My earliest remembrance of this week's tune is of it being a hit when I was in high school--and me hating it. A number of years later it was featured in the movie Good Will Hunting, and after hearing it for the first time in many years, I wondered why the hell I hated it. Turns out it was a damn good single from a damn good decade of music....
The Starland Vocal Band got its start in the early seventies as Fat City, a husband and wife group featuring Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert. While Fat City never took off, Danoff and Nivert co-wrote "Take Me Home Country Roads" with John Denver (and they're still enjoying the royalties, I'm sure), and would eventually add Jon Carroll and Margot Chapman (who also later married), becoming the Starland Vocal Band, which also happened to be the first act signed to Denver's Windsong record label. They had a huge hit with their debut single and album, but those would be the only hits they'd have and by 1981 they had disbanded. Still, they won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and also enjoyed their own TV show, called, amazingly enough, The Starland Vocal Band Show. For their career, the band released five albums and ten singles. While they've never reunited in full, they did reunite in 1998 for a handful of shows and in 2007 for a local TV show in New Jersey.
(Not So) Fun Fact: Not only did the band part ways in 1981, so did Danoff and Nivert...followed the next year by Carroll and Chapman. Despite their respective divorces, the band members have remained on good terms.
"Afternoon Delight" was the first single from their first album, the ever so cleverly entitled, Starland Vocal Band; both were released in 1976. The single would hit #1 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100, while the album reached #20 on the Billboard 200.
"Afternoon Delight" is a simple song, often using plays on words (which, believe it or not, were a little racy for the mid-seventies), extolling the virtues of making love when the sun is still high in the sky (works for me!). There's a nice acoustic guitar intro that I never noticed before, and a smooth melody that makes for easy listening. The crux of the song, though, comes in the harmonies, and the band makes excellent use of four different voices, pairing male and female and both female vocals effortlessly to great effect (I'd go as far as saying that you'd be hard pressed to find better harmonies in a pop song). All in all, it's another fine example of the many incredible pop tunes created in the seventies--the decade which most shaped my musical tastes.
Lyric Sheet: "Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight/Gonna grab some afternoon delight..."
Enjoy:
Republican = Racist
Peace,
emaycee
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