"My Love Is A Fire" by Donny Osmond

1990 / #21

Rate Your Music score: 2.34 out of 5!

"Baste!"

Remember the days when Donny Osmond, St. Paul, and Nelson (but especially the first two) seemed to be in a contest to see who could sound more like the others? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Donny had a big comeback that started in 1989, and his return was actually more commercially successful than that of other 1970s acts who reappeared at the same time. It was as if there was a constitutional provision that took effect then that required any '70s performer who was not Donny Osmond to be subsequently excluded from the top 6 of the Hot 100. Chart performance at the time was fueled overwhelmingly by radio, which could make or break hits at the snap of a finger.

Donny's comeback coincided with the "baste" craze. This tendency to say "baste" confronting almost every situation managed to spread to multiple schools locally. Just before the lost hit profiled in this entry charted, I had switched to a high school that was less bad than the one before, and all this "baste" business was just as big there - and just as hilarious.

This lost hit was like a basteplane of baste-o-matic proportions. At about 14 seconds in, Donny seems to declare, "Baste!"

I don't ever remember seeing the video back then, but the video just drives home the point.

One would almost think Donny also had a song called "5 Out Of 5" and that he followed up this set several years later with a cut titled "Burn Gum, It Melts." You may be surprised that he didn't later record a song called "Pooing Is Cool" that he released early on YouTube.

Donny filled in for Shadoe Stevens as host of American Top 40 for the week ending February 17, 1990. This brings to mind a funny recollection about AT40 of the early '90s. At the time, one of the show's jingles when coming out of a commercial break was preceded by a man bellowing, "Heeyyyyyyyy!" So I went up to the vents in the floor and yelled, "Heeyyyyyyyy!" That way, the rest of the house could hear it. My mom got mad because the noise kept her awake.

I remember another AT40 installment that was themed around something from Star Trek that only the most ardent Trekkies had ever heard of. Interestingly, this episode of the countdown is now highly desired by collectors.

The early '90s were full of records that charted much higher than this one that are completely forgotten now. Maybe we'll delve into this phenomenon in depth sometime.

"Let's Work" by Mick Jagger

1987 / #39

Rate Your Music score: 2.66 out of 5!

Let's work!

Let's not rest. Let's not play. Let's work!

This lost hit was a minor top 40 entry by the legendary Rolling Stones vocalist. You may remember the video with Mick running down a highway along with a huge group of people who appeared to be employed in various occupations. He wrote the song with the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart.

According to one website, Mick came up with the idea for the song when his girlfriend got mad at him because he refused to buy a house for their young daughter. She would have to work and earn it like everyone else.

A YouTube commenter said he was one of the firefighters in the video, but that he always hated the song. Another commenter said he was reminded of the song when his brother-in-law who he hired to do a job decided to just sit there and do nothing. Still another commenter said, "The left would call this song hate speech today." No we wouldn't. We would call it many things, but we wouldn't call it that. It's not like it's Ace Of Base or something.

Also, the surgeons in this video look like they're holding their knives and tools like they're about to kill someone.

If a song and video like this came out now, the entire endeavor would look mighty silly. It was bad enough that offshoring, corporate greed, and cronyism took so many jobs afterward, but now AI has stolen the rest of the jobs. These days, we'd see Mick Jagger being chased by an army of robots laughing at him because his royalty checks are taken to fund Parliament's leather stationery.

"I Gotta Try" by Michael McDonald

1982 / #44

Rate Your Music score: 3.2 out of 5!

We're due for more "yacht rock", aren't we?

That's the name for much of the slickly produced soft rock of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I still don't know why it's called that. The term is applied to many big radio hits of the era, and the lost hit in this entry did get a lot of airplay then.

This entry also gives us a chance to once again rake Solid Gold through coals. Parts of the show were genuinely entertaining. Some of it was actually a little bit cruel, like when comedian George Wallace appeared in a 1983 episode and made a joke about how Joe Cocker was in a Memorex ad and his face broke the glass. But the Solid Gold countdown was like a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a random number generator. I knew about the Hot 100 thanks to Casey Kasem's radio and TV shows, but I noticed the rankings on Solid Gold were way off from that. The closing credits of some episodes say, "The ranking of hit songs contained in this program was compiled by the producers after reviewing standard industry sources." Alright then, what sources?

Radio stations used to compile their own rankings, but even many individual stations provided more clues than Solid Gold did. Some of them put out printed survey sheets each week that said the numbers came from local record sales and requests to the station. A website describes how a major New York station would compile its survey by calling up record stores in the area and getting a list of their best-selling singles. The stores were chosen randomly to keep them from hyping records, and each call was recorded so the store knew to be honest. But it was also a relatively conservative station, not a fast-add station that we'd prefer.

The clip featured above for Michael McDonald's lost hit came from Solid Gold. I'm pretty sure that this single later reached the show's top 10 - even though it only hit #44 on the authentic Hot 100. At the time, I wrongly assumed it must have been close to the top 10 of the Hot 100, especially considering how much I heard it on the radio.

I think I remember hearing it on the car radio one day when we went to a doctor appointment when I was 9. I also recall hearing "Hand To Hold On To" by John Mellencamp and "You Got Lucky" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. It was the only time I ever visited that doctor. This practice was in the same building as a pizza restaurant where we had lunch that day. I forgot all about it until I was over 40 when a friend told me she thought she had a dentist in that building who was a money-grubbing creep.

A lot of folks poke fun at Michael McDonald these days, but he has true fans. Someone on YouTube wrote, "You should go to jail if you don't like Michael McDonald." That statement is a sign of a truly dedicated fan base.

"Dancing In Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop)" by Q-Feel

1989 / #75

Rate Your Music score: 3.29 out of 5!

This now-lost hit was actually first released in 1982 and barely scraped onto Billboard's Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart. But in 1989 - several years after it bubbled - it was rereleased, and only then did it reach the Hot 100. I only started hearing it then. I can't remember what station I kept hearing it on though.

And the video is a sight to behold.

I never saw the video until YouTube came along. Remember, it only made the main chart in 1989, and MTV was past its prime then. Kids at school still watched MTV, and they said some of the stupidest stuff imaginable about things they saw, but I didn't think MTV was nearly as exciting as it once was. Also, MTV kept going out on our local cable system. It went out just before something we actually wanted to watch, which caused a family member to accuse Storer Cable of "assholism." According to Wiktionary, assholism actually is a real word, and has appeared in print at least since 1970.

At the time, MTV actually had an afternoon program hosted by Martha Quinn that was full of "classic" music videos shown in the channel's early years. But those videos were only a few years old then. The equivalent today would be chronologically only about as far back as the U.S. Capitol riot or even Elon Musk's Twitter purchase.

Now, back to Q-Feel's video. The band's lead singer looks like "Weird Al" Yankovic wearing red pants, a ball cap, and a bunch of equipment strapped to his body. The other men look like they're wearing some sort of military pilot uniform. The women look like they're wearing something out of Star Trek. The participants all dance around, smiling their asses off.

I guess I missed all of this in the '80s, because the heyday of music videos was right between releases of this single. The rest of the '80s was driven by radio. These days, radio has little influence, and MTV has none at all, but our museum of lost hits is rooted in the days of these older media.

"Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply

1981 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 2.81 out of 5!

You figured we'd eventually get to the Air Supply ice monster, didn't you?

Air Supply in the early 1980s was not unlike Richard Marx or Phil Collins were in the late 1980s, in that you couldn't go more than 10 seconds without hearing them on the radio. Back then, any of Air Supply's hit singles ever becoming a lost hit would have been considered preposterous. But "Sweet Dreams" - part of the band's string of #5 hits - has somehow managed to do it, much to the surprise of anyone alive during the winter of 1981-82.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say this song used to be on the radio constantly. When I think of 1982, I think of playing in the living room each evening before dinner, while my mom had the now-forgotten local radio station Yes 95 blasting on the stereo. Go on ARSA's playlist archive and look under WYYS. Guess what song was #1 on the station's playlist for 2 weeks starting on February 9, 1982?

"Sweet Dreams" is actually a rather unusual entry in the Air Supply catalog. The band decided for a few brief minutes that they wanted to be hippies by offering a track that was less formulaic and featured unusual instrumentation. Hence the ice monster. Fast-forward the above clip to about 4:28. The record includes 6 piano notes that always reminded me of an ice monster grinning menacingly at unsuspecting comers.

The ice monster's grin was also like that of some kid at school who kept bothering everyone. In addition, there was a jeans commercial right around that time that ended with a young man slowly turning around and displaying that same ominous smirk. There were only a few people capable of producing this creepy look. It's like when criminologists used to judge a person's character from their facial appearance.

Years later, someone posted online that the scary Rankin/Bass bumper used at the end of many Christmas specials was similarly evocative of an ice monster. You be the judge...

That bumper was also likened to the spooky sounds heard at the very end of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood accompanying the drawing of the trolley, but we digress.

Even a colorful mental image of an ice monster couldn't ease the frustration of hearing the same Air Supply ballad repeated over and over. And it's not as if Journey or Kenny Rogers didn't also have ballads at the time that were just as pervasive on our airwaves. I was so aggravated by the punishing repetition of the MOR malaise of the early '80s that even the top 10 countdown on Solid Gold provoked an annoyed reaction. One Saturday, we had the TV on Solid Gold, and the countdown got up to #1. What might be atop the Solid Gold survey that weekend? The J. Geils Band? Stevie Wonder? The Cars?

You guessed it! It was "Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply.

I distinctly remember letting out a frustrated groan upon hearing this. It sounded just like the N'Ice commercial where the man threw down his cards. Incidentally, the chart rankings posted at the top of each entry on this blog are from Billboard's Hot 100 - the most authoritative chart in the beeswax - not the laughable Solid Gold ranking. Thus, "Sweet Dreams" is an official #5 rather than a #1. I don't know where Soiled Gold got their numbers from, but I think that was when I started to assume they just pulled the chart out of their ass. It could be pretty hilarious to see what they could come up with though, so I still watched the show after that.

"Tender Is The Night" by Jackson Browne

1983 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 3.07 out of 5!

"Tender..."

As we were emerging from the musical malaise of the early 1980s, this lost hit was one of these songs I remember hearing on the AM radio in the car on the way to and from school in 5th grade - along with "Modern Love" by David Bowie and "Undercover Of The Night" by the Rolling Stones.

And - similar to the lost hit "She Ain't Pretty" by the Northern Pikes - it comes in handy many decades after its chart run when describing restaurant meals.

Sometimes you'll order an item at a restaurant that you expect to be tough. But once in a while, you get a pleasant surprise.

When this happens, we start singing, "Tender..." We sing it in the same way Jackson Browne did in the last portion of his song. This has been going on for years.

Is that chicken sandwich tough? Nope, it's...tender...duh-dummm...

What about that macaroni or the complimentary side of fried grouch? No, it's...tender...duh-dummm...

What about your Coke? Tender...duh-dummm...

Hey, they charge a fee if you pay with a credit card! Tough...duh-dummm...

Tender are the memories of the lost hits profiled on this blog.

"Angelia" by Richard Marx

1989 / #4

Rate Your Music score: 3.2 out of 5!

If you said back in 1989 that Richard Marx would someday appear on a list of lost hits, a face would have been laughed in. That face would have been yours. Richard ranked right up there with Phil Collins in that every pop station played him at least once an hour.

Q-102 was particularly awash in Marx mania. ARSA reveals that the station placed "Right Here Waiting" at #1 on its playlist for 7 consecutive weeks. It wasn't even one of his rockers. It was a ballad among ballads. Imagine being a DJ on Q-102 and having to play the same ballad every 2 hours for 7 weeks. And that was during the summer, when radio should have been full of bright, cheery, fun music. Ballads should have been saved for the other 10 months of the year when it's rainy and dreary anyway.

That track didn't even disappear with 1989. ARSA also shows that during the week of November 18, 1994 - I repeat, 1994 - "Right Here Waiting" suddenly popped back up again and was played 22 times that week on Q-102. A station that supposedly had a format of current pop played a 5-year-old ballad 3 times a day!

But this entry profiles Richard's follow-up single "Angelia" - which has indeed become a lost hit.

Like the song in the previous entry, "Angelia" is connected to an assignment for high school art class in which we wrote fictional letters by relatives of supposedly well-known artists.

I had to come up with a name for a person being addressed in one of the letters. Much like how Phil Collins came up with Sussudio, I came up with Basteolia. It rhymed with Angelia - the woman Richard Marx sang about. The difference is that it had "baste" in it. "Baste-uh-lee-uh."

I started one of the letters, "Dear Basteolia." To the surprise of absolutely nobody, when I got the assignment back, it had a big, red X over that part.

Where you running to now, Basteolia?