"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.