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:

10cc – "Life Is a Minestrone" (1975)

Minnie Mouse has got it all sewn up

She gets more fan mail than the Pope 

Before covid-19 reared its ugly head, my Thursday nights were devoted to the weekly trivia competitions at a nearby brewery. 

I was at that brewery with my trivia teammates the evening of Thursday, March 12, 2020.  (We finished first that night, as usual.)  Everyone there that night was talking about covid, but none of us was taking it all that seriously.  After all, there had only been twelve confirmed coronavirus cases (and only two hospitalizations) in my home state of Maryland as of that date.

Minnie and Daisy – BFFs!

But the sh*t really hit the fan over the next few days.  State and county officials shut down schools, libraries, movie theaters, gyms, and casinos.  (Initially, schools were closed for only two weeks.  Little did we know . . .)

More importantly, all eating and drinking establishments were ordered to close their doors.  

As a result, there were no weekly trivia nights at that brewery for the next eighteen months.

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Fortunately, the county just west of the county where I live had a less draconian attitude when it came to bar trivia.

One of my daughters (and two of my grandchildren) live in that county, and I visit them once or twice a week.  

About six months ago, I found out that several of the breweries in that area were once again hosting trivia nights.  So I started playing at one of them every Thursday.  Pretty soon I was playing every Tuesday night as well. 

Some people think I’ve become obsessed with trivia.  I prefer to say that I am an enthusiastic trivia player.  So enthusiastic, in fact, that’s it hard for me to imagine anything short of a heart attack that would keep me away from my two usual trivia haunts on those nights.  (I’m talking about a serious heart attack.  A minor one probably wouldn’t be enough to stop me.)

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When I started doing trivia on Tuesdays, I decided to play at Smoketown Brewing – which is one of about a dozen different local venues offering trivia on that night of the week.

The first time I went, I played solo.  You occasionally see couples playing trivia, but most teams have several players.  (Solo players have almost no chance of winning.  Also, they look like losers who have no friends.) 

I had a respectable score for a solo contestant – I didn’t win one of the prizes that are awarded to the top three finishers, but I wasn’t at the bottom either.  The host – the guy who is hired to ask the questions and keep score – gave me a free pint glass as a consolation prize.

I noticed that the bartenders on duty that night were competing as well.  So when I returned the next Tuesday, I sat at the bar and asked them if they would like to combine forces with me.  They graciously accepted the invitation, and I’ve been playing with them ever since.

The more diverse your trivia teammates are, the better the chances are that you will win.  I know a lot of stuff about history, geography, literature, sports and sixties and seventies music, TV shows, and movies.  But there are some yuuuge black holes in my trivia database.  

For example, I know next to nothing about superhero movies or video games.  And my knowledge of recent TV shows and pop music is very spotty.

Fortunately, one of my bartender teammates is a Gen X’er, and the other is a Gen Y’er.  So when it comes to pop culture questions – there are usually a lot of pop culture questions at trivia – the three of us have the last half-century or so reasonably well covered.  

There are usually at least a dozen teams competing at Smoketown.  (Last week, there were 18.)  Most of the teams have six or seven players – which gives them a big  advantage over teams with just three members, like mine.  

But we’ve done very well, if I do say so myself.  We win about half the time, and rarely finish out of the top three.

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One of the relatively easy trivia questions from several weeks ago was “What cartoon character has three nephews named Huey, Dewey, and Louie?”

I immediately started to write down “Donald Duck” on my answer blank, but then stopped and thought for a moment.  I sometimes mishear a question, or jump to conclusions about where a question is going instead of waiting until the entire question is read.  This question seemed pretty easy, so I wondered if I had missed something – was the question actually harder than I thought it was?

So I asked my teammates if Donald Duck and Daisy Duck were married.  If they were, then Huey, Dewey, and Louie would have been her nephews as well.  But if was she just his main squeeze – or even just a FWB – then the answer to the question had to be Donald.

We decided to go with Donald, which was the right decision – I was overthinking it a bit to worry about Daisy.  (From what I can tell, Donald never made an honest woman of her.)  

Fun fact about Daisy Duck: Donald had three nephews, but Daisy had three nieces – named April, May, or June.  

You best believe I filed that little tidbit away in my mind in case it comes up at a future trivia event!

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Today’s featured song mentions Minnie Mouse, not Daisy Duck.  But Minnie and Daisy were BFFs, and I couldn’t find a worthwhile song that referred to Daisy.  

“Life Is a Minestrone” is on 10cc’s 1975 album, The Original Soundtrack, which I bought when I was in law school and damn near played to death.

I had a real weakness in those days for art rock with witty, tongue-in-cheek lyrics – think 10cc, or Sparks, or City Boy.  “Life Is a Minestrone” is chock full of such lyrics.

For example, the song begins with these lines:

I'm dancing on the White House lawn

Sipping tea by the Taj Mahal at dawn

Hanging ’round the gardens of Babylon

The second verse takes off from there:

I'm leaning on the Tower of Pisa

Had an eyeful of the tower in France

I'm hanging ’round the gardens of Madison

(The eyeful/Eiffel Tower pun in the second line is pretty good, but the next line is even better – it plays of the reference to the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the first verse with a reference to hanging around a very different kind of garden: Madison Square Garden.)

I’m not sure quite what to make of the next two lines:

The seat of learning and the flush of success

Relieves a constipated mind

The chorus says it all:

Life is a minestrone

Served up with parmesan cheese

Death is a cold lasagna

Suspended in deep freeze

AllMusic’s Dave Thompson said that “Life Is a Minestrone” was a “truly joyous piece of pop nonsense,” and went on to describe it quite accurately as “utterly daft [and] wholly compulsive.”  About the only thing wrong with the song is that it’s at most a three-minute song that’s been stretched to 4:42 with several unnecessary repetitions of the chorus and an endless outro.  (There’s a 4:08 single edit that’s better, but it’s still too long.)

Click here to listen to “Life Is a Minestrone.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

10cc – "Life Is a Minestrone" (1975)

I'm leaning on the tower of Pisa

Had an eyeful of the tower in France

I'm hanging round the gardens of Madison

The "Leaning Tower of Pisa" is a free-standing bell tower (or campanile) that stands in Pisa's Cathedral Square.  

The construction of the tower began in 1173 and was completed in 1372.  It began to sink in 1178, shortly after work started on the tower's second floor.  The problem was unstable subsoil.  

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

Between 1990 and 2001, the tower was stabilized and reconstructed.  It once tilted 5.5 degrees, but now tilts only 4.0 degrees.  Engineers say that the tower will be stable for at least 200 years.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is nothing compared to the Leaning Tower of Wanaka in New Zealand, which was constructed to lean at an angle of 53 degrees to horizontal:

The Leaning Tower of Wanaka

I have a real weakness for bands like 10cc and songs like "Life Is a Minestrone."

One reviewer called the song "a truly joyous slice of pop nonsense, and one of 10cc's most effervescent hit singles. . . . Lyrically, it is nothing less than a deadly accurate barrage of disconnected theories, thoughts and ghastly geographical puns, all tied together by that bizarre nomenclatural observation.  Utterly daft, wholly compulsive."

"Life Is a Minestrone" was released in 1975 on 10cc's The Original Soundtrack album, which I bought when I was in law school.  It reached #7 on the UK singles chart.  (The big hit from that album was "I'm Not in Love," which I think is one of the worst songs in history.) 

10cc consisted of two distinct songwriting teams.  Eric Stewart (formerly of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders) and Graham Gouldman (who wrote "Bus Stop" for the Hollies and "No Milk Today" for Herman's Hermits) wrote pop songs, while Kevin Godley and Lol Creme wrote 10cc's artsy-fartsy songs.  

Before forming 10cc, all four of its members worked at Strawberry Studios, which was located in the Manchester suburb of Stockport.  (Eric Stewart, the co-owner of the studio, named it after his favorite Beatles song, "Strawberry Fields Forever.")  

In 1969, famed American bubblegum pop producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz – who were responsible for the Ohio Express, the 1910 Fruitgum Company, and Crazy Elephant – commissioned Graham Gouldman to write bubblegum songs, many of which were recorded at Strawberry Studios.

Gouldman felt he had prostituted himself by accepting the Kasenetz-Katz deal.  "That was a time when I had lost a little bit of confidence in my writing," Gouldman said.  "I hadn't had any hits for some time. I felt awful. I just didn't seem to be keeping up with what other people were doing. It was very depressing."

Gouldman convinced Kasenetz and Katz that the series of throwaway two-minute songs he was writing could all be performed and produced by him and Stewart, Godley, and Creme at a fraction of the price of hiring outside session musicians.

Kevin Godley described the quartet's three-month stint at Strawberry Studios for Kasenetz and Katz:

We did a lot of tracks in a very short time – it was really like a machine.  Twenty tracks in about two weeks – a lot of crap really – really shit.  We used to do the voices, everything – it saved them money.  We even did the female backing vocals.

Here's "Life Is a Minestrone":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

10cc -- "Art for Art's Sake" (1976)

Art for art's sake

Money for God's sake

Jeff Koons lives at the intersection of Art Street and Money Avenue -- that's in Manhattan, by the way.

Earlier this month, his "Balloon Dog (Orange)" sold at a Christie's auction for $58.4 million, a record for a work by a living artist sold at auction:

About a year ago, Las Vegas hotel tycoon Steve Wynn bought Koons's "Tulips" for $33.6 million and installed it in the Wynn Hotel.  I stayed at the Wynn in Septemeber, and walked by that sculpture (which is made of stainless steel and weighs more than three tons) -- I had no idea what the price tag was:  

What do critics think of Koons?  According to Wikipedia, 

Critics are sharply divided in their views of Koons.  Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance.  Others dismiss his work as kitsch: crass and based on cynical self-merchandising.

I have nothing of any value to say about the merits of Koons's work.  (I didn't take an art history class in college -- which was a mistake -- and the bits and pieces of knowledge I've picked up over the years falls far short of allowing me to play art critic.)  Personally, I enjoy it -- it's a little silly, but it's cute and amusing.  What's not to like?

Is it art?  Yes, although I have no clue if it is great art (or if it will be considered great art in 100 years). 

Would I have paid $33.6 million for "Tulips"?  If I had Steve Wynn's bankroll, sure -- why not?  (Hot chicks would like it a lot more than some gloomy Rembrandt painting, right?)

Koons recently collaborated with a famous French manufacturer of Limoges china, Bernardaud, which produced a line of porcelain dinnerware based on his "Banality" sculpture series.  

You might not think a guy like Koons would be into fine china, but he has said that he "was always intrigued by porcelain, by both the economic and the sexual aspect of the material."  (Say what?)

I happened on Bernardaud's Park Avenue store while prowling the streets of midtown Manhattan on a brief trip there a couple of weeks ago.  I don't know about you, but when I see a display of dinner plates featuring the late Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee (Bubbles) in gold faux-military uniforms, I've just gotta stop and take a closer look:

Here's the original Koons sculpture:

Here's the plate based on that sculpture:

The "King of Pop"-and-his-monkey dinnerware is pretty pricey.  For one thing, the "Banality" series has six different designs, and to get one 16-cm Jackson bread-and-butter plates you have to buy a set containing all six designs -- which retails for $380.

If you want a single Jackson-and-Bubbles place setting -- a dinner plate, salad plate, bread-and-butter plate, and coffee cup and saucer -- you'll need to shell out a total of $2300.  (Plus tax and tip, of course.)

After telling the Bernardaud folks "Thanks, but no thanks," I crossed the street to do a little window-shopping at the Phillips gallery, which was about to hold an auction of contemporary art.

Once of the pieces that was most prominently displayed was "Laugh Now," a 2002 stencil painting by the wacky British artist known as Banksy, who started out as a graffiti artist.  It features a bunch of identical stenciled chimpanzees, some of which are wearing signboards that read "Laugh now, but one day we'll be in charge":

Here's a closeup of one of the Banksy chimps:

The presale estimate for "Laugh Now" was $300,000 to $400,00, but it eventually sold for $485,000.

I couldn't find any other chimp-related fine art works, so I went back to my hotel.

"Art for Art's Sake" was released on 10cc's 1976 album, How Dare You!, which was the last album featuring the group's original lineup.  I bought that album while I was in law school -- I had a real weakness for the arch, precious songs that 10cc, Sparks, and other bands of that ilk were putting out in the seventies.

The How Dare You! album jacket is pretty interesting.  Here's the front panel:

Here's the back panel:  

Here's the gatefold:

This link takes you to a page that discusses what those photos are all about.  

I'm not sure who sings the bridge of "Art for Art's Sake":

Money talks, so listen to it

Money talks to me

Anyone can understand it

Money can't be beat, oh no!

Maybe Jeff Koons?

Here's "Art for Art's Sake":

Click below to order the song from Amazon:

10cc -- "Silly Love" (1974)

Make up your own rhyme

Don't rely on mine

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

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 assh*les that surrounded me in the law school dorm where I lived . . . 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 "Records I Listened To in Law School" post, I sampled nearly all the songs on those albums.  OMG, what a bunch of crap!  (My apologies to the 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, not all of it is crap – 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 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: