"This Is Not America" by David Bowie/Pat Metheny Group

1985 / #32

Rate Your Music score: 3.65 out of 5!

For a song that's almost never been played in 40 years, everything about this lost hit is memorable. It has sort of a dark tone and a dark title. The video consists of clips from the movie The Falcon And The Snowman, and I'll always associate the song with the scene of a character from the film screaming at 3:12. Even hearing this song on the radio was memorable. I recall pondering it as it was on the car radio as we pulled into the driveway on the way home from the grocery store.

I continued to be influenced by the very title. When I was in my late teens in the early 1990s, I planned to write a book titled This Is Not America exposing how local school officials and politicians were running an organized crime racket, and how they were retaliating against young people who fought back. They continue to do it. This Is Not America was a good title, because they kept violating liberties guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. Someone dismissed my proposed book as "a left-wing complaint", but didn't actually deny any of it was true. Everyone knew it was true, but I was supposed to be quiet. It was the same wimpy, dismissive attitude now being displayed regarding the lockdown atrocities of the past few years.

Parts of this concept exist in bits and pieces in my later projects. I wish I could gather together all of that project, but it's on a disk for an Atari 800. I find it interesting that the home computing industry kept introducing new computers and standards that were incompatible with older machines, which relegated past events to the memory hole.

I've had to work harder at my projects since then, because more and more things have happened that are obviously idiotic. Things have gotten more ridiculous and stupid all the time.

My proposed book opened, "America is fast becoming a police state." A few people back then scoffed at this warning, but how did that turn out?

This is not America! I don't know what it is, but it sure as shit ain't America.

"I.G.Y. (What A Beautiful World)" by Donald Fagen

1982 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.9 out of 5!

"What a beautiful world this will be...What a glorious time to be free..."

Don't confuse "I.G.Y." with IGA or an IGO or a UGO.

This snappy lost hit by Steely Dan's Donald Fagen is one of a handful of songs I remember being popular around the time I wasted my brother's pink construction paper by drawing a stupid picture of a guy blowing a bubble. But that's not why it gets an entry here.

When I was 9, people developed a habit of wiping boogers on the wall and furniture at home. When a blob of mucus was found on a wall, it might be called an IGO - identified gross object. I also recall a UGO - unidentified gross object - stuck on a particular spot on the bedroom wall. It was right where you entered the room, below a styrofoam mock-up of one of those traffic signs that said "BUMP." Nobody knew what the hell it was. Sometimes those were produced when you got a piece of food stuck between your teeth and you spit it out in a projectile fashion.

After IGO's began filling our walls, "I.G.Y." began filling our airwaves. What does the title of the song stand for? It stands for International Geophysical Year - a period that ran from July 1957 through December 1958.

What was the song actually about? Although it was a hit in 1982, the topic seems tailor-made for the 2020s. I read an article a few years ago that said the song was about scientific arrogance. It was about scientists having unrealistic ideas and trying to impose them on everyone despite being at odds with objective facts. This inspired lines like, "90 minutes from New York to Paris." It was like "I am the science."

The International Geophysical Year itself seemed to defy objective facts. The event defined a "year" as being 18 months, like we're on Mars or something. It's like how the CIA just invents new oceans or how The View insisted the square root of 2 is a rational number.

What a glorious time to be - oh, wait.

"Someone Could Lose A Heart Tonight" by Eddie Rabbitt

1981 / #15

Rate Your Music score: 3.22 out of 5!

Back in 1981-82, this lost hit brang amusement to 3rd graders far and wide.

Each day, kids at school would sit there in class and sing this song with new lyrics. They called it "Someone Could Throw A Dart Tonight."

Wait, no, that wasn't it. I think it was "Someone Could Wreck A Cart Tonight." Or maybe it was "Someone Could Eat A Tart Tonight." Yeah, that was it!

For reference, this record was a hit right at the same time as "Harden My Heart" by Quarterflash. There was a kid in one of my classes who was about 5 years older than everyone else who sat there in class singing new lyrics for that song: "I'm gonna farten my fart...I'm gonna swallow my beer." He also came up with new lyrics for the Christmas song "Silver Bells": "Silver bells...Your momma smells."

Years after his heyday, Eddie Rabbitt went on a crusade against rap lyrics. In 1992, he wrote a letter to Billboard in which he groaned, "Are we becoming a nation that is just too cool to care?" On a 1991 album, Eddie included a song called "C-Rap (Country Rap)", which protested against "dirty talking on the radio"...

Silly Rabbitt!

"Into You" by Giant Steps

1989 / #58

Rate Your Music score: 2.92 out of 5!

This is the third and final entry of the Salmonella Three - 3 lost hits that ruled the radio during my bout with salmonella.

I always confused Giant Steps with Times Two, even though Giant Steps' vocals sounded more like Scritti Politti. And, unlike Times Two, Giant Steps appeared on A&M Records. And trust me, anyone who has ever come across their 45's knows this.

A&M did not always use the sturdiest material to press its records. By the late 1980s, its singles were on such cheap styrene that they're practically transparent if examined in a certain light. It's like the clandestine Soviet records that were pressed on x-ray sheets. And they last about as many plays before they start to sound fuzzy.

A&M's Herb Alpert blamed radio stations for wearing out promotional copies of records, yet much of that was because A&M used such flimsy material. But when you're talking about the singles sold in record stores, perhaps more blame rests with companies like Panasonic that sold turntables that had a stylus that seemed specifically designed to wear down styrene 45's. Record collecting websites have tried letting the world know about Panasonic's swindle.

A website comment says styrene records were "'cue-it-once' items" at radio stations. This meant you should only cue it up once before copying it to cartridge. The second try would leave a scratching sound at the beginning of the brand new record.

Years after Giant Steps mania - and before record collecting became gentrified - folks on the public Internet searched in earnest for the duo's old singles. They expressed extreme constipation that every copy they found sounded scratchy.

But even today, old lost hits still sometimes spin away on turntables in home offices far and wide.

"It's Only Love" by Simply Red

1989 / #57

Rate Your Music score: 3.16 out of 5!

This is the second entry of the Salmonella Three - so named because these 3 entries are for songs that dominated the airwaves while I had salmonella.

Simply Red had a couple songs that were already lost hits by the time "It's Only Love" came out. When those songs fell off the charts, that was it for those songs. With major radio stations becoming increasingly conservative, that was likely because of controversy surrounding them - though these controversies were actually pretty mild. I heard "It's Only Love" much more than I ever heard the band's two earlier lost hits - even though the others charted much higher.

Perhaps radio played it more to atone for not playing the others anymore. But it too was gone rather quickly.

The hairstyle sported by Simply Red's Mick Hucknall was not unique. Check out this old scare film about a little girl who ruins everything she borrows, including library books and other people's records...

This entry might not be the last of Simply Red that we see on this blog.

"Driven Out" by the Fixx

1989 / #55

Rate Your Music score: 3.51 out of 5!

This is the first of a series of entries I call the Salmonella Three.

Each of these 3 records charted in early 1989 and peaked in the 50s on the Hot 100. All 3 are by acts from England. I call these entries the Salmonella Three because they were on the airwaves when I had salmonella when I was a high school sophomore. This bout with salmonella ruined entirely my George Washington Weekend. I think I also missed about 5 days of school, which was about 185 fewer than I wish I had missed that year.

These days, they close down schools for 2 years over a handful of COVID cases, but in 1989, these same officials took the opposite approach for other illnesses. That extreme is bad too. Thanks to their doublethink, they have absolutely no credibility whatsoever. But county officials made a rare foray into science when they correctly attributed this salmonella outbreak to contaminated drinking water. Usually, they just blame the "drought" when our water tastes weird - even if it's been raining nonstop. But putting the blame where it belongs can't bring back my George Washington Weekend.

"Driven Out" was a hit at the time. For a long time, I've confused it with another lost hit: "Cuts You Up" by Peter Murphy, which coincidentally also peaked at #55. But the words to "Driven Out" seem to be about alienation, a phenomenon that has only heightened in the decades since. If only we could have our free spaces of the 2010s back, but those have been driven out by the bottomless fascism of the 2020s. Thanks a million, media.

Not everyone appreciated the apparent message of "Driven Out." Some folks were defined by their immaturity, and they used the song as a basis for an X-rated joke. They recycled this joke from one inspired by a radio commercial for a new McDonald's location.

Another thing I remember about having salmonella was that there was one evening when someone kept ripping silent-but-deadly bunker blasts and stinking up the living room while I was laying down. It was lovely.

I'm surprised people weren't driven out of the living room!

"Funky, Funky Xmas" by New Kids On The Block

Did not chart

I don't usually give entries to tracks that did not make the Hot 100, but this one was so idiotic that I couldn't resist.

"Funky, Funky Xmas" was the flip side of the New Kids' 1989 hit "This One's For The Children" but apparently was not listed on the chart. For what it's worth, that single has a dismal 1.43 as its average Rate Your Music score. The same Christmas records from as far back as the 1940s keep reappearing on the Hot 100 every holiday season, but "Funky, Funky Xmas" just didn't have as much staying power.

One reason why Christmas oldies rechart each year is that many radio stations on the Hot 100 panel switch to a format of all holiday music each season, yet are not dropped from the panel during that time. This temporary format blows off many listeners who hope to hear the station's regular format instead. By the time all these listeners return, it's time for the next holiday cycle. But a growing factor in the annual chart reappearance of old Christmas songs is that the music of the past few years is just not a mass appeal medium like the big pop hits of our day were.

"Funky, Funky Xmas" makes generous use of the vibraslap - that instrument that sounds like a rattlesnake. Every time I hear that instrument, I think of the 1970s police dramas where the cop and the villain are stalking each other in a warehouse. You can imagine the cop and robber slinking around and peeping out from behind walls as the spooky music plays, and every so often, the vibraslap goes off. The rattling gets louder when one of them pulls their gun. "Tonight on The Rookies...Vibraslap!"

(Random trivia about The Rookies that doesn't fit anywhere else: When Viacom began distributing reruns of The Rookies in syndication, they butchered some episodes and completely skipped others because they thought they were too "violent" - even though they had aired on prime time network TV without any trouble years earlier.)

This song came out at the peak of society's New Kids infatuation. In the '90s, we turned the page on that sorry chapter (but sadly not much else). In 1991, the New Kids' Donnie Wahlberg was charged with arson for allegedly pouring vodka on a carpet in a hallway of a Louisville hotel and setting it ablaze. Two of the group's guards were charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly abusing hotel employees. This followed a series of other incidents, including one in which a young man claimed Donnie attacked him for refusing to give up his seat on a plane. Vibraslap!

The hotel episode caused a Kentucky concert by the group to be canceled. I first heard about the cancellation when it was announced on the radio, but little did I know the sordid details yet. At first, I just thought it was due to illness, as when Paul McCartney canceled not long before.

As for New Kids On The Block, little has been heard from this ridiculous group since.

"Beat Of A Heart" by Scandal featuring Patty Smyth

1985 / #41

Rate Your Music score: 3.3 out of 5!

"Sometimes a fool gets lucky and wins...Sometimes the innocent pay for an old man's sin..."

This is what real music sounds like!

Even real music like this can have lyrics that are hard to interpret. Yet there must be some meaning. "Beat Of A Heart" isn't like "MMMBop" or "Nu Nu." But if the meaning of a song isn't clear, listeners interpret it to their heart's desire.

When I first heard this song, these words caught my ear: "Sometimes a fool gets lucky and wins...Sometimes the innocent pay for an old man's sin." I immediately thought it was about Ronald Reagan winning the election. But before I even said anything, someone repeated these lines in a voice imitating ol' Ronnie. At the time, it seemed so obvious, and I wasn't the only person who thought of this.

These days, when I think of the 1984 election, I start laughing because one of my 6th grade teachers got angry when everyone waited too long to do their election project. But the result of this election was no laughing matter.

Decades later, I saw Scandal a couple times in concert. They put on a fine show. And Patty was chewin' bubble gum! She didn't bubble. But she was chewin' bubble gum!

"It's Inevitable" by Charlie

1983 / #38

Rate Your Music score: 3.08 out of 5!

Who doesn't love physical comedy?

I came up with an idea for a TV show that would be just like Hee Haw except that people would spill stuff more. The hilarious thrills and spills would help satisfy the public's appetite for slapstick humor.

A time-honored staple of physical comedy is the classic pie-in-the-face gag. It is funny because it is. I'm sure that many suits and tablecloths have been ruined by this routine in movies and on TV.

And the British band Charlie came through!

The video for "It's Inevitable" is set in a bakery. It has one of those carts like that in a local bakery we frequented when I was about 4. The only thing inevitable about a video set in a bakery is that there will be a massive pie fight!

This pie-smashing brawl lays hulk to the bakery's entire inventory and prompts a visit by police. Even a harmless scale gets pied!

The sequence that begins at 3:15 is strikingly similar to an Electric Company segment that first aired several years earlier.

Charlie never got to enjoy their moment in the sun. "It's Inevitable" peaked at #38 for one week. The band never charted higher. During the week it was #38, American Top 40 - with Keri Tombazian filling in for Casey Kasem - mistakenly played "Pieces Of Ice" by Diana Ross, another lost hit, in that slot instead. This is sort of like when Shana received the Q-102 treatment, but at least Casey was able to correct the Charlie-related error the following week.

It wasn't inevitable that such mistakes were corrected. AT40 for the weekend of December 15, 1984, switched around "Hello Again" by the Cars and "You're The Inspiration" by Chicago. The Case did not correct this gnawing switcheroo. Also, my very first suspension from school began during the reign of that week's chart. That was in 6th grade when I was chased out of the school building by a gang of assailants. My "crime" was exiting the building. The punishment caused me to miss the field trip to Cincinnati Milacron. For decades after, every time my family drove past Cincinnati Milacron on Interstate 71, I retold that story.

"Gangsta" by Bell Biv DeVoe

1992 / #21

Rate Your Music score: 2.74 out of 5!

I'm surprised this lost hit doesn't have a better Rate Your Music score, because I remember it being praised by the vast majority of the American public. Back when this song was a hit, I got in a big argument with a family member about its degree of popularity, but I think reaching #21 is good enough.

There's lots to say about this legendary R&B trio from Boston. One day we were in a Pizza Hut, and someone noticed that a young man working there looked just like Bell Biv DeVoe's Michael Bivins! He had the same glasses and everything.

That was also around the time Bell Biv DeVoe was part of a big Taco Bell promotion. Taco Bell distributed collectible 32-ounce plastic cups featuring artwork created by the group. One day, my mom's car broke down in front of a local shopping center. Employees of a nearby Taco Bell brang out a Bell Biv DeVoe cup full of water to put in the radiator.

I ended up with that cup, but it only lasted a few years before the base of it started cracking. Then somehow part of it melted on the inside of the door of the stove.

It turns out the cup was part of a charity drive, so now I feel guilty because Taco Bell gave us the cup instead of having us buy it. Other acts who participated in the Taco Bell campaign were the Scorpions, Diana Ross, George Michael, and M.C. Hammer.

I was inspired to include "Gangsta" on this blog by something that happened a few months ago. There was some big rally or protest. I don't even remember what it was about. It drew counterprotesters who drowned out speakers by erupting into a chant that sounded exactly like that from "Gangsta"! What I'm talking about is the chant that starts at 26 seconds into the above video and is heard several times throughout the song. It wasn't words being chanted, but just one note that was held for a long time.

You take me as a prankster, but that really did happen!

"Look Out Any Window" by Bruce Hornsby & the Range

1988 / #35

Rate Your Music score: 3.41 out of 5!

Look out any window, Bruce, and you'll see it's raining.

I saw Bruce and his band play at Riverbend back in 1988, and they put on a good show. But let me tell you about the weather that day. The Extreme Weather Watch website shows Cincinnati got almost 3 inches of rain that day - second-highest of the whole year. That was in a year with 40 inches. The average back then was 39. (It's 42 now.)

That was our "drought." Seriously, our local media called it that.

Every. Single. Day.

That was all they talked about. I have no idea why.

There is credible scholarship of a 1988 drought covering much of the country. But trust me, that drought didn't come here. Understand? I'm particularly steamed at our local media because I developed a rash that lasted for months from sitting on the rain-soaked grass at Riverbend. According to these outlets, that didn't happen, because there was a "drought" here. These sources were essentially climate change deniers.

But Bruce and his Range could be counted on for quality music. Some of my high school classmates weren't mature or intelligent enough to appreciate it, so that's one of the reasons I enjoyed it. These schoolmates also showed rapidly expanding paranoia. Their paranoia and weak intellect was a bad combination, and I hate it so much.

When I went back to school for sophomore year, I took art. Sometimes, the teacher turned on the radio for us to listen to. My pals and I kept goofing off by dancing around and lip-syncing to the songs on the radio in a hilariously exaggerated fashion, often using art supplies as a microphone. "Look Out Any Window" was one of the first songs we did this with. It might have been the first.

Look out for the big boys tellin' you everything you're gonna do!

"Standing Still" by Jewel

2001 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 3.08 out of 5!

Yay! Crooked teeth!

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, you were considered a weirdo if you didn't have crooked teeth. This somehow lasted to a lesser extent until even after MTV hardly showed music videos anymore. Sadly, you just don't see crooked teeth much these days. You're legally required to be magazine perfect now.

So, by the time Jewel became popular, everyone made a big deal of the singer's crooked teeth. Twenty years earlier, it wouldn't have been a big issue.

Jewel mania was going strong in the late 1990s. That was when I planned to enroll at NKU again. I kept coming to campus to stave off the misery of the economic malaise of the era. I call it my "outside agitator" phase. In one of the buildings, there was a poster that included a small photo of Jewel. I noticed that someone had blown a bubble with bubble gum and stuck it over Jewel's face. The bub was still inflated. It made it appear as if Jewel was blowing a bubble.

Jewel was also the target of what became known as the "frisbee incident"...

Back in 1996, Jewel was playing at a festival at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C. Someone threw a frisbee at the stage, and it bounced off Jewel's guitar. Jewel promptly walked off stage. She wasn't standing still for that!

There was also a bizarre episode in 2004 when people kept driving past her tour bus after a concert in New Hampshire and yelling profanities.

Jewel. The last crooked teeth celebrity!

"I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down" by Paul Young

1985 / #13

Rate Your Music score: 3.18 out of 5!

This record was actually a remake. Ann Peebles released a version of it in 1973, but this version did not reach the Hot 100. I never got to hear of this song until Paul Young came along. And man, were the circumstances hilarious!

In our tiny back yard, we had a playhouse. It was just a wooden one-room structure that wasn't even tall enough to stand in. I remember standing on top of it and yelling something about Studio See, but I couldn't stand in it when I was older than about 6.

By the time I was about 12, the playhouse had rotted so much that we had to tear it down. It had an "attic" that was just a storage space a few inches high, and we found it filled with Rold Gold and Marlboro packages that had been surprisingly well-preserved. Some teenagers had apparently gathered at the playhouse and ate pretzels and smoked cigarettes back before my family moved there. We started tearing the playhouse down using a saw, but some neighborhood kids came along and knocked the rest of it over with just a few good kicks.

We thought we had it all set up, we thought we had the perfect plan, but those boys made quick work of that playhouse!

The best part is that the company hired by the city of Highland Heights to collect trash inexplicably would not take the remnants of the playhouse. So we had to wait until it was dark and drive around the area to dispose of pieces of it. We drove down Johns Hill Road and up Licking Pike and kept throwing big pieces of wood out the car window.

Finally, on Decoursey Pike, we found a little pull-off where we dumped the rest of the playhouse.

None of this was quite legal, of course. But the garbage collectors had forced our hand by refusing to pick up this waste. If anyone broke the law, it was the trash collecting firm, which broke the law by proxy.

The entire episode was uproarious but in a shocking sort of way.

Then came Paul Young.

Right after we tore the playhouse down, Paul released a new single. It was called..."I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down"!

Now that was funny!

And, 5 years after the remnants of the playhouse were dumped at that pull-off, there were still pieces of it laying there!

Also, that was right by a church where they took us in high school where someone tried to flush a Mello Yello can down the toilet.

"Rock 'N' Roll Is King" by ELO

1983 / #19

Rate Your Music score: 3.1 out of 5!

"Come along with me...To a Land of Make-Believe..."

At some point in our childhood, we all stop watching children's TV shows and start looking at them as objects of ridicule.

In my day, there was a trifecta of PBS kids' shows that aired each weekday afternoon: Sesame Street, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and The Electric Company. When I was 9, I started making fun of these shows constantly. I made up tasteless Sesame Street fanfic. I was shocked when I entered 5th grade and they had us watch The Electric Company in the classroom, as I had outgrown it years before. Wawwwww...wokka! Wawwwww...wokka! Waw waw waw waw waw wurma wurma wurm, waw waw waw waw waw wurma wurma wurm...splat! (I never knew how to spell that until a vulgar America Online troll talked about it. And no, it wasn't me who made those posts. That would have been pretty hard, because I was on a big vacation out west when some of them appeared, and that was before motels had Internet access.)

When I was 9 or 10, any popular song risked having the words changed to mention a Sesame Street character. "Overkill" by Men At Work became "Groverkill." "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" by Culture Club became "Do You Really Want To Bert Me." There's another song like that which is crying out to be profiled here as a lost hit sometime soon, but I'm warning you ahead of time that it's going to be another trip into adult contemporary land.

But for now, let's talk about a high-energy lost hit from ELO!

The timing was perfect for this hit, because this was right when my ridicule of the aforementioned TV shows was going strong. When I first heard this song, some of the lyrics caught my ear: "Come along with me...To a Land of Make-Believe."

I burst into laughter, because I thought it was a reference to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. That was where the trolley emerged and they had all those puppets and the Museum-Go-Round. It also starred Betty Aberlin, who was one of these celebrities like Dick Clark who seemed to never age. Probably the reason she never aged was that they kept showing episodes that were at least 10 years old.

An online commenter said he got a toy version of the trolley when he was too old for it.

Now all we need is something from Zoom.

"Don't Talk" by Larry Lee

1982 / #81

Rate Your Music score: 3.62 out of 5!

I'm shocked that this record by the man from Springfield, Missouri, only reached #81, because I heard it all the time back in 1982. Radio played it generously.

The main reason I'm giving this song an entry is to highlight a bizarre weekly countdown show that aired at the time. Remember, this was 1982, when even Wink Martindale had his own countdown. The countdown I'm talking about here wasn't Wink Martindale though.

This countdown was way off from the Hot 100. I knew of the Hot 100, thanks to Casey Kasem's radio and TV shows. But this show clearly didn't use the Hot 100. It wasn't even close. I don't think it was a survey from just one station. I can understand those being off. Those should be off. I think this countdown was actually broadcast nationwide.

One Sunday, we had the radio on, and I heard this countdown. After the #2 song was played, I noticed there were 2 records that were played on the radio constantly that hadn't been counted down yet, so one of them had to be #1. They were "Even The Nights Are Better" by Air Supply and "Don't Talk" by Larry Lee.

There was no way in hell they'd put Air Supply at #1. Am I right?

Well??? Am I right?????

You guessed it! Air Supply was #1.

Even the days were brighter when I stopped listening to that countdown.

"Stray Cat Strut" by the Stray Cats

1982 / #3

Rate Your Music score: 3.49 out of 5!

For a record that peaked at #3, this exciting lost hit sure disappeared from radio quickly. The way that it vanished from the airwaves is like one of those songs that hit #58 that you heard on MTV or the car radio once or twice.

For those unfamiliar with the Stray Cats, they were a Long Island band that based their sound on 1950s rockabilly. But I think they looked like one of those '80s bands that would be played on MTV or some of our small local radio stations, while being completely ignored by our big stations. These acts are generally respected now, even if radio gatekeepers used to shun them.

The "Stray Cat Strut" video includes a brief shot that reminds me of something that happened in high school. One of the Cats holds up a metal trash can lid as a shield to protect himself from eggs being thrown by an angry woman. I remember people using trash can lids as shields in high school because of schoolmates throwing things all the time. I wonder what armor class that was in Dungeons & Dragons.

The Stray Cats' Brian Setzer had a hilarious feud with Big Country's Stuart Adamson. I remember MTV talking about it, back when they used to call every new album an "effort." At least they didn't call it a "CD" before anyone had a CD player, like the legendary Shadoe Stevens did.

For years in the 1990s, I worked at our local public library. The Stray Cats still made albums and did concerts then. When they came to town, a woman who worked at the library went to their concert. The venue kicked her out because she took photos. Upon hearing of this, another woman who worked at the library said of the venue, "They sound like a bunch of communists." I got an image in my mind of Mao Zedong barging into a concert hall and dragging people out if they had a camera.

Yeah, don't cross my path!

"Never Thought (That I Could Love)" by Dan Hill

1987 / #43

Rate Your Music score: 2.15 out of 5!

"Can I touch you..."

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!"

Now that was funny!

"Fool Moon Fire" by Walter Egan

1983 / #46

Rate Your Music score: 3.42 out of 5!

The power of suggestion!

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.

"Tell Me Why" by Wynonna Judd

1993 / #77

Rate Your Music score: 3.34 out of 5!

Is it possible to drive into a fart?

Discuss.

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.

"Silhouette" by Kenny G

1988 / #13

Rate Your Music score: 1.99 out of 5!

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.

"Election Day" by Arcadia

1985 / #6

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

"We're coming up on re-election day..."

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!

"I Like" by Men Without Hats

1983 / #84

Rate Your Music score: 3.51 out of 5!

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.

"Overjoyed" by Stevie Wonder

1986 / #24

Rate Your Music score: 3.45 out of 5!

Ker-plop!

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.

"My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)" by Chilliwack

1981 / #22

Rate Your Music score: 3.48 out of 5!

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.

"She Ain't Pretty" by the Northern Pikes

1992 / #86

Rate Your Music score: 3.39 out of 5!

"She ain't pretty, she just looks that way..."

Let's go postal!

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.

"Hippychick" by Soho

1990 / #14

Rate Your Music score: 3.26 out of 5!

"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.

Also, Soho had nothing to do with Sohio.

"Stay The Night" by Benjamin Orr

1986 / #24

Rate Your Music score: 3.48 out of 5!

Remember this "dirty" song by the Cars bassist?

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.

"I Did It" by the Dave Matthews Band

2001 / #71

Rate Your Music score: 2.32 out of 5!

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.

He did it! Guilty as charged!

"Alive Again" by Chicago

1978 / #14

Rate Your Music score: 3.08 out of 5!

"I am a lima bean..."

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.

"I Want You" by Shana

1989 / #40

Rate Your Music score: 2.86 out of 5!

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.

We don't stop 'til we reach the top!