Fun:C.W. McCall

C.W. McCall is without a doubt the greatest country music singer ever.

"Convoy" was well known being a #1 hit based on the CB radio fad. His other "hits" were just...weird. "The Silverton" and "The Galloping Goose" were railroad woo, "There Won't Be No Country Music (There Won't Be No Rock & Roll)" was an odd bit of preachy environmentalist propaganda, "Roses for Mama" was a sappy piece of schmaltz that deserves to be melted down with extreme prejudice, "Kidnap America" was an incomprehensibly bizarre protest song that came out during the Iran hostage crisis, and "Round the World with the Rubber Duck" is in a class all its own - see below.

To truly grok the mysteries of the great C.W. McCall, listen instead to "Milton", "Crispy Critters", "Riverside Slide", the cannibalism tribute "Comin' Back For More", "Classified", "Four Wheel Drive", or my favorite, a short little ditty called "Roy" about his pet cat who likes to hunt snakes.

Concerning "Round the World with the Rubber Duck": it's fairly clear that after he had that huge #1 hit with "Convoy", his record company was applying severe pressure to Mr. McCall to repeat the success with another hit about CB. He wisely refused; his followup album, Wilderness, had him posing on the album cover looking like John Denver and did not include one single song about truck drivers or CB radio. Major faux-pas as far as MGM Records was concerned - they wanted a sequel to "Convoy" and they wanted it now. "You want a sequel to 'Convoy'? You got it!". (Heh heh, I'll show 'em). Mr. McCall then set out to deliberately jump the shark on his fourth album, the way over the top Rubber Duck featuring "Ratchetjaw" (a bunch of CB radio talk mostly, that sounds like a self-parody of his earlier CB novelty songs) and "Round the World with the Rubber Duck" (which went beyond mere self-parody, it was C.W. McCall methodically and deliberately Jumping The Shark, right down to the pirate-inspired "yo ho ho"isms and the backing "dumb, dumb, dumb, this is dumb, dumb, dumb" background chorus.) Needless to say, he quickly found himself on Polydor Records and slugged along with a few more hits before calling it quits.

In 1986, McCall (real name William Dale Fries, Jr., a former ad agency creative director) was elected mayor of Ouray, Colorado.

In 1990, he re-recorded a number of his songs for CD release, including a new track, "Comin' Back for More", a song about 19th century (alleged) cannibal Alferd Packer.