(I don’t have much of an intro for this week’s CHART ATTACK! — only that today’s writer, Rob Smith, made me laugh so hard it woke up my wife in the next room. It’s only fitting that Rob, who goes by “EightE1″ on the blogs, tackles this specific year. You’re going to love this one! — JH)


Kenny Rogers. The Alan Parsons Project. Leo Sayer. Oak Ridge Boys. Cliff Richard. Pablo Cruise. Alabama. Gino Vannelli. Neil Diamond. Kim Carnes. These are just a few of the wild, crazy hitmakers who sent songs up the charts in 1981. Juice Newton. Air Supply. Pointer Sisters. Marty Balin. The list goes on — a veritable who’s who of adult contemporary royalty. Commodores. Terri Gibbs. Champaign. John Schneider. This was Top 40 radio at the turn of the decade, and you either loved it or you plugged your ears until you could dial into a rock station more to your liking.

I was 11 years old in 1981. I had just discovered that if I placed my little GE portable cassette recorder next to my clock radio and pressed PLAY and RECORD, any song I wanted could be mine (with a bit of DJ patter or faded parts of another song, if I wasn’t quick enough to hit STOP in time). It was file-sharing for the Atari 2600 age — I was Napster before Napster was Napster. The first song I chose was “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang. The only time I hear it these days is at weddings (or as a really inappropriate selection at a funeral), but it will always hold a special place in my heart, as the song that revolutionized how I collected and listened to music.

I’m sure I had several of these next songs stashed away on 90-minute K-Mart blank cassettes (blue labels, three for a buck). Time and taste have certainly changed my opinion about some of them — the fresh-eared 11-year-old has given way to the grumpy, curmudgeonly almost-fortysomething who’s typing this now. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether I enjoyed music more back then, before CDs and MP3s and iPods, when I wasn’t focus-grouped to death and the concept of reunion tours hadn’t been invented yet. Did that kid with the tape recorder and the cheap, rickety cassettes have more fun with music?

Probably. But I think he also liked Christopher Cross. The kid was an idiot.

On with the countdown …

10.  The Night Owls — Little River Band  Amazon  iTunes
9.  Hard to Say — Dan Fogelberg  Amazon  iTunes
8.  Who’s Crying Now — Journey  Amazon  iTunes
7.  Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around — Stevie Nicks with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers  Amazon  iTunes
6.  Private Eyes — Daryl Hall and John Oates  Amazon  iTunes
5.  Step by Step — Eddie Rabbitt  Amazon  iTunes
4.  For Your Eyes Only — Sheena Easton  Amazon
3.  Start Me Up — The Rolling Stones  Amazon  iTunes
2.  Endless Love — Diana Ross and Lionel Richie  Amazon  iTunes
1.  Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do) — Christopher Cross  Amazon  iTunes

10. The Night Owls — Little River Band (download)

Australia’s Little River Band is one of those groups that has, at least in name, been around forever, a band that scored a load of hits in their heyday, yet if you challenge the average listener to name even one member of the band, that average listener would likely come up blank, even if you filled in all the vowels and the letter R. This is a good thing for LRB, since the group that currently tours casinos, amusement parks, state fairs, and city festivals contains not a single member of the original band, not even a single member of their most successful lineup (the guys who played on “Lonesome Loser” and “Reminiscing”? Nowhere to be found). Bassist Wayne Nelson — a Texan, fer Chrissakes — joined the band in 1980 and the next year sang lead on “The Night Owls” (usurping lead singer Glen Shorrock, who probably played tambourine or something), watched it hit Number Six on the US charts, and, suddenly, found he had a gig for life (he is the band’s lead vocalist today).

“The Night Owls” tries to be dark and mysterious. “There’s a bar right across the street,” Nelson sings. Ooh — alcohol is going to be consumed. Cool. Good start. “He’s got a need he just can’t beat,” he continues. A need — is he thirsty? Sexually frustrated? I want to know more. “Out on the floor, he shuffles his feet away.” He — he shuffles his feet away? He’s dancing, I suppose, but shuffling his feet away? Is he doing some serious James Brown shit, tearing up the floor while everyone else gawks? Or is he just, you know, walking across the floor? I get the strange sensation of wanting to know, yet not really caring. By the time we get to the chorus, where we’re implored to find the heart of a night owl falling (presumably, after it’s been knocked out of its tree and ripped apart by some hungry animal), I’ve pretty much lost whatever thread he’s talking about.

LRB saw their run of chart success end within a couple years, after they became a personnel carousel (read their Wikipedia entry for a full, incredibly confusing account of the group’s multitude of ex-members). Still, every summer, on tiny stages across the US, you can hear Wayne Nelson and whoever is calling themselves LRB these days belt out “The Night Owls.”

9. Hard to Say — Dan Fogelberg

Oh, God, I hate Dan Fogelberg. Yes, he’s dead, I know, and we all felt bad when he died, mere days after Jeff and Jason’s Fogelmas dialogue last holiday season. But, short of maybe John Denver, was there ever a singer/songwriter who lashed such über-sensitive sentiments to anemic studio accompaniment, with such wimp-god arrogance?

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