"Mind Playing Tricks On Me" by the Geto Boys

1991 / #23

Rate Your Music score: 4.26 out of 5!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Fool In Love With You" by Jim Photoglo

1981 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 2.78 out of 5!

I invented MTV!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jesus He Knows Me" by Genesis

1992 / #23

Rate Your Music score: 3.2 out of 5!

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

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

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

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

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

Pick a brick!

"Girls" by Dwight Twilley

1984 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least the school library subscribed to Song Hits.

"Mama Weer All Crazee Now" by Quiet Riot

1984 / #51

Rate Your Music score: 2.78 out of 5!

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

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

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

The principal was MAD!!!!!

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

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

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

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

"Rumbleseat" by John Cougar Mellencamp

1986 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 3.21 out of 5!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let the fun begin!