Rate Your Music score: 2.6 out of 5!
Look out. It's Paul Anka!
When I first heard this ballad, I thought it was by Chicago. That's because it included backing vocals by Peter Cetera. In fact, I'm not even sure if those are backing vocals. It sounds like Peter practically sang the chorus and ending himself.
Suffice it to say, not everyone is a fan of this tune. A reviewer on Rate Your Music opined, "I can't believe this shit charted."
I don't know if I ever heard this record on our top 40 stations except on American Top 40. My biggest exposure to this song was of course from a format that had many more stations: adult contemporary, which at the time was the latest development in what was once called a middle-of-the-road format. There were gobs of these stations. I couldn't avoid them, because my parents usually controlled the car radio. Occasionally they relented, but our crumbling Plymouth Horizon seemed almost synonymous with the big MOR stations on Cincinnati AM radio like WLW and WKRC.
Paul's lost hit dredges up memories of the Saturdays of the era that we wasted on a rather pointless endeavor. This actually lasted for years after. In the later years, it was occasional weekday evenings that were monopolized by this silliness, but around 1983, it was usually Saturdays that were afflicted. It wasn't the worst thing in the world - especially compared to school and church - but I felt like it didn't accomplish much either.
This series of outings contributed to some running jokes that we had. It actually kicked off my renewed attention to Sesame Street after I had outgrown the show.
I don't want to go into detail about the aforementioned undertaking in this entry, because you'd think there was something wrong with us that prompted it. I've alluded to this venture before, and it wasn't really anything that disastrous. Later, when our proprietors didn't get the answers they wanted, they shopped around until they did, which yielded incalculably bad results. But the entities we encountered circa 1983 were rather benign.
On those particular Saturdays, we would sometimes also do other things, like see a movie or visit electronics shops. We also ate lunch at restaurants. I remember one such eatery that held promise. I thought it was funny because of the remote Sesame Street connection: The name of the restaurant was the same as that of a character played by an actor who also appeared on Sesame Street.
This establishment opened to much fanfare. At first glance, it seemed to be a real showcase. The restaurant offered a smorgasbord format, and we kiddos got complimentary tokens for the video game arcade it had. Later accounts say it was known for its skillet-fried chicken and its meatloaf, but I don't remember those. I seem to recall a large room you could enter where a cook prepared and directly served food, but I might be confusing that with a post someone made on a message board I used to have on my website describing how a cook's nose ran onto some food.
Unfortunately, I found much of the food at this restaurant to be thoroughly inedible. Not long after, it was repeatedly sued for allegedly serving tainted food. Then it was reportedly shut down by the health department.
And Paul Anka brings back memories of the entire era!
