“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