Rate Your Music score: 3 out of 5!
Believe it or don't, I actually have the 45 of this. This record was also Barry Manilow's last top 40 hit - though he managed to reach the Hot 100 as late as 1988.
And the video was absolutely, positively ridiculous beyond description. I remember seeing the video on Solid Gold and thinking it was ridiculous then. It reminded me of some of the Solid Gold Dancers' "interpretations" of songs included on the show. Don't get me wrong: They were talented dancers. Just like how Barry is a talented singer. But their works appeared in contexts that were often pretty silly.
It seems like several years later, some of my peers planned to use a similar concept for some performance, but they goofed off so much that the event never took place. I'm not even sure what their point was going to be.
Barry's record was written and produced by Jim Steinman, who did a lot of work for Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler. One of Jim's trademarks was the type of thunderous, dramatic arrangement that we hear on "Read 'Em And Weep", especially during the song's bridge.
The main reason I'm giving this lost hit an entry on this blog is that it was played at a family wedding I attended in the early 1990s where I almost ate one of the small plastic birds from the cake. Each guest received a generous slice of the wedding cake. The reception hall was very dark, and the white plastic birds blended in with the white icing. So I could barely see the birds, let alone see that they were plastic.
After chewing on the bird for several minutes and not being able to swallow it, I finally realized it was plastic. I think I decided to chew on it a little bit more like it was bubble gum. But you couldn't blow bubbles with it.
Read it and weep!
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