"The Goonies 'R' Good Enough" by Cyndi Lauper

1985 / #10

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

Think hard, and you may remember hearing this song on the radio. If nothing else, you may recall the Cookie Monster-inspired line, "It's good enough for me."

When I say this is lost, I mean it's lost. Some folks say that some of the songs on this blog still appear on regular radio in their town. But this one is gone. I remember hearing it when I was about 12 and I was sitting on the floor in the den making up Monopoly rules that let players burn down each other's hotels. But when this song fell off the chart, that was it.

A couple years later, I was awed by the fact that we never heard this record anymore. But then came a very short chapter in my life that I've mostly forgotten about. For some reason, my mom forced me to take keyboard lessons. I had absolutely zero interest in these lessons. I wanted to be an Atari BASIC programmer, civil engineer, or broadcaster. I didn't want to become a musician too. Plus, school was hard enough without an additional workload. I already had an intense workload from school, and I was expected to excel in every subject.

Guess what song I had to use for keyboard practice?

Other than that, however, "Goonies" was gone. Everyone forgot it existed, and I don't think any radio station ever dug it up. I didn't even take keyboard lessons for very long.

The keyboard lessons were also around the time WCLU went under. If a top 40 station dug up a lost hit, it was usually WCLU. By contrast, the big stations in town had small playlists because they thought everyone had a short attention span. In some cases, maybe they were right. I had to fight with violent idiots at school every day, and I can't imagine them being advanced enough to recall any song after it was finished playing. If they took over American Top 40, they'd probably just play the same song 40 times.

The trend toward small playlists was aggravating, and combining that with the community normalizing the incredibly insane antics at school was a bad combination.

"Feelings" by Morris Albert

1975 / #6

Rate Your Music score: 2.5 out of 5!

"Feelings...Nothing more than feelings..."

Some hit records have a long tail before we consider them lost.

I planned to have this blog only go back to the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, since that's about how far back I might remember when a song was new. I wouldn't have been old enough to care, but I might remember it. But it's been suggested that I include this earlier ballad by Brazilian singer Morris Albert.

You never, ever hear this song anymore. But it took many years for people to stop talking about it.

Many, many years after the song was a hit, I was a high school junior. There was a student in my class who always acted up. He threw puzzle pieces across the room and yelled, "It's raining puzzles!" When the school took us on a walking tour to see holiday decorations in a department store, this student thought a customer was a mannequin, so he slapped him on the back and said, "Hey, look at this dummy!" He once taped his own mouth shut with "Support Our Troops" stickers.

He entertained me.

He acted just as hilarious on the school bus. The bus driver and monitor were two aging women who didn't exactly have enlightened views on matters of public interest. Someone once discarded a torn, shit-stained pair of underpants on the school bus, and the aforementioned student declared, "Inspector 12 is gonna be mad!" He also still had Morris mania 15 years after "Feelings" was on the chart.

We were on the bus one day, when he got a big, silly grin on his face and begin singing "Feelings" with new lyrics. "Poo-poo...Nothing more than poo-poo," he sang. The bus monitor and driver were absolutely furious!

Come to think of it, how can there be anything more than poo-poo? The mere existence of poo-poo should be enough.

But that was it for "Feelings."

"Too Young To Fall In Love" by Mötley Crüe

1984 / #90

Rate Your Music score: 3.45 out of 5!

Hemorrhoids can be age-related. Although people of all ages have been afflicted, the risk grows as you get older, because the body weakens and you can't exercise as much.

It's maddening.

The burning and itching are a fact of life for many. But some folks are afflicted fairly early in life. This prompted one observer to tell a hemorrhoid sufferer, "You're too young to have hemorrhoids."

This in turn led me to rename a Mötley Crüe song when I was a college DJ.

I started on WRFN during my second semester of college. NKU promised to mail me information about the station right when I enrolled, but never did, so I didn't get to go on the air until my second semester. The station gave me a morning timeslot, and there was a method to the madness. Music selections were categorized so we'd play current songs at certain points during each hour, and oldies from different decades at other points. We also ran ads during these hours, as this was a carrier current station and wasn't licensed as a noncommercial operation.

Eventually, the station moved me to late afternoons, so I could be "unleashed." Late afternoon slots weren't limited by the format clock, and we could play tracks that the station wouldn't otherwise play. This was also decades before NKU started raising a stink about students "clustering", so we were still allowed to have social lives.

I'm sure Mötley Crüe fit WRFN's regular rock format, but I was already in the lost hits biz, and I wanted to play songs you didn't hear much anymore. Thus, "Too Young To Fall In Love."

Or as I called it, "Too Young To Have Hemorrhoids."

I want to dig up some tapes of my old shows. I'm pretty sure I have one where I called the song that.

"Hello Again" by the Cars

1984 / #20

Rate Your Music score: 3.46 out of 5!

I've been trying to figure out what song or act best sums up my perceptions of music in 1984-85. I think the Cars are a leading candidate.

It wasn't because the wave at 1:22 in the video above was inspired by The Electric Company. I can't figure out why so much music of the time elicited the insights that I had. I viewed most music differently a year earlier, a fact that I'd rather not discuss and which made a lot of good music go unappreciated.

When I talk about music that sums up how I saw things in 1984-85, what I mean is that it's a prototype of the picturesque view that I had of music at the time. I can't fully recreate this nostalgic feeling. About 4 years ago, I found a few videos from that era on YouTube. Some long-lost memories were triggered, but I wasn't able to get to the root of why I thought so much of this music was either scenic or funny. It's right on the edge of my mind, but I just can't access it.

You try to relive the joy, and the only thing that comes to mind is just a fleeting jolt or image. It's like there are events that have completely escaped my mind. Other events have faded to the point that I think of them as being viewed on old film or videotape like some 1970s scare film about juvenile delinquents. That could just be because most people I knew were juvenile delinquents.

But if I have to recall anything from that timeframe, it should be the Cars. I have their Heartbeat City LP - from which "Hello Again" comes - and I actually got it when it was a fairly current item. It's still in pristine condition despite heavy play. For the life of me, I don't remember where I got this record, or exactly when. It's as if I just waved my hands and it magically appeared. To quote another hit from that album: "Uh-oh, it's magic."

You might think I'm crazy, but I remember a particularly strange incident surrounding "Hello Again." Casey Kasem once read a "Long Distance Dedication" on American Top 40 from someone talking about the Cars. If I remember correctly, it was for some folks who had taken the letter writer to a Cars concert, but I'm not sure. I know the Cars were a big topic of the letter, and its writer dedicated "Hello Again." But instead of "Hello Again" by the Cars, Casey played "Hello Again" by Neil Diamond.

The Cars are also known as the band whose usual lead singer, the late Ric Ocasek, resembled Leonard Nimoy. There has also been some disagreement about Ric's age. When he died in 2019, his age was reported as 70. Indeed, his voter registration record gave a birthdate of 1949. But he had also claimed he graduated high school in 1963, and a 1950 census record shows a 6-year-old Richard T. Otcasek living in Ric's hometown of Baltimore.

The Cars must have also been endlessly frustrated by the fact that they had 3 hits that peaked at #41 on the Hot 100 - just missing the top 40. I'm not sure if this is a record, but it has to be close. Scandal must have been almost as aggravated, as they had 2 records that peaked at #41. But both Scandal and the Cars reached the top 40 with other efforts. I bet my high school principal has never had a top 40 hit, so the Cars and Scandal had the last laugh.

"Trouble In Paradise" by Jarreau

1983 / #63

Rate Your Music score: 3.04 out of 5!

Ever spend decades trying to identify an old song you used to hear?

AM radio in our area in the early 1980s was in an MOR malaise. When a local AM station finally switched to a new format of current rock, my parents refused to add it to the presets on the car radio for months. I listened to this station on the way to and from school in 5th grade, but that was a pretty short distance, and my parents usually controlled the radio the rest of the time.

This means much of the music I heard on the car radio was geared to a grownup fan base. I wouldn't say this music was always bad. Some of it is at least listenable, and most of it reached the pop chart. But this softer music just wasn't what I was usually interested in when I was young.

Music evokes memories. For 40 years, I had the opening of a song stuck in my head that I couldn't identify. I associated it with all of the zillion stations that played music for the oldsters - and, by extension, their angry lectures that were so common then. How I longed for those days! At least that was better than putting up with The Today Show lately.

Just recently, with the help of YouTube, I figured out this unidentified song was a lost hit by Al Jarreau - back when he used only his last name. It turns out that it was popular right when the MOR madness was starting to let up for a few years. It never went away completely, of course, but it was less of a factor through the mid-1980s.

This wasn't the only oldie that took a long time for me to identify. I identified "Romeo's Tune" by Steve Forbert about 10 years after it was popular. I know there was a 1960s-era song that used a melody that's strikingly similar to a longtime opening theme to National Geographic specials, but I can't identify it. A YouTube commenter called the National Geographic theme "the music of intelligence", because those specials were indeed much smarter than the crap that fills the TV airwaves now.

"Take It Away" by Paul McCartney

1982 / #10

Rate Your Music score: 3.78 out of 5!

Time for some 4th grade memories!

When I entered 4th grade, "Take It Away" was one of the songs everyone in my class absolutely loved. The others were "Eye Of The Tiger" by Survivor and "Don't Fight It" by Kenny Loggins with Steve Perry. Someone even brang a record of Kenny and Steve's hit to class one day. I don't know why, because it's not like the school would let us wear down the motor in their precious record player by listening to it.

"Take It Away" inspired some obvious commentary during serious school projects. One day, there was an assignment we had to read in front of the class. One student stood up to read his assignment, and the teacher said, "Take it away." I knew exactly what would happen next. Another student immediately lapsed into a rousing chorus of the Paul McCartney tune.

The teacher was MAD!!!!!

I got kicked out of her class for good in the middle of the school year. Teachers there had a higher turnover rate than students did though. That was the year the school replaced 75% of its instructors.

People remembered "Take It Away" years after it misappeared from radio. When I was a high school freshman, science class was taught by an aging nun. One day, a student was playing with some toy in class, like a yo-yo or something. The nun angrily warned, "Put it away or I'll take it away."

Guess what happened? Yep! That rousing chorus was again heard!

This is like when my 1st grade teacher sent kids to the "time-out room" and said, "Let's go." That was when the Cars had a hit with that title, so somebody would inevitably erupt in song.

Take it away!

"Club At The End Of The Street" by Elton John

1990 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 2.87 out of 5!

Even superstars have lost hits.

The year 1989 saw stunning comebacks of acts who enjoyed their peaks of success in the 1970s. We had "One" by the Bee Gees, "This Time I Know It's For Real" by Donna Summer, and "Call It Love" by Poco - all of which are now lost hits. I remember that Power 94½ began playing each of those hits weeks before Q-102 did. That was true of most new records, in fact. Those tracks are in a different category from "Soldier Of Love" by Donny Osmond, because I just assumed Donny was politically connected enough that stations would add him right out of the box. He has espoused some right-wing stances in interviews. True to form, his record charted higher than the others.

Elton John never needed a comeback, because he was always putting out hit after hit. The lost hit we're profiling in this entry helped vault him into the 1990s.

It's about a club at the end of the street.

Most folks I knew didn't have a club at the end of their street. They usually had a trash dump, an ill-placed stop sign, or a creek where people threw bodies, but rarely a club. Not even a Honeycomb Hideout. But Elton took exception to this misrule.

This song is noteworthy because of what happened one weekend at an important family gathering at my grandparents' house. This record kept coming on the radio, and I kept calling it "Club On Sesame Street." A younger cousin thought that was absolutely hilarious.

It was one of the highlights of the decade!