On the rock and roll radio — Alan O’Day (“Angie Baby”)

It’s hard to imagine that the 1974 pop hit “Angie Baby” tops anyone’s list of “best murder ballads”, if such a list exists. It’s neither well known nor obscure enough. The melody has a bouncy lilt that makes you want to do that awkward dance with your shoulders. And I’m not even sure the story involves a murder.

But when a friend told me about Ken and his Murder Ballad Monday blog, it was the first song to pop into my head.

That might be because, like the song’s protagonist, I’ve always had a strong attachment to radio. I was one of those kids who fell asleep listening to my portable set almost every night. Unlike Angie, I wasn’t “touched”. But I was definitely a nut for pop music. And I loved our local DJs, who were witty, sarcastic, and prone to rattling off an endless stream of arcane factoids.

Though it’s doubtful that I first heard “Angie Baby” through my pillow, the song’s slightly menacing sound and otherworldly story is perfectly suited to late night prowlings, imaginary or otherwise. In fact that’s the “play” staged within the song: a man intent on taking advantage of a young woman who’s at home alone instead finds the tables turned, and he the victim of her special powers.

With its emphasis on phantom lovers and pop song swoons, “Angie” comes off as a story sprung fully formed from the feverish imagination of a tween-aged girl. But the song was actually written by a grown American male, Alan O’Day. 

O’Day is best known for writing “Undercover Angel”, another tale of nocturnal seduction which was also a number one hit single. Given what seems to be his predilection for late night lotharios, it comes as no surprise that O’Day actually talked to his therapist about “Angie Baby”, and even tweaked a few words on her advice. Here are the lyrics:

O’Day has said “Angie” was also partly inspired by The Beatles’ “Lady Madonna”, and that he wanted to write about a “typical” young woman “juggling” the demands of everyday life. 

He eventually found that scenario boring. But “Lady Madonna” has its own level of ambiguity. The narrator comes off less observer and more nagging neighbor or judgmental caseworker, lobbing one loaded question after another at the poor single mother, who, by implication, is at least flighty if not downright neglectful.

The Beatles, by the way, wrote their share of murder ballads, including “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and the more disturbing “Run for Your Life”, which I find icky listening every time I hear it (a song John Lennon apparently later disavowed, though didn’t he do that with much of The Beatles’ catalogue?).

When the expatriate Australian pop star Helen Reddy recorded “Angie Baby”, she was nearing the height of her career. She’d already scored a number one hit with “I Am Woman,” a song Reddy wrote, and which was later adopted as the anthem of the so-called “second wave” women’s liberation movement.

By current standards, Reddy was a bit of a late bloomer. She was already in her 30s when she hit the big time. She’d struggled for a time getting her career launched, and even spent some time in Chicago, singing at Mr. Kelly’s and finally signing with Fontana, a division of Mercury Records.

Though “Angie” isn’t a fist pumper like “I Am Woman”, Reddy’s performance of the song does give it a certain oomph. With a mix of 70’s style cool and “down under” hamminess, she acts out key narrative moments: Cocking a rueful eyebrow at Angie’s inability to “turn out cool”, miming Dad’s knock on the door, and then, during the climatic scene of, well, radio magic, running through a series of dramatic arm gestures that convey “man shrinking before your very eyes!”

Until writing this post, I’d never noticed how many “women of questionable sanity” songs can be found across Helen Reddy’s body of work. There’s the done wrong protagonists of “Delta Dawn” (“She’s forty-one and her Daddy still calls her ‘baby’/All the folks around Bronzeville say she’s crazy”) and “Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)” (But something happened to Ruby, she broke down to a fool”). 

And if not all of Reddy’s women have gone completely around the bend, what they do share is the special torment of loving the wrong man (“Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady”, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”). Even “I Am Woman”, which Reddy believed was supernaturally inspired, lashes out at love (“‘Cause I’ve heard it all before/And I’ve been down there on the floor/No one’s ever gonna keep me down again”). Let’s take a listen.

Maybe this association with wronged women trying to make it right is why some, including Alan O’Day, have read “Angie Baby” as a kind of feminist fantasy, a story of a female avenging and empowering herself through entropy.

That’s hard to say. Though the narrative of “Angie” is far less fragmentary than “Delta Dawn” or “Leave Me Alone” it does leave a lot of questions unanswered. And fans of the song have gone to town with their possible interpretations. Is there really an intruder-lover? Does Angie kill him, or is she just another actor in the “play” she’s staged that he wanders into? And what about that “secret lover”? Does she actually shrink him into the radio, only to ‘dial him out’ when she wants to get it on? Or, as I thought as a kid, is the radio itself her secret lover, wooing her with its constant output of catchy love songs? I mean, come on, what man is a match for the power of FM?

Reading the lyrics again, I’m struck that O’Day characterizes Angie’s victim as having lost his “soul”. The idea that he’s lost in an evil trap, or under her spell, suggests Angie’s less an unhinged maniac and more of a female sorceress or witch: That troubling and ambivalent figure who symbolizes both the potential of an alternative order of womanly power and a set of pernicious stereotypes around sexually rapacious and off-their-rocker female predators.

There are actually quite a few early ’70s songs that invoke witches. Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” and Sugar Loaf’s “Green-Eyed Lady” (both 1970), The Eagles “Witchy Woman” (1972), and of course Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” (1975). But compared to Angie, most of these are like the song equivalent of those “sexy witch” Halloween costumes: more uneasy pleasures than perilous encounters (though I’m not sure I’d want to encounter Rhiannon in a dark alley).

Angie, on the other hand, resembles someone like Sarah, the evil protagonist of Charles Bukowski’s story “Six Inches”, who lures lovers into her boudoir only to shrink them down to dildo-sized versions of themselves. Bukowski’s tale is almost an inverted, x-rated variation on the wicked witch of “Hansel and Gretel”.

Or how about this 1976 animated film version of “Angie Baby” (directed by John Wilson and put out by Fine Art Films).

First of all, if Tipper Gore had seen this film, she might have found it a suitable PSA about the dangers of rock music. Based on this short animation, we now know what drove Angie to murder, or at least insanity. Not her dangerous sexuality. But, The Beatles! Jim Croce! And some other harder to identify ’70s pop icons!

But I digress. Instead, check out the rather blatant phallic imagery at the beginning. And is it just a coincidence that the filmmaker invokes the dreaded vagina dentata, when Angie, portrayed as a rabid hybrid of radio-woman-hillbilly, gobbles up her prey whole? Her look of post-coital satisfaction is quite . . .  impressive.

I’m certainly not demanding nor really interested in a definitive interpretation here: The song’s appeal no doubt has something to do with its ambiguous scenario and resistance to straight forward readings. Many have been satisfied to take this as the tale of a clever and crafty female avenger, who stops her stalker in his tracks. I just think “Angie Baby” could be understood another way, as a harbinger of the 1980s, of the coming backlash against women and women’s liberation, and of the return to all those very old ideas about the deeply disturbing and not to be trusted nature of the female sex.