Dr. Frank's What's-it

Child Star

The references to the characters in the sitcom Family Affair are now obscure and most likely, and increasingly, incomprehensible to listeners past a certain age, but this song more than perhaps any other determined the route my own songwriting traversed, for better or worse. The Buffy in the song is the little girl played by Anissa Jones who died of a drug overdose at the age of eighteen; Uncle Bill and Mr. French were other characters in the show. It's essentially a song about lost innocence, suffused in irony. There would have been no "Danny Partridge" without it, that's for sure.

The whole album (their self-titled debut) is great, though out of print, but all of the songs, plus a few extras, are on this compilation.