"Club At The End Of The Street" by Elton John

1990 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 2.87 out of 5!

Even superstars have lost hits.

The year 1989 saw stunning comebacks of acts who enjoyed their peaks of success in the 1970s. We had "One" by the Bee Gees, "This Time I Know It's For Real" by Donna Summer, and "Call It Love" by Poco - all of which are now lost hits. I remember that Power 94½ began playing each of those hits weeks before Q-102 did. That was true of most new records, in fact. Those tracks are in a different category from "Soldier Of Love" by Donny Osmond, because I just assumed Donny was politically connected enough that stations would add him right out of the box. He has espoused some right-wing stances in interviews. True to form, his record charted higher than the others.

Elton John never needed a comeback, because he was always putting out hit after hit. The lost hit we're profiling in this entry helped vault him into the 1990s.

It's about a club at the end of the street.

Most folks I knew didn't have a club at the end of their street. They usually had a trash dump, an ill-placed stop sign, or a creek where people threw bodies, but rarely a club. Not even a Honeycomb Hideout. But Elton took exception to this misrule.

This song is noteworthy because of what happened one weekend at an important family gathering at my grandparents' house. This record kept coming on the radio, and I kept calling it "Club On Sesame Street." A younger cousin thought that was absolutely hilarious.

It was one of the highlights of the decade!

"Body" by the Jacksons

1984 / #47

Rate Your Music score: 2.72 out of 5!

Sometimes, when you get a booger in your nose, it's got to go. Otherwise, it can dry up and really irritate.

That's why sometimes we'd find them wiped on walls and furniture. They even got wiped in textbooks and library books at school. And I'll never forget the time in geometry class when I was a high school sophomore when I saw a humongous boog stuck to the back of a chair.

But let's go back to when I was 11. One of the first big-box stores in the area was Bigg's. If Rink's stinks, Bigg's was big. We went out to Bigg's back when it first opened.

As was normal for retailers back then, Bigg's had a record aisle, and it carried 45 RPM singles. You can see where this story is headed, right? Anyway, we stopped by the record department and looked at its offerings. It was something to see!

A young man was purchasing a 45 of "Easy Lover" by Philip Bailey & Phil Collins to replace his copy that got stolen. I know firsthand that nothing is safe in a home invasion, so it's a believable story. But while I was in the record aisle, my nose started to tickle. Why, it was a boog! And it had to be discarded somewhere.

What record could it be wiped on? It couldn't be "Private Dancer" by Tina Turner, as that was too sophisticated. I also decided to spare "Had A Dream (Sleeping With The Enemy)" by Roger Hodgson, which today is itself a lost hit. Hey! I know! How about "Body" by the Jacksons?

Perfect!

Before anyone asks, the chunk of mucus was wiped on the record itself - not the sleeve.

If the record skipped, you could just blame it on the boogie!

I remember visiting this store again not long after, and some woman who worked there got really mad at me for misbehaving in the store. What did she expect? It's not like I was 40 or something.

"Body" - along with "Material Girl" by Madonna and "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" by Don Henley - was also one of the hits of the era that everyone called "the owl songs." Listen to each of these songs to hear why.

"Some Kind Of Friend" by Barry Manilow

1983 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 2.74 out of 5!

Big or small, short or tall, you will all have a ball, it's the Tom & Jerry show! Wait, actually it isn't. It's Barry Manilow!

I remember being 9 years old and riding around in my parents' dilapidated Plymouth Horizon. Many Saturdays in that era were essentially wasted on a pointless endeavor. It wasn't nearly as grueling as school or church, but there were things I'd rather be doing, like flicking Stay Alive marbles at antique lamps or trying to blow bubbles with glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty. We usually had good choices for lunch though.

On one of those Saturdays, we drove up to the north side of Cincinnati where there was a family restaurant in which the eating area overlooked a huge stage where a man played an organ. It was when we were riding around near there that Barry Manilow's latest hit came blasting through the AM radio in the Horizon.

I immediately noticed something interesting about this new release. It sounded exactly like the theme music for some 1970s Tom & Jerry shorts!

Listen to Barry's hit in the clip above. Fast-forward to about 6 seconds in.

Now peep the Tom & Jerry theme. Jump to about 27 seconds in...

If our society was as litigious in 1983 as it is now, copyright lawyers would have had a field day!

And what about those '70s Tom & Jerry cartoons? I think most fans of the cat-and-mouse duo would rather forget those shorts existed. These were the ones where Jerry wore a red bowtie, and he and Tom were actually friends. My 4th grade classmates didn't seem too interested in those episodes.

"Hanging On A Heart Attack" by Device

1986 / #35

Rate Your Music score: 3.16 out of 5!

"You try to get up and here it comes again..."

Device was a band whose lead singers looked like Billy Idol and Joan Jett.

My memories of this lost hit are strikingly similar to those for John Mellencamp's "Rumbleseat." It was popular right at the same time, and it had a line that was associated with flatulence.

In 1986, as you know, ripping trouser sneezes was quite the production. At some point, a new custom took hold. Any time you were about to crack a loud-and-proud bunker blast, you would warn, "Here it comes." After the air biscuit was released, you'd say, "There it went."

That was also the year of supposed flatulence references in music. In addition to "Rumbleseat", 1986 saw "Why Can't This Be Love" by Van Halen, whose opening lines declare, "Whoa, here it comes...That funny feeling again." Unlike the lost hits profiled on this blog, that song still receives a lot of play.

"Hanging On A Heart Attack" didn't get to chart as high as those other tracks. But it too had an apparent flatus reference: "You try to get up and here it comes again."

Naturally, a nice, loud pooteroony was supposed to be unleashed after that line every time this song was played. The response to this was the same as it was for "Rumbleseat." I remember playing Dungeons & Dragons in the den, and this song would start sizzling out of the boom box. When the very first note was heard, a fist was brandished as a warning to those who might let one fly. Some people have no appreciation for humor.

It wasn't only songs that prompted a backdoor breeze. For years, The Price Is Right opened each episode with the announcer declaring, "Here it comes!" If we were home on a weekday, and if we knew The Price Is Right would be on, a fart would be saved up for the occasion.

"Hanging On A Heart Attack" was also climbing the chart at the time of my mom's company picnic at Coney Island that went hilariously awry, so that's a bonus.

"Man On The Moon" by R.E.M.

1993 / #30

Rate Your Music score: 3.94 out of 5!

You'd think a band as respected as R.E.M. would still see airplay for all their hits, but I don't think I've heard this one on the radio in 30 years. Most of our local stations aren't exactly known for playing quality music like this, but you'd still think it would turn up at some point.

I was on the radio in 1993 during "Man On The Moon" mania. Northern Kentucky University had a small student station called WRFN, and I was a DJ there. WRFN was not an FCC-licensed station but was somehow available in some buildings on campus. They called it a carrier current station. According to Wikipedia, this means the station broadcast with very low power using existing electrical wiring.

The important thing here is that it did somehow broadcast. I was told that you could pick it up on a standard AM radio if you were within a very short distance of the wiring. The airwaves are public, and being available over the air meant the station had a great responsibility to the community. Keep that in mind, because this point is central to this story.

"Man On The Moon" was a tribute to Andy Kaufman and was full of references to the comedian's Elvis Presley impressions. The song was near the top of WRFN's playlist back then, so we played it quite a bit. One day when I was on the air, one of the other DJ's - who was one of the managers of the station - was in the lobby of the studio and started loudly singing his own lyrics to the song. He was easily loud enough to be heard over the air.

"Elvis Presley gettin' a blowjob...Yeah yeah yeah yeah," he sang.

That was aired to much of the campus.

That's called broadcasting in the public interest! Or at least it served the public interest better than TV talk shows sending kids to boot camps.

"Cry" by Godley & Creme

1985 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.73 out of 5!

Not all of the entries on this lost hits blog are about the song itself. Some of them are about my memories of events that took place while I heard the song.

For instance, this hit will forever be known as the song that was playing when we coaxed a booger from the inside of our Atari 800.

Imagine sitting at your computer and working on BASIC programs such as a flatulence simulator or a game in which you slay Sesame Street characters. Imagine if a dried hunk of mucus flies in from out of nowhere and falls down between the keys of the keyboard. This really happened when I was 12. A crusty crew got flung across the den, landed between the keys, and fell down inside the computer. Best all, it happened while the computer was in use.

This was not intentional. The goal was for the booger to land on the TV screen instead.

Sometime later, we lugged the computer into the kitchen to pry out the terrible boog.

We removed the base of the computer with a screwdriver. As the base was slowly lifted away, the gob of mucus that had earlier slipped through the keyboard plopped squarely onto the kitchen table. A cheer was heard: "Taa-daa!"

We had a radio on in the kitchen, and guess what song was on?

WCLU was the only radio station I remember that regularly played "Cry." I remember that the record always skipped during the second verse. The song appeared on a few Q-102 surveys found on the ARSA website, but I don't remember hearing it on Q-102 outside of American Top 40.

"Cry" was better known for its video with the faces morphing. Some of the people in the video were said to resemble celebrities such as Mr. T and Ed McMahon. Most of them looked like nobody in particular, so everyone just said they looked like "a member of the Ronald Reagan Club" or something like that.

If the booger had destroyed our computer, it would have made me want to cry!

"There's The Girl" by Heart

1987 / #12

Rate Your Music score: 3.5 out of 5!

"Broken glass, complete disaster..."

This song did well enough on the chart that you might not think of it as lost, and it took a while for it to vanish completely from Power 94½. At least Power 94½ played this high-energy rocker instead of some of the music that other stations kept playing. But I haven't heard it in a station's regular rotation in decades now.

In late 1987, you may have been dancing around your living room, chewing bubble gum, passing gas, and dreaming of becoming an elite computer hacker. That's what cool people did back then. And this was when this exciting new Heart single grew on everyone even as everything came crashing down - literally.

I was a freshman at a Catholic high school then. My school made a struggle of 3 whole years. It was intentional and malicious. By late 1987, I was sort of shutting down. The school knew, and didn't do their job. It was already clear that I needed to find a better school. I complained bitterly but was told to be quiet. The school let me languish there for a couple more years because I was of no use to the school elsewhere.

Just before Christmas, the school had a huge Christmas tree in the hallway. It was adorned with gobs of glass ornaments. One afternoon right after lunch, we were filing into religion class. Then we heard a horrendous crash coming from the hall.

You guessed it! It was the Christmas tree!

And this was no accident. There was a fight in the hall, and somebody deliberately pulled the tree down onto a schoolmate.

The toppled tree blocked the hall right in front of the principal's office. There were shattered ornaments all over the floor.

Heart's latest hit had a line describing the school perfectly: "Broken glass, complete disaster." After the tree was knocked over, that line reminded me of that incident every time I heard it. It reminded me of everything about that school.

And trust me, the school was a disaster. Thank heavens I got out before junior year.

Also, pay attention to the above video at 1:35. Notice the gesture Nancy Wilson is making. I almost expect to hear someone yell, "Boist!"

Aah, memories!

"Only When You Leave" by Spandau Ballet

1984 / #34

Rate Your Music score: 3.55 out of 5!

Where do we start with these guys?

This is the most recent Hot 100 hit by this band from London. The Spandaus always seemed like a fair target for ridicule. They were best known for their big ballad "True." Lead singer Tony Hadley was seen on TV shows wearing a weird suit that looked like it had a giant necklace embedded in it.

They charted in their homeland for decades after their last American chart appearance. Here in the good ol' U.S. and A., people hardly ever talked about Spandau Ballet after 1984. Any mention of them after that had to be a relic.

By the time I was a high school sophomore, it had been years since the Spandaus were the big thing. That was the era of Poison and Bobby McFerrin. So I was surprised to find some Spandau-inspired criminal mischief in my literature textbook. This book included a play that had the memorable line, "Damnable cough!" I don't remember anything else about this script, and I never understood it anyway. But it was accompanied by a memorable photo. It was a black-and-white picture of a man in a suit with his mouth open in frustration.

Somebody had written next to the photo, "Tony Hadley." And let me tell you, he looked just like the Spandau Ballet frontman!

This shows that the book had to have been at least 5 years old. This was fine, as long as the information in it was still relevant - and if the school didn't blame me for the condition it was in. It had to have gone through at least 5 cycles of rough treatment. And it showed. The school kept making me pay for books damaged by others - and then not replacing them. That way, the school could use the book again the next year and make the next student pay for it too. You had to have been there. My school did shit like that.

The Tony Hadley comment wasn't the only damage like that in that book. The book also included a short story about an unruly youngster who carried away his dad's electric razor and shaved his own head completely bald. I've now figured out the story was titled "The Beginning Of Grief." The book included a drawing of the boy with a shaven head. Someone had written "chrome dome" right on his noggin!

I don't think it mattered in the end, because after I was forced to pay for this book that others had torn up, I'm pretty sure it became firewood for my Fourth of July bonfire.

In recent years, Tony has emerged as a bit of a right-wing curmudgeon. He has attended the Conservative Party's annual conference and has threatened to run for Parliament as he has spouted a number of reactionary grievances.

This might not be the last entry devoted to Spandau Ballet on this blog.

"Nobody's Perfect" by Mike & the Mechanics

1988 / #63

Rate Your Music score: 3.16 out of 5!

We got a chuckle out of this one, but things weren't so funny for very long.

You may know that Mike & the Mechanics were a project led by Genesis's Mike Rutherford. But this song didn't get quite the airplay that many Genesis efforts did. I did hear it on the radio a little bit though. The first time I heard it, I burst out laughing at the very notion that the clanking production of this record was expected to see major pop success.

This sound might make a fine music bed for a 30-second TV commercial for a financial firm. But it makes a downright weird hit single. I actually remember a commercial that used to air during 60 Minutes that used music like this, except it was less sparse and more electronic.

The existence of "Nobody's Perfect" wasn't something that kept me awake at night. It was nothing like the truly insufferable music in the ensuing months that shot straight to #1 on the chart. If it charted today, it would be a highlight.

I never saw the video for this song until I found it on YouTube recently. The video is exactly what you might expect. It's full of fast-paced shots of graphs and computer screens containing financial data, and people in business suits frantically milling about an office.

People have posted online comments saying they were 3 or 4 when this song came out and it's one of the first songs they remember hearing on the radio. They never heard it for years after, but they remember it because it sounded so strange.

It just goes to show that even lost hits are not always forgotten.

"It's Sad To Belong" by England Dan & John Ford Coley

1977 / #21

Rate Your Music score: 2.73 out of 5!

"So I'm gonna take the Big Bird for the rest of my days..."

Are you ready for some misheard lyrics?

So far, this blog has featured metal, rap, a couple good ol' heartland rockers, and more! But now we have to pay the piper by featuring a tame ballad instead of the high-energy lost hits we usually use. In the immortal words of Steve Hawkins of Q-102: I don't cool off very often but when I do it's dynamite stuff!

One day when I was very young, we were in some store like a Frank's Nursery & Crafts or a Ben Franklin. Their music system didn't seem to play Quiet Riot or the Geto Boys. Instead, it fed us a steady stream of light and easy "favorites."

One song in particular caught my ear. I noticed an interesting line in the bridge of the song. The singer crooned, "So I'm gonna take the Big Bird for the rest of my days."

This conjured a hilarious image. I envisioned a guy with big sideburns and a mustache - like a lot of soft rock acts who played on TV back then - being carried through the sky on Big Bird's back. This was even though Big Bird could not fly. Even if Big Bird could fly, why would he want to fly people around all day? How can the singer plan in advance to "take the Big Bird for the rest of my days" when there was always a possibility Big Bird could go on strike?

I wondered for years what song it was that I had heard that day, but eventually I figured out it was a top 40 hit for this Dallas duo that I actually used to hear quite a bit. And I had misheard the words to the song. The real lyrics are, "So I'll live my life in a dream world for the rest of my days."

This won't be the last time this blog strays from the action-packed rockers that are so common here. I'm warning you in advance!

"Mind Playing Tricks On Me" by the Geto Boys

1991 / #23

Rate Your Music score: 4.26 out of 5!

These Houston rappers gave us this lost hit that apparently ranks #3 of all of 1991 on Rate Your Music - but never gets any radio play these days.

In fact, it didn't get much in 1991.

This song was in the countdown when American Top 40 - then hosted by Shadoe Stevens - infamously ditched the Hot 100, the most authoritative chart in the beeswax. Outrageously, AT40 chopped the song down to about 45 seconds. This was when the once-great AT40 butchered everything to appease affiliate stations that couldn't handle rap. But, while the show shortened rap hits, it looped a verse in an Amy Grant record over and over.

At the time, I tried to buy a record or cassette of "Mind Playing Tricks On Me." But record stores around here didn't stock it. The same was true in Springfield, Illinois. I went on a trip there, and I tried to find this song at stores there, and they didn't have it either. I called every record store in the yellow pages there. One of them seemed particularly angry that I asked. After we hung up, I realized that it was a religious record store.

I was a high school senior at the time, and this song yields another funny story: One day, a student in my class wrote all the lyrics to "Mind Playing Tricks On Me" on a desk!

I eventually was able to buy the cassette. But it wasn't until I recently found the video on YouTube that I knew my cassette actually has the less explicit version.

And that's not just my mind playing tricks on me!

"Fool In Love With You" by Jim Photoglo

1981 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 2.78 out of 5!

I invented MTV!

Seriously, I came up with the idea of a TV station to air music videos. Too bad MTV had already invented MTV and I just didn't know about it yet.

MTV didn't come to town until 1983 (!), so the only place I saw videos was Casey Kasem's TV show. But if I did start a music video channel, I might have had to invest in clips like "Fool In Love With You" by Jim Photoglo.

I heard the song some on the radio back then, but I never saw the video until decades later when YouTube came along. And, man, did I get some laughs out of that!

The copies that appeared on YouTube were very low-res, so the guffaws didn't begin until the close-up scenes of Jim singing to the camera.

Even by the standards of 1981 - when guys such as Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds mustached the world right good - that mustache looked absolutely uproarious!

Around the time I found this on YouTube, I used to read several blogs about Kentucky politics. There was a mustachioed right-wing Kentucky politician back then named Stan Lee (not to be confused with the comic book writer of the same name). One of these blogs had a contest to provide a caption for a photo of Lee. One of the entries was, "Jim Photoglo called. He wants his mustache back."

Also, since 2016, Jim has been touring with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - an act that George H.W. Bush once called "the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird."

I bet you're just a fool in love with this blog!

"Jesus He Knows Me" by Genesis

1992 / #23

Rate Your Music score: 3.2 out of 5!

I never thought Genesis or Phil Collins would ever have a lost hit. In the late 1980s, Phil was considered a saint by radio stations. Pop stations played a Phil or Genesis record every single hour. This is no exaggeration. If they played an oldie, they went back further in time for ol' Phil than they did for almost any other act.

But one of the best records Genesis ever recorded disappeared from the airwaves as quickly as it appeared.

"Jesus He Knows Me" was a commentary about the phony televangelists who proliferated at the time. I'm mentioning it here because of the video. In the video, Phil portrays a preacher who uses donations to furnish his life of luxury. I saw the video one day, and something hilarious was immediately noted. Phil was wearing a wig that made him look just like my assistant principal from middle school. In addition to his diminutive stature, the wig gave him that same antiquated hairstyle.

I think that only caught my eye because my assistant principal was positively one of the worst human beings I've ever had the misfortune of meeting. When I got expelled in 7th grade, I wrote a simple Atari BASIC program that made fun of him. A few years later, I uploaded it to some local computer bulletin board systems.

Later still, a schoolmate told me about how the hapless assistant headmaster yelled at him for skateboarding in the school parking lot when he was no longer a student there. My schoolmate cussed him out in response.

Pick a brick!

"Girls" by Dwight Twilley

1984 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

I could never understand people who railed against MTV but tolerated radio stations that played much of the same music.

In 1984, that seemed to include most adults. It seemed like most of the rest were adults in my school district who shunned radio too. Any school employee who allowed MTV was downright anarchist by the school district's standards.

Something funny happened once in 5th grade. (Really? No way!) Our class was working in the school library, when the librarian turned on MTV for us to watch. Gasp! How subversive! My main teacher never permitted anything even close to that. She didn't even allow kids to dance to an Andy Gibb record or bring in those Song Hits magazines that were full of song lyrics. The librarian seemed radical compared to her.

We all enjoyed having MTV on while we studied. These days, when grownups say something is good or bad, kids snap into line, and they don't dare fight back. It's disgusting. But in my day, kids who liked MTV liked it even more when adults said it was bad.

But one video was too much even for the beloved librarian: "Girls" by Dwight Twilley.

Come on! The video wasn't that bad! If it was that "dirty", MTV never would have shown it right in the middle of the day. I don't think MTV has ever broadcast porn.

We were all laughing at the video as the librarian approached the TV. When she shut the TV off, everyone groaned.

One evening not long after that was our class play. The only thing I remember about the play itself was that students who acted in it wore giant paper cutouts of pennies. The librarian also spoke to the audience, and some of us said something about the Dwight Twilley incident at the end of her speech. This was the same play where we had refreshments afterwards and a student grabbed armloads of cookies and dropped them everywhere. The next day, our teacher famously lectured him about it: "You were greedy, you were wasteful, you were obnoxious."

MTV was a lightning rod for controversy for no apparent reason back then. It was the most popular cable TV channel in America, yet motel cable systems never carried it. They finally started carrying it when it became less popular. Today, there's a zillion cable channels, but I don't know of any for music videos. There's a business opportunity right there.

At least the school library subscribed to Song Hits.

"Mama Weer All Crazee Now" by Quiet Riot

1984 / #51

Rate Your Music score: 2.78 out of 5!

Even back in 1984, mass media had incredible influence. We're just damn lucky its influence was more positive than it is today.

Around the time of this lost hit, there were lots of songs that I thought were strangely funny or picturesque for reasons that were not intended by their performer. For the life of me, I can no longer remember what these reasons were. Examples include "Tenderness" by General Public and "Modern Day Delilah" by Van Stephenson - which are lost hits themselves. In fact, this belief seemed to extend to almost all rock and pop of the time, and I absorbed music as readily as Gavin Newsom absorbs Dippity-Do.

It culminated in hilarity one day in 6th grade. We were eating lunch in the school cafeteria. Near the end of lunch period, I suddenly decided to pound out a beat on the table. Within seconds, the entire 6th grade class had joined in! The trays and plates were shaking!

The principal was MAD!!!!!

Needless to say, it was one of the funniest things that took place all year.

It just so happened that the beat that I pounded out sounded exactly like the beginning of "Mama Weer All Crazee Now." I don't think this was intentional. I think I had subconsciously copied this beat after hearing the song frequently back then.

I'm surprised the principal didn't break out his trusty "board of education."

This record was actually a remake. Slade charted with it in 1972, but I don't remember Slade's version. Yet, whatever the weather, the song went down in history for inspiring one of the greatest incidents of my youth.

"Rumbleseat" by John Cougar Mellencamp

1986 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 3.21 out of 5!

For the first lost hit profiled on this blog, let's do some rumblin' - down in the seat area!

You might say this great song by the legendary rocker from Seymour, Indiana, is our signature lost hit. It has to be featured here on principle. With a title like "Rumbleseat", you can see exactly where this story is headed.

At the time, everyone thought the name of the song had something to do with flatulence. As we slogged through our chores that summer, it became inevitable that at least once each day, "Rumbleseat" would start crackling across the airwaves. So it became a matter of policy for people to have a good, loud clap of flatus saved up for when it aired.

Remember, this was 1986. I recall the entire year being one big, long, nasty fart. It was as hilarious as you might imagine. This was the same summer as a family vacation to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., that was defined by the ceaseless flatulence. We were in one of the Smithsonian museums when my mom declared, "It smells like somebody has a load in their pants!" Maybe someone did, but I don't know.

But as we did our home chores, some people didn't appreciate the custom of loudly passing gas whenever "Rumbleseat" came on. Some folks have no sense of humor. You could be rolling on the floor in uncontrollable laughter at this ritual, while some spoilsport could be scowling and shaking their fist at it. I could never figure out why some people were such killjoys.

Not long after that, in one of my 8th grade classes, I received an assignment in which the word rumbleseat was actually used. It was in a list of words that nobody used anymore, along with snood and milliner. Our assignment was to ask elderly relatives the meaning of each word. Today's middle schoolers probably find rumbleseat on their assignments and have to ask my generation what it means. Everyone knows exactly how to reply.

Welcome!

Welcome to our lost hits blog! It's just a few smiles from home! But watch out! If our users aren't big, you might slip, trip, and fall!

This blog profiles lost hits - songs that reached the pop chart that you never hear anymore. I plan to focus on records that made Billboard's legendary Hot 100 chart between the late 1970s and today but seem to no longer receive any play on radio, on the music system at Kroger, or elsewhere.

I'm not sure why they're lost while you still hear other hits from the same era 10 times an hour. Some lost hits deserve to be lost, but others should be held up as the greatest masterpieces ever recorded. I've noticed the lost hits phenomenon for as long as I've been old enough to reach the radio. Believe it or not, I actually have records, cassettes, CD's, or MP3's of many lost hits. This interest reached its stride in the early 1990s when I visited record stores and buyed whole stacks of used 45's. This blog is also a monument to the days when the future of 7-inch singles seemed forever assured.

Where did I originally hear so many songs that are now lost? I usually first heard them on the radio. The top 40 stations in Cincinnati that I remember the most are WKRQ (Q-102) and WCLU. I lived far south enough that I could also pick up Lexington's WLAP-FM (Power 94½). There were also venues like American Top 40 and MTV.

Those were by far our main music outlets, but not the only. For a time in my youth, I also listened to album rock radio, but I largely abandoned the format because it kept playing old dinosaurs instead of new, exciting rockers. Because of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, radio has only become worse and worse since then, as so-called classic hits stations repeat the same oldies over and over but never air lost hits - many of which still seem new because they're played so rarely.

Some of the lost hits profiled here may get a little bit of play on specialty channels on satellite radio or old American Top 40 rebroadcasts, but few if any FM or AM stations today have them in rotation.

Also, I was a broadcaster, not a musician, so this blog generally does not focus on the musicianship of these songs. Instead, I talk about them as a radio DJ would. There's gonna be lots of funny stories. Imagine that!

So let the fun begin!