(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)
Starland Vocal Band - "Afternoon Delight"
Hit Number 1: July 10, 1976
Stay at Number 1: 2 Weeks
It's pretty obvious what "Afternoon Delight" is about. Don't let the innocent sounding tune fool you, it's clearly a song about having sex in the daytime. Not only that, but the song seems to try to argue that having sex in the afternoon is better than any other time of day. What's really funny about that though is that the inspiration to write the song didn't come from anyone having sex in the day, thinking "this is amazing," and then writing a song about it. It actually came from a restaurant menu. Starland Vocal Band was an obscure group that had done some work with John Denver in the past, but none of the members were famous just yet. The band's lead songwriter/singer, Bill Danoff, was having some lunch with fellow group member, Margot Chapman, while his wife and other fellow band member, Taffy Danoff, was in surgery for cancer. Danoff noticed that there was a section on the restaurant's menu called the "Afternoon Delights," a happy hour menu.
If you ask Danoff, his song ended up being about sex, though that's not what he was intending: "I didn't want to write an all-out sex song. I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex." "Afternoon Delight" does a lot more than just "hint" at sex. There's lyrics like "Thinking of you is working up an appetite/looking forward to a little afternoon delight" that make it painfully obvious what's going on in this song. Danoff also says that the song took a while to write, over the course of about six months. He would often work on the song while watching Redskins football on TV, cause that kind of energy "got his creative juices flowing." His finished product is an innocent-sounding tune about not being able to wait until nighttime for sex. I mean, everyone sounds so happy, almost kid-like on the track, yet what they're singing about isn't meant for young audiences. This is the kind of thing we've come to expect out of '70s pop music though. There's a lot of songs about sex, and there's a lot of innocent sounding tunes that made their way to the top part of the Hot 100. "Afternoon Delight" manages to put those two together into one song.
For the Starland Vocal Band, this was a recipe for success. The Danoffs were paired up with Chapman and her boyfriend, Jon Carroll, and the four would harmonize with one another, and take turns singing different parts of the song. Now, I hear a lot of people say they don't like "Afternoon Delight," and I'm really not sure what it is that people hate about it. Sure, the song isn't among the best of the best, but it's also not one of the worst songs I've ever heard. Not even close. I appreciate a lot of that harmonizing, and even though I think attempts were made to disguise the true meaning of the song, they do manage to make afternoon sex sound awfully appealing. It's even more fitting that the singers are two couples. If I'm in the right mood, I think I could find myself getting lost in the song, and respecting the musicianship going on, which is pretty good. I even like that steel guitar riff after the line "skyrockets in flight," which is a fitting addition. It might not be as innocent as it makes itself seem, but as long as it has that "sound," to it, I don't understand how anyone couldn't like it a little bit. It's a song that never hurt anybody.
However, as big a hit as "Afternoon Delight" was, the Starland Vocal Band never did anything else big, only getting a couple more songs in the lower reaches of the Hot 100. Despite that, they had their own TV show named The Starland Vocal Band which only aired for six episodes, but that's still kind of an interesting fact. (A little known comic at the time appeared on the show once. His name? David Letterman) After the show ended, the band couldn't do anything else to stay relevant, and they disbanded in 1980. They're a true example of what we call "one-hit wonders," but at least they had a hit, and that song managed to get to the summit of the Hot 100, something a lot of artists can't say they've ever done. A gold record of "Afternoon Delight" now hangs in that same restaurant where Bill Danoff came up with the song's title all those years ago, which is also pretty cool. I get that the song isn't anything overly special, but man, "Afternoon Delight" deserves some more respect than what it gets. It's a decent little happy song.
GRADE: 6/10
IN POP CULTURE:
There's an amazing scene, of one of the many amazing scenes, in Anchorman where they sing "Afternoon Delight," and absolutely nail the harmonies before Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) gets told he has mental problems. Here's that scene: