"Heartlight" by Neil Diamond

1982 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 2.8 out of 5!

Get out the Reese's Pieces and Speak & Spell!

Every radio DJ in 1982 noted that this now-lost hit was inspired by the movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The record made Bob Leonard's countdown, and Bob mentioned the E.T. connection every chance he got. Now that I think about it, I actually don't know why that countdown was on so much in our home. It was on WMOH, of all places, which wasn't even one of the big signals in our part of town. Thankfully, I got in the habit of listening to WCLU because of this countdown, as I kept accidentally knocking the tuning knob from WMOH onto WCLU.

A reviewer on Rate Your Music said "Heartlight" is "the culmination of a long descent into sugary hamminess."

I have a weird memory of this song, but it might not even be real. I might just be imagining this. According to this recollection, there was a tutor who came to my school in 4th grade who really liked this song. I think she might have been a local college student. One day, there was a radio on, or maybe someone had brung in a record. The opening notes of "Heartlight" were heard. The tutor's face lit up, and she said something about how much she loved the song because it was about E.T.

That was also around the time Atari released an E.T. video game - which was such a commercial and critical flop that many folks blamed it for touching off the video game industry crash of 1983. Atari buried 10 to 20 truckloads of copies of the unsold game in a New Mexico landfill. The landfill was finally excavated in 2014 just to prove the games were buried there. The Smithsonian Museum then placed a ruined copy of the game from the landfill on display.

E.T. is also associated with a misheard lyric in a major hit song that was popular around the same time as "Heartlight" - namely "Gloria" by Laura Branigan. The real words were, "I think they got the alias." But everyone thought the song went, "I think they got Elliott," as in the kid in E.T.

Phone home!

"Find Another Fool" by Quarterflash

1982 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.27 out of 5!

When discussing popular music of the 1970s and 1980s, the conversation almost inevitably lands on one particular act: Little River Band.

Little River Band has had a couple songs profiled on this blog, but some of their softer hits have never truly become lost, as radio prefers light music. Take "Cool Change", for example. Q-102 still had this record in occasional rotation about a decade after it was a hit. By that time, I was in high school, and it prompted an obvious parody. I was forced to attend bad school after bad school. So, while lamenting how bad the school was, I would start singing, "Time for...A school change..."

This continued even after I started attending a school that was less bad. Not unbearably bad like the previous one, but still bad. As I sang my Little River Band parody, my mom got mad! But there was never any real reason why I had to keep attending such terrible schools. I didn't fare too well in the zip code lottery.

The "Cool Change" spirit also applies to the lost hit that serves as the main topic of this entry: "Find Another Fool" by the Portland band Quarterflash.

"Find Another Fool" had long since become a lost hit by the time I even started high school. But it was evoked during the 3 years I attended the world's worst school. One day, my parents received an angry letter from the principal of this Catholic school. I don't think it was because of a single big disciplinary breach. It was probably just because of a buildup of small violations. The letter concluded, "Tim must cooperate or find another school."

Find another - find another! - find another school to love you.

The funniest part is how the letter acted like I would be the one responsible for finding another school. Wasn't that my parents' responsibility? Nobody really should have had to go out and find one, because I should have been able to transfer to the public school just by default. But that school probably would have had its own problems. I went on to be invited to the 25-year reunion for that school, even though I never attended that school, and folks at this event said I never would have had any trouble at that school. I'm skeptical though.

To "find another school" makes it sound like I could just walk down the street and unexpectedly stumble upon a school: "Hey! A school!" Actually, over 20 years after I moved to Bellevue as an adult, I was surprised to find that the main high school building was all the way across town from the gym. But I had never noticed before, because I wasn't in high school anymore.

I have a feeling that if I was, it would have been time for a school change regardless of what school I attended, because the past decade has not been a happy chapter in American education.

"Vienna Calling" by Falco

1986 / #18

Rate Your Music score: 3.54 out of 5!

This memorable lost hit was one of few songs sung in German ever to make the top 40 of the Hot 100. (The Beatles' "Sie Liebt Dich" only got to #97.)

In addition to this distinction, "Vienna Calling" has other interesting characteristics. It's one of few top 40 hits that includes part of a classical piece. Some versions of "Vienna Calling" - like that in the video - open with a few seconds of Johann Strauss II's "The Blue Danube." However, I'm not sure if the single included that piece. I believe the version on the 45 may have opened with a slice of a different piece. Falco's vocals may have also been rerecorded for the 45.

"The Blue Danube" brings to mind an advertising campaign of several years later. It was for Borden dairy products. Borden advertised heavily during American Top 40 circa 1989. One of its radio ads sounded like it was for some diet chocolate milk it had (which I don't remember anyone ever drinking). The commercial featured a children's chorus singing the jingle, which was set to the tune of "The Blue Danube."

In another Borden ad, the children's chorus sang a different jingle...

Borden, it's light and sweet
Borden, it's good to eat
Borden, it's yummy for my tummy
If it's Borden (gulp, gulp)
It's got to be good

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, we made a parody of it called "Gordon", which was about Gordon from Sesame Street. That was also around the same time we went to Florence Mall on the same evening Gordon happened to be there. A bunch of little kids were gathered around him as he sang in the seating area that had the stone animals.

I remember hearing "Vienna Calling" on the car radio on I-275 one weekday evening as we were wasting time and fuel going to a ridiculous appointment - instead of living. Yet I feel "Vienna Calling" may be one of the greatest lost hits of the 1980s to be eligible for this blog.

"Space Age Whiz Kids" by Joe Walsh

1983 / #52

Rate Your Music score: 2.51 out of 5!

After over 2 years, it's finally happening. We're starting to run out of good stories for this blog.

Make no mistake. There's still lots of musically interesting lost hits out there. But how much can we possibly write about some of them?

I think this entry and the next are actually among the greatest and most musically distinctive lost hits of the 1980s. Don't let this record's disappointing Rate Your Music score fool you. It's blasphemy that this lost hit got a lower score than New Kids On The Block, but then again, George W. Bush somehow got 60 million votes, so what did we expect?

I haven't heard "Space Age Whiz Kids" on regular radio since the mid-'80s. I never even saw the video until I found it on YouTube. The clip features Joe Walsh strutting around in a video game arcade with a hilarious scowl on his face. The record was popular during the heyday of Starcade - a game show where contestants competed by playing video games. But it was also during what Wikipedia calls the video game crash of 1983. This was a recession in the gaming industry that was blamed on factors like the declining quality of games and a growing interest in computer programming instead of gaming.

I remember hearing the song on the radio in February 1985 on the same snowy Saturday that we went over to Devou Park to sled down the hill. I also heard "Relax" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the now-lost hit "The Bird" by the Time that day. I remember that we didn't stay very long at the park, because the weather made it so frustrating even for sledding.

Sometime after that, the song was on in the den, which provoked this standard parental reaction: "What are you listening to???"

I was living a life of illusion.

"Playing To Win" by Little River Band

1985 / #60

Rate Your Music score: 3.23 out of 5!

Why did a band from Melbourne, Australia, include the skyline of Cincinnati in a video?

"Playing To Win" was Little River Band's last Hot 100 hit, and I remember hearing it on album rock radio and MTV. The video was oddly appealing, but I could never figure out why a shot of the Cincinnati cityscape appears at 1:18. It's complete with Riverfront Stadium and the coliseum.

The video also has a few shots of a different city, which online sleuths have determined to be Minneapolis. Although I've been to Minneapolis a couple times, I couldn't recognize it from that angle.

The song is also interesting because its writers took the unusual step of analyzing all the lyrics to figure out a precise percentage of royalties that each writer would receive. The record also represents a brand of album rock that differs from some of the other musical styles we associate with that timeframe. This tune charted in early 1985, an era that otherwise brings to mind new wave and metal. People were staying up late and liking it fine that way, before they decided it was time for a cool change.