"Welcome To Heartlight" by Kenny Loggins

1983 / #24

Rate Your Music score: 3.12 out of 5!

Chirp chirp chirp. Boom! Clap! Clappity-clap!

Anyone alive in 1983 knew that this now-lost hit was about a particular school in Los Angeles. Every radio DJ at the time noted this. One website calls the tune "one of Loggins' oddest songs." Somebody also noted that the song was originally titled simply "Heartlight", but it became "Welcome To Heartlight" to avoid confusion with "Heartlight" by Neil Diamond, which is now also a lost hit. This commenter said of Kenny's record, "Too bad he had to change the name of this good song because of Diamond's movie-plugging song, which was probably the worst song he ever made."

Not much can be found about the school that Kenny sang about. Evidently, the school no longer exists.

I always thought this track was sung using an unusual intonation, as if Kenny was trying to mimic an accent. The way he sang it also reminds me of yet another lost hit, "Volcano" by Jimmy Buffett.

This song also has an absurd American Top 40-related memory. Casey Kasem once read a "Long Distance Dedication" in which the letter writer thought the song was titled "Welcome To Hard Life." If I remember correctly, the letter was from a spoiled teenager who was sent to live on a relative's farm for the summer. When they lived on the farm, they had to do actual work. They thought having to work was a "hard life."

That was riding into the danger zone!

"Desperate But Not Serious" by Adam Ant

1983 / #66

Rate Your Music score: 3.4 out of 5!

I don't know what made me think of this story just now, but I had to think of a lost hit whose title was evocative of the incident.

Let's go back to a few years before this song was a hit. I was about 6. I haven't thought about this story in such a long time. One evening, we were in the den. Somebody kept farting and stinking up the whole room. There were some real stinky ones. It was as hilarious as you might imagine.

But not everybody had a sense of humor. The angry reaction by a vocal few was met with more laughter. It was an endless cycle of laughs that provoked anger, which elicited yet more merriment.

Finally, a family member observed that all the flatulence meant somebody's "desperate juices" were acting up. Hence, I chose "Desperate But Not Serious" as the lost hit for this entry. Whoever was stinking up the den in this story was desperate but funny.

I had never heard anyone mention "desperate juices" before, and I haven't heard it since.

I remember around the same time, we all went to dinner at a restaurant in the Cincinnati suburb of Evendale. I thought this restaurant had good cornbread, but the rest of my family really loved this place. Anyway, that evening, someone ripped an air biscuit during our meal. Not long after that, we tried going to this eatery again, but - after driving an hour - we discovered it was permanently closed and replaced with something else.

As for Adam Ant, he's an interesting character. In 2002, he was involved in a widely publicized incident in which he threw a car alternator through the window of a pub, but the criminal charges were reduced to just a single count of causing affray. He has spoken candidly about the struggles he's had in life. He said his battles forced him out of art school many years earlier.

Mr. Ant also figured prominently in the Celebrity ABC Gum Project. In the late 1990s, someone had a website about how they mailed a stick of gum to numerous famous people and had asked them to chew it and mail it back. Adam Ant and John Waters were among the very few who obliged, though it seems like one other celebrity - maybe Don Ho - only sent back the wrapper.

"Freedom Overspill" by Steve Winwood

1986 / #20

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

When was the last time you even thought about this song?

And if you do think about it, you probably think about that ridiculous video that consists mostly of Steve holding his hand over his eye. It's like one of those exercises your eye doctor makes you do.

The clip also has a few other assorted scenes, such as Steve sitting in a chair in a featureless room. I always thought this scene made him look like he was ripping a silent-but-deadly and trying to hold in his laughter. At one point, he shifts his head downward as if to enjoy the stench.

Now, Steve was of course a fairly successful musician for years before. So much so that I was willing to protect Men At Work's territory from Steve even at a time when Steve had no chart hits. It appears that Steve did not have a single Hot 100 entry in 1983, which was Men At Work's heyday. But Steve had a couple of hits over the preceding few years (back when he looked like Conan O'Brien) that we still kept hearing all the time. Obviously, a station couldn't play two songs at once (unless they aired one in each stereo channel), so every time they played Steve Winwood, that was 3 to 4 minutes when they weren't playing Men At Work.

All the David Bowie, Eurythmics, Police, Michael Jackson, ZZ Top, Yes, and many others were seen as squeezing Men At Work off the airwaves. I let Eddy Grant, Dexys Midnight Runners, and Bonnie Tyler slide. But not Steve Winwood, even with his lack of current hits at the time.

Steve or no Steve, 1983 was actually one of the best years of music in the entire history of the record business, and I was a fool for not appreciating it. I can plead insanity, because 4th grade was such a disaster.

But after that, the finer things came shining through - at least until the next major crisis, of which there many starting in the mid-1980s.

"Keep On Walkin'" by CeCe Peniston

1992 / #15

Rate Your Music score: 3.42 out of 5!

It's time for some fond memories of warm summer days when I worked at the library!

Unfortunately, these fond memories weren't always so fond. "Keep on walkin'" is what we were told to do when we got assaulted by young neighborhood criminals. That's an exact quote too. Keep on walkin', the cops ain't talkin' to us anymore, because the criminals had so much pull.

Right, Philip?

The main reason I'm including this single in our online museum of lost hits is the video. I only saw the video once back then, and I burst out laughing when it got a little bit past the middle of the song. The humor begins at 3:22 with the "whoo! whoo! whoo!" part. CeCe sports a hilarious grin with each "whoo!"

It gets even funnier after a few seconds when the pitch gets higher. It looks like the video was just looped from the first part, so her mouth movements don't even line up with each "whoo!"

This isn't the only music video where a performer mugs for the camera like this and displays a ridiculously silly smile. Go West and Karla Bonoff provided similar amusement. Maybe we'll get to them someday.

Meanwhile, there's an assault case from 1992 that still needs to be filed. We can take our time, because there's no statute of limitations on felonies in Kentucky.

"One Lonely Night" by REO Speedwagon

1985 / #19

Rate Your Music score: 3.01 out of 5!

"One lonely night...One lonely night...That's all it takes to...Completely break you..."

This is one lost hit I hadn't forgotten, but I had forgotten everything about the video except lead singer Kevin Cronin with a long beard in a medieval setting. I also remember hearing the song on the car radio when we drove to Maysville one day.

Until recently, I thought everyone else had forgotten everything about this song. But I guess memories can be long in these parts, and some people remember.

A few months ago, during Thanksgiving weekend, we had an important family gathering. We had appetizers that included shrimp. As the number of shrimp dwindled to just one, these lyrics were heard: "One lonely shrimp...One lonely shrimp...That's all it takes to...Completely break you."

For a song that had hardly ever been heard in 40 years, it sure did elicit a clear recollection. I guess we're hoarders of music memories. I've always felt that top 40 stations should throw in a lost hit here and there, which actually did occur on some such stations, especially smaller ones. Yet it's a safe bet that the thought police on online forums about radio would call it "top 40 for hoarders." However, this sure beats "top 40 for wasters", which represents the throwaway attitude that has engulfed the format's most influential stations.

One lost hit...One lost hit...That's all it takes to...Completely break the brains of today's radio programmers.

"I Believe In You" by Stryper

1988 / #88

Rate Your Music score: 2.95 out of 5!

I'm pretty sure I heard this song in my day. Either that or I'm confusing it with "She Believes In Me" by Kenny Rogers.

The band Stryper was one of the few acts that performed Christian rock to reach the Hot 100. The Wikipedia article on Stryper cofounder Michael Sweet says, "The band's reputation declined in the 1990s." I'm not exactly sure what happened. Maybe they started biting heads off bats at concerts or something, but I'm not sure.

For a personal anecdote about Stryper, let's go back maybe a year or so before this song charted, back to when I was a high school freshman. I went to high school with some real punks. They were too old to be brats. They were punks. I don't mean it in a good way. They were juvenile delinquents. But they claimed to be good Christians, so that made it socially acceptable.

One of the worst offenders apparently liked Stryper. Now, the good thing about gym class was that we didn't wear our dumb school clothes for that class. So, for that class, this student always wore his Stryper t-shirt that had the number 777 prominently displayed. Get it? Instead of that devil number 666 - or the even more shocking 555 - Stryper used 777.

I think this student also sat right behind me in homeroom for 2 years, but gym class would always bring out the worst behavior in everyone. In gym, he was every bit as much of a troublemaker as you'd expect - and then some. I just don't remember much about what he did specifically. I just know it was bad.

I do remember a couple incidents in gym that show just how bad things were overall. One day, right in the middle of gym class, I saw a student emerge from the locker room carrying my school clothes, books, and other belongings. I don't remember if it was the same student discussed above. He proceeded to strew them all over the floor of the gym. I tried to stop him, and I got in trouble.

One other time, the teacher noted how bad everybody's behavior had become, so she required everyone to just sit on the floor and not do anything for the whole hour. We had to change into our gym clothes one by one instead of using the locker room all at the same time. At the end of the class period, we had to change back into our regular school clothes one by one. By the time we were all done changing into our gym clothes, it was time to start changing back into regular school clothes.

And much of the misbehavior was courtesy of a diehard Stryper fan!