A rabbit hole

Last night, I went down a rabbit hole around the music group Starland Vocal Band, and their weird one-hit-wonder sex song Afternoon Delight that reached #1 on the Billboard charts in 1977.

I got to that after watching an episode of their summer network variety show (that was quickly canceled) which features David Letterman playing a mailman (his first post local TV weatherman gig!) who reads the band's fan mail while also serving as host between sketches and music numbers.

I found that show I never knew existed after watching a 1977 episode of The Gong Show where Letterman appears as a judge promoting his hot new show coming this summer.

And I only found that after watching several episodes of Match Game '73 and Match Game PM, which still surprisingly hold up as extremely funny.

I also know that Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert who were half of the Starland Vocal Band probably had good careers despite their one-hit-wonder flash because they helped write Take Me Home Country Roads with John Denver (among other songs for John Denver) and I only know that because it's a plot point in Logan Lucky, which is still one of my all-time favorites.

To circle all the way back, I never thought about the song Afternoon Delight until it appeared in 2004 as a Daddy-Daughter karaoke scene in Arrested Development, which permanently seared into my brain what I thought was an innocuous 70s song I'd probably heard a hundred times in a grocery store but was really a pretty explicit tune.