10cc – "Silly Love" (1974)

Make up your own rhyme

Don't rely on mine

'Cause it's . . . s-s-s-s-s-s-silly!

[NOTE: It wasn't easy picking just one 10cc track for the 2 OR 3 LINES "SILVER DECADE" HALL OF FAME, but I think "Silly Love" was the right choice.  Here's a lightly edited version of my original July 30, 2011, post about today's featured record.]

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I bought four 10cc albums when I was in law school.  Think about that – four 10cc albums!

Obviously, I was not in my right mind – the pressure, the boredom, the horrible food and living conditions and climate, the many assh*les who were in my law school class . . . it was a miracle that the craziest thing I did was buy four 10cc albums.

My law school dormitory

In trying to decide what 10cc song to feature in this post, I listened to nearly all the tracks on those albums.  OMG, a lot of those tracks were absolute crap!  (My apologies to the other law students who lived on the first floor of good ol' Shaw Hall with me – I think I played those albums a lot.)

To be fair, there were a few reasonably good songs on each LP.  But even the good songs were often very uneven, consisting of two or three different song fragments unnaturally combined into a single song that was sometimes less than the sum of its parts.

10cc

As I've noted, I had (have?) a weakness for silly, tongue-in-cheek rock songs full of puns and odd rhymes and pseudo-intellectual nonsense.  Think Sparks . . . or City Boy . . . but most of all, think 10cc.  (It's surprising that I wasn't a big Queen fan, too, but I did have some standards.)  Let's face it – part of the band's appeal to me was probably the story behind their name.

Occasionally, 10cc played it straight instead of camping it up.  When they did, they produced sappy, girly love songs that made Chicago's later records sound a little rough around the edges.  

By far the worst songs on the albums I own – "I'm Not in Love" and "The Things We Do for Love" – fit in that category.  Of course, they were the band's two biggest singles in the U.S. because most people have no taste!  I thought they were awful songs then, and they haven't gotten one bit better over the past 35 years.

(I'm sorry if you've always just adored those songs, and I've hurt your feelings.  But give me a break . . . those songs blow . . . I refuse to provide a spoonful of sugar to make that medicine go down more easily.)

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Before I chose "Silly Love" to feature in this post, I thought about using "The Worst Band in the World."  I also considered "The Second Sitting for the Last Supper," and "Life Is a Minestrone" and "Une Nuit á Paris" and "Art for Art's Sake" and "Honeymoon With B Troop" and "I Bought a Flat Guitar Tutor."

(Look it up, folks – those are all real 10cc songs.  Some of them are good, but most of them are just a waste of time.)

"Silly Love" was originally released in 1974 on the band's second album, Sheet Music.  I never owned that album, but I did own a compilation album titled 100cc: The Greatest Hits of 10cc, which features 10 songs (including "Silly Love") chosen from the band's first two albums.  (I'm sure you can do the math.)

I was inspired to buy that compilation album because I was absolutely besotted with 10cc's third studio album, The Original Soundtrack.  The cover to that album features a detailed black-and-white drawing of a "Moviola" film editing machine, and most of the songs on the album are movie-related.  I plan to post about a couple of those songs in the future, so I won't get into the lyrics now.

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"Silly Love" is a pretty silly song (in both senses of that word).  But it does feature some kick-ass guitar playing, and the words – which poke fun at traditional love-song lyrics and include some outrageous puns and other wordplay – are pretty clever. 

For example:

Oooooh, you know the art of conversation

Must be dying

Oooooh, when a romance depends on

Clichés and toupées and "threepées"

(That last word is a play on "toupées," of course.) 

Later there are some lines that allude to the lyrics of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" ("To my honey I'll croon love's tune/Honey moon, keep a-shinin' in June"), which Bing Crosby did, in fact, record:

We're up to here with moonin' and June-in'

If you want to sound sincere

Don't rely on Crosby's croonin'

Take a little time

Make up your own rhyme!

Click here to listen to "Silly Love."

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: