"Go For Soda" by Kim Mitchell

1985 / #86

Rate Your Music score: 3.11 out of 5!

The man from Sarnia, Ontario, gave us this lost hit, which is about one of the strangest topics of any record ever to chart.

This song is about how if you've had a long day and you find yourself in any sort of disagreement, and you feel like angrily chugging beer and smoking cigarettes, you should drink soft drinks instead. To drive home this point, the video features Kim jumping out of a TV screen and kicking a cigarette out of an ashtray.

Remember, this song was from 40 years ago, so there were still fresh memories of soft drinks being better than they are now. The song was popular around the time most such products - at least those sold in the U.S. - added more weird additives. These ingredients are the main reason these products aren't as good as they once were. Other viands have also acquired more strange additives since then - bubble gum being another prime example. As a connoisseur of soft drinks, I've noticed that the major brands were much better before the mid-'80s. Makers of these products seemed to be admitting as much during the brief "throwback" craze of several years ago, when they sold varieties of sodas that were promoted as using real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, a substitute that did not appear until the 1980s. They even used 1970s logos. Supposedly, they still sell this line of bevs, but you can't get them around here anymore (of course).

In fact, it is reported that 1985 - the very year "Go For Soda" charted - was coincidentally the exact same year the last major soft drinks sold in the U.S. switched away from real sugar. And it was the year of the New Coke debacle. It was also around the time RC ran a commercial where the KGB shows up at a get-together where people are guzzling RC, and that's the end of it...

I goed for the soda. I think Kim's tune appeared on MTV's top 20 countdown that aired on Friday nights. I remember watching this show and smuggling soft drinks and Fritos in from the kitchen, which prompted the oldsters to hide the bottle cap opener. I also remember a 1985 episode of this countdown in which host Mark Goodman wore a shirt that looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. That very episode later showed up on YouTube, but it's gone now.

And I was in 7th grade in 1985-86. That was when soda sales saw a spike locally because our water system got so contaminated. It's like how water in the 1890s wasn't safe to drink so people drank a lot more beer. On the day our water crisis began, they let us out of school early, and a kid from school threw my bookbag onto U.S. 27 in the rain and a truck ran over it.

The mid-1980s were pivotal in soft drink history!

"Who's Behind The Door?" by Zebra

1983 / #61

Rate Your Music score: 3.63 out of 5!

Forgot about this one?

This lost hit by this New Orleans band got a few airings on MTV in my day. And the video dredges up a memorable battle we had with our TV set.

Fast-forward to 1:39 in the above video. For no apparent reason, some kids appear on a computer monitor - and they're green. When I saw this video when I was growing up, I thought our TV was acting up again - because our TV used to do this very thing.

For several years, images on our TV screen - including people - would frequently turn green. If you'd stomp your foot, it might return to normal. Sometimes I'd be in another room when my parents were watching TV. I knew the TV was turning green when I heard feet stomping in the living room.

This set also cut off the edges of the picture. I thought U2 was just called 2, because the title and artist tags that appeared on one of their videos on MTV were cut off.

We invested much of our hard-earned money into trying to get the TV fixed. It seems like we lost much of 1981 because the TV was in the shop so much. But nothing fixed it. The TV would still occasionally turn green until we got rid of it.

If I remember correctly, we sold this set to a guy my dad knew at work for something like a dollar. Later, I was told that the TV worked beautifully after that guy purchased it from us. By the time we sold it, we had also gotten a small set for the den, because nobody could agree on what to watch. That's Incredible! often lost out to college basketball.

The TV that we sold was replaced by a new set that worked great for years. But it was reduced to shambles when a power outage somehow shorted out most of our appliances. The electric company refused to accept any responsibility whatsoever, and we only got something like $10 from our insurer. The TV was probably the biggest loss. That was right after I moved out when I was in college, so I didn't have standing to handle the situation my way. If it was up to me, a minimum of one complimentary booger would have been imminent. An insulting booger would have been even better!

I now recall that having the extra set for the den didn't solve our problems completely. People who ended up watching their shows in the den often left garbage laying around and were always stinking up the place. It got to be as bad as a public restroom.

Who's behind the door? In our household in much of the 1980s, whoever was behind the door of the den must have been a slob!

"One" by the Bee Gees

1989 / #7

Rate Your Music: 3.14 out of 5!

Was I ever glad when these guys came back! And good on Power 94½ for adding this record in a timely manner - which is more than I can say for some other pop stations.

Sometimes, a previously big musical artist will go so long without any major successes that people start ridiculing them as just a remnant of the past that will never stage a comeback. But when people hear their music again, they realize they were actually a pretty good act after all. I think that's sort of what happened with the Bee Gees. In the late 1980s, we dug up our old Bee Gees records so we could ponder just how far back in the past the band was. It actually hadn't been that long since their peak. The equivalent now would be to dig up music from the mid-2010s, which actually seems futuristic to the graying population of today. Yet, as we were listening to our Bee Gees discs, we decided they were actually still a pretty good group.

We also unearthed an order form included with a Bee Gees album where you could order a Bee Gees poster with "a striking yellow background."

Music, TV, and other pop culture of the late '80s was often stale and trite. It got to the point where some of it literally made me angry. I thought the Bee Gees were far more exciting than most of what was going on then.

So "One" came at the perfect time!

About a year after "One", a weird battle cry emerged among some of my pals: "One, one, do it again!" It sounded like a mash-up of the chorus of this song with that of a Kinks lost hit. I have no idea what the hell it was supposed to mean. This saying also had variations that were even sillier and made even less sense.

It's also unfortunate that late '70s nostalgia never has gotten the respect it deserves.

"Just When I Needed You Most" by Randy VanWarmer

1979 / #4

Rate Your Music score: 2.71 out of 5!

Were Jennifer Warnes and Randy VanWarmer separated at birth?

Go look at the video for our previous entry and compare it with this one. You be the judge!

As with Jennifer's lost hit, Randy's tune was popular around the time I attended that summer class just before 1st grade. It was also around the time that most current pop disappeared from local AM radio for a couple years. Much of the then-current music that was played was softer stuff like this. Remember, I was only 6, so I had too much energy to be interested in soft ballads. Thus, the MOR malaise that was soon to get under way blunted my interest in popular music.

I forgot about this song for about 10 years after that. I remembered it when I was flipping through the channels on TV and it was playing on one of those local cable channels that had computerized text ads. Despite radio's preference for softer music, I rarely heard it again after that.

Randy wasn't exclusively an adult contemporary warhorse. He also gave us the minor chart entry "Suzi Found A Weapon." It seems like I may have heard that song once a long time ago and mistook it for the Cars. The Wikipedia article on Randy says "Suzi" went to #1 in Alaska - which is interesting because I didn't know Alaska had its own music chart.

Also, I used to get Randy VanWarmer confused with Michael Johnson, another Coloradan. And I used to get Michael Johnson confused with Michael Jackson.

"I Know A Heartache When I See One" by Jennifer Warnes

1979 / #19

Rate Your Music score: 3.17 out of 5!

There was a brief but interesting period in my life that took place during the summer before 1st grade. That was when I attended some class up at NKU for elementary school kids. I think the teacher was an NKU student working on her degree. It's been 46 years, but I still think about this class a lot.

It wasn't a class for "bad" kids, and anyone could have attended it. The Campbell County Schools did seem to have a strange vendetta against some of us though that lasted for years. But this class didn't have a lot of busywork like our main schools did. People mostly just made filmstrips with one of those do-it-yourself kits and chewed bubble gum. We also made chess pieces out of plaster, and someone famously broke one of the molds.

And the teacher was obsessed with this Jennifer Warnes song. She kept talking about it all the time.

When the regular school year started at my new school, there were several times when this teacher drove me to school. She would always crank the radio every time this song came on.

Her class was also the first place I ever saw a Speak & Spell. Kids got in trouble for pressing the "module select" button to hear the funny sound it made. The teacher thought it would break the Speak & Spell. But why would Texas Instruments make a toy for little kids that was so easy to break just by pressing a button?

This entry ties in with the next entry. And if you like 1979 adult contemporary, then whooooo, man, you're gonna love the next entry even more than this one! If you've stumbled upon some of the YouTube clips, you might know right where this is headed.

"Catch Me I'm Falling" by Real Life

1984 / #40

Rate Your Music score: 3.5 out of 5!

I promised to include more 1983-85 amazingness on this blog, as I try to recreate the pizzazz from before everything fell to shit. The era is rich in some of the best lost hits around, and some of them even have surprise ending stories that we love so much.

This entry is oddly funny yet left me scratching my head.

Peep the first scene in the video. That scene appears to include the band members, and the first thing you notice is that strange effect that makes one of them look like Big Bird. I'm talking about the guy you see from the side.

I wasn't even the only one who noticed this. The first time I saw this video on MTV when I was growing up, someone pointed this out right away.

More importantly, what in the hell is going on? There were a lot of goofy videos on MTV back then. But that scene is one of the most inexplicable that I can recall.

Maybe we need a secret decoder ring to figure it out. I remember when MTV ran ads trying to get hapless suckers to buy a "license" to watch their channel. Maybe they also sold little decoders you could look through like that little red thing that came in a Trix box that made red roads on a map disappear. They probably even had a commercial where some kid said, "Wow!"

Another thing like that is that weird gesture that music stars made in MTV promo bumpers that looked like a lion holding up its paw and moving its claws. What was that all about?

I guess we can't assume the music charts have heard the last of Real Life, because apparently they released a new album as recently as 2020.

"Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive" by Men At Work

1983 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 3.12 out of 5!

Man, I felt good to be alive when this great song charted! But I was absolutely livid that it only peaked at #28, when it should have been a chart-topping smash. This was one of many hit records from that era that WCLU regularly played but Q-102 did not. Unfortunately, only the latter station was on Billboard's Hot 100 panel.

This track came from Men At Work's Cargo album. We rushed out and buyed that LP as soon as it came out. Now, this was right at the end of 4th grade, and my teacher for the second half of the school year was absolutely obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. She was also obsessed with a book titled Babushka. I couldn't make heads or tails out of either book. Evidently, Babushka was about an elderly woman, but I didn't know what the title referred to. After I gave up on the book, the teacher interrogated me and said, "You thought Babushka was a little boy." Actually, I didn't think any such thing. I didn't even know the title referred to a person.

At least I understood one of the other books I read in 4th grade. It seems like during the early part of the school year, I read a Judy Blume book where a bunch of people peed on some stuff. But I might just be imagining this, because our schools around here are so conservative that they probably banned all of Judy Blume's books.

Now, back to Men At Work. My disappointment over the low chart peak of "Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive" knew no bounds. So, for months after the song dropped out of the top 40, I had a ritual I performed each week. Every Sunday morning, when American Top 40 got up to #28, I would kneel for 28 seconds before a folder that had the cover art of the band's Business As Usual LP. Then, at the end of the 28 seconds, I would solemnly salute the folder.

Things weren't business as usual during those months, but sooner or later, we had to accept that Men At Work would probably never be seen in the top 40 again.

"Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" by Judson Spence

1988 / #32

Rate Your Music score: 1.84 out of 5!

Remember this feel-good jam by the man from Pascagoula, Mississippi?

I'm shocked that this record has such a low Rate Your Music score. Power 94½ would have begged to differ with Rate Your Music, as this record seemed to be the glue that held the station together for months on end. This song always provided a much-needed break from the 5 hours of homework I got each night as a high school sophomore.

It even has a feel-good video. Judson throws off his hat - which resembles that worn by Al Lewis of The Uncle Al Show - and dances all over the stage like a madman!

In some ways, however, Judson mania didn't really age well. A website called Pop Dose has an article on Judson's self-titled LP. The piece calls Judson "Robbie Nevil's undescended testicle." The article pokes fun at the tame lyrics of the album's songs. Judson sounds like a guy who enrolls in college and is shocked that there are bars within 10 miles of campus. However, someone replied to that article saying Judson "is a major talent" who later beat alcoholism.

I'm not sure if Judson had any involvement with "Up All Night" by Annica, which happens to bear more than a passing resemblance to "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah." I'm not sure if anyone even noticed, as I don't think Annica's track ever got much radio play. It may have been one of these tracks that you mostly heard on websites that specialized in indie albums - back before Mitch McConnell led a boycott that put these sites out of business because they were based in countries where the government wouldn't support the Iraq War. A senator from my state put indie musicians out of work. Happy now, Mitch?

"Sausalito Summernight" by Diesel

1981 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 3.53 out of 5!

"I put a booger in your root beer..."

All aboard!

This lost hit was about some folks driving a broken-down Rambler up the California coast. Evidently, the outing described in this song went about as well as some of our vacations in the Horizon. Gaskets got blown, money got wasted on repairs, and about the only thing missing was the obligatory rain or arguing about who has to go to the bathroom or acting up at Druther's and being sent back to the car.

All in all, a disaster of a trip!

Suitably enough, the record charted in 1981 - the same year as our Chicago trip in which the Horizon broke down on the median of a busy highway and a group of people had to push it out of the way. (This is not to be confused with the famous Par-King trip of 1997.)

The song also contained a line that brang amusement to 8-year-olds everywhere: "I'll have a burger and a root beer." New lyrics were inevitably conjured by all 3rd graders within earshot: "I put a booger in your root beer." It's one thing to put mucus in someone's root beer, but it's another to brag about it.

Maybe that's why so many kids got sent out of Druther's.

"We Should Be Sleeping" by Eddie Money

1987 / #90

Rate Your Music score: 3.14 out of 5!

I don't always know what to think about Eddie Money. Sometimes I think he's an enjoyable listen, but at other times, I think these same songs are sort of juvenile.

For a song that only peaked at #90, we sure heard this one a lot back in 1987. When I say we heard it a lot, I mean it. Mean it like a dictionary, I do. An unabridged, no less!

We were entering a malaise of narrower playlists, and hearing all the same songs being played so much was tiring and frustrating. So it was bound to induce some ridicule.

I had just gotten a modem for my Atari 800. This was back in the days of the old dialup bulletin board systems. I wanted to be an elite hacker - like that guy who was obsessed with hacking Bruce Springsteen's phone. Anyway, I downloaded a few free computer games. That was the big thing back then.

One of these games - I don't even remember what it was called - consisted of flying some sort of spaceship or aircraft over a landscape and shooting down enemy forces. This game was interesting in that you could shoot off pieces of the mountains.

One day, we were playing this game while Eddie's "We Should Be Sleeping" was blaring on the radio. We flew over an unusually prominent mountain. It soared over the otherwise flat terrain. We began blasting chunks off this mountain and called it an "Eddie Money head."

Ever since then, if we see a mountain like this, we call it an "Eddie Money head."

We also downloaded a baseball game that used music that sounded like "The Candy Man."

Many years later, there was some movie about Pete Rose that appeared on cable TV in which the actor who played Pete actually bore a much stronger resemblance to Eddie Money. Also, in 2013, I went to a baseball game in Milwaukee where a man who worked in the stands looked just like Eddie Money. Some baseball fans sitting behind me even commented on it.

"Stay The Night" by Chicago

1984 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.04 out of 5!

I mentioned once before that Chicago had many lost hits that peaked at #14, but this one managed to fall just 2 notches shy.

A few months ago, our online museum of lost hits profiled "Stay The Night" by Benjamin Orr and how one of my teachers crusaded against this song. Several people said they remembered that lost hit, and they also recalled that Chicago had a lost hit titled "Stay The Night."

Indeed they did.

This was one of these from that time frame that I thought was somehow funny but I just can't remember why. A lot of good music from the preceding year or so just wasn't appreciated as it should have been. On the other hand, a lot of music 4 or 5 years later aggravated the living hell out of me, but with good reason. The 1984-85 period was sort of a sweet spot for me - before life really went to hell. And did it ever.

That was also before visuals associated with music devolved into a trite, ridiculous spectacle that made you wish you could peel off all the banana stickers you stuck under the kitchen table and use them to tape your eyes shut. In 1984, music videos may have been at their peak of popularity and creativity. Chicago's "Stay The Night" had an action-packed video that would never be made today. These days, we're bombarded with demands that the government censor TV programming deemed too "violent." But TV in 1984 was far more violent - i.e., exciting - than it is now.

Peep the video above. When I saw this clip in my youth, I noticed something interesting during the shots of the exploding pickup truck. At 3:53, there appears to be a body swirling around in the fireball.

But, now that v-chips are mandatory in TV sets, nobody uses them. A new TV costs an extra $15 for a feature no one uses.

Also, one article said Peter Cetera did most of the stunts in this video himself instead of hiring a stunt double.

Keep your eyes peeled for more lost hits! No one can stop us, nothing is in the way!

"White Horse" by Laid Back

1984 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.38 out of 5!

"If you wanna ride...Don't ride the white horse..."

I want to do more mid-'80s goodness on this blog, since that was when music-related media had perhaps the most influence.

There was a time in the late '80s and early '90s when we had something called the "radio recession." That was when many rap and metal hits did not appear on some top 40 stations. If such a tune charted, you knew you wouldn't hear it on top 40 radio unless it at least reached the top 10 - and maybe not even then.

There was something else like this going on even before then. But instead of metal and rap, the biggest target was electro-funk. Around here, electro-funk was usually relegated to very small stations. A good example is "19" by Paul Hardcastle, which is now a lost hit.

Another fine example is Laid Back's electro-funk hit "White Horse." I first heard this now-lost hit on American Top 40 when I was growing up. I rarely heard it anywhere else. Even when the song was at its chart peak, hearing it at all was a major event.

Imagine my surprise when I climbed into my parents' car to go to school one morning and heard "White Horse" crackling out of the car radio. I was surprised even though the song was peaking then.

"White Horse" has been widely interpreted as being full of drug references. The song repeatedly admonishes, "If you wanna ride...Don't ride the white horse." But the last verse suggests, "If you wanna ride...Ride the white pony." In other words, the song seems to be saying, "Don't use heroin. Use cocaine instead." However, the members of Laid Back said it was an anti-drug song, and that the "white pony" had nothing to do with cocaine.

If you want to talk about drug references, I have a story of something I saw just after "White Horse" peaked. I completely forgot about it for 40 years until recently. We went on a family trip to Chillicothe, and we were waiting outside the motel restaurant where we had breakfast. A man walked out of the restaurant wearing a red t-shirt that said, "Enjoy cocaine." It was a parody of the "Enjoy Coca-Cola" advertising signs.

Meanwhile, music media kept us occupied in a way that was free-floating like my zine did 5 to 10 years ago.

"Sesame's Treet" by Smart E's

1992 / #60

Rate Your Music score: 3.03 out of 5!

The greatest Sesame Street success on Billboard's Hot 100 was when Ernie's "Rubber Duckie" blasted to #16 back in 1970. An online commenter said a local station in Massachusetts placed it at #1 on one of its weekly surveys.

Years later, an act called Smart E's hoped that this success could be replicated. Sadly, this effort only peaked at #60 on the Hot 100. But it appears as if it reached the top 10 in almost every other country in the world. America was supposed to be a superpower, yet this happened. Whatever the weather, "Sesame's Treet" is the third and final entry in what I call the Sesame Three.

"Sesame's Treet" heavily sampled the Sesame Street theme. So this track loomed large. But it wasn't an entirely new concept. A few years earlier, when I was about 13, I came up with a perfect way to annoy the living shit out of the rest of the family. One afternoon, I kept loudly singing the Sesame Street theme and substituting the words with just some syllables strung together. It was sort of like one part of "Holiday" by the Bee Gees.

I felt the annoyance was earned. Around that time, we kept going to places that everyone else inexplicably thought were great, but which I thought were a rather uninteresting affair. Much worse than this, I was forced to attend shitty schools, and my complaints were brushed off again and again.

Another way I would intentionally annoy the fam was to repeat some of my catchphrases in a Speak & Spell voice. Another way was to keep calling the dogs silly names.

Can you tell me how to get to "Sesame's Treet"? Can you?????

"They Want EFX" by Das EFX

1992 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 3.5 out of 5!

Sesame Street and The Dukes Of Hazzard - together at last!

This rousing lost hit by this duo from Petersburg, Virginia, is the second installment in what I call the Sesame Three - and it has an undisputed Sesame Street reference. In the verse after the first chorus, this song includes the line, "I caught a Snuffleupagus and smoked a boogaloo spliff."

Mr. Snuffleupagus always seemed sort of dopey, so he must have been smoking something. Maybe that should have been part of my Sesame Street parodies. Back when I was doing those stories, I planned on making a public document detailing it all, which was supposed to be as influential as the great libraries of the ancient world. A few years later, I planned to add to this legacy by also including a completely unrelated true story of a kid in elementary school who ruined a book about football from the school library by cutting a photo out of it to hang on his wall. He also shit on the toilet seat once.

As "They Want EFX" gets going, the song also has a reference to another popular TV series, The Dukes Of Hazzard: "So nincompoop give a hoot and stomp a troop without a strain...Like Rosco P. Coltrane."

An early Dukes episode said Rosco lost his pension and would have had to retire as sheriff "on a bad case of hemorrhoids." He probably had lots of strains.

"They Want EFX" also repeatedly uses the 7-note "Shave And A Haircut" couplet. Years before "They Want EFX" came out, a kid in 1st grade farted that melody and said it was the "Volkswagen does it again" jingle.

In the mid-1980s, I associated music with videos, but by 1992, my perception of music had again evolved. I was focusing less on videos and more on radio, and that's what this lost hits blog is all about.

"57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" by Bruce Springsteen

1992 / #68

Rate Your Music score: 3.14 out of 5!

This is the first of a series of entries I call the Sesame Three.

One day back in 1992, I got a batch of 3 new cassette singles. All 3 are now lost hits. I still have the cassettes, but these tracks have disappeared from the public consciousness. They're completely lost. You never hear any of them now - and probably haven't since 1992. In fact, we very, very rarely ever heard them on local radio to begin with, since our stations were so stodgy by then. I can be proud that I didn't pick the big hits, because the top of the chart was filled by Mr. Big and the Heights.

All 3 singles in this batch had some connection with Sesame Street. I'll be featuring them here in increasing order of Sessification. First among them is "57 Channels."

Bruce's lost hit actually has only a very remote Sesame Street link. I don't know if the lyrics were meant to be taken metaphorically, or if it actually is a song about TV. I'll assume the latter. And any discussion of TV is sure to turn into a discussion of Sesame Street.

There may have been 57 channels in that cable-ready era, but at least Sesame Street was on. And it was still good. The show also introduced new closing credits with a cartoon of a dancing Statue of Liberty. Today, however, the show is unwatchable.

Among the few shows I regularly watched in 1992 was The Simpsons. I don't remember what year it was that there was a reality show about a high school where the toilet overflowed because someone clogged it, but that might have been a one-time special, not a regular series.

Bruce should have called his song "57 Channels (And Nothing On Except Sesame Street, The Simpsons, And A School Where The Toilet Overflowed)." A lot of TV in 1992 was truly miserable. I remember visiting family members, and they had on bad sitcoms that prompted me to provide some mock laughter. There was one that consisted mostly of just a teenage girl talking to herself.

I had to watch a lot of TV that year, because that was when it rained all summer. The one day it didn't rain was when all the local stations covered half the screen with their "severe thunderstorm watch" graphic. I also remember riding around in the car that day and we kept driving into a fart.

In my day, my grandparents told me what life was like without TV. Today's kids get to hear what life was like with bad TV. Their grandchildren will too, because it's worse now.

"Last Resort" by Papa Roach

2000 / #57

Rate Your Music score: 2.42 out of 5!

"The last resort! Toilet paper!"

This song is not truly lost anymore. I hadn't heard it on the radio in about 20 years, up until recently, when I actually heard a horribly edited version of it. That was just hours after I had most of this entry written, and I wasn't going to throw away this installment over a bad edit like that.

This entry isn't so much about the song itself but a funny story that comes to mind every time I think of the song. Let's go back to 6th grade, over 15 years before "Last Resort" charted. I was assigned to a gifted class that I hated. The teacher somehow decided he hated me too. I think that started when I had to miss the field trip to Cincinnati Milacron, even though that wasn't even my fault.

One day, we had to do a project that involved markers. I had pretty much had it by then. So I decided to just suddenly do something completely crazy. I wrote the name of each color on each marker. This was not necessary, as the outside of each marker was already the right color. The fact that it wasn't necessary was the whole point!

The teacher was so angry he just about pooped a hole in his pants. He made me go to the restroom and get some paper towels to wipe the ink off the markers.

But instead I got toilet paper. I told the teacher this was because the bathroom was out of paper towels, but I don't remember if this was true or not. Best all, I think I somehow grabbed a whole roll instead of just a few squares. I vaguely remember letting it unfurl as I entered the classroom.

After I said the restroom was out of paper towels, another student declared in a funny voice, "The last resort! Toilet paper!"

That was probably one of the reasons I wasn't assigned to the gifted class again for 7th grade. Good!

In 2016, Papa Roach gave us the track "Crooked Teeth", which they released to YouTube in advance of their album of the same name. "Crooked Teeth" has quite a story too. After all, crooked teeth are cool. When I heard "Crooked Teeth" on YouTube, I thought it was an instant #1 smash. But it never even made the Hot 100. Someone told me that it was because rock acts like Papa Roach didn't fit on the pop chart. This was hogwash, as Papa Roach had several Hot 100 hits before, and the Hot 100 was supposed to represent all popular genres.

After I listened to this tune, YouTube started recommending a bunch of cosmetic dentistry ads. YouTube must have assumed I hated my life. That was also around the time as that dumb TV commercial where people held their hands up over their mouths.

Bring back the soup wars and the Glad commercial that said, "Don Rickles is mad!"

"5.7.0.5." by City Boy

1978 / #27

Rate Your Music score: 3.36 out of 5!

I heard this song a little bit when I was growing up, but back then, I had no idea it was about a phone number.

City Boy was a band from Birmingham, England - the same city as ELO. In fact, some online commenters say they thought "5.7.0.5." was by ELO. Evidently, British phone numbers have more than 4 digits, so I don't know how this was about a phone number. Perhaps Birmingham had Cincinnati Bell, which is such a primitive company that maybe it still couldn't handle 7 digits. But the song has no reference to Cincinnati Bell's slogans: "We're sorry, all circuits are busy" and "Error 6." Nor does it mention Cincinnati Bell wiretapping Gerald Ford because they thought he was a communist.

The "5.7.0.5." saga gets weirder! The song was originally titled "Turn On To Jesus." All the music on the record was the same, but the lyrics were completely different. "Turn On To Jesus" was about a religious strip club in Kansas the band visited when they were on tour with Hall & Oates...

After "5.7.0.5.", City Boy's next single was "What A Night", which did not chart in the U.S., yet somehow I remember hearing it.

The City Boy legend continued even after the band broke up in 1982. Apparently, there was a different act called City Boy, which created confusion with the City Boy we know and love. In 1988, this other City Boy (unless it was the same City Boy) recorded a song titled "Michael Dukakis" as a tribute to the Democratic nominee for President of the United States at the time...

Needless to say, I never heard that tune on Cincinnati radio.

"I've Got A Lot To Learn About Love" by the Storm

1991 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.34 out of 5!

Here's a song that owed much of its popularity to a deceptive telemarketing campaign.

The Storm was formed partly from former members of Journey, and this record came right between two eras of lost hits. I consider lost hits from before 1991 and those from after 1991 to be distinct categories. One reason is that 1991 is when Billboard made its biggest change ever to its formula for computing the Hot 100. But then American Top 40 infamously stopped using that chart, so there was no longer an easy way to analyze hit singles. The Storm's single was on the Hot 100 right when this change occurred. Another reason I consider 1991 the frontier between two eras is that 1991 ushered in the grunge revolution. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana debuted on the Hot 100 the week after Billboard's new formula was rolled out. This debut showed how new musical styles and acts were taking hold and wiping away the chart stagnation of the previous few years. Unfortunately, local pop radio didn't get the message, and continued to become softer and softer over the next few years, but we were a little bit backwards around here.

Bands like the Storm and Alias seemed instantly antiquated when grunge and rap became more popular. But an online search of old Billboard issues reveals a Storm scandal! The February 1, 1992, edition says a Denver-based telemarketing company was calling up radio stations with gobs of requests to play the Storm's song. A station in Roanoke, Virginia, blew the lid off this campaign after a caller admitted she was making bogus calls to hype the record.

It gets weirder.

It turned out the telemarketing firm had also been hyping records by Winger - and that the company was based in an office owned by a real estate firm that belonged to Kip Winger's dad.

The FCC said these campaigns didn't qualify as telephone fraud under its rules, as no money was actually exchanged. But the FCC did say the calls might have violated payola laws, which were the bailiwick of the Justice Department.

Promoters had launched bogus request campaigns before. But, unlike those, the Storm and Winger campaigns used an outside firm and were very sophisticated. They managed to call stations when the music director was on the air, so they had some inside knowledge of the radio industry.

All of this boosted the Storm in the short term, but I don't know how much good it did them in the long run. I don't think I've heard their song on the radio since 1996, and it was already hardly ever heard anymore even then.

"It's A Miracle" by Culture Club

1984 / #13

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

"It's no surprise...There's something in my eyes..."

You may remember Boy George and Culture Club. Who can forget them?

I heard Culture Club on the radio before MTV came to town and before I even saw a picture of the band. It was around the time I kept something called "cultures", which were mostly small pieces of discarded food that I glued to a paper grocery bag. There was a macaroni elbow, bubble gum, and more! When I planned to save a booger as a "culture", my mom made me throw the whole thing away.

I used paper grocery bags for lots of projects. One day, I drew a picture of a big, yellow monster on a paper bag called a wolley - which was yellow spelled backwards. I think the wolley might have been anatomically correct, but I can't remember.

Culture Club's second album yielded many hits, including "It's A Miracle." I think this was before our biggest top 40 station adopted a stated policy of not playing Culture Club, but even before that statement, they seemed to shun some of the band's big hits. The Boy George blacklist helped fuel "It's A Miracle" quickly becoming a lost hit.

As with Paul McCartney's "Take It Away", someone alluded to "It's A Miracle" years after it had vanished from radio.

When I was a high school junior, there was a girl who was in my class for just one day. When she showed up that morning, she loudly argued with her parents and the teacher. She claimed she couldn't read because she forgot her glasses - even though her glasses were stowed safely in her desk. I never saw her again after that day, and a classmate told me she was ambushed by police when she got on the bus the next day. Her Sally Jessy Raphael specs and rotting food remained in her desk for the rest of the school year.

Anyway, on the day she did show up, we were at lunch when she declared, "There's something in my eye." This declaration resulted in another student immediately lapsing into a rousing chorus of "It's A Miracle."

I can't remember if this was before or after another student was apparently kicked out of school because he showed up drunk. One day, this student kept making a crude joke about Miracle Whip: "You whip it out and it's a miracle!" But nobody responded with a Culture Club song.

"Skin Trade" by Duran Duran

1987 / #39

Rate Your Music score: 3.38 out of 5!

"Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior?"

Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior? Would they???

This tune is the very definition of a lost hit. I can't even remember the last time I heard this one on the radio, except maybe in an American Top 40 rebroadcast. I seem to have a vague memory of it clanking out of an AM radio when I was 13, but when it was gone, it was gone.

Yet I've been informed that "Skin Trade" was recently played on a music system on a cruise ship. So whoever decides what music is played on cruise ships hasn't forgotten about the song. On the other hand, this was at sea, not on broadcast radio in the U.S., and cruise ship music systems have a very limited reach. You probably go to gatherings where folks have '80s cassette collections more than you go on international cruises.

Despite fading from radio quickly back in 1987, the song had some influence. It seems like my high school principal once angrily asked, "Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior?" But I don't remember if this was a real quote or just someone doing an impression of him, as it sounds like exactly the sort of thing he would say when very frustrated (as he often was). My battles with him had an even bigger influence - for many years thereafter. In broadcasting class in college, we had to record a radio drama, so we recorded lines from a Star Trek record. I was so fed up with being harassed by a star basketball player in that class that I just recorded my lines using a ridiculously exaggerated imitation of my old principal and didn't put any effort into it. Then I stopped coming to class because the school let this student get away with everything because he was a star athlete.

This student later went to prison after a big police chase in which he was found with gobs of meth and cash and a handgun.

Now that's some strange behavior we can't explain!

"Give It To You" by Jordan Knight

1999 / #10

Rate Your Music score: 3.29 out of 5!

This blog has praised Scandal and the Cars, but not every lost hit is worthy of such adulation. Any time our museum of lost hits profiles anything connected with New Kids On The Block, it's sure to be among the most idiotic exhibits ever.

The real surprise here is that this lost hit by this New Kids vocalist has such a high Rate Your Music score. How did it get a better score than the Dave Matthews Band or ELO?

Some radio stations that ostensibly have a format of current pop might have actually begun playing this record again, thanks to the "throwbacks" kick, but I'm not sure. Judging by these stations' poor ratings lately, I'm not sure anyone would notice if they do. So this tune still qualifies to be ridiculed on this blog.

By 1999, the New Kids seemed to be no longer a hazard to the radio listening public. Lots of things were wrong back then: the new economy recession, soaring crime, the rubber-stamping of the CBS/Viacom merger. Yet the New Kids were considered a loathsome remnant of the past.

But one day, we decided to drive to southwestern Indiana. We had the car radio on, and a DJ cheerfully introduced this brand new record from Jordan Knight. I couldn't contain my laughter at the song. It seemed to have no discernible form that music usually has. It sounded like just some instruments and vocals thrown together. I can't even figure out what time signature it was.

It appears that some folks who were fairly respected and well-known in the music biz worked on this record. I guess nobody in the music world can be perfect. Even Bob Dylan once got bad reviews because he made an album that included several tracks where it sounded like he was about to sneeze, so even the greats have their bad days.

Evidently, the New Kids got back together after Jordan's solo misadventure and somehow had a song that scraped into the top 40 in 2008. At least these guys from Massachusetts did less damage to their state than Charlie Baker did.

"Never Be The Same" by Christopher Cross

1980 / #15

Rate Your Music score: 3.3 out of 5!

When I was in 2nd grade, most of my schoolmates liked Devo, the Pretenders, or Pat Benatar.

But one of my favorite songs was by...

Are you ready for it?

Christopher Cross!

It was a different era from later when I listened to Men At Work or the Cars. But there was one reason and one reason only why I dipped my toes into the adult contemporary waters of Christopher Cross. It was because somebody likened this now-lost hit to the sound of bubble gum popping, and I thought that was hilarious.

One Sunday, we were in the parking lot at church, and this song was on the radio. A family member declared that the song sounded like someone popping bubble gum.

And the rest as they say is history.

Truth be told, it doesn't really even sound like real bubble gum popping. It sounds more like the sound effects they used in gum commercials - like the Hubba Bubba ads with the Gum Fighter, or the Bubble Yum ads where the guy was haranguing this Claire or Monica person.

Christopher Cross was such a sensation in the early 1980s that Texas lawmakers declared an official Christopher Cross Day...

But the big, bright Christopher Cross balloon that bobbed along America's skyline started losing its air with the rise of MTV. One website put it this way: Christopher wasn't actually ugly - but his high-pitched voice didn't match his appearance. When we got into the mid-'80s, the visual aspects of music media were often as important as the music itself. I think it became less important again later, when MTV hardly showed music videos anymore, but many people say that MTV's rise came at just the wrong time for the man from San Antonio.

"He's My Girl" by David Hallyday

1987 / #79

Rate Your Music score: 2.17 out of 5!

Some of our local radio stations in Cincinnati made weird choices as to what songs to play, but this was one rare occasion when they actually admitted it.

This high-energy rocker was the title track from the movie He's My Girl. Evidently, the film was about a musician who wins a trip to Los Angeles, but he must take a woman with him, so his male friend poses as a woman.

And Q-102 played the living shit out of the song.

This may seem strange in and of itself, because Q-102 had such a small playlist, and the record only peaked at #79 on the Hot 100, the most authoritative chart in the beeswax. But the station promoted the movie along with the song. The problem with that is that the film was not a great critical or commercial success, so the Q-102 peeps felt somewhat embarrassed that they had hyped it so much.

A few months later, some of the station's DJ's admitted on the air that they botched this one. They said the movie folks gave the station a bunch of He's My Girl swag and encouraged them to play the record. It was payola. After that humiliation, the station's on-air crew ridiculed the film and the song every chance they got.

That wasn't the last act of payola in the American radio industry. In the ensuing years, stations in other cities were caught accepting payoffs to play certain records. The word drugola was popularized, as some programmers were accepting drugs as a payoff. Hypocritically, some of the performers of these records liked to brag about being "drug-free."

It was probably impossible to have a big hit on the American pop chart in the 1980s without some support from corrupt promoters. Read the book Hit Men: Power Brokers And Fast Money Inside The Music Business by Fredric Dannen.

I put "He's My Girl" in a category of minor hits from around that time that were played on Q-102 like there was no tomorrow. This category also includes lost hits like "Never Thought" by Dan Hill and "Wild Horses" by Gino Vannelli. Lots of low-charting records were megahits at lots of top 40 stations, but Dan, Gino, and David were a weird combination, and now we know "He's My Girl" was selected because of payola.

"Get Over It" by the Eagles

1994 / #31

Rate Your Music score: 2.7 out of 5!

The Eagles came back with a vengeance in 1994 after a 14-year breakup. And did they ever!

This was the first song written by Don Henley and Glenn Frey after the band reunited. It was about the group's frustration with TV talk show guests who blamed their many problems on everyone else and thought the "big, bad world" owed them. Talk shows like that were big at the time.

Not all the subject matter on these shows was as sad as that. Some of it was just plain silly, like the segment about the guy who paid women to throw pies at him. I don't think these shows are as common as they used to be. Court shows started taking over, and I don't know what's on in these time slots now.

"Get Over It" was a sensation. A woman posted online that her pastor began including the song in his sermons. In the years after the song came out, I applied the song to a variety of situations - especially when people dwelled on stupid shit.

It was also invoked following one of my great literary projects. I had a book published through an indie publisher about how I was harassed by school officials and students who they deputized. When the volume appeared on Amazon, someone I went to school with gave it multiple bad reviews, even alluding to events that weren't mentioned in the book or were made up completely. That these reviews were posted proved that the whole premise of the book was true - namely, that schools harass anyone who crosses them. In reply to the bad reviews, somebody made a post under the name Don Henley consisting of the entire lyrics of "Get Over It."

The song was well-suited for that. Some idiot was talking shit over something that had happened 25 years earlier, and wouldn't get over it.

"Get Over It" is a song for all occasions!

"Go Insane" by Lindsey Buckingham

1984 / #23

Rate Your Music score: 3.52 out of 5!

In the mid-1980s, music-related media even had an influence on Dungeons & Dragons!

"Go Insane" is part of a group of lost hits from that time - such as "Are We Ourselves?" by the Fixx and "Along Comes A Woman" by Chicago - that tried to sound like Devo, even though Devo was past their peak by then. That time frame also represented a confluence of music videos, Atari BASIC, and Dungeons & Dragons.

We came up with a list of 100 curses to use in a Dungeons & Dragons session. They were numbered from 00 to 99 and were randomly determined by rolling the 10-sided dice twice. These curses could be cast on an adversary.

This was all fantasy, of course. It was only a game. Nothing real about it. You put the dice and books away, and it was gone.

The curses grew increasingly ridiculous as you went down the list. Curse #48 made a 10-foot-tall Sesame Street sign grow out of a person's head - because Channel 48 is one of our local PBS stations. Curse #57 made Heinz 57 sauce constantly shoot out the person's ears. My personal favorite curse was "arms control selves."

After seeing Lindsey Buckingham's "Go Insane" video, I came up with a curse for this list: The person's head would turn into a globe and spin endlessly - just as in the video. Best all, it would take place in public, for maximum humiliation. Not to be outdone, another curse was added in which the person's head would turn into a replica of the Liberty Bell.

"Go Insane" also had a link with my interest in computer programming. I remember a story on American Top 40 in which it was reported that the music for this track was stored on a floppy disk.

"Go Insane" may well be the mid-'80s manifest!

"Press" by Paul McCartney

1986 / #21

Rate Your Music score: 3.26 out of 5!

"Oklahoma was never like this..."

What the hell did Paul mean when he sang, "Oklahoma was never like this"?

This isn't a misheard lyric. Those are the actual words!

This ranks right up there with Billy Joel's "We had no Softsoap." But at least we knew what Billy was singing about, even if it was a ridiculous thing to worry about. I have no idea what Paul's reference to our 46th state is about. I remember radio DJ's making fun of it back in 1986.

Maybe he wasn't singing about the state of Oklahoma but rather a neighborhood in my area that was gentrified after a local newspaper spread a rumor that residents were eating horses. An online comment says the line is actually about the musical Oklahoma!, but that would make even less sense.

Then there's the video. The "Press" video was filmed on the London subway. Unlike TANK, the London subway actually went somewhere, so people actually used it. Paul picks his nose at 1:35. The woman at 2:48 acts as if somebody just let loose with a big, stinky fart.

It's a shame Paul didn't film this video on a TANK bus instead. So few people use TANK that he wouldn't have been bothered much. The few people using it would have been busy brawling among themselves, throwing cans out the window, or grabbing used wads of bubble gum off the floor.

"China" by the Red Rockers

1983 / #53

Rate Your Music score: 3.46 out of 5!

Before this lost hit by this New Orleans band came out, most information I had about China - and other countries - came from old cartoons and was full of misunderstandings. These days, we have to contend with American news outlets that have partnerships with Chinese state media or have capital projects in China, and the false ideas of today are different from those of old.

At the time of the Red Rockers' hit, what interest I had in China was fueled by the antiquated misconceptions I had. I was only 10. But most of this entry is not about a country. It's about yet another personal anecdote.

One evening back in 1983, Men At Work's Colin Hay appeared on MTV as a guest VJ. During that hour, Colin conducted a brief interview of members of the Red Rockers...

Now, the thing about this is that I considered Men At Work to be the greatest band in existence. In fact, I thought they were the greatest anything in existence! Nothing in the history of the universe had ever been better. So I waited all week to watch Colin's MTV appearance.

I started watching it, but after a few minutes, my mom decided that my behavior was too unruly to be permitted to continue. So I wasn't allowed watching the rest of it.

That story has a connection to China. A couple years later, Men At Work planned on giving concerts in China. But the Chinese government scuttled this plan, saying that another act from the Western world - namely Wham! - had destroyed the morals of the country's youth by performing there. It was as if the Chinese government had its own PMRC. Or maybe the PMRC had its own authoritarian government. Or maybe it was both.

"Dancing In The City" by Marshall Hain

1978 / #43

Rate Your Music score: 3.15 out of 5!

At the age of 12 or 13, around 1985-86, one of my goals was to see the inner workings of a radio station. Not the big stations where the studio was occasionally seen on the news if there was some story involving them. I'm talking about the smaller stations like WCLU.

I wanted to figure out why their records skipped so damn much - when their turntables worked at all. I was listening one day when one of their turntables actually broke. Until "turntable #2" was fixed, they had to pipe in music from a mobile studio they had. It was an amazing listen!

The closest I ever got to the station was just before signoff one evening when we drove back behind Latonia Plaza and saw their building resting forlornly in a field. Many years later, I actually saw photos of the inside of the studio posted online - complete with format clock and David Lee Roth poster.

But when I was 12, I could only imagine what the studio looked like. Phil Collins's "Don't Lose My Number" and Sade's "The Sweetest Taboo" filled the den as the signal creepily braved our gray sky, but I had to paint a mental image of the studio.

My image of WCLU fumbling with its equipment dredged up an incident I had in the back of my mind. It might not have even taken place. It might have just been the power of suggestion. I recalled that I had a record that my parents confiscated because I listened to it too much. According to this narrative, they hid it atop the kitchen cabinet. But by the time I was 12, there was no record there.

Years later, I recalled that the record may have been "Dancing In The City" by the English duo Marshall Hain. But - even if a record was indeed confiscated - I'm not even sure it was this. Again, this could be the power of suggestion. This song didn't get that much play locally - in fact, it got very little - so why would anyone in the family think to buy it?

Let me reiterate that it's possible that the seized record was something else - or that the incident didn't take place at all, and no record was ever confiscated. If so, I don't know why I recalled such an episode. I have clear memories of some real events that others deny, but this recollection is fuzzy.

It may be the power of suggestion manifest!

"Almost Over You" by Sheena Easton

1983 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 2.84 out of 5!

"When you come back around...After painting the town...You'll see I'm almost over you..."

I warned you that there was more adult contemporary balladry coming, and you didn't believe me, did you?

Sheena Easton wasn't always known for funky stuff like "Sugar Walls." Earlier in her career, she slogged along on MOR radio everywhere. That lasted into the era in which I wrote crude Sesame Street fanfic.

For months - maybe a year - I had an elaborate storyline which I titled "The Winds Of Sesame Street." This gave us ridiculous scenarios such as Big Bird's tail getting amputated and being found floating in outer space. In this storyline, Bert was afraid of Oscar the Grouch, so Ernie hung a portrait of Oscar above Bert's bed to scare him. This fanfic exercise even drew in characters from outside the Sesame Street universe. For example, He-Man appeared and was somehow chopped up into small pieces and put back together with Scotch tape. The Quaker Oats man also showed up at some point.

That was also around the time I made up song titles like "Groverkill" and "Do You Really Want To Bert Me." A line in "Puttin' On The Ritz" was parodied as, "Tryin' hard to look like Mr. Hooper."

When Sheena released "Almost Over You", you could see right where things were headed. You guessed it! I called it "Almost Grover You."

Wait! There's more! As an ode to Sesame Street's Number Painter character - the man with suspenders and a derby hat who appeared in a series of segments in which he painted numbers on things - I made a parody of the song's chorus: "When you come back around...After Number Painting the town...You'll see I'm almost Grover you."

All of this was back when Sesame Street was still good - long before its disastrous 51st season.

Not long after all of this, Sheena realized that the next few years would not be quite as friendly to the type of adult contemporary that had filled the airwaves in the early '80s. This was much to the PMRC's chagrin.

"Lies" by the Thompson Twins

1983 / #30

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

"Promises are snapped in two...And words are made to bend..."

The Thompson Twins. Discuss.

"Lies" made the top 40, but I didn't hear it that much. I remember hearing it in my parents' Horizon as we tooled down the street though. But it was the video that really grabbed my attention.

I saw the video one day, and I burst out laughing! The funniest part was the Thompsons' faces flying toward the viewer as they sang the chorus. To show you how much influence music-related media had at the time, the feet moving in the foreground also inspired a school photography project.

"Lies" has rarely been heard since. That's what this lost hits blog is all about. But the song's influence just won't go away! Only a few years ago, my zine was going strong with its unbeatable formula that relied heavily on funny stories about people breaking or ruining their eyeglasses - usually on purpose. One 2017 vignette was about how a woman on a parenting blog said her daughter kept breaking her own glasses at least once per week - usually by poking the lenses out. But the daughter came up with a new strategy of grabbing the glasses by each arm and tearing them off.

The title of this piece was "Glasses are snapped in two...And words are made to bend..."

And that's no lie!

"Me Myself And I" by De La Soul

1989 / #34

Rate Your Music score: 3.92 out of 5!

I'm giving this lost hit an entry to show how we focus on singles rather than albums.

You may know that - whenever possible - I buyed actual records instead of cassettes or CD's. Good records had better sound quality - and were cheaper than CD's. You could have your cake and eat it too! I continued with this until you could buy MP3's instead. I think the last new 45 that I purchased had to have been in the mid-1990s, maybe later.

Also - whether it was a record, tape, or CD - I usually buyed singles instead of albums. Sometimes the album version of a track was better than the single mix, but this was hit-or-miss. I usually purchased the single because singles represented excitement. Some of the best music had brevity. I didn't buy music so I could analyze it.

For some acts, such as Men At Work or "Weird Al" Yankovic, we'd buy the album. But for most other performers - even some of the greats - we got the single.

From its inception until 1998, the Hot 100 was a singles chart. There was a time in its early years when the chart included a few EP's too, but that didn't last past the 1960s. Only since 1998 has the chart included LP-only cuts. But apparently, even before 1998, a single would occasionally chart even if a commercial single was not available.

That's where "Me Myself And I" comes in.

When this record appeared on American Top 40, host Shadoe Stevens said it was the first item to reach the top 40 that was not available as a commercial single. I'm not sure under what rule it charted. Was there a promotional single for radio stations? There had been a few songs that famously did not chart because they were not released as commercial singles, but I know there were promo 45's for some.

In a later AT40 installment, Shadoe corrected this information, saying "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang from a decade earlier was actually the first item to reach the top 40 without being sold as a commercial single. But Wikipedia says there were 7-inch pressings of this hit that are "very rare." "Rapper's Delight" was also known for the brilliant line, "I can bust you out with my super sperm."

In the 1990s, many big hits were sold as a cassette single or CD single, but not as a single record. These were still eligible to appear on the Hot 100, because there was some type of single. But the era saw many big songs excluded from the Hot 100 because they didn't have a single at all.

Long live the single!

"Don't Let Go" by Wang Chung

1984 / #38

Rate Your Music score: 3.46 out of 5!

I profiled Wang Chung once before for their lost hit "Hypnotize Me." But it really is amazing how much their minor hit "Don't Let Go" - their first chart hit ever - essentially ruled the roost for about a year in the mid-1980s, even after it faded from radio and MTV.

I'm not even sure why or how. It just did. It's as if that record just takes that time frame and smashes it right in your face. I actually remember discussing this song with someone, maybe some neighborhood pals who stopped by. I don't even recall why.

Many events of the era were somehow linked to the musical culture of the day, and "Don't Let Go" appeared to be at the heart of it all. This song was the standard by which everything else was judged. It represented an environment that sort of bobbed along for a while, died down, and resurfaced a couple more times in the ensuing decades.

In more recent years, current popular music hasn't had nearly as much influence on our society, while other media have. I had a blast in the 2010s, as I went to rallies and participated in community projects (which were quickly swatted down in the 2020s). But if you look at a Hot 100 chart from the 2010s, you'll see very little music that you ever remember hearing. Even #1 hits aren't remembered. Yet a #38 hit from 1984 is still fondly recalled even after it's been off the airwaves for 41 years.

Another amusing note about Wang Chung: "Don't Let Go" came from their album Points On The Curve, a disc that prompted a hilarious review by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inquirer charged that Wang Chung were "mean-spirited fops." I burst out laughing when I found this, because Wang Chung always seemed like the ultimate nice guys, and it's hard to imagine them as "mean-spirited."

"Highwire" by the Rolling Stones

1991 / #57

Rate Your Music score: 3.3 out of 5!

This song sounds like a big hit, and maybe it would have been one if not for the radio industry's political intolerance.

"Highwire" came out around the end of the disastrous 1991 Gulf War. The Stones' Keith Richards said the song was "about how you build up some shaky dictator" just to "slam them down." The song criticized the politics behind the start of the war.

The tune's antiwar stance caused it to be banned by radio stations in Salt Lake City and St. Louis. This was while radio played songs that they linked to favorable views of the war. A station in Albany, New York, even collected congratulatory letters to send to George H.W. Bush for how he carried out the conflict.

I heard the song precisely once on Cincinnati radio - as we were in the car in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant - and it's a miracle our stations played it even that much, considering how stodgy and conservative our top-rated stations already were. You can bet your bottom dollar that after the song aired once on local radio, the suits slapped it down lickety-split. But the record apparently saw more play in smaller cities, so it actually made the Gavin Report's top 40.

The ban of this record was like having the 2020s in the 1990s!

"Right Here And Now" by Bill Medley

1982 / #58

Rate Your Music score: 2.62 out of 5!

I didn't set out to do a blog full of adult contemporary ballads, but when a performer strongly resembles your high school principal, you just can't help it.

Bill Medley is best known as a member of the Righteous Brothers and for his chart-topping duet with Jennifer Warnes "(I've Had) The Time Of My Life." I heard "Right Here And Now" on the radio quite a bit back in 1982, but it was 5 years later when Bill and Jennifer's duet was a hit that Bill's resemblance to my principal was first noted.

I started high school right when "The Time Of My Life" came out. What great timing! One day, we were watching TV at home, and that video came on. A family member noted that Bill looked quite a bit like the headmaster of my school. All he needed was a pair of tinted eyeglasses.

Incidentally, my principal was a titanically incompetent clown, and was one of the worst people I've ever had the misfortune of meeting. I was forced to put up with him for almost 3 years.

Because Bill Medley looked like my principal, this blog wouldn't be complete without him. But I damn sure wasn't going to include "The Time Of My Life", because after all, this blog is for lost hits. If you don't understand why "The Time Of My Life" doesn't belong on a lost hits blog, ask an adult.

"It Must Be Love" by Madness

1983 / #33

Rate Your Music score: 3.62 out of 5!

Madness madness was going strong in 1983! You may know this London band for their smash hit "Our House", but they had this chart entry too.

I heard "It Must Be Love" a little bit on the radio, but I only saw the video once on MTV, and missed most of it. I think I was busy letting the dog outside or sweeping potato chip crumbs off the kitchen floor. So I had little memory of what appeared in the video.

Perhaps 25 years later, I heard a rumor that there was a video on MTV around that time that featured Big Bird falling from the sky and landing on a band. If I had seen Big Bird in a music video in late 1983, I surely would have remembered. That was at the height of my stage of writing tasteless Sesame Street fanfic and threatening to start watching Sesame Street again if my cartoons kept getting preempted.

It turned out the video in question was this one. The clip clearly shows Madness vocalist Graham "Suggs" McPherson catching Big Bird as he falls into his arms. It wasn't one of the Big Birds actually used on Sesame Street, but it was clearly intended to be Big Bird.

A YouTube commenter said of the video, "I noticed four dangerous stunts: running in front of a moving car, playing an electric guitar under water, a back flip into a pool, and Big Bird jumping into the man's arms."

This might not be the only mid-'80s lost hit that had a video with a Big Bird connection, so keep your beak peeled!

"High On Emotion" by Chris de Burgh

1984 / #44

Rate Your Music score: 3.06 out of 5!

I've always thought of Chris de Burgh as being one of these guys like Phil Collins who has this everyman image that people think is strangely funny.

The top 40 stations in Cincinnati seemed to be unusually fast on adding anything Chris put out. I remember listening to American Top 40 and being surprised to hear that "Don't Pay The Ferryman" - now a lost hit itself - was only in the 30s and still climbing the chart. Judging by radio play back then, I would have thought it was a chart-topping smash that had run its course by then.

"High On Emotion" made it to our biggest top 40 station pretty quickly even though this same station was slow at adding most other new music. The video got a lot of play too, and it was noted that members of Chris's band bore strong resemblances to other famous people - David Bowie and Paul McCartney among them.

And Chris looked like Dr. Shrinker, the title character of one of the 1970s Saturday morning shows created by Sid and Marty Krofft.

This isn't the only such link between popular music and a Krofft show, as Carly Rae Jepsen has been said to strongly resemble Dyna Girl.

And how come you never see people wearing those shirts that say "Bah!" anymore?

"Why Me?" by Planet P Project

1983 / #64

Rate Your Music score: 3.51 out of 5!

This is a song that everyone insists does not exist - even after having the evidence shoved right in their face.

Planet P Project was like a one-man band. It was actually a pseudonym of Tony Carey - who has had several lost hits under his real name. It appears as if some other musicians did work with Tony, but Wikipedia suggests the name Planet P Project refers to Tony himself.

Radio stations in Cincinnati aren't exactly known for making the best choices as to what music to play, but this is one they got right. This record only got to #64, but both top 40 stations in Cincinnati at the time regularly played it, and it was apparently big on our album rock stations too. This was a better choice than some of the others that have been made, despite the record's low chart peak.

But when it was gone, it was gone.

I mentioned this song sometime later, and everyone insisted I made it up. It was like they couldn't remember anything that happened more than a few months earlier. For years, I would mention this song, and they would still deny it ever existed.

Finally, maybe around 1992, I found a 45 of it. I played it for them, and they still insisted it wasn't real!

What did they think it was? Did they think I just put one of our record-shaped beverage coasters on the turntable and played instruments and sang along with it?

It's real! Cope!

At least the cast of Sesame Street knew Mr. Snuffleupagus was real when they finally saw him. But in this crazy world we call real life, sometimes solid proof isn't enough.

I didn't post the video above. That's from someone who had a much bigger 45 collection than I have. The single version posted above is the mix that everyone was familiar with - before they began denying it existed. The song had a video too, but it used a vastly different mix...

Although the single version was better known in 1983, I need to handle my 45 with care, because that mix is so rare today. The rarity of that version is also one of the reasons I keep records instead of relying on YouTube.

Just a few years ago, everyone insisted Toby Beau wasn't real, and that I made them up. But we can count on YouTube to embarrass musical naysayers!

"Get Used To It" by Roger Voudouris

1979 / #21

Rate Your Music score: 3.14 out of 5!

If you hadn't seen the year listed above, what year would you guess this lost hit was from? 1987?

This record sounds quaint today, but it was considered way ahead of its time in 1979. It was popular during the summer I turned 6, and back then, I thought the beginning of this song was like nothing I'd ever heard before.

The only context I ever remember hearing this song though was through an external speaker we set up on the back porch. We had a Magnavox console stereo with an AM/FM receiver from circa 1972 in the living room. For years, I think it was the only radio we had with FM, except for a transistor radio that later got broken when the dog knocked it off the kitchen table. Somehow, we ran a wire from the stereo all the way to the back porch.

I don't even remember where the wire went. We might have run it up through the living room closet and through an "attic" that supposedly existed, but which I never saw.

This was also in the days when radio DJ's used to tell listeners, "Don't touch that radio!" How was a DJ supposed to know if I touched the radio? I once tested this admonition by fiddling with the bass, treble, and balance knobs on the stereo. The DJ didn't come to my house and beat me up.

In the 1980s, we moved the external speaker into the den - yet hardly ever used it anymore. The only time I remember the speaker being on in the den was one day when I got into a famous sibling squabble. My mom tried to make us behave by putting the stereo on some weird station and blasting it in the den. It's like how stores blare the same music nonstop to chase away loiterers (while not caring what nearby residents think), or when Sesame Street songs were played for days at a time to torture Guantanamo Bay inmates.

Playing the same music over and over as a torture technique is actually what radio stations today do. In contrast to this, this lost hits blog commemorates music we never get to hear anymore.

"Forever In Blue Jeans" by Neil Diamond

1979 / #20

Rate Your Music score: 2.97 out of 5!

"Money talks...But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk..."

Time to grow those sideburns!

For a song you never hear anymore, this lost hit sure is memorable. The opening lines have been repeated fondly many times over the past 46 years. It's not because of the image these lyrics bring to mind when taken literally, but because these words have a very important meaning.

And what is this song's meaning? I once read an article that said it was about how you don't need fame, money, and glitz to get satisfaction in life. The piece said it was a message against wastefulness, greed, and flaunting wealth. It sounds like a good anthem against capitalist excess. You don't need gold-plated tennis balls or marble toilets. You can be happy just living in harmony with your surroundings.

Sure, our rulers have made it harder to do - even as everyone gets poorer and poorer - but it brings the satisfaction that we have a right to expect from life.

People who have seen Neil Diamond in concert say this song brings the best audience reaction out of all of his many tunes.

Of course, no song has a constitutional right to be free from parody. Apparently, a local radio station made a parody of this record titled "Forever In Beer Cans." I don't remember if it was anything like "Pee-Pee Song." When I was about 8, I compiled a personal ranking of favorite songs I heard on the radio, and one of them was "Pee-Pee Song." I didn't find the list again until years later. I think "Pee-Pee Song" was a parody of "No No Song." If I remember correctly, this parody went, "No no no no, I don't pee-pee no more...I'm tired of it landing on the floor."

We'd do OK forever in beer cans.

"Money Changes Everything" by Cyndi Lauper

1984 / #27

Rate Your Music score: 3.57 out of 5!

"It's all in the past now...Money changes everything..."

One of the most misused statements in the entire English language is, "It's all in the past now."

If you rightly complain about some mistreatment you got only a day ago, someone will inevitably shrug it off, saying, "It's all in the past now." It's this dismissive attitude that ensures a complete lack of accountability for atrocities of all sorts. These days, those who maliciously do wrong not only evade punishment but are actually elevated to even more powerful positions.

Meanwhile, my adversaries went on and on about the same shit for 35 years. Considering their record, I don't think they're done yet. They've just been distracted by new powers they've been given over the past few years. This feud of theirs lasted longer than the Hatfields and McCoys. Get over it! (Relax, we'll get to that one.)

The lost hits profiled on this blog seem to be all in the past now, but most actually do turn up in some venue once in a great while - just not in regular rotation on traditional radio. Yet it's not quite like it was 30 years ago when you couldn't hear lost hits anymore unless by some chance you had the record. I'm pretty sure "Money Changes Everything" turned up on Sirius XM's '80s channel a few years ago, and that I have a video from a road trip in which it happened to be playing in the background in the car. But this record never appears anymore on regular radio that you don't have to pay for. Money changes everything!

"When The Lights Go Out" by Naked Eyes

1983 / #37

Rate Your Music score: 3.66 out of 5!

Shh! Naked!

This lost hit was a memorable one, but I'm giving it an entry for one reason and one reason only. It's because the singer in this band tried to sound like Paul McCartney!

In fact, the first time I heard this song, I actually thought it was Paul. I was 10, and I had just gotten a new bedroom, which was tiny. I had the clock radio on - back when clock radios were actually easy to use. This song came on.

And I thought it was Paul McCartney!

That was back in the days when Paul kept doing ridiculous duets with Michael Jackson. After all, lots of performers had goofy duets back then. But I was surprised there'd be a new Paul McCartney single coming out so soon after "Say Say Say." I was even more surprised to discover it wasn't Paul, but Naked Eyes.

Naked Eyes were best known for their version of "Always Something There To Remind Me", a well-known song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. I recalled that a few months earlier, Marilyn McCoo performed that song on Solid Gold. I burst out laughing because of the spacey keyboard in the chorus. Fast-forward to 19:30...

Also, around 1983-84, there was a lot of fine music I didn't appreciate then. Much of this was because of some personal experiences I had during the preceding couple years that just stuck in my craw. I also fretted that Men At Work were being unfairly prevented from charting higher. But, along with 1978-79, that era actually had some of the best music ever.

I started appreciating music more in 1984, thinking much of it was strangely funny or some sort of spectacle. For a long time, I couldn't figure out why, but someone told me it must have been because there were so many goofy videos on MTV then. Much of popular culture was built around music videos, and it emerged in weird ways.

It just goes to show the influence of mass media!