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.
No comments:
Post a Comment