Tag: RFTS (Page 1 of 12)

Chart Week: March 24, 1984
Song: “Eat It” – ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic
Chart Position: #18, 3rd week on the chart. Peaked at #11 the week of April 14.

It’s been a while, and for that I offer my endless apologies. I still listen to at least part of an AT40 show every weekend. Over the past couple months I’ve started several drafts for new RFTS entries. However, each time I’ve lost enthusiasm while doing research and have let them die on the digital vine.[1] To be honest, today’s selection isn’t one I would have normally been interested in. But I was getting antsy about not updating the series, plus spring break is next week and the site will be on hiatus. It worked out that there is an interesting aspect of this song that relates to the greatest musical rivalry of the Eighties and made it worth writing about.

I never really got ‘Weird Al’. I admired his cleverness and ability to make such coherent parodies of other great songs. There is true craft to that. I also respected his total commitment to the bit that included mimicking the visuals – including clothing, dancing, and videos – of the original artists. His songs were always a little too goofy for me, though. Maybe it was because I never listened to Dr. Demento to develop the part of my musical brain that would connect with them.

Yankovic began making parodies in the late 1970s without any chart success. I remember hearing his 1983 singles “Ricky,” (Toni Basil’s “Mickey”) and “I Love Rocky Road” (Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”), but neither cracked the Top 40.

His break came when he took on Michael Jackson’s mega-smash “Beat It.” I’ve written several times about the power of Jackson’s name in 1983–84. “Eat It” might be the biggest and best example of MJ’s influence. In only its third week in the Hot 100, the record was already at #18, and was the biggest climber in this countdown. Michael’s help could only take this song so far, as it stalled out at #11 a month later.

Although parody is protected under American copyright law, Yankovic always asked artists for their permission before recording his versions of their originals. For the most part he received clearance. That was true in this case; “Eat It” only existed because of Michael’s blessing.

“Michael Jackson wasn’t just cool about my parody of ‘Beat It,’” Yankovic told Billboard magazine, “but he also loved my version of ‘Bad,’ which was ‘Fat.’ He even let me use the actual ‘Bad’ subway set for the ‘Fat’ video. He was very supportive, which was huge with opening the doors with other artists. Because if Michael Jackson signed on, you couldn’t really say no.”

Well, one person said no.

Weird Al asked Prince at least four times for permission to cover one of his songs. Each time the Purple One declined. Al had an idea for “Let’s Go Crazy” based on The Beverly Hillbillies. For “1999,” he wanted to sing about dialing a 1–800 number that ended with the digits 1999. None of his pitches swayed Prince. Or, more likely, Prince just didn’t have a sense of humor about his own music. Maybe Al should have asked to do a straight cover rather than parody, as Prince loved for other people to sing the words he wrote. Or maybe if Al had been an attractive, ethnically ambiguous woman Prince would have signed off.

I’m not sure it sways their battle in any way, but score one for Michael over Prince here.

“Eat It” went to #1 in Australia, which is amazing. It has sold over 500,000 copies in the US. It was Yankovic’s biggest American hit until “White & Nerdy” hit #9 in 2006.

As I said, “Eat It” never did much for me, and still doesn’t. The video is funny, but I’m never going to seek the song out. I know a lot of other people like it a lot more than I do. So I’m genuinely sorry if this grade disappoints you. 5/10

Speaking of Michael Jackson, also on this week’s chart, “Thriller” checked in at #11 on its way down after peaking at #4. And Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” which featured Jackson on background vocals, began its three-week stay at #2.

Chart Week: January 7, 1978
Song: “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” – Crystal Gayle
Chart Position: #16, 22nd week on the chart. Peaked at #2 for three weeks in November/December 1977.

What is the first American Top 40 show I remember listening to? If you know me, you understand that I wish I could identify that broadcast to give it the appropriate commemorative post. My first vivid memories of hearing Casey’s voice for which I can clearly identify the year are from 1978. Mostly in the spring, after my parents separated for the first time, and my mom and I moved in with a friend of hers for a few months until we got our own apartment.

However, there are murkier memories from earlier that year in which I remember specific songs, but can’t be sure whether I recall hearing Casey introduce them on his program.

When I listened to this countdown there was a flood of recollections from this moment in my life. Specifically of a big snowstorm that hit southeast Missouri in January 1978, wiping out several days of school. Snow days are always awesome, but this time the Star Wars action figures that my parents got me for Christmas, which famously had to be shipped to kids all over the country weeks after the holiday, arrived the day before this bonus break. I remember sitting in my room playing with the most prized possessions I had owned to that point in my young life while we were stuck inside, the biggest hits of the day playing on the very cool, European clock radio my aunt and uncle had sent me from Germany.[1]

I’m guessing that storm came a little later in January than this countdown aired. So let’s say that sometime in the opening month of 1978 was the first time my brain registers me listening to Casey countdown the 40 hottest records in the country.

What entries sparked memories of that snowy month? Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name,” “Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill, “I Go Crazy” by Paul Davis, ELO’s “Turn to Stone,” “Just the Way You Are,” by Billy Joel, “We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You,” by Queen, and Styx’s “Come Sail Away.” I can hear them coming out of the speaker of that little radio as the sun reflecting off the piled up snow lit up my room. I can even feel the cold radiating off the window.

The tune that stuck out the most was Crystal Gayle’s biggest pop hit, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” which spent three weeks at #2 in late 1977.[2] I think it registered the most because my dad loved it, and, under the tree for him on Christmas morning was a copy of Gayle’s We Must Believe In Magic album. I remember that LP vividly for two reasons. First was Gayle’s striking appearance. She was a dazzlingly attractive woman. I might have been just six, but I wasn’t too young to sneak peaks at her pictures on the album sleeve when my parents weren’t looking. I’m sure the photos were super wholesome, but it felt like I was getting away with something when I sat in the corner next to our record player and stared at them. Second, we had no country music in our house. Nothing even close. So, even as a wee youngster, I was surprised by the addition of an album by a “country star” to the family album collection.[3]

I think my dad, and tons of other people, liked it because it doesn’t sound country at all. It has a more jazzy, adult contemporary vibe. There’s just a hint of swing to it, as well, the gentlest cocktail hour nudge. Unlike Dolly Parton, who was at #5 this week with her delightful “Here You Come Again,” Gayle sang without any twang. “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” certainly leans more towards cheesy, country club cotillion schmaltz than Hee Haw honky tonk.

That lack of true country character is remarkable because of Gayle’s geographic origins and sibling connection. She was born in Paintsville, KY, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. You would expect her voice to drip of that hilly country, just like her oldest sister, Loretta Lynn. There was no mistaking where Lynn was from. On this song, at least, Gayle could just as easily have been from Southern California or New York as deep in the mining country of Kentucky. Some of that is explained by her family moving to Wabash, IN when she was four. Compared to rural Kentucky, Wabash was much more urban, which led to Gayle listening to all kinds of music other than country. And, apparently, softening her accent.

Casey referenced that biological link as he introduced “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” this week. He noted that despite her reputation as one of THE queens of country music, Loretta Lynn had never had the kind of Top 40 success her baby sister was having. For years there were rumors the sisters didn’t get along because of professional jealousy. They both tried to quash that talk, but for some reason it came to define their relationship in the music press. You wonder if it started with relatively innocent comments like Casey’s. Or if it’s just because people suck.

Gayle would crack the pop top 20 a couple more times in the Seventies as a solo artist, then hit #7 with the Eddie Rabbit on the duet “You and I” in 1982. She was a monster in the Nashville world, though. She hit #1 a staggering 18 times on the country chart, with 16 other singles reaching the top 10. That’s a hall of fame career. I haven’t listened to any of those tracks, so I don’t know if she sounded more traditionally country on them, or if her voice always landed in that sweet range where no genre could entirely claim it.

I don’t love this song, but I don’t hate it, either. While lacking any regional identifiers, her voice is very nice. Gayle does an effective job portraying her sadness about a romance that is ending, but adds a subtle smokiness that should make her man want to come running back to her. Legend has it that it features the first studio take she recorded of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” She took a couple more cracks at the tune, but the producer told her to stop, as her initial effort could not be topped. She doesn’t show off a huge range, but stays in a pocket where every note is perfect. To bad the rest of the track kind of stinks. But a pretty face and a pretty voice can go a long way. Especially when you are six. 6/10

Chart Week: December 13, 1980
Song: “(Just Like) Starting Over” – John Lennon
Chart Position: #4, 7th week on the chart. Peaked at #1 for five weeks across December and January.

This entry is less about a specific song than an extraordinary moment in American Top 40 history. And an opportunity for me to revisit a lost piece of writing from my past.

One December night in the mid–2000s, I sat down and quickly typed out what I think is one of the best things I’ve ever written. It was too personal to share, though, so I stashed it in whatever notes/journaling app I was using at the time. Since I was a serial app hopper back in the day – trying out whatever the newest, latest, interesting program Mac Geeks were yapping about – I eventually lost that draft as I failed to save it while jumping from App A to App B. I’ve tried to re-create it a few times, but never captured the tone or emotion of that initial effort.

That essay was about the night/week John Lennon died and how I imagined my mom reacted to his death.

My memories of that night, December 8, 1980, are vague. I had likely been watching the Monday Night Football game between the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins earlier in the evening. I know my mom was working late so I would have been staying at a sitter’s house, and the sitter’s husband always had MNF on while he drank 182 beers. However, my mom had picked me up and we were home, with me likely in bed, by the time Howard Cosell made his famous announcement of Lennon’s passing.

I definitely remember being at the mall the night after the shooting and hearing Lennon’s music coming out of every store instead of the usual holiday racket. I recall the coverage on the news of people gathering in Central Park to mourn his death, which didn’t make sense to me. I knew who the Beatles were – my parents had their “Blue Album” which they listened to a ton when I was little – but likely didn’t understand who Lennon was until that week. Why were all these people so sad about a singer dying?[1]

I have fuzzy mental images of my mom being sad that week, but that may be more my brain making it up than based on reality. Besides, she was down a lot that fall and winter, so no particular night of sadness would seem unusual.

She was going through one of the most difficult stages of her life at the time. We moved to Kansas City in July and a few weeks later she and my dad finally decided to divorce after being separated off-and-on for most of the previous two years. Their marriage officially ended four days after Lennon was killed. She struggled to find a job in KC, working 10–12 hour shifts at a mall jewelry store while she sent out resumes hoping to re-launch her marketing career. She had a nine-year-old kid who was kind of a pain in the ass, mostly because he was getting into trouble at school a lot after the move. She was deeply in debt, some of it leftover from college and some that she and my dad had racked up trying to stay afloat in the difficult late–70s economy. My mom was generally an optimistic person, but when I think of her during this period, I see her worn out, depressed, and sleeping a lot.

In that lost composition from nearly 20 years ago, I tried to get into her head and understand what she may have been feeling after she learned of Lennon’s passing. She had all this other shit she was dealing with and then a man who wrote and sang some of her favorite songs of her teenage and young adult years was murdered in cold blood. For her, like so many others her age, any idealism left from her college years was likely destroyed for good that night. The world must have seemed very bleak to her. I think I went to some dark places in my essay, which probably was the reason I kept it to myself.

I never got the chance to ask my mom about that week in December 1980. She died in 1998 and I didn’t really fall in love with the Beatles until a few years later, when high speed internet and file sharing allowed me to dive deeply into their catalog. By then my own recollections of the week of Lennon’s death had faded so they were barely distinguishable amongst all the other 1980 nostalgia in my head.[2]

I wish I still had those drafted words. Maybe it is fitting, though, that they were deleted from the hard drive that held them and my memories of it are hazy and imperfect, much like my memories of the week John Lennon died.

Now to that piece of American Top 40 history. Lennon’s death forced a change to the show that had never been done before, nor since, as far as I can tell. Although he was killed on a Monday night, the program for the week of December 13 had already been recorded and was being pressed and shipped to radio stations.[3] Following the shooting, Casey Kasem recorded a brief tribute to Lennon, recalling his career, how his life fell apart in the Seventies, how he retreated from the public eye to be with his family, and how he had recently released a new album.[4] Casey ended with a message to both Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon. It is a powerful moment that closed a terrible week for music fans.

The addendum was rushed to radio stations and most inserted it into the countdown before the number four song that week, Lennon’s comeback hit, “(Just Like) Starting Over.”

(Here is another video that has both the original and revised introductions. It also adds some unnecessary music so I did not embed it.)

It is impossible for me to evaluate “(Just Like) Starting Over,” or the other two singles from the Double Fantasy album – “Woman” and “Watching the Wheels” – dispassionately. I’m pretty sure I rate them all one-to-three points higher than I would had Lennon not been shot and killed as/before they were played on the radio. They will forever be weighed down by the knowledge that Lennon was murdered just as he was about to top the pop charts again. They will always remind me of what my mom was going through, as well.

“(Just Like) Starting Over” was a wonderful way for John Lennon to re-introduce himself to the public. It had a light, throwback vibe that recalled the early rock songs he fell in love with and inspired him to start making his own music. Lennon admitted that he was trying to sound like Elvis or Roy Orbison on some of his vocals. The track is about recommitting to a relationship, just as he was doing to his fans who had waited patiently for new music from him. There’s nothing edgy or experimental about it like much of his late era Beatles work, nor confrontational and caustic like some of his Seventies records. I think that’s the point. He had just turned 40. He was happy and healthy. He was rejoining the world after hiding at home for five years. There was nothing wrong with making solid pop music that didn’t have a huge message beyond remembering how much you love the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with. 8/10

Chart Week: December 6, 1976
Song: “More Than A Feeling” – Boston
Chart Position: #9, 12th week on the chart. Peaked at #5 the week of December 25.

A perfect song.

I could end this post there and it would be enough. Why waste your and my time cranking out a thousand or so words breaking down the how and why when that simple phrase sums it all up?

Because that’s not the point of this series, obviously. In a pinch, though, say if asked as an elevator door was closing why I love “More Than A Feeling,” those three words would suffice. I’m not alone; I came across the same statement more than once while reading up on this all-time classic.

We’ll get to the tune itself in a moment, but first I wanted to use this entry as a chance to dive into my history as a true music geek. Because Boston might have been the band that started me down that path.

I certainly knew of Boston as a kid, although unlike several other records on this week’s countdown, I don’t have clear memories of it from late 1976. I do recall visiting my grandparents a couple summers later and seeing my uncle’s Boston albums in his collection and thinking the spaceship motif on the covers were cool. I may have been around when he played their second album, Don’t Look Back, and surely I heard its title track on the radio. But, again, no concrete memories from the first era of the band.

Fast forward to the early Eighties, when I began to form my own musical preferences. There were constant rumors of a new Boston album. They came on Entertainment Tonight and in quick comments by radio DJs. I heard them often enough that I had this low-key excitement for an album that may or may not exist by a band I wasn’t actually sure if I liked or not.

In the fall of 1986 Boston finally returned from their eight-year sabbatical with the monster ballad “Amanda,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. I quickly bought the Third Stage album and listened to it over-and-over. I also read band leader Tom Scholz’s super detailed liner notes over-and-over as I listened. In them he documented the arduous process that was the making of the album, including tales of tape so old it was nearly disintegrating and having to apply a restorative agent by hand in hopes of saving a song he had been working on for nearly a decade.

His notes piqued my interest. Soon I was digging through the Rolling Stone magazine archives at the library, pulling out articles about Boston from 1976, 1978, and any other year that they made news. I learned about Scholz’s unique background and the band’s incredible, out-of-nowhere rise to popularity ten years earlier. I bought and absorbed the first two Boston albums. Soon I was playing “More Than A Feeling,” “Peace Of Mind,” and “Don’t Look Back” along with the songs from Third Stage as often as current Top 40 tracks.

This was the first time I ever did this, discovering a band and working backwards through their history, both in consuming their music and exploring their biographical details. I would soon repeat the exercise with Van Halen, buying most of their back catalog later that same fall. Eventually I would do it with U2, The Clash, and others, falling in love with a band’s latest tunes and then exploring their older music while reading all I could about them.

In the Nineties, when I was both hearing bands as they burst onto the scene and logging onto the Internet for the first time, I was able to become an expert on groups that had only been releasing albums for a matter of months. Online music magazines, message boards, band websites, and weekly alternative papers kept me on the forefront of knowledge about the Gen X Alternative Rock Revolution.

This quirk has never faded, even as my music tastes changed.

Given my personality, surely I was destined to behave this way. But the credit, or blame depending how you look at it, for falling into my first musical rabbit hole goes to Boston.

Now, the music.

Tom Scholz was/is a legitimate musical genius. He has crafted almost every song Boston has ever made in home studios, spending hours meticulously assembling them by playing most of the instruments, sending those sounds through devices he invented to arrive at the tones he desired, and producing and mixing them to their final format. An engineer educated at MIT, music was a hobby to provide relief from his job at Polaroid. Beginning in the late Sixties, he spent nearly a decade toiling in his basement, shipping his demos to record labels, only to have each attempt ignored or rejected.

Finally, in 1976, his demo for “More Than A Feeling,” featuring vocalist Brad Delp, got a bite from Epic Records. Within a matter of months the duo had written, recorded, and released an album; formed a touring band; earned a slot as the opening act for Black Sabbath; and then headlined their own tour that featured a stop at Madison Square Garden. A crazy trajectory of success, especially in the pre-Internet age. For over 30 years, Boston was the biggest selling debut album of all-time, finally eclipsed by Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction in 2008.

Scholz is a studio master, recording and re-recording tracks endlessly and then spending hours layering and editing them in order to get the perfect sound. Again, in the pre-digital age. Lining up multiple tracks was not the simple act of cutting/pasting that it is today. It was an intensive, manual process that sometimes involved razor blades and tape – literal cutting and pasting! – to get multiple sections lined up properly.

That was one criticism of Boston and the other arena-oriented acts of their time: the music was overproduced, refined to sound great on radio, losing some of their soul in the process. Which is fair. If not careful, you can strip away some of a song’s energy and sense of spontaneity when refining them.

Boston’s answer to this was the presence of Delp. I’m going out on a limb here and proclaiming him as the greatest singer in rock history. Notice I say singer, not frontman. At worst, he is in a three-way tie with Freddy Mercury and Chris Cornell. But the man did things with his voice even those two legends could not match. Go watch some of the music theory breakdowns of Boston’s music and pay special attention to Delp’s isolated vocals. He hit notes that seem impossible, especially in the analog era when what you sang was what you recorded was what you released. Delp’s otherworldly voice added back any soul that had been eroded by Scholz’s hours of studio tinkering.

Put Scholz’s musical and engineering skills together with Delp’s unrivaled vocals and add Sib Hashian’s mammoth, caveman drumming, and the result was a sound that recalled those spaceships on the covers of Boston’s albums.[1] It was massive, irresistible, and brilliant. The instruments were the horsepower, Delp’s voice the torque that launched you into the heavens.

And this was their first ever single! Again, it is flawless, from the slow fade-in to Scholz’s guitar tone[2] (and pick slides) to Delp’s pitch-perfect high notes to its arrangement to its universal theme of wistfully looking back at a moment from your past.

“Amanda” might have been their biggest record on the pop chart, but this is the track that stands above everything else Boston has ever produced. It is one of the great songs of its era, of its genre, and of all time. Close your eyes and slip away. 10/10

I’m not sure why the official video is time edited, so I’ll throw the whole song on as well.

Chart Week: November 9, 1985
Song: “You Belong To The City” – Glenn Frey
Chart Position: #4, 9th week on the chart. Peaked at #2 for two weeks.

The fall of 1985 was one of those proverbial Big Times in my life.

I was a freshman in high school, which brought all kinds of new excitement and perils each day.

The Royals got hot late in the season, came back from two 3–1 post-season deficits, and won the World Series for the first time ever.

My mom and stepdad, who got married that August, bought a house that we moved into over the first weekend of November. After over 14 years in apartments, townhomes, and duplexes, this was the first detached home I lived in.

Big stuff.

Bigger than all of that, though, might have been my obsession with Miami Vice, which reached its peak as the second season of the show debuted and its soundtrack became the best selling album in the country. I believe I bought the cassette the week it came out and faithfully listened to it multiple times each day after school. I know I’ve shared this before, but there was a moment when I thought I would never need to buy another album again. I would just listen to the music from Miami Vice over-and-over until the end of time. Where would this site be if I had stuck to that plan?

The biggest single from the album was Jan Hammer’s “The Original Miami Vice Theme,” which spent a week at #1. It is still a banger, even if it became an Eighties, Yuppie cliché. I’ll crank that shit all the way up any time I hear it.

Glenn Frey placed two tracks on the soundtrack. “Smuggler’s Blues,” a song that first appeared on his 1984 solo album The Allnighter, served as the basis for MV episode 16 of season one. Frey even appeared in that show as the titular smuggler. Made sense to drop that tune onto the soundtrack.

He also wrote an original song for the program, “You Belong To The City,” which was used as the centerpiece musical moment within season two’s premiere episode. In that two-hour “movie event,” Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs traveled to Tubbs’ old stomping grounds of New York City to help the DEA track Colombian drug dealers who had murdered several undercover cops in Miami. The gritty, dark visuals of NYC were a stark contrast to the bright, tropical pastels of Miami that made the show stand out. Frey’s music was supposed to add to that shift in aesthetic.

At age 14, I ate this shit up. I freaking loved this song, from its smoky sax to Frey’s depiction of how the big city can dominate a person’s life.[1] It made me want to put on a linen jacket, smoke cigarettes, and have complicated relationships with women who spent hours teasing their hair into gravity-defying styles.

And probably drink a Michelob. This may have been the launching point for that mini-genre of late Eighties music that seemed crafted explicitly to be used in beer commercials.

Anyway, I was INTO this shit in the fall of ’85. I listened to it while I helped pack up the duplex my mom and I had lived in for five years and then as we settled into our new home. I listened to it while reading summaries of the Royals’ playoff run. I listened to it while shooting hoops. I listened to it while doing homework. My life had nothing in common with what Frey was singing about. That didn’t stop me from forming a tight bond with his music.

I decided to write about this song both to do a quick review of that fun fall and to introduce a new sub-category for songs in this series: Songs I Used To Love But Think Fucking Suck Today.

Probably too long a description, right? I’ll workshop it and tighten it up before I use it again.

That smoky sax comes across as cheesy now. The lyrics are nearly as clichéd. It feels like Frey (RIP, by the way) was trying to reach for something big when he wrote this. However, he came up woefully short and ended up with a bunch of words that seem hopelessly basic compared to what he was trying to conjure up. Go read the lyrics. They just look dumb.[2] I will admit, the chorus isn’t terrible. There’s some drama and emotion in those sections. But otherwise I always think of it being more a tool to sell me some lifestyle than a truly interesting song.

OK, maybe saying it fucking sucks is a little harsh. It is certainly of its era, for better and worse. Today I can hear it and chuckle, shaking my head at memories of my high school freshman self trying desperately to carve out some kind of cool identity just as I was going through my most awkward phases. It is truly shocking that I could not approach a fraction of the hipness of Crockett or Tubbs. Their Florida style just did not translate to a skinny kid with glasses in Missouri who preferred to not be the center of attention.

Frey was trying to translate their coolness, too. He did succeed in delivering a memorable track that fit the vapidness of Miami Vice. That meant it aged poorly, though, and those of us who loved the record as it climbed the Hot 100 quickly relegated it to the recesses of our music collections. Much like we soon hung those linen jackets in deepest corners of our closets. 4/10

It was soooo Eighties to have two different videos for “You Belong To The City.” One featured shots from the show, mostly Don Johnson walking around and smoking, cut with shots from around New York City. The other basically substitutes Frey for Johnson, and throws in a mystery lady for added drama.

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