Number 1 With A Bullet: Mac Davis And “Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me”

January 4, 2012 10:00 AM

Mac Davis – “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” (Columbia, 1972)

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We felt a bit bad after a post we wrote about [lastfm link_type="artist_info"]Mac Davis[/lastfm] a few months back (Top 10 Songs That Were Better Than Mac Davis). After all, he didn’t intend to hurt anyone. So let’s give some props to that famous #1 of his from September of ’72: the hook-laden “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.”

Mac had already penned hits for [lastfm link_type="artist_info"]Bobby Goldsboro[/lastfm] (“Watching Scotty Grow”) and Elvis Presley (“In the Ghetto”) when he came up with his own #1, “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.”

“My producer, Rick Hall, asked me to write a ‘hook’ song,” he is quoted as saying in a Billboard interview from 1973. A “hook” song is “one with a repeat phrase which is singles oriented,” he explained, “so I came up with this phrase and melody line, ‘baby don’t get hooked on me.’”

“Hall tells me, ‘Now that sounds like a number 1 record. Let’s cut it.’ Hell, I hadn’t even written it yet. I wrote the song that night and we cut it the next day.”

So it was that Mac Davis found his first #1 hit, a three week resident at the top of the chart in September ’72.

In his defense, Davis says: “I thought it was super-egotistical and pretentious, but Columbia released it anyway.”

Word.