"C-I-T-Y" by John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band

1985 / #18

Rate Your Music score: 2.55 out of 5!

Remember the city craze of 1985?

With songs like "You Belong To The City" and "We Built This City", cities loomed large. That may have also been the same year I borrowed a book from the public library about the design of buildings in several of America's major cities. Cities were the home of pioneers, since that was before gentrification ruined our cities.

It was also the year of towns. We had "Small Town" and "Life In A Northern Town." Bruce Springsteen gave us "My Hometown." When that song came on the radio in 7th grade home ec, it prompted a response from a particularly troubled student. He declared, "My hometown is Pennsylvania, Kentucky!" Also, he used to fight by biting his adversaries.

And John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band graced us with "C-I-T-Y." This memorable song is now a lost hit.

While John is a real person, it appears as if we can't say the same for ol' Beav. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, the band got the name Beaver Brown from a color of paint. I'm not sure how much we can still trust Wikipedia though, since the CIA makes so many edits that are full of disinformation. If anyone would make up something about John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band, it's the CIA.

The band's musical spelling lesson was all the rage in the fall of 1985. I remember one time we were in the car on Interstate 71, and I noticed the people in the car next to us were spelling out "C-I-T-Y" with their hands - just like in the video. So I knew what song was on their car radio.

Apparently, this band is still around, and has been in existence since 1972.

"Fool's Game" by Michael Bolton

1983 / #82

Rate Your Music score: 3.04 out of 5!

Michael Bolton a hard rocker?

I repeat: Michael Bolton a hard rocker?????

This lost hit appeared in 1983, when I really didn't appreciate all the interesting music that was out there. I had a few rough times with some things in life during the preceding time frame. Fourth grade was a disaster (but still somehow less of a disaster than high school). Even outside of school, there were a couple of incidents that still stuck in my craw.

So I hated to lose, and almost anyone who challenged Men At Work's dominance met my wrath. Take the Eurythmics and the Police, for instance. These were generally decent bands. But they incurred the displeasure of the Great Royal Tim when their hit singles prevented Men At Work from charting higher.

I think I liked "Jeopardy" by the Greg Kihn Band. But even Greg wasn't safe from my disappointment, because he was one of many music stars of the era who appeared in annoying radio or TV commercials for soft drinks. I think it was the same for Laura Branigan.

Anyway, back to Michael Bolton. "Fool's Game" only peaked at #82, so it wasn't much of a threat to Men At Work's chart prominence. But Michael elicited my chagrin because stations kept playing this track when they could have been playing Men At Work instead.

It's actually surprising that this lost hit only got to #82. I know competition was fierce in 1983, but maybe the sound was just too familiar. I think "Fool's Game" sounded a little bit like the previously popular "Shadows Of The Night" by Pat Benatar, so maybe that sound wasn't considered new anymore. But, a couple years later, "Crazy In The Night (Barking At Airplanes)" by Kim Carnes - which is now a lost hit - actually did pretty well on the chart, and it had that same sound.

A few years after "Fool's Game", Michael reemerged as an MOR crooner. I kept reminding folks that he had that action-packed rocker "Fool's Game" a few years earlier, but somehow that song had been consigned to the memory hole. Everyone thought I was making it up.

Michael Bolton. The man, the myth, the legend!

"High Time" by Styx

1983 / #48

Rate Your Music score: 2.64 out of 5!

Cashbox called this lost hit a "strong defense of freedom of expression." What a novel idea!

These days, there are entire agencies to find things to get offended about. Things weren't as bad in the 1980s, but they weren't perfectly hunky-dory either. Our cable system took forever to get MTV, and Q-102 reportedly refused to play certain songs because "morality" groups threatened to picket the station's advertisers. According to an online post, the records in question included "Relax" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and "I Want Your Sex" by George Michael. The picketers were probably just bluffing, as I don't remember anyone picketing Campbell County Chevrolet because WCLU played "Relax." (This station went under just weeks before George's hit was released.)

As for "High Time", I didn't hear it much when it was a current hit, but I know I did hear it some. That's sufficient for it to be profiled here as a lost hit. It's like the kid in school who you didn't see much but you remember because they understood free expression better than school officials did.

What makes this track especially amusing is that ARSA has a WCLU survey sheet that mistakenly (?) calls it "High Times" - as in High Times magazine. There was one time in high school when an anti-drug speaker came, and he held up a copy of High Times. He called it a "druggie magazine." At another one of his presentations, we were all supposed to keep stomping our feet and flailing our arms in unison.

In the lost hit profiled in this entry, singer Dennis DeYoung declared, "I see the kids of a new generation...And they won't stand for this mind control." I guess he never saw my high school. Outside of my school, however, the 1980s were better than today. These days, everyone - even at other schools - just snaps into line.

"Alibis" by Sérgio Mendes

1984 / #29

Rate Your Music score: 3.13 out of 5!

Although this lost hit was credited to Sérgio Mendes, the lead vocal was by Joe Pizzulo. Joe was the guy who attempted the Lyle Alzado look in the above video. This single was at the tail end of the era in which everyone tried to sound like Michael McDonald.

And the beat of this song still comes in handy after 41 years. Every time someone accuses me of something I didn't do, and I have an alibi that proves I didn't do it, I start humming this beat. That usually shuts them up right quick, but some people are allergic to facts, so they continue to keep up with their bullshit.

Probably the most noteworthy example of this was in 1997 when one of the usual suspects on the Internet accused me of hacking his ISP and knocking it offline. The problem with this was that it went offline while I was on a little road trip - specifically, the one that included Mount Mitchell - and this was before wi-fi access was as ubiquitous as it is today. Unless you seriously think I lugged my Power Mac and dialup modem into a motel room, I think we can establish my innocence. I couldn't broadcast myself humming "Alibis" across the Internet back then, but I'm sure I hummed it to myself when the accusation arose.

For years and years, there has also been a strange tendency by some to charge that anyone who agrees with me on any online forum is actually me using a sockpuppet account. That has been debunked so many times it'll make your face spin. Some people just can't accept that their opinions are in the minority. I've often had an alibi on these occasions too, but sometimes the person who I allegedly impersonated appears in plain sight in a video. This proves they're real people, but for some, even that isn't proof enough.

The only times I did use a phony account were the times I wasn't actually accused. I once made an account on a dialup bulletin board with the name of a porn publisher (not one of the big 3), and it was met with just a shrug. Later, I made an Internet account with an obviously fake name. I didn't even try to hide that it was me. Only one person ever made an issue of it, and he was the same guy who accused me of hacking his ISP.

Dum-da-dum-dum-dummm-dum, dum-da-dum-dum-dummm-dum...

"Talk To Me" by Fiona

1985 / #64

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

Let's talk about MTV Top 20 Video Countdown. A weird thing, that countdown. MTV used to compile its own weekly ranking of its top 20 hottest music videos - or "video songs", as it called them. This program debuted in early 1984 and apparently ran all the way until 1998 - which seemed like a completely different world from when the show first aired. The show started in the days of 45 RPM singles and the Atari 800, and ended in the era of MP3's and the World Wide Web.

I always watched this countdown in the mid-'80s, when it was hosted by Mark Goodman. But at some point, I gave up on it, because I was hardly ever allowed to watch it anymore. That may have been for the better, because then I had more time to spend on dialup bulletin boards and road map collecting instead.

In our last entry, I made a reference to a 1985 installment of this show in which Mark wore a shirt that was so ridiculous that I couldn't contain my laughter. I said it had been posted on YouTube but later taken down. Well, guess what? It's back...

And trust me, nobody except Mark Goodman wore anything that hideous in 1985. I was around in 1985. I remember what people wore. Nobody wore anything like that. This is like when someone made a webpage about how they found a 1970s clothes catalog and thought that guys back then wore oversized orange shirts that looked like a bath towel.

I'm not going to wade through that entire episode. Not even the interview where Molly Ringwald appears to be chewing bubble gum. Since we're on the topic of Molly Ringwald, I should also mention that one of my 8th grade teachers later railed against The Breakfast Club much as she crusaded against the Benjamin Orr hit song "Stay The Night."

In that episode of MTV's countdown, Fiona's lost hit appeared at #18. I remember this tune clanking out of the boom box in the den, but I think it got more exposure on MTV. Fiona once told Dick Clark that her parents hated radio so much that they didn't let her listen to it. That's what a lot of adults thought about MTV in the mid-'80s, even though they thought radio stations that played the same music were just fine.

My folks must have really hated MTV's top 20 countdown. They tolerated it at first, but eventually, they went to great lengths to stop me from watching it. When I declared I would watch it, the resulting conversation was like the Simpsons episode where Marge tries to get cartoons banned and Bart keeps saying he's gonna relax and go watch some toonies.

"Go For Soda" by Kim Mitchell

1985 / #86

Rate Your Music score: 3.11 out of 5!

The man from Sarnia, Ontario, gave us this lost hit, which is about one of the strangest topics of any record ever to chart.

This song is about how if you've had a long day and you find yourself in any sort of disagreement, and you feel like angrily chugging beer and smoking cigarettes, you should drink soft drinks instead. To drive home this point, the video features Kim jumping out of a TV screen and kicking a cigarette out of an ashtray.

Remember, this song was from 40 years ago, so there were still fresh memories of soft drinks being better than they are now. The song was popular around the time most such products - at least those sold in the U.S. - added more weird additives. These ingredients are the main reason these products aren't as good as they once were. Other viands have also acquired more strange additives since then - bubble gum being another prime example. As a connoisseur of soft drinks, I've noticed that the major brands were much better before the mid-'80s. Makers of these products seemed to be admitting as much during the brief "throwback" craze of several years ago, when they sold varieties of sodas that were promoted as using real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, a substitute that did not appear until the 1980s. They even used 1970s logos. Supposedly, they still sell this line of bevs, but you can't get them around here anymore (of course).

In fact, it is reported that 1985 - the very year "Go For Soda" charted - was coincidentally the exact same year the last major soft drinks sold in the U.S. switched away from real sugar. And it was the year of the New Coke debacle. It was also around the time RC ran a commercial where the KGB shows up at a get-together where people are guzzling RC, and that's the end of it...

I goed for the soda. I think Kim's tune appeared on MTV's top 20 countdown that aired on Friday nights. I remember watching this show and smuggling soft drinks and Fritos in from the kitchen, which prompted the oldsters to hide the bottle cap opener. I also remember a 1985 episode of this countdown in which host Mark Goodman wore a shirt that looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. That very episode later showed up on YouTube, but it's gone now.

And I was in 7th grade in 1985-86. That was when soda sales saw a spike locally because our water system got so contaminated. It's like how water in the 1890s wasn't safe to drink so people drank a lot more beer. On the day our water crisis began, they let us out of school early, and a kid from school threw my bookbag onto U.S. 27 in the rain and a truck ran over it.

The mid-1980s were pivotal in soft drink history!

"Who's Behind The Door?" by Zebra

1983 / #61

Rate Your Music score: 3.63 out of 5!

Forgot about this one?

This lost hit by this New Orleans band got a few airings on MTV in my day. And the video dredges up a memorable battle we had with our TV set.

Fast-forward to 1:39 in the above video. For no apparent reason, some kids appear on a computer monitor - and they're green. When I saw this video when I was growing up, I thought our TV was acting up again - because our TV used to do this very thing.

For several years, images on our TV screen - including people - would frequently turn green. If you'd stomp your foot, it might return to normal. Sometimes I'd be in another room when my parents were watching TV. I knew the TV was turning green when I heard feet stomping in the living room.

This set also cut off the edges of the picture. I thought U2 was just called 2, because the title and artist tags that appeared on one of their videos on MTV were cut off.

We invested much of our hard-earned money into trying to get the TV fixed. It seems like we lost much of 1981 because the TV was in the shop so much. But nothing fixed it. The TV would still occasionally turn green until we got rid of it.

If I remember correctly, we sold this set to a guy my dad knew at work for something like a dollar. Later, I was told that the TV worked beautifully after that guy purchased it from us. By the time we sold it, we had also gotten a small set for the den, because nobody could agree on what to watch. That's Incredible! often lost out to college basketball.

The TV that we sold was replaced by a new set that worked great for years. But it was reduced to shambles when a power outage somehow shorted out most of our appliances. The electric company refused to accept any responsibility whatsoever, and we only got something like $10 from our insurer. The TV was probably the biggest loss. That was right after I moved out when I was in college, so I didn't have standing to handle the situation my way. If it was up to me, a minimum of one complimentary booger would have been imminent. An insulting booger would have been even better!

I now recall that having the extra set for the den didn't solve our problems completely. People who ended up watching their shows in the den often left garbage laying around and were always stinking up the place. It got to be as bad as a public restroom.

Who's behind the door? In our household in much of the 1980s, whoever was behind the door of the den must have been a slob!

"One" by the Bee Gees

1989 / #7

Rate Your Music: 3.14 out of 5!

Was I ever glad when these guys came back! And good on Power 94½ for adding this record in a timely manner - which is more than I can say for some other pop stations.

Sometimes, a previously big musical artist will go so long without any major successes that people start ridiculing them as just a remnant of the past that will never stage a comeback. But when people hear their music again, they realize they were actually a pretty good act after all. I think that's sort of what happened with the Bee Gees. In the late 1980s, we dug up our old Bee Gees records so we could ponder just how far back in the past the band was. It actually hadn't been that long since their peak. The equivalent now would be to dig up music from the mid-2010s, which actually seems futuristic to the graying population of today. Yet, as we were listening to our Bee Gees discs, we decided they were actually still a pretty good group.

We also unearthed an order form included with a Bee Gees album where you could order a Bee Gees poster with "a striking yellow background."

Music, TV, and other pop culture of the late '80s was often stale and trite. It got to the point where some of it literally made me angry. I thought the Bee Gees were far more exciting than most of what was going on then.

So "One" came at the perfect time!

About a year after "One", a weird battle cry emerged among some of my pals: "One, one, do it again!" It sounded like a mash-up of the chorus of this song with that of a Kinks lost hit. I have no idea what the hell it was supposed to mean. This saying also had variations that were even sillier and made even less sense.

It's also unfortunate that late '70s nostalgia never has gotten the respect it deserves.

"Just When I Needed You Most" by Randy VanWarmer

1979 / #4

Rate Your Music score: 2.71 out of 5!

Were Jennifer Warnes and Randy VanWarmer separated at birth?

Go look at the video for our previous entry and compare it with this one. You be the judge!

As with Jennifer's lost hit, Randy's tune was popular around the time I attended that summer class just before 1st grade. It was also around the time that most current pop disappeared from local AM radio for a couple years. Much of the then-current music that was played was softer stuff like this. Remember, I was only 6, so I had too much energy to be interested in soft ballads. Thus, the MOR malaise that was soon to get under way blunted my interest in popular music.

I forgot about this song for about 10 years after that. I remembered it when I was flipping through the channels on TV and it was playing on one of those local cable channels that had computerized text ads. Despite radio's preference for softer music, I rarely heard it again after that.

Randy wasn't exclusively an adult contemporary warhorse. He also gave us the minor chart entry "Suzi Found A Weapon." It seems like I may have heard that song once a long time ago and mistook it for the Cars. The Wikipedia article on Randy says "Suzi" went to #1 in Alaska - which is interesting because I didn't know Alaska had its own music chart.

Also, I used to get Randy VanWarmer confused with Michael Johnson, another Coloradan. And I used to get Michael Johnson confused with Michael Jackson.

"I Know A Heartache When I See One" by Jennifer Warnes

1979 / #19

Rate Your Music score: 3.17 out of 5!

There was a brief but interesting period in my life that took place during the summer before 1st grade. That was when I attended some class up at NKU for elementary school kids. I think the teacher was an NKU student working on her degree. It's been 46 years, but I still think about this class a lot.

It wasn't a class for "bad" kids, and anyone could have attended it. The Campbell County Schools did seem to have a strange vendetta against some of us though that lasted for years. But this class didn't have a lot of busywork like our main schools did. People mostly just made filmstrips with one of those do-it-yourself kits and chewed bubble gum. We also made chess pieces out of plaster, and someone famously broke one of the molds.

And the teacher was obsessed with this Jennifer Warnes song. She kept talking about it all the time.

When the regular school year started at my new school, there were several times when this teacher drove me to school. She would always crank the radio every time this song came on.

Her class was also the first place I ever saw a Speak & Spell. Kids got in trouble for pressing the "module select" button to hear the funny sound it made. The teacher thought it would break the Speak & Spell. But why would Texas Instruments make a toy for little kids that was so easy to break just by pressing a button?

This entry ties in with the next entry. And if you like 1979 adult contemporary, then whooooo, man, you're gonna love the next entry even more than this one! If you've stumbled upon some of the YouTube clips, you might know right where this is headed.

"Catch Me I'm Falling" by Real Life

1984 / #40

Rate Your Music score: 3.5 out of 5!

I promised to include more 1983-85 amazingness on this blog, as I try to recreate the pizzazz from before everything fell to shit. The era is rich in some of the best lost hits around, and some of them even have surprise ending stories that we love so much.

This entry is oddly funny yet left me scratching my head.

Peep the first scene in the video. That scene appears to include the band members, and the first thing you notice is that strange effect that makes one of them look like Big Bird. I'm talking about the guy you see from the side.

I wasn't even the only one who noticed this. The first time I saw this video on MTV when I was growing up, someone pointed this out right away.

More importantly, what in the hell is going on? There were a lot of goofy videos on MTV back then. But that scene is one of the most inexplicable that I can recall.

Maybe we need a secret decoder ring to figure it out. I remember when MTV ran ads trying to get hapless suckers to buy a "license" to watch their channel. Maybe they also sold little decoders you could look through like that little red thing that came in a Trix box that made red roads on a map disappear. They probably even had a commercial where some kid said, "Wow!"

Another thing like that is that weird gesture that music stars made in MTV promo bumpers that looked like a lion holding up its paw and moving its claws. What was that all about?

I guess we can't assume the music charts have heard the last of Real Life, because apparently they released a new album as recently as 2020.

"Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive" by Men At Work

1983 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 3.12 out of 5!

Man, I felt good to be alive when this great song charted! But I was absolutely livid that it only peaked at #28, when it should have been a chart-topping smash. This was one of many hit records from that era that WCLU regularly played but Q-102 did not. Unfortunately, only the latter station was on Billboard's Hot 100 panel.

This track came from Men At Work's Cargo album. We rushed out and buyed that LP as soon as it came out. Now, this was right at the end of 4th grade, and my teacher for the second half of the school year was absolutely obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. She was also obsessed with a book titled Babushka. I couldn't make heads or tails out of either book. Evidently, Babushka was about an elderly woman, but I didn't know what the title referred to. After I gave up on the book, the teacher interrogated me and said, "You thought Babushka was a little boy." Actually, I didn't think any such thing. I didn't even know the title referred to a person.

At least I understood one of the other books I read in 4th grade. It seems like during the early part of the school year, I read a Judy Blume book where a bunch of people peed on some stuff. But I might just be imagining this, because our schools around here are so conservative that they probably banned all of Judy Blume's books.

Now, back to Men At Work. My disappointment over the low chart peak of "Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive" knew no bounds. So, for months after the song dropped out of the top 40, I had a ritual I performed each week. Every Sunday morning, when American Top 40 got up to #28, I would kneel for 28 seconds before a folder that had the cover art of the band's Business As Usual LP. Then, at the end of the 28 seconds, I would solemnly salute the folder.

Things weren't business as usual during those months, but sooner or later, we had to accept that Men At Work would probably never be seen in the top 40 again.

"Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" by Judson Spence

1988 / #32

Rate Your Music score: 1.84 out of 5!

Remember this feel-good jam by the man from Pascagoula, Mississippi?

I'm shocked that this record has such a low Rate Your Music score. Power 94½ would have begged to differ with Rate Your Music, as this record seemed to be the glue that held the station together for months on end. This song always provided a much-needed break from the 5 hours of homework I got each night as a high school sophomore.

It even has a feel-good video. Judson throws off his hat - which resembles that worn by Al Lewis of The Uncle Al Show - and dances all over the stage like a madman!

In some ways, however, Judson mania didn't really age well. A website called Pop Dose has an article on Judson's self-titled LP. The piece calls Judson "Robbie Nevil's undescended testicle." The article pokes fun at the tame lyrics of the album's songs. Judson sounds like a guy who enrolls in college and is shocked that there are bars within 10 miles of campus. However, someone replied to that article saying Judson "is a major talent" who later beat alcoholism.

I'm not sure if Judson had any involvement with "Up All Night" by Annica, which happens to bear more than a passing resemblance to "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah." I'm not sure if anyone even noticed, as I don't think Annica's track ever got much radio play. It may have been one of these tracks that you mostly heard on websites that specialized in indie albums - back before Mitch McConnell led a boycott that put these sites out of business because they were based in countries where the government wouldn't support the Iraq War. A senator from my state put indie musicians out of work. Happy now, Mitch?

"Sausalito Summernight" by Diesel

1981 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 3.53 out of 5!

"I put a booger in your root beer..."

All aboard!

This lost hit was about some folks driving a broken-down Rambler up the California coast. Evidently, the outing described in this song went about as well as some of our vacations in the Horizon. Gaskets got blown, money got wasted on repairs, and about the only thing missing was the obligatory rain or arguing about who has to go to the bathroom or acting up at Druther's and being sent back to the car.

All in all, a disaster of a trip!

Suitably enough, the record charted in 1981 - the same year as our Chicago trip in which the Horizon broke down on the median of a busy highway and a group of people had to push it out of the way. (This is not to be confused with the famous Par-King trip of 1997.)

The song also contained a line that brang amusement to 8-year-olds everywhere: "I'll have a burger and a root beer." New lyrics were inevitably conjured by all 3rd graders within earshot: "I put a booger in your root beer." It's one thing to put mucus in someone's root beer, but it's another to brag about it.

Maybe that's why so many kids got sent out of Druther's.

"We Should Be Sleeping" by Eddie Money

1987 / #90

Rate Your Music score: 3.14 out of 5!

I don't always know what to think about Eddie Money. Sometimes I think he's an enjoyable listen, but at other times, I think these same songs are sort of juvenile.

For a song that only peaked at #90, we sure heard this one a lot back in 1987. When I say we heard it a lot, I mean it. Mean it like a dictionary, I do. An unabridged, no less!

We were entering a malaise of narrower playlists, and hearing all the same songs being played so much was tiring and frustrating. So it was bound to induce some ridicule.

I had just gotten a modem for my Atari 800. This was back in the days of the old dialup bulletin board systems. I wanted to be an elite hacker - like that guy who was obsessed with hacking Bruce Springsteen's phone. Anyway, I downloaded a few free computer games. That was the big thing back then.

One of these games - I don't even remember what it was called - consisted of flying some sort of spaceship or aircraft over a landscape and shooting down enemy forces. This game was interesting in that you could shoot off pieces of the mountains.

One day, we were playing this game while Eddie's "We Should Be Sleeping" was blaring on the radio. We flew over an unusually prominent mountain. It soared over the otherwise flat terrain. We began blasting chunks off this mountain and called it an "Eddie Money head."

Ever since then, if we see a mountain like this, we call it an "Eddie Money head."

We also downloaded a baseball game that used music that sounded like "The Candy Man."

Many years later, there was some movie about Pete Rose that appeared on cable TV in which the actor who played Pete actually bore a much stronger resemblance to Eddie Money. Also, in 2013, I went to a baseball game in Milwaukee where a man who worked in the stands looked just like Eddie Money. Some baseball fans sitting behind me even commented on it.

"Stay The Night" by Chicago

1984 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.04 out of 5!

I mentioned once before that Chicago had many lost hits that peaked at #14, but this one managed to fall just 2 notches shy.

A few months ago, our online museum of lost hits profiled "Stay The Night" by Benjamin Orr and how one of my teachers crusaded against this song. Several people said they remembered that lost hit, and they also recalled that Chicago had a lost hit titled "Stay The Night."

Indeed they did.

This was one of these from that time frame that I thought was somehow funny but I just can't remember why. A lot of good music from the preceding year or so just wasn't appreciated as it should have been. On the other hand, a lot of music 4 or 5 years later aggravated the living hell out of me, but with good reason. The 1984-85 period was sort of a sweet spot for me - before life really went to hell. And did it ever.

That was also before visuals associated with music devolved into a trite, ridiculous spectacle that made you wish you could peel off all the banana stickers you stuck under the kitchen table and use them to tape your eyes shut. In 1984, music videos may have been at their peak of popularity and creativity. Chicago's "Stay The Night" had an action-packed video that would never be made today. These days, we're bombarded with demands that the government censor TV programming deemed too "violent." But TV in 1984 was far more violent - i.e., exciting - than it is now.

Peep the video above. When I saw this clip in my youth, I noticed something interesting during the shots of the exploding pickup truck. At 3:53, there appears to be a body swirling around in the fireball.

But, now that v-chips are mandatory in TV sets, nobody uses them. A new TV costs an extra $15 for a feature no one uses.

Also, one article said Peter Cetera did most of the stunts in this video himself instead of hiring a stunt double.

Keep your eyes peeled for more lost hits! No one can stop us, nothing is in the way!

"White Horse" by Laid Back

1984 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.38 out of 5!

"If you wanna ride...Don't ride the white horse..."

I want to do more mid-'80s goodness on this blog, since that was when music-related media had perhaps the most influence.

There was a time in the late '80s and early '90s when we had something called the "radio recession." That was when many rap and metal hits did not appear on some top 40 stations. If such a tune charted, you knew you wouldn't hear it on top 40 radio unless it at least reached the top 10 - and maybe not even then.

There was something else like this going on even before then. But instead of metal and rap, the biggest target was electro-funk. Around here, electro-funk was usually relegated to very small stations. A good example is "19" by Paul Hardcastle, which is now a lost hit.

Another fine example is Laid Back's electro-funk hit "White Horse." I first heard this now-lost hit on American Top 40 when I was growing up. I rarely heard it anywhere else. Even when the song was at its chart peak, hearing it at all was a major event.

Imagine my surprise when I climbed into my parents' car to go to school one morning and heard "White Horse" crackling out of the car radio. I was surprised even though the song was peaking then.

"White Horse" has been widely interpreted as being full of drug references. The song repeatedly admonishes, "If you wanna ride...Don't ride the white horse." But the last verse suggests, "If you wanna ride...Ride the white pony." In other words, the song seems to be saying, "Don't use heroin. Use cocaine instead." However, the members of Laid Back said it was an anti-drug song, and that the "white pony" had nothing to do with cocaine.

If you want to talk about drug references, I have a story of something I saw just after "White Horse" peaked. I completely forgot about it for 40 years until recently. We went on a family trip to Chillicothe, and we were waiting outside the motel restaurant where we had breakfast. A man walked out of the restaurant wearing a red t-shirt that said, "Enjoy cocaine." It was a parody of the "Enjoy Coca-Cola" advertising signs.

Meanwhile, music media kept us occupied in a way that was free-floating like my zine did 5 to 10 years ago.

"Sesame's Treet" by Smart E's

1992 / #60

Rate Your Music score: 3.03 out of 5!

The greatest Sesame Street success on Billboard's Hot 100 was when Ernie's "Rubber Duckie" blasted to #16 back in 1970. An online commenter said a local station in Massachusetts placed it at #1 on one of its weekly surveys.

Years later, an act called Smart E's hoped that this success could be replicated. Sadly, this effort only peaked at #60 on the Hot 100. But it appears as if it reached the top 10 in almost every other country in the world. America was supposed to be a superpower, yet this happened. Whatever the weather, "Sesame's Treet" is the third and final entry in what I call the Sesame Three.

"Sesame's Treet" heavily sampled the Sesame Street theme. So this track loomed large. But it wasn't an entirely new concept. A few years earlier, when I was about 13, I came up with a perfect way to annoy the living shit out of the rest of the family. One afternoon, I kept loudly singing the Sesame Street theme and substituting the words with just some syllables strung together. It was sort of like one part of "Holiday" by the Bee Gees.

I felt the annoyance was earned. Around that time, we kept going to places that everyone else inexplicably thought were great, but which I thought were a rather uninteresting affair. Much worse than this, I was forced to attend shitty schools, and my complaints were brushed off again and again.

Another way I would intentionally annoy the fam was to repeat some of my catchphrases in a Speak & Spell voice. Another way was to keep calling the dogs silly names.

Can you tell me how to get to "Sesame's Treet"? Can you?????

"They Want EFX" by Das EFX

1992 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 3.5 out of 5!

Sesame Street and The Dukes Of Hazzard - together at last!

This rousing lost hit by this duo from Petersburg, Virginia, is the second installment in what I call the Sesame Three - and it has an undisputed Sesame Street reference. In the verse after the first chorus, this song includes the line, "I caught a Snuffleupagus and smoked a boogaloo spliff."

Mr. Snuffleupagus always seemed sort of dopey, so he must have been smoking something. Maybe that should have been part of my Sesame Street parodies. Back when I was doing those stories, I planned on making a public document detailing it all, which was supposed to be as influential as the great libraries of the ancient world. A few years later, I planned to add to this legacy by also including a completely unrelated true story of a kid in elementary school who ruined a book about football from the school library by cutting a photo out of it to hang on his wall. He also shit on the toilet seat once.

As "They Want EFX" gets going, the song also has a reference to another popular TV series, The Dukes Of Hazzard: "So nincompoop give a hoot and stomp a troop without a strain...Like Rosco P. Coltrane."

An early Dukes episode said Rosco lost his pension and would have had to retire as sheriff "on a bad case of hemorrhoids." He probably had lots of strains.

"They Want EFX" also repeatedly uses the 7-note "Shave And A Haircut" couplet. Years before "They Want EFX" came out, a kid in 1st grade farted that melody and said it was the "Volkswagen does it again" jingle.

In the mid-1980s, I associated music with videos, but by 1992, my perception of music had again evolved. I was focusing less on videos and more on radio, and that's what this lost hits blog is all about.

"57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" by Bruce Springsteen

1992 / #68

Rate Your Music score: 3.14 out of 5!

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

One day back in 1992, I got a batch of 3 new cassette singles. All 3 are now lost hits. I still have the cassettes, but these tracks have disappeared from the public consciousness. They're completely lost. You never hear any of them now - and probably haven't since 1992. In fact, we very, very rarely ever heard them on local radio to begin with, since our stations were so stodgy by then. I can be proud that I didn't pick the big hits, because the top of the chart was filled by Mr. Big and the Heights.

All 3 singles in this batch had some connection with Sesame Street. I'll be featuring them here in increasing order of Sessification. First among them is "57 Channels."

Bruce's lost hit actually has only a very remote Sesame Street link. I don't know if the lyrics were meant to be taken metaphorically, or if it actually is a song about TV. I'll assume the latter. And any discussion of TV is sure to turn into a discussion of Sesame Street.

There may have been 57 channels in that cable-ready era, but at least Sesame Street was on. And it was still good. The show also introduced new closing credits with a cartoon of a dancing Statue of Liberty. Today, however, the show is unwatchable.

Among the few shows I regularly watched in 1992 was The Simpsons. I don't remember what year it was that there was a reality show about a high school where the toilet overflowed because someone clogged it, but that might have been a one-time special, not a regular series.

Bruce should have called his song "57 Channels (And Nothing On Except Sesame Street, The Simpsons, And A School Where The Toilet Overflowed)." A lot of TV in 1992 was truly miserable. I remember visiting family members, and they had on bad sitcoms that prompted me to provide some mock laughter. There was one that consisted mostly of just a teenage girl talking to herself.

I had to watch a lot of TV that year, because that was when it rained all summer. The one day it didn't rain was when all the local stations covered half the screen with their "severe thunderstorm watch" graphic. I also remember riding around in the car that day and we kept driving into a fart.

In my day, my grandparents told me what life was like without TV. Today's kids get to hear what life was like with bad TV. Their grandchildren will too, because it's worse now.

"Last Resort" by Papa Roach

2000 / #57

Rate Your Music score: 2.42 out of 5!

"The last resort! Toilet paper!"

This song is not truly lost anymore. I hadn't heard it on the radio in about 20 years, up until recently, when I actually heard a horribly edited version of it. That was just hours after I had most of this entry written, and I wasn't going to throw away this installment over a bad edit like that.

This entry isn't so much about the song itself but a funny story that comes to mind every time I think of the song. Let's go back to 6th grade, over 15 years before "Last Resort" charted. I was assigned to a gifted class that I hated. The teacher somehow decided he hated me too. I think that started when I had to miss the field trip to Cincinnati Milacron, even though that wasn't even my fault.

One day, we had to do a project that involved markers. I had pretty much had it by then. So I decided to just suddenly do something completely crazy. I wrote the name of each color on each marker. This was not necessary, as the outside of each marker was already the right color. The fact that it wasn't necessary was the whole point!

The teacher was so angry he just about pooped a hole in his pants. He made me go to the restroom and get some paper towels to wipe the ink off the markers.

But instead I got toilet paper. I told the teacher this was because the bathroom was out of paper towels, but I don't remember if this was true or not. Best all, I think I somehow grabbed a whole roll instead of just a few squares. I vaguely remember letting it unfurl as I entered the classroom.

After I said the restroom was out of paper towels, another student declared in a funny voice, "The last resort! Toilet paper!"

That was probably one of the reasons I wasn't assigned to the gifted class again for 7th grade. Good!

In 2016, Papa Roach gave us the track "Crooked Teeth", which they released to YouTube in advance of their album of the same name. "Crooked Teeth" has quite a story too. After all, crooked teeth are cool. When I heard "Crooked Teeth" on YouTube, I thought it was an instant #1 smash. But it never even made the Hot 100. Someone told me that it was because rock acts like Papa Roach didn't fit on the pop chart. This was hogwash, as Papa Roach had several Hot 100 hits before, and the Hot 100 was supposed to represent all popular genres.

After I listened to this tune, YouTube started recommending a bunch of cosmetic dentistry ads. YouTube must have assumed I hated my life. That was also around the time as that dumb TV commercial where people held their hands up over their mouths.

Bring back the soup wars and the Glad commercial that said, "Don Rickles is mad!"

"5.7.0.5." by City Boy

1978 / #27

Rate Your Music score: 3.36 out of 5!

I heard this song a little bit when I was growing up, but back then, I had no idea it was about a phone number.

City Boy was a band from Birmingham, England - the same city as ELO. In fact, some online commenters say they thought "5.7.0.5." was by ELO. Evidently, British phone numbers have more than 4 digits, so I don't know how this was about a phone number. Perhaps Birmingham had Cincinnati Bell, which is such a primitive company that maybe it still couldn't handle 7 digits. But the song has no reference to Cincinnati Bell's slogans: "We're sorry, all circuits are busy" and "Error 6." Nor does it mention Cincinnati Bell wiretapping Gerald Ford because they thought he was a communist.

The "5.7.0.5." saga gets weirder! The song was originally titled "Turn On To Jesus." All the music on the record was the same, but the lyrics were completely different. "Turn On To Jesus" was about a religious strip club in Kansas the band visited when they were on tour with Hall & Oates...

After "5.7.0.5.", City Boy's next single was "What A Night", which did not chart in the U.S., yet somehow I remember hearing it.

The City Boy legend continued even after the band broke up in 1982. Apparently, there was a different act called City Boy, which created confusion with the City Boy we know and love. In 1988, this other City Boy (unless it was the same City Boy) recorded a song titled "Michael Dukakis" as a tribute to the Democratic nominee for President of the United States at the time...

Needless to say, I never heard that tune on Cincinnati radio.

"I've Got A Lot To Learn About Love" by the Storm

1991 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.34 out of 5!

Here's a song that owed much of its popularity to a deceptive telemarketing campaign.

The Storm was formed partly from former members of Journey, and this record came right between two eras of lost hits. I consider lost hits from before 1991 and those from after 1991 to be distinct categories. One reason is that 1991 is when Billboard made its biggest change ever to its formula for computing the Hot 100. But then American Top 40 infamously stopped using that chart, so there was no longer an easy way to analyze hit singles. The Storm's single was on the Hot 100 right when this change occurred. Another reason I consider 1991 the frontier between two eras is that 1991 ushered in the grunge revolution. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana debuted on the Hot 100 the week after Billboard's new formula was rolled out. This debut showed how new musical styles and acts were taking hold and wiping away the chart stagnation of the previous few years. Unfortunately, local pop radio didn't get the message, and continued to become softer and softer over the next few years, but we were a little bit backwards around here.

Bands like the Storm and Alias seemed instantly antiquated when grunge and rap became more popular. But an online search of old Billboard issues reveals a Storm scandal! The February 1, 1992, edition says a Denver-based telemarketing company was calling up radio stations with gobs of requests to play the Storm's song. A station in Roanoke, Virginia, blew the lid off this campaign after a caller admitted she was making bogus calls to hype the record.

It gets weirder.

It turned out the telemarketing firm had also been hyping records by Winger - and that the company was based in an office owned by a real estate firm that belonged to Kip Winger's dad.

The FCC said these campaigns didn't qualify as telephone fraud under its rules, as no money was actually exchanged. But the FCC did say the calls might have violated payola laws, which were the bailiwick of the Justice Department.

Promoters had launched bogus request campaigns before. But, unlike those, the Storm and Winger campaigns used an outside firm and were very sophisticated. They managed to call stations when the music director was on the air, so they had some inside knowledge of the radio industry.

All of this boosted the Storm in the short term, but I don't know how much good it did them in the long run. I don't think I've heard their song on the radio since 1996, and it was already hardly ever heard anymore even then.

"It's A Miracle" by Culture Club

1984 / #13

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

"It's no surprise...There's something in my eyes..."

You may remember Boy George and Culture Club. Who can forget them?

I heard Culture Club on the radio before MTV came to town and before I even saw a picture of the band. It was around the time I kept something called "cultures", which were mostly small pieces of discarded food that I glued to a paper grocery bag. There was a macaroni elbow, bubble gum, and more! When I planned to save a booger as a "culture", my mom made me throw the whole thing away.

I used paper grocery bags for lots of projects. One day, I drew a picture of a big, yellow monster on a paper bag called a wolley - which was yellow spelled backwards. I think the wolley might have been anatomically correct, but I can't remember.

Culture Club's second album yielded many hits, including "It's A Miracle." I think this was before our biggest top 40 station adopted a stated policy of not playing Culture Club, but even before that statement, they seemed to shun some of the band's big hits. The Boy George blacklist helped fuel "It's A Miracle" quickly becoming a lost hit.

As with Paul McCartney's "Take It Away", someone alluded to "It's A Miracle" years after it had vanished from radio.

When I was a high school junior, there was a girl who was in my class for just one day. When she showed up that morning, she loudly argued with her parents and the teacher. She claimed she couldn't read because she forgot her glasses - even though her glasses were stowed safely in her desk. I never saw her again after that day, and a classmate told me she was ambushed by police when she got on the bus the next day. Her Sally Jessy Raphael specs and rotting food remained in her desk for the rest of the school year.

Anyway, on the day she did show up, we were at lunch when she declared, "There's something in my eye." This declaration resulted in another student immediately lapsing into a rousing chorus of "It's A Miracle."

I can't remember if this was before or after another student was apparently kicked out of school because he showed up drunk. One day, this student kept making a crude joke about Miracle Whip: "You whip it out and it's a miracle!" But nobody responded with a Culture Club song.

"Skin Trade" by Duran Duran

1987 / #39

Rate Your Music score: 3.38 out of 5!

"Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior?"

Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior? Would they???

This tune is the very definition of a lost hit. I can't even remember the last time I heard this one on the radio, except maybe in an American Top 40 rebroadcast. I seem to have a vague memory of it clanking out of an AM radio when I was 13, but when it was gone, it was gone.

Yet I've been informed that "Skin Trade" was recently played on a music system on a cruise ship. So whoever decides what music is played on cruise ships hasn't forgotten about the song. On the other hand, this was at sea, not on broadcast radio in the U.S., and cruise ship music systems have a very limited reach. You probably go to gatherings where folks have '80s cassette collections more than you go on international cruises.

Despite fading from radio quickly back in 1987, the song had some influence. It seems like my high school principal once angrily asked, "Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior?" But I don't remember if this was a real quote or just someone doing an impression of him, as it sounds like exactly the sort of thing he would say when very frustrated (as he often was). My battles with him had an even bigger influence - for many years thereafter. In broadcasting class in college, we had to record a radio drama, so we recorded lines from a Star Trek record. I was so fed up with being harassed by a star basketball player in that class that I just recorded my lines using a ridiculously exaggerated imitation of my old principal and didn't put any effort into it. Then I stopped coming to class because the school let this student get away with everything because he was a star athlete.

This student later went to prison after a big police chase in which he was found with gobs of meth and cash and a handgun.

Now that's some strange behavior we can't explain!

"Give It To You" by Jordan Knight

1999 / #10

Rate Your Music score: 3.29 out of 5!

This blog has praised Scandal and the Cars, but not every lost hit is worthy of such adulation. Any time our museum of lost hits profiles anything connected with New Kids On The Block, it's sure to be among the most idiotic exhibits ever.

The real surprise here is that this lost hit by this New Kids vocalist has such a high Rate Your Music score. How did it get a better score than the Dave Matthews Band or ELO?

Some radio stations that ostensibly have a format of current pop might have actually begun playing this record again, thanks to the "throwbacks" kick, but I'm not sure. Judging by these stations' poor ratings lately, I'm not sure anyone would notice if they do. So this tune still qualifies to be ridiculed on this blog.

By 1999, the New Kids seemed to be no longer a hazard to the radio listening public. Lots of things were wrong back then: the new economy recession, soaring crime, the rubber-stamping of the CBS/Viacom merger. Yet the New Kids were considered a loathsome remnant of the past.

But one day, we decided to drive to southwestern Indiana. We had the car radio on, and a DJ cheerfully introduced this brand new record from Jordan Knight. I couldn't contain my laughter at the song. It seemed to have no discernible form that music usually has. It sounded like just some instruments and vocals thrown together. I can't even figure out what time signature it was.

It appears that some folks who were fairly respected and well-known in the music biz worked on this record. I guess nobody in the music world can be perfect. Even Bob Dylan once got bad reviews because he made an album that included several tracks where it sounded like he was about to sneeze, so even the greats have their bad days.

Evidently, the New Kids got back together after Jordan's solo misadventure and somehow had a song that scraped into the top 40 in 2008. At least these guys from Massachusetts did less damage to their state than Charlie Baker did.

"Never Be The Same" by Christopher Cross

1980 / #15

Rate Your Music score: 3.3 out of 5!

When I was in 2nd grade, most of my schoolmates liked Devo, the Pretenders, or Pat Benatar.

But one of my favorite songs was by...

Are you ready for it?

Christopher Cross!

It was a different era from later when I listened to Men At Work or the Cars. But there was one reason and one reason only why I dipped my toes into the adult contemporary waters of Christopher Cross. It was because somebody likened this now-lost hit to the sound of bubble gum popping, and I thought that was hilarious.

One Sunday, we were in the parking lot at church, and this song was on the radio. A family member declared that the song sounded like someone popping bubble gum.

And the rest as they say is history.

Truth be told, it doesn't really even sound like real bubble gum popping. It sounds more like the sound effects they used in gum commercials - like the Hubba Bubba ads with the Gum Fighter, or the Bubble Yum ads where the guy was haranguing this Claire or Monica person.

Christopher Cross was such a sensation in the early 1980s that Texas lawmakers declared an official Christopher Cross Day...

But the big, bright Christopher Cross balloon that bobbed along America's skyline started losing its air with the rise of MTV. One website put it this way: Christopher wasn't actually ugly - but his high-pitched voice didn't match his appearance. When we got into the mid-'80s, the visual aspects of music media were often as important as the music itself. I think it became less important again later, when MTV hardly showed music videos anymore, but many people say that MTV's rise came at just the wrong time for the man from San Antonio.

"He's My Girl" by David Hallyday

1987 / #79

Rate Your Music score: 2.17 out of 5!

Some of our local radio stations in Cincinnati made weird choices as to what songs to play, but this was one rare occasion when they actually admitted it.

This high-energy rocker was the title track from the movie He's My Girl. Evidently, the film was about a musician who wins a trip to Los Angeles, but he must take a woman with him, so his male friend poses as a woman.

And Q-102 played the living shit out of the song.

This may seem strange in and of itself, because Q-102 had such a small playlist, and the record only peaked at #79 on the Hot 100, the most authoritative chart in the beeswax. But the station promoted the movie along with the song. The problem with that is that the film was not a great critical or commercial success, so the Q-102 peeps felt somewhat embarrassed that they had hyped it so much.

A few months later, some of the station's DJ's admitted on the air that they botched this one. They said the movie folks gave the station a bunch of He's My Girl swag and encouraged them to play the record. It was payola. After that humiliation, the station's on-air crew ridiculed the film and the song every chance they got.

That wasn't the last act of payola in the American radio industry. In the ensuing years, stations in other cities were caught accepting payoffs to play certain records. The word drugola was popularized, as some programmers were accepting drugs as a payoff. Hypocritically, some of the performers of these records liked to brag about being "drug-free."

It was probably impossible to have a big hit on the American pop chart in the 1980s without some support from corrupt promoters. Read the book Hit Men: Power Brokers And Fast Money Inside The Music Business by Fredric Dannen.

I put "He's My Girl" in a category of minor hits from around that time that were played on Q-102 like there was no tomorrow. This category also includes lost hits like "Never Thought" by Dan Hill and "Wild Horses" by Gino Vannelli. Lots of low-charting records were megahits at lots of top 40 stations, but Dan, Gino, and David were a weird combination, and now we know "He's My Girl" was selected because of payola.

"Get Over It" by the Eagles

1994 / #31

Rate Your Music score: 2.7 out of 5!

The Eagles came back with a vengeance in 1994 after a 14-year breakup. And did they ever!

This was the first song written by Don Henley and Glenn Frey after the band reunited. It was about the group's frustration with TV talk show guests who blamed their many problems on everyone else and thought the "big, bad world" owed them. Talk shows like that were big at the time.

Not all the subject matter on these shows was as sad as that. Some of it was just plain silly, like the segment about the guy who paid women to throw pies at him. I don't think these shows are as common as they used to be. Court shows started taking over, and I don't know what's on in these time slots now.

"Get Over It" was a sensation. A woman posted online that her pastor began including the song in his sermons. In the years after the song came out, I applied the song to a variety of situations - especially when people dwelled on stupid shit.

It was also invoked following one of my great literary projects. I had a book published through an indie publisher about how I was harassed by school officials and students who they deputized. When the volume appeared on Amazon, someone I went to school with gave it multiple bad reviews, even alluding to events that weren't mentioned in the book or were made up completely. That these reviews were posted proved that the whole premise of the book was true - namely, that schools harass anyone who crosses them. In reply to the bad reviews, somebody made a post under the name Don Henley consisting of the entire lyrics of "Get Over It."

The song was well-suited for that. Some idiot was talking shit over something that had happened 25 years earlier, and wouldn't get over it.

"Get Over It" is a song for all occasions!

"Go Insane" by Lindsey Buckingham

1984 / #23

Rate Your Music score: 3.52 out of 5!

In the mid-1980s, music-related media even had an influence on Dungeons & Dragons!

"Go Insane" is part of a group of lost hits from that time - such as "Are We Ourselves?" by the Fixx and "Along Comes A Woman" by Chicago - that tried to sound like Devo, even though Devo was past their peak by then. That time frame also represented a confluence of music videos, Atari BASIC, and Dungeons & Dragons.

We came up with a list of 100 curses to use in a Dungeons & Dragons session. They were numbered from 00 to 99 and were randomly determined by rolling the 10-sided dice twice. These curses could be cast on an adversary.

This was all fantasy, of course. It was only a game. Nothing real about it. You put the dice and books away, and it was gone.

The curses grew increasingly ridiculous as you went down the list. Curse #48 made a 10-foot-tall Sesame Street sign grow out of a person's head - because Channel 48 is one of our local PBS stations. Curse #57 made Heinz 57 sauce constantly shoot out the person's ears. My personal favorite curse was "arms control selves."

After seeing Lindsey Buckingham's "Go Insane" video, I came up with a curse for this list: The person's head would turn into a globe and spin endlessly - just as in the video. Best all, it would take place in public, for maximum humiliation. Not to be outdone, another curse was added in which the person's head would turn into a replica of the Liberty Bell.

"Go Insane" also had a link with my interest in computer programming. I remember a story on American Top 40 in which it was reported that the music for this track was stored on a floppy disk.

"Go Insane" may well be the mid-'80s manifest!