(You're) Having My Baby

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "(You're) Having My Baby," and if you Zoo Freaks out there on THE ZOO thought the freeform hour was about to stay all long hair and leather, well, hang on to the handlebars. Paul Anka cut this one in 1974 with Odia Coates riding shotgun on the vocal, and it sat on his album Anka, the United Artists record that also carried "One Man Woman/One Woman Man" and "Papa" on the flip of the single. The Crew is spinning it the way the old rock and roll bikers used to spin a curveball: not because it fits the denim, but because the story behind the grooves is wilder than half the guitar solos in the crate.

Anka wrote the thing while he was working a stand at Lake Tahoe, aimed straight at his wife Anne de Zogheb and the daughters they already had at home. He has said the early songs were autobiographical, and this one was no different. He meant it as a solo. Then United Artists executive Bob Skaff heard it and told him the lyric sounded like a one-man parade. Turn it into a duet, Skaff said. Coates happened to be in the studio that session. She had come up through gospel, born in Mississippi, raised in Watts, singing in her father's church and later in Edwin Hawkins's choir. Anka had been producing around that circle, so she was already in the room when the suggestion landed. Rick Hall produced the record. The single ran about two and a half minutes, B-side "Papa," and United Artists pushed it out in June 1974 under the catalog number UA-XW454-W.

What happened next still makes the old jocks shake their heads. Anka had not sat at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 since "Lonely Boy" in 1959. Fifteen years is a long stretch between summits for a guy who had been a teen idol before the British bands even packed a suitcase. "(You're) Having My Baby" climbed anyway and held the top for three weeks on the chart dated around late August 1974. It was his third number one, after "Diana" and "Lonely Boy." A follow-up duet with Coates, "One Man Woman/One Woman Man," cracked the Top 10 early the next year. Middle America bought the single by the bag. The United Kingdom put it in the Top 10 as well. Radio did not argue with the request lines.

The arguments came from everywhere else. Critics called the sentiment maudlin. Feminists called the point of view worse than that. The line that stuck in everyone's teeth was the title itself: my baby, not our baby. Anka told interviewers in 1974 that he could have written "our" and that it was not a male ego trip, it just sounded better the other way. He also said the song was not meant to alienate anybody. The National Organization for Women was not buying the explanation. On Women's Equality Day they handed him a sarcastic "Keep Her in Her Place" award, the same season they tagged Seals and Crofts over the unrelated album Unborn Child. Ms. magazine named him their Male Chauvinistic Pig of the Year. He later told people he had tested the song before release and knew the flak was coming. He still defended motherhood as a fact of life and said he was not putting women in a subservient spot.

There was another line that poured gasoline on the fire. "You could have swept it from your life, but you wouldn't do it" landed barely a year and a half after Roe v. Wade, and listeners heard an abortion reference whether Anka spelled it out or not. He has said the woman in the song chooses to keep the child as a way of showing love. Plenty of writers heard a man congratulating himself for a decision that was not his to make. In concert he sometimes closed the number by switching to "you're having our baby," which he called a concession, not a rewrite of the record. He told one interviewer he never changed the song on the disc at all, only the tag at the end of some shows. Years later a PopMatters reviewer noted that Anka had wisely left the tune off a career-highlights set. In 2006 a CNN.com poll voted it the worst song of all time. The Crew will not pretend the ballad is a biker anthem. The Crew will say the fuss is half the reason the record still gets pulled out of the stack.

Coates paid a strange price for the hit. She got a number one credit and a few more Anka duets, then the pop lane closed. She died of breast cancer in 1991 at 49. Her answers on the record, lines like being a woman in love and loving what was going through her, were the parts that made the critics angriest, because they sounded like agreement. Whether she believed a word of it or was simply the singer in the room is a question the session tapes do not answer.

Before any of that soft-rock weather, Anka was a kid from Ottawa who would not stay in the choir loft. Born July 30, 1941, into a tight Lebanese-Canadian family, he sang at St. Elijah Syrian Orthodox Church, messed with the piano, and took journalism courses that landed him a cub reporter gig at the Ottawa Citizen. By 13 he had a vocal group called the Bobbysoxers. He borrowed his mother's car, sometimes without her knowing, and drove across the river into Quebec for every amateur night that would have him. A Campbell's soup label contest, three months of collecting cans, won him a trip to New York, and that trip locked the plan in his head. He was going to be a singer who wrote his own songs.

In 1956 he talked his parents into a Los Angeles visit with an uncle, then hitchhiked to a meeting with Modern Records. The first single was "Blau-Wile Deveest Fontaine," pulled from a John Buchan book he was supposed to be reading for a Fisher Park school report. It was not a hit. Back in Ottawa he snuck into Fats Domino's dressing room, found Domino and Chuck Berry sitting there, and sang at them. They told him to stay in school. He did not stay long. In 1957 he got in front of Don Costa, the A&R man at ABC-Paramount, and played a batch that included "Diana." Costa heard a record. "Diana" went to number one and made a star out of a 15-year-old. The girl behind the name was Diana Ayoub, an Ottawa teenager he knew through the Lebanese community and church socials. He later called her a teen crush in the autobiography My Way. She said she thought they were friends and had no clue the song was coming. The old babysitter story was a myth he eventually put to rest himself.

From there the bus was the classroom. He rode the Cavalcade of Stars with Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Frankie Lymon, and Chuck Berry, and became the youngest act to play the Copacabana. He wrote "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," the last song Holly recorded, plus sides for Connie Francis and Lesley Gore, the theme for The Longest Day, and the longest-running Tonight Show theme of the Johnny Carson years. In the late 1960s he handed Frank Sinatra "My Way." By the time Lake Tahoe and the baby song arrived, the teen idol had already rebuilt himself as a writer who could still sing a hit when the arrangement called for strings instead of a backbeat. The official home for all of that history is paulanka.com, where the biography still lists "(You're) Having My Baby" among the 1970s records that put him back on the chart. His official Facebook page is Paul Anka on Facebook, the Instagram account is @paulankaofficial, and the X account is @paulanka. Fans comparing notes and old 45s gather in the Official Paul Anka fan club group. The Zoo Freaks can argue the lyric all they want. The record is already on the turntable.