Ask your average reputable citizen who Helen Reddy was and they’ll say the woman who gave us the inspirational (and defiant) feminist anthem “I Am Woman.” But Reddy had depth, and alongside such goo as “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (from the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar) and “You and Me Against the World” released three smash hits about women plagued by mental illness: “Delta Dawn,” “Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress),” and “Angie Baby.”
All three were amongst the six consecutive chart toppers Reddy released between 1973 and 1974. Both “Delta Dawn” and “Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)” are of your jilted women gone mad variety, but “Angie Baby”—which was the first single from Reddy’s 1974 LP Free and Easy—is a far weirder proposition. It’s not just eerie, it’s an episode of The Twilight Zone, and could well be the creepiest single to ever top the U.S. pop charts. Written by Alan O’Day, the singer-songwriter who took “Undercover Angel” to No. 1 and wrote the Righteous Brothers’ unforgettable (for better or worse) “Rock and Roll Heaven,” “Angie Baby” makes Alice Cooper’s “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” sound like Debbie Gibson material.
The song’s plot is pure Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and its sound—which unlike Albert Hitchcock’s wacky cartoon theme sets an authentically unsettling tone, setting a electric piano that is pure dread to a melody that partakes of a nightmare. A strange girl (“Folks hoping you’d turn out cool/But they had to take you out of school/You’re a little touched, you know, Angie baby”) spends her evenings alone in her room, dancing with imaginary lovers to the songs on her radio. Normal enough so far; I used to do the same when I was a teenage girl. But then reality intrudes in the form of an “evil” teen pervert who peeks through Angie’s bedroom window at night promising her a good time, by which he most likely doesn’t mean Monopoly.
And that’s where things get really spine-chilling. Said teen might have had his way with Angie, destroying her fantasies of romance forever. Instead he walks into her room—the song’s hazy on whether Angie extended him an invite or he crawls through the window—but he immediately knows things are off: “He feels confused/Like he walked into a play/And the music’s so loud it spins him around/’Til his soul has lost its way.” And the song goes full Rod Serling when Reddy sings, “And as she turns the volume down/He’s getting smaller with the sound/It seems to pull him off the ground/Toward the radio he’s bound/Never to be found.”
Now there are ways to be taken hostage by a would-be lover, but being miniaturized in a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids scenario and then sucked into a portable radio isn’t one of them. Angie obviously has some serious Steven King powers to pull off a stunt like that—it’s almost as good as starting fires with your eyeballs. And you have to love the song’s denouement: “The headlines read that a boy disappeared/And everyone thinks he died/’Cept a crazy girl with a secret lover/Who keeps her satisfied/It’s so nice to be insane/No one asks you to explain.” Is the song the fantasy of a crazy girl “living in a world of make believe” asks Reddy. “Well, maybe” she sings at song’s close, but we know better—inside Angie’s AM transistor radio there’s a horny punk screaming to be let out.
And speaking of punks screaming to be let out, “Angie Baby” speaks to a desire on the, let’s face it, square Helen Reddy to talk a walk on the weird side. You won’t find a successful artist of Reddy’s stature who released such a strange single, with the possible exception of the Carpenters’ flop “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” which is a friendly song—more E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial than The Twilight Zone’s “The Living Doll.” An insane person with uncanny powers—now there’s a subject you rarely run across in the popular song. Delta Dawn and the woman in the faded dress are sad characters. Angie baby is a woman you don’t want to put the moves on.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
