Bad Songs Say So Much

A Brief History of Very Bad Songs

Van Morrison, 1967, about to blow your nose. PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

One morning a couple weeks ago, I was lying in bed doing some deep-dive research on 70s bubblegum pop phenoms Bay City Rollers (as one does) when I came across this strange Rollers-themed curio: Nick Lowe, perhaps one of pop music’s greatest songwriting treasures, had, at an early part in his career, written a song about the Scottish proto-boyband. It was called “Bay City Rollers We Love You.” Here it is, in all its glory:

So that seemed a bit weird. Why would Nick Lowe write a song about Bay City Rollers? Turns out, he’d written it to get fired. He’d been trapped in a contract with United Artists; he wanted out and the only way he knew how to do it was to intentionally write a terrible song. Lowe’s thinking was that UA, on realizing that one of the songwriters in their stable was demonstrably bad at writing songs, would immediately release him. Here he is explaining the process:

The old “write a bad song” gambit didn’t work out so well for Nick; “Bay City Rollers We Love You” was not only accepted by the suits at UA, but went on to become a certified hit (in Japan anyway) and the unofficial anthem for the legions of Bay City Rollers fans. It was so successful, in fact, that Nick was pressed to write a follow up Rollers-fawning song, “Rollers Show.”

This all got me thinking about bad songs and the songwriters who write them. To be clear, there are millions of bad songs being written by songwriters every day. I’m talking about songs that are intentionally bad. I myself am no stranger to writing bad songs — but, IMHO, I’ve only once ever aired one of those bad songs to a paying audience. “Dracula’s Daughter” is a fragment of a song that was so incredibly bad that I only made it a verse/chorus and a bridge into it before I abandoned it in disgust. I thought it was so bad, in fact, that there was something funny about it. I played it, briefly, live during a set in San Francisco in 2006. The gag ended up on my live solo record; it’s gone on to have a bit of a life of its own. That does not make it a decent song, though. It is still the shell — the gestating worm — of a horrible song.

Little did I know, I was following in a time-honored tradition. In 1967, Van Morrison was snared in a deal with Bang Records. They’d overseen the recording of the session that produced “Brown Eyed Girl” and “T.B. Sheets” — classics, all — but had gone on to release an LP of those recordings without Morrison’s knowledge or consent. Van wanted out of the deal. Thing was, he still owed them more songs — thirty six, to be exact. So he did what any rational, free thinking individual would do: he booked time at a studio and recorded thirty six truly awful songs, using a guitar that became progressively more out of tune as the session went on. Here’s the opening track, “Twist and Shake”:

This song is followed by one called “Shake and Roll.” “Stomp and Scream,” “Scream and Holler,” and “Jump and Thump” follow in quick succession. Each song, while ostensibly adhering to some kind of theme, are as genuinely terrible as the one before it — and then you’re only five songs into this thirty-odd track masterpiece of monstrousness. “Freaky If You Made it This Far” appears about halfway through the tracklist; a song about ring worm precedes it by a few tunes.

The thing that sets Van’s terrible songs from Nick Lowe’s is that “Bay City Rollers We Love You” has a kind of infectiousness to it, one that even Nick admits to in that interview. He can’t help but write a great song, even if he’s aspiring to an awful one. You’d have to squint pretty hard to find something in Morrison’s “Blowin’ Your Nose” (track nineteen) that would make you want to play it more than once. That said, you can hear the seeds of the songs that would make up Van’s true masterpiece, Astral Weeks, in these Bang Sessions songs — the simple three-chord progressions, the strumming patterns — they sound eerily similar to what you hear in “Cypress Avenue,” a song he would record only a year later. And this recurring George character that appears throughout the songs (“Goodbye George,” “Dum Dum George” “Here Comes Dumb George”) feels like they must be a kernel of the Madame George who arrives, click and clacking, in Astral Weeks.

While Van’s Contractual Obligation Album really takes the cake when it comes to definitively bad songwriting, there are plenty of other instances out there of musicians trying to wriggle out of one obligation or another by submitting a song that was written for the express purpose of turning someone off. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote “Cocksucker Blues” in order to satisfy their contract with Decca, a record label that had a long history of censoring their work. A song about a lonesome schoolboy looking for furtive homosexual sex would have to do.

In a similar vein, the Turtles apparently wrote “Elenore” as a way to clown their record label, who was resistant to the band producing anything but the radio-friendly pop that had been the source of their popularity. This is what the songwriter Howard Kaylan had to say about the song:

Elenore was a parody of "Happy Together." It was never intended to be a straight-forward song. It was meant as an anti-love letter to White Whale Records who were constantly on our backs to bring them another "Happy Together." So I gave them a very skewed version. Not only with the chords changed, but with all these bizarre words. It was my feeling that they would listen to how strange and stupid the song was and leave us alone. But they didn't get the joke. They thought it sounded good.

IMHO, “Elenore” is an absolute masterclass in pop songwriting — at once painfully heartfelt and deeply ironic (“You are my pride and joy et cetera”). Its irreverence only makes it strike at the heart of the matter more accurately. The fact that it was not only done haphazardly, but was also meant to be genuinely bad is hilarious. Listening again, I’m inclined to call bullshit on Kaylan; I think he knew it was good. I think he might’ve just been a little too keenly aware of his band’s reputation as pop songmakers at a time when it wasn’t necessarily cool to make radio-friendly music. But we must take him at his word: “Elenore” is a bad song.

In my internet sleuthing for other intentionally bad recordings, I saw a lot of people citing Dylan’s Self Portrait and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music as examples. I don’t think these make the cut. For one, I think Self Portrait was not written to be truly bad, it just was not received well. Metal Machine Music was certainly a left turn for Reed, but it’s not bad, at least by my definition. It’s an experimental piece, a more thorough exploration of some of the stuff the Velvets had explored on songs like “Sister Ray” and “The Gift.” These don’t count.

“Hootenanny,” the song that kicks off The Replacements sophomore LP, on the other hand, is a gloriously terrible song. In the midst of tracking one of the more affecting songs on the record, “Willpower,” Paul Westerberg got into a fight with the engineer, Paul Stark, over the amount of reverb on Westerberg’s vocals. Because Stark couldn’t see the band from the control room, Westerberg decided to orchestrate a kind of fuck you to the engineer. He made all the band members switch instruments and proceeded to improvise an ersatz blues shuffle. “It’s a hootenanny!” yowled Westerberg, seated at the drum set. From Bob Mehr’s excellent Trouble Boys:

The band was trying to stifle their laughter during the take. “Stark didn’t know it was a joke,” said Westerberg. “He took it seriously.”

When the track was over, Stark’s voice came through the talkback. “Uh, okay,” he said, sounding confused about what he’d just heard. “Do you want to try that again or come in and listen to it?”

“Nope,” said Westerberg. “That’s it: first song, side one.”

“Hootenanny” might be legitimately awful, but it serves as a kind of statement of purpose from a band that refused to take itself seriously.

There are a few more songs that could arguably make the cut as intentionally bad songs, but there tend to be asterisks for each of them. “Please Don’t Listen,” by Donner Party certainly falls into the Cocksucker Blues camp of let’s-see-how-offensive-I-can-make-this songwriting, but I wouldn’t call it a bad song; similarly, the Ex Cat Heads “Anti-Song” is a song expressly written to describe its own badness (“This song ain’t any good,” goes the refrain at the end), but manages to undercut itself by being actually very catchy. These songs merely pretend at badness.

See, we need bad songs in the world; we need them as much as we need the good songs. We need them to prove that sometimes we are not the experts on what is good or bad in a song; we need them to shine a light on the decent songs, to make them sparkle brighter.