"New Frontier" by Donald Fagen

1983 / #70

Rate Your Music score: 3.69 out of 5!

When I had another heart surgery back in May, it must have been Yacht Rock Day at the hospital.

When I entered the operating room, a song that we once profiled here was playing: "I.G.Y. (What A Beautiful World)" by Donald Fagen. Later that night, when I was in the recovering room, I found that the hospital's cable TV system carried several local radio stations. To my absolute shock, WGRR played "Never Be The Same" by Christopher Cross - another record we once profiled as a lost hit, as we noted the bubble gum popping sound throughout. I was floored that WGRR played this, as the station has a very limited playlist and rarely plays lost hits outside of old American Top 40 shows.

Hearing "I.G.Y." brang to mind another Donald Fagen chart entry: "New Frontier."

Donald helped found Steely Dan and was the band's lead singer. I've always been amused by the fact that his name rhymes with Ronald Reagan. Donald once described the pain of having to move to the suburbs as a youngster. He said the suburbs were "like a prison."

"New Frontier" is about a young couple holding a party in a fallout shelter built by the young man's dad in their back yard. I remember hearing the song during one of those times when I kept changing the station on the radio at a therapist's office.

And Donald hates, hates, hates it when you talk about "yacht rock." A few years ago, the maker of a documentary about the genre called up Donald about it, and he replied with some choice words and hung up. He probably wouldn't have gotten so angry if the filmmaker had just called it Horizon music instead.

"Saved By Zero" by the Fixx

1983 / #20

Rate Your Music score: 3.58 out of 5!

The Fixx is exactly the sort of act that inspired this very blog. My go-to radio station in much of the mid-1980s seemed to be fast on new wave. While I try to make sure this blog has a good balance of music, it might at times lean slightly toward new wave. Maybe it only seems that way, because there's nothing resembling new wave on the charts today. We need a new wave revival.

And with a title like "Saved By Zero", we should have known this single would eventually be profiled here. It evokes an incident in life that was extensively rehashed many years after it took place.

I didn't even know what the title of this song meant or what the song was about until recently when I read that it's about the freedom of having nothing left in life to lose. Yet, every time I think of this song, I think of something that occurred in 5th grade. For months that year, we had to read books that had won the Newbery Medal. And they were hard books too. The other 5th grade class got to read books that had won the Caldecott Medal, so they got books like 1 Is One. But we had to read books like Smoky The Cowhorse that had about 1,000 pages. And we only got a few weeks to read each one.

There wasn't any logic to this, as we were assigned to these classes randomly.

Literature was not my strong suit. So when it became time for a very difficult test on one of these books, success was not an option. It was not an open book test, but I had the book open in my lap. I still got frustrated with the test, so I decided to see if I could get steam to shoot out my ears - like Fred Flintstone. I would clench my jaws tightly and hold my breath.

As I loudly paged through the book on my lap, the teacher finally noticed that I had the book open for a closed book test. By this point, I had long since given up completely, so I figured I might as well entertain the class as much as possible. The teacher took me out in the hall to lecture me. She declared I would receive a 0% for the test, because I had the book open when I wasn't supposed to.

I replied at the top of my lungs, "WHAT?!?!?! ZERO?!?!?!"

The kids in each of the classrooms must have been having the time of their lives listening to this exchange. Good for them! I was happy to provide the entertainment.

I forgot about this hilarious episode for over 10 years. Then, when I was in college, one of my schoolmates who was in one of the 4th grade classes down the hall from me when I was in 5th grade started talking about it. I was considered a hero by his 4th grade class because of the incident.

For months after it was first rehashed, this story kept getting repeated over and over. One of our most popular sayings became, "WHAT?!?!?! ZERO?!?!?!"

Maybe someday, saved by zero.

"Big Log" by Robert Plant

1983 / #20

Rate Your Music score: 3.66 out of 5!

"Led Zeppelin rules!"

Robert Plant was the legendary lead vocalist of Led Zeppelin, one of the pioneering bands of heavy metal. Of course, this blog is designed to cover every popular music genre, from metal to rap to country to soft rock to new wave to R&B, but metal might not be represented as well as many readers would like.

However, there was a time in my youth when I actually sort of admired some metal acts, including those with few or no chart singles. I had pals who liked metal to the complete exclusion of everything else. I also noticed that metal was under particular attack from the censors. But this censorship spread to other styles of music. A particularly aggravating incident took place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where some right-wing preacher forced the cancellation of an Ozzy Osbourne concert. The clergyman vowed to keep all hard rock shows out of Baton Rouge, but the ban also reportedly kept Barry Manilow and Alabama out of town. Forty years later, local residents said the Baton Rouge concert scene still hadn't recovered.

(Some years before the Baton Rouge ban, a city-owned venue in Denver banned rock concerts. The band America - who gave us such dangerous anthems as "Daisy Jane" and "The Border" - was deemed too hard to be allowed to perform there. A lawsuit by the band's promoter forced the city to relent. This venue is still said by music fans to be one of the worst around. Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles might be worse though, as it gets terrible reviews due to abusive staff.)

Led Zeppelin was still one of the most widely admired bands in the world even several years after they tragically disbanded. So at one point, MTV opted to air a Led Zeppelin special. It was around that time that I first heard the expression that something "rules." MTV kept running a promo for this special that featured a group of teenagers declaring, "Led Zeppelin rules!" It wasn't just a statement. It was an exhortation.

That was also after Robert Plant's solo single "Big Log." It's hard to imagine a slice of blues rock like "Big Log" appearing on top 40 radio today, but back then, it didn't seem strange to me. This was before pop stations began dropping each genre little by little (as another one of his singles would say) and not adding new ones quickly enough to replace them. By the end of the 1980s, I was told that songs like "Big Log" would never be played alongside later music, for fear that each would scare away fans of the other. This extreme narrowcasting signaled the rise of the 15-second mind.

And where did the title "Big Log" come from? I know you're getting excited hearing all this talk about "logs", much like how any mention of David Bowie is sure to rehash the story about "elimination", but we can only rely on toilet humor for so long. It turns out that the song is called "Big Log" all because Robert found an old log that he used for firewood.

The record might sound like it would have belonged on album rock radio. But with the narrowcasting of today, it now seems downright weird that it was ever heard on top 40 radio.

"Shake It" by Ian Matthews

1978 / #13

Rate Your Music score: 3.07 out of 5!

"She's got a picture in her locker...An autographed basketball..."

Don't be confused by websites that spell this performer's name Iain. He officially changed the spelling of his name in 1989.

People talk about how they remember a song on the radio in the late 1970s that sang about "an autographed basketball." Well, it's this one. It's about someone who keeps a picture of an autographed basketball in her locker.

When I was in school, I knew better than to store anything of such great value in my locker, because people kept breaking into the lockers. It was particularly bad in high school, when the locks were a separate piece from the locker instead of being built-in. Apparently, somebody kept sawing them off with a hacksaw. At least once, someone threw a lock into the toilet. The school refused to replace our locks when someone removed them. Then the school made us pay for textbooks that got stolen from our lockers because we didn't have a lock.

We had to pay for the stolen locks too. The school charged an inflated price for these. I saw this brand of lock being sold at a store for a fraction of the cost, but we were required to use the locks provided by the school.

Around the same time Iain's now-lost hit was popular, the sport of basketball had a big advertising campaign. I don't know who was paying for it. I don't think it was a major league like the NBA or a particular brand of basketballs like Spalding or Wilson. I remember a radio commercial that featured what sounded like a loud fart, followed by a woman singing, "Basketbaaaaaaaall!"

"Ppppphhh! Basketbaaaaaaaall!"

I also recall that around the same time, there was a gum commercial that seemed to have fart noises sprinkled throughout the jingle. People would dance around to this ad and act like they were farting, but unfortunately, not everyone saw the humor in this.

But it was truly a slam dunk!

"Love's Got A Line On You" by Scandal

1983 / #59

Rate Your Music score: 3.15 out of 5!

It's almost a matter of principle that we need to include more Scandal on this blog. Man, does Scandal ever rule!

I even saw them in concert a couple times more than 20 years after their heyday. Throughout each show, lead singer Patty Smyth was chewin' bubble gum! She didn't bubble. But she was chewin' bubble gum!

Here we're profiling another great Scandal single that sadly missed the top 40. I have to admit that the pop stations in Cincinnati actually made a good choice by playing this record despite its low chart peak. Along with hits by DeBarge and Kajagoogoo, I remember that this song would crop up during the summer before 5th grade when I took the infamous "Are you ready?" hearing test. I also had to take one of those tests where you arrange pieces of paper with drawings on them to form a story. What a waste of time those tests were.

Eventually, we buyed Scandal's self-titled EP that included the lost hit we're profiling today. Not only was the record full of great tracks, but I was also amused by the back cover of it. The back of the record jacket showed Patty dancing and making a funny face with her mouth open. During one of the concerts I attended, a fan had this record sleeve and was proudly holding it up and waving it around, with this picture visible.

For the most part, this blog deals with recordings, not concerts. I was a broadcaster. I was lucky ever to see Scandal in concert, because there weren't very many interesting acts that came to town. A lot of rockers avoided Cincinnati even before they saw how shabbily the Damn Yankees were treated. I do remember once around 1996 - about a decade before I saw Scandal - when I was woken up at about 3 PM when a family member called with the news that there was a concert coming to town by some act who might be fun to see. I was asleep at 3 PM because this was during the particularly crushing timeframe after the NKU disaster - an era that the media somehow thinks was some shimmering renaissance.

I am the warrior.

"When We Kiss" by Bardeux

1988 / #36

Rate Your Music score: 3.01 out of 5!

"I know all about your checkered past..."

This entry is a lesson in how to humiliate an adversary - 1988 style.

These days, paid troll farms might be too sophisticated to make comebacks like this effective. But it was dynamite in 1988.

Let's go back to when I was in high school - perhaps late during freshman year. Because I was surrounded by spoiled idiots all day, it was a guarantee that I'd catch them saying or doing something incredibly stupid at least once every 30 seconds.

They might start a typical conversation by asking something like, "Remember last year when you got a 68 on a history test?"

I might reply, "Remember last week when you got caught in the restroom with a Sears catalog?"

Pretty quickly, however, I realized that more had to be done to combat these little twerps. Bardeux to the rescue!

After Bardeux's now-lost hit was released, I used a line from the song as a new comeback: "I know all about your checkered past."

Anyone who I used that line on was huuuuuuuuuumiliated! They got a look on their face like Dan Quayle did after Lloyd Bentsen told him, "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." The person stumbled backwards like a buffoon. Then they looked like they were about to cry!

Actually, I didn't know all about their checkered past. I just acted like I did, because present behavior seems to be a good indicator of past behavior. But the way they reacted to the Bardeux line shows my assumptions were correct.

This line usually didn't work over stupid stuff. After I began using this line, somebody tried using it to make some point that is now forgotten. It just bounced off like water off a duck's back.

We've played this game 1,000 times before.