Will Rick Dees become the disco duck again? Yes. That’s the narrative tension in the song. Later on, there’s a subplot where Rick Dees goes and sits down, but then he gets up again and turns back into the disco duck. I can’t believe the Cast Of Idiots let that one slip past.Īnyway, that’s basically the whole story. Rick Dees really should’ve fact-checked this narrative a little better. And yet Rick Dees never considers the possibility that he’s the disco chicken. Look at Rick Dees! He’s the disco duck!ĭucks don’t cluck, by the way. Flapping his arms, Rick Dees began to cluck. Rick Dees was on the dancefloor acting strange. Moving his feet to the disco beat, how in the world could Rick Dees keep in his seat? Then, all of a sudden, Rick Dees began to change. The storyline of “Disco Duck” is something like this: Rick Dees went to a party the other night. (It’s a pretty good duck voice.) But “Disco Duck” can’t compete with the actual disco songs of its era, and it doesn’t work as a joke. There are some decent things about it - the rubbery bassline, the short bursts of horn, the duck voice. But Bobby Manuel wasn’t really a disco producer, and “Disco Duck” only barely qualifies as a disco song. It’s pretty fun when people can make guitars sound like other things. I actually like those guitar-quacking noises, by the way. When the song took off in the South, Dees convinced RSO to give it a national release. Manuel produced “Disco Duck,” and he presumably also made the quacking guitar noises on it. (Stax had gone out of business in 1975, long after Axton had sold her stake in it.) Axton set Dees up with Bobby Manuel, a former Stax session guitarist. Eventually, Dees signed on with Estelle Axton, one of the co-founders of Memphis institution Stax Records, and her post-Stax label Fretone Records. His response to this was to write a song about a disco-dancing duck.ĭees had an easy time writing “Disco Duck,” but he had a hard time convincing anyone to record it with him. He also played records in clubs on the side, so he saw the rise of disco firsthand. By 1976, Dees, then in his mid-twenties, had worked for a few different radio stations in the southeast before landing in Memphis. He’d grown up in Greensboro, North Carolina and studied radio at Chapel Hill. Inspired by this duck voice, Dees wrote “Disco Duck,” and he hired the guy from the gym to do the duck voice on the song.ĭees, as you have probably already figured out, was not a musician. But no: Dees heard a guy doing a duck voice while he was working out at his local gym. The Donald Duck impression is literally the only thing that anyone remembers about the song. “Disco Duck” sounds like the sort of song that you only write if you have a decent Donald Duck impression. Rick Dees was not the duck on “Disco Duck.” This blew my mind. But then again, this was “Disco Duck.” Can you blame the station?
If you’re a local radio station, and one of your DJs suddenly has a hit single shooting up the national charts, you can probably get away with letting him play the damn song. Today, this all seems more than a little ridiculous.
Dees’ station manager heard him, and he fired Dees on the spot. But one morning on the air, Dees casually mentioned that this song he’d recorded might hit #1, and he also noted that he wasn’t allowed to play it. So “Disco Duck” was basically taking off everywhere except Memphis.
Other Memphis stations wouldn’t play the song, either they didn’t want to promote their competition. WMPS wouldn’t let Dees play the song they figured it would violate FCC rules about conflict of interest. He’d recorded “Disco Duck” as a sort of side-hustle goof, but the song had taken off. At the time, Dees was working as a DJ on the Memphis AM station WMPS. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.įive days before his song “Disco Duck” hit #1, Rick Dees was fired.
0 kommentar(er)
