Chart Week: November 4, 1978
Song: “Alive Again” – Chicago
Chart Position: #21, 3rd week on the chart. Peaked at #14 for two weeks in December.

In the Seventies and Eighties the band Chicago was like air: they were always around. In over 21 years of hitting the pop chart, they had 34 Top 40 singles, 20 Top 10s, and three number ones.[1]

Hits on top of hits on top of hits.

While their music was generally right down the middlest portion of the middle of the road, especially in the Eighties, they did have a unique sound thanks to their horn section. Chicago’s blend of rock and pop, R&B and soul, and even jazz was unlike any other band, save maybe Earth, Wind, & Fire. I would argue the bands were quite different, but since they were the only two that had great success with horns on pretty much every song, they have to be mentioned together.[2]

The second part of Chicago’s career, which covered their Eighties peak, came with a pronounced move away from some of the quirky eccentricity of their Seventies music into mostly soft rock/Adult Contemporary. That second act almost didn’t happen.

In January 1978, founding member and guitar player Terry Kath was partying with a band roadie. While joking around with a gun, Kath put it to his head and pulled the trigger, not realizing there was a round in the chamber. He died instantly.

The band was devastated. Kath was a huge part of Chicago’s sound and one of the most respected guitar players of the era. For several months the surviving members debated whether they should continue making music together or not.

Eventually they regrouped and hit the studio to record their tenth studio album, Hot Streets. “Alive Again” was the first single released after Kath’s death. While ostensibly about a romantic partner bringing happiness back to the narrator’s life, it is clearly also about picking up the pieces and moving on after a personal tragedy.

Yesterday I would not have believed
That tomorrow the sun would shine

Later, songwriter James Pankow said it was indeed about the band coming together and renewing their partnership as Kath looked down on them and smiled. Chicago was alive again.

I think I knew this story pretty soon after “Alive Again” came out. A couple of my uncles were into Chicago, and I must have overheard them talking about the band’s comeback. Or maybe I just heard Casey Kasem tell the story as my mom played AT40 in the kitchen.

Even back then I was struck by how joyous this track sounded. Peter Cetera’s vocals are filled an almost defiant cheer. The horns have the classic sharp, powerful Chicago sound. For a band that was on the verge of breaking up following a tragedy, they were remarkably locked in and energized.

In fact, given what they had been through, the brightness of this song could be a little off-putting if you think about it enough. But Chicago got famous making buoyant pop songs about the simple pleasures in life, not by making profound statements of life and death. So perhaps it would have been more out-of-character to have made a song that more directly addressed their grief.

“Alive Again” stands in stark contrast to how The Pretenders dealt with the loss of their guitar player a few years later. I’ve always said there is no right or wrong way to grieve, we all find our own path. These songs are good examples of that.

I liked a lot of Chicago’s music when I was younger. I can still admire their craft on a few songs. However, their catalog very much strikes me as mellow, old people music now. While I may be trending in that direction, it’s not what I would choose to listen to.

This song, though, has an energy that separates it from many of their other big hits. A little more rock-y than usual, with even a hint of toughness. A tease of disco, likely picked up when the horn section worked with the Bee Gee’s on “Tragedy” earlier in the year. It has an energy that was rare in Chicago’s biggest hits. “Alive Again” is the one Chicago track I’m excited to hear a few times every year. 7/10

For the video portion, you get some bonus Dick Clark action.

Chart Week: October 4, 1980
Song: “I’m Alright” – Kenny Loggins
Chart Position: #8, 13th week on the chart. Peaked at #7 the next two weeks.

Every successful career has a turning point, a moment that elevates it from being run-of-the-mill into something special and lasting. This song, for example, recorded as a favor to a friend for a movie that initially was a bit of a flop, helped turned Kenny Loggins into one of the best known artists of the Eighties.

After a decent run in the Seventies – first with The Nitty Gritty Dirty Band, then in Loggins and Messina, and finally as a solo artist – Loggins hit the Top 40 six times in the 1980s with songs that appeared on movie soundtracks. Four of those would crack the Top 10. His title track for the movie Footloose would become the only #1 of his career.

Eventually, people started calling Loggins the King of the Movie Soundtrack.

It’s funny for me to think of him in just that way. That’s primarily because my mom really liked his music and had many of his solo albums. I can go deep on some early ‘80s Kenny! Really, only three of his movie songs had staying power beyond their chart runs. “Footloose,”“Danger Zone,” from Top Gun, and “I’m Alright” were so big, they are what people remember him for, not the eight other Top 40 hits from his solo albums, or for co-writing the Doobie Brothers’ #1 hit “What A Fool Believes.” But it seemed like every summer would bring another Loggins song (or two) that was tied to a movie.

He started on the path to his honorary royalty thanks to another movie connection.

In 1976 he wrote the song “I Believe In Love,” which Barbra Streisand sang in that year’s version of A Star Is Born. Through that project he became friends with the movie’s producer, Jon Peters. A few years later Peters called Loggins and said he was working on a new movie, Caddyshack, and needed a song for the title sequence. Loggins saw an early cut of the movie – one that did not yet include the animatronic gopher tearing up the golf course – and was struck by Michael O’Keefe’s character Danny Noonan.

“… I got the idea they wanted to portray him as a bit of a rebel, even though he had not yet achieved that particular character,” said Loggins. “(He) was trying to figure out where he fit. But at the same time he wanted people to leave him alone and let him find his own way. So I wanted to grab him and summarize that character, and that’s what ‘I’m Alright’ is doing."

I’m not sure I ever got much of that. Probably because I was nine years old when the single was released and didn’t bother to consider the lyrics much then. Or since, to be honest. It was just a really good song that I heard often before, during, and after our move from southeast Missouri to Kansas City in the summer of 1980. I heard it often on the AM radios in my parents’ cars and on the transister radio I received for my birthday that I carried around everywhere.

It also fit Peters’ title sequence perfectly. It followed Noonan as he rode his bike from his chaotic, overfilled, over-the-top stereotypically Irish home to the assumed relaxed and refined environment of Bushwood Country Club. The song is fun, engages the listener, and has some momentum to it that gets you amped for what you’re about to see on the screen. I also hear the rumble of the road in our multiple trips between Southeast Missouri and KC that summer.

When re-listening to “I’m Alright” this week, I thought for a moment that Lindsey Buckingham might have co-wrote it with Loggins. There are so many elements to it that sound like a Buckingham song. The structure, the instrumentation, the layering of the vocals, that hint of country-rock. Hell, the drums, with their floppy, heaviness recall Mick Fleetwood’s work behind the kit, so I guess this sounds more like a Fleetwood Mac song without the female vocalists than a Buckingham solo effort. There might be some common threads in there, but neither Buckingham nor Fleetwood had any involvement in the track’s writing and recording.

Casey Kasem’s introduction for the record on this week’s countdown blew my mind a little. He said sometimes a song will be a hit no matter what gets in its way. In this case, he noted, Caddyshack had not done well at the box office, and the soundtrack wasn’t selling well either. But “I’m Alright” was doing just fine on its own, still climbing in its fourth month on the Hot 100.

It’s wild to hear a transmission from the fall of 1980 claiming that Caddyshack was a commercial disappointment. I didn’t see it then, but it seemed like every kid I knew with an older sibling had seen it. There was much talk about it at the bus stop. Weird that Caddyshack didn’t really become a huge hit until a few years later, when it landed on cable and our generation could watch it over-and-over, memorizing every line, and boring bystanders with horrible immitations of Carl Spackler’s “Gunga galunga” speech.

The song holds up. It’s not just nostalgia for the movie that keeps it in high rotation on ‘80s stations. It’s a genuinely good song, by an artist who knew better than anyone else how to craft a pop tune that pulled in vibes from the film it was attached to.8/10

One more note: when Loggins was recording “I’m Alright,” Eddie Money was working on his own album in a nearby studio. Loggins invited him over to lay down some background vocals. You can hear Money most distinctly when he sings the line “You make me feel good!” in the bridge.

Well, Loggins did not give Money an official credit for his contribution. That started a grudge that lasted at least 34 years.

“I’m not a fan of Kenny Loggins to tell you the truth,” he told Cincinnati morning show host Kidd Chris of WEBN in 2014. “I sang the bridge in that. We were label mates, you know.”

I wonder if they made up before Money passed in 2019.

Chart Week: September 7, 1985
Song: “Cry” – Godley & Creme
Chart Position: #24, 8th week on the chart. Peaked at #16 the week of October 5.

Every decade is filled with unlikely hits. In the Eighties, the best way to force your way into the Top 40 was by making a video that was unique and memorable.

That’s how Englishmen Godley & Creme earned their only hit as a duo in the US.

Kevin Godley and Lol Creme[1] first met in the late 1950s and began making music together almost immediately. They were partners in several groups, eventually landing in 10cc. They were part of the 10cc roster when that band had its biggest American single, the 1975 dreamy masterpiece “I’m Not In Love,” which peaked at #2 on the Hot 100.

The duo left 10cc in 1976 to work on their own. They managed to churn out a couple minor UK hits but had no luck in America. However, as Casey shared during this countdown, Godley & Creme weren’t limited to just making records.

Beginning in 1977, they experimented with video to supplement their music. Turned out the lads had some skills crafting images for the small screen. Soon they were making videos for other artists. Notable G&C works included Duran Duran’s “Girls On Film” and “A View To A Kill;” Asia’s “Heat of the Moment” and “Only Time Will Tell;” Elton John’s “Kiss the Bride;” and Artists Against Apartheid’s “Sun City.”[2]

They were most famous for three other pieces.

In 1983 they directed the wild video for Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit.” Without that video, there was no way white, suburban kids like me would have ever heard a Herbie Hancock song without having a really cool uncle.[3] Later that year, the stark, art-house cinema influenced piece for The Police’s mega-smash “Every Breath You Take” was also a G&C joint.[4] The partners earned a stack of awards for those two projects. Casey described to their work as “unusual, complex videos.” I like that. He was calling them artsy, but doing so in a way that wouldn’t put regular folks off.

Then, in 1985, came the video for their single “Cry.”

In that piece, Godley & Creme used the relatively new technique of morphing – the dissolving of one image into another – to blend the faces of various people singing “Cry.” It was a startling effect that helped it stand out from the other videos on MTV at the time, and I’m 100% sure it was almost solely responsible for the song’s success.

Godley said the track’s basic lyrics led them to selecting the visuals for the video.

“It occurred to us that the song itself is a kind of song that anyone can sing,” Godley told Songfacts. “So, we thought, why not do just that? Find a load of interesting faces, including ourselves of course, get them in the studio and get them to lip sync to the song and see what happens, which is precisely what we did.”

A few years later John Landis used the same effect, with a bigger budget and more advanced, digital processing, in the short film for Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White.”

I say the single was successful because of the video. That does not mean that the song itself isn’t good. Musically, it has a cool, sensual swagger countered by dark, ominous undertones. It could easily be the score to a Cinemax movie about a private detective who gets involved with the woman he’s supposed to be investigating, only for things to get really messy. I’m thinking she turns up dead, he’s framed for it, and has to prove it was her ex or something along those lines. You know what else it sounds perfect for? Soundtracking a key, dramatic scene in an episode of Miami Vice. Oh, hey, guess what? That’s exactly what happened!

Godley’s vocals are also layered in significance. If you don’t listen to his words, you might think he was trying to seduce someone through his casual tone. The lyrics, though, are far more bitter than his voice suggests. The words aren’t Shakespearean, but they are exceptionally effective. The listener knows someone has done damage to him. The vocal outro, featuring Godley’s processed, freaked-out, falsetto screams, borders on melodramatic yet serves as the perfect ending statement. It is the only part of the music that has the same impact as the video. Just like that ex-lover who gets under your skin, so too does this song. 7/10

In a huge coincidence, M. Ward just released a cover of “Cry” on his new album.

My momentum in this series has been off for a few months. No worries for the two or three of you who care about these posts; I’m not giving up on them!

A combination of factors over the summer kept me from listening to American Top 40 very often. Less time in the kitchen, where I play the iHeart Radio Classic American Top 40 channel the most. No more SiriusXM in the car, so no 80s on 8 Big 40 countdowns to supplement my Casey shows.

While every AT40 boradcast ever aired has been re-mastered and digitized, iHeart Radio and Premiere Networks only play a portion of them. No one is sure why. As I’ve been listening to them, one way or another, for close to 20 years, many of them are repeats to me. Which both makes them a little boring and strips them of material for RFTS posts.

There is a way around this. The man who is responsible for those remastered editions also has the right to sell them. A couple weeks ago I learned that I could have the entire original Casey Kasem era – from 1970 to 1988 – delivered on a hard drive for the low price of $1500. Say I just wanted his shows from the 1980s? $750.

Ok, I love American Top 40 but fifteen hundred bucks, or even seven-fifty, is a lot. Me being me, I did think about it for a minute before deciding it was certainly too much to sneak past S when she reviewed that month’s credit card bill. She’s indulgent of my hobbies, but all indulgences have their limits!

However, I do have a high speed internet connection, a web browser, and the ability to use search engines. Thus I spent about a week finding and downloading hundreds of old AT40 recordings for free. My media hard drive in the basement now holds copies of 365 shows that aired between 1976 and 1986, my golden era of pop music.

I did the most damage in the Seventies, grabbing 196 countdowns, or 94% of the shows recorded between 1976–1979. For some reason the shows from the Eighties were harder to find. I managed to obtain just 46% of them, with as many as 37 (1981) and as few as 14 (1986) per year.

Yes, I tracked them in a spreadsheet.

My source was Archive.org, a brilliant, world treasure of a site for all kinds of material. There were several contributors who have uploaded AT40 programs, a few of which had just been updated. I figure if I keep an eye on those pages, some of my missing shows will eventually appear on them.

I also focused on downloading shows that were available in a single audio file. I skipped over dozens and dozens that had been broken into individual files based on either program hour or side of the original AT40 LP. When I’m bored with this original run of 365 countdowns, there should be opportunities to get more.

Most of the programs were ripped from radio broadcasts, so they include ads and local breaks from the stations that aired them. It has been jarring to hear weather reports from who knows when in the midst of some of them.

So what the hell am I going to do with 365 (and counting) American Top 40s? Play them and write some fucking blog posts!

At 3–4 hours per show, that’s a lot of listening.[1] I figure each week I’ll select a couple that correspond to that moment on the calendar, then scrub through them, focusing on Casey’s trivia between songs and tunes that jump out at me as interesting topics for new posts. I can’t see myself playing them all start-to-finish. I have too much other music and podcasts to listen to.

I’ve already reviewed two of my downloads. One was from September 9, 1979. While there was no great trivia for a new RFTS post in it, I was amazed that Gordon Elliott served as the guest host that week. This was before Elliott came to the States and established himself as a third-tier media personality. He was still a radio DJ in Australia at the time. Apparently one with good contacts in Hollywood!

There was one piece of trivia Elliott shared that was familiar. He told a story about Dionne Warwick’s career going sideways when she changed how she spelled her name on the advice of her astrologer. Casey would relay the same anecdote three years later; I wrote about it two years ago.

Kind of sloppy, AT40 folks. I imagine I’ll find other examples of repeated stories as I work through my digital pile of shows.

What does this all mean for you, the blog post consumer? Hopefully it gets me back on track for one or two RFTS posts per month. I’m currently working a draft based on a song from the second downloaded show I listened. The ratio of my collected shows also helps me with a goal I’ve had for a long time: writing more about music from the Seventies.

So that’s yet another weird way I’ve been wasting my time, obsessing about a radio show from my childhood. I know it makes me seem (even more) like a psychopath, but we all need hobbies. And you benefit from my mania, so everybody wins!

Chart Week: June 20, 1987
Song: “I Want Your Sex” – George Michael
Chart Position: #36, 3rd week on the chart. Peaked at #2 the week of August 8.

Hey, a countdown that landed on my birthday! How did I celebrate turning 16? Well, we lived in San Leandro, CA at the time, and had dinner the night before at a seafood restaurant I loved in San Francisco. Being the Bay Area, it was like 50 and dreary. In late June. I wore a sweater and jeans to my birthday dinner, where on my first day at my new school the previous January, I had worn a t-shirt and shorts. Bay Area will always Bay Area.

I also spent much of the night pouting because my parents thought it would be hilarious to get me a Hot Wheels car as a joke gift instead of the real car I wanted. I had no concept of how expensive cars were, so I was an ungrateful ass and refused to talk to them while they laughed at me.

Michael Jackson isn’t the only Giant of the Eighties I (unintentionally) ignored in the first 100 posts in this series. I have yet to get to his sister Janet, who on this countdown with “The Pleasure Principle” became the first female solo artist to have six Top 40 singles from one album. Madonna is a Mount Rushmore of the Eighties artist, and I’ve posted about her zero times.

The final super-mega star of the era finally makes their RFTS debut this week, thanks to a bit of commonly accepted AT40 trivia that I discovered to be incorrect.

George Michael hit #1 eight times in the Eighties. He did so as a member of Wham!, as a solo artist, and on his duet with Aretha Franklin, “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me).” Tom Breihan has spent a lot of time covering Michael’s career, so there’s not much room for me to add anything new.[1]

While both “Careless Whisper” and “A Different Corner” were, officially, solo tracks, they appeared on Wham! albums. Thus, “I Want Your Sex” seemed like the proper beginning of his solo career. I’m not sure anyone was ready for the wholesome voice behind Wham! to morph into anything like this.

The song initially didn’t make much of an impact on me. For sure it was racy and suggestive, but as I wasn’t a big Michael fan, I didn’t devote much attention to it. It probably meant more to me that it was on the Beverly Hills Cop 2 soundtrack.

Until the video hit MTV.

Holy smokes!

Michael’s girlfriend Kathy Jeung prancing around in lingerie and the couple frolicking together in satin sheets seemed like a late-night Cinemax movie being played every 90 minutes all day long. Remember back when MTV would tell you the exact times when they were going to play new videos? I doubt many teenage boys missed those premiere times for “I Want Your Sex.”

Looking back, like most things that were edgy 40 years ago, the video seems pretty tame today. You see more graphic, sexually suggestive scenes in promos for prime time shows that run during daytime sporting events. I bet if you showed the video to a 16-year-old boy today it wouldn’t register much given what they have access to. I mean, they would probably still watch it, but its impact would be dramatically different than how it affected their dads.

It is also funny how many of us teenage horndogs were completely dubious of Michael’s relationship with Jeung. Could a British guy who looked, sang, and danced like him really be into a woman who looked like that? Or any woman for that matter? We weren’t familiar with the term “beard” yet, but I bet there was about 99% consensus in my friend group that Michael wasn’t really into her.

Turns out we were mostly right. Michael and Jeung had a genuine relationship, but he was also struggling to come to terms with being a gay man living in the public eye.

As for that piece of AT40 trivia I debunked…

When people talk about “I Want Your Sex” and the various controversies around it – the refusal by many radio stations to play it, the video and the disclaimers Michael eventually added saying the song was not about casual sex – they often claim that Casey Kasem never uttered its title during the song’s 13 weeks on American Top 40. A quick web search will return many sites that make this claim.

Turns out that is not true.

In this, the track’s debut week on AT40, Casey introduced it by saying it might be difficult for some listeners to hear, as many radio stations were refusing to play it. He called it “George Michael’s latest hit,” but indeed identified it by its full title both before and after spinning it. For the rest of its chart run, it remained only “George Michael’s latest hit,” or some variation on that. Which is weird. Michael sings the full title six times, so Casey not saying it doesn’t really change things.

For small town America, “I “Want Your Sex” was far too overt. For the urban centers where the AIDS epidemic was spreading out of the gay community into the larger population, singing so directly about the joys of sex seemed irresponsible. Casey was always loyal to the hundreds of stations that carried his show, and I guess he was giving those program directors an assist by not saying the title and including directions for how to skip the song in each countdown’s cue sheet.

That reluctance by some radio stations to play “I Want Your Sex” probably kept it from reaching #1, a momentary speed bump in Michael’s career. Casey never played favorites with songs, but I bet he was relieved that “I Want Your Sex” fell just short of the top spot and stations across the country didn’t skip the end of the countdown.

The weirdest thing about “I Want Your Sex,” to me at least, is the irony in its title. For a song explicitly about sex, it’s not very sexy. Wait, that’s not true. From the porno-soundtrack bounce of the electric bass, synthesizers, and cowbell, to Michael’s growling voice on his most insistent lines, there is plenty of sex here. However, there is nothing subtle about it. There are no clever, winking innuendos. It is raw, direct, and nakedly about lust, without any sense of seduction or romance. What once seemed titillating and provocative now comes across as over-the-top and, more than anything else, kind of silly. Could you ever sing this song with a straight face, as opposed to “Let’s Get It On,” or “Ain’t To Proud To Beg”?

It reminds me of two drunk people, as they are closing down their third bar of the night, clumsily deciding to go home together. It’s a physical transaction, devoid of romance, more focused on the end result than the process of getting there.

Michael didn’t seem to love the song, either. He never performed it live after 1989 and refused to include it in two different greatest hits collections. In 2008 he described it as “a bad Prince song,” which is both harsh and pretty funny.

“I Want Your Sex” was very effective in serving as a hard break from the more innocent sound of Wham! as Michael transitioned to the music he felt represented him best. To me, though, it suffers because his songs that followed over the next year were so much better. 6/10

Chart Week: June 4, 1983
Song: “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” – Michael Jackson
Chart Position: #22, 2nd week on the chart. Peaked at #5 for two weeks in July.

High Fidelity was one of my favorite movies of the early 2000s. I loved the record store culture it celebrated. Hanging around with fellow music geeks, arguing about insanely obscure bits of trivia, opening each other’s minds to new sounds, and mocking people who did not listen to the right kind of music (according to us) seemed like a great way to earn a living. And making music lists all day? Could anything be more up my alley than that?!?!

One of my top five lists the employees of Championship Vinyl assembled was Top Five Side One, Track Ones.[1] Naturally, given the personalities in the store, the conversation went off the rails quickly.

There are like a million great Side One, Track Ones, so this list was destined to be flawed. The biggest selling album of all time was probably too mainstream for the Championship crew. But, seriously, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” should be on every Side One, Track One list!

You can make a legit argument that it is the greatest Side One, Track One of all time. Is it a great song? Yes. Is it on a great album? One of the greatest. Does it stand up next to the monster hits later on the LP? 100%. Does it have a bonus quality that gives it a boost? Um, check out the title.

The greatest Side One, Track Ones have to be more than terrific songs, though. They must be a blueprint for what is to follow. When you drop the needle or press play, the first sounds you hear have to grab your attention and excite you about where the next hour or so will take you. They need to make you think, or say, “Holy Shit!”

“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” does all of that.

It makes an impact with its first beats. The bass, high hats, funky guitar, keyboards, and horns slowly fill in to create the classic Quincy Jones sound. When Michael Jackson begins singing, there is no mistaking the urgency in his voice. He squeezes a lot of syllables into small spaces, maintaining complete control the whole time. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” was a mission statement that Michael was all grown up, want to get something started, and would not fuck around while doing so.

Well, Michael never used the word fuck, but it was implied here.

There is a sense of unrestrained joy and celebration throughout the track. Michael’s rapturous lead vocals, including all the undefinable yelps, whoops, and hiccups. The ecstatic backing vocals. The blissful blasts from the horns. The entire low end of the song, which sets a sturdy groove for everything built upon it. The almost overwhelming hand claps in the outro. This song is a straight party from the first note to the last.

Did anyone ever make nonsense sound as good as Michael? This song includes the lines:

You’re a vegetable

Ma ma se, mama sa, ma ma coo sa

and

Hee-haw

It’s all straight ridiculousness, yet Michael made it sound amazing.[2]

He originally wrote and recorded this track in 1979 for the Off the Wall album. Which explains why you hear more of a disco influence on it than on any other Thriller track. That earlier version was written about his sister LaToya’s relationship with some of her sisters-in-law. Which seems both super interesting and a bizarre basis for a dance-pop song. But these were the Jacksons…

When he re-vamped it for Thriller, he shifted the focus to be about how the media builds up and tears down celebrities, foreshadowing where his life and music were soon headed.

How in the hell did this song not top the Billboard pop chart? It was already at #22 in its second week on the entire Hot 100!

Was it MJ fatigue? Maybe. “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” dominated the spring of 1983. They were EVERYWHERE for four months. No matter how good the next song was, it was going to be difficult to match the their chart success.

It didn’t help that the song’s first week at #5 was also the beginning of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take”’s two-month reign at the top of the chart. Irene Cara’s former #1 “Flashdance…What A Feeling” was also ahead of Michael both weeks. The other two songs that kept “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” from climbing higher? Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue,” and Sergio Mendes’ “Never Gonna Let You Go.” Segio fucking Mendes!

The biggest reason is, likely, that Michael didn’t release a video for “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” Why? I can’t find a reason. It seems kind of insane that MJ didn’t make one. Perhaps it was his ego, insisting he could be just as successful without the MTV push. Or maybe it was Epic Records wanting to save some money? Perhaps there just wasn’t enough time in Michael’s schedule.

The record did make it to #1 in Canada and The Netherlands but topped out at #5 here in the States. I think that’s crazy and a sign that sometimes America isn’t all that it can be.

Another crazy thing: I did not know until sometime in the last 5–10 years that part of the third verse referenced “Billie Jean.” I don’t remember how I learned that: on another AT40, in some list of songs that reference other songs, or just in an article about MJ’s music. I do know my mind was utterly blown that I had never deciphered what Michael was saying in that verse. I blame it on getting my copy of Thriller from Columbia House, which lacked the lyric sheet.

You know what else is crazy? That I somehow made it through 100 RFTS entries without any of them focusing on Michael Jackson. Sure, I’ve referenced him multiple times.[3] But never writing just about Michael seems like a massive oversight.

Yeah, I know, his career became very problematic. There are a lot of people who have serious, legitimate issues listening to his music. However, I’ve always been able to compartmentalize his songs from what he was accused of doing. I haven’t been able to do that with some other artists, so I realize that makes me a bit of a hypocrite.

When Pitchfork last ranked their Top 200 songs of the 1980s, they included four tracks from Thriller. The highest? “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” which they slotted as the second-best song of the decade, 11 spots higher than “Billie Jean.” Maybe it was that lack of a video that kept “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” from topping the pop chart like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” had done. It was every bit as good a song as those two number ones, though. This may be my newest musical obsession: convincing people that “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is a woefully underrated, under appreciated song. 9/10

With 100 Reaching for the Stars entries under my belt, it is time to break down where we’ve been, AT40 style.

It should be no shock that there have been more entries from 1984 than any other year, a healthy 18 posts from the greatest year in pop music history. I was mildly surprised that 1982 was second with 16. Not sure if that’s a function of more 1982 countdowns being rebroadcast than other years, or more 1982 songs grabbing my attention. Here’s a year-by-year breakdown:

1976 – 3
1977 – 2
1978 – 4
1979 – 3
1980 – 6
1981 – 7
1982 – 16
1983 – 12
1984 – 18
1985 – 10
1986 – 10
1987 – 3
1988 – 2
1989 – 3
2023 – 1

One of the biggest artists of 1984 led the way on the posts-per-act list. Again, not a surprise who is at the top.

Prince – 3
Elton John – 2*
Daryl Hall and John Oates – 2
Pat Benatar – 2
Sheena Easton – 2
Kansas – 2
Stevie Nicks – 2*

(Both Elton and Stevie have entires as duets with other artists that I give them full credit for.)

Another common element of American Top 40 was Casey Kasem sharing the geographic breakdown of charts in weeks when there was a lot of non-American representation. “This week there are a whopping 21 foreign acts on the chart!” Here are the locations where we can place pins on our virtual RFTS map.

United States – 67
United Kingdom – 20
Australia – 4
Canada – 4
Netherlands – 1

The remaining four were either multi-national groups or posts about special countdowns that had no single act as a focus.

I tried to tally the entries by genre, but that proved difficult. In retrospect, like 90% of what I’ve written about can be defined as Pop. How do you decide which Prince songs were Pop and which were Soul, for example? Same for several other Black artists. Where was the line between Pop and Rock? Adult contemporary vs. Pop? Disco/Dance vs. Soul? Impossible. So I scrapped that breakdown.

Beyond those numbers, nothing else really jumped out at me. My entries have gotten longer and more detailed, which shouldn’t be a surprise. They also take more time to write now than they did when I began this series. I think that has made them better. I hope that means they are more interesting to read for my fellow music geeks. If you’re not into deep music trivia dives, you probably think those early posts were better.

If you want to go back and review any of the first 100 posts in the series, here’s the link to my RFTS page.

If you had any worries that I was bringing the series to a close after making it to 100 post, never fear, I’m already working on volume 101. I also have several partial drafts waiting for when we get to the right part of the calendar. As Casey said every week, the countdown continues!

Chart Week: May 15, 1987
Song: “Don’t Dream It’s Over” – Crowded House
Chart Position: #15, 18th week on the chart. Peaked at #2 for one week in April.

A few months ago, as I moved into posts 90-plus in this series, I considered whether I should do something special for number 100. Then I realized that since these entries are pretty sporadic, there was no way to predict where in the calendar we would be until we got to Volume 100.

Amazingly, organically, without any effort on my part – I swear! – it coincides with me hearing a couple countdowns from the spring of 1987. Both of which featured my all-time favorite song at or near its peak.

You may laugh when I reference the Music Gods. They are real, though, and they are mighty.

I’ve written about how much “Don’t Dream It’s Over” means to me several times over the years. A quick refresher: it arrived on the radio shortly after I started classes at my new high school in the Bay Area. I struggled to make friends right away, and I was bummed that all my California dreams had not come true the instant I set foot in the Golden State. As this record climbed the Hot 100 that spring, Neil Finn’s bittersweet lyrics and music resonated with me.

What struck me most was how the song addressed the loneliness and disappointment inside me, while also serving as a guide for climbing out of that depression. Even when Finn is singing about being overwhelmed and let down, there is a strong thread of resilience and even defiance in his music. If you can just hang on through the bad times, he seemed to be saying, better ones are sure to come.

Finn is one of the greatest pop songwriters of any era, and he packs so many wonderful elements into “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” There’s his opening riff, which sets the tone for the bumpy ride that is ahead, descending notes immediately followed by ascending ones. There is the way his vocals convey emotion, sounding weary and resigned in the first two verses, then strong and hopeful in the choruses and final verse. Mitchell Froom’s melancholic organ solo is countered by Finn’s bright, optimistic guitar. There’s the single-beat pause in the final verse, a simple yet brilliant choice. As the tune slowly fades, Finn and the backing vocals are lifting you up while Froom’s organ is again in opposition. Finn is economical, yet loads each lyric with great meaning.

Ironically, for as much as I love “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” and as much as it has meant to me for the last 37 years, I’m having a hard time writing about it. That’s probably for the best. No one needs me breaking it down, line by line, throwing all that accumulated history at each of Finn’s words.

Neil Finn is one of the most important artists in my musical life. I adore so much of what he’s done in his career, from the songs he wrote as a teenager for his big brother Tim’s band Split Enz,[1] to the three eras of Crowded House, then again with Tim as The Finn Brothers, to his excellent solo work, to the 7 Worlds Collide project.[2] My own Neil Finn Greatest Hits collection would stretch for 30 tracks? Forty? More?

In a career filled with magnificent, perfect, pop tunes, this is his crown jewel.

Hey now, hey now, it is a 10/10.

As a bonus, this is the final time the band’s original members performed the song together, closing their Farewell to the World concert in 1996 in front of a quarter million fans at the Sydney Opera House.

Chart Week: April 30, 1983
Song: “Back On The Chain Gang” – The Pretenders
Chart Position: #37, 21st week on the chart. Peaked at #5 for three weeks in March and April.

The Pretenders were on the verge of big things in 1982. They already had a #1 hit in the UK – 1979’s “Brass In Pocket,” which maxed out at #14 in the US – and were generally beloved by critics. They somehow managed to dip a toe in almost every genre of rock without being relegated to a single camp. They had roots in the London punk scene of the late Seventies, but weren’t punk. They were contemporaries of the first generation of post-punkers, New Wavers, and New Romantics, but didn’t fit squarely into any of those schools. They stood next early College Rock bands like R.E.M. but weren’t really college rock. They had a healthy dose of 1960s jangle pop to their sound, and could have fit into the Paisley Underground scene had they come up in LA. But they weren’t from LA. Nor were they true mainstream rockers.

That difficulty in pigeonholing them resulted in broad appeal that was ripe for capitalizing upon when they started making their third LP.

In mid–1982 the band, specifically lead singer and lyricist Chrissie Hynde and guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, began to hash out ideas for new songs. Hynde had one centered on finding a photo of her boyfriend, Kinks lead singer Ray Davies, and the feelings that came with it. The couple had a tumultuous romance, but Hynde was newly pregnant and hoped that would salvage their relationship. Yet she still thought back to how things were better when they had first met.

Hynde and Honeyman-Scott tinkered with the words and arrangement and knew they were onto something. They were excited about recording it with the rest of the band.

One problem. Pretenders bass player Pete Farndon had fallen deep into heroin addiction. He had turned irritable and quarrelsome towards his bandmates. Sensing that the upcoming recording sessions would be brutal and unproductive because of Farndon’s behavior, Honeyman-Scott laid down an ultimatum: either sack Farndon or he would leave.

On July 14, 1982 the band fired Farndon.

As upsetting as that was, something worse came hours later.

On July 16, Honeyman-Scott died of an accidental overdose.

In two days, half of the original Pretenders lineup was gone.

Most people would have retreated from the world to deal with the immense pain they were experiencing. Not Hynde. She leaned on her music.

On July 20, 1982, she and drummer Martin Chambers entered the AIR Studios in London and recorded “Back On The Chain Gang” with help from several friends, including Big Country’s Tony Butler on bass. What began as an ode to the early days of her romance with Davies turned into an elegy for Honeyman-Scott.

There is an immediate sense of melancholy in Hynde’s opening riff. I think it comes from the languid, contemplative tempo she plays at. You can feel the sadness that must have been overwhelming her at the time. Once I knew the full story behind the song, I always imagined her taking a long, deep breath before she hit the first chord, steeling herself against the emotions that were sure to swell up.

She adds to that mournful vibe with the “Oh oh oh ohs” that are sprinkled through the tune. Hynde is one of the great, badass, female rockers of all time. I wouldn’t say she was ever as vocally aggressive as her contemporary Joan Jett, but she was certainly as assertive. The restraint she used in “Back On The Chain Gang” was wonderful, conveying all the emotions she was going through without over doing it. The real genius of her performance is that it doesn’t sound as though it recorded less than a week after her band seemed to fall apart. It sounds like she is a year or two out, looking back on what happened, and trying to make sense of it all.

The song peaks with an emotional section where the bridge transitions into the final verse.

First, Hynde sings this:

But I’ll die as I stand here today knowing that deep in my heart
They’ll fall to ruin one day for making us part

Her restraint falls momentarily, with her voice breaking as she stretches out the final word.

Then there is that magical line in the next verse. After repeating “I found a picture of you,” she adds:

Those were the happiest days of my life

A truly heart-wrenching, soul-destroying choice of words. You don’t have to know about the state of her partnership with Davies, the health of her band, or the loss of one of her best friends to get all the feels from that line. The “Oh oh oh ohs” hit harder in the final verse, too.

When asked a few years later about how she could record music so soon after experiencing so much pain, Hynde responded, “What else were we going to do? Stay at home and be miserable, or go into the studio and do what we dig and be miserable?” That idea, jumping back into the grind when faced with calamity, was as much the theme of the song as celebrating Honeyman-Scott

Despite everything falling apart around her, Hynde got back on the chain gang. The result was the best song of her career. 9/10

As if all that weren’t enough, as the song was falling from its US chart peak, there was more terrible news. On April 13, Farndon was found dead after overdosing and drowning in a bathtub.

“Back On The Chain Gang” was released as a single in late 1982. Somewhat strangely, the album it was featured on, Learning to Crawl, was not released until early 1984. Included on that LP was another ode to Honeyman-Scott, “2000 Miles.” I wouldn’t say it is a holiday classic; it is far too depressing to get much radio airplay. Coldplay did a version in the early 2000s that revived it a bit. KT Tunstall’s slightly less sad version is in all my Spotify holiday playlists.

How about this amazing rendition of the song from the Covid days. Hynde was nearly 70 and still had it.