Today's AT40

[acroyear]

Is from June 28, 1986.  The summer of changes, as I spent more time rediscovering "classic rock" than pop music, though I still did plenty of MTV watching.  Did chemistry in summer school, much as I'd done biology the year before, only this time it was at my own school rather than bussing all the way to West Springfield, so I had to walk it.

I also spent a LOT of time watching Robotech as well as (now) classic Dr. Who (mostly 4 and 5 - though 6 was out, our local was always years behind).

This was also my "summer of bachelorhood", after having recovered from the teen infatuation of the previous year, I simply decided to spend time being "girl-crush free".  Mostly succeeded.

Anyways, "last week" was
#3 Crush on You, the Jets
#2 They'll be sad songs, Billy Ocean
#1 On My Own (Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald

Doesn't bode well, does it? Well, maybe the Rock scene will come out somewhere in all this...The recent countdown of May 17 shows promise in some tracks moving up, but others on that list are long gone...

#40, Hyperactive from Robert Palmer. Not the higher quality of his big 3, but not too bad. I've no memory of ever hearing this before, so probably the lack of a video had something to do with it.  4 really good ones dropped out, but the next debut doesn't make up for any of them, Jeffrey Osborne is at #39. bleh.  38 is Another song I never heard before, Melbourne's The Models with Out of Mind Out of Sight.

A trivia question - what top 40 singer had more success AFTER joining a group rather than before?  The answer at the time, Tony Orlando of Tony Orlando and Dawn.  Since then, that record was shattered by Sammy Hagar with a few singles before, but with multiple top ten singles and #1 albums after joining Van Halen.

• 37 - OMD's If You Leave.  Decent but overplayed, and annoying since I always saw their CD's in Oldfield's bin making me hopeful for a new one and then disappointed to see it just a filing error.
• 36 - The Fixx's Secret Separation.  Never heard of this either (what's up?  Were we starting to feel the effects of MTV's themed shows?  This was still years before Real World and even Remote Control, so I know they were still playing videos at the time...were bands just not making them or was MTV being more selective in what they were going to show?).
• 35 - Jermain Stewart's We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off.  I wrote on this before - good sentiment, shitty (and overplayed) song.  So far, all 4 debuts suck, compared to the good ones kicked out.  This *really* doesn't bode well.
  
• 34 - All I need is a Miracle (on its way down), from Mike and the Mechanics.  This was co-written by co-producer Chris Neil (after-the-fact) - Mike submitted it, Chris modified it during the rehearsals and mixing stage to something  much poppier than Rutherford's rockier original.  Chris had a knack for that which all Marillion fans felt (the hard way) when he produced Holidays in Eden and did much the same to the band's normally thick layerings.  The songs there sound much better live than on the studio album.  Chris promised not to turn them into "Mike and the Mechanics", but we're not so sure he succeeded in not succeeding.
  
  Still, I love this video and miss Roy Kinear greatly.
  
• 33 - The Bangles - If She Knew What She Wants.  Not too shabby.
• 32 - it's ballad time, Peter Cetera's biggest (almost his only) solo hit, Glory of Love from Karate Kid 2.  Overplayed, and watching the video pretty much meant you didn't actually need to watch the movie.
• 31 - The Blow Monkeys, Digging Your Scene.  Yet another I never heard before.  so far, they're outnumbering the songs I know by quite a bit...
• 30 - Billy Joel's Modern Woman, one of his interim singles while riding the extreme success of the joint Greatest Hits Volume I and II.  Joel says he doesn't particularly care for this (recorded for the film Ruthless People), and I suppose I agree.
• 29 - Something about you, Level 42.  An ok song, not one I'd turn off instantly but not one to get high priority on a playlist either.
• 28 - Rolling Stones still around with One Hit to the Body.  Like all stones songs to me.  'nuf said.
• 27 - Love Touch from Rod Stewart.  Deep into his 80s pop superstar phase.  Yet another movie song this week, this one from Legal Eagles.  Rod writes in the Storyteller boxed set (first one I ever bought), "Holly Knight has written many a great song.  This isn't one of them."
• 26 - Speaking of that band whose lead singer did better after joining a band, Dreams from Van Halen.  Being a naval aviation buff, my dad loved the original video for this featuring the Blue Angels, a kind of scrapbook of them in their A-4 Skyhawk days before moving on to the F-18 later that year.
• 25 - Belinda Carlyle's first solo hit, Mad About You.
• 24 - Prince does Mountains, with music by Wendy and Lisa, a generally forgotten followup to Kiss.  It's actually not too bad - Prince is one of those that rarely makes a bad song (though I still hate Kiss), but his great songs are SO great, that his typical output pales by comparison.
• 23 - Pet Shop Boys with one of thier earliest and biggest, Opportunities.  I still like the (hard to find) British mixes better, and certainly the British video is incredibly surreal (stick around for the ending - and not that the American version was "normal" either) but in any form it's a great song.
• 22 - *sigh*, my most hated Whitney Houston song.  bleh.  Won't even name it again, having had to type it twice this spring so far...
  
• 21 - Steve Howe and Steve Hackett short-lived duo band, GTR, with When the Heart Rules the Mind, the song that pretty much set the "AOR" format's direction for the next 5 years.

So, generally, the second 10 were a great improvement over the first 10, where I hadn't heard more than half of them before, and Rock and brit-pop are starting to make their mark.  Lets see if the trend continues...

• 20 - Falco's Vienna Calling.  Again, the more American mix which isn't nearly as good as his European originals, but at least it preserves the original Austrian lyrics (unlike Rock Me Amadeus).
• 19 - Jacksonville's 38 Special are still going, with Like No Other Night.  Rather forgettable compared to their early hits.  Sounds like it could have just been a simple rewrite of It Don't Come Easy.
• 18 - The Moody Blues start the "missing old friends" trilogy with Wildest Dreams.  Set 20 years after their late 60s peak, I certainly now know how Hayward felt in writing those songs.
  
• 17 - Like a Rock from Bob Segar, immortalized as a car commercial we'd all would rather forget, I think.  Segar apparently wrote a song for Don Johnson's solo album.
• 16 - Heart's late 80s dominance continues with Nothin' at All, down out of the top 10.
• 15 - Tough Enough from the Fabulous Thunderbirds.  Good song, but I wonder if it would have hit as high as it did without the hot-shorts-babe dominated video.
• 14 - Kenny Loggins hits the Top Gun peak with Danger Zone.  Another video full of film clips that practically told the whole story of the film in one shot, but still worth watching with all the F-14 stunt work in it (so yeah, my dad loved this one, too.)
• 13 - Boys Don't Cry with I Wanna Be a Cowboy.  One of those silly brit things that's more popular on VH-1 classic than it ever was on MTV or VH1 at the time.
• 12 - Nu Shooz's I Can't Wait drops down from #5.  As I wrote earlier, they're still around, now as a jazz piece.
• 11 - Madonna's first staring film role was an italian film for which she only received $100.  Shanghai Surprise paid her a million, for the ridiculous flop that was.  The song here is one of my favorites from her, Live to Tell.

So yeah, good stuff continued to rule this week, but we'll see if the horrid top 3 of last week is broken up.  Into the top ten, here we go with

• 10 - Peter Gabriel's biggest, Sledgehammer.  I was not that big a So fan at the time.  Like Hysteria, I had to wait until the hype-machine died down before I could give it an honest chance.  Now, of course, I recognize it as one of the best albums of the decade.
• 9 - sigh, the dance thing is here, with Janet Jackson's utterly repetitive Nasty.
• 8 - Gabriel's former bandmates (featuring the Mike Rutherford heard earlier) with their first HUGE hit, Invisible Touch.
• 7 - George Michael's boring and forgotten A Different Corner.
• 6 - El Debarge's Who's Johnny, yet another movie-based song from Short Circuit.
• 5 - Howard Jones with No one is to blame.  Too mellow for my tastes compared to other hits of his.
• 4 - Simply Red croons beautifully with Holding Back the Years.

uh oh...doesn't bode well for a change in the top 3...in fact, no change at all...

• 3 - The Jets hold with Crush On You.  ick.

Trivia The #1 Jinx - one of every seven artists that hit #1 never have another top 40 hit after that hit.

• 2 - Billy Ocean's They'll be sad songs
  
• 1 - Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald with the long forgotten On My Own.

*sigh* - time to switch to Top Tracks (XM 49) to get the bad ballad blues out of my system.