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don mclean, "building my body" (1977)

Posted on February 7th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.

Song Project #11

I had few friends in high school. Jay Drumheller was the smartest, I think. After our freshman year, his family moved to Hawaii. We corresponded for a couple of years, mostly via cassette tape, rambling monologues interspersed with songs. I am dreadfully sorry I fell out of touch with him, and I've never been able to track him down on the net. He had more adventurous taste in music than I did; at fourteen or so, while I was sending him "Angry Young Man" by Billy Joel, he was introducing me to Steve Forbert.

One of his tapes had two songs by Don McLean -- "Color TV Blues" and "Building My Body" -- both from the 1977 album Prime Time, long after "American Pie" and well before "Crying", in the interregnum when McLean had disappeared from the radio. I loved both "Color TV Blues" and "Building My Body", and they stuck in my head long after I'd lost the tape they'd been on. I had a hard time choosing which of them to write about first.

"American Pie" is a freak hit. It's been said of McLean, in explanation of his quick return to obscurity after "American Pie", that he deliberately avoided recreating his smash hit. But he didn't really do anything differently than he ever had; he flitted from style to style, and his subject matter was eccentric, but "American Pie" is itself different from standard smash hits. There is no formula there to duplicate. It is what it is, a piece of McLean that struck a common chord out of nowhere.

Prime Time, his first and last album for Arista after four commercial failures with United Artists, is stubbornly insular. It's not completely off in late-70s Harry Nilsson self-indulgent twaddle territory, but it's evident that McLean either didn't give much of a damn about redicovering a mass audience or hadn't a clue how to go about it. Even the songs I haven't connected with aren't ordinary disposable singer-songwriter filler, and the best songs are articulate, sometimes acerbic, sometimes po-faced.

This is "Building My Body".

Remember Larry Groce's novelty hit "Junk Food Junkie"? I think of "Building My Body" as a less yuk-yuk take on 1970s health trendiness. This kind of delicate humor is easy to push over the line, and I'm not going to defend the "ouch!" and "let me out!" (though they make me laugh). In fact the whole thing makes me smile, all the little interpolated sounds and the simple piano-acoustic guitar verses that remind me of Greg Brown's goofier songs (or Randy Newman's -- the opening piano figure sounds like Newman to me), swelling with strings and drums and backing vocals in the chorus to a silly crescendo, pulling back after the "and I know that it won't be long!" peak to the "until I gotta quit smoooooooooooo, king" comic anticlimax.

I love all the little changes in the acoustic guitar playing -- try listening to just the guitar through the first verse -- and the commentary of the strings through the second verse, and all the little bits of novelty percussion, including a fair bit of nice shaker egg playing. In a way it's overproduced -- I'll bet it's a funny live number with just the guitar -- but all the overproduction suits the song. And the ending of the song suggests a whole new disturbing song inside the song -- it's prefigured early in the song with "I know I feel the pain of birth" -- and reinforces the suggestion by leaving the melody open and unresolved, like something's been chopped off.

And McLean is a terrific singer. Of course he can belt, as he does on the chorus, but he also does a great job selling the verses with a dry tone and subtle held notes and changes of vibrato and the little tightening of the throat on "baaaahhh-dy" (and I love the drop to the low note on the second "building" in each verse). And he has good lines to sell; "I'm tired of fighting, let's make friends" and "I'm sweating out mistakes I've made" and "I'm gaining a rapport with my body" are beyond novelty: they're funny.

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