(The Hit Hammer is where I'm reviewing each #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. Starting from when the chart started in 1958 and eventually working my way to the present. To see my inspiration and more information about this blog, please CLICK HERE)
Cher - "Dark Lady"
Hit Number 1: March 23, 1974
Stay at Number 1: 1 Week
The Ventures are one of the best instrumental bands of all time. They were popular all throughout the '60s, and they saw great amounts of chart success. (Their highest-charting single was "Walk-Don't Run". It peaked at #2 in 1960. It's an 8) Since the Ventures were known for doing instrumentals only, no one in the band wrote lyrics for songs very often. But one case of them doing so turned out to be a key moment in pop music. Johnny Durrill, the Ventures' keyboard player, found himself writing a strange song one day. This song was about a lady who went to go see a fortune teller, who told her that someone who is very close to her is secretly seeing her male lover. The narrator soon discovers that the "close person," was the fortune teller herself.
Durrill had yet to finish the song, and he wanted to take what he had so far to Snuff Garrett, a well-known producer whose name has shown up in this blog a couple times. Garrett was pretty into it, but he had one request for Durrill: "make sure the bitch kills him." So that's what Durrill did. He had the narrator shoot both the guy and the fortune teller in cold blood, but had her do it in strange fashion. The line in the song said "Next thing I knew they were dead on the floor", as if the narrator blacked out while doing the killing. The song was complete, and was called "Dark Lady", but Durrill needed to find someone to record the song. At the time of writing "Dark Lady", Durrill was staying in the basement of Garrett, who had worked with Cher in the past while she was still performing with Sonny Bono, and he thought she could work for the song. Because of course she would work. If you needed someone to record something dark or disturbing, Cher was the one you were looking for. That stuff was right up her alley.
It also helped that Cher was still one of the biggest stars in music at the time. She hit #1 in 1971 and 1973 respectively with "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" and "Half-Breed", both of which are also dark songs in some form. But "Dark Lady" is probably the darkest, simply cause a murder occurs in the song, and it also involves possible adultery, two of the most disturbing things you can put into a song. However, "Dark Lady" is also, out of Cher's four solo #1 hits, the worst. The song starts out with some cheesy strings that try to put you into some eerie atmosphere. Admittedly, it kind of works, but the rest of the song is hard to follow with. And the murder in the song is completely random. One minute the narrator's trying to cope with the "strange things" the fortune teller told her, and the next she kills her and the guy. There's no buildup. There's no intrigue to where the story is going. You can tell that Durrill quickly jotted down the death scene and called it good. But it's not good. It's random and absolutely stupid.
I wasn't too crazy about Cher's two previous #1 songs, but at least Cher herself was able to save them. She was able to put on her own weird charm for those two songs, but that's not the case on "Dark Lady". Cher's part of the problem on "Dark Lady". I already consider the story to be stupid, but Cher sounds like she's having the most freaking fantastic time singing this stupid song. I can't stand it. Her chorus sticks with you, but not because it's good. It's all just so incessantly stupid. "Dark Lady" is one of those songs that gives the claim of 1974 being the "worst year for music" some justification. It's so, so bad.
Cher will appear in this blog again, but it won't be for a very long time. Like, I mean a long time. I was born before Cher's next #1 hit, and I was born in 1997. But at least "Dark Lady" was not her final #1 hit, because that would suck. Though I've clearly never been too excited by Cher's #1 hits to this point, I still have a lot of respect for her career and her accomplishments. "Dark Lady" notwithstanding.
GRADE: 2/10
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