Time for what may well be the most uproariously stupid line ever to appear in a hit song.
Ready for it? Here it is...
"We met a lot of people and girls..."
That ranks up there with the chart-topper "Disco Lady" by Johnnie Taylor, which included the line, "You ought to be on TV or Soul Train."
And man, did this New Kids song annoy the living hell out of everyone! I'm embarrassed to even include the video above.
One of the categories that Rate Your Music lists this single under is "baroque pop", but I really wasn't even sure what that meant. Wikipedia says "In My Life" by the Beatles inspired that entire genre, but "Tonight" doesn't sound anything like that track. "Tonight" sounds more like a poor imitation of "What A Night" by City Boy, with a few of those weird, screaming strums from "The Night Chicago Died" by Paper Lace. There's a few wisps of "I'll Play For You" by Seals & Crofts mixed in there as well.
In other words, "Tonight" just sounds cobbled together from other songs. That was my impression even when I first heard this song - which wasn't under the best of circumstances, incidentally.
"If I could make it to the bathroom...If I could make it to the coast..."
When you watch any of this band's early 1980s videos, one of the main things you'll notice is that anti-glare coating for eyeglasses wasn't common yet back then. When I saw their "You Can Do Magic" clip, I was afraid of being blinded by all that glare.
It appears that for their video for "The Border", the band tried using the lack of anti-reflective coating for artistic effect but gave up on it quickly. A world without anti-glare glasses was better than today, because back then you didn't have to worry about the coating getting ruined by bubble gum, but I digress.
You all know that we love poking lighthearted fun at many of the songs and performers profiled on this blog. And - because this song was popular when I was 10 - it was a sure thing that I'd make up new lyrics for the chorus: "If I could make it to the bathroom...If I could make it to the coast..." But I didn't write additional lyrics about what I'd do when I got to the bathroom or the coast.
This record became a lost hit pretty much immediately when it fell out of the top 40. Maybe it sounded too familiar, as it does bear a strong resemblance to "Ride Like The Wind" by Christopher Cross. It was so lost that when I heard it once on the radio about 3 years later, my jaw hit the floor.
But it is my bathroom-related parody that guaranteed this track a spot on this blog. Toilet humor was a staple in the early '80s. TV commercials were also fair game for this type of comedy. For example, for the Stetson cologne commercial where the horses were running around in the guy's hat, I claimed they were actually swimming in his toilet - which would make a mess when he put it on his head. This was accompanied by the inevitable slogan "Stetson shits." For the Wrangler jeans commersh where the big, tough cowboy walks into the saloon, I always said he was wetting his pants. He's hard to beat when he takes his seat!
I'm sure all the lost hits profiled on this blog so far got some radio play, and there's very few that I only heard on venues outside of regular radio. But this is one whose video was just as well-known as the song.
Slade's lead singer Noddy Holder provided the secret sauce that made this vid so memorable. It's not just because he looked like the Gum Fighter with long hair. I'm talking about the part that begins at about 2:15 where Noddy makes faces at the camera.
My high school biology teacher made faces sort of like that every time he became angry or frustrated (i.e., often). But the event that reminded me of this video took place a few months ago. There's a public swimming pool in Cincinnati that I use on some of the 3 days each year that we have warm, dry weather. Occasionally, someone poops in it and they have to close it for a while. Anyway, back in July, I visited this pool. There was some woman in the pool who made faces like Noddy Holder did for an hour nonstop.
I concluded that the woman most likely had loose dentures.
Also, I think Slade's lost hit was big during our family trip to Chillicothe. My biggest memory of that trip is visiting a convenience store along a lake where some woman got mad at her kids because they wanted to buy bubble gum. Gum was fine, just as long as it wasn't specifically labeled as bubble gum.
In the 2000s, we had bands like Nickelback and Creed that had maybe one or two big hits, but everyone started ridiculing the hell out of them the moment those tracks fell off the chart.
Well, a decade earlier, we had the Rembrandts.
Their highest-charting single is the lost hit we're featuring today. It wasn't such a bad song, and some folks today actually have some level of respect for it. But as soon as it dropped off the chart, the Rembrandts suffered years and years of the Nickelback treatment.
Not long after this hit charted, I was listening to the radio when a listener called in with a request for the Rembrandts. The DJ laughed his ass off!
There was a period a few years later when it looked like the Rembrandts might regain the luster they once had, but everyone confused them with the BoDeans. That's because the Rembrandts and the BoDeans were responsible for the theme songs to Friends and Party Of Five, respectively, which were essentially the same song - which in turn was practically the same song as "Good Girls Don't" by the Knack, only without the naughty lyrics.
I never intentionally watched either of those TV shows - my preferences at the time were The Simpsons and Seinfeld - so I heard the Rembrandts' and the BoDeans' TV music on the radio much more than I ever heard it on TV. And did I ever! It seems like that's all they ever played! Plus "The Grease Megamix", which Q-102 acted like it made itself. This was a particularly rough time in life for a number of reasons, including Newt Gingrich's fascism and my conflicts with NKU, and there was one time I stayed up all night listening to the radio because I couldn't sleep. I remember sitting on the floor in my old apartment and hearing the Rembrandts' Friends theme.
After a few years of that, it was back to Rembrandts ridicule.
Luckily for them, people seem to have moved past that and let bygones be bygones. The Bee Gees scored a top 10 hit years after everyone thought they were out of business for good, so there may be hope yet for the Rembrandts.
This lost hit by the mullet-headed man from Flatwoods, Kentucky, included one of the most unintentionally hilarious lyrics of the era...
"I got no invitation...I guess the mailman didn't bring it to me..."
Nope. You got no invitation because you weren't invited. It's not like the mailman wiped his ass with the invitation and threw it in the woods with all the beer that some teenagers hid there.
Billy's conspiracy theory about the missing invitation provided an important contribution to life. The song was popular around the time I started subscribing to M Street Journal - a great weekly newsletter full of radio news such as format changes and other tidbits. If M Street Journal wasn't in my mailbox each Monday, I would harangue the Highland Heights post office until it was. And, each time M Street Journal didn't arrive on time, I would go around singing, "I got no M Street Journal...I guess the mailman didn't bring it to me."
That was also around the time some people with Florida plates kept parking in front of our mailbox. Every time they did this, the mail carrier would skip us. If this car didn't park there, customers of a nearby business often did. There shouldn't have even been a business there, as that block was only zoned for residential. Nothing was ever done about people parking in front of our mailbox. Imagine that, a problem didn't get solved.
People occasionally parked in front of our driveway. I once saw an episode of Cops in which someone dealt with this problem creatively: They plowed their car into the offending vehicle and knocked it out of the way.
Even after I got my own apartment, the late deliveries continued. At least once, someone at the Postal Service inexplicably changed the zip code on the envelope, so the delivery of my M Street Journal was delayed. But I don't think I completely missed an issue while I subscribed - although there was plenty of other mail I never received.
The well-known standard "Any Day Now", which was recorded by notables such as Chuck Jackson, Elvis Presley, and Ronnie Milsap, had a similar M Street connection. Each year, the M Street folks published the legendary M Street Radio Directory, which summarized all of their data. M Street often had to delay publishing it because deregulation kept causing so much information to change. The changes in the radio industry were rarely good, of course, but at least M Street kept us notified of the horrifying situation. I remember at least one year when the book had to be delayed so much that by the time it was published, it was time for the next one.
Any time a new edition of this directory was released, and it was about to be shipped, I kept singing, "Any day now...We will have an M Street!"
It was hard to top the version with the pink cover though. I think that was the one that the post office delayed delivering until the same day I was assaulted up the street after work and the police wouldn't do anything about it.
PowerSource was a church group from Texas. This song dealt with child abuse, and it was recorded in 1985 with lead vocals by 6-year-old Sharon Batts. The record finally became popular when influential radio stations in New York and Tampa began playing it.
But Rate Your Music reviewers have taken a rather dim view of this record. One said, "Never before have I heard a song so contrived, so emotionally manipulative, so downright disgusting and harrowing in its shameless exploitation of such a serious issue. This is basically every bad 'message song' of the 1980s rolled into one."
Other websites complain that the '80s had a "vigilante" attitude toward child abusers. But that's a lot better than what we see now. These days, TV networks and political parties go out of their way to elevate celebrities who have endorsed child abuse. For example, CBS gave Lisa Whelchel her own spot on Survivor: Philippines. The Democratic National Convention invited has-been singer Pink to perform, even after she said, "I think parents need to beat the crap out of their kids." That's in addition to NBC's Today endorsing child abuse outright.
Incidentally, I learned in broadcasting class in college that affiliated TV stations are responsible for what they air, even if it comes from a network. I think the FCC might want to take a look when the licenses for some of our local affiliates come up for renewal.
Even a serious song like "Dear Mr. Jesus" isn't safe from parody. Back when the song was a hit, a local radio station (I don't even remember which one) made a parody called "Dear Mister Rogers." That was also around the time Mister Rogers visited a children's show in the Soviet Union.
You'd think a top 10 hit wouldn't be lost, but we live in a strange world.
This song had a "Take It Away" moment of sorts. This took place one day just before I started a new semester of college or had a schedule change when I worked at the public library. I was getting ready for my new daily schedule, and my mom asked, "What about your lunch?"
The predictable happened. I burst into an adaptation of this now-lost TLC hit: "What about your lunch..."
My mom must have thought I would have to rush all the way home at noon each day to eat lunch, or that lunch had to be precisely at noon. But NKU actually had 2 cafeterias in the University Center building, and the public library had an employee lounge plus a gas station convenience store right next door.
Admittedly, I didn't always like using these venues, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Our lounge at the library always had spilled food and other trash laying around. And I kept getting in fights in the food courts at NKU - especially in the Helmethead era. For those who don't remember, Helmethead was a young man who always hung around in the cafeteria on the lower floor. I hesitate to say he was a student, because I never saw him going to or from a class. I only ever remember seeing him in the cafeteria. He was never eating or working on schoolwork. This lazy loafer was always just gambling with his friends. But I must have known him from before, because he started a fight with me every time I saw him. After he hounded me out of that food court for good, I started using the other one, and I got chased out of it too.
The lower food court is also where I got the slice of pizza that was spoiled, which caused me to discard it in the outgoing mail slot at the post office. I wonder who got that pizza in the mail. I think that court was also the source of the taco sauce that got smeared on the record player.
Five years ago, NKU whined to holy high hell about students "clustering", yet they wouldn't do a damn thing about Helmethead. What a complete, unmitigated, unchecked disaster.
This is one of these songs that always comes up in discussions about lost hits. But everyone always thinks it was the Thompson Twins.
I heard this song some back in my day. Around the time it was popular, we went on a family vacation to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in which people kept farting. As we were visiting one of the Smithsonian museums, someone cracked a silent-but-deadly, and my mom declared, "It smells like somebody has a load in their pants!" This was also the trip where we had a reservation at a Holiday Inn, but when we got there, we found that it had been converted into an Imperial 400 Motor Inn. I remember someone listening to "The Love Parade" on the jukebox at a Pizza Hut in northern Virginia. They also played "Sex As A Weapon" by Pat Benatar, now also a lost hit.
When 8th grade started, I wrote about this trip for my "what I did over the summer" report that I had to read in front of the class. I think I mentioned all the flatulence and how someone put a whole roll of toilet paper in the toilet at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I actually remember more about the Pizza Hut than you might expect, considering it was 39 years ago. I have surprisingly clear memories of the meals on that trip, for some reason. Most restaurant visits saw frustrated parents yelling at unruly children. Also, when we visited relatives near Philadelphia, my aunt said there was a burger place nearby called Charburger that had recently burned down: "So Charburger is now charred."
I always thought the first few notes of "The Love Parade" sounded strikingly similar to the beginning of some TV commercial at the time for an over-the-counter acne treatment. I don't think it was the Oxy ad where the guy with the deep voice said, "Zit, this is it!" I always called that guy the Oxy Moron, because when I first heard the word oxymoron, I thought of those ads.
This also brings to mind how nobody used those round acne pads because they smelled so bad. The smell would give you a headache for the rest of the day, so it was considered better to just live with the consequences of going without. I grew up in that era, and there were lots of products for my age group that just seemed idiotic beyond belief. It's nothing like now, of course, but it was pretty bad.
This duo from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, made up of Lenny LeBlanc and the late Pete Carr gave us this lost hit. Like an England Dan & John Ford Coley tune we profiled a while back, this is yet another slice of 1977 adult contemporary with misheard lyrics with a pop culture connection.
Now, the Ewoks were not introduced to the Star Wars universe until 1983, which means the line in this song didn't catch my attention until the song was a few years old. I remember hearing the song long before then though. I think I first noticed the Ewok-related lyrics when we were in line at the pharmacy counter at Thriftway (a now-defunct local supermarket chain) and it was playing on the store's music system. But that could just be...the power of suggestion!
That's not the end of the "Falling" saga!
After this record was a hit, Lenny found religion. I guess there's really nothing wrong with that. But what he said afterward was rather interesting. In an interview with a religious TV show, Lenny talked about how he used to do all these demonic, decadent things like record "Falling." He made it sound like "Falling" was an anthem about biting heads off schoolchildren instead of a tender love ballad that was on par with big hits by Bread or Randy VanWarmer.
"Falling" may be a little too much for these days, with Big Tech censorship and social distancing being the law of the land, but 1977 was more freewheeling times. LeBlanc & Carr charted during the same era as Kiss and Alice Cooper. Put on the 1977 glasses and imagine how tame LeBlanc & Carr sounded compared to some of the other performers of the day.
