Song 45:
"Ain't No Way to Treat a Lady" by
Helen Reddy
Peak: 8
Year: 1975
Year end position: NA
Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/11
Chronological Songs by Artist: 9/11
Video?: No
Wikipedia?: Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't_No_Way_to_Treat_a_Lady
Spotify?: Yes
A few posts ago, I mentioned that I thought Diana Ross was
an underappreciated artist given the number of songs she had that made it into
the top 20. I think today's artist may
be on par, or even more underappreciated than Diana Ross. At least people would come up with Diana Ross
eventually if they tasked with naming acts that have had 10 or more top 20
hits. I'm not so sure the same would be true
for Helen Reddy. I'll admit that I was
surprised by the volume of songs that she had.
I did a little more research on her, and as of this posting, she is the
3rd most prolific Australian that we will get to on this blog (The Bee Gees and
Olivia Newton John are #1 and #2 respectfully).
For some perspective, she had 11 top 20 songs over the
course of 7 years. That's a better run
than Abba or Boyz II Men had over the same time frames, and I'm pretty sure
that people think of them as sure fire Hall of Famers.
This also ends a 12-post run of songs by American
artists. The last non-American we've
heard from was Phil Collins "Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me
Now)".
This song was the last top 10 song by Helen Reddy. This was also the second song in a row that
didn't make the yearend top 100 chart in the year it was released. Yesterday's song makes some sense given that
it only reached #16, but you would think that a song that hit #8 would show up
somewhere on the yearend list. Not so. A big reason for that is the sheer volume of
songs that were released and hit the charts in the 1970s. In 1975, there were 168 songs that hit the
top 20, so competition was tight to get into that final top 100. For comparison, the song "Hey Mama"
by David Guetta peaked at #8 last year (2015) and it finished #31.
Something I didn't know about this song was that it was a
remake. The original song was written
and sang by a woman named Harriet Schock in 1974. The story I read was that part of the reason
for the lack of success of that version was that her recording was deemed too
slow by an influential Los Angeles DJ, but that by the time she had re-recorded
it, the DJ had quit, so her version never found an audience. Apparently, the song was popular in certain
circles to have been covered by a number of other acts in the next few years
including Vikki Carr. Helen Reddy seemed
to waste no time picking the song up, because her version came out just a year
later in 1975, and it wasn't just another song.
She named her whole album "No Way to Treat a Lady".
The song is very much a break up song as the title might
lead you to believe. The woman in the
song is writing the song to her lover to tell him/her why they are leaving the
relationship. The first verse sets the
tone for the song with the opening lines "I guess it was yourself you were
involved with / I would have sworn it was me". The accusation here is that the person that
the singer is breaking up with feels that the other person was too self-centered
to care too much for her. Because of
that, she is breaking up with him. The
verse spells out the initial argument, and the chorus is the resolution to that
argument. She says that she won't accept
that behavior anymore, and her decision is to leave him. The second verse follows the same pattern as
the first verse. It's just more evidence
of the poor behavior.
The bridge is a little bit of a jab at the guy. She essentially is saying that because the
guy is so self-absorbed, he probably won't be sad when she's gone.
The last verse is more of the piling on for this guy. The only difference is that she's predicting
that this cycle will probably repeat with another woman down the road. The third verse closes with the lines "And
before you know your own reflection / Always starts to tire you and it's
happened again". The way I read
this is that she thinks that he'll eventually decide he needs someone else to
provide him with attention, and everything she just went through will happen
again. At least this time, she won't be
that person. The song ends with the
chorus two more times, so it's pretty clear that she's packed her bags for good.
Given that this song came in the midst of 2nd wave feminism
in America, and is a song of female empowerment, it's not too surprising that
this song found an audience in 1975.
That makes a song like this an interesting portrait of the times, and
that's a lot of what I like to look at the charts for.
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