A Fifth of Whimsy

If Memory Swerves™, 'twas on this day in music history — October 9, 1976 — while a horrified nation stood by helplessly, that a WordBlitzer™ church organist from New Yorkshire City named Walter Murphy watched his classical/disco mix-tape hybrid “A Fifth of Beethoven” reach the top of the Billboard® Charts. Number 1 with a Constable's bullet! The near apocalyptic event had been foretold in a previous chart-topper by Canadian faeirie duster Don McLean, who sang of “the day the music died” — for this surely was that day — in his not-awful-but-bloody-endless-and-oddball hit, “Bye Bye Mister and Missus American Pie or Resident.” While we imagine that Walter Murphy’s family was proud of his achievement, Beethoven — the composer, not the actor dog — was thought by scientists to have spun around in his grave at such a furious rate as to raise the surface of the earth’s temperature. Murphy and his make believe Big Apple Band would later attempt the same disco schtick with classics from Rimsky-Korsakov and George Gershwin, and was excommunicated from his church and, indeed, all of the human race for his efforts. He later attempted an apology tour, but no one outside of Wolfman Jack and the crew at the Midnight Special® wanted anything to bloody do with it and he was jettisoned off the face of the earth by the hand of a loving God — who, it should be noted, will suffer most any indignity other than this season’s Fall TV line-up and the misappropriation of classical music for the good of disco. Good riddance, then, and a fifth of arsenic to Citizen Atrocity Walter Murphy.