Everybody has a list of songs that they just HATE. Unfortunately, many of those are earworms, songs that you can't get out of your head no matter how hard you try. Songs like "Afternoon Delight", "You Light Up My Life", "The Night Chicago Died", "My Heart Will Go On". You get the drill.
One of the Hall of Famers of Songs You Love To Hate is "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes. God, how I despised that song when it came out, and if I hear three notes of it now it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. It was a #1 song, and most of us dismiss it as a One Hit Wonder, and figured Rupert Holmes faded into obscurity afterwards.
But boy would you be wrong. Galactically wrong. Rupert Holmes has had an amazing career. Born in England but raised in New York, Holmes decided to augment his singing career by writing musicals. His first effort was to take an unfinished Charles Dickens story called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, later shortened to just Drood for Broadway revivals.
The production invited audience participation, to cheer the hero and boo/hiss the villain. It also had a different ending each night, as Dickens didn't finish the novel and Holmes wrote multiple endings. The audience voted on who was the killer and that actor got another song at the end of the play. I saw The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1985, my first Broadway experience. I was a vote-tallier, as I was at the end of a row. Betty Buckley (Broadway legend) was part of the cast. Holmes won two Tony Awards.
He went on to write several more musicals over the years, some good, some not so good. He wrote songs for Barbra Streisand and others, and continued to perform and release albums. He's currently working on a book on how to kill your boss, and I'd love to see that turned into a musical.
But back to "Escape". After the success of that song (which, by the way, was the last #1 song of the '70s, in 1979), he released another song. It didn't get to #1, but it did get to #6 on the Hot 100. Which brings us to today's Time Machine trip. A song titled after a pronoun. A masculine pronoun. Another earworm. Join us as Rupert struggles with a second male in his relationship. And what to do about "Him"...
By the way, the title of today's post is a reference to a classic Warner Brothers cartoon, in which Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny are interacting with Elmer Fudd to determine what hunting season it is. Duck Season? Rabbit Season? And which one should Elmer shoot? Daffy ends up on the short end of each interaction. At one point, Daffy demands they run their lines again, breaking the fourth wall and walking through the process by which Daffy gets his bill blown off. Worth an investment of 19 seconds...
See you tomorrow...
Pete
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