Sweet Smiling Children (by Jim Webb)
You tell all the sweet smiling children
About that one great pink candy love
That's waiting somewhere in the dark
To change our lives and make us all worthwhile
But we already are, you just don't know it
You tell all those sweet smiling children
That we need your fine hairsprays and combs
Lipstick, perfumes, fine cars and homes
So that when we find that love it will be true
But it already is, we just don't know it
Yeah, then you watch all those sweet smiling children
Stumble in the darkness you have madе
Looking for the dream that's nevеr quite there
And cry 'cause we can't win the games we play
Ah, but you sell a lot of hairspray that way, don't you?
Listen to it here: (2) [HD] Johnny Rivers - Sweet Smiling Children - YouTube
{Note: Jim Webb was an outstanding pop songwriter who contributed several songs to Johnny Rivers’ “Rewind” album in 1967. Unfortunately, Webb was later afflicted with “Neil Diamond Syndrome”; unwilling to settle for writing catchy pop tunes, he wrote “MacArthur Park,” a song so bad it took Donna Summer’s astonishing and totally unexpected disco version several years later to rescue it. In the annals of cringeworthy rock music (not counting the “efforts” of William Shatner), “MacArthur Park” was unrivaled until Meat Loaf recorded Jim Steinman’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Steinman also wrote Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a song which has its detractors; but anyone who has seen the film “Bandits” and watched Cate Blanchett singing along to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on her car radio as she is driving down the highway—well, that’s just a great moment in a great movie. Here’s a brief, edited clip: (2) Bandits (2001) Cate Blanchett, Bonnie Tyler - YouTube}
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