This is a drab and rainy day as I write this and one of our cats is sick, so I thought that I might as well bunch all the bad stuff all at once. It had been nearly half a century since I heard this, and my first thought on listening to it again was that it wasn't so much that it was bad in and of itself: it was that there was something horribly wrong with the mid-1970s if people thought that this was a good idea. This song was a symptom, not the disease.
Rick Dees (born 1950) grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and began his radio career while still in high school. At the time of "Disco Duck", he was working at WMPS-AM in Memphis, Tennessee. It reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over six million copies, but Dees could not play the song on his own station, as station management feared a conflict of interest. When he mentioned this on the air, WMPS fired him.
Unfazed, Dees moved to another Memphis radio station and eventually relocated to Los Angeles. He's still working as a radio DJ and hosts a weekly syndicated radio show, The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 Countdown.
Two bits of trivia to end this entry:
Created May 6, 2026.