The ’70s had plenty of animal references in pop culture. Musical acts included the Eagles, Cat Stevens, Three Dog Night and the TV act, The Partridge Family. The box office featured a titular mutt, Benji, and that great white shark in Jaws. Garfield debuted as a syndicated comic strip. The pet rock had legs as a fad. Songs like “Crocodile Rock,” “Fox on the Run” and “Barracuda” mentioned animals but weren’t about them. Other songs, however, included more literal references to beasts in the wild, domesticated companions and even human-created incarnations of the real thing. These songs are truly about the animals.
10 “Shannon” by Henry Gross
Let’s get the dead dog song out of the way first. In 1975, Henry Gross was touring with The Beach Boys and, over lunch one day with guitarist Carl Wilson, Gross mentioned his Irish Setter named Shannon. Wilson shared that he too had a setter named Shannon that had recently died after getting hit by a car. As written by Gross, a mother grieves for a dog that seems to have been lost at sea. Gross amps up the sadness and mystery by noting the father’s absence. While the mother is distraught, Gross offers a consoling image: “Maybe she’ll find an island with a shaded tree, Just like the one in our backyard.”
The following year, “Shannon” became Gross’s only top ten hit. It’s a pretty ballad that features Gross singing falsetto and dreamy backing vocals reminiscent of The Beach Boys, creating a soothing eulogy for the family pet.
9 “Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s
This song made a big splash for the B-52’s, the lead single from their self-titled debut album in 1979. It was the perfect introduction, as fun and kooky as anything they released, featuring Fred Schneider’s spoken delivery, groovy hooks by Ricky Wilson on electric guitar, and heavy percussive beats by Keith Strickland, all of it punctuated with animalistic wails from Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson. Fred and Ricky wrote the song after Fred took inspiration from the Atlanta franchise of 2001 Club, a chain of discos popping up across the U.S. in the ’70s. As Schneider tells it, the club projected a slide show that included “puppies, babies and lobsters on a grill” while the music played. The tune’s star attraction is the rock lobster but includes shout-outs to other real and imagined marine animals, from a stingray and jellyfish to a sea robin and bikini whale, during the sprawling, seven-minute album cut, pared down to by two minutes for the single.
In addition to creative, nonsensical “fish noises,” Cindy Wilson added screams that Schneider called “the Yoko Ono part.” When John Lennon heard the song, he took it as a sign the world was ready for Yoko’s guttural cries, prompting the couple to hit the studio to record Double Fantasy after a five-year musical hiatus. Yoko joined the band for “Rock Lobster” at the New York City show during their 25th anniversary tour.
8 “Disco Duck (Part I)” by Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots
In 1976, Rick Dees was a disc jockey at radio station WMPS in Memphis. Capitalizing on the disco craze, he wrote and recorded “Disco Duck” about a feverish dancer who flaps his arms and transforms to a duck. The song may remind listeners of the chicken dance, but Dees also gives a nod to Jackie Lee’s soulful “The Duck” which hit #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966. “Disco Duck” captures some of the lingo of the ’70s with the lyrics “Get down mama” and “Dyn-O-Mite” which Jimmie “J.J.” Walker popularized on the sitcom Good Times.
As the song took off nationally, WMPS wouldn’t play the song, considering it a conflict of interest. When Dees mentioned the song on air, he was fired. The next week, the song hit number one on Billboard.
“Disco Duck” plays in the movie Saturday Night Fever but was not included on the soundtrack because, as Dees tells it, his agent didn’t want the soundtrack to take away sales from Dees’s own album, The Original Disco Duck. Dees tried unsuccessfully to capitalize on his “Duck” luck, recording “Dis-Gorilla,” which stuck to the same formula.
7 “Snowbird” by Anne Murray
Anne Murray was twenty-five when “Snowbird” became her breakthrough single, reaching #8 on the BillboardHot 100 chart in 1970. The song was written by Canadian Gene MacLellan whom Murray met in the late ’60s on CBC’s Nova Scotia-based music telecast, Singalong Jubilee. The lyrics flutter between hope (“flowers that will bloom again in spring”) and sorrow (“the one I love forever is untrue”).
“Snowbird” was the first single by a female Canadian solo artist to be certified gold in the U.S., selling more than a million copies. The song earned Murray a 1970 Grammy nomination for best female contemporary vocal performance. An instrumental version won Chet Atkins a Grammy in 1972.
Murray guested on a 2013 episode of “Family Guy,” welcoming Brian and Stewie into her home with matters devolving to Stewie tying her up and holding her at gunpoint, commanding her to sing the tune while gagged.
6 “Be” by Neil Diamond
It’s hard to explain the phenomenon that helped this song come to be. In 1970, Macmillan published the novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach to little fanfare. As word of mouth grew, the book became the bestselling title of both 1972 and 1973. The story is about a seagull who eschews the obsessive food scavenging of his colony, opting to spend his days in flight, striving to go higher and faster. Due to his differences, Jonathan is banished from the colony. The meaning of the story leans into New Age thinking that gained momentum in the ’70s.
In the fall of 1973, Paramount released a live-action movie based on the book, the gulls voiced by actors including Juliet Mills, Hal Holbrook and Dorothy McGuire. The movie was a flop but the soundtrack, composed by Neil Diamond, hit #2 on the Billboard album chart and “Be” was released as a single, reaching #34. The music is a sweeping orchestral arrangement and the lyrics are vague enough to be about a bird, a person striving to reach one’s potential or something more metaphysically muddled (“Lost on a painted sky, Where the clouds are hung for the poet’s eye, You may find him, If you may find him.”).
5 “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” by Lobo
In the spring of 1971, this infectious ditty about an American road trip with a canine travel companion hit pop radio, eventually peaking at #5. Often mistaken for a band, Lobo, fittingly a Spanish word for wolf, was singer/songwriter Roland Kent LaVoie. In high school in Winter Haven, Florida, LaVoie had played gigs with Gram Parsons and Jim Stafford. The eponymous pooch was Lobo’s own dog commanded attention while LaVoie wrote the song.
The song was produced by Phil Gernhard who’d made a name for himself producing The Royal Guardsmen’s 1967 smash, “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron.” In addition to a string of subsequent hits spanning the ’70s, Lobo also co-produced, with Gernhard, hits for Stafford, including the creepy critter-themed “Spiders & Snakes.”
4 “Rubber Duckie” by Ernie
On February 25, 1970, during the first season of PBS’s Sesame Street, Ernie took a bath. Rather than having Bert join him, Ernie shared the moment with “a very special friend,” his rubber duckie. The song was written by the show’s first head writer, Jeff Moss, who won fourteen Emmys for his work and received an Academy Award nomination for Original Song Score in 1984 for The Muppets Take Manhattan. (The Oscar went to Prince’s Purple Rain.) Voiced and sung by Jim Henson and making heavy use of a squeak toy (and Ernie’s distinctive laugh), the tune became a mainstream novelty hit, reaching #16 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the biggest Muppet single ever. (Kermit’s “Rainbow Connection” hit #25 in 1979. A Carpenters cover of the Sesame Street song “Sing” was a Top Three smash in 1973.
Little Richard performed “Rubber Duckie” on the show in 1994. Other Sesame Street songs featuring the bath toy included the reggae-infused “Do De Rubber Duck” and “Put Down the Duckie.”
3 “Wildfire” by Michael (Martin) Murphey
Murphey’s early success in music came as a songwriter with songs recorded by Bobbie Gentry and The Monkees. While co-writing with Larry Cansler all songs for the 1972 double album, The Ballad of Calico, by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, Murphey dreamed the concept of a song he’d call “Wildfire.” The dream recalled a story from boyhood Murphey’s grandfather told him about a ghost horse that cowboys could never catch. In the song, Wildfire escapes its stall in a Nebraska blizzard, leading to the death of the woman who sets out to find him.
The song opens and closes with a piano arrangement based on Russian classical composer Alexander Scriabin’s “Preludes Op. 11 No. 15 in D-Flat.” Nitty Gritty Dirt Band members Jeff Hanna and Jimmy Ibbotson contributed backing vocals. Released in 1975, the single reached # 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and went platinum with sales exceeding two million copies.
2 “Muskrat Love” by Captain & Tennille
In 1972, a Texas singer named Willis Alan Ramsey released his self-titled debut album. To date, it is his only release but it maintains cult status, its songs having been recorded by Jimmy Buffett, Waylon Jennings and Shawn Colvin. One track, “Muskrat Candlelight,” caught the attention of the band America whose first hit was, incidentally, the equine-referenced “A Horse with No Name.” They changed the title to “Muskrat Love.” The song reached #67 on the Billboard Hot 100, a temporary dip in their career.
Toni Tenille and Daryl Dragon, known professionally as Captain & Tennille, heard America’s version and added the song to their nightclub act. Needing a final track for their Song of Joy album, they recorded “Muskrat Love.” A&M Records hadn’t planned to release it as a single but a Madison, Wisconsin radio station received overwhelmingly favorable listener feedback when it began playing the album track. It became a #4 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 and topped the Adult Contemporary chart for four weeks. The song continues to draw a love-it-or-hate-it response, Dragon’s synthesizer effects to simulate muskrats mating adding to the kitsch/cringe factor. In 1976, the duo performed the song at the White House for President Gerald Ford, First Lady Betty and Queen Elizabeth II. Some in attendance, including Julia Child, considered the choice risqué and in poor taste. Years later, the former president remembered it as “the song about the mice.”
1 “Ben” by Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson might have earned a spot on the list with “Rockin’ Robin,” a remake of Bobby Day’s 1958 hit—both songs hit #2 on the Billboard Hot 100—but his ode to a horror film rat in 1972 better befits the oddness that would characterize the rising superstar. Reaching its apex when Jackson was fourteen, “Ben” was Jackson’s first of thirteen #1s as a solo artist. The song was written for Donny Osmond, but Osmond couldn’t be reached while on tour. (Conversely, The Osmonds’ #1 smash, “One Bad Apple” had been written with Jackson in mind.)
The film Ben was made by Bing Crosby Productions, a company established by the Oscar-winning crooner, best known today for his rendition of “White Christmas.” The company also produced movies including the Crosby-Frank Sinatra-Grace Kelly musical, High Society, and TV shows such as Hogan’s Heroes.
The ballad “Ben” was written by five-time Oscar nominee Don Black (winner for 1967 song, “Born Free”) and ten-time Oscar nominee Walter Scharf. “Ben” was a contender for Best Song, losing to “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure. It settled for a Golden Globe.
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