"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?