Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Aug. 1, 2011

Cake, pie or weasel?

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I love good music. I played cornet in my high school band, and outlasted three band directors. All of them told me that I could flat a note better than anyone they’d ever heard; and louder, too. And not only did I play the cornet, I also played the radio. I was very versatile, and could play transistor radios, table models, and car radios in either AM or FM. In my youth I adopted the popular Dick Clark definition of good music, which required only that a song have a decent melody, a good beat, and be something a person could dance to. And I could dance just as well as I could play the cornet.

To those three American Bandstand qualifications I added another–a decent song should last no longer than four minutes. One of the very longest songs I remember from my youth was the abominably melodramatic “MacArthur Park,” which featured actor Richard Harris whining because “someone left the cake out in the rain, and he didn’t think that he could take it, ‘cause it took so long to bake it, and he’d never have that recipe again, OOOOOOOH NOOOOO!” The song lasted for seven-and-a-half minutes, which seemed more like seven-and-a-half hours. Disc jockeys loved to play the thing over and over again, because it gave them time to eat a sandwich, go to the bathroom and read the paper. But the line “there will be another song for me, for I will sing it,” only served to inflame the desire in a large percentage of radio listeners to hunt Richard Harris down and strangle him with his own apron strings before he got the chance to follow through on his threat. We didn’t care about his stupid soggy cake, and if there had been music videos back in 1968, we’d have loved the scene where the fearsome MacArthur Park squirrels attacked Harris and carried him off for burial with all their other nuts.

There were other long songs. Frank Zappa, for example, composed “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary” in the mid-1970s. This told the story of a pig who lived in California, wore a tie and worked in an office building where he invented the Greggerian Calendar. Greggery also discovered brown clouds and hung around with a philosopher named DeNameland. It is a very deep, introspective Zappa song. I think Greggery came to a tragic end at an office picnic and barbecue, but I’m not sure. What I do know is that the song lasted for almost half an hour. I managed to listen to four or five minutes of the piece once, and found it way more entertaining than “MacArthur Park”. But “Greggery Peccary” seldom got any air time due to PETA complaints. Zappa may have been unstable, but he was an innovator. He was so innovative that he named his four children Moon Unit Zappa, Dweezil Zappa, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan Zappa and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen Zappa. [NOTE: Although Zappa died in 1993, there is still no evidence that any of his children were implicated in his death.]

But this column is not a blanket condemnation of long songs; only of really bad long songs. I recently received an email from Gadsden reader Bruce Gage, who was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, about twenty miles from my hometown of Middleville. He sent a link to the “Grand Rapids Lip Dub” YouTube site, which featured thousands of Grand Rapids folks lip synching to Don McLean’s “American Pie.” The song lasts for over eight-and-a-half minutes, but it is the exception to my four-minute rule. “American Pie” was released in 1971, and it was not a lament about cake recipes, nor was it some cookbook anecdote about barbecued pork by a guy who named his youngest daughter Pigeen. No, “American Pie,” in case you are under 50, or are a senior citizen who has recently suffered a serious croquet mallet injury, isn’t even about pie. It is a fascinating headfirst dive into rock and roll history. It tells of the 1959 Buddy Holly plane crash (“the day the music died”) and the demise of good, old fashioned rock and roll over the decade that followed. There are references to Elvis, Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Joplin, Satan, pickup trucks, Chevys, levees, whiskey and other rock and roll related things. To his credit, McLean never once mentions anyone leaving his pie out in the rain and not thinking that he can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it and now he needs serious psychiatric help, “OOOOOH, NOOOO!” That is just one of the reasons “American Pie” is a really great long song. Of course you may prefer Richard Harris’s cake to Don McLean’s pie, and there is no shame in that. There are some people out there who hate sirloin steak, and just love shaving their tongues and gargling with turpentine until their lips swell shut, too. Taste is very subjective.

The “Grand Rapids Lip Dub” video was produced in response to a Newsweek article which listed Grand Rapids as one of “America’s Dying Cities.” Director Rob Bliss and his friend Scott Erickson released the video over the Memorial Day weekend. To date it has garnered over 3,890,000 hits on YouTube, and film critic Roger Ebert laid his pie aside long enough to call it “the greatest music video ever made.” The video features Grand Rapids streets filled with crowds of everyday folks, marching bands, football players, cheerleaders, guitarists, processions of fire trucks and lines of cop cars. There’s also a couple waving from the back of a pickup truck, others waving handkerchiefs from balconies, kayakers on the Grand River, and an actual mayor, all lip dubbing “American Pie” while being filmed from the back of a John Deere Gator in one continuous nine-minute shot.

Yeah, it’s a promotional video, but it’s a good one. So if anybody has a video camera and a few hundred bucks, we’ve got our very own river and several John Deere tractors right here in Centre. And given Centre’s size, we could get by with a much shorter song.

I found one, an inspirational melody, which lasts for only a minute-and-a-half. It is called “Weasel Stomping Day,” by Weird Al Yankovic, and features happy hometown folks wearing Viking helmets and spreading mayonnaise on their lawns to attract the creatures. The PETA folks would love it.