Song #8: "Afternoon Delight" by The Starland Vocal Band

 

Song #8: “Afternoon Delight” — Starland Vocal Band

Today’s Song

Song: “Afternoon Delight”
Artist: Starland Vocal Band
Era bucket: 1970–1979
First project-qualification date: June 19, 1976
Hot 100 entry: May 8, 1976
Peak: #1
Weeks at #1: 2
Weeks charted: 20
Weeks in the Top 20: 10
Weeks in the Top 10: 8
1976 year-end rank: #11
All-time ranking: #463
My familiarity: Know very well
My rating: 82/100

Starland Vocal Band at this point:
Charting record: 1st of 4
Top-20 hit: 1st of 1
Top-10 hit: 1st of 1
#1 hit: 1st of 1

Record: Windsong 10588
B-side: “Starland”
Album: Starland Vocal Band
Songwriter: Bill Danoff
Producer: Milt Okun
Running time: 3:12

Original recording: Available on the official Starland Vocal Band YouTube channel
Contemporary video: A 1976 promotional video also survives
Lyrics: Available online

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A Guilty Pleasure That Might Just Be Good

Unlike several of the songs I've encountered so far in this project, I didn't need to learn “Afternoon Delight.”

I've known this song for basically my entire life. I was four years old when it became a #1 hit in the summer of 1976, and I remember hearing it on the radio. Obviously, I didn't know what it was about at four. It was probably another decade before that particular light bulb went on.

Before listening to it today, I could already sing most of the first verse and chorus from memory.

And I had a pretty well-established category for it: guilty pleasure.

“Afternoon Delight” is cheesy. It's hokey. Starland Vocal Band may be one of the most aggressively 1976 band names imaginable. The song is about having sex in the middle of the afternoon, but it's sung by four smiling people harmonizing so wholesomely that you could put elementary-school children in the front row while they performed it.

In fact, somebody did.

But after spending a day with this song, I'm starting to think “guilty pleasure” sells it short.

Maybe “Afternoon Delight” is just a really good pop record.

They Weren't a Joke Band

It's easy to look back at Starland Vocal Band as a punchline: the people who sang “Afternoon Delight,” won the Best New Artist Grammy, got their own short-lived variety show, and then disappeared from the Top 20 forever.

Their actual story is more interesting.

Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert had been working in the Washington, D.C. folk scene for years, first as Fat City and later as Bill & Taffy. More importantly, they weren't just acquaintances of John Denver. Danoff and Nivert co-wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads” with him and sang backing vocals on the recording.

Eventually Danoff and Nivert joined with Jon Carroll and Margot Chapman to form Starland Vocal Band. They became the first act signed to Denver's Windsong label and opened for him on tour.

And the Denver connection wasn't something buried in their biography that we've reconstructed decades later. In a surviving 1976 appearance on The Merv Griffin Show, John Denver actually introduces Starland Vocal Band before they perform “Afternoon Delight.”

There's something wonderfully incongruous about that now.

John Denver, with one of the most wholesome public images in popular music, is introducing a song whose basic proposition is: Why don't we have sex this afternoon?

But then you actually listen to the record, and Denver's presence makes perfect sense.

Forget the lyrics for a moment and “Afternoon Delight” sounds completely at home in John Denver's musical world. There's an acoustic folk-pop foundation, country touches, steel guitar, a bright melody and, most importantly, those clean vocal harmonies.

The subject matter seems completely wrong for John Denver.

The sound seems completely right.

That contrast is also a big part of what makes “Afternoon Delight” work.

They Could Really Sing

That became even more apparent when I watched the first episode of The Starland Vocal Band Show, a six-week CBS summer variety series from 1977.

It's...a show.

It feels very much like a mid-'70s summer replacement series. There's an extremely young David Letterman, along with the usual assortment of comedy sketches and musical performances.

What's strange is how little the supposed stars of the show actually participate in the comedy. Most of the sketches don't feature the members of Starland Vocal Band at all, and on the occasions when they do have lines to deliver, they don't seem particularly comfortable doing it.

Then they sing.

“Afternoon Delight” itself is clearly lip-synced, but they perform two other songs live.

And they're good.

Whatever I think of the songs themselves, these people could sing.

It creates the peculiar impression of a variety show built around four people whose obvious talent wasn't really variety television. Put them in a comedy sketch and they look a little out of place. Put them together in front of microphones and suddenly it makes sense.

Strangely enough, watching this not-very-good television show made me appreciate them more as a band.

The Grammy Everyone Forgets

That makes one part of their Grammy history much more interesting.

Everyone remembers that Starland Vocal Band won Best New Artist. In retrospect, that has become part of the joke, especially because Best New Artist has developed a reputation as the Grammys' “kiss of death.”

There's something slightly strange about that award anyway. Most Grammys recognize what someone actually accomplished during the eligibility period. Best New Artist does that too, of course, but we tend to judge it afterward as though the voters were also making a prediction: Which of these artists is going to have the important career?

Those aren't necessarily the same question.

If the award meant “Which new artist had the most impressive breakthrough this year?”, Starland Vocal Band wasn't an absurd choice. They had a #1 record, a successful album, John Denver behind them and enough attention that CBS would soon give them their own television show.

If the award meant “Which of these artists will have the most enduring career?”, well, that didn't work out quite as well.

But Starland Vocal Band won another Grammy that year: Best Arrangement for Voices for “Afternoon Delight.”

That one seems much more important after actually paying attention to the record.

The harmonies are excellent.

They're not merely four people singing the same melody together. Voices enter and separate, parts move around one another, and the arrangement becomes increasingly elaborate without ever making the song feel complicated.

That's probably part of the trick. They're making something fairly sophisticated sound effortless.

The vocal arrangement isn't kitsch.

It's genuinely good.

Wholesomeness Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Then there's the subject matter.

Bill Danoff got the phrase “Afternoon Delight” from the name of an afternoon food special at Clyde's restaurant in Georgetown and turned it into something else entirely.

The song is about recreational daytime sex.

And in 1976, that probably wasn't nearly as culturally bizarre as it can seem in retrospect. This was late in the sexual-revolution era, moving toward the disco years, when recreational sexuality had become a much more visible part of mainstream popular culture.

What makes “Afternoon Delight” unusual is the packaging.

It doesn't sound remotely dangerous.

It's bright. Cheerful. Folksy. Almost aggressively wholesome.

And I think that's a feature, not a bug.

If the same lyrics were delivered by somebody trying to sound seductive, the whole thing could become sleazy very quickly. Instead, Starland Vocal Band treats sex like a particularly enjoyable recreational activity that might be preferable to whatever else you had planned this afternoon.

There's a coyness to it.

Even the lyrics play with that.

For most of my life, I've heard them sing about how the thought of “lovin' you” is so exciting.

Today I noticed something I'd somehow missed all these years.

At the end, “lovin'” becomes “rubbin'.”

That's quite a little escalation.

The song has gone from PG to PG-13 without changing its sunny disposition at all.

About That Second Verse...

Not everything improves under examination.

I don't think I ever actually knew most of the second verse. The words go by quickly enough that I'd apparently spent decades hearing them as sounds rather than sentences.

Reading them today explained why I hadn't been missing much.

It begins with the peculiar idea of starting the day “feeling so polite,” which makes a certain amount of sense as a contrast with what the singer wants to do later—but also seems suspiciously like a word chosen because it rhymes with “delight.”

Then we get an extended metaphor involving a fish, bait and nibbling.

I think the singer is the fish. His lover has the bait. Sex is presumably the bait. He's considering nibbling.

It's not Bill Danoff's finest moment.

But here's the strange thing:

It doesn't matter.

I didn't know or understand most of that verse for nearly 50 years, and it never diminished the song at all.

The music simply carries you through it and back to the chorus.

And what a chorus it is.

Incredibly Sturdy

This is where my opinion of “Afternoon Delight” changed the most.

There are plenty of records from 1976 that were enormous at the time but have faded substantially from popular memory.

“Afternoon Delight” hasn't.

As I write this, it has about 96.8 million Spotify streams. Diana Ross's #1 hit from the same year, “Love Hangover,” has about 14.5 million.

Spotify isn't a perfect measurement of cultural durability. Diana Ross also has an enormous catalog over which listeners can spread their attention, while almost anyone seeking out Starland Vocal Band is going to end up here.

Still, a difference that large is hard to ignore.

And “Afternoon Delight” has undoubtedly been kept alive partly because it's funny.

It's been used in movies and television. Anchorman famously turned it into a four-man singalong. It seems almost engineered for karaoke: everybody knows the chorus, multiple people can sing the harmonies, and by the end practically the entire room can participate.

But I think two things have become commingled.

People may consciously listen to “Afternoon Delight” because it's cheesy, nostalgic or funny.

At a more basic level, though, they keep enjoying it because it's a well-made, incredibly catchy song.

Compare it with something like Rick Dees' “Disco Duck,” another #1 hit from 1976. That record was supposed to be funny. You don't hear “Disco Duck” very much anymore.

“Afternoon Delight” wasn't created as a novelty record. It was a sincere pop record that eventually became kitsch.

And underneath the kitsch is an extremely durable piece of pop construction: a memorable melody, an indestructible chorus, excellent harmonies, polished production, steel guitar, some interesting guitar sounds around the chorus, and a lyrical premise that nobody is going to confuse with another song.

Maybe the irony and guilty-pleasure reputation have given people permission to keep putting it on.

But the record itself gives them a reason not to turn it off.

The One-Hit Wonder Problem

Starland Vocal Band is also about as legitimate a one-hit wonder as we're likely to encounter.

After “Afternoon Delight” reached #1, their remaining Hot 100 singles peaked at #66, #71 and #71.

They never had another Top-40 hit, much less another Top-20 hit.

But even that label obscures something.

Starland Vocal Band had one hit.

The people in Starland Vocal Band did not have one-hit careers.

Danoff and Nivert had already helped write one of the most enduring songs in American popular music with “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The members had worked professionally before Starland Vocal Band and continued working in music afterward.

Even “Afternoon Delight” itself provides evidence that we're dealing with more than a novelty act. That Grammy for vocal arrangement wasn't an accident.

The hit may have been a fluke.

The musicianship wasn't.

Final Verdict

I came into today thinking I already understood “Afternoon Delight.”

It's a song I've heard a million times. I knew what it was about. I knew it was cheesy. I knew I liked it in that slightly apologetic “guilty pleasure” way.

I'm less convinced now that there's anything to feel guilty about.

This song seems almost perfectly constructed for the cultural moment that produced it. Everything about Starland Vocal Band—from the name to the sound to the wholesome presentation of a song about afternoon sex—feels intensely 1976.

Fifty years later, that makes it easy to laugh at.

But fifty years later, we're also still listening.

And that's the thing I keep coming back to: “Afternoon Delight” is incredibly sturdy.

People joke about it. People sing it ironically. People call it hokey. But I can't think of many people who actually seem to dislike it.

I've heard it countless times in my life. I listened to it a ridiculous number of times today.

And I still smile when it comes on.

It isn't one of my favorite songs.

But maybe it should be a little closer than I thought.

82/100.