"Do Me Baby" by Meli'sa Morgan

1986 / #46

Rate Your Music score: 3.1 out of 5!

Let's talk about Sly Fox.

After I was expelled from a public school in 7th grade, I attended a Catholic school that spring. It was a disaster from day one.

My literature teacher was an elderly, diminutive nun who resembled Emma Tisdale, the motorcycle-riding mail carrier on The Dukes Of Hazzard. I think she retired from teaching at the end of the school year.

One day, we had a class discussion on popular music. Students were supposed to name titles of songs that were big at the time. Inevitably, someone mentioned Sly Fox's big hit "Let's Go All The Way." Even more inevitably, snickers reverberated throughout the classroom when this title was uttered.

According to all sources, there was nothing suggestive about that song. Wikipedia says the title is actually "a message of encouragement." Nothing racy about it.

When the old nun heard everyone laughing, she frowned. She hoped that the title really wasn't anything naughty. Because if it was, "that's outright pornography!"

Think how she would have reacted to another song that was popular right at the same time - which is the lost hit we're profiling today, "Do Me Baby" by Meli'sa Morgan. The title and lyrics were obviously more risqué than Sly Fox's hit. I can just see Simon Leis raiding radio stations that played this song, or Citizens for Community Values following people around in record stores and writing down their license plate number if they purchased the record.

It must have gone over the censors' heads, because I don't remember anyone picketing the advertisers of stations that played the record. But some of these advertisers would have been hard to picket, as they weren't all local businesses. This was around the time the Army advertised heavily on local stations with their "Be all that you can be" campaign. At the time, the Army had a commercial that ended with a sergeant talking to a young soldier who was going off to college after his tour of duty...

"Know what I want you to do?"

"What's that, sergeant?"

"Graduate!"

I always made fun of this ad by replacing that last line with "Kill yourself!"

Prince is credited as the writer of "Do Me Baby." When Prince became really popular, I was warned that most of his songs were "dirty." But Prince's bassist André Cymone has claimed to be the song's actual writer.

I don't remember if "Rock Me Amadeus" or "Beat's So Lonely" prompted any snickering during that classroom exercise.

"Dreamtime" by Daryl Hall

1986 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 3.18 out of 5!

"You're living in dreamtime, baby...You wanna run away...It's time to wake up..."

I had Kermit the Frog for my 8th grade science teacher.

Seriously, my 8th grade science teacher looked just like Jim Henson did circa 1967. And his voice sounded exactly like Kermit the Frog!

And he had a temper! He was a good teacher, but man, did he have a temper! I apparently missed one of his best tantrums though, which reportedly took place when I was out of the room to deliver a note to the office. On the other hand, people shouldn't have been trying to get a rise out of him either.

His classroom was right next to the supply room where I poured nickel sulfide in the drain.

Anyway, this teacher once reportedly delivered an angry lecture in which he borrowed a line from this big solo hit by Daryl Hall. According to this legend, a student was dozing off in class, so the instructor became angry and declared, "You're living in dreamtime! It's time to wake up!"

I don't know if that actually was a real quote from my science teacher, or if it was just someone doing an impression of him. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing he would have said though. This is like how a line from a Duran Duran song was attributed to my high school principal.

"Dreamtime" became a lost hit pretty much right when it fell of the chart. I was amazed by the fact that you never heard it anymore. For peaking way up at #5, it sure did disappear from radio quickly. As local radio was entering its own doldrums around the time this tune became lost, my interest in lost hits heightened, and my frustration grew at the narrowing of playlists. I think this is when the 15-second mind became the norm.

Many years later, something funny appeared on YouTube. A high school class somewhere posted a video they made for a school project. The video was a humorous exposé about kids getting in trouble for chewing gum at school. I'm pretty sure the school was in the United States, but the closing music of the video was "Dreamtime" that someone had recorded in a different language. I couldn't understand the words, but the song was very clearly "Dreamtime."

It's time to wake up!

"Need A Little Taste Of Love" by the Doobie Brothers

1989 / #45

Rate Your Music score: 3 out of 5!

"Need a little taaaaaste..."

Whooooo, man! If you went to my high school, you know exactly where this is headed!

What words rhyme with taste? Let's see, there's waste, raced, spaced, chaste, defaced, posthaste, paste. Hmm. Can we think of any others?

That's right.

Everyone called this song "Need A Little Baste Of Love."

What great timing the Doobies had to release this single just as we were starting a new school year at my high school. This meant we were subjected to endless repetitions of a slightly off-color spoof of the chant from the song's second verse: "Need a little baaaaaste..."

This was also just after I went on a family trip to St. Louis where I kept hearing a radio commercial that sang, "Don't baste your barbecue." Throughout the trip, I kept having to hold in my laughter over this jingle.

Also, if you're a little surprised that the Doobie Brothers were still around in 1989, remember that was the year of the comeback for big 1970s acts. The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Joe Cocker, Poco, and Donny Osmond also had substantial chart hits then.

"He's A Liar" by the Bee Gees

1981 / #30

Rate Your Music score: 3.11 out of 5!

The Bee Gees always seemed like the ultimate nice guys. But they could be real badasses when they wanted to.

Back when Michael Jackson was at his commercial peak, I noticed that nobody ever talked about the Bee Gees anymore. The Brothers Gibb did have a few minor hit songs then, but it was nothing like before. I wondered aloud if Michael would soon fall into such obscurity, but somehow, people never stopped talking about him. The Bee Gees rule and there's no point in arguing. But the lost hit we're profiling in this entry came during the group's relative lull in commercial success.

The group is best known for their electrifying Saturday Night Fever work. The whole world danced to the likes of "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever." But "He's A Liar" was a very different animal. Some reviewers said the song was just too bitter and confrontational for the Bee Gees. But the tune was a concerted effort to move away from disco. Also, Living Eyes - the album that included "He's A Liar" - was the first LP ever recorded on CD for demonstration purposes.

This song also yielded one of the funniest misheard lyrics I can remember. The real line is, "Well, they told me I fell but I just don't remember." But I used to think the song went, "Well, you sold me your bell bottoms but I just don't remember." This isn't the only misheard lyric regarding anything resembling pants, as Dr. Hook knows.

"Think Of Laura" by Christopher Cross

1983 / #9

Rate Your Music score: 2.69 out of 5!

Even the most high-energy radio stations smuggle tame ballads onto the airwaves. But it's an easier pill to swallow if it's treated as a novelty.

This brings to mind a feature that peopled local radio in 1985. Each weekday evening, not long before the station's nightly signoff, Joey T of WCLU gave us the "Mellow Yellow Combo." Two songs - usually ballads - were played in each installment. It was where the station relegated all the Dan Hill and Air Supply. Joey would introduce each "Mellow Yellow Combo" by singing, "They call me Mellow Yellow...Oh yes, oh yes, it's extra, extra sickening!"

Joey proceeded to heap industrial-strength ridicule on each record in the combo. Not all of the songs he featured were really wimpy ballads, but they weren't blazing rockers either. I remember some ABBA and Gino Vannelli making it onto the "Mellow Yellow Combo."

This must have inspired my own choice of music years later when I was on WRFN, the carrier current station at Northern Kentucky University. Probably 95% of what I played was energetic rockers. But I had to make an occasional exception, and when I did, that's when the real fun took place. As Steve Hawkins of Q-102 used to say, "I don't cool off very often, but when I do it's dynamite stuff!"

One afternoon, I wanted to slip in one of the mellowest hit ballads of the 1980s - just for shits and giggles. That tune was Christopher Cross's "Think Of Laura." I thumbed through the record rack in the studio and found the album jacket emblazoned with a pink flamingo. Why, it was our old friend Christopher Cross! The record, not the flamingo.

When I aired this song, I really didn't even need to say much about it. That I played it at all spoke for itself.

I may have a tape of this broadcast buried somewhere, but if I remember correctly, all I needed to say to bring a reaction was 3 little words: "Here's Christopher Cross."

Now the thing about this was that WRFN was heard over speakers in the hallway. There were some guys hanging out in the lounge and walking through the hall as I was on the air. As soon as the 3 dreaded words were spoken, I heard one of them in the hall yell out, "Oh no!"

He was loud enough that I could hear him through the booth at the station. Best all, his outburst went out over the air.

This differed from many of our other local stations in that they actually expected to be taken seriously when they played ballads all the time.

"Point Of No Return" by Nu Shooz

1986 / #28

Rate Your Music score: 3.44 out of 5!

What is the point of no return?

You probably know what the phrase means, but what is the point of no return for society, politics, and life?

In aviation, the phrase refers to the point at which an airplane doesn't have enough fuel to return to where it departed from and must continue to its destination - like passengers paid it to do. So if someone says "poop" during a flight from Cincinnati to Honolulu, and they're over the Pacific Ocean, the plane has no choice but to continue the flight instead of going back home. Regardless of where the plane lands, the TSA will be waiting there to arrest the offending passenger for air piracy.

When did American politics pass the point of no return? You might say it was the 1988 "election." Eight years of Ronald Reagan's terror was probably survivable for most Americans. But adding even a single week of George H.W. Bush was too much.

I had thought of my personal point of no return as being when I was expelled in 7th grade and being forced to attend a school that was even worse. I had thought I could have survived what had taken place up until then, and that this event is what really dug us in deep. Remembering a bit more, however, the point of no return had to have been at least a few months earlier, when people started coming to my home and trying to fight me over things that happened at school. Maybe it was when the harassing phone calls started picking up.

Our major universities passed the point of no return when they decided to remake themselves as exclusive institutions instead of serving the mainstream public. Sesame Street was a great show in my day, but even it passed the point of no return during its disastrous 51st season.

The point of no return isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing, like when it breaks some barrier or taboo. For example, a judge lecturing a defendant about flatulence opens the floodgates for people who hold dignified positions discussing gross bodily functions. When I was about 9, I came up with a proverb to represent shattering taboos like this: "Once it's in the box, it stays in the box." I knew what a proverb was, because The Joker's Wild had a category on proverbs, and the Bible was full of them. I came up with this wise saying when I was collecting pieces of discarded food which I called "cultures" and wanted to add a booger. I placed the booger in a small box instead of gluing it to a paper grocery bag. When my mom found out and made me throw away all my "cultures", I responded with my new proverb.

The funniest thing about the "cultures" is that my folks knew for about a year that I was collecting decaying pieces of food, but I didn't have to throw it away until I tried to save a booger.

"Tears" by John Waite

1984 / #37

Rate Your Music score: 2.97 out of 5!

"I'll see those tears...The damage they do..."

John Waite was one of these acts who actually looked like an '80s lost hit song. Best all, this record was a hit smack-dab in the middle of the timeframe that we try to focus on the most. This moment in time is stuck in my head, largely for personal reasons.

John's song also prompted new lyrics from a schoolmate. When I was in 6th grade, a stoner at school - who was about 5 years older than all his classmates - parodied the chorus of this tune. He kept singing, "I'll see those tears...The damaged Quaaludes."

I'm sure he would have shed lots of tears if someone damaged his Quaaludes. Kids at school damaged my belongings all the time too - if they didn't steal them.