"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!