Alvin M. Keeling 
You’d think people would get tired of stupid love songs. But I look around me and I see that is not the case…. It’s true; we can never have enough stupid love songs. The stupidity of some is the cathartacism of others.
You’ve probably already noticed my almost Uncle Rico’s fascination with the past and its song lyrics. He’s been compared to Springsteen’s Glory Days pal who gets slammed while endlessly buzzing about when he used to “Throwing that fastball next to you, making you look like a jerk, boy.” It’s one of those timeless and priceless lyrical lines that will last through eternity.
Even more then:“I love a good beer buzz early in the morning, and Billy loves peeling the labels off his Bud bottles.” All Sheryl Crow wanted to do was have fun, but expressed it perfectly. And who can forget the future timeless classic, “I kissed a girl and liked it; the taste of cherry lipstick”?
In this case, it was gal on gal, but I remember my first kiss, forced at age 14 by Winnie Godin, an older church girl. I’m in the back seat of my sister’s boyfriend’s car with her when without warning she takes off her cat-eye glasses and sticks her tongue down my throat, gagging me a little. Yeah, “I kissed a girl and hated it, the taste of rancid potato chip dip.”
Some of the classics were completely silly with no love involved: Chuck Berry’s “Ding-a-Ling” and old Ray Stevens shouting at his wife,“Don’t look at Ethel!” It was too late; she had already been mooned.
But a few were just plain hurtful. I didn’t like Randy Newman and his “Well, I don’t want short people, no short people ‘this way…” and “They have little baby legs that hang so low; you have to take them just to say hello…”.
If it wasn’t below the belt, he kicks in an existential sip of bitter gall: “Short people have no reason…no reason to live…” Is that a fact, sir?
How do you think that made me feel thinking back to another cheerleader cooing, “Ahh, he’s such a funny little guy?”
I dedicate this week’s songfest to Meat Loaf who passed away recently. Mr. Loaf, or simply “Meat” to his closest friends, has become an icon, a giant in both stature and stage presence. It seems like one week he was bellowing in his brash, intimidating style, “Making Love to the Dashboard Light” (no thanks Winnie, I just wanna go home), then “Like a bat out of hell “, he was gone. We miss you very much, Meat.
I might have to continue this chart with some real love songs next week, via Valentine’s Day. Be warned: not all of them will be happy endings, because “Song sung in blue, everyone knows one; song sung in blue, every garden grows one.
A final note to Mr. Newman though, who must be 80 by now. I hope you lost three inches with age, but your nose just kept growing. It’s time you knew how you made some of us feel!
