Ariel (1977)

Performer: Dean Friedman                                   Writer: Dean Friedman
Album US Chart Position: #26                              Label: Lifesong Records
Musicians: Dean Friedman, Rick Witkowski, Tony Levin, Rick Marotta and George Young

I’m not a big fan of wordplay in pop songs, especially of the John Lennon variety. But there are a couple of exceptions. The first is “Year of the Cat” by Al Stewart, which has one of my favorite lines of all time. The other is the far less sophisticated, yet still grin inducing lyrics of Dean Friedman in “Ariel.” My associations with the tune began, of course, by hearing it on the radio. Despite not cracking the top ten, it had a very impressive run of twenty-two weeks on the charts in the spring and summer of 1977. But it was probably a year later, when I was dating my first real girlfriend, that acquired a copy of my own. She and her younger sisters had the 45 in rotation on their giant console stereo in the living room and I borrowed it along with a bunch of other songs I didn’t own and recorded it on my 8-track tape recorder. I’m not really sure I noticed the lyrics at all at the time, however, as I’ve always been much more interested in melody. The distinctive chorus was the real draw and was absolutely captivating for me. The single was released in late April and debuted at number eighty-six, peaking two months later at twenty-six on June 25th after having sat at twenty-seven for the previous two weeks. Interestingly, after dropping down to forty-seven the next week it began to inch upward for the next five weeks until it reached thirty-two before taking another five weeks to drop off completely.

The song begins with a Ricky Marotta drum pickup on the and of three and four, Dean Friedman’s piano and the bass of Tony Levin entering on the downbeat with a repeated descending pattern. The lyrics begin with Friedman talking about meeting a girl who lives in Paramis, New Jersey, “deep in the bosom of suburbia.” Rick Witkowski’s guitar comes in on the second half, as she was collecting money for a radio station and Friedman sings, in the first nice turn of a phrase, “she was looking for change and so was I.” The first verse is followed by a second in which Tony Levin takes some liberties with the bass line. Friedman falls in love, invites her to hear his band, and when he picks her up he sings the classic line, “Hi, and she said, ‘Yeah, I guess I am.’” Then he launches into the wonderfully Frankie Valli-esque chorus that consists lyrically of simply the title sung over and over again and ends with three staccato beats and two beats of silence, In the third verse, which is only on the album version, the couple stops at Dairy Queen before the dance with some humorous background vocals that hold throughout the second half. The next chorus is followed by a great fifties style R&B George Young sax solo. Young also makes some well-place honks in the following verse with Friedman and his girl on the couch, “fooling around with the vertical hold,” and finally making love to the sound of fireworks on the television as it’s signing off for the night. The final chorus modulates and then, in the album version, oddly goes into the first part of the first verse before suddenly ending.

There was a bit of controversy over the song from Friedman’s label, Lifesong Records, but it wasn’t about the drug reference, or the fact that Ariel “wore a peasant blouse with nothing underneath.” Instead, they objected to the fact that she was a “Jewish girl.” The label demanded that Friedman remove the line, not because they were racist but because they thought that radio stations would use it as an excuse not to play the record. They also stuck a chorus between the first and second verse and removed the third because they felt the song was too long to be a single. Friedman was unhappy about the changes--though removing the first verse reprise from the end and fading out on the last chorus is a much more satisfying ending. Nevertheless, with assistance from the Jewish Defense League, Friedman was able to convince the company to leave his original version on the album, though the single edit remained. Lifesong was a small record label with limited distribution, and the reason for the song’s strange chart journey is that the label actually ran out of records, causing the song to stall in the mid-twenties. A fresh infusion of 45s was the reason for the uptick on the charts but by then it was too late for it to break into the top ten. The B-side, “Funny Papers,” has Friedman playing piano and singing with a jazz trio including George Mraz on bass and Mel Lewis on drums. “Ariel” is sometimes interpreted as a reminiscence of early sixties love, but it clearly reflects an early seventies sensibility and remains one of my favorite songs from 1977.