My Top 1000 Songs #915: Beach Baby

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

This would definitely be one for the Guilty Pleasures file if it weren't such a perfectly-constructed bubblegum pop song, with grander ambitions than its simple charm might suggest.

British singer-songwriter John Carter was a sort of hired gun throughout the 60s and 70s, penning songs for a random assortment of artists. He wrote this 1974 instant AM radio classic with his wife, Jill Shakespeare, and then created a studio band called The First Class to record it. A blend of Beach Boys-styled harmonies and sentimentality with a touch of Raspberries-like power pop, stretched out to epic length as a multi-part suite that's somewhere between "Good Vibrations" and "Bohemian Rhapsody." It's pretty hard not to like the song--though there's some schizophrenic tension between its demand that you roll down the car windows and crank it up on a sunny day, and the inherent need to roll the windows back up out of shame that you've fallen for something so obviously kitschy.

The sorta-faux band managed a couple albums, which are surprisingly ok--unabashedly cheesy sunshine pop with power pop touches, nothing as instantly winning as "Beach Baby" but also not terrible if you let down your guard.

Shortened & lip-synced on tv:

Here's where I foist David Hasselhoff's stunningly bad dance version on you (I know, what did you ever do to me to deserve this????):