The Bee Gees always seemed like the ultimate nice guys. But they could be real badasses when they wanted to.
Back when Michael Jackson was at his commercial peak, I noticed that nobody ever talked about the Bee Gees anymore. The Brothers Gibb did have a few minor hit songs then, but it was nothing like before. I wondered aloud if Michael would soon fall into such obscurity, but somehow, people never stopped talking about him. The Bee Gees rule and there's no point in arguing. But the lost hit we're profiling in this entry came during the group's relative lull in commercial success.
The group is best known for their electrifying Saturday Night Fever work. The whole world danced to the likes of "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever." But "He's A Liar" was a very different animal. Some reviewers said the song was just too bitter and confrontational for the Bee Gees. But the tune was a concerted effort to move away from disco. Also, Living Eyes - the album that included "He's A Liar" - was the first LP ever recorded on CD for demonstration purposes.
This song also yielded one of the funniest misheard lyrics I can remember. The real line is, "Well, they told me I fell but I just don't remember." But I used to think the song went, "Well, you sold me your bell bottoms but I just don't remember." This isn't the only misheard lyric regarding anything resembling pants, as Dr. Hook knows.
Even the most high-energy radio stations smuggle tame ballads onto the airwaves. But it's an easier pill to swallow if it's treated as a novelty.
This brings to mind a feature that peopled local radio in 1985. Each weekday evening, not long before the station's nightly signoff, Joey T of WCLU gave us the "Mellow Yellow Combo." Two songs - usually ballads - were played in each installment. It was where the station relegated all the Dan Hill and Air Supply. Joey would introduce each "Mellow Yellow Combo" by singing, "They call me Mellow Yellow...Oh yes, oh yes, it's extra, extra sickening!"
Joey proceeded to heap industrial-strength ridicule on each record in the combo. Not all of the songs he featured were really wimpy ballads, but they weren't blazing rockers either. I remember some ABBA and Gino Vannelli making it onto the "Mellow Yellow Combo."
This must have inspired my own choice of music years later when I was on WRFN, the carrier current station at Northern Kentucky University. Probably 95% of what I played was energetic rockers. But I had to make an occasional exception, and when I did, that's when the real fun took place. As Steve Hawkins of Q-102 used to say, "I don't cool off very often, but when I do it's dynamite stuff!"
One afternoon, I wanted to slip in one of the mellowest hit ballads of the 1980s - just for shits and giggles. That tune was Christopher Cross's "Think Of Laura." I thumbed through the record rack in the studio and found the album jacket emblazoned with a pink flamingo. Why, it was our old friend Christopher Cross! The record, not the flamingo.
When I aired this song, I really didn't even need to say much about it. That I played it at all spoke for itself.
I may have a tape of this broadcast buried somewhere, but if I remember correctly, all I needed to say to bring a reaction was 3 little words: "Here's Christopher Cross."
Now the thing about this was that WRFN was heard over speakers in the hallway. There were some guys hanging out in the lounge and walking through the hall as I was on the air. As soon as the 3 dreaded words were spoken, I heard one of them in the hall yell out, "Oh no!"
He was loud enough that I could hear him through the booth at the station. Best all, his outburst went out over the air.
This differed from many of our other local stations in that they actually expected to be taken seriously when they played ballads all the time.
You probably know what the phrase means, but what is the point of no return for society, politics, and life?
In aviation, the phrase refers to the point at which an airplane doesn't have enough fuel to return to where it departed from and must continue to its destination - like passengers paid it to do. So if someone says "poop" during a flight from Cincinnati to Honolulu, and they're over the Pacific Ocean, the plane has no choice but to continue the flight instead of going back home. Regardless of where the plane lands, the TSA will be waiting there to arrest the offending passenger for air piracy.
When did American politics pass the point of no return? You might say it was the 1988 "election." Eight years of Ronald Reagan's terror was probably survivable for most Americans. But adding even a single week of George H.W. Bush was too much.
I had thought of my personal point of no return as being when I was expelled in 7th grade and being forced to attend a school that was even worse. I had thought I could have survived what had taken place up until then, and that this event is what really dug us in deep. Remembering a bit more, however, the point of no return had to have been at least a few months earlier, when people started coming to my home and trying to fight me over things that happened at school. Maybe it was when the harassing phone calls started picking up.
Our major universities passed the point of no return when they decided to remake themselves as exclusive institutions instead of serving the mainstream public. Sesame Street was a great show in my day, but even it passed the point of no return during its disastrous 51st season.
The point of no return isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing, like when it breaks some barrier or taboo. For example, a judge lecturing a defendant about flatulence opens the floodgates for people who hold dignified positions discussing gross bodily functions. When I was about 9, I came up with a proverb to represent shattering taboos like this: "Once it's in the box, it stays in the box." I knew what a proverb was, because The Joker's Wild had a category on proverbs, and the Bible was full of them. I came up with this wise saying when I was collecting pieces of discarded food which I called "cultures" and wanted to add a booger. I placed the booger in a small box instead of gluing it to a paper grocery bag. When my mom found out and made me throw away all my "cultures", I responded with my new proverb.
The funniest thing about the "cultures" is that my folks knew for about a year that I was collecting decaying pieces of food, but I didn't have to throw it away until I tried to save a booger.
John Waite was one of these acts who actually looked like an '80s lost hit song. Best all, this record was a hit smack-dab in the middle of the timeframe that we try to focus on the most. This moment in time is stuck in my head, largely for personal reasons.
John's song also prompted new lyrics from a schoolmate. When I was in 6th grade, a stoner at school - who was about 5 years older than all his classmates - parodied the chorus of this tune. He kept singing, "I'll see those tears...The damaged Quaaludes."
I'm sure he would have shed lots of tears if someone damaged his Quaaludes. Kids at school damaged my belongings all the time too - if they didn't steal them.
You'd think a top 10 hit wouldn't be lost, but David Bowie was so sparse on our major local radio stations that it's as if we can deduct 30 notches from the chart peak of each of his mid-'80s singles. David is also one of these acts who I didn't fully appreciate in the days when it seemed like everyone (even performers who had no chart hits at the time) seemed to be competing against Men At Work for chart success.
But there's a story behind "Blue Jean." It happened in 6th grade when I was in the gifted class one day a week. I think we were at the table with the microscopes, but this wasn't the same day someone broke the microscope slides by running them under hot water. Also, I'm not sure if it was the same day I tried going to my regular classes instead but got caught.
Anyway, I made up a humorous song that I kept singing to myself. I think this was the one that went, "Poo-poo is fun to eat...It's the all-around extraordinary breakfast treat." In any event, I was quietly singing it to myself at the microscope table. Then a girl sitting in the seat next to me started snickering and asked, "Are you singing 'Blue Jean'?"
Whatever I was singing, it sounded nothing like "Blue Jean." The melody sounded more like Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown."
Also, I never really understood the "Blue Jean" video, but that's true of a lot of music videos of the time, although music videos were at their peak then.
When you saw David Bowie in the header for this entry, you were probably hoping most of it would be about the guy who looked like David Bowie talking about "elimination" because someone shit on the school bus, but I'm sorry to disappoint you.
I had to include more Thompson Twins on this blog just as a matter of principle. If you could draw a picture of a 1980s lost hit, it would look like the classic lineup of the Thompson Twins from the mid-'80s when they were a trio.
But by the time this lost hit was released, the Thompsons were down to just a duo. This single was also their last Hot 100 appearance. It's hard to believe Glen Campbell's last chart hit was 25 years after that of the Thompson Twins, but it's also hard to believe that a jail inmate's quip about "anti-smiling laws" later came true, so I guess life is full of surprises.
It's important to understand some basics about the Thompson Twins situation - and about other music that was popular during the Thompsons' mid-'80s heyday. It was truly a sight to behold. People were completely spoony over it. It set the standards for all of society. Nothing like that exists today. Folks invested heavily in the swag of their favorite music acts. They Thompson Twinned, and they Thompson Twinned some more.
Now, about "Sugar Daddy." Sugar Daddy was also the name of a candy that you almost never saw except when you went trick-or-treating on Halloween. It apparently still exists, but I can't remember the last time I saw it. The only time I saw Sugar Daddy anywhere other than trick-or-treating was one time in elementary school when they gave us this candy for a special occasion. Predictably, kids fought over each other's Sugar Daddy.
And this candy took a damn long time to devour, because it was so chewy and sticky - even more so than bubble gum. You'd always find clumps of it stuck between your teeth 5 hours later. A Reddit commenter said, "They take too long to finish either way and the payoff isn't enough to justify it. They're tasty, but not enough so to justify the work to eat them." Someone on Facebook said she once got in trouble for letting a Sugar Daddy melt on the back seat of her parents' car.
I'm sure that this candy has also resulted in scenarios that were just as hilarious as the time in 2nd grade when we got caramel-covered apples on a field trip and some kid let huge hunks of apple fall off his teeth and onto the floor and seat of the school's van.
Let's talk about American Top 40. In my day, AT40 was hosted by Casey Kasem and later by Shadoe Stevens - both of whom were legends. From its 1970 debut until 1991, this radio program counted down the top 40 of Billboard's weekly Hot 100 singles chart, which was compiled from record sales and radio station playlists. AT40 and the Hot 100 were also special because of the way they were woven into each other.
For much of my youth, I moved all the heavens to listen to American Top 40 every Sunday. And my parents absolutely hated it. Hated, hated, hated it! Or at least that was the impression I got. I'm not sure if they hated the show itself that much, but they hated the fact that I devoted so much interest to it. One time in the mid-1980s, when I was about 11, my mom warned me that I couldn't let my life "revolve around" AT40.
There was a period of a couple years around that time when I had several running gags that involved a significant chunk of the music industry. That timeframe was also one of the high water marks of pop radio.
Fast-forward to 1988. I was still an AT40 fan. But the tables were turned! For weeks on end, my parents decided they weren't going to let me listen to AT40. But by then, I was absolutely fed up, so I devised a way to catch this great program and not miss any of it.
How did I accomplish this?
I made sure to clear my bottom drawer so a boom box would fit snugly therein. I had stockpiled a few blank cassettes. I turned the volume all the way down on the boom box as it was tuned to AT40 - so nobody would know it was on - and recorded the show onto tape. Each cassette held 30 minutes per side, so every half-hour, I'd sneak into my room and change the tape. At night, after I had supposedly gone to bed, I listened to AT40 off of cassette - with the volume down very low so I wouldn't get caught.
It was like the RC Cola commercials where people had to smuggle RC into prison or hide it from the KGB.
The lost hit profiled in this entry was by 12-year-old Tracie Spencer from Waterloo, Iowa. It scraped into the top 40 during some of the weeks in which I carried out the above plan. In fact, I think AT40 was the only place I ever heard this song. There were getting to be more and more top 40 hits that I didn't hear anywhere except the countdown, thanks to the narrowing of radio playlists and the minds that compiled them.
I don't think my folks banned me from listening to AT40 again after that timeframe. I guess they got it out of their system. I think somehow they eventually discovered that I had taped the program when I wasn't allowed to - but that wasn't until years later, after the statute of limitations had run out.
"You'd be overreacting if you think that I still hurt..."
If Peter Wolf is like the patron saint of lost hits, Paul Carrack would be like a venerable.
This tune was a rare highlight of 1988. As is usual when Paul Carrack is involved, there's lots to say about it. And it's not just because the album sleeve appears to show Paul urinating.
The song was so well-liked that someone once called up Power 94½ to declare that it was the "best song" they ever heard - but they inserted another word between "best" and "song." I never heard the particular DJ who was on the air that evening again.
I think someone in high school had the LP on cassette. Maybe it was a different LP by someone else, but I think it was this one. One day, the tape was sitting on a table at lunch. The principal saw the list of songs on it, and he asked, "These are songs?" These tracks had such unbelievably wacky titles as "Don't Shed A Tear" and "When You Walk In The Room."
"Button Off My Shirt" is also notable because it uses the word overreacting. I heard that word a lot, because I was always accused of "overreacting" to adverse situations, even though I actually underreacted. It went something like this...
"Today at school, somebody punched me in the face, so I said, 'Please don't punch me in the face anymore.'"
"TIM, YOU'RE OVERREACTING!!!!!!!!!!"
The song also had a version by Ronnie Milsap that was a big hit on country stations...
Now you know the legend of one of the greatest songs to fill the airwaves in 1988!
This jazzy instrumental was a big hit back in 1978 but never gets any airplay on regular radio now. And when I say regular radio, I mean FM or AM broadcasting like we had in 1978. We don't call it "terrestrial radio." We just call it radio. Radio is what comes out of a radio.
As Chuck's record was one of very few instrumentals to be such a success in 1978, it prompted an obvious joke: Whenever someone mentioned "Feels So Good", somebody would inevitably ask, "Who sings it?" I also remember hearing the track emanating from a speaker when I was on a giant slide (the kind where you sit on a "magic carpet") at some park.
I also recall being at my grandparents' house and seeing Chuck perform this tune live on TV. It was widely noted in the media that Chuck pressed the wrong valve on his flugelhorn as he was playing, but a flugelhorn is a very hard instrument to play, so there was sure to be some spontaneity like this - even from a talented musician such as he.
In my entry on "Runner" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, I talked about how I had a funny dream in which the Manfreds' lead singer Chris Thompson attacked me in an online post. I have a similar story about Chuck Mangione. In 2017, I had a hilarious dream in which I was watching a TV show where Chuck was performing. During the performance, he blew a bubble with bubble gum through his flugelhorn.
After I posted about this online, a friend commented that Chuck's signature tune was an example of a genre of music that was particularly popular in the 1970s: Electric Company music. That term actually has a real meaning. It's not one of these terms like "yacht rock" or "bubble gum" that is applied to certain songs or acts but you don't know what the origin of the term is. Electric Company music is a style of music that sounds like the funky music beds that were used on The Electric Company. Maybe in a future entry, I'll explore how that sound suddenly went away as soon as the 1980s hit.
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!
According to numerous sources, this rocker is about a Vietnam War veteran's struggles with readjusting to regular life. This is among the more serious songs to reach the top 40 at the time.
It also generated a story that's been embedded in family lore for 40 years. This anecdote centers on the line, "Taught me how to shoot to kill." The line is immediately followed by a gunshot sound effect. One day, this song came on the radio. When the gunshot was heard, my brother held out his index finger to mimic firing a gun. In doing so, he somehow poked me in the eye.
According to legend, he then declared, "That's what you get for existing." Pure genius!
Maybe I should have worn goggles around the house to avoid dangers like that. We probably should have all worn gas masks too, judging by the stories surrounding the "Rumbleseat" and "Can't Stop" entries.
Hearing this song brings back memories of a 1979 trip in which we visited relatives near Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. I think this track was even on the car radio the night the Horizon broke down in Maryland and we played with the Speak & Spell while stranded at a Boron station.
Throughout the trip, I kept snickering when this song came on, because it used the word overflowing, a word that was associated with toilets. When I started working on this entry, however, "Half The Way" brang back a particular recollection from that trip that I forgot about for 45 years.
We stayed with relatives through much of this trip. One day, we played in the woods adjoining their back yard. For some reason, I discarded part of an orange popsicle in the woods when nobody was looking. I don't know why. Maybe I just thought it was funny. More likely, it had been reduced to a state in which the remainder was not retrievable for consumption, or the wooden stick ruined the taste. This wasn't like in high school when kids kept throwing popsicles on the floor at lunch after taking only one bite. They were being wasteful just for the sheer hell of it.
When I think about the popsicle episode, "Half The Way" plays in my mind.
At least I got the mischief rating up for that trip!
In the years after, Crystal Gayle's floor-length hair prompted questions from radio shock jocks asking how she was able to go to the bathroom. These questions lingered even into the Reddit era.
Everyone remembers "I Swear." This tender love ballad had hit versions by All-4-One and John Michael Montgomery. It also has a funny - if not childish - story. Back when the song was popular, there was a kid of elementary school age who lived upstairs from me above my old apartment. One of his specialties at the time was throwing perfectly good toy trucks in the air and hitting them with a baseball bat. Anyway, one day, he was in the back yard, and I overheard him loudly singing, "I swear...By the pee and the poo in the sky..."
Now there's some man out there who is going on 40 who probably has to disclose that on job applications. That is, if there were any jobs out there.
"I'll Be" has a similar story to "I Swear." Given radio's propensity for big ballads, it's surprising that a ballad that made the top 10 like "I'll Be" is so seldom heard now. This record by the man from Greenville, South Carolina, might be heard on a soft rock specialty station, but I rarely listen to those.
Now, "I'll Be" loomed large during the infamous Usenet war. At the time, there was a way to encode entire files to post on Usenet to be downloaded. On one of the newsgroups I read, somebody asked that someone post or send them an MP3 of "I'll Be."
This wasn't quite legal, of course. This was before YouTube, so Edwin McCain couldn't monetize this transaction. It's not as if the recording was out of print. Apparently, it even came out as a 45 RPM single, and that was as late as 1998. On the other hand, I still tried to buy 45's in 1998, but it was slim pickings by then.
After someone posted this request for an Edwin McCain bootleg, somebody responded with a truly enlightening reply.
Ready for it?
"I'll be the pee-pee that you poo-poo."
That was one of the most intelligent things posted on Usenet all year.
Usenet looks like a pillar of democracy compared to the heavily censored Internet of today, but it was actually taking rapid steps backward in the late '90s. Still, which would you rather have: newsgroups with occasional offhanded toilet references, or corporate-owned social media sites that collude to censor anyone who disagrees with their local unelected public health director or the ever-growing war machine?
Time for what may well be the most uproariously stupid line ever to appear in a hit song.
Ready for it? Here it is...
"We met a lot of people and girls..."
That ranks up there with the chart-topper "Disco Lady" by Johnnie Taylor, which included the line, "You ought to be on TV or Soul Train."
And man, did this New Kids song annoy the living hell out of everyone! I'm embarrassed to even include the video above.
One of the categories that Rate Your Music lists this single under is "baroque pop", but I really wasn't even sure what that meant. Wikipedia says "In My Life" by the Beatles inspired that entire genre, but "Tonight" doesn't sound anything like that track. "Tonight" sounds more like a poor imitation of "What A Night" by City Boy, with a few of those weird, screaming strums from "The Night Chicago Died" by Paper Lace. There's a few wisps of "I'll Play For You" by Seals & Crofts mixed in there as well.
In other words, "Tonight" just sounds cobbled together from other songs. That was my impression even when I first heard this song - which wasn't under the best of circumstances, incidentally.
"If I could make it to the bathroom...If I could make it to the coast..."
When you watch any of this band's early 1980s videos, one of the main things you'll notice is that anti-glare coating for eyeglasses wasn't common yet back then. When I saw their "You Can Do Magic" clip, I was afraid of being blinded by all that glare.
It appears that for their video for "The Border", the band tried using the lack of anti-reflective coating for artistic effect but gave up on it quickly. A world without anti-glare glasses was better than today, because back then you didn't have to worry about the coating getting ruined by bubble gum, but I digress.
You all know that we love poking lighthearted fun at many of the songs and performers profiled on this blog. And - because this song was popular when I was 10 - it was a sure thing that I'd make up new lyrics for the chorus: "If I could make it to the bathroom...If I could make it to the coast..." But I didn't write additional lyrics about what I'd do when I got to the bathroom or the coast.
This record became a lost hit pretty much immediately when it fell out of the top 40. Maybe it sounded too familiar, as it does bear a strong resemblance to "Ride Like The Wind" by Christopher Cross. It was so lost that when I heard it once on the radio about 3 years later, my jaw hit the floor.
But it is my bathroom-related parody that guaranteed this track a spot on this blog. Toilet humor was a staple in the early '80s. TV commercials were also fair game for this type of comedy. For example, for the Stetson cologne commercial where the horses were running around in the guy's hat, I claimed they were actually swimming in his toilet - which would make a mess when he put it on his head. This was accompanied by the inevitable slogan "Stetson shits." For the Wrangler jeans commersh where the big, tough cowboy walks into the saloon, I always said he was wetting his pants. He's hard to beat when he takes his seat!
I'm sure all the lost hits profiled on this blog so far got some radio play, and there's very few that I only heard on venues outside of regular radio. But this is one whose video was just as well-known as the song.
Slade's lead singer Noddy Holder provided the secret sauce that made this vid so memorable. It's not just because he looked like the Gum Fighter with long hair. I'm talking about the part that begins at about 2:15 where Noddy makes faces at the camera.
My high school biology teacher made faces sort of like that every time he became angry or frustrated (i.e., often). But the event that reminded me of this video took place a few months ago. There's a public swimming pool in Cincinnati that I use on some of the 3 days each year that we have warm, dry weather. Occasionally, someone poops in it and they have to close it for a while. Anyway, back in July, I visited this pool. There was some woman in the pool who made faces like Noddy Holder did for an hour nonstop.
I concluded that the woman most likely had loose dentures.
Also, I think Slade's lost hit was big during our family trip to Chillicothe. My biggest memory of that trip is visiting a convenience store along a lake where some woman got mad at her kids because they wanted to buy bubble gum. Gum was fine, just as long as it wasn't specifically labeled as bubble gum.
In the 2000s, we had bands like Nickelback and Creed that had maybe one or two big hits, but everyone started ridiculing the hell out of them the moment those tracks fell off the chart.
Well, a decade earlier, we had the Rembrandts.
Their highest-charting single is the lost hit we're featuring today. It wasn't such a bad song, and some folks today actually have some level of respect for it. But as soon as it dropped off the chart, the Rembrandts suffered years and years of the Nickelback treatment.
Not long after this hit charted, I was listening to the radio when a listener called in with a request for the Rembrandts. The DJ laughed his ass off!
There was a period a few years later when it looked like the Rembrandts might regain the luster they once had, but everyone confused them with the BoDeans. That's because the Rembrandts and the BoDeans were responsible for the theme songs to Friends and Party Of Five, respectively, which were essentially the same song - which in turn was practically the same song as "Good Girls Don't" by the Knack, only without the naughty lyrics.
I never intentionally watched either of those TV shows - my preferences at the time were The Simpsons and Seinfeld - so I heard the Rembrandts' and the BoDeans' TV music on the radio much more than I ever heard it on TV. And did I ever! It seems like that's all they ever played! Plus "The Grease Megamix", which Q-102 acted like it made itself. This was a particularly rough time in life for a number of reasons, including Newt Gingrich's fascism and my conflicts with NKU, and there was one time I stayed up all night listening to the radio because I couldn't sleep. I remember sitting on the floor in my old apartment and hearing the Rembrandts' Friends theme.
After a few years of that, it was back to Rembrandts ridicule.
Luckily for them, people seem to have moved past that and let bygones be bygones. The Bee Gees scored a top 10 hit years after everyone thought they were out of business for good, so there may be hope yet for the Rembrandts.
This lost hit by the mullet-headed man from Flatwoods, Kentucky, included one of the most unintentionally hilarious lyrics of the era...
"I got no invitation...I guess the mailman didn't bring it to me..."
Nope. You got no invitation because you weren't invited. It's not like the mailman wiped his ass with the invitation and threw it in the woods with all the beer that some teenagers hid there.
Billy's conspiracy theory about the missing invitation provided an important contribution to life. The song was popular around the time I started subscribing to M Street Journal - a great weekly newsletter full of radio news such as format changes and other tidbits. If M Street Journal wasn't in my mailbox each Monday, I would harangue the Highland Heights post office until it was. And, each time M Street Journal didn't arrive on time, I would go around singing, "I got no M Street Journal...I guess the mailman didn't bring it to me."
That was also around the time some people with Florida plates kept parking in front of our mailbox. Every time they did this, the mail carrier would skip us. If this car didn't park there, customers of a nearby business often did. There shouldn't have even been a business there, as that block was only zoned for residential. Nothing was ever done about people parking in front of our mailbox. Imagine that, a problem didn't get solved.
People occasionally parked in front of our driveway. I once saw an episode of Cops in which someone dealt with this problem creatively: They plowed their car into the offending vehicle and knocked it out of the way.
Even after I got my own apartment, the late deliveries continued. At least once, someone at the Postal Service inexplicably changed the zip code on the envelope, so the delivery of my M Street Journal was delayed. But I don't think I completely missed an issue while I subscribed - although there was plenty of other mail I never received.
The well-known standard "Any Day Now", which was recorded by notables such as Chuck Jackson, Elvis Presley, and Ronnie Milsap, had a similar M Street connection. Each year, the M Street folks published the legendary M Street Radio Directory, which summarized all of their data. M Street often had to delay publishing it because deregulation kept causing so much information to change. The changes in the radio industry were rarely good, of course, but at least M Street kept us notified of the horrifying situation. I remember at least one year when the book had to be delayed so much that by the time it was published, it was time for the next one.
Any time a new edition of this directory was released, and it was about to be shipped, I kept singing, "Any day now...We will have an M Street!"
It was hard to top the version with the pink cover though. I think that was the one that the post office delayed delivering until the same day I was assaulted up the street after work and the police wouldn't do anything about it.
PowerSource was a church group from Texas. This song dealt with child abuse, and it was recorded in 1985 with lead vocals by 6-year-old Sharon Batts. The record finally became popular when influential radio stations in New York and Tampa began playing it.
But Rate Your Music reviewers have taken a rather dim view of this record. One said, "Never before have I heard a song so contrived, so emotionally manipulative, so downright disgusting and harrowing in its shameless exploitation of such a serious issue. This is basically every bad 'message song' of the 1980s rolled into one."
Other websites complain that the '80s had a "vigilante" attitude toward child abusers. But that's a lot better than what we see now. These days, TV networks and political parties go out of their way to elevate celebrities who have endorsed child abuse. For example, CBS gave Lisa Whelchel her own spot on Survivor: Philippines. The Democratic National Convention invited has-been singer Pink to perform, even after she said, "I think parents need to beat the crap out of their kids." That's in addition to NBC's Today endorsing child abuse outright.
Incidentally, I learned in broadcasting class in college that affiliated TV stations are responsible for what they air, even if it comes from a network. I think the FCC might want to take a look when the licenses for some of our local affiliates come up for renewal.
Even a serious song like "Dear Mr. Jesus" isn't safe from parody. Back when the song was a hit, a local radio station (I don't even remember which one) made a parody called "Dear Mister Rogers." That was also around the time Mister Rogers visited a children's show in the Soviet Union.
You'd think a top 10 hit wouldn't be lost, but we live in a strange world.
This song had a "Take It Away" moment of sorts. This took place one day just before I started a new semester of college or had a schedule change when I worked at the public library. I was getting ready for my new daily schedule, and my mom asked, "What about your lunch?"
The predictable happened. I burst into an adaptation of this now-lost TLC hit: "What about your lunch..."
My mom must have thought I would have to rush all the way home at noon each day to eat lunch, or that lunch had to be precisely at noon. But NKU actually had 2 cafeterias in the University Center building, and the public library had an employee lounge plus a gas station convenience store right next door.
Admittedly, I didn't always like using these venues, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Our lounge at the library always had spilled food and other trash laying around. And I kept getting in fights in the food courts at NKU - especially in the Helmethead era. For those who don't remember, Helmethead was a young man who always hung around in the cafeteria on the lower floor. I hesitate to say he was a student, because I never saw him going to or from a class. I only ever remember seeing him in the cafeteria. He was never eating or working on schoolwork. This lazy loafer was always just gambling with his friends. But I must have known him from before, because he started a fight with me every time I saw him. After he hounded me out of that food court for good, I started using the other one, and I got chased out of it too.
The lower food court is also where I got the slice of pizza that was spoiled, which caused me to discard it in the outgoing mail slot at the post office. I wonder who got that pizza in the mail. I think that court was also the source of the taco sauce that got smeared on the record player.
Five years ago, NKU whined to holy high hell about students "clustering", yet they wouldn't do a damn thing about Helmethead. What a complete, unmitigated, unchecked disaster.
This is one of these songs that always comes up in discussions about lost hits. But everyone always thinks it was the Thompson Twins.
I heard this song some back in my day. Around the time it was popular, we went on a family vacation to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in which people kept farting. As we were visiting one of the Smithsonian museums, someone cracked a silent-but-deadly, and my mom declared, "It smells like somebody has a load in their pants!" This was also the trip where we had a reservation at a Holiday Inn, but when we got there, we found that it had been converted into an Imperial 400 Motor Inn. I remember someone listening to "The Love Parade" on the jukebox at a Pizza Hut in northern Virginia. They also played "Sex As A Weapon" by Pat Benatar, now also a lost hit.
When 8th grade started, I wrote about this trip for my "what I did over the summer" report that I had to read in front of the class. I think I mentioned all the flatulence and how someone put a whole roll of toilet paper in the toilet at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I actually remember more about the Pizza Hut than you might expect, considering it was 39 years ago. I have surprisingly clear memories of the meals on that trip, for some reason. Most restaurant visits saw frustrated parents yelling at unruly children. Also, when we visited relatives near Philadelphia, my aunt said there was a burger place nearby called Charburger that had recently burned down: "So Charburger is now charred."
I always thought the first few notes of "The Love Parade" sounded strikingly similar to the beginning of some TV commercial at the time for an over-the-counter acne treatment. I don't think it was the Oxy ad where the guy with the deep voice said, "Zit, this is it!" I always called that guy the Oxy Moron, because when I first heard the word oxymoron, I thought of those ads.
This also brings to mind how nobody used those round acne pads because they smelled so bad. The smell would give you a headache for the rest of the day, so it was considered better to just live with the consequences of going without. I grew up in that era, and there were lots of products for my age group that just seemed idiotic beyond belief. It's nothing like now, of course, but it was pretty bad.
This duo from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, made up of Lenny LeBlanc and the late Pete Carr gave us this lost hit. Like an England Dan & John Ford Coley tune we profiled a while back, this is yet another slice of 1977 adult contemporary with misheard lyrics with a pop culture connection.
Now, the Ewoks were not introduced to the Star Wars universe until 1983, which means the line in this song didn't catch my attention until the song was a few years old. I remember hearing the song long before then though. I think I first noticed the Ewok-related lyrics when we were in line at the pharmacy counter at Thriftway (a now-defunct local supermarket chain) and it was playing on the store's music system. But that could just be...the power of suggestion!
That's not the end of the "Falling" saga!
After this record was a hit, Lenny found religion. I guess there's really nothing wrong with that. But what he said afterward was rather interesting. In an interview with a religious TV show, Lenny talked about how he used to do all these demonic, decadent things like record "Falling." He made it sound like "Falling" was an anthem about biting heads off schoolchildren instead of a tender love ballad that was on par with big hits by Bread or Randy VanWarmer.
"Falling" may be a little too much for these days, with Big Tech censorship and social distancing being the law of the land, but 1977 was more freewheeling times. LeBlanc & Carr charted during the same era as Kiss and Alice Cooper. Put on the 1977 glasses and imagine how tame LeBlanc & Carr sounded compared to some of the other performers of the day.
I always thought of this song as being stupidly hilarious. A lot of music legends - even Quincy Jones - worked on this record, but even the greats can be stupidly hilarious when they want to.
I remember Casey Kasem introducing this now-lost hit as an "inspirational" song. I guess that's because it inspired people to write stupidly hilarious songs!
What was the title even supposed to mean? Michael McDonald once said it was a religious phrase that James Ingram decided to modify so it wouldn't scare away pop radio's godless listeners.
I have my own personal anecdote about this song. I mentioned once before how "Mama Weer All Crazee Now" by Quiet Riot inspired me to get my entire 6th grade class to pound on the tables in the lunchroom. But let's go back to 5th grade for a story of how James and Michael's hit subconsciously inspired another act of cafeteria mischief. At the time, I was forced to attend a gifted class each Monday. Now, everyone knows you can blow bubbles in your milk through your straw. No news there. But I decided to add my own twist.
While I was eating lunch with the gifted class - with the teacher sitting right there - I began blowing bubbles through the straw in my milk. The twist was that I added music to it. As I was bubbling, I simultaneously hummed 4 high-pitched notes.
I thought it sounded like something from a sci-fi or perhaps an epic space fantasy like a Star Wars movie. So - in a C-3PO voice - I declared, "Oh no, R2!"
The teacher was MAD!!!
Years later, in college, I kept recounting this incident to a group of schoolmates when we met on the knoll by the box sculpture. They thought it was uproarious.
But where did the melody of those 4 notes come from? Fast forward to 2:50 in the above video. Now I realize that the notes that I hummed while blowing milk bubbles were identical to 4 notes in "Yah Mo B There" that seemed to be produced by some sort of gurgling instrument. The song must have subconsciously inspired me to hum these notes while blowing milk bubbles. But blowing milk bubbles made the tune sound more spacey.
The fact that "Yah Mo B There" inspired me to blow milk bubbles must be why Casey called it an "inspirational" record!
It may have been just another day in paradise for Bertie Higgins, but it was many years of laughter for me.
Bertie mania struck when he gave us his big hit "Key Largo." Remember, I was usually forced to listen to softer stations at the time. Every evening during the run-up to dinner, the stereo was tuned to one of these corny stations. Then Bertie's follow-up single - which we're profiling here today - crackled across the AM radio in my parents' Horizon as we tooled down Interstate 471.
Bertie's songs had a tropical feel that I associated with the colorful animated commercials for Froot Loops that were set on a beach or some other sunny environment.
Later, things really got hilarious. A couple years after all of this, I came up with something that tied in with Dungeons & Dragons yet somehow involved Bertie Higgins - who by that time was long since out of hit material. In this game, assorted individuals were forced to appear on TV and admit to certain aspects of their personal lives - which may or may not have been true. They might not be things that are necessarily illegal, but they were things that might have destroyed the image that these persons were trying to cultivate for themselves.
The list of people in this D&D spinoff ranged from ubiquitous celebrities to school bullies who I encountered. I don't know why Bertie Higgins was included. By the time I came up with this, nobody cared much about poor Bertie anymore.
None of this was real. It was only a game. But it worked something like this: In this game, people all over the country - maybe the world - would be watching TV when the network broke in with an important bulletin. After the slide with the network logo appeared on the screen, Bertie would show up and address the viewer...
"Remember me? I'm Bertie Higgins. You may recall that song 'Key Largo' that I had a couple years back. Anyway, you know something? I have a rather peculiar interest. I enjoy drawing pictures of Howdy Doody playing with himself. Then I like to tear the paper into tiny pieces and eat them. I also like licking cotton candy off of the shopping carts at IGA. But the store nearest to me won't let me do this anymore because it was scaring other customers.
"Life can be rough if you have these interests. People like me are often misunderstood. But there's hope. We now have over 200 cosponsors in Congress for a constitutional amendment to protect the right to lick cotton candy off grocery carts. Though this is an American movement, it has support from music performers around the world, including Julio Iglesias and members of Air Supply. Our movement has chapters in all 50 states and D.C., all of which have support from the music world. For example, Greg Guidry has just signed on as the chief fundraiser for our Missouri chapter. I've known Greg for many years, and he does not himself partake in shopping cart licking. But he believes in freedom.
"So take it from me - Bertie, your better. America is fast becoming a police state, and if we don't act, we may someday wake up in an America we don't recognize. Someday, not even 40 years from now, we might even have anti-smiling laws. You don't want that. Do you? So write your congresscritter about these important matters. Thank you, and God bless!"
Like I said, this wasn't real. It was all just a game. So don't throw a tantrum if you lose.
For decades after, Bertie still made albums, but none of them sold very well. Last year, he turned 80. Then, early this year, he put out a new single titled "Do The Donald." It was a disco-styled record that was a tribute to Donald Trump...
A YouTube commenter said of this song, "Key Largo was solid gold, but this is solid dog shit." Another said, "To think this guy went from writing a masterpiece like Key Largo in better days to writing literal cult propaganda music in our dystopian present is unbelievably sad and depressing."
But I guess it's just another day in paradise for Bertie.
Meet Andrew Roachford, the man who skipped over even numbers when he counted things.
Andrew and his band gave us this memorable lost hit that showcased his rather unconventional counting method. Maybe that's because odd numbers are funnier than even numbers - as we all know. Our 8th grade battle cry was "5 out of 5", not "6 out of 6" or "10 out of 10." In fact, it was still a popular saying when I was a high school sophomore 3 years later. One day, we were all sitting quietly in biology class, when I heard someone yell out this catchphrase in the hallway.
Accordingly, this lost hit became one of the very first cassette singles I ever purchased. It also became one of the very few cassette singles I ever lost. Scroll down for the ending of that harrowing story...
Keep scrolling...
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I recently found it after it was lost for over 20 years.
I can't count the number of things like that have been lost here. You can pretty much forget about ever finding something when someone says, "It's probably buried under all that junk." When it gets to that point, you can be 99% sure it's hopeless. One of very few exceptions is my Roachford cassette. Michael Penn still hasn't turned up though.
These cassettes weren't lost because I neglected them. They were lost because of incidents like the repeated break-ins in which everything got either scattered or stolen. This continued as late as last year, but the police insisted that this burglary must have been committed by family members who just wanted to use my bathroom. Seriously, they said that.
These Cincinnati siblings began charting long before I was even born, but they also managed to score several Hot 100 entries during what we call the second generation of lost hits, which we define as late 1991 and later. Some might argue that we should just stop this blog at 1991, but I was already interested in lost hits by then, and if we stop at 1991 now, that would be like if we stopped at 1957 then. It's like how the time someone carved "I am gay" into a table in 6th grade was as close to the mid-1940s as it is to the mid-2020s.
"Contagious" was a substantial hit at Tantrum 95.7, but it was also popular in other contexts. I remember downstairs neighbors frequently blaring the tune loudly. This brings to mind a funny story involving these neighbors.
The buildings where I've lived during my adult life have been a wellspring of stories. One of the most memorable was a kid throwing a brand new toy down the steps and breaking it and the resulting angry lecture. Another is when some loudmouths kept smashing the window in the front door during their many stupid arguments. But the story in this entry involves a dispute between my downstairs neighbors and the people in the apartment next to mine on the second floor. These are not current neighbors, as they all moved out a long time ago.
One day, I heard what sounded like glass breaking in the alley. It was accompanied by a loud thump. Then I heard the man downstairs angrily yelling.
I just thought some little kids were smashing beer bottles in the alley again, but then I heard stern voices talking outside. I ran downstairs to investigate. I saw a police car idling with its lights going. Several patrolmen were out there talking to the neighbors.
It turned out that the neighbors next to me were dropping their trash out their second-story window into the dumpster below - instead of carrying it outside like they were supposed to. They kept missing the dumpster, and glass would shatter on the pavement. The alley was littered with glass, rotting food scraps, and diapers, which caused the people downstairs to call the police.
I mentioned the incident at a family gathering not long after, and I think some relatives said they had similar dealings with an event like this.
This early 2000s episode predated more recent gentrification projects that have done even more to contribute to local mouse infestations. But if anything was contagious, it was the overall stupidity that was enveloping society.
Michael Jackson recorded the vocals for this song back in 1973, the year he turned 15. The song was remixed for a 1984 compilation album just as his Thriller set was finally being exhausted. Remember, it wasn't until 1987 that Bad was released, so Michael mania had to be kept alive all those years.
During the height of Thriller's popularity, some girl at school admiringly said of Michael, "He's not a man. He's a phenomenon!" I miss Michael Jackson today, but I wasn't into him during his heyday. On the other hand, "Beat It" is said to have rescued top 40 radio from itself, so we can be thankful that Michael helped end the MOR doldrums of the early 1980s and got everyone listening to high-energy top 40 again.
People still talked about Michael all through the years when he had no new solo albums of new material. This brings to mind a classmate I had in 6th grade. For a while, he sat right behind me in literature class. Now, this was an advanced class. I don't know why the school placed me in an advanced literature class, as that was my weakest subject. The assistant principal's excuse was usually that "a computer did it."
Anyway, the classmate I'm talking about didn't start the year there, but he just showed up one day as a new student. He asked me what my favorite songs and musicians were. I know I liked the now-lost hit "Romancing The Stone" by Eddy Grant. I think I liked "I Can't Drive 55" by Sammy Hagar. I also actually enjoyed some metal and new wave that wasn't big on pop radio. Who didn't? But my classmate's favorite performer was - drum roll, please - Michael Jackson.
I guess there's really nothing wrong with that, but Michael was one of only two topics that he talked about constantly. What was the other? Well, one day, he asked me what my favorite TV shows were. I don't remember what my answer was, because network TV was in sort of a malaise at the time with its squeaky clean family sitcoms. But he said his favorite show was...
Are you ready for it?
Are you?
Sesame Street.
Yes, Sesame Street. In 6th grade!
He spent the rest of the school year talking about nothing but Michael Jackson and Sesame Street. It appears that he even wrote fan mail to Luis.
Sesame Street and Michael Jackson were better than some of the other things people talked about. A lot of kids at school just talked about bashing people's heads in. That's why I stockpiled thorns to defend myself.
I don't think I ever saw this particular schoolmate again after 6th grade until I was in high school. That was when he sat down next to me on a TANK bus, and I didn't recognize him. "Remember me, man?" he said. When he said who he was, I remembered then!
With such an unusual title, I had no idea what this song was about when I was growing up. Later, I read that the song was written because Pete Townshend had a guru whose followers would always grab his coat and hang on to it.
The title also brings back an early 1980s memory of some mischief I got into. I should refer to this song as "Do Let Go The Coat", because it was a surgical strike, and I would have been caught if I hadn't let go.
I was about 8, and this incident took place at a department store like Sears or JCPenney. I was with my family doing Christmas shopping. We didn't buy much at midrange stores like this, but this was special. Anyway, my nose started to tickle. It was a telltale sign of a boog.
A booger was gonna be snagged, and that's all there was to it. The problem was that I didn't know where to discard it. I didn't have a tissue handy. It had to go somewhere. I couldn't make it magically disappear.
So I waited until some woman with a little boy walked past. They were complete strangers, and they didn't say a word as they walked by. The woman was wearing a long, tan overcoat.
What an enticing target that overcoat was!
When nobody was looking, I snuck up behind the woman as she was walking and wiped the freshly snagged gob of mucus onto her coat. Then I skedaddled away!
I never got caught, and nobody knows what became of the boog.
That was a couple years before I made a department store escalator grind to a halt by shoving a metal hook into the grooves. I never got caught for that either, but it was so funny to see the look on everyone's faces when the escalator loudly screeched to a stop! It was also before I changed the radio station to static at a sporting goods store and made everyone think the stadium blew up during a Reds game.
In the winter of 1983-84, this Three Stooges tribute song by the Chicago-based Jump 'n the Saddle Band filled pop radio airwaves far and wide. But later, the song would always come up in every conversation about lost hits.
Even 20 years ago, someone on a message board for alumnuses of our local school system said he was surprised to hear "The Curly Shuffle" blaring over the speakers at a Reds game, as he hadn't heard it for 20 years before.
Years after that posting, something took place that caused "The Curly Shuffle" to play in my head. During TV court shows, there were lots of commercials for a law firm called Elk & Elk. One of the attorneys in the ad bore a striking resemblance to Moe Howard. Recently, I typed in "Elk & Elk" and "Moe Howard" into a Google search to see if anyone else noticed the resemblance, and Google's AI feature said, "Elk & Elk and Moe Howard are not directly related." I'm sure Joe Biden and actor Mike Farrell aren't directly related either, but the amazing resemblance between the two has been noted.
Now there's new life to the phrase Curly shuffle. These days, a Curly shuffle is an instance of diarrhea that's so bad that no amount of toilet paper can do the job of cleaning it up, and you have to jump in the shower to get clean. Why do we call it that? "Jump in the shower" → Jump 'n the Saddle → Curly shuffle.
We never shit our pants...We get up and dance and do the Curly shuffle!
This lost hit by Michael Penn - brother of actors Sean and Chris - inexplicably includes a line about a comic strip cat. That's not a misheard lyric. It's like Billy Joel fretting over the lack of Soaftsoap in the heat of war or Paul McCartney extolling the greatness of the Sooner State in that it's a real lyric that doesn't seem to make sense.
As with Tina Turner's "Steamy Windows", I think we heard Michael's song on the same day we drove to Frankfort. I think I've pegged the date as February 3, 1990. I'm also pretty sure we heard this song on the FM radio on the stereo in the den that night after we got home. I remember this because I had just been forced to abandon my favorite dialup computer bulletin board. It had been replaced by some sort of fancy system that made an account under my name and posted stupid stories. I was unable to log on under my own name and delete these narratives. So I spent that evening making gag accounts on the BBS that I was forced to abandon.
No hard feelings, but it needed to be done.
The good news is that I had a much better high school the following fall, so not all of 1990 was the total loss that the first 8 months of it were. It's pretty bad when that school was actually an improvement, but it's truly breathtaking just how bad our schools around here are.
Also, I remember a longer version of "No Myth" that I only ever heard on American Top 40. The version in the video above is the same one that I had on cassette (that disappeared in the home invasions) and which radio stations outside of AT40 always played. But the longer version had an ending that was evocative of a swarm of bees flying out of a snake charmer's basket. Every so often, you'd hear a "ding!" that seemed to represent a bee stinging someone. I can't find this extended version on YouTube though - or anywhere.
