Spitball Army

Generator: iTunes < CD

Song title: “Mad Dog”
Artist: America

Album source: Holiday
Year of release: 1974
[audio:America___Mad_Dog.mp3]

First impressions: Pleasant, jaunty, piano-driven song.  Vocal and piano line wrap around each other playfully.  Rich harmonies on first chorus.  Brassy entrance after first chorus sounds like Beatles influence.  Second chorus introduces woodwinds.  Lyrics sound apologetic (“I’ve had way too much, clearly too much tonight…”), in contrast with the chest-puffing in the musical arrangement.

On second thought: The Beatles influence, after another listen, is not merely an influence: this song sounds like a Beatles homage!  The trumpet fanfare from “Penny Lane,” a “When I’m Sixty Four” clarinet, even a barely disguised George Harrison guitar line.  Being a Beatlemaniac, my claws were out when I first realized what America seemed to be doing with this song, but it is so well done – and such a trifle at 2:42 – that I will give it the “all clear.”  Furthermore, I’m now hearing the music as portraying the buffoonery of the title character, who apparently has bared his soul after getting overly-soused.  It’s a tidy little character vignette.

Why do I own this?:  Until recently, the only America recording I owned was History: America’s Greatest Hits, and it served nicely for many years – first on vinyl, then on CD.  I do remember seeing a vinyl copy of the debut album at a friend’s house when I was a kid (it belonged to his parents, of course).  Over the last four or five years, I’ve been like one possessed, immersing myself in the music of my youth – with an especially strong focus on the early 1970’s soft rock stuff (was it a “movement?”) – and have been collecting some of the full-length albums that contained songs that I knew from the radio of the time.  America’s Holiday contains “Tin Man” and “Lonely People” from History, and also has “Baby It’s Up To You,” one of my absolute favorite America songs, on it.  When the Collectables label re-issued it on CD in 2005, I snapped it up.