"Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" by Sophie B. Hawkins

1992 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 3.55 out of 5!

This is another top 10 hit that seems to have completely faded from major venues. I haven't heard it on regular radio in about 30 years.

And it's a late example of Electric Company music - a characteristic that was otherwise almost nonexistent outside the 1970s.

The Electric Companying in this record begins in the second verse. Make no mistake, that's Electric Company music. If Dick Clark had put together a compilation album called That's Electric Company Music!, this song might be included.

However, Sophie's record - since it was in the space-age '90s - might use different instruments for Electric Companying than Elton John or Chuck Mangione used.

I have a funny story about this song that involves Power 94½ - or rather, the downfall of Power 94½. One evening, we were in Lexington for some reason. Power 94½ had just abandoned its successful format that it had for years, leaving its main competitor alone in the format. We couldn't pick up its competitor at home. As Billy Ray Cyrus would say, I got no invitation. I guess the FCC didn't bring it to me.

This competing station also didn't last much longer in the format, and Lexington actually didn't have another top 40 station for 4 years. That was the king of mass appeal formats, and for 4 years, about the only people satisfied by Lexington radio were those whose musical tastes were narrow enough to be served by niche formats. Cincinnati had the same problem to an extent, as Q-102 had softened so much.

During our trek through Lexington, we parked on the Power 94½ lot and tuned the car radio to its competitor. Then we blared it loudly enough for the Power peeps to hear us. The song on the radio was Sophie's now-lost hit that we're profiling in this entry.

I bet the Power peeps pooped their pantaloons!

This may have been the same day I set the VCR to tape a heavily promoted 2-hour Cops marathon off the TV because I wouldn't be home that evening, and I discovered it didn't tape because someone had toyed with the VCR settings.

"Mama Can't Buy You Love" by Elton John

1979 / #9

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

Ready for some Electric Company music?

That's what I call a certain sound that was all over the airwaves in the 1970s. I call it that because the same sound was used in the music beds on The Electric Company. It can best be described as a "wokka" sound. I didn't know how to spell that until a hilarious online troll posted about it some years ago. I'm not even sure what instruments create that sound. In fact, I think different instances of it used different instruments. It's not just a sound but a genre.

It should be a whole radio format! In the mid-1990s, WUBE-AM briefly had a format of old pop standards remade by then-current artists. A format of Electric Company music is no more niche than that.

Elton John came through on the Electric Company front. Listen to his lost hit we're profiling today. The Electric Companying begins about 21 seconds in. Wokka!

This song was big while I attended my enlightening summer class just before 1st grade. I remember hearing it on the radio in the Horizon as we were tooling up U.S. 27 near NKU. This was around the same time and same spot where I burst out laughing because we were behind a TANK bus where a passenger blew a humongous bubble with bubble gum.

As soon as the '80s came, that was the end of Electric Company music. A blink of an eye, and it was suddenly gone. Just like that. Reruns of The Electric Company aired throughout the '80s, but in the decade of MTV and new wave, The Electric Company seemed dated because of its music beds.

But Electric Company music made a fleeting reappearance in the '90s, which we'll cover in our next entry - another top 10 hit, no less!

"Superbowl Shuffle" by the Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew

1986 / #41

Rate Your Music score: 2.39 out of 5!

During the 1985-86 NFL season, the Chicago Bears seemed to be trying to lay claim as "America's team." They ended the regular season with a smashing 15-1 record, and everyone knew they were well on their way to play in Super Bowl XX.

So, not long before the big game, the Bears recorded this charity single that had a hip-hop beat. The team had built such a strong national following that the record was played on the radio all over the country and managed to peak just one notch shy of the nationwide top 40. Profits from the record were donated to an organization that helped needy Chicago area families.

After "Superbowl Shuffle" was released, the Bears went on to destroy the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX at the Louisiana Superdome. That was the Super Bowl that had the Up with People halftime show where the guy wearing ridiculous clothes sang the Huey Lewis song "The Power Of Love"...

I had thought he also wore fluorescent suspenders, but I must have been thinking of someone else.

After that was when I started being forced to attend a terrible Catholic school for the rest of 7th grade. During the spring was the 8th graders' variety show. This was a live performance that the class gave for the entire school and community. One of the skits consisted of some of the 8th grade girls wearing football jerseys and dancing to "Superbowl Shuffle." The entire show was G-rated, yet somehow, it was too much for the ultraconservative citizenry of Cold Spring, Kentucky, to handle. A year later, when I was in 8th grade, the school refused to let us have a variety show. They said it was because spring was a time solely for reflection, and that the previous year's show had offended the community. It is believed that the "Superbowl Shuffle" segment provoked much of the outrage. I don't see how it was offensive at all.

When our show was canceled, some of my 8th grade classmates begged me to write a petition to have it reinstated. But the rest of the time, they kept harassing me. Oops, there went their petition. They harassed me, and they lost their variety show. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

In 2014 - almost 30 years after "Superbowl Shuffle" was recorded - some of the Bears players who performed on the record sued the company that held the license to the song, rightly saying the proceeds should continue to go to charity. It's sad that even charities are no longer safe from the greed of companies that try to rip them off.

"Winds Of Change" by Jefferson Starship

1983 / #38

Rate Your Music score: 3.4 out of 5!

Here's a lost hit from the band that was always changing corporation names: "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." Just joking! If you don't understand why "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" shouldn't be on a lost hits blog, ask an adult.

Anyway, back in 1983, Jefferson Starship charted with the energetic rocker we're profiling in this entry: "Winds Of Change." The title was evocative of several other things that were going on at the time. It happened to be around the same time ABC aired the miniseries The Winds Of War. The title of the song and the miniseries both inspired a project I had at the time.

This was right when I started making up tasteless Sesame Street fanfic. At first, I came up with a storyline called "Sesame Street In Hell", in which all the characters were killed off pretty quickly. Then I came up with a new storyline called "The Winds Of Sesame Street." This storyline was much more elaborate, and it went on for at least a year. This was the one in which Big Bird's feathery tail was amputated and was found floating in outer space. Also in this storyline, Bert started a toilet paper factory. He-Man visited the show and was somehow chopped up into small pieces, prompting Gordon to put him back together with Scotch tape. Men At Work visited too, and they gave a concert where they used Grover's head as a drum.

I think I came up with the title for this storyline one windy day in early spring of that year when we were playing at the end of the street and found a pile of drywall someone had discarded. We used the drywall to draw pictures of Ernie and Bert on the street. We also wrote, "Mister Softee is a softhead," a reference to the ice cream truck that often came along.

Also around that time, a bratty neighborhood kid kept calling everyone an "Ernie-and-Bert-butt." I think he later went on to threaten to kill a local prosecutor and a judge.

"It's Raining Again" by Supertramp

1982 / #11

Rate Your Music score: 3.4 out of 5!

"Come on, you little fighter..."

Let's talk about Dungeons & Dragons.

I was 8 the first time I heard of Dungeons & Dragons, but I didn't really know what it was. I knew it was a game, but I didn't know it was anything so involved. I was maybe 9 when my brother buyed a Dungeons & Dragons set. I think it was from a yard sale but hadn't been opened yet. It was as if some kid had purchased it before and their parents made them get rid of it right away. This set came with chits - the small pieces of paper they used because there was a dice shortage. The only people who really liked chits were prison inmates, because many prisons did not allow dice, as prisoners might use them to gamble.

I kept calling the game "Dumbgeons & Dragons" to see if it would provoke a reaction. I discovered pretty quickly though it's actually a pretty interesting game.

I think this was before we got Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Back then, we had just plain old Dungeons & Dragons. So it would have been before we had the Monster Manual whose cover had a creature that was half horse and half Michael McDonald.

Anyway, we had an ongoing game of Dungeons & Dragons going on. This particular campaign featured several non-player characters who liked to upstage the player characters. Right around that time, the lost hit by Supertramp that we're featuring in this entry blasted up the music chart.

This song contained a line that was of note: "Come on, you little fighter." I thought it had something to do with the fighter character class in Dungeons & Dragons. It actually sounded like a playground taunt. "Come on, you little fighter! I'm a big, tough magic-user, and I can kick your ass any day!" I bet they're "armed with Ajax" too.

One is almost inclined to think the band intended the line as a taunt. The lyrics of Supertramp's classic rock staple "Bloody Well Right" seem to be talking down to those who complain about how miserable life is. Sometimes it's justifiable to call out complainers, such as boards of directors of hospitals that whined that their hospital was full after they did absolutely nothing to add more beds - when they had years to do so. They had lots of complaints but no solutions. I got so sick of that word can't. Can't, can't, can't. That's all I ever heard. They complained more than the Whiners, a couple that appeared on Saturday Night Live. But most of the time, I love it when people complain. Even the word complain sounds like it's complaining.

Come on, you little fighter!

"What About Love" by 'til tuesday

1986 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.55 out of 5!

I have a knack for innovation and thinking outside the box.

When I was 13, I copied down the characters from a children's book, and spent most of the fall setting aside each day to mimic the misbehavior of a particular young character. They each had a specialty, such as cutting photos out of perfectly good books, tracking mud everywhere, acting up in school, or losing things. I think I even started writing an Atari BASIC game based on this.

I think this is what led me to act up at a younger cousin's birthday party at McDonald's. I stuck tape on a light bulb over a table, causing it to melt onto the table. I shot straw paper at some old man. I filled the toilet with tissue paper. Other than that, I didn't do anything that bad. I got in trouble though. These days, the school system would connive with the McDonald's to ban students from the restaurant, even though this event had nothing to do with school. But when I was growing up, this was a free country - usually. Well, sort of.

I think the character in the book who tracked mud everywhere may have been what inspired me to get mud all over my shoes at recess at school and track it all over the building. I also kept a muddy brick in my desk for months.

Music can be a snapshot in time. These days, Billboard's Hot 100 is dominated by Christmas or even Halloween oldies for half the year. Last fall, Billboard tightened the rules as to how long a track could stay on the chart if it was below a certain position, but inexplicably said this change wouldn't apply to seasonal songs. But in 1986, records zipped up and down the chart with dispatch. And 'til tuesday - as with a-ha, the band's name was usually written in all lowercase - came through!

I don't ever remember seeing the video for the enjoyable lost hit profiled in this entry until YouTube came along. When I first saw it, it looked like lead singer Aimee Mann had a big, long column of mucus dangling out of her nose at 2:36. But it's actually a strand of hair.

I'm looking over my shoulder for more lost hits!

"Do Me Baby" by Meli'sa Morgan

1986 / #46

Rate Your Music score: 3.1 out of 5!

Let's talk about Sly Fox.

After I was expelled from a public school in 7th grade, I attended a Catholic school that spring. It was a disaster from day one.

My literature teacher was an elderly, diminutive nun who resembled Emma Tisdale, the motorcycle-riding mail carrier on The Dukes Of Hazzard. I think she retired from teaching at the end of the school year.

One day, we had a class discussion on popular music. Students were supposed to name titles of songs that were big at the time. Inevitably, someone mentioned Sly Fox's big hit "Let's Go All The Way." Even more inevitably, snickers reverberated throughout the classroom when this title was uttered.

According to all sources, there was nothing suggestive about that song. Wikipedia says the title is actually "a message of encouragement." Nothing racy about it.

When the old nun heard everyone laughing, she frowned. She hoped that the title really wasn't anything naughty. Because if it was, "that's outright pornography!"

Think how she would have reacted to another song that was popular right at the same time - which is the lost hit we're profiling today, "Do Me Baby" by Meli'sa Morgan. The title and lyrics were obviously more risqué than Sly Fox's hit. I can just see Simon Leis raiding radio stations that played this song, or Citizens for Community Values following people around in record stores and writing down their license plate number if they purchased the record.

It must have gone over the censors' heads, because I don't remember anyone picketing the advertisers of stations that played the record. But some of these advertisers would have been hard to picket, as they weren't all local businesses. This was around the time the Army advertised heavily on local stations with their "Be all that you can be" campaign. At the time, the Army had a commercial that ended with a sergeant talking to a young soldier who was going off to college after his tour of duty...

"Know what I want you to do?"

"What's that, sergeant?"

"Graduate!"

I always made fun of this ad by replacing that last line with "Kill yourself!"

Prince is credited as the writer of "Do Me Baby." When Prince became really popular, I was warned that most of his songs were "dirty." But Prince's bassist André Cymone has claimed to be the song's actual writer.

I don't remember if "Rock Me Amadeus" or "Beat's So Lonely" prompted any snickering during that classroom exercise.

"Dreamtime" by Daryl Hall

1986 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 3.18 out of 5!

"You're living in dreamtime, baby...You wanna run away...It's time to wake up..."

I had Kermit the Frog for my 8th grade science teacher.

Seriously, my 8th grade science teacher looked just like Jim Henson did circa 1967. And his voice sounded exactly like Kermit the Frog!

And he had a temper! He was a good teacher, but man, did he have a temper! I apparently missed one of his best tantrums though, which reportedly took place when I was out of the room to deliver a note to the office. On the other hand, people shouldn't have been trying to get a rise out of him either.

His classroom was right next to the supply room where I poured nickel sulfide in the drain.

Anyway, this teacher once reportedly delivered an angry lecture in which he borrowed a line from this big solo hit by Daryl Hall. According to this legend, a student was dozing off in class, so the instructor became angry and declared, "You're living in dreamtime! It's time to wake up!"

I don't know if that actually was a real quote from my science teacher, or if it was just someone doing an impression of him. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing he would have said though. This is like how a line from a Duran Duran song was attributed to my high school principal.

"Dreamtime" became a lost hit pretty much right when it fell of the chart. I was amazed by the fact that you never heard it anymore. For peaking way up at #5, it sure did disappear from radio quickly. As local radio was entering its own doldrums around the time this tune became lost, my interest in lost hits heightened, and my frustration grew at the narrowing of playlists. I think this is when the 15-second mind became the norm.

Many years later, something funny appeared on YouTube. A high school class somewhere posted a video they made for a school project. The video was a humorous exposé about kids getting in trouble for chewing gum at school. I'm pretty sure the school was in the United States, but the closing music of the video was "Dreamtime" that someone had recorded in a different language. I couldn't understand the words, but the song was very clearly "Dreamtime."

It's time to wake up!

"Need A Little Taste Of Love" by the Doobie Brothers

1989 / #45

Rate Your Music score: 3 out of 5!

"Need a little taaaaaste..."

Whooooo, man! If you went to my high school, you know exactly where this is headed!

What words rhyme with taste? Let's see, there's waste, raced, spaced, chaste, defaced, posthaste, paste. Hmm. Can we think of any others?

That's right.

Everyone called this song "Need A Little Baste Of Love."

What great timing the Doobies had to release this single just as we were starting a new school year at my high school. This meant we were subjected to endless repetitions of a slightly off-color spoof of the chant from the song's second verse: "Need a little baaaaaste..."

This was also just after I went on a family trip to St. Louis where I kept hearing a radio commercial that sang, "Don't baste your barbecue." Throughout the trip, I kept having to hold in my laughter over this jingle.

Also, if you're a little surprised that the Doobie Brothers were still around in 1989, remember that was the year of the comeback for big 1970s acts. The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Joe Cocker, Poco, and Donny Osmond also had substantial chart hits then.

"He's A Liar" by the Bee Gees

1981 / #30

Rate Your Music score: 3.11 out of 5!

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.

"Think Of Laura" by Christopher Cross

1983 / #9

Rate Your Music score: 2.69 out of 5!

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.

"Point Of No Return" by Nu Shooz

1986 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 3.44 out of 5!

What is the point of no return?

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.

"Tears" by John Waite

1984 / #37

Rate Your Music score: 2.97 out of 5!

"I'll see those tears...The damage they do..."

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.

"Blue Jean" by David Bowie

1984 / #8

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

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.

"Sugar Daddy" by the Thompson Twins

1989 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 3.28 out of 5!

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.

"Symptoms Of True Love" by Tracie Spencer

1988 / #38

Rate Your Music score: 2.7 out of 5!

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.

"Button Off My Shirt" by Paul Carrack

1988 / #91

Rate Your Music score: 3.38 out of 5!

"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!

"Feels So Good" by Chuck Mangione

1978 / #4

Rate Your Music score: 3.38 out of 5!

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.

"Hold Me 'Til The Mornin' Comes" by Paul Anka

1983 / #40

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!

"Walking On A Thin Line" by Huey Lewis & the News

1984 / #18

Rate Your Music score: 3.37 out of 5!

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.

"Half The Way" by Crystal Gayle

1979 / #15

Rate Your Music score: 3.16 out of 5!

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.

"I'll Be" by Edwin McCain

1998 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 2.34 out of 5!

"I'll be your cryin' shoulder..."

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?

"Tonight" by New Kids On The Block

1990 / #7

Rate Your Music score: 2.71 out of 5!

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.

"The Border" by America

1983 / #33

Rate Your Music score: 3 out of 5!

"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!

"Run Runaway" by Slade

1984 / #20

Rate Your Music score: 3.4 out of 5!

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.

"Just The Way It Is, Baby" by the Rembrandts

1991 / #14

Rate Your Music score: 3.21 out of 5!

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.

"Could've Been Me" by Billy Ray Cyrus

1992 / #72

Rate Your Music score: 2.34 out of 5!

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.

"Dear Mr. Jesus" by PowerSource

1987 / #61

Rate Your Music score: 0.67 out of 5!

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.

"What About Your Friends" by TLC

1992 / #7

Rate Your Music score: 3.49 out of 5!

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.

"The Love Parade" by the Dream Academy

1986 / #36

Rate Your Music score: 3.51 out of 5!

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.

Vulture capitalism strikes again!