Scorn Along with Archie

People seemed to be content Fifty dollars paid the rent Freaks were in a circus tent Those were the days.

The lyrics are flat, the accompaniment tinny and the voices dreadful. But the theme song of TV's No. 1 family, the Bunkers, has been released both as a single record and as part of an LP, and it seems to be scoring with the same mass audience that watches All in the Family each week (an estimated 50 million). The album, a sort of singalong, scorn-along with Archie, has risen into the top ten of the record charts in only eight weeks, and has racked up an impressive total of more than $1,000,000 in sales.

Besides the song, the album (Atlantic Records) contains excerpts from a dozen shows, a litany of the Bunkerisms that have won All in the Family the respect of rednecks and the laughter of liberals. To Archie (Carroll O'Connor), the proudly bigoted head of the Bunker household, England is a "fag country," his wife Edith a "dingbat," the Renaissance master Michelangelo "that Dago artist," and Women's Lib a "dreaded disease." As for the theory of evolution, Archie tells his son-in-law Mike (Rob Reiner): "We didn't crawl out from under no rocks; we didn't have no tails, we didn't come from monkeys, you atheistic, pinko meathead."

All in the Family is not only one of the most successful of the recordings that have been translated from TV series, such as Sesame Street and Flip Wilson. It also seems to signal a return to the popularity of comedy albums such as those that flourished in the early '60s. Another fast-selling LP is David Frye's Richard Nixon Superstar. Even Vaughan Meader, the man who started the trend in 1962 with The First Family, is back with a satirical vision of Jesus' return to earth titled The Second Coming.

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