rock by the mid-eighties, I knew the Replacements were both trash and treasure and .38 Spayshul was just trash.

WOOP!  WOOP!  UPDATE!

Hammonds are still pumping out the swill.  Just go to Allmusic and check out the Strokes.  Yep -- there's a Stroke-boy who's one of THOSE Hammonds.  Except this generation's Hammonds not only write puerile, pointless lyrics -- they can't write music to save their nuts, either!

And Ally McB(ig d)eal is off the air.  Looks like the Hammonds won, after all.  Shame about Blue Swede and all that.  Guess that's the breaks.