Rats Amoré (or, Sam is So Skinny)

My daughter (7 this October) has, for some reason, fallen in love with America’s “A Horse with No Name.” Beats me how this even came to find its way onto my iPod, but she adores it. (Hippie music, I call it – drug-inspired, it must be, to boast such lyrics as “the heat was hot.” Wow, guys, you dug deep for that one!) Anyway, on the trip to my uncle’s birthday party this past Saturday (where I was looking right when my turn was on the left, and I went 9 miles past my turn to end up at Tallulah Gorge which I had, incidentally, seen Karl Wallenda cross on a wire when I was 4) we had the iPod rocking and she wanted to hear “A Horse with No Name.” I just set it to play the America songs and after her song came America’s “Muskrat Love.” Daughter had, by this time, turned her attention back to her Junie B. Jones book. At first I was kind of humming along and singing the song. I played it again, and thought it was kind of cute. I played it again, and started chuckling out loud and finally just giggling while daughter, with all the aplomb of a 13-year-old, rolled her eyes and tried to ignore me. Mind you, please, that I already had my own flip-face clock radio radio when The Captain and Tennille had a hit with their version of “Muskrat Love." What I mean to say is, that song is no stranger to me. Phooey, I had the album. So why this song struck me as so funny at age 40 I have no clue. But in true stream-of-consciousness thinking, where one thing leads to another and to yet another, I decisively resolved that it must truly have been a low point in American radio when a Top 40 slot (heck, a Top 5, at that) was held for 12 weeks by a song about water rodents whirling, twirling, and tangling in a blissful expression of love. Which got me thinking…what a dark period in television, indeed, for Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille—replete with long, flowing tunics—to be broadcast weekly. I loved them and thought The Captain was terribly cute and mysterious, what with his nickname, his cap, and his apparent vow of silence. But…what was ABC thinking? What was I thinking when I commandeered the technologically advanced, 13-channel RCA ColorTrak from my parents every week?

What were THEY thinking when they relinquished control of the dial? Now that I think about it, they disappeared during that time. Maybe they were nibbling on bacon and chewing on cheese…

Side notes: Funny, I always thought it was Neil Young singing on "A Horse with No Name." Apparently a lot of people did but it actually wasn’t him. And, according to Wikipedia: This song has also been ridiculed for the banal lyric, "The heat was hot". Randy Newman once described it as a song "about a kid who thinks he's taken acid". Ow, that’s gotta hurt!

Thought for today: “Sustain me with raisin cakes, refresh me with apples, for I am lovesick.” – Song of Solomon 2:5