Looking backward to a little Afternoon Delight

 

By Rob Carrigan, rob carrigan1@gmail.com

Considered bright for my age, I remember being 10-, or 11-, or maybe 12-years-old, in the 1970s and thinking ...  you know, you don't always get the meaning of things happening — until a long time after being first exposed.

A good example is the song called “Afternoon Delight” by Starland Vocal Band, which, at the time was based in Aspen, and has multiple connections here in Colorado.

"In 1976, Starland Vocal Band won the Best New Artist Grammy, beating out Boston for the honor. They also beat “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen to take home the statue for Best Arrangement for Voices (Duo, Group, or Chorus). “Afternoon Delight” was everywhere you turned. It was sitting atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart on July 4, 1976. As the country celebrated its 200th anniversary, it was only fitting there would be a song about fireworks at number one. But there’s more to this song than just skyrockets in flight. Let’s look at the meaning behind “Afternoon Delight” by Starland Vocal Band," writes Jay McDowell. in American Songwriter, earlier this year.

"Starland Vocal Band consisted of two couples. Bill and Taffy Danoff, and Margot Chapman and Jon Carroll worked up four-part harmonies and released five albums before breaking up in 1981. The Danoffs began as a duo using the name Fat City and backed John Denver on many of his albums. They co-wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads” with the singer and sang on the recording. It became an official state anthem of West Virginia. Starland Vocal Band was signed to Denver’s Winding Records, which was a subsidiary of RCA Records. The group opened many shows for Denver. The success of “Afternoon Delight” led to a summer replacement show on CBS hosted by the band that featured up-and-coming comedian David Letterman."

Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight
Gonna grab some afternoon delight
My motto’s always been, ‘When it’s right, it’s right’
Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night?
When everything’s a little clearer in the light of day
And we know the night is always gonna be there anyway

Clyde’s of Georgetown opened for business in 1963 in the Northwest section of Washington, D.C. The legendary saloon offered a happy hour menu called “Afternoon Delight.” Bill Danoff started writing the song over a six-month period, often while watching home team NFL football games. He told People magazine, “All that energy coming out of the tube gets my creative juices flowing.”

Thinkin’ of you’s workin’ up my appetite
Looking forward to a little afternoon delight
Rubbin’ sticks and stones together makes the sparks ignite
And the thought of lovin’ you is getting so exciting
Sky rockets in flight
Afternoon delight

"The song is filled with double entendres referring to midday sexual encounters. Nooners or quickies could now be called Afternoon Delights. Danoff told Dennis Hunt of The Los Angeles Times, “I didn’t want to write an all-out sex song. I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex. It was one of those songs that you could really have a good time writing. If the song had been banned, it would have been a real injustice. The lyrics are subtle and sophisticated and not at all raunchy. It might have been banned years ago, but not today.”

The song is clearly not only about fireworks.

Started out this morning feeling so polite
I always thought a fish could not be caught who wouldn’t bite
But you’ve got some bait a waitin’, and I think I might try nibbling
A little afternoon delight
Sky rockets in flight
Afternoon delight

According to Jay McDowell, "The song has been used in movie and television soundtracks or parodied on PCU, Boogie Nights, Good Will Hunting, Sports Night, Malcolm in the Middle, ER, The Simpsons, Arrested Development, South Park, 30 Rock, Family Guy, My Name Is Earl, Emily’s Reasons Why Not, and Mindhunter. 

Please be waiting for me, baby, when I come around
We could make a lot of lovin’ ‘fore the sun goes down

"Of course, the vocals take center stage on the recording," says McDowell.

"One of the musical highlights of the song is the soaring, heavily processed pedal steel guitar lick which appears just after the skyrockets line. The lick, as well as the solo, were played by Danny Pendleton, who went on to record with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. Initially, producer Milt Okun tried a Moog synthesizer in that spot but was not happy with the results. Engineer Phil Ramone asked Pendleton to come up with something, and the iconic lick was born."

Bassist Russell George told The Washington Post in 2011. These guys were folkies trying to come up with a groove that just doesn’t happen in folk music. I’d done a James Brown album. I’d done Labelle. I said to Bill, ‘Do you mind if I kick it off?’ My count-off—a one, a two, a one-two-three-four—set up the whole groove. They had this wonderful song, but we didn’t know it until we heard it in its finality. We didn’t know what tune we were playing; we were just reading symbols off the page. They put the vocals down later. The first time I heard ‘Afternoon Delight’ in its complete form was when I got the record at home. I damn near [wet] myself. Honest to god, I got chills.”

Thinkin’ of you’s workin’ up my appetite
Looking forward to a little afternoon delight
Rubbin’ sticks and stones together makes the sparks ignite
And the thought of lovin’ you is getting so exciting
Sky rockets in flight
Afternoon delight

One of the biggest-selling singles of 1976, "Afternoon Delight," was
the group's,  which began as Fat City, a husband/wife duo of Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, greatest hit.

Danoff and Nivert co-wrote the song "I Guess He'd Rather Be in Colorado" and then, with John Denver, "Take Me Home, Country Roads", which became a hit single in 1971 and became an official song of West Virginia in 2014. The duo recorded two albums as Fat City (Reincarnation, Welcome to Fat City), and two more as Bill & Taffy (Pass It On, Aces), all released from 1969 to 1974.

In the mid-1970s, Starland Vocal Band was formed and subsequently signed to John Denver's label Windsong Records. Starland Vocal Band also included Jon Carroll (keyboards, guitar, vocals) and Margot Chapman (vocals). Carroll and Chapman also became a couple, marrying in 1978.

The group's debut album was the self-titled Starland Vocal Band and included "Afternoon Delight". The song was a US number one hit and the album also charted. They were nominated for four Grammy Awards in 1977 and won two: Best Arrangement for Voices and Best New Artist, the latter award over the group Boston. 

The band also hosted a variety show, The Starland Vocal Band Show, that ran on CBS for six weeks in the summer of 1977. David Letterman was a writer and regular on the show, which also featured Mark Russell, Jeff Altman, and Proctor and Bergman. April Kelly was a writer for the series.

Unable to match their previous success, the band broke up in 1981. Carroll and Chapman divorced later that year followed by Danoff and Nivert in 1982. All four members went on to pursue solo careers. All four members have remained on friendly terms, and in 1998 the group reunited for a few concerts, often featuring the children of the four original members as additional vocalists. In 2007, they appeared on a 1970s special on the New Jersey Network (NJN), singing "Afternoon Delight".  

It’s also one of the most-mocked songs in pop history. Rolling Stone readers once voted it the second worst song of the 1970s, just ahead of “(You’re) Having My Baby” and behind “Disco Duck.” To some, it’s offensively inoffensive, a soft-focus Coke commercial stretched out past three minutes.

“Afternoon Delight” is cheerful and sprightly. It smells like soap and sounds like a bonfire singalong at Christian summer camp. And it’s the pinnacle of AM Gold, which is part of what makes it so deviously wonderful. If AC/DC or Prince had sung the chorus – “Rubbin’ sticks and stones together makes the sparks ignite” – you’d have known immediately it was about sex. Under the cover of sunshine, “Afternoon Delight” snuck a pro-screwing song onto the charts," says Rob Tannebaum, of GQ, in an October of 2021 story for the magazine.

"Bill Danoff, the Starland Vocal Band mastermind who wrote the song, disagrees with this description. He thinks it’s subtle. Taffy Nivert, Danoff’s wisecracking ex-bandmate and ex-wife, told me,  "Because he didn’t say it like that, you can say it was subtle.”

"The mid-‘70s were full of dirty songs, many of them hits. Pop music’s response to the sexual liberation of the 1960s was an outbreak of grunting and moaning. In 1973, singer Sylvia Robinson (a canny self-starter who also produced the first hip-hop hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” a few years later) released “Pillow Talk,” a cooing come-on full of moans and ad libs, including “Niiiiice daddy.” Here’s a possibly incomplete list of songs that included the sounds of orgasms: “Tell Me Something Good,” and “Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied)” in 1974; “Love to Love You Baby,” “Rockin’ Chair,” “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You,” and “Love Won’t Let Me Wait” in 1975; and in 1976, “More More More” (by Andrea True, an actual porn star), “Love Hangover,” “Tonight’s the Night,” “Could It Be Magic,” and “I Want You.

"Most of those songs are disco, which celebrated a transgressive attitude towards sex even on record covers. Disco was chiefly Black, Hispanic, and gay, and although the backlash against it didn’t peak until a few years later, by 1976 plenty of straight white people already felt enraged by the ubiquity of dance music. In the Bicentennial year, when the smug celebration of American exceptionalism reached a new peak, they were ready to embrace a song that stood in clear, pale contrast to other hits of the day and affirmed their cultural hegemony. What has ever been whiter than “Afternoon Delight?” asks Rob Tannebaum.

"Danoff’s song was a safe, mainstream outlet for the zeitgeist of Roe v. Wade, Deep Throat, and the Hite Report. It remains the dirtiest song ever to top the Billboard Hot 100, precisely because subsequent contenders like “WAP” are so beyond, radio will play only censored, diluted versions. “Afternoon Delight” locates the exact boundary at which America’s Puritan gag reflex kicks in."

 “We were freaks. Long hair, the counterculture, whatever,” Bill Danoff says. Yes, “Afternoon Delight,” that 1970s totem, was written by a 1960s hippie.

"Danoff grew up in a working-class New England family, and majored in Chinese at Georgetown, where his classmates included Bill Clinton. He planned a career in the foreign service, and played music on the side, including benefits for NORML and local free clinics. He and Nivert recorded two albums of playful folk-rock as Fat City, then two more as Bill and Taffy. Their songs included the crowd favorite “Richard” (as in Nixon), “Readjustment Blues” (a soldier is flummoxed when he sees an anti-war protest) and “The Fat City High School Fight Song,” which begins “Thank god for marijuana, because it’s the cheapest thing to buy,” asys Rob Tannebaum.

"Washington, D.C. was the center of a burgeoning folk, country, and bluegrass scene, and one night John Denver, then an unknown, saw a Danoff and Nivert set and asked if they had any new songs he might record. They played him an unfinished song about West Virginia, and together, the three finished “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which made Denver a huge star. It became a folk-country standard, and was subsequently recorded by Loretta Lynn, Ray Charles, Wayne Newton, Toots and the Maytals, the Carter Family, and David Hasselhoff, among many."

Denver took Danoff and Nivert on tour with him, but their own music never got popular outside of D.C., and Danoff worried that they might lose their record contract. He started to imagine “a Mamas and the Papas kind of thing” with two musicians he’d heard around town: Hawaiian-born Margot Chapman, and Jon Carroll, who was seventeen, more than a decade younger than the rest.

“Afternoon Delight” is an odd, unique mix of styles and temperaments. Thanks to the steel guitar, it feels broadly American. Suzanne Ciani’s sound effects on the Buchla 200 modular synth (it comes right after the orgasmic refrain “Skyrockets in flight”) add a dose of futurism. The vocals — arranged by Carroll, who incorporated ideas of countermotion inspired by Bach — add a classy, accomplished feel. The studio bassist and drummer are top-notch, and the string arrangement is by David Matthews, who worked with James Brown and Nina Simone. And it was produced by two legends: Milt Okun, who’d worked extensively with Laura Nyro, and Phil Ramone, who’d just produced Still Crazy After All These Years with Paul Simon.

Shortly after the Starland Vocal Band’s self-titled debut — which has several dulcet highlights including “Boulder to Birmingham,” written by Danoff with Emmylou Harris — won two Grammys, including a much-mocked Best New Artist trophy, Starland’s ambitious manager, Jerry Weintraub, booked them to host a CBS summer replacement variety show, then one of TV’s hottest trends. Chapman and Carroll were also now a couple, which gave the quartet a two-couple wholesomeness. “The fact that we were clean-cut and didn’t look like the Grateful Dead, CBS thought that was good. But we didn’t want it,” Danoff says. The show — which included a young comedian named David Letterman, whose misery is evident in every second of his appearances — was soon cancelled," according to Tannebaum.

"Starland Vocal Band recorded three more albums, but subsequent singles didn’t get any higher than #66 on the Top 40 chart, and soon, they weren’t charting at all."

“I knew something was breaking up,” Jon Carroll says. “But I wasn’t sure if it was the group, or Bill and Taffy, or if Margot and I should be breaking up,” quotes Tannebaum

At rehearsal one day in 1981 Danoff called an end to it. “You can put up with all kinds of stuff if you’re making a lot of money,” he says now. “When there’s no money, and it’s not fun, I’m out.” He and Nivert, who’d become parents, soon divorced. Chapman and Carroll also became parents, and split up for good in 1990.

Click link below for a little Afternoon Delight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taSa16bSPvY