"Hearts In Trouble" by Chicago

1990 / #75

Rate Your Music score: 1.83 out of 5!

This blog is not a place for catatonic worship of musical artists, no matter how many positive contributions they've made.

In my day, I adored Chicago's now-lost hit "Alive Again." By the mid-1980s, we poked fun at the band a lot because they had softened up so much, but they still occasionally put out an action-packed rocker. But I think it was pretty much downhill for them after that.

One of my high school teachers noted that Chicago was one of the few major bands in popular music that had lasted 20 years. But they weren't really the same band, as they had so many membership changes.

"Hearts In Trouble" wasn't a really soft ballad, but it's associated with the frustration that coincided with Chicago's decline. A reviewer on Rate Your Music noted, "Great band; lousy track." This record rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but they just can't figure out why. I have to admit that when I used to hear this song, it wasn't under the best circumstances. It was like the grand finale of a series of crises that had built up over the preceding few years.

When I first heard this song, I knew it had to be from a movie. What's more is that I knew it had to be from a film I had no plans to see. Sure enough, it turns out it's from a motion picture titled Days Of Thunder - a movie that I don't even remember existing. On the page for "Hearts In Trouble", another Rate Your Music critic said Chicago "could turn in some of the best jazz/rock on the planet but got reduced to supplying songs for lame, crappy big budget films."

Wikipedia says Billboard reported that this single - even though it went on to peak only at #75 - was one of the most added records to American radio station playlists during the week of July 21, 1990. Oh, I believe that. Memories are long. It also appears to be one of few singles to make the Hot 100 whose flip side was by a different act. Its flip was "Car Building" by German composer Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is known for the quote, "I'd much rather everyone made music as opposed to going and beating the shit out of each other."

But no music today represents the culmination of a crisis, because no crisis today is ever dealt with, and the crisis simply becomes permanent.

"A Girl In Trouble (Is A Temporary Thing)" by Romeo Void

1984 / #35

Rate Your Music score: 3.64 out of 5!

This bouncy record by this San Francisco band is exactly the sort of mid-1980s song that got me interested in lost hits in the first place. It was just a big enough hit that it got a few spins on pop radio, but just minor enough that stations stopped playing it for good after only a few weeks. Most such tracks - like this one - fall into the category of new wave, but perhaps that's because it was the mid-'80s.

Romeo Void's fine single is particularly qualified for this blog because it peaked during a brief window after which life has never been able to recover its former glory. The late 2010s came close in some ways - but just not musically.

It helps that the mid-'80s were a good time for music - even by '80s standards. It beats the ballad-heavy early '80s and the often insufferably stale late '80s. I'm as fond of music from 1983-85 as I am of the great music of 1978-79.

Strangely, I don't ever remember seeing the "A Girl In Trouble" video back in the '80s. However, I seem to recall the instrumental break in the middle being used in an unlikely venue: Not Necessarily The News. I'm pretty sure this show once had a segment in which "A Girl In Trouble" served as the bed music.

Probably my favorite NNTN segment though was a parody of the Civil War Chess Set commercial that used different kinds of cheese as chess pieces, and they leaked all over the board. NNTN also once had a segment called "Senator Hogg" - a reference to Boss Hogg - that used footage of Jesse Helms.

Subscribing to a premium cable channel was a temporary thing. I don't know how much longer we had HBO, but we weren't made of money, and I don't remember ever seeing HBO much after the mid-'80s.

"My Love Is A Fire" by Donny Osmond

1990 / #21

Rate Your Music score: 2.34 out of 5!

"Baste!"

Remember the days when Donny Osmond, St. Paul, and Nelson (but especially the first two) seemed to be in a contest to see who could sound more like the others? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Donny had a big comeback that started in 1989, and his return was actually more commercially successful than that of other 1970s acts who reappeared at the same time. It was as if there was a constitutional provision that took effect then that required any '70s performer who was not Donny Osmond to be subsequently excluded from the top 6 of the Hot 100. Chart performance at the time was fueled overwhelmingly by radio, which could make or break hits at the snap of a finger.

Donny's comeback coincided with the "baste" craze. This tendency to say "baste" confronting almost every situation managed to spread to multiple schools locally. Just before the lost hit profiled in this entry charted, I had switched to a high school that was less bad than the one before, and all this "baste" business was just as big there - and just as hilarious.

This lost hit was like a basteplane of baste-o-matic proportions. At about 14 seconds in, Donny seems to declare, "Baste!"

I don't ever remember seeing the video back then, but the video just drives home the point.

One would almost think Donny also had a song called "5 Out Of 5" and that he followed up this set several years later with a cut titled "Burn Gum, It Melts." You may be surprised that he didn't later record a song called "Pooing Is Cool" that he released early on YouTube.

Donny filled in for Shadoe Stevens as host of American Top 40 for the week ending February 17, 1990. This brings to mind a funny recollection about AT40 of the early '90s. At the time, one of the show's jingles when coming out of a commercial break was preceded by a man bellowing, "Heeyyyyyyyy!" So I went up to the vents in the floor and yelled, "Heeyyyyyyyy!" That way, the rest of the house could hear it. My mom got mad because the noise kept her awake.

I remember another AT40 installment that was themed around something from Star Trek that only the most ardent Trekkies had ever heard of. Interestingly, this episode of the countdown is now highly desired by collectors.

The early '90s were full of records that charted much higher than this one that are completely forgotten now. Maybe we'll delve into this phenomenon in depth sometime.

"Let's Work" by Mick Jagger

1987 / #39

Rate Your Music score: 2.66 out of 5!

Let's work!

Let's not rest. Let's not play. Let's work!

This lost hit was a minor top 40 entry by the legendary Rolling Stones vocalist. You may remember the video with Mick running down a highway along with a huge group of people who appeared to be employed in various occupations. He wrote the song with the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart.

According to one website, Mick came up with the idea for the song when his girlfriend got mad at him because he refused to buy a house for their young daughter. She would have to work and earn it like everyone else.

A YouTube commenter said he was one of the firefighters in the video, but that he always hated the song. Another commenter said he was reminded of the song when his brother-in-law who he hired to do a job decided to just sit there and do nothing. Still another commenter said, "The left would call this song hate speech today." No we wouldn't. We would call it many things, but we wouldn't call it that. It's not like it's Ace Of Base or something.

Also, the surgeons in this video look like they're holding their knives and tools like they're about to kill someone.

If a song and video like this came out now, the entire endeavor would look mighty silly. It was bad enough that offshoring, corporate greed, and cronyism took so many jobs afterward, but now AI has stolen the rest of the jobs. These days, we'd see Mick Jagger being chased by an army of robots laughing at him because his royalty checks are taken to fund Parliament's leather stationery.

"I Gotta Try" by Michael McDonald

1982 / #44

Rate Your Music score: 3.2 out of 5!

We're due for more "yacht rock", aren't we?

That's the name for much of the slickly produced soft rock of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I still don't know why it's called that. The term is applied to many big radio hits of the era, and the lost hit in this entry did get a lot of airplay then.

This entry also gives us a chance to once again rake Solid Gold through coals. Parts of the show were genuinely entertaining. Some of it was actually a little bit cruel, like when comedian George Wallace appeared in a 1983 episode and made a joke about how Joe Cocker was in a Memorex ad and his face broke the glass. But the Solid Gold countdown was like a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a random number generator. I knew about the Hot 100 thanks to Casey Kasem's radio and TV shows, but I noticed the rankings on Solid Gold were way off from that. The closing credits of some episodes say, "The ranking of hit songs contained in this program was compiled by the producers after reviewing standard industry sources." Alright then, what sources?

Radio stations used to compile their own rankings, but even many individual stations provided more clues than Solid Gold did. Some of them put out printed survey sheets each week that said the numbers came from local record sales and requests to the station. A website describes how a major New York station would compile its survey by calling up record stores in the area and getting a list of their best-selling singles. The stores were chosen randomly to keep them from hyping records, and each call was recorded so the store knew to be honest. But it was also a relatively conservative station, not a fast-add station that we'd prefer.

The clip featured above for Michael McDonald's lost hit came from Solid Gold. I'm pretty sure that this single later reached the show's top 10 - even though it only hit #44 on the authentic Hot 100. At the time, I wrongly assumed it must have been close to the top 10 of the Hot 100, especially considering how much I heard it on the radio.

I think I remember hearing it on the car radio one day when we went to a doctor appointment when I was 9. I also recall hearing "Hand To Hold On To" by John Mellencamp and "You Got Lucky" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. It was the only time I ever visited that doctor. This practice was in the same building as a pizza restaurant where we had lunch that day. I forgot all about it until I was over 40 when a friend told me she thought she had a dentist in that building who was a money-grubbing creep.

A lot of folks poke fun at Michael McDonald these days, but he has true fans. Someone on YouTube wrote, "You should go to jail if you don't like Michael McDonald." That statement is a sign of a truly dedicated fan base.

"Dancing In Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop)" by Q-Feel

1989 / #75

Rate Your Music score: 3.29 out of 5!

This now-lost hit was actually first released in 1982 and barely scraped onto Billboard's Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart. But in 1989 - several years after it bubbled - it was rereleased, and only then did it reach the Hot 100. I only started hearing it then. I can't remember what station I kept hearing it on though.

And the video is a sight to behold.

I never saw the video until YouTube came along. Remember, it only made the main chart in 1989, and MTV was past its prime then. Kids at school still watched MTV, and they said some of the stupidest stuff imaginable about things they saw, but I didn't think MTV was nearly as exciting as it once was. Also, MTV kept going out on our local cable system. It went out just before something we actually wanted to watch, which caused a family member to accuse Storer Cable of "assholism." According to Wiktionary, assholism actually is a real word, and has appeared in print at least since 1970.

At the time, MTV actually had an afternoon program hosted by Martha Quinn that was full of "classic" music videos shown in the channel's early years. But those videos were only a few years old then. The equivalent today would be chronologically only about as far back as the U.S. Capitol riot or even Elon Musk's Twitter purchase.

Now, back to Q-Feel's video. The band's lead singer looks like "Weird Al" Yankovic wearing red pants, a ball cap, and a bunch of equipment strapped to his body. The other men look like they're wearing some sort of military pilot uniform. The women look like they're wearing something out of Star Trek. The participants all dance around, smiling their asses off.

I guess I missed all of this in the '80s, because the heyday of music videos was right between releases of this single. The rest of the '80s was driven by radio. These days, radio has little influence, and MTV has none at all, but our museum of lost hits is rooted in the days of these older media.

"Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply

1981 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 2.81 out of 5!

You figured we'd eventually get to the Air Supply ice monster, didn't you?

Air Supply in the early 1980s was not unlike Richard Marx or Phil Collins were in the late 1980s, in that you couldn't go more than 10 seconds without hearing them on the radio. Back then, any of Air Supply's hit singles ever becoming a lost hit would have been considered preposterous. But "Sweet Dreams" - part of the band's string of #5 hits - has somehow managed to do it, much to the surprise of anyone alive during the winter of 1981-82.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say this song used to be on the radio constantly. When I think of 1982, I think of playing in the living room each evening before dinner, while my mom had the now-forgotten local radio station Yes 95 blasting on the stereo. Go on ARSA's playlist archive and look under WYYS. Guess what song was #1 on the station's playlist for 2 weeks starting on February 9, 1982?

"Sweet Dreams" is actually a rather unusual entry in the Air Supply catalog. The band decided for a few brief minutes that they wanted to be hippies by offering a track that was less formulaic and featured unusual instrumentation. Hence the ice monster. Fast-forward the above clip to about 4:28. The record includes 6 piano notes that always reminded me of an ice monster grinning menacingly at unsuspecting comers.

The ice monster's grin was also like that of some kid at school who kept bothering everyone. In addition, there was a jeans commercial right around that time that ended with a young man slowly turning around and displaying that same ominous smirk. There were only a few people capable of producing this creepy look. It's like when criminologists used to judge a person's character from their facial appearance.

Years later, someone posted online that the scary Rankin/Bass bumper used at the end of many Christmas specials was similarly evocative of an ice monster. You be the judge...

That bumper was also likened to the spooky sounds heard at the very end of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood accompanying the drawing of the trolley, but we digress.

Even a colorful mental image of an ice monster couldn't ease the frustration of hearing the same Air Supply ballad repeated over and over. And it's not as if Journey or Kenny Rogers didn't also have ballads at the time that were just as pervasive on our airwaves. I was so aggravated by the punishing repetition of the MOR malaise of the early '80s that even the top 10 countdown on Solid Gold provoked an annoyed reaction. One Saturday, we had the TV on Solid Gold, and the countdown got up to #1. What might be atop the Solid Gold survey that weekend? The J. Geils Band? Stevie Wonder? The Cars?

You guessed it! It was "Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply.

I distinctly remember letting out a frustrated groan upon hearing this. It sounded just like the N'Ice commercial where the man threw down his cards. Incidentally, the chart rankings posted at the top of each entry on this blog are from Billboard's Hot 100 - the most authoritative chart in the beeswax - not the laughable Solid Gold ranking. Thus, "Sweet Dreams" is an official #5 rather than a #1. I don't know where Soiled Gold got their numbers from, but I think that was when I started to assume they just pulled the chart out of their ass. It could be pretty hilarious to see what they could come up with though, so I still watched the show after that.

"Tender Is The Night" by Jackson Browne

1983 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 3.07 out of 5!

"Tender..."

As we were emerging from the musical malaise of the early 1980s, this lost hit was one of these songs I remember hearing on the AM radio in the car on the way to and from school in 5th grade - along with "Modern Love" by David Bowie and "Undercover Of The Night" by the Rolling Stones.

And - similar to the lost hit "She Ain't Pretty" by the Northern Pikes - it comes in handy many decades after its chart run when describing restaurant meals.

Sometimes you'll order an item at a restaurant that you expect to be tough. But once in a while, you get a pleasant surprise.

When this happens, we start singing, "Tender..." We sing it in the same way Jackson Browne did in the last portion of his song. This has been going on for years.

Is that chicken sandwich tough? Nope, it's...tender...duh-dummm...

What about that macaroni or the complimentary side of fried grouch? No, it's...tender...duh-dummm...

What about your Coke? Tender...duh-dummm...

Hey, they charge a fee if you pay with a credit card! Tough...duh-dummm...

Tender are the memories of the lost hits profiled on this blog.

"Angelia" by Richard Marx

1989 / #4

Rate Your Music score: 3.2 out of 5!

If you said back in 1989 that Richard Marx would someday appear on a list of lost hits, a face would have been laughed in. That face would have been yours. Richard ranked right up there with Phil Collins in that every pop station played him at least once an hour.

Q-102 was particularly awash in Marx mania. ARSA reveals that the station placed "Right Here Waiting" at #1 on its playlist for 7 consecutive weeks. It wasn't even one of his rockers. It was a ballad among ballads. Imagine being a DJ on Q-102 and having to play the same ballad every 2 hours for 7 weeks. And that was during the summer, when radio should have been full of bright, cheery, fun music. Ballads should have been saved for the other 10 months of the year when it's rainy and dreary anyway.

That track didn't even disappear with 1989. ARSA also shows that during the week of November 18, 1994 - I repeat, 1994 - "Right Here Waiting" suddenly popped back up again and was played 22 times that week on Q-102. A station that supposedly had a format of current pop played a 5-year-old ballad 3 times a day!

But this entry profiles Richard's follow-up single "Angelia" - which has indeed become a lost hit.

Like the song in the previous entry, "Angelia" is connected to an assignment for high school art class in which we wrote fictional letters by relatives of supposedly well-known artists.

I had to come up with a name for a person being addressed in one of the letters. Much like how Phil Collins came up with Sussudio, I came up with Basteolia. It rhymed with Angelia - the woman Richard Marx sang about. The difference is that it had "baste" in it. "Baste-uh-lee-uh."

I started one of the letters, "Dear Basteolia." To the surprise of absolutely nobody, when I got the assignment back, it had a big, red X over that part.

Where you running to now, Basteolia?

"Sincerely Yours" by Sweet Sensation with Romeo J.D.

1989 / #14

Rate Your Music score: 2.29 out of 5!

Sophomore year of high school should have a big red X over it - as if scrawled by an angry teacher on a test you failed. But which sophomore year? My school didn't count it the first time, but the first was actually the worse of the two - if you don't count the particularly outrageous butchery at the end of the second.

During the second attempt - months before the disastrous events that closed out the year - the art teacher gave us an unusual assignment. This project dealt with a famous (?) artist. We had to write what appeared to be a series of letters between the artist's relatives.

I figured my grade was already predetermined, so I had no reason to even take the assignment seriously. I looked to Sweet Sensation's now-lost hit for guidance.

This record includes a rap by Romeo J.D. that seems to espouse a Billy Ray Cyrus-like conspiracy theory about missing mail. This rap in particular influenced how I did this assignment.

At the end of one of the letters between the artist's relatives that made up the assignment, I wrote, "If ever this letter should reach your door, you'll find it signed sincerely yours."

Needless to say, that got the red X treatment. You can almost hear the record's freestyle percussion and background vocals as the teacher's red pen works its magic!

"Sincerely Yours" isn't the only lost hit associated with this assignment. There was another that charted a bit higher that also left its imprint on that project - much to the chagrin of an angry high school art instructor. We'll get to it very soon.

"If I Had A Rocket Launcher" by Bruce Cockburn

1985 / #88

Rate Your Music score: 3.7 out of 5!

First things first: MTV always mispronounced the name of this bespectacled Canadian folk rock singer-songwriter. It's "ko-burn." It's not pronounced the way it's spelled.

I had forgotten about this lost hit for many years, until recently when YouTube yanked the video for it as too "violent." Bruce wrote the song after an Oxfam-sponsored visit to camps for Guatemalan refugees in Mexico. The camps had been attacked by Guatemalan military helicopters.

YouTube recently pulled the video even though MTV aired it without any problems at all in 1985. The video included real footage of events in Guatemala that inspired the song. But Bruce said the song "is not a call to arms. This is a cry."

This song is not to be confused with "If I Had $1000000" by the Barenaked Ladies. However, when the Barenakeds performed their song in concert, they often inserted the "Some son of a bitch would die" line from Bruce's lost hit.

"Don't Look Down - The Sequel" by Go West

1987 / #39

Rate Your Music score: 3.15 out of 5!

These guys pretended their shit's not stinking!

Over the course of 8 years or so, the London duo Go West would occasionally pop up with a hit single here and there. The lost hit we're profiling today is among this string of tunes.

Now, the thing about this is that I never saw the video for this action-packed song until it appeared on YouTube not long ago. And when it did, I burst out laughing! That's because Go West looked almost like an exaggerated rendering of another London act of the era: Wang Chung. Even funnier, the members of Go West - especially the singer - kept mugging for the camera throughout, and looked absolutely ridiculous doing so.

At least they had a good time up on stage. That's better than the stuff that goes on now. These days, even the biggest festivals in town consist mostly of people just moping around with blank stares. I went to baseball's Opening Day parade a few years ago, and nobody seemed to notice there even was a parade. It's better to look ridiculous in a 1980s way than be a Debbie Downer in a 2020s way.

And why is this "The Sequel"? Apparently, this record was a remix of a track from an earlier album. But it sounds like there's not much difference.

I associate this song with a couple other lost hits from around the same time: "Something Real (Inside Me/Inside You)" by Mr. Mister and "One For The Mockingbird" by Cutting Crew. They're all similar in that the record peaked in the lower reaches of the top 40 after the band had become well-known for other songs. The difference is that - unlike with those other acts - Go West's earlier songs that I had heard actually missed the top 40.

We close our eyes to time slipping away!

"Three Times In Love" by Tommy James

1980 / #19

Rate Your Music score: 3.03 out of 5!

Time for some fond memories of the 1979-80 season. I was a youngster only 6 years of age, and America still had promise.

At the time, there were many weekday evenings when my mom dropped me off at my grandparents' house. They always had the TV on in the living room, and that was my introduction to The Joker's Wild, the game show hosted by the late Jack Barry. A strange thing, that Joker's Wild. A stranger thing, that Jack Barry. Jack's career was almost ruined in the 1950s by the quiz show scandals of the era. He revived his career by buying a radio station. If the FCC felt he was of good enough character to own a station, then game show producers could trust him to host game shows again.

That wouldn't work these days, because the FCC obviously no longer considers character as a factor in granting broadcasting licenses. But character used to be a big deal.

The Joker's Wild in the early 1980s had a lot of interesting incidents. One day, a contestant named Miya accidentally broke the lever that activated the part of the game where you'd "face the Devil." One other time, Jack accidentally gave away the answer to a question as he was reading it, and he dramatically ripped up the piece of paper.

Jim Peck occasionally filled in for Jack Barry. One of the most infamous series Jim regularly hosted was Three's A Crowd - which was sort of like The Newlywed Game except that it also included the husband's secretary. Nobody liked being on the show, and the show was blamed for ruining many marriages. Jim even hated hosting it. During each commercial break, he just locked himself in his dressing room.

Anyway, as I was watching The Joker's Wild at my grandparents' house, I remember some Zesta crackers with cheese on them being dropped down between the cushions of the couch. They weren't found for years.

There were a couple hit records back then that I remember hearing on the AM radio in my parents' Horizon to and from these outings. One of them was "You're Only Lonely" by J.D. Souther. The other was the lost hit we're profiling today, "Three Times In Love" by Tommy James.

If the "yacht rock 30" countdown was around in 1979-80, Tommy's hit probably would have done very well on it. For that matter, J.D.'s record probably would have too. But I only ever heard that countdown in 1982, though Nicolette Larson was still charting on it then.

Tommy once claimed that his old record label - Roulette Records - owed him $30 to $40 million in royalties. Roulette was actually tied to the Mafia.

But his comeback hit of 1980 brings back tender memories of a happy time in life!

"The Captain Of Her Heart" by Double

1986 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.67 out of 5!

Good morning, Captain!

This is a weird one. I remember when this song was popular, everyone called it "Kroger music." At a time when my favorite station was playing rockers by Heart or Falco, Double's now-lost hit was likened to the easy listening fare you might have heard over the speakers at a supermarket.

The main difference with grocery music is that this tune had some vocals. It was something about how too long ago and too long apart, someone kept waiting for the captain of her heart. All the rest of the lyrics after the first chorus are about she couldn't wait another day for the captain of her heart. Man, was she ever waiting for the captain of her heart!

Let me guess. At the end of the song, she still couldn't wait another day for the captain of her heart.

This was actually softer than most music you heard in stores - even stores that tuned their radios to some of the softest stations in town. There was a small bookstore at the Newport Shopping Center that we occasionally visited, and even the music there wasn't as soft as this. This bookstore, incidentally, was the site of a funny incident in which someone cussed in public. One day, we were at this store, when a biker couple walked in. The man asked the clerk where the road atlases were, and the clerk directed the couple to the proper shelf. Then, with the road atlases staring him right in the face, the man said to his partner, "Nah, bullshit, they don't have any road atlases here!"

Anyway, back to Double. Their lost hit prompted an obvious parody: "Too long ago, too long apart, she couldn't wait another day for Captain Kangaroo." These new lyrics conjured an image of somebody with the maturity level of a small child pacing back and forth in the living room all day with the TV on, waiting for Captain Kangaroo to come on.

"Welcome To The Boomtown" by David & David

1986 / #37

Rate Your Music Score: 3.53 out of 5!

This memorable lost hit tells the grim story of how hard it was becoming to get by in America in those years. Guess what? Things are worse now.

I'm giving this song an entry because when I was in 8th grade, some classmates made a parody of it called "Welcome To The Boogertown." As the title suggests, this parody was about mucus. Best all, they wrote it down and gave it to me. Unfortunately, this paper disappeared around the time of the home invasions.

Everyone back then was obsessed with boogers. At the same school, I once sneezed into my hand and then slapped my hand on the wall outside the office (right next to the window where they sold school supplies). The hand-shaped mucus stain stayed on the wall for months.

Another thing like the aforementioned paper that has vanished over the years is some notes someone passed in religion class in high school that contained funny rhymes. One of them was, "Kenny Rogers hates the Dodgers." Another was, "Kenny Loggins laid a log right outside of Boss Hogg." Later, the student who passed that note asked, "Remember Boss Hogg?" How can anyone forget Boss Hogg?

As for the song in this entry, it has a rather interesting line that refers to a once-widespread restaurant chain: "Deals dope out of Denny's, keeps a table in the back." But the official lyric sheet calls it "Danny's." It was speculated that this was to keep Denny's restaurants from suing David & David.

Pick a booger. We got plenty to go around.

"Take The L" by the Motels

1982 / #52

Rate Your Music score: 3.36 out of 5!

I think it's hilarious that a song title that nobody understood in 1982 is now a common expression.

When I used to hear this song when I was 9, I thought it had something to do with the Chicago "L" - the rapid transit system in that city. We had gone on a family trip to Chicago the year before, and someone kept talking about how Chicago had an "L."

This was different from the Chicago trip many years later when we protested the Par-King by blowing bubbles through the straw in our sodas at a Denny's restaurant. That was the same trip where someone tried to buy bubble gum from a machine at Six Flags and discovered it was actually a jawbreaker. It was later likened to reaching into your pocket and thinking you found a $20 bill, only to find it's a used tissue.

Although I heard "Take The L" when it was a hit in 1982, I never saw the video until at least the following year, when MTV finally came to town. I noticed that in most of the Motels' videos, lead singer Martha Davis always looked like she was about to cry as she sang. It was only then that I figured out the song had nothing to do with the Chicago "L." It also inevitably led to new Sesame Street-related lyrics being promulgated in our family digs: "Take the L out of lover and it's Grover."

Just in the past few years, "take the L" has become a common phrase. It's what you say to somebody when they need to accept losing an argument, an election, a court case, or some competitive activity. It has nothing to do with the Motels song, the Chicago "L", or Grover.

"I'm Not The Man I Used To Be" by Fine Young Cannibals

1989 / #54

Rate Your Music score: 3.52 out of 5!

This is a blog for lost hits. But you can almost write an entirely separate blog just for lost hits that sound like the Bee Gees but aren't. We need a place to discuss "Sexy Eyes" by Dr. Hook and "Never Let Me Down" by David Bowie.

The lost hit we're profiling today surely fits the bill. When I first heard this tune on the radio on a cold, snowy, blustery evening in late 1989, I actually thought it was the Bee Gees. But it was the Fine Young Cannibals - the band from Birmingham, England, that gave us chart toppers like "She Drives Me Crazy."

Despite what someone at school thought, they weren't called the Five Young Cannibals, but the Fine Young Cannibals.

The band's lead singer Roland Gift is one of these men who appeared nude in some context despite being well-known mostly for something else. You see, Roland is also an actor. He once appeared nude in a romantic comedy film. But in a magazine interview, he said, "I wouldn't do it for the sake of it, and I wouldn't make a habit of it." In this regard, Roland is like John Hoyt, the actor who played Carl Kanisky's dad on Gimme A Break! When this sitcom was at its height of popularity, John reportedly posed nude for a calendar that showed elderly men in their birthday suits.

Let this sink in. John played Chief Kanisky's dad, so he was almost 80 when he posed nude. John said that when his pastor heard about this endeavor, "he laughed for half an hour."

John Hoyt was probably not the man he used to be, yet he posed nude for that calendar.

"Boys Do Fall In Love" by Robin Gibb

1984 / #37

Rate Your Music score: 3.17 out of 5!

"At the end of the day, making love to a paper moon..."

The late Robin Gibb was one of the Gibb brothers who was a member of the Bee Gees, and this great lost hit is another that has a rather unusual line that I thought had to be a misheard lyric but is actually real.

"At the end of the day, making love to a paper moon." No way in hell was that the real lyrics. I have a record of this tune, and every time I listened to it, I tried to figure out what Robin was really singing. But nowadays, with lyrics websites, we learn that those were the actual lyrics.

Robin, you're weird.

What is that line even supposed to mean? It sounds like something involving a prop for a high school dance. If that's what the dances at my school were like, I'm glad I didn't go to any of them. From what I've heard though, most of the dances consisted of people throwing tantrums over the outcome of the big basketball game and fighting with the DJ because he only played music that was 50 years old.

"Rebels" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

1985 / #74

Rate Your Music score: 3.59 out of 5!

Hey hey hey! It's Fat Albert! Wait, actually it isn't. It's skinny Tom!

There's always some interesting stories behind Tom Petty's many hits, and "Rebels" is no exception. It came from the LP Southern Accents, which Tom originally planned as a concept album about his life in Gainesville, Florida. It was while he was recording "Rebels" that Tom got mad and punched a wall, breaking his hand.

Radio DJ's back then loved talking about Tom's tantrum. After hearing about it on the radio, I described it to a family member, who insisted I made it up. After hearing the same story on the radio later, they still insisted I made it up. I pointed out that the DJ had confirmed exactly what I had said, but my family member was adamant that this wasn't the case.

Tom wasn't some neo-Confederate dinosaur. He once said "Rebels" was actually about a character who blames all his problems on everyone else, when really the character created his own troubles. The fictional character in the song was a failure in life. Tom's fans have described the song as pure genius.

This lost hit also has a story that's quite like another entry we featured a while back. When our online museum of lost hits profiled "Overjoyed" by Stevie Wonder, I noted that DJ's on WCLU always called Stevie's record "The Ker-Plop-Plop Song." Similarly, I remember DJ's on a local station - probably WCLU again, but it could have been a different station - always referring to "Rebels" as "The Fat Albert Song" because of the "hey hey hey" refrain.

In the years since Tom's untimely death, his influence continues. Even the one-man band Five Times August often has a sound that seems influenced by Tom Petty. Five Times August is known for tracks like "Sad Little Man", a protest song against Anthony Fauci that has a hilarious video...

"One Good Reason" by Paul Carrack

1988 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 2.8 out of 5!

This lost hit features some of the strangest lyrics ever to appear in a top 40 record.

After the roaring intro, and after the booming beat kicks in, we're treated to these stirring opening lines...

I stand on my ground when we fight, no matter where we are
I am the sad clown with teared eyes, so I pee on your arm

By all accounts, those are the actual lyrics. I'm not even going to search for "official" lyrics, because everyone agreed those are the real words to the song.

Those are the sort of lyrics that if they appeared in a grunge or rap song 5 years later, people would have just laughed them off as something normal. But this was standard late '80s pop rock, so there was a bit of shock value surrounding those lyrics.

We know those are the real lyrics because of the reaction they once generated at a local shop. One evening - probably when I was a high school freshman - we went to some business at or near Newport Shopping Center. It was probably to get something for school. We had to make impromptu trips to buy stupid stuff for school all the time. This shop had Q-102 blaring loudly, and this song came on. When the opening lines were heard, a woman who was working there glanced at another employee and said, "Huh?" So I think it's safe to say Paul was indeed singing about urinating on a person's limb.

At least he sang about it artfully. Later songs might have used lyrics like this because people were out of ideas. But it seemed original back when Paul used these lines. There's also a small but meaningful pause before the final 3 words of the controversial line - as if to dramatize the point.

With the addition of this entry, it appears as if Paul Carrack is the first act with 3 entries on this blog. He actually has 4 if you count the fact that he was in Mike & the Mechanics.

"Welcome To Heartlight" by Kenny Loggins

1983 / #24

Rate Your Music score: 3.12 out of 5!

Chirp chirp chirp. Boom! Clap! Clappity-clap!

Anyone alive in 1983 knew that this now-lost hit was about a particular school in Los Angeles. Every radio DJ at the time noted this. One website calls the tune "one of Loggins' oddest songs." Somebody also noted that the song was originally titled simply "Heartlight", but it became "Welcome To Heartlight" to avoid confusion with "Heartlight" by Neil Diamond, which is now also a lost hit. This commenter said of Kenny's record, "Too bad he had to change the name of this good song because of Diamond's movie-plugging song, which was probably the worst song he ever made."

Not much can be found about the school that Kenny sang about. Evidently, the school no longer exists.

I always thought this track was sung using an unusual intonation, as if Kenny was trying to mimic an accent. The way he sang it also reminds me of yet another lost hit, "Volcano" by Jimmy Buffett.

This song also has an absurd American Top 40-related memory. Casey Kasem once read a "Long Distance Dedication" in which the letter writer thought the song was titled "Welcome To Hard Life." If I remember correctly, the letter was from a spoiled teenager who was sent to live on a relative's farm for the summer. When they lived on the farm, they had to do actual work. They thought having to work was a "hard life."

That was riding into the danger zone!

"Desperate But Not Serious" by Adam Ant

1983 / #66

Rate Your Music score: 3.4 out of 5!

I don't know what made me think of this story just now, but I had to think of a lost hit whose title was evocative of the incident.

Let's go back to a few years before this song was a hit. I was about 6. I haven't thought about this story in such a long time. One evening, we were in the den. Somebody kept farting and stinking up the whole room. There were some real stinky ones. It was as hilarious as you might imagine.

But not everybody had a sense of humor. The angry reaction by a vocal few was met with more laughter. It was an endless cycle of laughs that provoked anger, which elicited yet more merriment.

Finally, a family member observed that all the flatulence meant somebody's "desperate juices" were acting up. Hence, I chose "Desperate But Not Serious" as the lost hit for this entry. Whoever was stinking up the den in this story was desperate but funny.

I had never heard anyone mention "desperate juices" before, and I haven't heard it since.

I remember around the same time, we all went to dinner at a restaurant in the Cincinnati suburb of Evendale. I thought this restaurant had good cornbread, but the rest of my family really loved this place. Anyway, that evening, someone ripped an air biscuit during our meal. Not long after that, we tried going to this eatery again, but - after driving an hour - we discovered it was permanently closed and replaced with something else.

As for Adam Ant, he's an interesting character. In 2002, he was involved in a widely publicized incident in which he threw a car alternator through the window of a pub, but the criminal charges were reduced to just a single count of causing affray. He has spoken candidly about the struggles he's had in life. He said his battles forced him out of art school many years earlier.

Mr. Ant also figured prominently in the Celebrity ABC Gum Project. In the late 1990s, someone had a website about how they mailed a stick of gum to numerous famous people and had asked them to chew it and mail it back. Adam Ant and John Waters were among the very few who obliged, though it seems like one other celebrity - maybe Don Ho - only sent back the wrapper.

"Freedom Overspill" by Steve Winwood

1986 / #20

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

When was the last time you even thought about this song?

And if you do think about it, you probably think about that ridiculous video that consists mostly of Steve holding his hand over his eye. It's like one of those exercises your eye doctor makes you do.

The clip also has a few other assorted scenes, such as Steve sitting in a chair in a featureless room. I always thought this scene made him look like he was ripping a silent-but-deadly and trying to hold in his laughter. At one point, he shifts his head downward as if to enjoy the stench.

Now, Steve was of course a fairly successful musician for years before. So much so that I was willing to protect Men At Work's territory from Steve even at a time when Steve had no chart hits. It appears that Steve did not have a single Hot 100 entry in 1983, which was Men At Work's heyday. But Steve had a couple of hits over the preceding few years (back when he looked like Conan O'Brien) that we still kept hearing all the time. Obviously, a station couldn't play two songs at once (unless they aired one in each stereo channel), so every time they played Steve Winwood, that was 3 to 4 minutes when they weren't playing Men At Work.

All the David Bowie, Eurythmics, Police, Michael Jackson, ZZ Top, Yes, and many others were seen as squeezing Men At Work off the airwaves. I let Eddy Grant, Dexys Midnight Runners, and Bonnie Tyler slide. But not Steve Winwood, even with his lack of current hits at the time.

Steve or no Steve, 1983 was actually one of the best years of music in the entire history of the record business, and I was a fool for not appreciating it. I can plead insanity, because 4th grade was such a disaster.

But after that, the finer things came shining through - at least until the next major crisis, of which there many starting in the mid-1980s.

"Keep On Walkin'" by CeCe Peniston

1992 / #15

Rate Your Music score: 3.42 out of 5!

It's time for some fond memories of warm summer days when I worked at the library!

Unfortunately, these fond memories weren't always so fond. "Keep on walkin'" is what we were told to do when we got assaulted by young neighborhood criminals. That's an exact quote too. Keep on walkin', the cops ain't talkin' to us anymore, because the criminals had so much pull.

Right, Philip?

The main reason I'm including this single in our online museum of lost hits is the video. I only saw the video once back then, and I burst out laughing when it got a little bit past the middle of the song. The humor begins at 3:22 with the "whoo! whoo! whoo!" part. CeCe sports a hilarious grin with each "whoo!"

It gets even funnier after a few seconds when the pitch gets higher. It looks like the video was just looped from the first part, so her mouth movements don't even line up with each "whoo!"

This isn't the only music video where a performer mugs for the camera like this and displays a ridiculously silly smile. Go West and Karla Bonoff provided similar amusement. Maybe we'll get to them someday.

Meanwhile, there's an assault case from 1992 that still needs to be filed. We can take our time, because there's no statute of limitations on felonies in Kentucky.

"One Lonely Night" by REO Speedwagon

1985 / #19

Rate Your Music score: 3.01 out of 5!

"One lonely night...One lonely night...That's all it takes to...Completely break you..."

This is one lost hit I hadn't forgotten, but I had forgotten everything about the video except lead singer Kevin Cronin with a long beard in a medieval setting. I also remember hearing the song on the car radio when we drove to Maysville one day.

Until recently, I thought everyone else had forgotten everything about this song. But I guess memories can be long in these parts, and some people remember.

A few months ago, during Thanksgiving weekend, we had an important family gathering. We had appetizers that included shrimp. As the number of shrimp dwindled to just one, these lyrics were heard: "One lonely shrimp...One lonely shrimp...That's all it takes to...Completely break you."

For a song that had hardly ever been heard in 40 years, it sure did elicit a clear recollection. I guess we're hoarders of music memories. I've always felt that top 40 stations should throw in a lost hit here and there, which actually did occur on some such stations, especially smaller ones. Yet it's a safe bet that the thought police on online forums about radio would call it "top 40 for hoarders." However, this sure beats "top 40 for wasters", which represents the throwaway attitude that has engulfed the format's most influential stations.

One lost hit...One lost hit...That's all it takes to...Completely break the brains of today's radio programmers.

"I Believe In You" by Stryper

1988 / #88

Rate Your Music score: 2.95 out of 5!

I'm pretty sure I heard this song in my day. Either that or I'm confusing it with "She Believes In Me" by Kenny Rogers.

The band Stryper was one of the few acts that performed Christian rock to reach the Hot 100. The Wikipedia article on Stryper cofounder Michael Sweet says, "The band's reputation declined in the 1990s." I'm not exactly sure what happened. Maybe they started biting heads off bats at concerts or something, but I'm not sure.

For a personal anecdote about Stryper, let's go back maybe a year or so before this song charted, back to when I was a high school freshman. I went to high school with some real punks. They were too old to be brats. They were punks. I don't mean it in a good way. They were juvenile delinquents. But they claimed to be good Christians, so that made it socially acceptable.

One of the worst offenders apparently liked Stryper. Now, the good thing about gym class was that we didn't wear our dumb school clothes for that class. So, for that class, this student always wore his Stryper t-shirt that had the number 777 prominently displayed. Get it? Instead of that devil number 666 - or the even more shocking 555 - Stryper used 777.

I think this student also sat right behind me in homeroom for 2 years, but gym class would always bring out the worst behavior in everyone. In gym, he was every bit as much of a troublemaker as you'd expect - and then some. I just don't remember much about what he did specifically. I just know it was bad.

I do remember a couple incidents in gym that show just how bad things were overall. One day, right in the middle of gym class, I saw a student emerge from the locker room carrying my school clothes, books, and other belongings. I don't remember if it was the same student discussed above. He proceeded to strew them all over the floor of the gym. I tried to stop him, and I got in trouble.

One other time, the teacher noted how bad everybody's behavior had become, so she required everyone to just sit on the floor and not do anything for the whole hour. We had to change into our gym clothes one by one instead of using the locker room all at the same time. At the end of the class period, we had to change back into our regular school clothes one by one. By the time we were all done changing into our gym clothes, it was time to start changing back into regular school clothes.

And much of the misbehavior was courtesy of a diehard Stryper fan!

"The Right Thing" by Simply Red

1987 / #27

Rate Your Music score: 3.16 out of 5!

Banned in Singapore! And this song didn't even have a single mention of chewing gum or not flushing toilets.

The government of Singapore deemed "The Right Thing" by the English group Simply Red so suggestive that it banned the entire album, prohibiting it from being sold at all. The song aired on MTV and many American radio stations without any trouble, but it was too much for a regime that was praised by George H.W. Bush and David Perdue. The Simply Red ban came several years before the island country outlawed the sale, import, and possession of chewing gum. That was also before schools in Newport, Kentucky, praised the regime in a project given to students.

But in 1992, a newspaper article said Simply Red performed the banned song at a concert in Singapore despite the prohibition. In order to be allowed to hold a concert, the band had to first submit to the government a list of songs that they were going to play. They left "The Right Thing" off that list. The article also said Color Me Badd gave a concert in Singapore that included their banned song "I Wanna Sex You Up."

A police spokesman vowed that "action will be taken" against both acts.

The initial Simply Red ban came years after Singapore outlawed jukeboxes, pinball machines, and long hair on men. In 1972, the government of Singapore instituted what it called Operation Snip Snip, in which men were required to cut their hair. Cliff Richard of all people was denied entry into the country because his hair was too long. Operation Snip Snip was tightened in 1974, as government agents conducted surprise inspections of workplaces to nab long-haired men.

They wasted all their tears. Wasted all those years.

"Hold Me" by Colin James Hay

1987 / #99

Rate Your Music score: 2.84 out of 5!

I can't believe Rate Your Music reviewers gave this great record only a 2.84. Anyone who gives this song less than a 5 out of 5 ought to be required to visit the toughest biker bar in town wearing a Metric Man costume. It's equally tragic that this single only spent one week in the Hot 100 - at #99.

Colin Hay is best known as the lead vocalist of Men At Work and one of the greatest guitarists around. I once traveled all the way to Toronto to see him perform - back before the Bush regime began requiring a passport just to reenter the United States. Four years after Men At Work's heyday, "Hold Me" was a minor solo hit for Colin.

When the song came out, I thought the video was absolutely hilarious. The clip consists of Colin sitting next to what appears to be a robot version of himself that has a distorted head that is capable of spinning. Finally, Colin punches the robot and knocks his noggin off. The robot catches the head in the palm of his hand. The head then spins around on the floor and flies through the air.

This song also reminds me of another lost hit by a big-name act that peaked below #90 on the Hot 100: "Dancing With The Mountains" by John Denver. But it's unmistakably Colin.

"Street Of Dreams" by Nia Peeples

1991 / #12

Rate Your Music score: 3.05 out of 5!

Is a hit record truly lost if you don't even remember that it existed?

There was a period of over 8 years when I listened to American Top 40 so religiously that there were very, very few top 40 hits that I simply couldn't remember even when I heard them on AT40 rebroadcasts years later. These included the now-lost hit "Jam Tonight" by Freddie Jackson and New Edition's remake of "Earth Angel." Nothing against these tunes, but for some reason, I simply could not recall them - even though each of them was in the top 40 for weeks. I had no recollection of them whatsoever. I couldn't remember them even existing.

There's also maybe 3 or 4 sleepy ballads that just barely scraped into the top 40 back then that I can't place how they sounded, but I remember them existing.

Now I've found an action-packed dance-pop number that made it all the way up to #12 during that 8-year timeframe that I simply don't remember at all - even though it charted much higher than the aforementioned tunes. I was looking at a chart for the last week before Billboard switched to its new Hot 100 formula in 1991. I got to #12 and I said to myself, "What?????"

I'm talking about "Street Of Dreams" by Nia Peeples. Again, I have nothing against this record. I simply don't even remember that it existed. I'm drawing a complete blank.

There was nothing in my personal life at the time that was any worse than what was usually going on. In fact, things were actually much better than they were a couple years before. So it's not like there's a big chunk of my memory that was wiped out by a crisis. And I know I heard Nia's tune, because it would have appeared on AT40 for weeks during the Shadoe Stevens era before the chart switchover.

When I saw Nia Peeples on the chart, I thought that might be the song that began, "I know you can control it, baby, know you can control it, baby, know you can control it, baby." I'm drawing a blank as to what that was, but I remember hearing it during a little Saturday drive in which I was angry about something.

Some folks say the change to the Hot 100 methodology made the chart more accurate. They may have had a case, except perhaps in one aspect: The new formula disproportionately reduced the influence of smaller cities. After that, the chart included less heartland rock, which was more popular among small-town venues. Heartland rockers were among our bread and butter at the time. Most of my pals lived in urban areas but enjoyed rural activities. In a recent interview, John Mellencamp backed up the claim that the new formula was weighted toward very large cities more than it should have been.

That change also the marks the start of what I call the second generation of lost hits, which accounts for some entries on this blog that cover music at least into the 2000s.

"The Only Way Out" by Cliff Richard

1982 / #64

Rate Your Music score: 3.22 out of 5!

Let me introduce you to a countdown show that I now call the "yacht rock 30."

This was a weekly top 30 countdown hosted by Bob Leonard that I heard back in 1982. It was almost wall-to-wall "yacht rock" - plenty of Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, and Toto - plus some "yacht R&B" like Jeffrey Osborne. I don't remember it having any of the Human League or Men At Work that was conquering the Hot 100, as those acts were probably considered too dangerous for poor Bob.

Another name for "yacht rock" is Horizon music. I call it that because the oldsters always listened to this music in our flailing Plymouth Horizon. For several years, that was about the upper limit of what most AM stations in Cincinnati would play.

In the early rock 'n' roll era, Cliff Richard was marketed as Britain's version of Elvis Presley. But by the time the "yacht rock 30" aired, Cliff was as yacht as anyone else. This made the lost hit featured in this entry eligible to appear on Bob's countdown. Halloween fell on a Sunday that year, and I have a vague memory of hearing Cliff's hit on the countdown that day.

It turned out that Cliff is very religious. Even the lyrics to "The Only Way Out" sound somewhat religious. This brings us to a funny story about Cliff. For years, British TV hosts shared one goal in life: They wanted to get Cliff Richard to say the F-word on TV. The idea of someone as religious as him cussing on TV was considered too funny for words. Finally, they got him to say it. The clip used to be on YouTube, but I can't find it anymore.

There are recent reports that Cliff appeared on The View and got in a profanity-laced argument with Joy Behar, but that seems to be just a myth. I don't watch The View, so I wouldn't know. I have a life. But if this didn't happen, where did the story come from?

But I ain't losin' sleep. And I ain't countin' sheep.