“All Cried Out” by Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force featuring Paul Anthony & Bowlegged Lou (1986, #8)

One person’s view:  “This thing is some real amateur hour shit.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.14 / 5.00 or 1.99 / 5.00, depending on the version of the single

Today we consider the legacy of Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force featuring Paul Anthony & Bowlegged Lou.  Let’s unpack this musical clown car.  Full Force was a six-man production and songwriting team.  Paul Anthony and Bowlegged Lou were two of Full Force’s members.  Cult Jam sounds like something to spread on toast at a Unification Church breakfast, but it was actually two guys playing instruments without any toast.  Lisa Lisa was a singer, and also the only one of these nine people famous enough to be invited onto TV shows like Origami with the Stars and I’m a Celebrity...Please Pay My Water Bill!  This unwieldy agglomeration normally specialized in freestyle dance music, but they decided one day to make a grandiose, histrionic, nearly five-minute-long break-up ballad.  “All Cried Out” then wept its way onto the airwaves, setting radios on fire with its tears.

I am surprised to learn how poorly Lisa Lisa is viewed by many of today’s armchair ‘80s critics.  She hasn’t achieved Peter Cetera’s feat of unanimous condemnation, but she does get a generous amount of vitriol.  Some of the reactions to her vocals are too cruel for me to quote, even on a blog that usually revels in the bashing of substandard hit music, and “All Cried Out” is her most poorly reviewed hit single.  It has been assailed not just for Lisa’s singing, but for pretty much every aspect of the song and its production.

The reviews like to point out that Full Force did not have much of a history with adult contemporary, and the group couldn’t quite grasp the melodic and lyrical conventions of the genre.  There are apparently some rules to manufacturing this stuff, dag gummit, and “All Cried Out” doesn’t follow them.  It can be contrasted with another break-up ballad from the same year, Patti LaBelle & Michael McDonald’s “On My Own”, which was written and produced by Carole Bayer Sager and Burt Bacharach.  Patti and Michael and Burt and Carole had a thousand times more song-crafting experience than Lisa Lisa’s crew, and they knew that ballads are supposed to color between the lines and not scribble all over the paper.  All the notes in “On My Own” are perfectly placed where the listener expects them to be.  Sophisticates and fancy-pantses swooned over it while turning up their noses at Lisa Lisa.

That being said, “All Cried Out” certainly has a lot more passion than “On My Own” and most of the other slick corporate ballads that topped the charts in 1986.  Lisa Lisa mournfully recounts the carnal joys of the relationship (“My body never knew such pleasure”) while bemoaning the heartbreak of its loss.  There is no such carnal joy in “On My Own”.  We get the impression that the wildest thing Michael McDonald and Patti LaBelle ever did as a couple was to pick out furniture together, and now dividing it up is their most pressing concern.  McDonald complains that it’s like a divorce and they weren’t even married.  Shit.  And “On My Own” was the biggest #1 song of that summer?!  How dismal.

The ex-boyfriend makes an appearance on “All Cried Out”, trying to say that he’s sorry for his woefully neglectful behavior.  Lisa’s response:  “Apology not accepted.”  This is a fun line, suitable for use as a T-shirt slogan.  Good luck finding such a sassy and shirt-worthy lyric in “On My Own” or in the collected works of Peter Cetera.  There is one aspect of this that feels contrived, however:  the ex-boyfriend’s part is actually sung by two different men.  Paul Anthony handles a couple of lines and then Bowlegged Lou waddles up to the plate.  It turns out that Paul and Lou are brothers, and I’m guessing that the unnatural dual arrangement was imposed by their parents to preserve family tranquility.  “Mom, Paul won’t let me sing!”  “Paul, you better let your brother have a turn at the microphone.  Don’t you know he has rickets?”

I’m not going to argue that “All Cried Out” is a flawless masterpiece.  I also can’t defend its cheap video, which implausibly stars a weirdly smooth-skinned cherub as Lisa’s ex.  Nonetheless, I believe the song’s rawness mostly works to its advantage.  If you think it was one of the worst ballads of 1986, then you probably didn’t experience 1986 first-hand.  Or maybe you’re a sophisticate or a fancy-pants.

My rating:  7 / 10

“Friends and Lovers” by Gloria Loring & Carl Anderson (1986, #2)

One person’s view:  “Terrible ballad that hit number two but is justifiably forgotten today.” – DonKarnage @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.64 / 5.00

I gave a horrendous review to the Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin duet “Separate Lives” on my #1 hits blog, but I admit to having some reluctant admiration for it.  It is a song that sets out to punish the listener and ruin part of his day, and it thoroughly succeeds.  “Friends and Lovers” is a different beast entirely.  It was not the product of an experienced team that consciously decided to rain pestilence down upon the world.  It’s an amateurish endeavor that somehow bumbled its way up the charts, and yet – without even trying – still managed to rival “Separate Lives” as one of the most monumentally annoying ballads of the mid-1980s.

The premise of “Friends and Lovers” is that two people, portrayed by Gloria Loring and Carl Anderson, have been platonic buddies for a long time and now plan to start having sex with each other.  Why didn’t either of them think of this earlier?  Was one of them stuck in another romance until now?  No, there’s nothing that even hints at this.  These two 40-year-olds just happened to look down their pants for the first time in their lives and figured out that there are parts they could be using more effectively.  The song’s bridge would be the ideal place to offer a different explanation, but instead we get such amazing lines as “I’ve been through you, you’ve been through me.”  “Friends and Lovers” was almost certainly the product of a lyricist on a tight deadline.

The track was produced by three individuals, including Carl Anderson himself, and it seems that none of the three ever worked on other pop songs of note.  The instrumentation they devised for “Friends and Lovers” serves only to highlight just how bad the concept and lyrics are, and if I didn’t know better I would think they were mocking the turd they were told to polish.  The dreadfully slow tempo and soft strings heighten the anticipation for drama that never arrives.  The abrupt “buh-bang” after the words “friend” and “lover” is a musical exclamation point that punctuates the couple’s trite declarations as if they have just discovered a relationship principle that no one else knows.  Maybe they should share some other axioms of romance with us.  “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus.  Ta-da!  Give your girlfriend jewelry for her birthday, not office supplies you stole from work.  Sha-boom!”  Every epiphany deserves a sound effect.

When I forced myself to listen to “Friends and Lovers” before writing this entry, I was surprised that the singing was much better than I remembered from those dark days in 1986 when it was all over the radio.  There isn’t a great deal of personality on display, but Loring is capable and Anderson does his best to make something out of this weak material.  The two of them comprise a solid “B” team for an ‘80s duet, as opposed to “A” teams like Patti Austin & James Ingram.  That’s perfect for this scenario, because you wouldn’t want to embarrass one of your “A” teams by having them sing these ridiculous lyrics.

Let’s compare “Friends and Lovers” with its peer “Separate Lives”.  “Separate Lives” finds so many ways to irritate:  the lengthy opening monologue that wastes our time; the barely noticeable melody that leads nowhere; the depressing subject matter made worse by the bitterness, blame, and whining; and the video that doubles down on the most awful things about the song.  It is a true “A” team duet, with both singers fully utilizing their talents, yet the vocal arrangement is engineered to inflict pain.  “Separate Lives” is a masterpiece of calculated malevolence, the musical equivalent of Senator Mitch McConnell.  I find it morbidly fascinating.

“Friends and Lovers” might have matched that level of infamy if everyone had been on board with the mission, but Gloria Loring treated it as a serious work that she thought people might actually like.  Because of the genuine effort that she and Carl Anderson put into their performance, I can’t give it my lowest rating.  In some ways, however, it leaves a less desirable legacy than the few hits that are scored lower.  The screed I’ve posted today is probably the most anyone has written about “Friends and Lovers” – and a good chunk of it focuses on an entirely different record.  Instead of being remembered as something uniquely unpleasant, the song is now barely remembered at all.

My rating:  2 / 10