"Rock 'N' Roll Is King" by ELO

1983 / #19

Rate Your Music score: 3.1 out of 5!

"Come along with me...To a Land of Make-Believe..."

At some point in our childhood, we all stop watching children's TV shows and start looking at them as objects of ridicule.

In my day, there was a trifecta of PBS kids' shows that aired each weekday afternoon: Sesame Street, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and The Electric Company. When I was 9, I started making fun of these shows constantly. I made up tasteless Sesame Street fanfic. I was shocked when I entered 5th grade and they had us watch The Electric Company in the classroom, as I had outgrown it years before. Wawwwww...wokka! Wawwwww...wokka! Waw waw waw waw waw wurma wurma wurm, waw waw waw waw waw wurma wurma wurm...splat! (I never knew how to spell that until a vulgar America Online troll talked about it. And no, it wasn't me who made those posts. That would have been pretty hard, because I was on a big vacation out west when some of them appeared, and that was before motels had Internet access.)

When I was 9 or 10, any popular song risked having the words changed to mention a Sesame Street character. "Overkill" by Men At Work became "Groverkill." "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" by Culture Club became "Do You Really Want To Bert Me." There's another song like that which is crying out to be profiled here as a lost hit sometime soon, but I'm warning you ahead of time that it's going to be another trip into adult contemporary land.

But for now, let's talk about a high-energy lost hit from ELO!

The timing was perfect for this hit, because this was right when my ridicule of the aforementioned TV shows was going strong. When I first heard this song, some of the lyrics caught my ear: "Come along with me...To a Land of Make-Believe."

I burst into laughter, because I thought it was a reference to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. That was where the trolley emerged and they had all those puppets and the Museum-Go-Round. It also starred Betty Aberlin, who was one of these celebrities like Dick Clark who seemed to never age. Probably the reason she never aged was that they kept showing episodes that were at least 10 years old.

An online commenter said he got a toy version of the trolley when he was too old for it.

Now all we need is something from Zoom.

"Don't Talk" by Larry Lee

1982 / #81

Rate Your Music score: 3.62 out of 5!

I'm shocked that this record by the man from Springfield, Missouri, only reached #81, because I heard it all the time back in 1982. Radio played it generously.

The main reason I'm giving this song an entry is to highlight a bizarre weekly countdown show that aired at the time. Remember, this was 1982, when even Wink Martindale had his own countdown. The countdown I'm talking about here wasn't Wink Martindale though.

This countdown was way off from the Hot 100. I knew of the Hot 100, thanks to Casey Kasem's radio and TV shows. But this show clearly didn't use the Hot 100. It wasn't even close. I don't think it was a survey from just one station. I can understand those being off. Those should be off. I think this countdown was actually broadcast nationwide.

One Sunday, we had the radio on, and I heard this countdown. After the #2 song was played, I noticed there were 2 records that were played on the radio constantly that hadn't been counted down yet, so one of them had to be #1. They were "Even The Nights Are Better" by Air Supply and "Don't Talk" by Larry Lee.

There was no way in hell they'd put Air Supply at #1. Am I right?

Well??? Am I right?????

You guessed it! Air Supply was #1.

Even the days were brighter when I stopped listening to that countdown.

"Stray Cat Strut" by the Stray Cats

1982 / #3

Rate Your Music score: 3.49 out of 5!

For a record that peaked at #3, this exciting lost hit sure disappeared from radio quickly. The way that it vanished from the airwaves is like one of those songs that hit #58 that you heard on MTV or the car radio once or twice.

For those unfamiliar with the Stray Cats, they were a Long Island band that based their sound on 1950s rockabilly. But I think they looked like one of those '80s bands that would be played on MTV or some of our small local radio stations, while being completely ignored by our big stations. These acts are generally respected now, even if radio gatekeepers used to shun them.

The "Stray Cat Strut" video includes a brief shot that reminds me of something that happened in high school. One of the Cats holds up a metal trash can lid as a shield to protect himself from eggs being thrown by an angry woman. I remember people using trash can lids as shields in high school because of schoolmates throwing things all the time. I wonder what armor class that was in Dungeons & Dragons.

The Stray Cats' Brian Setzer had a hilarious feud with Big Country's Stuart Adamson. I remember MTV talking about it, back when they used to call every new album an "effort." At least they didn't call it a "CD" before anyone had a CD player, like the legendary Shadoe Stevens did.

For years in the 1990s, I worked at our local public library. The Stray Cats still made albums and did concerts then. When they came to town, a woman who worked at the library went to their concert. The venue kicked her out because she took photos. Upon hearing of this, another woman who worked at the library said of the venue, "They sound like a bunch of communists." I got an image in my mind of Mao Zedong barging into a concert hall and dragging people out if they had a camera.

Yeah, don't cross my path!

"Never Thought (That I Could Love)" by Dan Hill

1987 / #43

Rate Your Music score: 2.15 out of 5!

"Can I touch you..."

I know that when this blog features an adult contemporary ballad like this, you just love making fun of it. But don't laugh too hard. After one of our top 40 stations went away, local radio fell into a deep malaise, and our remaining top 40 station seemed determined to play this record many times per day. And it had a long tail there before it became a lost hit, as they still occasionally played it a couple years later.

It wasn't specifically this song that I had the gravest objections to, but rather the broader practices of our local radio stations. The fact that our stations became so sluggish was beyond aggravating. You should have seen what I had to deal with in daily life, and I wasn't even safe from it at home, in part because radio was instituting narrower playlists to appeal to those with short attention spans.

But "Never Thought" did provide a positive contribution to broadcasting - with the help of Steve Hawkins of Q-102. One evening, Steve introduced this record like normal. The song began with the unintentionally hilarious opening line: "Can I touch you..."

Then Steve broke in and declared, "No, you can't, get your hands off of me!"

Now that was funny!

"Fool Moon Fire" by Walter Egan

1983 / #46

Rate Your Music score: 3.42 out of 5!

The power of suggestion!

I'm absolutely certain I heard this lost hit on the radio when it was current. Then somehow I forgot about it for 35 years. It's not the only time I've forgotten an action-packed song like this. It's usually because a personal crisis wiped out my memory of the preceding weeks. One example is "Save Me" by Fleetwood Mac - a lost hit also. Maybe I forgot "Fool Moon Fire" because pretty much all of life became a crisis, but I doubt that, as the song was a hit right when things were improving because I was about to transfer out of one of the many bad schools I attended.

Right after I remembered this long-lost song again, I found an old WCLU survey sheet on a website that included it. This seemed to trigger a faint memory of hearing it on the car radio in the school parking lot near the end of 4th grade. But this could just be...the power of suggestion! I might not have actually heard it there, because I usually took the school bus home then. But I probably did, because there were enough times back then when I got after-school detention and my parents drove me home instead.

That's an indictment of the school - not me. After the incident in which a teacher locked me in a hot car at the Kentucky Horse Park, it was becoming clear to everyone that the school was full of shit. (Shockingly, she was still teaching at a different school just recently.) Academically, it was a joke too. Whenever I completed an assignment in class, the teacher just sent me to sit on the floor and read the same books for 5-year-olds over and over again. That wasn't the same teacher who tied me to a chair and stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth like a hostage. On the other hand, schools were doing things like that all the time 3 or 4 years ago and were cheered by the smarmy charlatans on The Today Show.

I also have a memory of going to Taste of Cincinnati around that time and thinking it was insufferably boring. After all, it's not the most exciting event, but there just isn't much recreation around here, and it rains all the time.

An online comment said the reason "Fool Moon Fire" wasn't a big hit was because the record label was involved in some squabble about promoting it. Indeed, there probably weren't any big hits on the Hot 100 in the 1980s that didn't have some support from corrupt promoters. For example, the promoters began blackballing "Turn Me Loose" by Loverboy because some execs at Columbia wouldn't play the promoters' game. The promoters had to do it their way or no way at all.

I never saw the "Fool Moon Fire" video until I found it on YouTube. It came out a year before Michael Jackson's "Thriller" clip, but the gist of it is pretty much the same.

I once was a fresh young kid. Nothing could drag me down. Except 4th grade.

"Tell Me Why" by Wynonna Judd

1993 / #77

Rate Your Music score: 3.34 out of 5!

Is it possible to drive into a fart?

Discuss.

Either way, the answer will upend some of the pseudoscience we've seen over the past few years, but let's make the case for each side of the great debate. You might think that if you fart in a moving vehicle, the cloud of flatulence will somehow move with the vehicle and stink it up for miles to come. It's like how if you place a coin on your knee on a free fall ride at an amusement park, the coin is supposed to fly up and levitate at eye level while you fall.

It seems more logical though that the air biscuit would stay behind. If you're in a car and you smell a big, stinky fart, it would seem to be because you drove into it.

Whatever the weather, I remember hearing this lost hit on a day in which one of the above scenarios took place. This song was on the radio on the day we drove home from a college trip to New Orleans at the end of my freshman year.

The college folks kept saying that what happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans. I take issue with that. They imposed this edict unilaterally and expected me to follow it without agreeing to it. But I would have respected it if they hadn't become such condescending tyrants later. When they weren't throwing tantrums, they were talking down to you. Sad how they bullied people in this manner. For another thing, this story is about what happened on the way home, not what happened in New Orleans.

We were zooming north on a rural Interstate when the unmistakable bouquet of a silent-but-deadly filled the van. People poked their heads into the front seat to comment on it. Nobody could be indicted, but it was suggested that we make a pit stop soon. The bunker blasts took place repeatedly over many miles.

And "Tell Me Why" brings back fond memories of that day!

What a fine way to cap off freshman year! It's a shame more recent students didn't get to make great memories like this. For example, the university canceled spring break in 2021 just to keep a tighter rein on students. But I checked some Hot 100 charts from early 2021, and it looks like they were lucky not to be stuck with the music of 2021 on a long trip.

"Silhouette" by Kenny G

1988 / #13

Rate Your Music score: 1.99 out of 5!

Not all the records profiled on this blog are rousing rockers. In the late 1980s, a pop station could play a Kenny G instrumental alongside Guns N' Roses. Back then, everyone got it.

At least most people did. I sort of admired Kenny G, because he seemed to run afoul of people who I dealt with daily whose attention spans were too narrow to care about more than one or two acts. Pop stations had variety. You could hear Mötley Crüe, Bobby Brown, U2, Enya, Henry Lee Summer, and Tone Loc all on the same station. But some folks were obsessed with just one performer. I remember someone in high school being absolutely spoony over Richard Marx - to the complete exclusion of everything else. At the end of a Walk-a-Thon one fall, I heard the opening notes of "Right Here Waiting" blaring from a boom box, and I knew my schoolmate was nearby.

The variety might not have been as wide as a decade before, when Kermit the Frog was on the chart at the same time as Kiss, but the point stands.

But even Kenny G was probably completely full of shit sometimes.

One Sunday, I heard one of the big countdown hosts - like Casey Kasem or Shadoe Stevens - tell a story about Kenny G. According to this story, Kenny attended a rough high school in Seattle.

I've figured out that Mr. G would have attended high school in the early 1970s. How rough could a high school in Seattle in the 1970s possibly be? Did Bill Gates throw calculators at him or something? There is no way - not a chance in hell - Kenny's high school was any worse than mine. Absolutely zero.

It's like the local sysop who complained about how rough he had it because he attended high school in Minneapolis at the same time as Prince. He used this terrifying experience as an excuse for all his extreme right-wing views. Grow up!

Also, when I was working on this entry, memories of sophomore geometry class came rushing back. I remembered how my teacher purchased a very expensive electric pencil sharpener, but kids kept using it to try to sharpen pens and batteries - which evokes a vastly different image from a gentle Kenny G tune.

"Election Day" by Arcadia

1985 / #6

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

"We're coming up on re-election day..."

Arcadia was a Duran Duran splinter group that was active around the time our big local stations seemed to eschew Duran Duran - even their biggest hits. Arcadia's biggest single - "Election Day" - peaked way up at #6 on the Hot 100, but if we go by airplay on major local stations, it just doesn't seem like a #6. David Bowie received similar treatment, as he seemed to be largely confined to smaller stations for a while.

What the hell is "re-election day"? I'm old enough to remember when we had an election day. But I guess now it's re-election day, because incumbent parties file frivolous lawsuits against their opponents to knock them off the ballot, or it's like my area where the parties make backroom deals not to challenge elected officials. But now it's not just incumbents who run unopposed. They'll let one party nominate its worst newcomer and go unchallenged in November. That doesn't always work out, because there have been a few times when a party miraculously didn't pick its worst candidate, but the goal is to have the absolute worst "leaders" we can dredge up.

The "Election Day" video has a scene that is strikingly similar to a later advertising campaign. Notice the faces in the wall at 34 seconds into the above video. That shot is like the "Halls of medicine" ads for Halls cough drops in the early 1990s...

When I was in college, someone gagged on some food while walking down the hall, and somebody likened it to those Halls ads.

Every little thing the gag reflex does leaves you answered with a question mark!

"I Like" by Men Without Hats

1983 / #84

Rate Your Music score: 3.51 out of 5!

Life has always seemed to get stupider and stupider, but even rough times have bright spots. Even in a disastrous year like 2020, I smiled my ass off as I strolled down the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland, that September.

There were already lots of weird medical theories afoot in the 1980s. It wasn't nearly as bad as the flat earth 2020s are, but still bad. By then, if you disagreed with anything a school did, it was assumed there was something wrong with you. Big Pharma made lots of money by diagnosing everyone with ADHD. Schools also used ADHD as an excuse to coerce parents into taking their kids to therapists of the school's choosing.

Sometimes this backfired, as the school didn't like the answers the doc gave. The school - out of retaliation - would then shop around for new therapists until they found one that satisfied them. Meanwhile, you'd realize the first therapist wasn't so bad.

The first therapist might even have a radio in the waiting room that was completely unguarded. The doc had no secretary or receptionist, and there were usually no other clients in the room. Nothing but a shelf with a few magazines and an Ernie and Bert puzzle.

You know what that meant, don't you? That meant I didn't have to slog through the MOR fodder that the radio was tuned to. I could just change the station.

I remember one time when I changed the station and I heard Men Without Hats' "I Like." This song is not to be confused with a parody of Tom T. Hall's "I Love" that was sung by a guy who sounded like Oscar the Grouch. That was a completely different song with the same title.

Often, when the doc noticed the station had been changed, he bopped along and changed it back. He didn't say a word about it though.

One other time, we were at a sporting goods store and the radio was tuned to a Reds game. I reached up and changed the station to static. Customers were horrified, because they thought there was some disaster at the stadium that knocked the game off the air.