This is the second entry of the Salmonella Three - so named because these 3 entries are for songs that dominated the airwaves while I had salmonella.
Simply Red had a couple songs that were already lost hits by the time "It's Only Love" came out. When those songs fell off the charts, that was it for those songs. With major radio stations becoming increasingly conservative, that was likely because of controversy surrounding them - though these controversies were actually pretty mild. I heard "It's Only Love" much more than I ever heard the band's two earlier lost hits - even though the others charted much higher.
Perhaps radio played it more to atone for not playing the others anymore. But it too was gone rather quickly.
The hairstyle sported by Simply Red's Mick Hucknall was not unique. Check out this old scare film about a little girl who ruins everything she borrows, including library books and other people's records...
This entry might not be the last of Simply Red that we see on this blog.
This is the first of a series of entries I call the Salmonella Three.
Each of these 3 records charted in early 1989 and peaked in the 50s on the Hot 100. All 3 are by acts from England. I call these entries the Salmonella Three because they were on the airwaves when I had salmonella when I was a high school sophomore. This bout with salmonella ruined entirely my George Washington Weekend. I think I also missed about 5 days of school, which was about 185 fewer than I wish I had missed that year.
These days, they close down schools for 2 years over a handful of COVID cases, but in 1989, these same officials took the opposite approach for other illnesses. That extreme is bad too. Thanks to their doublethink, they have absolutely no credibility whatsoever. But county officials made a rare foray into science when they correctly attributed this salmonella outbreak to contaminated drinking water. Usually, they just blame the "drought" when our water tastes weird - even if it's been raining nonstop. But putting the blame where it belongs can't bring back my George Washington Weekend.
"Driven Out" was a hit at the time. For a long time, I've confused it with another lost hit: "Cuts You Up" by Peter Murphy, which coincidentally also peaked at #55. But the words to "Driven Out" seem to be about alienation, a phenomenon that has only heightened in the decades since. If only we could have our free spaces of the 2010s back, but those have been driven out by the bottomless fascism of the 2020s. Thanks a million, media.
Not everyone appreciated the apparent message of "Driven Out." Some folks were defined by their immaturity, and they used the song as a basis for an X-rated joke. They recycled this joke from one inspired by a radio commercial for a new McDonald's location.
Another thing I remember about having salmonella was that there was one evening when someone kept ripping silent-but-deadly bunker blasts and stinking up the living room while I was laying down. It was lovely.
I'm surprised people weren't driven out of the living room!
I don't usually give entries to tracks that did not make the Hot 100, but this one was so idiotic that I couldn't resist.
"Funky, Funky Xmas" was the flip side of the New Kids' 1989 hit "This One's For The Children" but apparently was not listed on the chart. For what it's worth, that single has a dismal 1.43 as its average Rate Your Music score. The same Christmas records from as far back as the 1940s keep reappearing on the Hot 100 every holiday season, but "Funky, Funky Xmas" just didn't have as much staying power.
One reason why Christmas oldies rechart each year is that many radio stations on the Hot 100 panel switch to a format of all holiday music each season, yet are not dropped from the panel during that time. This temporary format blows off many listeners who hope to hear the station's regular format instead. By the time all these listeners return, it's time for the next holiday cycle. But a growing factor in the annual chart reappearance of old Christmas songs is that the music of the past few years is just not a mass appeal medium like the big pop hits of our day were.
"Funky, Funky Xmas" makes generous use of the vibraslap - that instrument that sounds like a rattlesnake. Every time I hear that instrument, I think of the 1970s police dramas where the cop and the villain are stalking each other in a warehouse. You can imagine the cop and robber slinking around and peeping out from behind walls as the spooky music plays, and every so often, the vibraslap goes off. The rattling gets louder when one of them pulls their gun. "Tonight on The Rookies...Vibraslap!"
(Random trivia about The Rookies that doesn't fit anywhere else: When Viacom began distributing reruns of The Rookies in syndication, they butchered some episodes and completely skipped others because they thought they were too "violent" - even though they had aired on prime time network TV without any trouble years earlier.)
This song came out at the peak of society's New Kids infatuation. In the '90s, we turned the page on that sorry chapter (but sadly not much else). In 1991, the New Kids' Donnie Wahlberg was charged with arson for allegedly pouring vodka on a carpet in a hallway of a Louisville hotel and setting it ablaze. Two of the group's guards were charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly abusing hotel employees. This followed a series of other incidents, including one in which a young man claimed Donnie attacked him for refusing to give up his seat on a plane. Vibraslap!
The hotel episode caused a Kentucky concert by the group to be canceled. I first heard about the cancellation when it was announced on the radio, but little did I know the sordid details yet. At first, I just thought it was due to illness, as when Paul McCartney canceled not long before.
As for New Kids On The Block, little has been heard from this ridiculous group since.
"Sometimes a fool gets lucky and wins...Sometimes the innocent pay for an old man's sin..."
This is what real music sounds like!
Even real music like this can have lyrics that are hard to interpret. Yet there must be some meaning. "Beat Of A Heart" isn't like "MMMBop" or "Nu Nu." But if the meaning of a song isn't clear, listeners interpret it to their heart's desire.
When I first heard this song, these words caught my ear: "Sometimes a fool gets lucky and wins...Sometimes the innocent pay for an old man's sin." I immediately thought it was about Ronald Reagan winning the election. But before I even said anything, someone repeated these lines in a voice imitating ol' Ronnie. At the time, it seemed so obvious, and I wasn't the only person who thought of this.
These days, when I think of the 1984 election, I start laughing because one of my 6th grade teachers got angry when everyone waited too long to do their election project. But the result of this election was no laughing matter.
Decades later, I saw Scandal a couple times in concert. They put on a fine show. And Patty was chewin' bubble gum! She didn't bubble. But she was chewin' bubble gum!
I came up with an idea for a TV show that would be just like Hee Haw except that people would spill stuff more. The hilarious thrills and spills would help satisfy the public's appetite for slapstick humor.
A time-honored staple of physical comedy is the classic pie-in-the-face gag. It is funny because it is. I'm sure that many suits and tablecloths have been ruined by this routine in movies and on TV.
And the British band Charlie came through!
The video for "It's Inevitable" is set in a bakery. It has one of those carts like that in a local bakery we frequented when I was about 4. The only thing inevitable about a video set in a bakery is that there will be a massive pie fight!
This pie-smashing brawl lays hulk to the bakery's entire inventory and prompts a visit by police. Even a harmless scale gets pied!
The sequence that begins at 3:15 is strikingly similar to an Electric Company segment that first aired several years earlier.
Charlie never got to enjoy their moment in the sun. "It's Inevitable" peaked at #38 for one week. The band never charted higher. During the week it was #38, American Top 40 - with Keri Tombazian filling in for Casey Kasem - mistakenly played "Pieces Of Ice" by Diana Ross, another lost hit, in that slot instead. This is sort of like when Shana received the Q-102 treatment, but at least Casey was able to correct the Charlie-related error the following week.
It wasn't inevitable that such mistakes were corrected. AT40 for the weekend of December 15, 1984, switched around "Hello Again" by the Cars and "You're The Inspiration" by Chicago. The Case did not correct this gnawing switcheroo. Also, my very first suspension from school began during the reign of that week's chart. That was in 6th grade when I was chased out of the school building by a gang of assailants. My "crime" was exiting the building. The punishment caused me to miss the field trip to Cincinnati Milacron. For decades after, every time my family drove past Cincinnati Milacron on Interstate 71, I retold that story.
I'm surprised this lost hit doesn't have a better Rate Your Music score, because I remember it being praised by the vast majority of the American public. Back when this song was a hit, I got in a big argument with a family member about its degree of popularity, but I think reaching #21 is good enough.
There's lots to say about this legendary R&B trio from Boston. One day we were in a Pizza Hut, and someone noticed that a young man working there looked just like Bell Biv DeVoe's Michael Bivins! He had the same glasses and everything.
That was also around the time Bell Biv DeVoe was part of a big Taco Bell promotion. Taco Bell distributed collectible 32-ounce plastic cups featuring artwork created by the group. One day, my mom's car broke down in front of a local shopping center. Employees of a nearby Taco Bell brang out a Bell Biv DeVoe cup full of water to put in the radiator.
I ended up with that cup, but it only lasted a few years before the base of it started cracking. Then somehow part of it melted on the inside of the door of the stove.
It turns out the cup was part of a charity drive, so now I feel guilty because Taco Bell gave us the cup instead of having us buy it. Other acts who participated in the Taco Bell campaign were the Scorpions, Diana Ross, George Michael, and M.C. Hammer.
I was inspired to include "Gangsta" on this blog by something that happened a few months ago. There was some big rally or protest. I don't even remember what it was about. It drew counterprotesters who drowned out speakers by erupting into a chant that sounded exactly like that from "Gangsta"! What I'm talking about is the chant that starts at 26 seconds into the above video and is heard several times throughout the song. It wasn't words being chanted, but just one note that was held for a long time.
You take me as a prankster, but that really did happen!
Look out any window, Bruce, and you'll see it's raining.
I saw Bruce and his band play at Riverbend back in 1988, and they put on a good show. But let me tell you about the weather that day. The Extreme Weather Watch website shows Cincinnati got almost 3 inches of rain that day - second-highest of the whole year. That was in a year with 40 inches. The average back then was 39. (It's 42 now.)
That was our "drought." Seriously, our local media called it that.
Every. Single. Day.
That was all they talked about. I have no idea why.
There is credible scholarship of a 1988 drought covering much of the country. But trust me, that drought didn't come here. Understand? I'm particularly steamed at our local media because I developed a rash that lasted for months from sitting on the rain-soaked grass at Riverbend. According to these outlets, that didn't happen, because there was a "drought" here. These sources were essentially climate change deniers.
But Bruce and his Range could be counted on for quality music. Some of my high school classmates weren't mature or intelligent enough to appreciate it, so that's one of the reasons I enjoyed it. These schoolmates also showed rapidly expanding paranoia. Their paranoia and weak intellect was a bad combination, and I hate it so much.
When I went back to school for sophomore year, I took art. Sometimes, the teacher turned on the radio for us to listen to. My pals and I kept goofing off by dancing around and lip-syncing to the songs on the radio in a hilariously exaggerated fashion, often using art supplies as a microphone. "Look Out Any Window" was one of the first songs we did this with. It might have been the first.
Look out for the big boys tellin' you everything you're gonna do!
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, you were considered a weirdo if you didn't have crooked teeth. This somehow lasted to a lesser extent until even after MTV hardly showed music videos anymore. Sadly, you just don't see crooked teeth much these days. You're legally required to be magazine perfect now.
So, by the time Jewel became popular, everyone made a big deal of the singer's crooked teeth. Twenty years earlier, it wouldn't have been a big issue.
Jewel mania was going strong in the late 1990s. That was when I planned to enroll at NKU again. I kept coming to campus to stave off the misery of the economic malaise of the era. I call it my "outside agitator" phase. In one of the buildings, there was a poster that included a small photo of Jewel. I noticed that someone had blown a bubble with bubble gum and stuck it over Jewel's face. The bub was still inflated. It made it appear as if Jewel was blowing a bubble.
Jewel was also the target of what became known as the "frisbee incident"...
Back in 1996, Jewel was playing at a festival at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C. Someone threw a frisbee at the stage, and it bounced off Jewel's guitar. Jewel promptly walked off stage. She wasn't standing still for that!
There was also a bizarre episode in 2004 when people kept driving past her tour bus after a concert in New Hampshire and yelling profanities.
This record was actually a remake. Ann Peebles released a version of it in 1973, but this version did not reach the Hot 100. I never got to hear of this song until Paul Young came along. And man, were the circumstances hilarious!
In our tiny back yard, we had a playhouse. It was just a wooden one-room structure that wasn't even tall enough to stand in. I remember standing on top of it and yelling something about Studio See, but I couldn't stand in it when I was older than about 6.
By the time I was about 12, the playhouse had rotted so much that we had to tear it down. It had an "attic" that was just a storage space a few inches high, and we found it filled with Rold Gold and Marlboro packages that had been surprisingly well-preserved. Some teenagers had apparently gathered at the playhouse and ate pretzels and smoked cigarettes back before my family moved there. We started tearing the playhouse down using a saw, but some neighborhood kids came along and knocked the rest of it over with just a few good kicks.
We thought we had it all set up, we thought we had the perfect plan, but those boys made quick work of that playhouse!
The best part is that the company hired by the city of Highland Heights to collect trash inexplicably would not take the remnants of the playhouse. So we had to wait until it was dark and drive around the area to dispose of pieces of it. We drove down Johns Hill Road and up Licking Pike and kept throwing big pieces of wood out the car window.
Finally, on Decoursey Pike, we found a little pull-off where we dumped the rest of the playhouse.
None of this was quite legal, of course. But the garbage collectors had forced our hand by refusing to pick up this waste. If anyone broke the law, it was the trash collecting firm, which broke the law by proxy.
The entire episode was uproarious but in a shocking sort of way.
Then came Paul Young.
Right after we tore the playhouse down, Paul released a new single. It was called..."I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down"!
Now that was funny!
And, 5 years after the remnants of the playhouse were dumped at that pull-off, there were still pieces of it laying there!
Also, that was right by a church where they took us in high school where someone tried to flush a Mello Yello can down the toilet.
