“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