"I Love You Period" by Dan Baird

    Hey friends, it’s time for our annual April Fools review, where the Dial spotlights a track with a peculiar sense of humor to give you a bit of a chuckle. This year marks the first April Fools tune that actually made a sizable showing on the top 40 charts as well, Dan Baird’s “I Love You Period”.

“Back when I was goin’ to school, I never learned a thing.

All I did was daydream, a-waitin’ for the bell to ring.”

Best known as the lead singer for The Georgia Satellites, whose big hit “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” reached #2 hit in 1986, Baird is considered an important figure in the subgenre of “cowpunk”, a hybrid of country, rock, and punk.

In the song, Dan relates a story of himself as a young man (seemingly in elementary school) with a crush on his teacher. He writes her a love note, but it gets returned with criticism of his poor punctuation.

As he grows up, he continues to work the love note angle in his attempts to woo other young ladies, but the teacher’s comments from years earlier cause him to over-emphasize his punctuation, much to the detriment of his romantic success.

“Then one day I decided, that I would write a little letter…

She said the spellin’ was a masterpiece, the punctuation could be better…”

The story mines the same vein as Van Halen’s rock classic “Hot for Teacher”, as both songs deal with male students lusting after a female teacher. But where Van Halen’s track is from the point of view of a teenage boy, Dan Baird’s character seems to be in grade school, making the line about mentally undressing her just a bit unsettling. Still, fans of the Satellite’s “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” will find much to like here, as “I Love You…” exhibits a similar hillbilly cornpone sense of humor as that 1986 smash.

As mentioned earlier, Baird’s solo tune is the first of our annual April Fools songs to hit the Billboard top 40. Landing at a modest #26 on the pop charts, “I Love You…” had greater success on the US Mainstream rock listing, achieving the #5 position.  Dan’s follow up single “The One I Am” reached #13 on the mainstream rock chart, but had no showing on the hot 100. Both singles were pulled from Baird's first solo LP, Love Songs for the Hearing Impaired, in 1992. 

So, get your funny on, and click the video below to enjoy Dan’s ode to schoolboy fantasies, and Happy April Fools Day from Kyle’s Radio Dial!

“I love you period… Do you love me question mark?

Please, please, exclamation point… I want to hold you in parentheses…”