"Talk To Me" by Fiona

1985 / #64

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

Let's talk about MTV Top 20 Video Countdown. A weird thing, that countdown. MTV used to compile its own weekly ranking of its top 20 hottest music videos - or "video songs", as it called them. This program debuted in early 1984 and apparently ran all the way until 1998 - which seemed like a completely different world from when the show first aired. The show started in the days of 45 RPM singles and the Atari 800, and ended in the era of MP3's and the World Wide Web.

I always watched this countdown in the mid-'80s, when it was hosted by Mark Goodman. But at some point, I gave up on it, because I was hardly ever allowed to watch it anymore. That may have been for the better, because then I had more time to spend on dialup bulletin boards and road map collecting instead.

In our last entry, I made a reference to a 1985 installment of this show in which Mark wore a shirt that was so ridiculous that I couldn't contain my laughter. I said it had been posted on YouTube but later taken down. Well, guess what? It's back...

And trust me, nobody except Mark Goodman wore anything that hideous in 1985. I was around in 1985. I remember what people wore. Nobody wore anything like that. This is like when someone made a webpage about how they found a 1970s clothes catalog and thought that guys back then wore oversized orange shirts that looked like a bath towel.

I'm not going to wade through that entire episode. Not even the interview where Molly Ringwald appears to be chewing bubble gum. Since we're on the topic of Molly Ringwald, I should also mention that one of my 8th grade teachers later railed against The Breakfast Club much as she crusaded against the Benjamin Orr hit song "Stay The Night."

In that episode of MTV's countdown, Fiona's lost hit appeared at #18. I remember this tune clanking out of the boom box in the den, but I think it got more exposure on MTV. Fiona once told Dick Clark that her parents hated radio so much that they didn't let her listen to it. That's what a lot of adults thought about MTV in the mid-'80s, even though they thought radio stations that played the same music were just fine.

My folks must have really hated MTV's top 20 countdown. They tolerated it at first, but eventually, they went to great lengths to stop me from watching it. When I declared I would watch it, the resulting conversation was like the Simpsons episode where Marge tries to get cartoons banned and Bart keeps saying he's gonna relax and go watch some toonies.

"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.