(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)
Helen Reddy - "Angie Baby"
Hit Number 1: December 28, 1974
Stay at Number 1: 1 Week
Usually part of my reviews involve my own interpretation of a song's content, and what the lyrics mean to me. However, this is one of the few times where I've got nothing. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I listen to "Angie Baby", I can never figure out what in the world this song is about. There are a few givens: This Angie character is clearly off her rocker. She's kicked out of school for how crazy she is, so she is unable to make any friends. Angie doesn't care though, because she's content sitting in her room at her home listening to her music on the radio. Her radio is supposedly her own little world, and she's able to live in this fantasy world with her made-up lovers that keep her company through the songs. Okay, so that's really strange in and of itself, but the song gets even crazier after all of this. But we'll get to that part in a second.
1974 is one of the most musically turbulent years ever. It has to be. We've had songs ranging from a man running around naked, to a woman who kills someone she had just spoken to hours before, to a cop/gang fight that takes place in Lake Michigan, and for good measure, to some Kung Fu fighting. All kinds of weird crap was making #1 in this time, so of course something so bizarre and mind-boggling such as "Angie Baby" would be a rather fitting way to end the year. The artist of the song is surprising to me though. Helen Reddy seemed to be one of the most no-nonsense artists in the '70s, and she gave us one of the true anthems of women empowerment with "I Am Woman" in 1972, and that sort of feminist figure is one that Reddy would come to embrace for the rest of her life. So it's hard to see how "Angie Baby" could fit with what she had going on. It's one of the oddest songs to ever hit #1 in my opinion, and the fact that someone like Reddy is the artist of it, it makes the story even stranger.
For what it's worth, Reddy is not the one who wrote "Angie Baby". That would be Alan O'Day, a then-unknown dude who will eventually get his own time to shine later on in this blog. You could be forgiven if you thought O'Day was on one powerful drug while writing "Angie Baby", but according to him, the character was based off the character in the Beatles' song "Lady Madonna". He also remembered a girl he used to live next to who struck him as "socially retarded," and he decided he would make the character of his song a bit like her to make it more interesting. Part of the story of "Angie Baby" is inspired by O'Day's own life, as he remembered himself growing up and being sick in bed with the radio playing to keep him company. O'Day didn't care to record it himself, and the song found its way to Reddy, whose husband and manager, Jeff Wald, was very impressed by the song. He heard a demo first, then Reddy second, and by that afternoon they had their own arrangement for the song. Reddy would record it and release it, and it was met with great success. Reddy would later say that it was the only song of hers that she didn't have to push the radio to play.
Now let's talk more about the content. I can follow along okay until we get to the part where a neighbor boy enters Angie's room. All we're told about this boy is that he sometimes peaks through Angie's blinds into her room, and he talks to her one night with "evil on his mind." (Basically, the guy's own dick gets him in trouble) He enters her room and he's confused by what's around him, and then the song takes weird to a whole new level. Angie turns her radio volume down, and the boy becomes smaller, before disappearing. He's never found, and everyone assumes that he's dead. Except, as the song says, "a crazy girl with a secret lover who keeps her satisfied." That's beyond me. O'Day and Reddy have both unfortunately passed on, but neither one ever spilled the beans on the meaning of this song. Reddy would say that she thought it was funny how everyone thought of their different meanings of the song, so she never gave her own interpretation. Maybe she didn't even have one.
So, it's pretty well-established that "Angie Baby" is a damn weird song lyrically, and that it gets suddenly intense when the boy gets swept into Angie's radio, or whatever the hell is supposed to be happening at that part of the song. But musically, it's a decent song. Everything is very subtle, including Reddy's vocal, and the chorus elevates to a tipping point with "Living in a world of maaake beliiiiiiiieve," which gives the song some cool flavor. The song matches the mood of when the boy is getting swept away, and the strings, Reddy's lead vocal and some sudden backing singers give the song its sudden dose of intensity. All told, it's really just another piece of standard pop music that fits right into the '74/'75 era. But "Angie Baby" doesn't have enough musical qualities to distract me from the oddity of the words being sung. At the end I'm not thinking "Wow, awesome song!" Instead I'm thinking "What just happened? What really happened to that boy?" It's like "Ode to Billie Joe", where I'm left with more questions than answers.
Helen Reddy, of course, passed away just last year, so we'll never know her thoughts on the song's content, but what we do know is that she went on a hell of a run in the early '70s. "Angie Baby" was the end of that run, so we won't see her in this blog again, but I have to think that the peculiarity of her song will continue to live on. Here I am, in 2021, continuing to try and figure out what my own understanding is of the song. It's not easy to figure out, and since there isn't enough excitement going on with the music, I'll probably just continue to label "Angie Baby" as a weird-ass song.
Props to "It's so nice to be insane/No one asks you to explain" though. That's a cool lyric!
GRADE: 5/10
IN POP CULTURE:
You know how I said that Alan O'Day didn't care to record "Angie Baby"? Well he eventually decided he would record his own version for his 1977 album Appetizers, an album that will feature his lone #1 hit. There have been a million different cover versions of "Angie Baby", but it seemed like it made the most sense for me to include the actual songwriter's version here. So, here it is:
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