“Dancing in the Street” by Mick Jagger & David Bowie (1985, #7)

One news editor’s view:  “... [O]ne of the most irritating and ridiculous singles of its era and truly a low point in the otherwise storied careers of Jagger and Bowie.  Everything about this recording feels phony, phoned in, or coked up, from the sterile ‘80s production to Jagger’s incessant yelps ...” – Jonathan Cohen @ Spin

The public’s view:  2.33 / 5.00

If you were deliberately trying to create a Bad Top Ten Hit, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more thorough scheme than the one perpetrated by Mick Jagger and David Bowie.  Their version of “Dancing in the Street” checks most of the boxes that we associate with awfulness.  It’s a superstar duet.  It’s an unnecessary remake of a classic.  It’s white people doing a half-assed imitation of black music.  It’s a charity single that the two men were making for free, so they were unwilling to devote more than a few hours to rehearsing and recording the song and filming the accompanying video.  And wow, Pope Pius on a pretzel, what a video it was.  The next time you forget to change clothes for a Zoom meeting while working from home, you can put your embarrassing faux pas in perspective by remembering when two celebrities willingly made fools of themselves in front of the entire world.  Your Spider-Man pajamas are now famous throughout the company, but at least no one has footage of you maniacally thrusting your face toward Mick Jagger’s gaping mouth.

Like most viewers, I considered Bowie and Jagger’s vaguely amorous tango session to be cringeworthy and repulsive.  Billy Squier’s notorious “Rock Me Tonite” video was almost elegant by comparison.  Whenever “Dancing in the Street” aired on MTV in 1985, I would find any excuse to leave the room until it was over.  However, the intervening four decades of cultural decline have helped soften my opinion of it.  The nausea that this clip once provoked is now replaced by grudging respect for the duo’s improvisation skills.  I even managed to watch it four times while researching this write-up.  I know this sounds like a painful sacrifice for the sake of amateur music criticism, but it doesn’t make me a hero.  Watching the insufferable Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin “Separate Lives” video once while researching my Bad #1 Hits blog is what makes me a hero.

As for the audio portion of this endeavor, “Dancing in the Street” is a fun song and it’s hard to ruin it.  With the same nonexistent budget that the Live Aid organization gave Mick and David’s team, almost any random combination of performers could have made a passable version of the tune.  Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias, for example.  Dionne Warwick and Iron Maiden.  Johnny Rotten, Howdy Doody, and the 90-year-old waitress who always led the happy birthday song at the Chi-Chi’s in Sheboygan.  A rendition by two rock legends like Jagger and Bowie should have been more than just passable, but here we are.

Ultimately, however, it’s a mistake to try to separate the “Dancing in the Street” single from the visual image of two flamboyant egomaniacs strutting around in a derelict London flour mill.  Bowie and Jagger’s vocal stylings on this track are not good, in any sense of that word, but the pair exudes an effortless charisma that few other entertainers can match.  With these two on the roster, this wasn’t merely an annoying, unwanted duet like so many others.  It was an annoying, unwanted event.  Maybe that counts for something.

My rating:  4 / 10

“You’re the Inspiration” by Chicago (1985, #3)

One person’s view:  “This song is quintessential Chicago.  If you wanted to know how lame and dull they and soft rock can be, look to this song.  ...  The piano, the synths, the bass, the percussion, and the strings all sound fake to the point where you question if it was even made by a band and not some overpaid tool in a studio.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.49 / 5.00

The period from autumn 1982 to autumn 1984 was a glorious time for the Hot 100, as many incredible recording artists were at their peaks and the pop charts were rewarding the highest quality efforts.  The public was showing an unusual amount of good taste and an aptitude for selecting music that would endure for future generations.  Optimism was even floating in the air for the latest Chicago release.  The album’s title conveyed the excitement:  Chicago 17.  Certainly, there wouldn’t be any bland mushiness on this record like there was on Chicago 16 and Chicago XIV.  A prime number meant prime material.

But when “Hard Habit to Break” hit the airwaves as the album’s second single, it reminded everyone that Chicago had mostly abandoned its rock ‘n’ roll origins and had devolved into an adult contemporary act.  “Hard Habit” was a love ballad, albeit an ambitious and unconventional one.  Producer and arranger David Foster threw every trick he knew at it and would later claim that the song was his finest work.  The track included several jarring shifts to its tempo and loudness.  The most unexpected twist was that Peter Cetera’s vocals were intermingled with lines sung by Bill Champlin.  It wasn’t clear whether the two men were supposed to be awkwardly serenading the same woman, or whether they were awkwardly serenading each other.

Although Foster’s slick production kept the tune from being as uninteresting as it might have been, the critics still gave it plenty of flak.  “Hard Habit to Break” is included on all five of the lists of the worst songs of 1984 that I’ve found.  It would have been a shoo-in for an entry here if Chicago’s follow-up single, “You’re the Inspiration”, hadn’t usurped its place as a “bad” hit.

Cetera and Foster originally wrote “You’re the Inspiration” for Kenny Rogers.  The song seemed like a good fit for him.  It was exactly the type of sycophantic Lionel Richie-style love ode that filled Kenny’s swimming pools with caviar while he was riding the lucrative country-pop crossover wave of the early ‘80s.  Surprisingly, though, Rogers wasn’t interested.  He was working with a budding young master of musical excitement named Richard Marx, and Marx could churn out sycophantic Lionel Richie-style love odes just as efficiently as Richie himself.  Rogers picked a couple of Marx’s compositions for his next album and ignored “Inspiration”.  Cetera saw this rejection as a blessing because it allowed him to keep the ballad for his band’s use on Chicago 17.

As with “Hard Habit”, David Foster loaded Chicago’s rendition of “Inspiration” up to the ceiling with gimmicks.  The group’s pre-Foster records had a natural flow to them, like what you might hear from a jam band, but Foster favored a technique known as subito in which a song’s dynamics go through abrupt changes.  This grabbed listeners’ attention at the cost of forcing every transition to be precisely programmed.  His productions sounded synthetic.  The vocals on “Inspiration” also featured double-tracking and echo effects which suggested that Peter Cetera had been cloned repeatedly.  A whole army of him was threatening to engulf us with a shrill falsetto that kept suddenly jumping up and down the scale.  And if the video is telling us the truth, the song didn’t have just one keyboardist.  It had three guys playing keyboards – plus a fourth dude on piano.  Foster had no idea, however, how to use Chicago’s famous horn section on this track.  Saxophonist Walt Parazaider is shown reading the newspaper during the performance.

So does all of this wizardry elevate the song?  Let’s compare it with other works of its kind.  A typical Richie/Marx/Rogers love ballad is like a school cafeteria meatloaf.  You are never happy to see it on your plate, but you understand why it is there.  Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration” is that same lumpy meatloaf, but don’t you dare call it that.  Now it is an artisanal savory cake of grass-fed Preakness-grade pâté.  It’s delivered to your table on a silver platter, and there’s a little sparkler candle in it and a thin layer of gravy drizzled around it in an ornate spiral.  Oh, and the lunch lady is topless.  The meal is still barely edible, but at least it’s an experience.

We can be thankful that this inherently dull ballad didn’t wind up with Kenny Rogers as was first intended.  He was not the right man to imbue it with the dynamism that it needed.  His singing relied on warmth and subtlety, not flapping his larynx all over the place like Cetera.  Kenny probably thought a subito was something from the value menu at Taco Bell.  I give him credit for turning down the assignment and letting Chicago handle it.  While Cetera’s showboating and Foster’s overproduction may have contributed to the decline of a great band, their studio antics are the best thing about “You’re the Inspiration”.

My rating:  4 / 10

“To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” by Julio Iglesias & Willie Nelson (1984, #5)

One person’s view:  “The pairing of Iglesias and Nelson was absurd...  ...  Loaded with accents and vibrato, it was unbelievably ear shattering.  ...  Excluding novelty songs and strange one-hit wonder stuff, I would have to rank this as one of the absolute worst hits of the decade (and probably beyond).” – ArnieNuvo @ PopRedux80

The public’s view:  1.71 / 5.00

When the Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes duet “Up Where We Belong” was released in 1982, many radio DJs thought that Island Records was pranking them.  Cocker’s alcohol-laden croak was such a harsh mismatch to Warnes’s willowy vocal that no one believed the two singers had been intentionally paired together.  Plus, the lyrics were ludicrous.  Some stations shipped their copies back to the label to ensure that they didn’t accidentally play the tune over the air.  It wasn’t until the success of the associated movie, An Officer and a Gentleman, that the ballad was taken seriously.  “Up Where We Belong” ultimately went to the very top of the charts – where the eagles cry on a mountain high.  No one publicly admitted that it had been a joke, but the people involved in making the record were later seen laughing all the way to the bank.  Except for Joe Cocker, who vomited all the way to the bank.

For those radio programmers who remembered being Cockered and Warned, it must have been déjà vu when “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” showed up in the mailroom.  Now this had to be a prank.  There was essentially no overlap in the fan bases of Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson, and nobody was asking to hear them on the same record.  The duo even looked preposterous together.  Julio always wore a tux everywhere in case someone asked him to emcee the Oscars on a moment’s notice.  Willie would be standing right next to him, dressed like he was about to head out to the barn to slop the pigs.  Their collaboration was a classic case of what I call a “hot fudge crabcake”:  two items that are perfectly good on their own, combined in a way that ruins both.

The first time I heard “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” was when it made its debut on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.  The twelfth time I heard it was on its twelfth and final appearance on AT40, eleven weeks later.  I never encountered it anywhere else.  The pop and rock stations didn’t play it.  My parents’ Soft and Lite and Warm and Wimpy stations didn’t play it.  MTV never aired a video for it nor held a contest in which a lucky viewer could win Willie’s childhood outhouse.  None of that stopped Nelson and Iglesias from hanging out in the top 10 with Cyndi Lauper, Lionel Richie, and Kenny Loggins.  It was weird at the time and is still weird.

One day I snuck a peek at a Billboard at Waldenbooks, and noticed that the Hot 100 listing for “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” was now accompanied by a solid-filled circle.  This was the universally recognized symbol for an RIAA gold certification.  I was incredulous.  Today the RIAA generously gives away gold and platinum awards like a rib joint hands out extra napkins, but in 1984 a gold single was a big flappin’ deal.  It meant that one million copies of the 45 RPM disc had been shipped to record stores and presumably sold.  Most of the time a record needed to hit #1 or #2 to have a chance at being certified gold, but Julio and Willie had done the near-impossible.  They sold a million singles without the support of radio or MTV, and they did it without appealing to the usual single-buying demographic of teenagers.  The main reason to purchase “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” was to keep it as a collectible.  The record was a curiosity, a 1980s pop culture mistake that would someday be good for a laugh.  It belonged in a climate-controlled room with a Pittsburgh Maulers USFL jersey, an unopened case of New Coke, and a Mary Decker action figure that blames a nearby Cabbage Patch doll every time it falls off the shelf.  It didn’t belong on a turntable.

Now that I am even older than Willie and Julio were in 1984, I thought that revisiting their duet might yield a new appreciation for it.  It did not.  Both men are excellent singers, to be sure, but that only makes the endeavor more painfully embarrassing.  If I have to hear two geezers wistfully recalling their thousands of one-night stands, I want the proceedings to be jocular rather than sincere.  “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” would work better as a locker room brag than it does as a corny ballad.

Whatever you think of this song, it does contain one truthful observation:  the winds of change are always blowing.  Those winds carried Willie away, along with Kenny, Dolly, and all of the other country acts that had crossed over to the Hot 100 in the first half of the 1980s.  Country singers were effectively banished from the pop chart for many years to come, and it was probably the fault of “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”.

My rating:  1 / 10

“Mr. Roboto” by Styx (1983, #3)

One critic’s view:  “‘Mr. Roboto’ offers glib paradoxes about technology in a hackneyed techno-pop style that borrows science fiction sound effects from the Alan Parsons Project.  ...  While one wants to applaud Styx for their good-heartedness, again and again one is brought up short by the shallow derivativeness of their music and the awkwardness of their lyrics.” – Stephen Holden @ New York Times, “Serious Issues Underlie a New Album from Styx”, Mar. 27, 1983

The public’s view:  2.65 / 5.00

The early 1980s was the heyday of the Moral Majority, a conservative political group headed by a televangelist named Jerry Falwell.  The Moral Majority is one of the two most misnamed things ever invented, the other being Grape-Nuts cereal.  Just as Grape-Nuts contains neither grapes nor nuts, the Moral Majority was not moral and it represented the interests of only 5 or 10 percent of the population.  Actually, Grape-Nuts would have been a slightly more accurate name for Falwell’s organization.  There were no grapes in that wacky Virginia vineyard, but there were plenty of nuts.

Falwell and similar agitators often competed for attention by making unfounded attacks on rock music, with the more ridiculous the charge the better.  A few of the evangelists went too far when they alleged that Styx’s anti-drug track “Snowblind” included a Satanic message that could be revealed by playing the record backwards.  Some acts would have embraced and monetized the false accusation by adopting a lucrative new image as devil-worshippers, starting by sacrificing their fans on stage and drinking their blood.  (It’s too bad no one found any occult references in “You and I”, because I would have loved to see Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle try this tactic.)  Ritual human sacrifice conflicted with Styx singer Dennis DeYoung’s devout Christian beliefs, however, so the band chose not to pursue this approach.  Instead they retaliated with a concept album, Kilroy Was Here, that depicted a music-hating cult which had taken over the world.  This unflattering caricature of the Moral Majority was a solid foundation for the record, but DeYoung decided that the project needed more than that.  It needed robots.

Robots have always been a favorite science fiction motif, but in other genres in Kilroy’s era they were usually a symptom of writer’s block.  When it was time to make the 92nd episode of Benson or the 3rd sequel to Rocky, and the idea mill was running on fumes, a robot could be tossed into the screenplay to shake things up.  It was the last plot device to try before deploying an even more desperate trope like Benson getting amnesia, or Apollo Creed somehow accidentally switching bodies with Paulie before an important fight.  Robots were also able to get away with stuff that would be controversial if human characters did it.  Evangelical groups bitched about everything 24 hours a day, but they never threatened to boycott Star Wars over the same-sex relationship between C3PO and R2D2.

Although DeYoung was traveling down a well-worn path with his embrace of robots, there were logistical issues to overcome.  It would take a 600-page novel to fully explain why an army of Japanese androids had allied itself with a record-burning preacher in the dystopian future.  But Styx was making an album of nine songs, at least one of which was required to be a groaner love ballad to keep radio programmers happy.  How was the band going to tell such a complex tale under these constraints?

As usual, DeYoung thought he had the answer.  He decreed that Styx would star in a 10-minute pre-concert movie to introduce the implausible robot-and-preacher-infested milieu, and then act out the remainder of the story on stage.  The other band members had no thespian ambitions, however, and went along with this without enthusiasm.  Tommy Shaw grimaced his way through the performances as if he was being forced to give his grandfather a pedicure.  He would later describe, with a measure of satisfaction, fans rushing to the exits when subjected to DeYoung’s sci-fi meanderings during the band’s headlining set at a festival.

The first single from Kilroy Was Here was “Mr. Roboto”.  Those who had seen the stage act knew that this song described the pivotal plot moment in which the outlawed rock star escapes from the cult’s prison by disguising himself as one of the robot guards.  These informed fans were few in number, unfortunately, because DeYoung had insisted on starting the Kilroy tour in intimate venues where his vision could be fully realized.  Instead of selling out stadiums like they usually did, his band was playing to small crowds in community theaters and school gymnasiums.  You couldn’t plan a birthday party for your cat without worrying that Styx might show up with their 10-minute movie and their silly robot costumes.  Meanwhile the general public remained blissfully unaware of the Kilroy story, and most incorrectly believed that “Mr. Roboto” was some sort of protest against technology.  Or maybe it was an ode of praise for technology – DeYoung does keep thanking the robot, after all.  Either way, the gimmicky storyline and self-indulgent tour obscured the album’s anti-censorship message and earned Styx decades of ridicule.

All of this makes “Mr. Roboto” sound like a total fiasco.  Today, however, it is seen primarily as a charming piece of musical nostalgia like other quirky 1983 hits such as “She Blinded Me with Science” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz”.  Although Dennis DeYoung may have taken himself way too seriously, he at least put a semi-original thought or two into this song.  That’s more than we can say for a couple of the other records I’ve discussed here recently.

My rating:  6 / 10

“You and I” by Eddie Rabbitt & Crystal Gayle (1983, #7)

One person’s view:  “A cynical, calculated attempt to fashion a country analogue of Lionel Richie and Diana Ross’ mind-numbing blockbuster Endless Love.” – gasp65 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.43 / 5.00

“You and I” raged across America at the start of my teen years, and it immediately became my least favorite single by either Eddie Rabbitt or Crystal Gayle.  Love ballads such as this were impossible to appreciate when I had never fallen in love and had no immediate likelihood of doing so.  However, I believed that after weathering a relationship or two, I might someday learn to enjoy – or at least tolerate – songs of this ilk.

It was the same misplaced sense of optimism that I had about the dreaded chore of buying new shoes.  Shoe shopping was always a lengthy ordeal that required trying on ten pairs to find the right size.  Making matters worse, my Catholic school’s bizarre dress code forced me to purchase additional shoes that were too ugly and uncomfortable to be worn in any non-school setting.  I longed for the day, not far off, when my foot size would stabilize at an adult level and the shoe-buying process would be much more efficient.  I also assumed that science would disprove Catholicism by that time, thereby nullifying the dress code.  I’d be able to grab any 10½-wide pair of men’s sneakers and be out of the store in two minutes.

Although scientists eventually came through for us on Catholicism, I continue to be disenchanted by today’s footwear experience.  My feet may have stopped growing, but it matters little when sneaker sizes are inconsistent across models and the best-fitting ones are never in stock anyway.  Quality control has also gone AWOL, so left shoes and right shoes from the same pair now usually differ by half a centimeter in every dimension.  Picking out shoes sucks as much as it ever did.  You know what else still sucks like it did when I was 13?  Listening to “You and I”.

Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle were good country & western singers, but there isn’t much country or western in “You and I”.  It’s a generic adult contemporary product with a mediocre arrangement.  Gayle has such a beautiful voice, and sadly the only time we get to hear it in isolation is when she’s echoing one of Rabbitt’s lines.  She’s relegated to the role of a parrot.  I also don’t care for the structure of the song.  The bridge is sung twice in identical fashion, so if you tune in during this part you can’t tell whether it’s the first or second occurrence.  This makes it hard to decide whether to change the station or tough it out.  After the second bridge, the song ends with the singers smugly congratulating themselves.  “We made it, you and I.”  Hey, I’m the one who just endured four minutes of deprivation and auditory hardship.  Where’s my praise?

There is one setting where “You and I” makes perfect sense:  weddings.  It’s a lovely ballad for the first slow dance between the newly married couple.  You know, that moment during the reception when everyone is distracted and you can sneak over to the cake and lick all the frosting off.  Unfortunately, wedding songs and funeral songs quickly wear out their welcome in other contexts.  (This phenomenon was later recognized as Midler’s Law.)  I remember an FM station in the ‘80s whose announcers constantly touted all the places where we could listen:  “At home, at work, at school, and in your car.”  Not once did they suggest tuning in to their broadcast at your wedding to save money on a DJ.  And yet, “You and I” was inexplicably all over the radio and on the charts for what seemed like forever.

In late winter it was clear that “You and I” had finally stalled out at #7 on the Hot 100 and was about to begin its highly awaited descent.  But just as the embattled populace was breathing a sigh of relief, Kenny Rogers & Sheena Easton’s squawking remake of Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonite” leapt into the top 10 right behind Eddie & Crystal.  This was like Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow and announcing that there will be six more weeks of bitter cold, and also that he will continue shitting on your porch for the duration of it because he doesn’t like getting snow on his bottom.

Aside from being fouled by these two tedious duets, the Hot 100 enjoyed one of its best years in history in 1983.  Almost every song to make the top 10 was a keeper – even the “bad” one that will be discussed next.

My rating:  3 / 10

“The Girl Is Mine” by Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney (1983, #2)

One person’s view:  “Two of the greatest music artists of all time took the biggest dump on the biggest album of all time!  Uggh, this song makes me want to rip my ears off and rip all the skin off my face!” – Paul Stroessner @ Return to the 80s

The public’s view:  2.76 / 5.00

Superstar duets have been around since the time of Sodom & Gomorrah, but they took a dark turn in the 1980s.  Duets were no longer serendipitous pairings of people who decided to sing together after a chance run-in at an awards ceremony or an AA meeting.  Now they were carefully scripted events whose participants were matched to one another by record label accountants based on their appeal to the targeted demographics.  Sometimes the duet was tied to the cross-merchandising of a movie, in the same way that Burger King might have served your drink in a collectible Return of the Jedi glass or sprinkled horsefly wings on your sandwich to promote The Fly.  The songs chosen for superstar duets were often the weakest available to either performer, in the belief that putting two big names on the same record would be enough to overcome the poor quality and sell a lot of copies.  All too frequently, this proved to be a valid assumption.

“The Girl Is Mine” is a notable example of a bad superstar duet, and it is frequently cited as a marketing faux pas.  What idiot at Epic Records decided to release Thriller’s worst song as its first single?  After looking into this maneuver, however, I think it was actually a stroke of genius and that it contributed to the album’s blockbusting sales.  “The Girl Is Mine” may have been wimpy and childish, but it accomplished several goals for Michael Jackson.  It reminded pop and adult contemporary radio stations that he wasn’t just an R&B or dance act.  It softened up the stodgier media outlets for his forthcoming singles about paternity suits and street gangs.  (Remember, radio had just come out of the doldrums and there was still some lingering conservatism.)  It also put him on the path to being named the King of Pop.  Let me explain this last one.

If you want to become the king of something but you aren’t in the line of succession, your best hope is to depose the current king.  In 1982, nobody was more respected than Paul McCartney.  He was the de facto King of Pop, even if no one ever addressed him that way and he didn’t walk around wearing a crown.  But Michael Jackson sensed that King Paul’s rule over his dominion was imperiled.  It was one thing to spend the last decade making silly love songs, but a silly anti-racism song like “Ebony and Ivory” suggested that McCartney was finally way out of his depth.  Now Jackson had the opportunity to write a song that the two of them would perform together.  This gave rise to the following multi-year scheme:

1.  Force Paul to sing Michael’s juvenile lyrics along with him on “The Girl Is Mine”, adding to the narrative that Paul had become a lightweight.

2.  Follow up the duet with some kick-ass solo songs, so that people can see how much better MJ is without a goofy has-been like McCartney weighing him down.

3.  Use the profits from Thriller to outbid Paul for the publishing rights to the Beatles catalog.

4.  Send Paul a bill every time he performs one of his own old songs.

5.  License Beatles tunes for use in commercials.  Paul stops watching TV, fearing that he will see a Tinactin ad with the jingle “Yesterday / All my jock itch finally went away...”

6.  Declare himself the new King of Pop, even as McCartney fumes that he’s still alive and is still making plenty of great pop music in the 1980s.  Doesn’t the theme to Spies Like Us count for anything?

7.  Marry into the royal family of the other singer who had been called The King.  Winner, winner, vegetarian dinner.

Although “The Girl Is Mine” ultimately led to phenomenal success for Jackson, its artistic merit is mixed.  It has two world-class singers performing at a high level, plus decent studio work from the guys in Toto, but it also sounds like an argument between a couple of first-graders.  “You’re a poohead, Paul.”  “Am not.”  “Are too.”  “Takes one to know one.”  “When I get rich I’m going to buy something you want and ruin it.”  “I hope your nose falls off someday, Michael.”  In the days before Tupac and Biggie, this was the best we could hope for in a musical feud.

My rating:  4 / 10

“I’ve Never Been to Me” by Charlene (1982, #3)

One person’s view:  “[I]t’s trying to present itself as a wise moral lesson for the audience, but instead it just comes across as sappy and dumb.” – Valeyard’s Music Corner

The public’s view:  2.22 / 5.00

Hey reader.  You, reader, cursing at this site.  I have this need to tell you about Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me”.  Now would be a good time to flee to Georgia, or California, or anywhere you can run.

“I’ve Never Been to Me” is sung from the perspective of an aging woman who has led an amazing life of luxury and hedonistic excess.  Naturally, she regrets it all.  I assume it’s because she has failed to prepare herself financially for retirement.  Goofing around in the Mediterranean isn’t the kind of job that comes with a 401k plan.  She wishes she hadn’t divorced the preacher whom she wed long ago, even though he was a domineering control freak who wouldn’t let her consort with kings and billionaires.  She is determined to complain to someone about her discontent, and she spies a harried housewife who is simply trying to make it through the day without a complete meltdown.  Aha, this will be the perfect victim for a lengthy harangue and some unsolicited marriage advice.

The setting of “I’ve Never Been to Me” is never specified, but it’s obvious that the housewife was not having much fun even before the rant took place.  I imagine that she’s at the grocery with her horrible little boy who is running around and knocking stuff off the shelves.  She’s struggling to buy all of the items on her shopping list without overdrawing the family’s checking account.  She would like to get the generic no-name version of Cheerios to save 60 cents, but she knows that the rat hairs in the box always trigger little Buford Jr.’s asthma.  Then along comes Charlene, telling her that the French Riviera is overrated and she should be thankful that she will never be able to go there.  The housewife should make an answer song called “I Lost My Temper at Kroger (And You Would Have Too)”.  I’ve written the first few lines:

Hey lady, old lady
Please get out of my face
Can’t you see that I am busy
The Isle of Greece is not a real place

I know you like to brag about
The things that you once did
If you really want to help me out
You’ll adopt my rotten kid

“I’ve Never Been to Me” was recorded way back in 1976, but its first release as a single only made it to #97 on the Hot 100.  Few would have heard it if not for Scott Shannon, a radio DJ who had a knack for rediscovering forgotten older records and turning them into hits.  I can understand why it caught Shannon’s ear, because it has a nice melody, a good singer, and memorably tone-deaf lyrics that I can’t believe anyone would say out loud.  It’s like a more extreme version of “Sometimes When We Touch”.  I can think of only one ‘80s hit whose narrator is both less likable and more delusional:  “Into the Night” by Benny Mardones.  The singer of “Into the Night” complains about the “fools” who object to his seduction of an underage girl.  Shannon helped revive that song too.  Nice job, Scott.  Matt Gaetz sends his thanks.

At a cursory level, “I’ve Never Been to Me” comes across as a denunciation of the women’s lib movement and a defense of traditional marriage.  It’s impossible to take that message seriously, though, because the narrator is such a ridiculous person.  She has an entirely atypical biography, yet she extrapolates a universal lesson from it and imposes it on a complete stranger.  She tries to convince the housewife that it’s best to never have great experiences so that she won’t be bitter when the fun inevitably comes to an end.  It’s as if Tom Brady went around giving demotivational speeches to young athletes, telling them that he’s sorry he won 7 Super Bowls because it sucks to know he won’t ever make it to 8.  And guys should date only ugly girls, because if they marry a supermodel they’ll eventually split up.

Although “I’ve Never Been to Me” is considered by many to be one of the worst songs ever made, I don’t hate it like I should.  It’s just too catchy and too quirky, and it has continued to take up room in my head more than 40 years after it permanently disappeared from the radio.  Last year I visited Monte Carlo, and I ought to have been fascinated by all of the weird expensive cars, the casino that has been in a bunch of movies, and the bewildered looks on the locals’ faces when asked for directions to the nearest Waffle House.  Instead, all I could think about was Charlene.  This was the very spot where she had moved like Harlow!  Maybe someday I’ll visit the Isle of Greece.

My rating:  5 / 10

“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.