Today's AT40

[acroyear]

April, 1981.  Aside from the handful of songs on "Solid Gold", I have little recollection of knowing the pop music of this time.  I was 10 and soon to be moving back to Florida.  While in Chula Vista (San Diego), California, I was at a "year-round" school, where they shortened summer vacation in exchange for adding longer vacations elsewhere (a month at Christmas, 2 weeks in fall, 2 weeks in spring, lots of individual days off).  April was definitely one of those times I was spending at home, and mostly watching the News because of the coverage of Columbia's first flight...and Hinkley's assassination attempt on Reagan.  There wasn't much else on given the significance of those two events.

The year before (1980), my spring break was spent in Florida...suffering from Chicken Pox. :)

Right now, Blondie's Rapture was last week's #1.  Never quite sure what to make of it.  The video is extremely surreal.

Starting off, #40: Andy Gibb's Me Without You.  I have no recollection of ever hearing this ballad before. The backing track sounds like it could have been a new age electronic music piece 4 years later and nobody would know the difference.

38: Watching the Wheels from John Lennon's "last" album.  Actually, it wouldn't be because Yoko had enough material to complete Milk and Honey 3 years later.  Of course, like with the countdown from the week he died 4 months earlier, Casey would have no way of knowing that.

anyways, laundry time...

• Loverboy's Turn Me Loose.  This one stayed on MTV's rotation well into 1982.  MTV really liked Loverboy 'til the Nirvana revolution started.  I hadn't realized it was this much older.
• Phil Collins's I Missed Again.  Interesting, in that the rockers usually credit "In the Air Tonite" as being his first hit and certainly the oldest they'll play on classic rock radio, but as far as the singles go, it wasn't his first.
• Kim Carnes just debuted with Bette Davis Eyes at #33, which would eventually be not just a #1, but the#1 song of the year.  Another extremely strange video.  THIS song I definitely heard 'cause it was somewhat inescapable.
• hmm...the "Climax Blues Band".  Another one in the vein of Ambrosia and Little River Band, and "mellow" Toto, with guitar solo sound stolen from ELO.  This one I knew 'cause mom occasionally listened to adult contemporary (re: mellow) radio when she wasn't listening to oldies and it certainly got high rotation.  Can't say much for it other than, well, it's perfect for that format.
  
• oh great, another week of "all ballads, all the time", as Champaign's "How 'Bout Us" comes up next.  I probably heard more of these songs in the commercials for K-Tel "music for lovers" compilations than actually on the radio.
  
• oh good grief.  we get enough "Play Freebird" as it is, and yet here they actually caved in and played it as a long distance dedication.  *sigh*
• The Who's You Better You Bet.  Not quite sure what this one really means.  It's so unlike anything the Who did before, and also Pete's solo material and It's Hard which came after.  Fun track, but very atypical Who, especially with the large piano part.  It's really a pop song (with the obligatory "slide" key change up at the end), not a rock song.
• "Franke and the Knockouts"?  there's a dustbin chap waiting to happen...kinda a Toto clone, another in that group of LRB I mentioned above.  Or was it?  Wikipedia shows that Franke Previte's craftsmanship in songwriting would reveal itself years later, with Dirty Dancing's Time of My Life.
  
• Styx's Paradise Theater was the #1 album.  Too Much Time on my Hands is an arena rocker that was hard to escape and continued airplay on rock-pop radio stations for years after.  Styx was one of those where I knew almost all of their hits as a young kid, which was surprising in hindsight given that dad didn't have any of their albums.  Now, is Paradise Theater really a concept album?  Or just a theme for a few songs the envelope the work.  The same could be said for Roboto 2 years later - Dennis may have had a concept in mind, but aside from Heavy Metal Poisoning, JY and Shaw wouldn't really follow him in the direction he wanted.
  
  
• ugh.  Steely Dan's Time out of Mind.  Everything I ever said about them before...still holds up.  This sounds exactly like every other SD track ever, and the blandness continues to leave a foul taste in my mouth like stale water.
  
  
• REO's Take it on the Run - setting the power ballad stage that Journey would follow, following up from the success of Styx's Babe.  A few months later, I had neighbors who were evanglicals that believed all of the crap about rock music that the moral majority types would spout, and REO was one of those top of the list "satanists", along with Styx's Snowblind (a song really about cocaine addiction, but which I turned into a cool soundtrack for Empire Strikes Back's battle of Hoth sequence).  When I actually *heard* REO that was the clincher for me to realize that anything religion ever said about rock music or pop culture was highly likely to be wrong - follow the evidence, indeed.  My first taste of true skepticism, age 11.
  
• April Wine's "Just Between You and Me" - A Canadian band that never really quite broke out into America.  Recorded at Le Studio, just before Rush would record Moving Pictures at the same location.
• more ballads, this time Gino Vannelli's Living Inside Myself.  KTel take me away...there's probably 3 other songs from this era/genre you could probably layer on top of each other with this one and not notice anything "wrong".
  
• One of Abba's last, Winner Takes it All.  A band always slightly ahead of its time, but only by a fortnight or so.  Dancing Queen was released in '76 though it would dominate Disco playlists well into 1979, for example.  In this case, if they'd not added the drum beat and kept it as a ballad, they'd have been indistinguishable from Gloria Estefan's ballads of the late 80s.
• After a country break (Dolly Parton's #1 hit, 9 to 5), a few more ballads (like James Taylor), and we're at Smokie Robinson's Being with You.  Another adult-mellow hit that would be immortal in that genre.  Then more ballads, as Neil Diamond's Hello Again comes up.  Trivia from AT40 - his first single for Columbia flopped and he got a whole 15 cents royalties at the time.  10 years later, Columbia would shell out a 4.5 MILLION dollar contract to get him back.
  
• Country ballad time, with Juice Newton's first crossover hit, Angel of the Morning.  Casey says that her real first name is a "closely guarded secret", but Wikipedia quickly reveals it to be "Judy".  Oh if they had those resources back then... :)  Correction, her first hit was The Sweetest Thing, which I didn't actually know was her. Go fig.
  
  
• breaking into the top ten, The Police with Don't Stand So Close To Me.  Another one of those that MTV would keep in heavy rotation well past it's pop chart prime.  All Sting's fault, I'm sure.
• another REO ballad, Keep On Loving You.  Anybody who'd only heard their radio stuff probably wouldn't have known they were such a rough hard-rock band for most of the late 70s, and probably got shocked when they first heard things like Stillness of the Night and Riding the Storm Out.
• A little pop-rock, Steve Winwood's While you see a Chance.  I realize his characteristic voice is a strong factor, but his ability to stay on the charts and stay relevant long after his original band (Traffic) broke up, even more successfully so than contemporary Paul McCartney, is quite respectable.
  
• A bit of history - Terry Fox is the subject of a long distance dedication, talking about his Marathon of Hope, not knowing he would die from the cancer just 2 months later.  The dedication song is Time in a Bottle.
• Don McLean was still in the countdown?  This song, Crying, was a cover of Roy Orbison's song, and was a huge worldwide hit...and I really don't see why.  Cheesie and directionless compared to Orbison's original and I don't know why Roy praised it so at the time.
• Sheena Easton - I thought Morning Train came AFTER For Your Eyes Only, but I guess not...pre "American Idol", she was the subject of a "how to become a celebrity" reality tv show back in 1980.
  
• longest continuous note in any top 40 song - Lovely Day sung by Bill Withers, now singing Just the Two of Us for Grover Washington Jr.  The song recently was sampled by Will Smith, turning it from a romance into a divorced father to his son song.
• More late Lennon, Woman, at #4.  Talk about a comeback being snuffed too soon.  This entire album could have been released in singles and every one of them would have been a hit...now More Styx with Best of Times.
• ooh, Rapture drops to number two, making the new number 1...
  
  
• Kiss on my List by Hall and Oats.

That last song was one I loved a year later and kept trying to tape off the radio throughout 1982 (while songs from Private Eyes dominated the charts) and never managed to, so I gave up and just bought the album.  I'm pretty sure I claimed it was my fav song of all time at the time, a record that would stand until 1983 with Mr. Roboto and Men At Work's It's a Mistake.

Out of some 30+ tapes I made off the radio from December of 1981 to 1984, I think I only have two of them left.  One has my cousins and I improvising comedy (generally rather immaturely, but I thought it was funny at the time) on side one when I was 11.  It is locked in a vault with an intentionally forgotten combination so it never escapes to make its way to myspace...nyah.

And with that threat, I'm out of here.