“Key Largo” by Bertie Higgins (1982, #8)

One person’s view:  “Factor in Higgins’ blandly hunky vocals and the overly-smooth, glassy production, and you have a song that captures nothing of either the relationship he’s trying to save or the tropical paradise he’s convinced will save it.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.43 / 5.00

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, TV stations found it difficult to fill their schedules in the overnight hours when the networks weren’t feeding them any content.  (They couldn’t idle their transmitters in case the commies attacked and the Emergency Broadcast System was activated.)  Other than displaying a test pattern of a peacock, the most affordable option was to air black-and-white movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s that the studios offered at a discount.  This was the “late show”, a media phenomenon that lasted for a generation.  Every Baby Boomer has a memory of watching a Humphrey Bogart classic on TV at 2 AM during a bout with insomnia.  It must have been eerie to see this long-dead actor with a cigarette dangling from his lips and a cocktail in his hand, and to know that smoking and drinking had eventually killed him in dreadful fashion.  Maybe that specific cigarette was the one that did it?  Good luck getting back to sleep after thinking about that.

The tapes of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca started wearing out after 4 billion or so airings.  This prompted a shift to a more sustainable form of inexpensive programming:  infomercials.  Product labs reworked existing objects into new items that were perfect for advertising in this format.  A torture device from an Iraqi prison was rebranded as the “BowFlex 2000X”, for example, and a mad scientist by the name of Ron Popeil figured out how to cook a rotisserie chicken inside of an old motorcycle helmet.  Cheap talk shows and sitcom reruns also oozed into the nighttime hours along with the infomercials.  The old movies are now long gone and the Boomers who remember the late show format have started to die off with them.

If it were up to Bertie Higgins, the late show would still be on today.  His song “Key Largo” is a tribute to Humphrey Bogart’s films and the important place that they occupied on TV before the non-stop crapfest took over.  It is also a break-up song – or at least a near-break-up song.  Bertie pleads with his woman not to let their relationship end, reminding her of the times that they watched the late show together and comparing their own romance to that of Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall.  “Key Largo” has sentimentality, warmth, and a pleasant, memorable melody, but this well-crafted record was probably always doomed to premature obsolescence.

“Key Largo” came along just as radio stations were figuring out that their overreliance on soft rock ballads had been a huge mistake, and that the more lively and videogenic groups on MTV were the way of the future.  More inauspiciously, the song’s references to classic films mean very little to those of us born after 1965.  I had heard of Bogie & Bacall before “Key Largo” hit the charts, but I possessed only a vague notion of who they were.  I couldn’t have picked the couple out of a police lineup with Ozzie & Harriet Nelson and Kukla, Fran & Ollie.  Mostly, I associated Bogart with certain annoying meme-like phrases that adults sometimes uttered, such as “Here’s looking at you, kid” and “Don’t Bogart that joint, my friend.”  My younger brother didn’t know of him at all, and misheard the “Just like Bogie and Bacall” line as “Just like boogers in the car.”  In his view, “Key Largo” wasn’t a song about old movie stars.  It was a song about the sticky little landmines that you find on your backseat after you drive the neighbor’s kids to school.

Today’s listeners are even further removed from 1940s cinema, and they often inaccurately dismiss “Key Largo” as a lazy retelling of a Florida vacation.  This is unfair, but I have to admit that Bertie’s other work gives critics and complainers some grist for their mill.  Consider his follow-up single “Just Another Day in Paradise”, which is a genericized imitation of “Margaritaville”.  It would be the ideal music to play at a private-equity-owned tropical resort where beers cost $14 apiece and a beach patrol issues fines to anyone who tosses a Frisbee or wears a thong.  Bertie has grown tired of being called a second-rate Jimmy Buffett, however, and has recently branched out into disco with “Do the Donald”.  “The Donald” is the signature dance of our beloved 45th & 47th chief executive, a choreographic maneuver that commentator Bill Maher likens to “jerking off two guys at once.”  It’s the most obscene presidential dance since Herbert Hoover tauntingly shook his bare behind at a group of Bonus Army protesters from the gondola of a hot air balloon in 1932.  “The Donald” is too simple to need an instructional song, but Bertie wrote one anyway.  I guess he needed a place to use such patriotic lyrics as “He’s gonna be known as the Great Deporter.”

Although the Higgins oeuvre may contain a couple of embarrassments, “Key Largo” is not one of them.  Most break-up records consist of a guy whining about his precious feelings getting hurt, and Bertie deserves credit for not following that template.  It isn’t the song’s fault that its target audience of Bogart buffs has now aged out of Medicare and must get their annual check-ups from a paleontologist at the natural history museum.  Bertie should make a new disco song just for these elderly listeners who are too frail to even do “The Donald” anymore.  He can call it “Do the Melania”.  It will describe a less strenuous dance that consists of scowling bitterly and gently pushing the person next to you away.  This would be perfect for Bertie’s fans, because they already scowl whenever they see Seth Meyers in the TV time slot where the black-and-white movies are supposed to be.

My rating:  7 / 10

“Here I Am (Just When I Thought I Was Over You)” by Air Supply (1981, #5)

One person’s view:  “It’s a sonic swamp of overwrought sentimentality, complete with lyrics so predictable they could have been generated by a heartbroken robot.  ...  It’s the kind of music that makes you question the very existence of human creativity.” – Dowell De Los Reyes @ I Love Classic Rock (dead link)

The public’s view:  2.54 / 5.00

Late 1981 was a frustrating time to be a music fan.  A typical record album cost the equivalent of $30, adjusted for inflation.  MTV was on the cable systems in about three cities.  AM music stations were dying off, but FM car radios were still a rare luxury.  And even an expensive stereo couldn’t save you from the dreaded radio doldrums, which was continuing to rain down a punishing deluge of adult contemporary onto the hapless citizenry.

A radio doldrums doesn’t happen overnight on the orders of the Army.  It is a slow-moving frog-in-boiling-water type of situation in which the damage accumulates bit by bit and isn’t fully recognized until later.  It’s like how the Fourth Amendment was gradually phased out while no one was paying attention.  (The only part of the Bill of Rights still in effect is the clause that says bakeries don’t have to make cakes for gay people.  It was for this freedom that our ancestors fought the British.)  My interest in music slowly evaporated during 1980 and 1981 without me even noticing.  I didn’t know that radio stations were actively pushing me and millions of others away with their stale playlists of lethargic songs.

This realization finally hit me at the end of 1981, when I tried to revive my waning Billboard chart hobby by seeking out Casey Kasem’s annual countdown of the top 100 songs of the year.  After hours of twiddling the AM and FM dials in a futile search, I landed on a knock-off show hosted by some no-name DJ who wasn’t fit to skim the dead bugs out of Casey’s heart-shaped swimming pool.  This year-end countdown conspicuously failed to include major hits by Rick Springfield, Tom Petty, and Pat Benatar.  “Jessie’s Girl” had been one of the few bright spots of recent months, and its omission felt like an act of contempt toward the listeners and an insult to our intelligence.

Radio’s travails continued into the new year.  The J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” was the #1 song in the country, and I was constantly hearing it hummed, whistled, and burped by people at school.  (I didn’t know that nuns could belch like that.)  The only place I never encountered it was on the airwaves.  My radio could summon up Dan Fogelberg’s “Leader of the Band” with the touch of just about any button, but “Centerfold” – the tune I actually wanted to hear – was beyond its capabilities.  That finally changed one evening when my parents neglected to enforce my bedtime.  I discovered that the local top 40 station aired a late night countdown of each day’s most requested records, and this was where they were keeping the J. Geils Band and other popular acts like the Go-Go’s and Joan Jett.  The rest of the station’s schedule was reserved for songs that nobody ever requested, like Air Supply’s “Here I Am”.

I’ve already conveyed my general feelings about Air Supply in the entry for “The One That You Love” on the Bad #1 Hits blog.  They were talented and had some catchy tunes, and they don’t deserve their miserable reputation.  You could say the same about other acts that are stigmatized by their association with the ‘80s doldrums.  Contrary to what many people believe, the era was not defined by the poor quality of its soft rock music.  It was defined by the overbearing ubiquity of its soft rock and the smug suppression of music that didn’t fit the prevailing narrative.  When we take the media’s misplaced priorities out of the equation, the early ‘80s ballads of love and loss actually stack up well against their counterparts from a few years later.  On their worst day, Air Supply could never have come up with something as wretched as “Separate Lives” or “Friends and Lovers”.

“Here I Am” is a lament about heartache, but it doesn’t sound like something that a songwriter created cathartically following a devastating break-up.  It sounds like it was commissioned for a scene in a boring movie and written to spec.  The most interesting thing about it is its confusing faux pas of a title.  “Here I Am” begins with the line “Here I am,” but then never utters its title again.  Air Supply had just reached #1 with a different song that used that identical “Here I am” line multiple times in its chorus, and by all rights that hit should have been called “Here I Am”.  I have to wonder if the group was deliberately trying to mislead people into buying the wrong record.

The second line of “Here I Am” is “Playing with those memories again.”  This lyric will live forever in my mind, thanks to my classmate Jeff who theatrically mocked it as “Playing with those mammaries again.”  Hey, he’s the one who said it.  Blame him, not me.

I can’t think of any Air Supply hits less enjoyable than “Here I Am” (though “Even the Nights Are Better” comes close).  And yet, it didn’t jump out of the radio and pummel us with awfulness.  It simply took up a surprisingly large amount of precious airtime that could have been used more productively, while making no cultural impact other than helping some kid named Jeff win a vote for class clown.  No one ever hummed or whistled “Here I Am”, and burping it would have been a waste of good air.  Save your eructations for the next song I will discuss, which was a far more memorable tear-jerker about a dying relationship.

My rating:  4 / 10

“I Don’t Need You” by Kenny Rogers (1981, #3)

One person’s view:  “This song steadfastly refuses to stay in my brain once it ends.  It’s like the opposite of an earworm – pop music teflon.” – DonKarnage @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.52 / 5.00

Those of us in Generation X grew up hearing our parents and grandparents tell far-fetched accounts of their childhood woes, like how they had to ride a unicycle up Pike’s Peak in a hurricane every morning to get to school.  Today when we lecture our kids and grandkids about our youthful hardships, many of our tales are just as difficult to accept as real.  For example, the TV stations in my city would routinely pre-empt beloved network shows with college basketball games or The Billy Graham Crusade.  When this occurred, we couldn’t just fire up a streaming service to watch the missed program.  Our only option was to fiddle with the antenna to pull in a channel from another town 70 miles away.  The video part of the signal would be unusable, but sometimes we’d hear enough of the dialogue to get the gist of the plot.  (“I think Arnold just asked Willis what he’s talking about.”)  We’d have just one more chance to catch the episode during the summer re-runs – when it was apt to be pre-empted by baseball – before it was lost to the ages.

This is a factual story, but kids scoff at the absurdity of it.  The anti-renaissance that music fans experienced in the early 1980s is another historic event that prompts similar levels of skepticism.  This so-called “doldrums” period (which I’ve already mentioned on my Bad #1 Hits blog) was a time in which radio casually dismissed much of the rock and new wave music that would ultimately define the decade, and instead drilled us with lame ballads over and over again.  Much like cancelling an episode of a top-rated sitcom for religious programming, the ‘80s doldrums seems too pointless, malicious, and self-defeating for anyone to believe it actually happened.  “Grandpa, is it really true that almost every radio station in the country simultaneously decided to hit itself in the crotch with a mop handle?  And then ten years later they did it again, but this time they used a mop handle with spikes on it?  By the way, what was a ‘radio station’?”

Whenever people bemoan the wimpy music that accompanied the 1980s doldrums, they always single out Air Supply for ridicule and contempt.  Lionel Richie and Neil Diamond fare little better, and even Christopher Cross is sometimes thrown under the lions or fed to the bus.  But one of the horsemen of the adult contemporary apocalypse is given a pass:  Kenny Rogers.  I know Kenny had a great voice and that he left us with many classic songs and some delicious roasted chicken, but even his legendary performance on “The Gambler” can’t shield him from scrutiny forever.  He scored eight top tens between 1979 and 1983, and six of those earned mediocre Rate Your Music scores under 2.70.  It’s finally time to decorate Kenny’s life with an entry on the Bad Top Ten Hits blog.

You may be thinking that “We’ve Got Tonight” is the Kenny Rogers hit that deserves to be dismantled here.  Bob Seger wrote and recorded the definitive rendition of this song, and there was no need for a remake just five years later when his original was still getting airplay.  This did not deter Kenny, who conspired with Sheena Easton to churn out a cover version.  Easton’s quixotic ambition was to make at least one song for each radio format, in the same way that other people might set a goal of eating one of every species of penguin.  She achieved quite a bit of progress toward her musical mission in the 1980s, though she didn’t eat any penguins that I know of.  Her patriarchal anthem “Morning Train (9 to 5)” hit #1 at both pop and AC, and her collaborations with Prince made a splash on the R&B and dance charts.  I wish I were joking about this, but the genre-hopping Scottish lass even recorded a Spanish language album and won a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance.  (Sheena Easton:  the Selena of Glasgow.)  Her duet with Kenny Rogers allowed Easton to check off the country music item on her bucket list.  She probably also traded some marriage tips with the elder statesman.  The two singers would eventually rack up four divorces apiece.

“We’ve Got Tonight” is the lowest rated top ten for either Kenny or Sheena, but we need to keep in mind that it was a 1980s superstar duet.  This category was rife with disappointment, and this blog will already be covering several very bad superstar duets in the near future.  We must grade them on a curve, just as we do with novelty tunes and teeny-bopper records, or else we will be discussing little else from the decade.  For Kenny’s entry, I’ve instead decided to spotlight his solo hit “I Don’t Need You”.  It’s one of his most pleasureless singles and I was surprised to see that it had reached #3 on the Hot 100.  It peaked in the same week that Lionel Richie and Diana Ross settled in at #1 for a 9-week stay with “Endless Love”.  I consider that exact moment to be the nadir of the ‘80s doldrums.

“I Don’t Need You” is a boring song with a boring tempo and boring instrumentation.  The title lyric’s negative sentiment is the only thing that keeps us listening past the first 20 seconds, because we think for a moment that Rogers is finally going to tell a woman to go to hell.  He’s done being her knight in shining armor!  This hope is shattered as “I Don’t Need You” slowly reveals itself to be another love ballad like a million others.  I do, however, like the line “I don’t need children in my old age.”  I wonder if Kenny was reminded of that lyric at age 65 when his fifth wife told him that she was pregnant with twins.  It’s more likely that he had forgotten the song completely by then, like everybody else did.

Kenny’s singing was good even when the material wasn’t, but it’s too bad that his dullest music yielded some of his biggest crossover success.  It was all part of the doldrums, I guess.  We’ll delve deeper into this sinister period of pop music history, and into the reputation of the era’s most notorious band, in the next entry.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Boy from New York City” by the Manhattan Transfer (1981, #7)

One person’s view:  “[W]ith the over-sanitised backing from a skittish-sounding guitar and what sound suspiciously like programmed drums, it has the air of toffs slumming it downtown rather than the real street romance the Ad-libs evoked so joyously.” – Lejink @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.38 / 5.00

Let’s stand and face the flag as we solemnly reminisce about a beloved American singing group that proudly incorporated its hometown into its name.  This ensemble’s peak moment arrived in 1981 after it had been performing together for many years.  By remaking a forgotten tune from the mid-1960s, the group was finally allowed to taste the dewy air near the top of Billboard’s Hot 100.

This song’s lead melody was quite catchy, but it was the backing singers that really made it stand out.  One of the singers was blessed with a voice deep enough to damage nearby infrastructure each time he cleared his throat.  The public loved his bass vocal parts, and the group’s remake became one of the major hits of the summer.  Unfortunately, it was one of those songs like “Achy Breaky Heart” or “Dance Monkey” that held up about as well as a Jim Cramer stock market prediction.  Everyone got thoroughly sick of it and it had to be removed from Pizza Hut jukeboxes to keep unruly children from playing it as ragebait.  Today it is almost never heard on ‘80s oldies stations, and it possesses one of the lowest Rate Your Music scores of any top 10 hit of its time.

This is, of course, the story of the Oak Ridge Boys and their most famous song, “Elvira”.  Now that you mention it, though, everything I said also applies to a different vocal ensemble and their most famous song.  Most people haven’t thought about the Manhattan Transfer in eons, but they will be the focus of today’s entry in the Bad Top Ten Hits Hall of Fame.

Before the Manhattan Transfer revived it in 1981, “The Boy from New York City” was a rarely heard oldie by a doo-wop group called the Ad Libs.  The “Boy” in the lyrics excels at life by every metric, most importantly wealth.  He has one of the finest penthouses in NYC, pockets full of spending loot, and even a brand new car.  (The song doesn’t say anything about owning a parking spot, so I suppose he has to leave the car at a garage in White Plains.  The Boy ain’t a trillionaire.)  He’s also cute, sweet, romantic, and a good dancer.  He’s the kind of goody two-shoes who you want to pick up by the belt and throw headfirst into a cart full of medical waste.  The Transfer understood that he came across as a nepo-baby wuss, so they toughened him up in their remake by adding a mention of his “dueling scar”.  Now he is a strange amalgam of moneyed culture and street violence, like if Michael Bloomberg joined the Latin Kings.

“The Boy from New York City” is mostly well-written, but I am baffled by the way the first verse starts:  “He’s kind of tall / He’s really fine / Some day I hope to make him mine, all mine.”  The lyrics are tyrannically obsessive about rhyming, to the point that the narrator is named Kitty so that she rhymes with “city”.  And yet, “tall” stubbornly refuses to rhyme with “fine”.  Many rhymes would have worked well for that first line:  “He’s six-foot-nine.”  “He makes bathtub wine.”  “He’s quite benign.”  The songwriters chose none of them.  Maybe they deserve credit for tearing up the rulebook, but this glaring deviation from the rhyme scheme sticks in the craw.  Simple pop songs aren’t supposed to trigger my OCD.

The bad reviews of this record do not mention the rhyme foul-up, instead criticizing the Transfer’s overly clean, whitewashed sound.  This act always seemed a little too high-class to merit a place on pop radio.  Manhattan Transfer concerts were staid black-tie affairs, with none of the rioting and public nudity that you might see at, say, an Oak Ridge Boys show.  Behind the scenes, however, the quartet were rock-and-roll hell-raisers.  Janis Siegel, the lead singer on “Boy from New York City”, once even put a pig’s head in a hotel toilet as a prank.  The Manhattan Transfer was every kosher plumber’s worst nightmare.

I personally can’t complain about the group’s performance on “Boy from New York City”.  For me, this crazy Sesame Street-sounding song was a fun distraction that helped make America’s soft rock misadventure of 1981 more bearable.  I was always secretly delighted when it interrupted the never-ending sequence of boring ballads on my parents’ radio, though I’d rarely hear it all the way through before someone changed the station.  If I must find fault with something, it would be the frequent “yeah” noises that are emitted by bass singer Tim Hauser in response to Janis Siegel’s assertions about The Boy.  Hauser sounds like he’s auditioning for a Pepto-Bismol commercial, trying out for the role of Man Who Just Ate Three Burritos And Is Dismayed To Find A Pig’s Head Blocking The Toilet.  One or two of these groaning interjections would have been enough to get the point across.  They didn’t need to be repeated in every verse.

My rating:  7 / 10

“Sexy Eyes” by Dr. Hook (1980, #5)

One person’s view:  “[Dennis Locorriere] was a horrendously unappealing vocalist on every conceivable level, and he pretty much single-handedly tanks the song with his pitifully half-hearted performance.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.83 / 5.00 or 2.68 / 5.00, depending on the version of the single

It was exciting when my homeroom teacher at St. Joseph Elementary decided that our class should have a weekly newspaper and that I should be the editor.  I had big dreams for this periodical.  I planned to provide dazzling entertainment features while also assigning reporters to investigate matters of public interest.  I envisioned an exposé about what was behind the mysterious door labeled “Faculty Room”, a column with recipes for making explosives and corrosive acids, and a word search puzzle of “Things St. Joe Students Have Found in Their Cafeteria Food”.  The teacher wanted each edition to include a profile of one of her pupils, and I welcomed the chance to interview my peers and ask hard-hitting questions.  (“Kathy, you seem fairly smart and well-behaved.  Why did you get put in this class with all the fuck-ups?”)  I figured I’d have a Pulitzer by the time the school year was over.

As we know from the recent debacles at 60 Minutes and the Washington Post, however, there are always powerful forces seeking to steer journalists away from the truth.  My teacher believed that her primary role at the Class Classic was to censor most of my contributions and replace them with vacuous content that appealed only to the elderly and enfeebled.  She deleted my thoughtful literary assessment of the profane graffiti on the school’s dumpster and substituted some blather about a phony holiday called “Catholic Education Week”.  The profile of my classmate Eddie no longer mentioned his career ambition of leading an anti-government militia, instead offering sycophantic lines like “Eddie has a beautiful smile” and “Eddie is talented with watercolors.”  All of this embarrassing drivel appeared under my name, which was on the masthead as editor-in-chief.  The publisher should have been listed as William Randolph Worst.

Most of these revisions were made behind my back, but the teacher confronted me directly when I tried to print a list of Billboard’s top 10 songs in our newspaper.  I thought she was going to lecture me about the sanctity of Billboard’s copyright, but no.  She was upset over the titles of the songs on the chart.  First, she decreed that Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” was not to be mentioned in our publication.  I actually understood her concerns.  “Da” and “ya” were misspellings, and “sexy” was the type of naughty word that some ne’er-do-well might spray-paint on our dumpster.  I offered to salvage the column by listing Rod’s song as “Do You Think I’m Stinky?”  My teacher said that would be insufficient, because another record in the top 10 was even more objectionable:  Dr. Hook’s “Sharing the Night Together”.  It was then that I realized I should be paying more attention to Dr. Hook.  If they were angering authority figures, then maybe they weren’t as dull of a band as I had thought.

Dr. Hook made their living mostly from soft rock music targeted at the female demographic aged 25 and up.  However, they weren’t fully committed to the genre and seemed to be doing a subversive parody of it.  Once you picked up on this, you could easily spot the meta jokes throughout their discography.  There was singer Dennis Locorriere’s hilariously overdone weepiness on “Sylvia’s Mother”.  There was the funny video for “A Little Bit More”, in which Locorriere started getting intimate in the woods with his bandmate Ray Sawyer.  There was the obvious erection pun in “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman”, which didn’t stop the single from earning heavy play on AM radio.  “Sharing the Night Together” was perhaps the finest example of Dr. Hook’s humor.  In that song, the singer approaches a random stranger and immediately asks her to go off somewhere and have sex with him.  The request is too laughable to be offensive, and it is made even more comical by Locorriere’s delivery.  He has as much masculine bravado as a Care Bears cartoon.  My teacher was horrified by the title’s implication of a one-night stand, but most listeners understood that “Sharing the Night Together” was not really about sex.  It was an amusing story of a pathetic guy humiliating himself in public.

“Sexy Eyes” was the last of the group’s top 10 singles.  It begins with a funky disco beat, and then Dennis Locorriere starts singing about sitting in a disco by himself while voyeuristically watching couples dance.  We can tell immediately that this song was obsolete before it ever got out the factory door.  It was released in January 1980, right after everyone had abruptly tired of disco and had mulched up all of their Donna Summer records for use as goldfish food.  Most of the discotheques in the U.S. had just been converted into video game arcades or fitness clubs, and the rest were now being rented out as meeting halls for supporters of charismatic presidential candidate John B. Anderson.  “Sexy Eyes” was a relic of a bygone era many days or even weeks in the past.

The singer is unhappy about his lack of a dance partner, but then a woman walks over and asks him to shake his groove thing with her.  Her defining attribute is her “sexy eyes”, even though female eyes do not biologically differ from male eyes in any noticeable way.  A lady can be equipped with pretty eyes, freshly polished elbows, or a gorgeous spleen, but none of these organs can ever be sexy.  Thus, “Sexy Eyes” is not merely outdated; its entire premise is outlandish.  Dr. Hook has once again made a mockery of serious adult contemporary music.

This doesn’t mean that the people of 1980 were rolling on the floor in laughter.  Dr. Hook’s clever self-referential humor was obvious in records like “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone’”, but in “Sexy Eyes” it is almost too subtle.  It’s only mildly funny that the band waited to put out a disco record until after the fad had ended.  It’s mildly funny that the singer gets turned on by a lady’s eyeballs.  It’s mildly funny to imagine the woman’s reaction when this cute guy in the disco opens his mouth and out comes the voice of a castrated Muppet.  Unfortunately, it’s easy for the entire gag to go right over a listener’s head.  When that happens, we’re left with a song that is pretty much just run-of-the-mill yacht rock.  The disco bass line may be out of step with its time period, but it happens to be the best feature.

My rating:  5 / 10

Note:  Portions of this review were first published in the Arts & Leisure section of the March 7, 1980 St. Joseph Elementary Class Classic, under the heading “Stinky Eyes”.  The original is available on microfiche at your local library.

“You Take My Breath Away” by Rex Smith (1979, #10)

One person’s view:  “[I]t’s not that he can’t hit the notes, it’s that he hits every note like it’s the most all-important, monumental, world-changing task ever laid before man; it’s the first time in a while that I’ve found one of these songs physically exhausting to listen to.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  1.83 / 5.00

Last week I wrote about Barry Manilow, the guy whose recordings usually sounded like show tunes in search of a show.  He wasn’t the only singer in the top 10 in 1979 with a vocal that would have been more at home in a stage production than on the radio.  Say hello to Melissa Manchester and Rex Smith.

Manchester’s hit, “Don’t Cry Out Loud”, describes a circus spectator who bursts into tears upon realizing that the festivities are not about her and that she must watch idly from the stands.  This person should be careful what she wishes for.  Nearly a century ago, a Georgia woman named Velna Turnage had a front row seat to the Christy Brothers Circus and unwittingly became part of the act.  A dancing horse backed up and pooped in her lap, prompting intense laughter from the crowd and the performers.  Velna’s successful $500 lawsuit was a landmark case in the field of equine defecation law.  The decision in Turnage v. Christy Bros. Circus was later cited by the courts in Evans v. Trigger and Jerry’s Trackside Hot Dogs v. Seattle Slew.  However, lobbying by horse PACs has finally put a damper on this type of litigation.  The Supreme Court recently ruled, in a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Alito, that sick children have no constitutional right to not have manure deposited on their heads while visiting Busch Gardens (Make-a-Wish Foundation v. Budweiser Clydesdales Nos. 35 & 117).  Meanwhile, President Trump has posthumously pardoned Mister Ed for an unsanitary incident at the 1962 Emmy Awards ceremony.

“Don’t Cry Out Loud” is not as interesting or coherent as the tale of Velna Turnage’s historic ordeal.  That doesn’t stop Melissa Manchester from triumphantly belting it out as if it is just as significant.  She presents it as a lesson on resilience in the face of adversity, even though it’s mainly just a story of someone throwing a childish tantrum.  Given the subject matter, it was bound to be a divisive record no matter how she sang it.  It might have merited its own entry on the Bad Top Ten Hits blog if Melissa hadn’t been eclipsed by a different singer with an even brassier Broadway style who eked his way into the top 10 a few months later.  On “You Take My Breath Away”, Rex Smith outdoes both Manchester and Manilow with his histrionics despite working with inferior material.

The highlight of “You Take My Breath Away” is the spooky theremin that is heard over the piano intro.  Some folks might argue that this is just a cheap synthesizer that tries to sound like a theremin, but we should always give music creators the benefit of the doubt.  I am going to assume – despite indications to the contrary – that the people who made this song really cared about its craftsmanship and authenticity.  I believe they laid out some big bucks and hired a skilled thereminist from the Theremin Belt of the Caucasus region.

Unfortunately, the intro ends all too soon and then Rex Smith starts bellowing his head off about some woman who takes his breath away.  Many listeners have panned his performance, dumping all over Rex as if he was sitting ringside at the Christy Brothers Circus.  In my opinion, however, the problem is not the singer – it’s the song.  Smith sings “I don’t know what to say,” and he really doesn’t.  Lyricist Bruce Hart apparently went out for lunch halfway through and didn’t come back, leaving Rex to do little more than repeat the title over and over until the record mercifully fades out.  Smith’s hammy vocal invites mockery, but without him humorously over-emphasizing these banal and duplicative lines there is virtually nothing of interest here.  He had to destroy the song in order to save it.

Bruce Hart is better known for writing the words to the Sesame Street theme, a more intellectually satiating musical work whose full version runs for 1:48.  “You Take My Breath Away” is completely out of steam by the 1:30 mark.  It would have been better as a TV theme song than it was as a pop single, but it would have to be for a pretty bad show – maybe one in which a dancing horse backs up to the camera.  That will definitely take your breath away.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Somewhere in the Night” by Barry Manilow (1979, #9)

One person’s view:  “This turns into easy listening that’s too tame even for easy listening radio!!  ...  Is anyone gonna seriously call this their favorite song?” – ImFire11 @ Fire’s Flaming Hot Takes

The public’s view:  2.43 / 5.00

There’s a subgenre of reality TV that depicts people attempting to improve things that desperately need improvement.  Examples of this type of show include Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, and Waiting Room Vomit Mop-Up.  (The last of these concepts is currently the subject of a bidding war between The Learning Channel and the prestige programming division of CBS.)  If there had been a reality series about Barry Manilow’s creative process, it might have been titled Nightmare Song Rescue Mop-Up.  One of his many superpowers was finding songs by others that had failed to live up to their potential, and then reworking them into gold records.  Scott English’s #91 non-hit “Brandy” became Manilow’s #1 hit “Mandy”.  “I Write the Songs” was an obscurity for the Captain & Tennille, and then for David Cassidy, before becoming another #1 for Barry.  “Somewhere in the Night” was another Manilow-engineered turnaround story, but it didn’t quite make it to the top of the Hot 100.  Some would argue that even its #9 peak was much higher than it deserved.

With a few rare exceptions like “It’s a Miracle” and “Copacabana”, Manilow preferred to sing ballads.  He developed a particular style for doing so.  Each of his ballads begins with mournful piano notes and some slow-paced vocals that are tinged with sadness.  It’s kind of hard to tell Manilow’s works apart when they are in this embryonic phase, but the listener’s patience and angst are rewarded after a couple of minutes.  Each performance soars to grandiose heights as it nears its conclusion, and Barry’s vocals become more and more dramatic.  He rounds up everyone within 3 miles who can play a musical instrument, and drafts them all into an orchestra of brass, strings, and percussion to help him end the song in majestic fashion.  The resulting product is a bombastic show tune that has everything except an actual show.

The workmanship is always flawless on Manilow records, but his ballad formula imposes some limits on his creativity.  He applies an identical technique to each track, even though the lyrics usually focus on totally different things.  “Mandy” describes how the singer’s world has ended because he broke off a passionate romance.  “Looks Like We Made It” describes how the singer is doing just fine despite breaking off a passionate romance.  “I Made It Through the Rain” is about the time that the singer absent-mindedly left his umbrella on the subway.  “Ready to Take a Chance Again” is about the singer taking a calculated gamble with the cleanliness of the white slacks he is wearing.  All of these topics are feted and fanfared as if they are the most important piece of information that we need to hear that day.  Manilow is at his most convincing on “I Write the Songs”, to the point that most people incorrectly believe that he really did write that song.  His performance on “Somewhere in the Night” is every bit as powerful, but it doesn’t feel as authentic.  Maybe it’s because it’s 1979 and we’ve already heard his shtick umpteen times.  More likely, it’s because it’s a simple love message that is delivered with the same intensity as a warning of an incoming missile attack.

Part of the problem with “Somewhere in the Night” is that, unlike Manilow’s other fixer-upper jobs, this song wasn’t in need of help.  It had already been a substantial hit for Helen Reddy just three years prior, reaching the top 20 of the Hot 100 and #2 at easy listening radio.  (Another perfectly competent rendition by Batdorf & Rodney had also charted previously, but that dynamic duo had since quit music to concentrate on fighting crime in Gotham City.)  Manilow’s redo felt like a pointless bit of one-upmanship, as if he was trying to provoke a fight with Reddy by implying that her version wasn’t good enough.  Sadly, there is no evidence that there was ever a feud, a spat, or even a kerfuffle between the two.  I was hoping to find a juicy story about Helen retaliating against Barry.  She could have replaced the hair spray in his dressing room with Cheez Whiz, or she could have run over his foot with her Harley.  Instead, she meekly accepted Manilow’s insult.  So much for “I am woman, hear me roar.”

“Somewhere in the Night” is not a badly done record by any stretch, but it is perhaps the most unnecessary of any of Barry Manilow’s major singles.  In 1981, he recorded a different hit ballad that used not just the same shopworn formula, but also a similar title:  “Somewhere Down the Road”.  This helped guarantee that “Somewhere in the Night” would be completely forgotten.

My rating:  4 / 10

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” by Andy Gibb (1978, #9)

One person’s view:  “I sincerely hope Andy’s legacy ends up being his more lively, catchy stuff like ‘Shadow Dancing’ instead of mediocre scraps foraged from his brothers’ wastebin.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.89 / 5.00

The Bad Top Ten Hits blog is not usually a place for hero worship and hagiography, but I have to make an exception for the Gibb family.  The Bee Gees and little brother Andy were veritable hit machines, and together they achieved near-total command of the music world for a two-year period in the late 1970s.  And their music was not just commercially successful – it was pretty damn good.  The melodies were instantly pleasing, the vocals were perfectly executed, and most of the songs survive as fondly remembered classics.  It’s unusual to see the brothers on any lists of bad music, but logic dictates that one of their hits has to be the worst.  So today we are gathered to debate whether “(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away”, the rare Gibb song that does appear on multiple lists of bad music, deserves that designation.

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” was originally a Bee Gees song, but the older Gibb brothers were blessed with a surplus of excellent material and didn’t need a ballad with a clunky title.  They decided to pawn it off on Andy.  I perfectly understand their behavior, because I also once disposed of an unwanted item by foisting it upon my younger brother.  It was my Fritos T-shirt.  My mom had ordered this shirt for me from the textiles division of Frito-Lay.  It was supposed to have depicted Frankenstein’s monster consuming a bag of Fritos while ominously declaring, “I’ll munch to that.”  I was crushed to learn that the Frankenstein shirts were sold out, and that the Frito people had instead sent a T-shirt with Napoleon on it.  I didn’t know who Napoleon was, and I was sure that other kids would mock me for having this big-hatted chip-chomping nerd on my chest.  So I convinced my mom that I had outgrown the shirt while waiting 4 to 6 weeks for its delivery, and that my brother had grown into it during that time.  Lucky him.  When he was made to wear it, he threw a monumental tantrum that culminated with the shirt being flushed down the toilet.  Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, and was defeated again by the water in our loo in 1977.

Andy Gibb did not flush his brothers’ hand-me-down song down the toilet.  He dutifully recorded his own version, with big brother Barry helping out on backing vocals, and released it as the third single from his Shadow Dancing album.  “(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” is a weepy plea to a woman to stay in a romance which, truth be told, she has pretty much already checked out of.  It’s an example of the sunken cost fallacy.  Andy has certainly bought presents for this girl and invested time in learning stupid trivia about her family, and all of that is for naught if they break up.  However, there is little future benefit to be derived from a relationship with someone who will no longer talk to him or even look at him.  Any economist would tell Andy to walk away and cut his losses, but he just won’t listen.  Again, the Napoleon T-shirt is illustrative.  My family had eaten a lot of Fritos to get the proofs of purchase that were needed for that garment, so my mom insisted that someone must wear it despite its negative marginal utility.  My brother understood the sunken cost fallacy, however, and demonstrated it with a sunken shirt.

“(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away” might be the weakest top 10 single to emerge from the Gibbs’ foundry.  The toothless musical arrangement borders on easy listening, the singer’s chances of reviving the romance are nonexistent, and Andy’s normally exquisite falsetto comes across as whiney in this context.  I can’t fault the critics who place this record in the ridicule bin with Player’s similarly themed “Baby Come Back”, but I hear just enough of the Bee Gees’ songwriting brilliance to keep me from tuning out.  Just barely enough.

My rating:  5 / 10

Napoleon and Andy Gibb.  Both men nearly conquered the world, but each experienced a catastrophic downfall.  One was exiled from Europe, and the other was exiled from Solid Gold.