I know that when this blog features an adult contemporary ballad like this, you just love making fun of it. But don't laugh too hard. After one of our top 40 stations went away, local radio fell into a deep malaise, and our remaining top 40 station seemed determined to play this record many times per day. And it had a long tail there before it became a lost hit, as they still occasionally played it a couple years later.
It wasn't specifically this song that I had the gravest objections to, but rather the broader practices of our local radio stations. The fact that our stations became so sluggish was beyond aggravating. You should have seen what I had to deal with in daily life, and I wasn't even safe from it at home, in part because radio was instituting narrower playlists to appeal to those with short attention spans.
But "Never Thought" did provide a positive contribution to broadcasting - with the help of Steve Hawkins of Q-102. One evening, Steve introduced this record like normal. The song began with the unintentionally hilarious opening line: "Can I touch you..."
Then Steve broke in and declared, "No, you can't, get your hands off of me!"
I'm absolutely certain I heard this lost hit on the radio when it was current. Then somehow I forgot about it for 35 years. It's not the only time I've forgotten an action-packed song like this. It's usually because a personal crisis wiped out my memory of the preceding weeks. One example is "Save Me" by Fleetwood Mac - a lost hit also. Maybe I forgot "Fool Moon Fire" because pretty much all of life became a crisis, but I doubt that, as the song was a hit right when things were improving because I was about to transfer out of one of the many bad schools I attended.
Right after I remembered this long-lost song again, I found an old WCLU survey sheet on a website that included it. This seemed to trigger a faint memory of hearing it on the car radio in the school parking lot near the end of 4th grade. But this could just be...the power of suggestion! I might not have actually heard it there, because I usually took the school bus home then. But I probably did, because there were enough times back then when I got after-school detention and my parents drove me home instead.
That's an indictment of the school - not me. After the incident in which a teacher locked me in a hot car at the Kentucky Horse Park, it was becoming clear to everyone that the school was full of shit. (Shockingly, she was still teaching at a different school just recently.) Academically, it was a joke too. Whenever I completed an assignment in class, the teacher just sent me to sit on the floor and read the same books for 5-year-olds over and over again. That wasn't the same teacher who tied me to a chair and stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth like a hostage. On the other hand, schools were doing things like that all the time 3 or 4 years ago and were cheered by the smarmy charlatans on The Today Show.
I also have a memory of going to Taste of Cincinnati around that time and thinking it was insufferably boring. After all, it's not the most exciting event, but there just isn't much recreation around here, and it rains all the time.
An online comment said the reason "Fool Moon Fire" wasn't a big hit was because the record label was involved in some squabble about promoting it. Indeed, there probably weren't any big hits on the Hot 100 in the 1980s that didn't have some support from corrupt promoters. For example, the promoters began blackballing "Turn Me Loose" by Loverboy because some execs at Columbia wouldn't play the promoters' game. The promoters had to do it their way or no way at all.
I never saw the "Fool Moon Fire" video until I found it on YouTube. It came out a year before Michael Jackson's "Thriller" clip, but the gist of it is pretty much the same.
I once was a fresh young kid. Nothing could drag me down. Except 4th grade.
Either way, the answer will upend some of the pseudoscience we've seen over the past few years, but let's make the case for each side of the great debate. You might think that if you fart in a moving vehicle, the cloud of flatulence will somehow move with the vehicle and stink it up for miles to come. It's like how if you place a coin on your knee on a free fall ride at an amusement park, the coin is supposed to fly up and levitate at eye level while you fall.
It seems more logical though that the air biscuit would stay behind. If you're in a car and you smell a big, stinky fart, it would seem to be because you drove into it.
Whatever the weather, I remember hearing this lost hit on a day in which one of the above scenarios took place. This song was on the radio on the day we drove home from a college trip to New Orleans at the end of my freshman year.
The college folks kept saying that what happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans. I take issue with that. They imposed this edict unilaterally and expected me to follow it without agreeing to it. But I would have respected it if they hadn't become such condescending tyrants later. When they weren't throwing tantrums, they were talking down to you. Sad how they bullied people in this manner. For another thing, this story is about what happened on the way home, not what happened in New Orleans.
We were zooming north on a rural Interstate when the unmistakable bouquet of a silent-but-deadly filled the van. People poked their heads into the front seat to comment on it. Nobody could be indicted, but it was suggested that we make a pit stop soon. The bunker blasts took place repeatedly over many miles.
And "Tell Me Why" brings back fond memories of that day!
What a fine way to cap off freshman year! It's a shame more recent students didn't get to make great memories like this. For example, the university canceled spring break in 2021 just to keep a tighter rein on students. But I checked some Hot 100 charts from early 2021, and it looks like they were lucky not to be stuck with the music of 2021 on a long trip.
Not all the records profiled on this blog are rousing rockers. In the late 1980s, a pop station could play a Kenny G instrumental alongside Guns N' Roses. Back then, everyone got it.
At least most people did. I sort of admired Kenny G, because he seemed to run afoul of people who I dealt with daily whose attention spans were too narrow to care about more than one or two acts. Pop stations had variety. You could hear Mötley Crüe, Bobby Brown, U2, Enya, Henry Lee Summer, and Tone Loc all on the same station. But some folks were obsessed with just one performer. I remember someone in high school being absolutely spoony over Richard Marx - to the complete exclusion of everything else. At the end of a Walk-a-Thon one fall, I heard the opening notes of "Right Here Waiting" blaring from a boom box, and I knew my schoolmate was nearby.
The variety might not have been as wide as a decade before, when Kermit the Frog was on the chart at the same time as Kiss, but the point stands.
But even Kenny G was probably completely full of shit sometimes.
One Sunday, I heard one of the big countdown hosts - like Casey Kasem or Shadoe Stevens - tell a story about Kenny G. According to this story, Kenny attended a rough high school in Seattle.
I've figured out that Mr. G would have attended high school in the early 1970s. How rough could a high school in Seattle in the 1970s possibly be? Did Bill Gates throw calculators at him or something? There is no way - not a chance in hell - Kenny's high school was any worse than mine. Absolutely zero.
It's like the local sysop who complained about how rough he had it because he attended high school in Minneapolis at the same time as Prince. He used this terrifying experience as an excuse for all his extreme right-wing views. Grow up!
Also, when I was working on this entry, memories of sophomore geometry class came rushing back. I remembered how my teacher purchased a very expensive electric pencil sharpener, but kids kept using it to try to sharpen pens and batteries - which evokes a vastly different image from a gentle Kenny G tune.
Arcadia was a Duran Duran splinter group that was active around the time our big local stations seemed to eschew Duran Duran - even their biggest hits. Arcadia's biggest single - "Election Day" - peaked way up at #6 on the Hot 100, but if we go by airplay on major local stations, it just doesn't seem like a #6. David Bowie received similar treatment, as he seemed to be largely confined to smaller stations for a while.
What the hell is "re-election day"? I'm old enough to remember when we had an election day. But I guess now it's re-election day, because incumbent parties file frivolous lawsuits against their opponents to knock them off the ballot, or it's like my area where the parties make backroom deals not to challenge elected officials. But now it's not just incumbents who run unopposed. They'll let one party nominate its worst newcomer and go unchallenged in November. That doesn't always work out, because there have been a few times when a party miraculously didn't pick its worst candidate, but the goal is to have the absolute worst "leaders" we can dredge up.
The "Election Day" video has a scene that is strikingly similar to a later advertising campaign. Notice the faces in the wall at 34 seconds into the above video. That shot is like the "Halls of medicine" ads for Halls cough drops in the early 1990s...
When I was in college, someone gagged on some food while walking down the hall, and somebody likened it to those Halls ads.
Every little thing the gag reflex does leaves you answered with a question mark!
Life has always seemed to get stupider and stupider, but even rough times have bright spots. Even in a disastrous year like 2020, I smiled my ass off as I strolled down the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland, that September.
There were already lots of weird medical theories afoot in the 1980s. It wasn't nearly as bad as the flat earth 2020s are, but still bad. By then, if you disagreed with anything a school did, it was assumed there was something wrong with you. Big Pharma made lots of money by diagnosing everyone with ADHD. Schools also used ADHD as an excuse to coerce parents into taking their kids to therapists of the school's choosing.
Sometimes this backfired, as the school didn't like the answers the doc gave. The school - out of retaliation - would then shop around for new therapists until they found one that satisfied them. Meanwhile, you'd realize the first therapist wasn't so bad.
The first therapist might even have a radio in the waiting room that was completely unguarded. The doc had no secretary or receptionist, and there were usually no other clients in the room. Nothing but a shelf with a few magazines and an Ernie and Bert puzzle.
You know what that meant, don't you? That meant I didn't have to slog through the MOR fodder that the radio was tuned to. I could just change the station.
I remember one time when I changed the station and I heard Men Without Hats' "I Like." This song is not to be confused with a parody of Tom T. Hall's "I Love" that was sung by a guy who sounded like Oscar the Grouch. That was a completely different song with the same title.
Often, when the doc noticed the station had been changed, he bopped along and changed it back. He didn't say a word about it though.
One other time, we were at a sporting goods store and the radio was tuned to a Reds game. I reached up and changed the station to static. Customers were horrified, because they thought there was some disaster at the stadium that knocked the game off the air.
We were lucky to grow up in the days of live, local radio. People remember more about tiny stations of 40 years ago than they do about what today's biggest stations were playing just an hour ago. Perhaps the most underrated station ever in the Cincinnati area was WCLU when it was top 40. This small AM daytimer was my favorite station when I was in middle school. And that was even after we got a car with an FM radio.
I think small stations gave their DJ's more freedom to come up with catchphrases, funny characters, and jokes. Small stations seemed to have bigger playlists as well, perhaps because they couldn't afford to hire consultants to tell them which records to play. On the other hand, they probably didn't get as many free promo records from the labels, and had to buy music from a regular record store. I know WCLU did air some of its music from promo 45's though, since I remember them playing versions of some songs that were only on the promo single. For example, they originally played the promo version of "Dress You Up" by Madonna, which started with a rumbling sound. This prompted a DJ to declare, "Ew, Madonna, that was gross!" We were in the parking lot at the Highland Heights Shopping Center when we heard this, and I thought I'd bust a gut laughing!
Not long after, Stevie Wonder gave us the tender ballad "Overjoyed." The record was noted for its interesting production elements, which the album's liner notes called "environmental percussion." The sound of a pebble splashing into a puddle was heard throughout the song. This gave rise to a WCLUism that is remembered to this day. Every time WCLU played this record, they called it "The Ker-Plop-Plop Song."
I double-check these entries before posting them, because not everything that was talked about on local pop radio in the '80s fits today's environment in which finding things to get offended about has become America's leading cash crop. When I was looking this over, I stumbled on some items on my hard drive that weren't even that old but would never fly today. I probably have stuff that's brand new that wouldn't fly today, but nobody has to give a reason anymore why something is offensive. But, as far as I can recall, even the fusty FCC didn't go after most of our local DJ's 40 years ago.
Leave It To Beaver is said to be the first network program to show a toilet. It happened in 1957. Before then, the TV industry just pretended toilets didn't exist. But Leave It To Beaver only showed the tank. It was in an episode in which the boys hid a pet alligator in the toilet tank.
Everyone in the 1980s thought music videos were so daring, but they rarely even showed a toilet tank, let alone a whole toilet. Progress is slow, I guess. But the Canadian band Chilliwack was at least bold enough to dip their toes in the water.
The video of this lost hit is full of shots in which the camera is facing upward out of what appears to be a toilet bowl. Or at least everyone in the '80s thought it was a toilet bowl. If you were watching MTV with friends, and this video came on, everyone got excited all at once because a toilet was shown on TV. If it's anything other than a toilet, the band should have made it so it didn't look like a toilet.
Maybe it's like a Rorschach test, where your shrink tells you to interpret some inkblots any way you want, and then diagnoses you with a mental disorder because you interpret them the "wrong" way. It could be like how one of the inkblots is very clearly a bat, but you're never supposed to say it's a bat.
But everyone knew the Chilliwack video was being filmed from a toilet when the band started lighting matches and throwing them in the bowl. The big thing back then was for people to blow up school toilets with M-80's. That's why there was a restroom stall with no toilet at my high school.
The unanimous verdict: It's a toilet.
Also, Chilliwack's lead singer resembled an actor who used to play the villain in some episodes of cop shows back then. Imagine Ponch and Jon of CHiPs chasing the singer from Chilliwack through an alley on their motorcycles.
There was a time when the word postal didn't mean what it means today. It used to actually have something to do with the postal service.
A strange thing, that postal service. I could never really figure out how they sort all that mail, or how they manage to deliver magazines and not lose any part of them except all the pages. But when you think of the postal service, you think of stamps.
And when you think of stamps, you think of a problem that started cropping up at restaurants in the 1980s. I noticed that occasionally, when you ordered a soft drink with your meal, it would taste minty - not unlike the glue on a postage stamp. It was like that phase in the early 2000s when French fries at fast food restaurants tasted like soap. But I don't think the problem with the soft drinks has ever gone away, because I still encountered it just a couple years ago.
When we get a soft drink that tastes like this, we say it's postal. But we're luckier than this a vast majority of the time. That means we get to break into song instead.
"It ain't postal, it just looks that way!"
Almost every restaurant visit since 1992 in which we receive a beverage that tastes anywhere close to normal has been graced with these new lyrics to a lost hit by the Northern Pikes, a band of Saskatoon rockers. One sip, and you should know whether to sing.
This routine is still a hit after all these years - even though the Pikes' original song long ago became lost on U.S. airwaves.
According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, "She Ain't Pretty" was inspired by an episode of Rhoda in which a character used a similar phrase. It would be like if the band had watched The Dukes Of Hazzard and written a song titled "You Done Scuffed My Vehicle!"
Meanwhile, don't be surprised to find Yelp or Tripadvisor reviews in which the reviewer complains that a restaurant served a soda that tasted like a postage stamp.
"I stopped loving you since the miners' strike..."
Let me tell you about high school. It was kinda weird!
I'm from an area with infamously shitty schools. Let's just say I, uh, transferred schools a lot.
The stupidity hit paydirt when I was a high school senior. Our school had something completely idiotic that very few schools had: a level system. Think of what schools would be like if they had a Social Credit System. These levels dictated what "privileges" - known elsewhere as rights - you were allowed to have.
In order to move up a level, you had to write a big statement and grovel to the class. The class would gather around a table each week to decide levels. But teachers and administrators did of course have the ultimate say.
A string of classroom pranks led to me being stuck at level 1 for a ridiculously long time. One day, I applied to move up to level 2. In my statement that I read to the class, I borrowed a line from Soho and wrote, "I have been on level 1 since the miners' strike."
Needless to say, I wasn't raised to level 2. In fact, I don't think I moved up from level 1 ever again. I think this was around the time the school asked me to stop showing up on Wednesdays because I made Wednesdays my prank day. I'm probably still on level 1!
And what was this mysterious "miners' strike"? Many of us in America didn't know about it, but there was a major strike by coal miners in Britain in 1984-85. Margaret Thatcher fought against the miners and consolidated her power. Her regime seized the union's assets and banned strikers' dependents from getting welfare.
Seriously, our local intelligentsia - or rather, stupidsia - thought this song was the filthiest thing ever recorded. You'd think we would have had a lot of laughs at their expense over that, but they had lots of power, and it wasn't so funny.
I had a teacher in 8th grade who actually went on a big crusade against this song. One day, she was haranguing the class about something, when she mentioned that she had heard this record on the radio. She was shocked that any station would broadcast such porn.
This was a school that wouldn't even maintain order in class or in the hallways. I was even hit in the head with a rock someone threw at recess, and I was once hit in the head with a Liquid Paper bottle someone threw in another class. A student also once threatened me with a razor in class. Yet the school thought it could ban a song by the Cars bassist from local airwaves!
Don't laugh. Our major radio and TV stations were so conservative that they would agree to yank a song if pushed hard enough. This is the market where our ABC affiliate refused to air New Year's Rockin' Eve for several years.
Our school also crusaded against a video store that rented out (gasp!) R-rated movies.
All of this is like in the 1990s when some busybodies purchased the rights to some songs they thought were too suggestive - even though they were actually pretty tame - and relicensed them under SESAC so radio stations couldn't play them. Most stations paid only ASCAP and BMI fees, not SESAC. A radio station in Pittsburgh got in trouble for playing some of this music without realizing it was under SESAC.
What my school did was Taliban-level stuff. But now - in the 2020s - censorship like this is essentially the norm.
As late as 2001, we were still rockin' and rollin' by adding new lost hits!
This is yet another song that sounds like it has something to do with flatulence: "I did it...Guilty as charged."
I can't believe this song doesn't have a better Rate Your Music score. It's not surprising though that it only peaked at #71 on the Hot 100, because the chart's methodology by then was generally unfavorable to acts like the Dave Matthews Band that had a solid reputation. By 2001, the music biz rewarded fleeting trends, not reputations.
Hilariously, when "I Did It" reached its chart peak, the song at #1 was another title that seemed evocative of trouser sneezes: "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy featuring RikRok. "It Wasn't Me" was actually one of few big hits of the era that has lasted, as people still sing the title when denying something they're accused of.
The Dave Matthews Band did a lot to cement their good reputation. Central to this was drummer Carter Beauford frequently chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles while performing. Someone who went to a Dave Matthews Band concert in Kansas City said Carter blew a huge bubble that burst all over his face during the show.
But the band's reputation took a hit in 2004 when their tour bus was traveling through Chicago and accidentally dumped an estimated 800 pounds of feces and urine onto a sightseeing boat in the Chicago River. This incident drew the attention of even the mayor, and the band had to pay a $200,000 legal settlement. The band also agreed to keep a log of when their buses emptied their septic systems. The driver of the bus pleaded guilty to reckless conduct.
Someone suggested that this blog feature Chicago's "25 Or 6 To 4", but I wouldn't quite call that song lost - unless you're talking about the band's 1986 rerecording. In fact, somebody recently pointed out that "25 Or 6 To 4" was the most played song of all of June on Sirius XM's Classic Vinyl channel. Chicago has a big catalog though, and some of it is unintentionally hilarious.
One of the first misheard lyrics I ever remember was when I was 5 years old. Most of my exposure to pop music was from the AM radio in my parents' car. The radio had 5 presets, which were set by pulling the buttons outward. This was also around the time I first saw a music chart. Someone showed me a newspaper that listed the week's top 10 singles and said those were the songs that were big on the radio at the time. After I heard a song on the radio about a lima bean while we were on a family trip to Wapakoneta, I kept saying that I hoped the lima bean song would come on the radio again.
Nobody knew what I was talking about. When the song came on again, I noted the chorus that went, "I am a lima bean."
And the rest as they say is history.
It turns out I actually mentioned this a couple times over the past few years on a website that has absolutely nothing to do with this topic.
I remember a couple other misheard lyrics that I used to hear on the radio back then. One was the Four Seasons singing, "Oh one eye." Another was the Patti Smith Group's "Eight Is Enough belongs to us."
I probably haven't heard "Alive Again" on regular radio more than once in the past 45 years. This might not be the last we hear of Chicago on this blog, since they seem to enjoy having #14 hits that become lost.
This record spent one week in the top 40 - at #40.
That's happened many times. But this time was different.
That's because this song was never heard on American Top 40 in Cincinnati despite reaching the top 40. AT40 was broadcast around the world, but Q-102 was Cincinnati's AT40 affiliate for years. Q-102 skipped over the show for the week ending January 13, 1990, choosing instead to broadcast the prior week's show.
You might think a competitor should have picked up AT40 so the program could be shown more respect, but by 1990, Q-102 didn't have a competitor - at least not in the same format. So the butchering of AT40 that had gone on for years continued. That started in 1987 when Q-102 kept deleting "I Want Your Sex" by George Michael from the show. It continued when the station inexplicably started the show late once and cut out portions of it so it would end on time.
This - shockingly - isn't as bad as what was starting to happen in some other cities. In a few cities, the AT40 affiliate would drop the show without even telling the AT40 people. So AT40 couldn't find another station for their great program.
It was also in 1990 that American Top 40 celebrated its 20th anniversary. There was a display about it at Forest Fair Mall. It wasn't much though. They just put up a few posters listing the top 100 records of each year. It was off in a part of the mall that people didn't use. Wait, that was the whole mall.
A chart-topping smash might not seem lost. But the instrumental theme to the movie Chariots Of Fire by Greek composer Evangelos Papathanassiou is said to have now vanished from radio - despite the heavy airplay it got during its 1981-82 chart run.
I remember hearing it on a family vacation to Myrtle Beach, as it accompanied a channel on the motel cable TV system that showed all-text computerized ads. I don't know why we sat around and watched an ad channel, but it must have been raining. This is also the record that ended Joan Jett's 7-week reign at #1.
I've never seen the movie though. It won 4 Oscars - counting one for Vangelis's theme music. Everyone says their school took them to see this film, yet the students weren't that interested in it. According to the description, the movie was about an Olympic runner overcoming prejudice. Many of my schoolmates liked to create prejudice instead of fighting against it.
I've heard of lots of feature films that schools had everyone see, yet students weren't interested in. Apparently, there was one that had absolutely no dialogue whatsoever. I vaguely remember seeing something like that. I remember a high school teacher showing us some theatrical release and fast-forwarding through most of it. I think it was something that was only PG-rated, so it's not like there was anything offensive that we needed to skip over. She didn't say anything as she was fast-forwarding.
This also reminds me of the time in 8th grade when our school took us to see a play and someone kept chewing bubble gum and making Darth Vader noises.
Think hard, and you may remember hearing this song on the radio. If nothing else, you may recall the Cookie Monster-inspired line, "It's good enough for me."
When I say this is lost, I mean it's lost. Some folks say that some of the songs on this blog still appear on regular radio in their town. But this one is gone. I remember hearing it when I was about 12 and I was sitting on the floor in the den making up Monopoly rules that let players burn down each other's hotels. But when this song fell off the chart, that was it.
A couple years later, I was awed by the fact that we never heard this record anymore. But then came a very short chapter in my life that I've mostly forgotten about. For some reason, my mom forced me to take keyboard lessons. I had absolutely zero interest in these lessons. I wanted to be an Atari BASIC programmer, civil engineer, or broadcaster. I didn't want to become a musician too. Plus, school was hard enough without an additional workload. I already had an intense workload from school, and I was expected to excel in every subject.
Guess what song I had to use for keyboard practice?
Other than that, however, "Goonies" was gone. Everyone forgot it existed, and I don't think any radio station ever dug it up. I didn't even take keyboard lessons for very long.
The keyboard lessons were also around the time WCLU went under. If a top 40 station dug up a lost hit, it was usually WCLU. By contrast, the big stations in town had small playlists because they thought everyone had a short attention span. In some cases, maybe they were right. I had to fight with violent idiots at school every day, and I can't imagine them being advanced enough to recall any song after it was finished playing. If they took over American Top 40, they'd probably just play the same song 40 times.
The trend toward small playlists was aggravating, and combining that with the community normalizing the incredibly insane antics at school was a bad combination.
Some hit records have a long tail before we consider them lost.
I planned to have this blog only go back to the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, since that's about how far back I might remember when a song was new. I wouldn't have been old enough to care, but I might remember it. But it's been suggested that I include this earlier ballad by Brazilian singer Morris Albert.
You never, ever hear this song anymore. But it took many years for people to stop talking about it.
Many, many years after the song was a hit, I was a high school junior. There was a student in my class who always acted up. He threw puzzle pieces across the room and yelled, "It's raining puzzles!" When the school took us on a walking tour to see holiday decorations in a department store, this student thought a customer was a mannequin, so he slapped him on the back and said, "Hey, look at this dummy!" He once taped his own mouth shut with "Support Our Troops" stickers.
He entertained me.
He acted just as hilarious on the school bus. The bus driver and monitor were two aging women who didn't exactly have enlightened views on matters of public interest. Someone once discarded a torn, shit-stained pair of underpants on the school bus, and the aforementioned student declared, "Inspector 12 is gonna be mad!" He also still had Morris mania 15 years after "Feelings" was on the chart.
We were on the bus one day, when he got a big, silly grin on his face and begin singing "Feelings" with new lyrics. "Poo-poo...Nothing more than poo-poo," he sang. The bus monitor and driver were absolutely furious!
Come to think of it, how can there be anything more than poo-poo? The mere existence of poo-poo should be enough.
Hemorrhoids can be age-related. Although people of all ages have been afflicted, the risk grows as you get older, because the body weakens and you can't exercise as much.
It's maddening.
The burning and itching are a fact of life for many. But some folks are afflicted fairly early in life. This prompted one observer to tell a hemorrhoid sufferer, "You're too young to have hemorrhoids."
This in turn led me to rename a Mötley Crüe song when I was a college DJ.
I started on WRFN during my second semester of college. NKU promised to mail me information about the station right when I enrolled, but never did, so I didn't get to go on the air until my second semester. The station gave me a morning timeslot, and there was a method to the madness. Music selections were categorized so we'd play current songs at certain points during each hour, and oldies from different decades at other points. We also ran ads during these hours, as this was a carrier current station and wasn't licensed as a noncommercial operation.
Eventually, the station moved me to late afternoons, so I could be "unleashed." Late afternoon slots weren't limited by the format clock, and we could play tracks that the station wouldn't otherwise play. This was also decades before NKU started raising a stink about students "clustering", so we were still allowed to have social lives.
I'm sure Mötley Crüe fit WRFN's regular rock format, but I was already in the lost hits biz, and I wanted to play songs you didn't hear much anymore. Thus, "Too Young To Fall In Love."
Or as I called it, "Too Young To Have Hemorrhoids."
I want to dig up some tapes of my old shows. I'm pretty sure I have one where I called the song that.
I've been trying to figure out what song or act best sums up my perceptions of music in 1984-85. I think the Cars are a leading candidate.
It wasn't because the wave at 1:22 in the video above was inspired by The Electric Company. I can't figure out why so much music of the time elicited the insights that I had. I viewed most music differently a year earlier, a fact that I'd rather not discuss and which made a lot of good music go unappreciated.
When I talk about music that sums up how I saw things in 1984-85, what I mean is that it's a prototype of the picturesque view that I had of music at the time. I can't fully recreate this nostalgic feeling. About 4 years ago, I found a few videos from that era on YouTube. Some long-lost memories were triggered, but I wasn't able to get to the root of why I thought so much of this music was either scenic or funny. It's right on the edge of my mind, but I just can't access it.
You try to relive the joy, and the only thing that comes to mind is just a fleeting jolt or image. It's like there are events that have completely escaped my mind. Other events have faded to the point that I think of them as being viewed on old film or videotape like some 1970s scare film about juvenile delinquents. That could just be because most people I knew were juvenile delinquents.
But if I have to recall anything from that timeframe, it should be the Cars. I have their Heartbeat City LP - from which "Hello Again" comes - and I actually got it when it was a fairly current item. It's still in pristine condition despite heavy play. For the life of me, I don't remember where I got this record, or exactly when. It's as if I just waved my hands and it magically appeared. To quote another hit from that album: "Uh-oh, it's magic."
You might think I'm crazy, but I remember a particularly strange incident surrounding "Hello Again." Casey Kasem once read a "Long Distance Dedication" on American Top 40 from someone talking about the Cars. If I remember correctly, it was for some folks who had taken the letter writer to a Cars concert, but I'm not sure. I know the Cars were a big topic of the letter, and its writer dedicated "Hello Again." But instead of "Hello Again" by the Cars, Casey played "Hello Again" by Neil Diamond.
The Cars are also known as the band whose usual lead singer, the late Ric Ocasek, resembled Leonard Nimoy. There has also been some disagreement about Ric's age. When he died in 2019, his age was reported as 70. Indeed, his voter registration record gave a birthdate of 1949. But he had also claimed he graduated high school in 1963, and a 1950 census record shows a 6-year-old Richard T. Otcasek living in Ric's hometown of Baltimore.
The Cars must have also been endlessly frustrated by the fact that they had 3 hits that peaked at #41 on the Hot 100 - just missing the top 40. I'm not sure if this is a record, but it has to be close. Scandal must have been almost as aggravated, as they had 2 records that peaked at #41. But both Scandal and the Cars reached the top 40 with other efforts. I bet my high school principal has never had a top 40 hit, so the Cars and Scandal had the last laugh.
Ever spend decades trying to identify an old song you used to hear?
AM radio in our area in the early 1980s was in an MOR malaise. When a local AM station finally switched to a new format of current rock, my parents refused to add it to the presets on the car radio for months. I listened to this station on the way to and from school in 5th grade, but that was a pretty short distance, and my parents usually controlled the radio the rest of the time.
This means much of the music I heard on the car radio was geared to a grownup fan base. I wouldn't say this music was always bad. Some of it is at least listenable, and most of it reached the pop chart. But this softer music just wasn't what I was usually interested in when I was young.
Music evokes memories. For 40 years, I had the opening of a song stuck in my head that I couldn't identify. I associated it with all of the zillion stations that played music for the oldsters - and, by extension, their angry lectures that were so common then. How I longed for those days! At least that was better than putting up with The Today Show lately.
Just recently, with the help of YouTube, I figured out this unidentified song was a lost hit by Al Jarreau - back when he used only his last name. It turns out that it was popular right when the MOR madness was starting to let up for a few years. It never went away completely, of course, but it was less of a factor through the mid-1980s.
This wasn't the only oldie that took a long time for me to identify. I identified "Romeo's Tune" by Steve Forbert about 10 years after it was popular. I know there was a 1960s-era song that used a melody that's strikingly similar to a longtime opening theme to National Geographic specials, but I can't identify it. A YouTube commenter called the National Geographic theme "the music of intelligence", because those specials were indeed much smarter than the crap that fills the TV airwaves now.
When I entered 4th grade, "Take It Away" was one of the songs everyone in my class absolutely loved. The others were "Eye Of The Tiger" by Survivor and "Don't Fight It" by Kenny Loggins with Steve Perry. Someone even brang a record of Kenny and Steve's hit to class one day. I don't know why, because it's not like the school would let us wear down the motor in their precious record player by listening to it.
"Take It Away" inspired some obvious commentary during serious school projects. One day, there was an assignment we had to read in front of the class. One student stood up to read his assignment, and the teacher said, "Take it away." I knew exactly what would happen next. Another student immediately lapsed into a rousing chorus of the Paul McCartney tune.
The teacher was MAD!!!!!
I got kicked out of her class for good in the middle of the school year. Teachers there had a higher turnover rate than students did though. That was the year the school replaced 75% of its instructors.
People remembered "Take It Away" years after it misappeared from radio. When I was a high school freshman, science class was taught by an aging nun. One day, a student was playing with some toy in class, like a yo-yo or something. The nun angrily warned, "Put it away or I'll take it away."
Guess what happened? Yep! That rousing chorus was again heard!
This is like when my 1st grade teacher sent kids to the "time-out room" and said, "Let's go." That was when the Cars had a hit with that title, so somebody would inevitably erupt in song.
The year 1989 saw stunning comebacks of acts who enjoyed their peaks of success in the 1970s. We had "One" by the Bee Gees, "This Time I Know It's For Real" by Donna Summer, and "Call It Love" by Poco - all of which are now lost hits. I remember that Power 94½ began playing each of those hits weeks before Q-102 did. That was true of most new records, in fact. Those tracks are in a different category from "Soldier Of Love" by Donny Osmond, because I just assumed Donny was politically connected enough that stations would add him right out of the box. He has espoused some right-wing stances in interviews. True to form, his record charted higher than the others.
Elton John never needed a comeback, because he was always putting out hit after hit. The lost hit we're profiling in this entry helped vault him into the 1990s.
It's about a club at the end of the street.
Most folks I knew didn't have a club at the end of their street. They usually had a trash dump, an ill-placed stop sign, or a creek where people threw bodies, but rarely a club. Not even a Honeycomb Hideout. But Elton took exception to this misrule.
This song is noteworthy because of what happened one weekend at an important family gathering at my grandparents' house. This record kept coming on the radio, and I kept calling it "Club On Sesame Street." A younger cousin thought that was absolutely hilarious.
Sometimes, when you get a booger in your nose, it's got to go. Otherwise, it can dry up and really irritate.
That's why sometimes we'd find them wiped on walls and furniture. They even got wiped in textbooks and library books at school. And I'll never forget the time in geometry class when I was a high school sophomore when I saw a humongous boog stuck to the back of a chair.
But let's go back to when I was 11. One of the first big-box stores in the area was Bigg's. If Rink's stinks, Bigg's was big. We went out to Bigg's back when it first opened.
As was normal for retailers back then, Bigg's had a record aisle, and it carried 45 RPM singles. You can see where this story is headed, right? Anyway, we stopped by the record department and looked at its offerings. It was something to see!
A young man was purchasing a 45 of "Easy Lover" by Philip Bailey & Phil Collins to replace his copy that got stolen. I know firsthand that nothing is safe in a home invasion, so it's a believable story. But while I was in the record aisle, my nose started to tickle. Why, it was a boog! And it had to be discarded somewhere.
What record could it be wiped on? It couldn't be "Private Dancer" by Tina Turner, as that was too sophisticated. I also decided to spare "Had A Dream (Sleeping With The Enemy)" by Roger Hodgson, which today is itself a lost hit. Hey! I know! How about "Body" by the Jacksons?
Perfect!
Before anyone asks, the chunk of mucus was wiped on the record itself - not the sleeve.
If the record skipped, you could just blame it on the boogie!
I remember visiting this store again not long after, and some woman who worked there got really mad at me for misbehaving in the store. What did she expect? It's not like I was 40 or something.
"Body" - along with "Material Girl" by Madonna and "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" by Don Henley - was also one of the hits of the era that everyone called "the owl songs." Listen to each of these songs to hear why.
Big or small, short or tall, you will all have a ball, it's the Tom & Jerry show! Wait, actually it isn't. It's Barry Manilow!
I remember being 9 years old and riding around in my parents' dilapidated Plymouth Horizon. Many Saturdays in that era were essentially wasted on a pointless endeavor. It wasn't nearly as grueling as school or church, but there were things I'd rather be doing, like flicking Stay Alive marbles at antique lamps or trying to blow bubbles with glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty. We usually had good choices for lunch though.
On one of those Saturdays, we drove up to the north side of Cincinnati where there was a family restaurant in which the eating area overlooked a huge stage where a man played an organ. It was when we were riding around near there that Barry Manilow's latest hit came blasting through the AM radio in the Horizon.
I immediately noticed something interesting about this new release. It sounded exactly like the theme music for some 1970s Tom & Jerry shorts!
Listen to Barry's hit in the clip above. Fast-forward to about 6 seconds in.
Now peep the Tom & Jerry theme. Jump to about 27 seconds in...
If our society was as litigious in 1983 as it is now, copyright lawyers would have had a field day!
And what about those '70s Tom & Jerry cartoons? I think most fans of the cat-and-mouse duo would rather forget those shorts existed. These were the ones where Jerry wore a red bowtie, and he and Tom were actually friends. My 4th grade classmates didn't seem too interested in those episodes.
Device was a band whose lead singers looked like Billy Idol and Joan Jett.
My memories of this lost hit are strikingly similar to those for John Mellencamp's "Rumbleseat." It was popular right at the same time, and it had a line that was associated with flatulence.
In 1986, as you know, ripping trouser sneezes was quite the production. At some point, a new custom took hold. Any time you were about to crack a loud-and-proud bunker blast, you would warn, "Here it comes." After the air biscuit was released, you'd say, "There it went."
That was also the year of supposed flatulence references in music. In addition to "Rumbleseat", 1986 saw "Why Can't This Be Love" by Van Halen, whose opening lines declare, "Whoa, here it comes...That funny feeling again." Unlike the lost hits profiled on this blog, that song still receives a lot of play.
"Hanging On A Heart Attack" didn't get to chart as high as those other tracks. But it too had an apparent flatus reference: "You try to get up and here it comes again."
Naturally, a nice, loud pooteroony was supposed to be unleashed after that line every time this song was played. The response to this was the same as it was for "Rumbleseat." I remember playing Dungeons & Dragons in the den, and this song would start sizzling out of the boom box. When the very first note was heard, a fist was brandished as a warning to those who might let one fly. Some people have no appreciation for humor.
It wasn't only songs that prompted a backdoor breeze. For years, The Price Is Right opened each episode with the announcer declaring, "Here it comes!" If we were home on a weekday, and if we knew The Price Is Right would be on, a fart would be saved up for the occasion.
"Hanging On A Heart Attack" was also climbing the chart at the time of my mom's company picnic at Coney Island that went hilariously awry, so that's a bonus.
You'd think a band as respected as R.E.M. would still see airplay for all their hits, but I don't think I've heard this one on the radio in 30 years. Most of our local stations aren't exactly known for playing quality music like this, but you'd still think it would turn up at some point.
I was on the radio in 1993 during "Man On The Moon" mania. Northern Kentucky University had a small student station called WRFN, and I was a DJ there. WRFN was not an FCC-licensed station but was somehow available in some buildings on campus. They called it a carrier current station. According to Wikipedia, this means the station broadcast with very low power using existing electrical wiring.
The important thing here is that it did somehow broadcast. I was told that you could pick it up on a standard AM radio if you were within a very short distance of the wiring. The airwaves are public, and being available over the air meant the station had a great responsibility to the community. Keep that in mind, because this point is central to this story.
"Man On The Moon" was a tribute to Andy Kaufman and was full of references to the comedian's Elvis Presley impressions. The song was near the top of WRFN's playlist back then, so we played it quite a bit. One day when I was on the air, one of the other DJ's - who was one of the managers of the station - was in the lobby of the studio and started loudly singing his own lyrics to the song. He was easily loud enough to be heard over the air.
"Elvis Presley gettin' a blowjob...Yeah yeah yeah yeah," he sang.
That was aired to much of the campus.
That's called broadcasting in the public interest! Or at least it served the public interest better than TV talk shows sending kids to boot camps.
Not all of the entries on this lost hits blog are about the song itself. Some of them are about my memories of events that took place while I heard the song.
For instance, this hit will forever be known as the song that was playing when we coaxed a booger from the inside of our Atari 800.
Imagine sitting at your computer and working on BASIC programs such as a flatulence simulator or a game in which you slay Sesame Street characters. Imagine if a dried hunk of mucus flies in from out of nowhere and falls down between the keys of the keyboard. This really happened when I was 12. A crusty crew got flung across the den, landed between the keys, and fell down inside the computer. Best all, it happened while the computer was in use.
This was not intentional. The goal was for the booger to land on the TV screen instead.
Sometime later, we lugged the computer into the kitchen to pry out the terrible boog.
We removed the base of the computer with a screwdriver. As the base was slowly lifted away, the gob of mucus that had earlier slipped through the keyboard plopped squarely onto the kitchen table. A cheer was heard: "Taa-daa!"
We had a radio on in the kitchen, and guess what song was on?
WCLU was the only radio station I remember that regularly played "Cry." I remember that the record always skipped during the second verse. The song appeared on a few Q-102 surveys found on the ARSA website, but I don't remember hearing it on Q-102 outside of American Top 40.
"Cry" was better known for its video with the faces morphing. Some of the people in the video were said to resemble celebrities such as Mr. T and Ed McMahon. Most of them looked like nobody in particular, so everyone just said they looked like "a member of the Ronald Reagan Club" or something like that.
If the booger had destroyed our computer, it would have made me want to cry!
This song did well enough on the chart that you might not think of it as lost, and it took a while for it to vanish completely from Power 94½. At least Power 94½ played this high-energy rocker instead of some of the music that other stations kept playing. But I haven't heard it in a station's regular rotation in decades now.
In late 1987, you may have been dancing around your living room, chewing bubble gum, passing gas, and dreaming of becoming an elite computer hacker. That's what cool people did back then. And this was when this exciting new Heart single grew on everyone even as everything came crashing down - literally.
I was a freshman at a Catholic high school then. My school made a struggle of 3 whole years. It was intentional and malicious. By late 1987, I was sort of shutting down. The school knew, and didn't do their job. It was already clear that I needed to find a better school. I complained bitterly but was told to be quiet. The school let me languish there for a couple more years because I was of no use to the school elsewhere.
Just before Christmas, the school had a huge Christmas tree in the hallway. It was adorned with gobs of glass ornaments. One afternoon right after lunch, we were filing into religion class. Then we heard a horrendous crash coming from the hall.
You guessed it! It was the Christmas tree!
And this was no accident. There was a fight in the hall, and somebody deliberately pulled the tree down onto a schoolmate.
The toppled tree blocked the hall right in front of the principal's office. There were shattered ornaments all over the floor.
Heart's latest hit had a line describing the school perfectly: "Broken glass, complete disaster." After the tree was knocked over, that line reminded me of that incident every time I heard it. It reminded me of everything about that school.
And trust me, the school was a disaster. Thank heavens I got out before junior year.
Also, pay attention to the above video at 1:35. Notice the gesture Nancy Wilson is making. I almost expect to hear someone yell, "Boist!"
This is the most recent Hot 100 hit by this band from London. The Spandaus always seemed like a fair target for ridicule. They were best known for their big ballad "True." Lead singer Tony Hadley was seen on TV shows wearing a weird suit that looked like it had a giant necklace embedded in it.
They charted in their homeland for decades after their last American chart appearance. Here in the good ol' U.S. and A., people hardly ever talked about Spandau Ballet after 1984. Any mention of them after that had to be a relic.
By the time I was a high school sophomore, it had been years since the Spandaus were the big thing. That was the era of Poison and Bobby McFerrin. So I was surprised to find some Spandau-inspired criminal mischief in my literature textbook. This book included a play that had the memorable line, "Damnable cough!" I don't remember anything else about this script, and I never understood it anyway. But it was accompanied by a memorable photo. It was a black-and-white picture of a man in a suit with his mouth open in frustration.
Somebody had written next to the photo, "Tony Hadley." And let me tell you, he looked just like the Spandau Ballet frontman!
This shows that the book had to have been at least 5 years old. This was fine, as long as the information in it was still relevant - and if the school didn't blame me for the condition it was in. It had to have gone through at least 5 cycles of rough treatment. And it showed. The school kept making me pay for books damaged by others - and then not replacing them. That way, the school could use the book again the next year and make the next student pay for it too. You had to have been there. My school did shit like that.
The Tony Hadley comment wasn't the only damage like that in that book. The book also included a short story about an unruly youngster who carried away his dad's electric razor and shaved his own head completely bald. I've now figured out the story was titled "The Beginning Of Grief." The book included a drawing of the boy with a shaven head. Someone had written "chrome dome" right on his noggin!
I don't think it mattered in the end, because after I was forced to pay for this book that others had torn up, I'm pretty sure it became firewood for my Fourth of July bonfire.
In recent years, Tony has emerged as a bit of a right-wing curmudgeon. He has attended the Conservative Party's annual conference and has threatened to run for Parliament as he has spouted a number of reactionary grievances.
This might not be the last entry devoted to Spandau Ballet on this blog.
We got a chuckle out of this one, but things weren't so funny for very long.
You may know that Mike & the Mechanics were a project led by Genesis's Mike Rutherford. But this song didn't get quite the airplay that many Genesis efforts did. I did hear it on the radio a little bit though. The first time I heard it, I burst out laughing at the very notion that the clanking production of this record was expected to see major pop success.
This sound might make a fine music bed for a 30-second TV commercial for a financial firm. But it makes a downright weird hit single. I actually remember a commercial that used to air during 60 Minutes that used music like this, except it was less sparse and more electronic.
The existence of "Nobody's Perfect" wasn't something that kept me awake at night. It was nothing like the truly insufferable music in the ensuing months that shot straight to #1 on the chart. If it charted today, it would be a highlight.
I never saw the video for this song until I found it on YouTube recently. The video is exactly what you might expect. It's full of fast-paced shots of graphs and computer screens containing financial data, and people in business suits frantically milling about an office.
People have posted online comments saying they were 3 or 4 when this song came out and it's one of the first songs they remember hearing on the radio. They never heard it for years after, but they remember it because it sounded so strange.
It just goes to show that even lost hits are not always forgotten.
