"Overjoyed" by Stevie Wonder

1986 / #24

Rate Your Music score: 3.45 out of 5!

Ker-plop!

We were lucky to grow up in the days of live, local radio. People remember more about tiny stations of 40 years ago than they do about what today's biggest stations were playing just an hour ago. Perhaps the most underrated station ever in the Cincinnati area was WCLU when it was top 40. This small AM daytimer was my favorite station when I was in middle school. And that was even after we got a car with an FM radio.

I think small stations gave their DJ's more freedom to come up with catchphrases, funny characters, and jokes. Small stations seemed to have bigger playlists as well, perhaps because they couldn't afford to hire consultants to tell them which records to play. On the other hand, they probably didn't get as many free promo records from the labels, and had to buy music from a regular record store. I know WCLU did air some of its music from promo 45's though, since I remember them playing versions of some songs that were only on the promo single. For example, they originally played the promo version of "Dress You Up" by Madonna, which started with a rumbling sound. This prompted a DJ to declare, "Ew, Madonna, that was gross!" We were in the parking lot at the Highland Heights Shopping Center when we heard this, and I thought I'd bust a gut laughing!

Not long after, Stevie Wonder gave us the tender ballad "Overjoyed." The record was noted for its interesting production elements, which the album's liner notes called "environmental percussion." The sound of a pebble splashing into a puddle was heard throughout the song. This gave rise to a WCLUism that is remembered to this day. Every time WCLU played this record, they called it "The Ker-Plop-Plop Song."

I double-check these entries before posting them, because not everything that was talked about on local pop radio in the '80s fits today's environment in which finding things to get offended about has become America's leading cash crop. When I was looking this over, I stumbled on some items on my hard drive that weren't even that old but would never fly today. I probably have stuff that's brand new that wouldn't fly today, but nobody has to give a reason anymore why something is offensive. But, as far as I can recall, even the fusty FCC didn't go after most of our local DJ's 40 years ago.

"My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)" by Chilliwack

1981 / #22

Rate Your Music score: 3.48 out of 5!

Leave It To Beaver is said to be the first network program to show a toilet. It happened in 1957. Before then, the TV industry just pretended toilets didn't exist. But Leave It To Beaver only showed the tank. It was in an episode in which the boys hid a pet alligator in the toilet tank.

Everyone in the 1980s thought music videos were so daring, but they rarely even showed a toilet tank, let alone a whole toilet. Progress is slow, I guess. But the Canadian band Chilliwack was at least bold enough to dip their toes in the water.

The video of this lost hit is full of shots in which the camera is facing upward out of what appears to be a toilet bowl. Or at least everyone in the '80s thought it was a toilet bowl. If you were watching MTV with friends, and this video came on, everyone got excited all at once because a toilet was shown on TV. If it's anything other than a toilet, the band should have made it so it didn't look like a toilet.

Maybe it's like a Rorschach test, where your shrink tells you to interpret some inkblots any way you want, and then diagnoses you with a mental disorder because you interpret them the "wrong" way. It could be like how one of the inkblots is very clearly a bat, but you're never supposed to say it's a bat.

But everyone knew the Chilliwack video was being filmed from a toilet when the band started lighting matches and throwing them in the bowl. The big thing back then was for people to blow up school toilets with M-80's. That's why there was a restroom stall with no toilet at my high school.

The unanimous verdict: It's a toilet.

Also, Chilliwack's lead singer resembled an actor who used to play the villain in some episodes of cop shows back then. Imagine Ponch and Jon of CHiPs chasing the singer from Chilliwack through an alley on their motorcycles.

"She Ain't Pretty" by the Northern Pikes

1992 / #86

Rate Your Music score: 3.39 out of 5!

"She ain't pretty, she just looks that way..."

Let's go postal!

There was a time when the word postal didn't mean what it means today. It used to actually have something to do with the postal service.

A strange thing, that postal service. I could never really figure out how they sort all that mail, or how they manage to deliver magazines and not lose any part of them except all the pages. But when you think of the postal service, you think of stamps.

And when you think of stamps, you think of a problem that started cropping up at restaurants in the 1980s. I noticed that occasionally, when you ordered a soft drink with your meal, it would taste minty - not unlike the glue on a postage stamp. It was like that phase in the early 2000s when French fries at fast food restaurants tasted like soap. But I don't think the problem with the soft drinks has ever gone away, because I still encountered it just a couple years ago.

When we get a soft drink that tastes like this, we say it's postal. But we're luckier than this a vast majority of the time. That means we get to break into song instead.

"It ain't postal, it just looks that way!"

Almost every restaurant visit since 1992 in which we receive a beverage that tastes anywhere close to normal has been graced with these new lyrics to a lost hit by the Northern Pikes, a band of Saskatoon rockers. One sip, and you should know whether to sing.

This routine is still a hit after all these years - even though the Pikes' original song long ago became lost on U.S. airwaves.

According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, "She Ain't Pretty" was inspired by an episode of Rhoda in which a character used a similar phrase. It would be like if the band had watched The Dukes Of Hazzard and written a song titled "You Done Scuffed My Vehicle!"

Meanwhile, don't be surprised to find Yelp or Tripadvisor reviews in which the reviewer complains that a restaurant served a soda that tasted like a postage stamp.

"Hippychick" by Soho

1990 / #14

Rate Your Music score: 3.26 out of 5!

"I stopped loving you since the miners' strike..."

Let me tell you about high school. It was kinda weird!

I'm from an area with infamously shitty schools. Let's just say I, uh, transferred schools a lot.

The stupidity hit paydirt when I was a high school senior. Our school had something completely idiotic that very few schools had: a level system. Think of what schools would be like if they had a Social Credit System. These levels dictated what "privileges" - known elsewhere as rights - you were allowed to have.

In order to move up a level, you had to write a big statement and grovel to the class. The class would gather around a table each week to decide levels. But teachers and administrators did of course have the ultimate say.

A string of classroom pranks led to me being stuck at level 1 for a ridiculously long time. One day, I applied to move up to level 2. In my statement that I read to the class, I borrowed a line from Soho and wrote, "I have been on level 1 since the miners' strike."

Needless to say, I wasn't raised to level 2. In fact, I don't think I moved up from level 1 ever again. I think this was around the time the school asked me to stop showing up on Wednesdays because I made Wednesdays my prank day. I'm probably still on level 1!

And what was this mysterious "miners' strike"? Many of us in America didn't know about it, but there was a major strike by coal miners in Britain in 1984-85. Margaret Thatcher fought against the miners and consolidated her power. Her regime seized the union's assets and banned strikers' dependents from getting welfare.

Also, Soho had nothing to do with Sohio.

"Stay The Night" by Benjamin Orr

1986 / #24

Rate Your Music score: 3.48 out of 5!

Remember this "dirty" song by the Cars bassist?

Seriously, our local intelligentsia - or rather, stupidsia - thought this song was the filthiest thing ever recorded. You'd think we would have had a lot of laughs at their expense over that, but they had lots of power, and it wasn't so funny.

I had a teacher in 8th grade who actually went on a big crusade against this song. One day, she was haranguing the class about something, when she mentioned that she had heard this record on the radio. She was shocked that any station would broadcast such porn.

This was a school that wouldn't even maintain order in class or in the hallways. I was even hit in the head with a rock someone threw at recess, and I was once hit in the head with a Liquid Paper bottle someone threw in another class. A student also once threatened me with a razor in class. Yet the school thought it could ban a song by the Cars bassist from local airwaves!

Don't laugh. Our major radio and TV stations were so conservative that they would agree to yank a song if pushed hard enough. This is the market where our ABC affiliate refused to air New Year's Rockin' Eve for several years.

Our school also crusaded against a video store that rented out (gasp!) R-rated movies.

All of this is like in the 1990s when some busybodies purchased the rights to some songs they thought were too suggestive - even though they were actually pretty tame - and relicensed them under SESAC so radio stations couldn't play them. Most stations paid only ASCAP and BMI fees, not SESAC. A radio station in Pittsburgh got in trouble for playing some of this music without realizing it was under SESAC.

What my school did was Taliban-level stuff. But now - in the 2020s - censorship like this is essentially the norm.

"I Did It" by the Dave Matthews Band

2001 / #71

Rate Your Music score: 2.32 out of 5!

As late as 2001, we were still rockin' and rollin' by adding new lost hits!

This is yet another song that sounds like it has something to do with flatulence: "I did it...Guilty as charged."

I can't believe this song doesn't have a better Rate Your Music score. It's not surprising though that it only peaked at #71 on the Hot 100, because the chart's methodology by then was generally unfavorable to acts like the Dave Matthews Band that had a solid reputation. By 2001, the music biz rewarded fleeting trends, not reputations.

Hilariously, when "I Did It" reached its chart peak, the song at #1 was another title that seemed evocative of trouser sneezes: "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy featuring RikRok. "It Wasn't Me" was actually one of few big hits of the era that has lasted, as people still sing the title when denying something they're accused of.

The Dave Matthews Band did a lot to cement their good reputation. Central to this was drummer Carter Beauford frequently chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles while performing. Someone who went to a Dave Matthews Band concert in Kansas City said Carter blew a huge bubble that burst all over his face during the show.

But the band's reputation took a hit in 2004 when their tour bus was traveling through Chicago and accidentally dumped an estimated 800 pounds of feces and urine onto a sightseeing boat in the Chicago River. This incident drew the attention of even the mayor, and the band had to pay a $200,000 legal settlement. The band also agreed to keep a log of when their buses emptied their septic systems. The driver of the bus pleaded guilty to reckless conduct.

He did it! Guilty as charged!

"Alive Again" by Chicago

1978 / #14

Rate Your Music score: 3.08 out of 5!

"I am a lima bean..."

Someone suggested that this blog feature Chicago's "25 Or 6 To 4", but I wouldn't quite call that song lost - unless you're talking about the band's 1986 rerecording. In fact, somebody recently pointed out that "25 Or 6 To 4" was the most played song of all of June on Sirius XM's Classic Vinyl channel. Chicago has a big catalog though, and some of it is unintentionally hilarious.

One of the first misheard lyrics I ever remember was when I was 5 years old. Most of my exposure to pop music was from the AM radio in my parents' car. The radio had 5 presets, which were set by pulling the buttons outward. This was also around the time I first saw a music chart. Someone showed me a newspaper that listed the week's top 10 singles and said those were the songs that were big on the radio at the time. After I heard a song on the radio about a lima bean while we were on a family trip to Wapakoneta, I kept saying that I hoped the lima bean song would come on the radio again.

Nobody knew what I was talking about. When the song came on again, I noted the chorus that went, "I am a lima bean."

And the rest as they say is history.

It turns out I actually mentioned this a couple times over the past few years on a website that has absolutely nothing to do with this topic.

I remember a couple other misheard lyrics that I used to hear on the radio back then. One was the Four Seasons singing, "Oh one eye." Another was the Patti Smith Group's "Eight Is Enough belongs to us."

I probably haven't heard "Alive Again" on regular radio more than once in the past 45 years. This might not be the last we hear of Chicago on this blog, since they seem to enjoy having #14 hits that become lost.

"I Want You" by Shana

1989 / #40

Rate Your Music score: 2.86 out of 5!

This record spent one week in the top 40 - at #40.

That's happened many times. But this time was different.

That's because this song was never heard on American Top 40 in Cincinnati despite reaching the top 40. AT40 was broadcast around the world, but Q-102 was Cincinnati's AT40 affiliate for years. Q-102 skipped over the show for the week ending January 13, 1990, choosing instead to broadcast the prior week's show.

You might think a competitor should have picked up AT40 so the program could be shown more respect, but by 1990, Q-102 didn't have a competitor - at least not in the same format. So the butchering of AT40 that had gone on for years continued. That started in 1987 when Q-102 kept deleting "I Want Your Sex" by George Michael from the show. It continued when the station inexplicably started the show late once and cut out portions of it so it would end on time.

This - shockingly - isn't as bad as what was starting to happen in some other cities. In a few cities, the AT40 affiliate would drop the show without even telling the AT40 people. So AT40 couldn't find another station for their great program.

It was also in 1990 that American Top 40 celebrated its 20th anniversary. There was a display about it at Forest Fair Mall. It wasn't much though. They just put up a few posters listing the top 100 records of each year. It was off in a part of the mall that people didn't use. Wait, that was the whole mall.

We don't stop 'til we reach the top!

"Chariots Of Fire" by Vangelis

1981 / #1

Rate Your Music score: 3.43 out of 5!

A chart-topping smash might not seem lost. But the instrumental theme to the movie Chariots Of Fire by Greek composer Evangelos Papathanassiou is said to have now vanished from radio - despite the heavy airplay it got during its 1981-82 chart run.

I remember hearing it on a family vacation to Myrtle Beach, as it accompanied a channel on the motel cable TV system that showed all-text computerized ads. I don't know why we sat around and watched an ad channel, but it must have been raining. This is also the record that ended Joan Jett's 7-week reign at #1.

I've never seen the movie though. It won 4 Oscars - counting one for Vangelis's theme music. Everyone says their school took them to see this film, yet the students weren't that interested in it. According to the description, the movie was about an Olympic runner overcoming prejudice. Many of my schoolmates liked to create prejudice instead of fighting against it.

I've heard of lots of feature films that schools had everyone see, yet students weren't interested in. Apparently, there was one that had absolutely no dialogue whatsoever. I vaguely remember seeing something like that. I remember a high school teacher showing us some theatrical release and fast-forwarding through most of it. I think it was something that was only PG-rated, so it's not like there was anything offensive that we needed to skip over. She didn't say anything as she was fast-forwarding.

This also reminds me of the time in 8th grade when our school took us to see a play and someone kept chewing bubble gum and making Darth Vader noises.