When I worked at Billboard in the mid-’90s, a stroll past dance editor Larry Flick’s cubicle was a necessity — he sat near the door — as well as an adventure. His turntable was always hopping with a new house, trance, or hi-NRG 12-inch, and often he could judge a remix’s merits by the spontaneous boogying (or cringing) of the passersby.

One day, probably on my way to the loo, I was stopped in my tracks by a song that had long been buried in the recesses of my consciousness, yet it was spinning right there on Larry’s desk, albeit at a profoundly different tempo. Larry, unimpressed, looked up at me and said, “Want it?” And thus came into my life Saint Etienne’s 1993 remake of Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods’ “Who Do You Think You Are.”

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Can you feel it? I feel it. You know what I’m talking about – that sudden jolt, that shock that has surged through the American consciousness over the past three weeks? It’s not the Democrats nominating a black guy for president…who didn’t see that one coming? It’s not gays getting married in California…though I do distinctly sense my own marriage being undermined.

No, I’m talking about the recent revelation that, back in the ’70s, there were people with loose morals! Don’t take my word for it; the (vaguely titillating) evidence is right there on CBS (CBS?!?) every Thursday night at 10 on Swingtown, a show that’s a veritable smorgasbord of bell bottoms, Playboy Club parties, soft rock, and archetypal placeholders that so far occupy the space where real characters should be.

There’s Grant Show, who already made the ’90s safe for promiscuity on Melrose Place, as an airline pilot intent on bringing the Mile High Club down to earth. There’s Jack Davenport, the onetime backbone of the awesome British sex-romp Coupling who wasn’t much of a swordsman (ahem) in the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, as a family man struggling with the sexual revolution and his American accent.

There’s Molly Parker, who first gained notice playing a necrophile (necrophiliac?) in the Candian indie film Kissed, as a homemaker straddling ’50s suburban mores and the swingin’ ’70s. (It seems clear she’ll be straddling other things in the coming weeks, but that’s another story.) And then there’s the gorgeous Lana Parrilla, late of 24 and the short-lived Windfall, as Show’s absurdly hot-to-trot wife who takes a practically evangelical approach to the recruitment and seduction of swinger wannabes.

It’s the bicentennial summer of ’76, and Davenport and Parker, thanks to some financial good fortune, have moved “only five minutes away” from their conservative Chicago neighborhood and their dowdy friends into a den of iniquity filled with wife-swappers, slutty divorcees, and perhaps even some nascent teen homosexuality. (Only on TV could changing neighborhoods seem like time travel – but then, Swingtown producers Mike Kelley and Alan Poul told the New York Times that they envisioned the show as the bastard child of Boogie Nights and The Wonder Years, and if that’s possible then I guess anything is.) Here’s a humorous sneak peek: (more…)

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Last week in this space, I described a single by the Canadian rock band Prism as “sounding like an early-’80s Cliff Richard single (not that there’s anything wrong with that).” I’d like to say I spent hours deciding whether or not to make such a seemingly insulting comparison, but I’d be lying – I tossed it off. It wasn’t until I was editing the piece that I began weighing the significance of what I’d written; suddenly (ahem), the wheels were in motion, and that phrase triggered a flood of memories and bits of knowledge that I’m pretty sure I’ve been suppressing since about 1983 – when I finished high school and headed off for college determined to invent a cooler version of my previous self (just like everyone else does, right? Right?).

Anyway, thanks to the magic researching powers of the Internet, I quickly discovered that not only had I been a fan of Cliff’s turn-of-the-’80s singles like “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” “Dreaming,” and especially “A Little In Love” – I had actually owned a Cliff Richard album. Legit MP3 files are difficult to come by for some of these tunes (how can it be impossible to buy a copy of a top-10 hit like “We Don’t Talk Anymore”?), but as I searched iTunes and Amazon I found the title of his 1980 collection I’m No Hero vaguely familiar, and as I sampled track after track I recognized each one, until…

Cripes! I know it was 28 years ago, but I’ve owned at least 10,000 records/tapes/CDs/digital albums in my life, and until now, I thought I had a pretty good handle on which ones I’ve had and which ones I haven’t. Is Cliff really that forgettable?

Apparently so, at least in the U.S.

Of course, in the U.K. no homegrown solo artist has ever been bigger. Beginning with “Move It” in 1958 – a song that no less an authority than John Lennon identified as the “first British rock record” – Cliff has sold more singles than any other act in British history. (more…)

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Actually, it’s only Volume 2, but who’s counting?

This is an all-Canadian edition of my occasional series sorting through the wreckage of a vinyl collection that focused heavily on minor hits and gone-but-not-always-forgotten acts. The bands featured here shared not only a home country, but also a home city (Vancouver), a bass player (Ab Bryant), and a rockin’ (but not too hard-rockin’) sound that scored them a series of minor U.S. hits before their brief early-’80s journeys to Kasemopolis. Oh, and one other thing: Both these songs skimmed the bottom of the Top 40 during the same weeks in March 1982.

Chilliwack – “I Believe”

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any more voices in my head than the average person, but during the fall of 1981 one of those voices was running a particular phrase on a perpetual loop: “Gone gone gone, she been gone so long, she been gone gone gone so long/Gone gone gone, she been gone so long, g-gone gone gone gone so long.”

Chilliwack formed around 1970 and named themselves after a city east of Vancouver, in the Fraser Valley region of southern British Columbia; the name means “going back up” in one of the nearly dead Salishan languages once spoken by the region’s Native Americans. And now that you know that, know this: “My Girl (Gone Gone Gone)” not only wasn’t Chilliwack’s sole American hit, it wasn’t even their first. Four other songs, all major Canadian hits, had charted here during the ’70s – the biggest being the #67 smash “Arms of Mary” from 1978.

None of those songs, however, had inspired anything like this: (more…)

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The difference between journalism and history is, of course, time and perspective – as I’ve been reminded over the last few months, as I’ve presumptuously taken it upon myself to identify the Worst Number One Songs of the Rock Era. I’ve had to attack songs from the ’50s and ’60s that I wasn’t around to hear in heavy rotation on Top 40 radio, and therefore can only judge through a historical prism. I’ve been forced to balance my childhood/teenage perspective on the music of the ’70s and ’80s with my current, more jaundiced view – a view that dominated my thoughts on ’90s music.

But now that’s all out the window, as I wade into the (at times kinda filthy) waters of Noughties pop with a firm realization that I am definitively Out Of The Demographic. Though it fluctuates around the edges, the traditional target demo of Top 40 radio is ages 12 to 35; well, I hit my 35th birthday in December 2000 – the Number One song that week appears on this list – and right around that time my (practically) lifelong obsession with pop radio and the Hot 100 was confronted by a simple, yet overpowering question: “What is this crap?”

And just like that, I found myself perilously close to this:

Oh, I’ve done my best to fight it – that whole “Why do kids listen to this type of music?” thing. I’ve tried to keep up, and in fact, in researching this column I was pleasantly surprised to find relatively few songs that I had never heard even once. (Of course, in many cases I had only heard them because I had seen a fresh issue of Billboard, thought “What the heck is that?” and made a quick visit to iTunes or YouTube.) Of course, music fans of all ages, races and tastes are likely to find similar gaps in their knowledge of this decade’s chart-topping songs. As I detailed last week in this space, huge changes at radio and in the marketplace have turned the Hot 100 into something of a warehouse for the biggest hits in various (and often mutually exclusive) radio sub-formats, rather than a distillation of the once-hegemonic Top 40 beast.

Simply put, the Hot 100 no longer reflects the listening experiences of many pop-radio-listening Americans. It leans a bit too heavily on R&B tracks, because the “Rhythmic Top 40” stations on the Hot 100 radio panel tend to give more daily spins to their top tracks than do “Top 40 Mainstream” stations. It leans way too heavily on rap singles, even though many of those singles receive scant airplay on the majority of pop stations, because rap accounts for a disproportionate percentage of the CD singles still being sold. In fact, the Hot 100 has changed so much, and generated so many complaints in recent years, that Billboard saw fit three years ago to create a “Pop 100” chart (and a complementary “Pop 100 Airplay” list) to track activity on what’s left of “mainstream” Top 40.

But you know what? Screw it. If the Hot 100 is still good enough for Fred Bronson and his Billboard Book of Number One Hits, it’s good enough for me – even if it means I had to give multiple spins to a batch of derivative, middling rap hits that likely wouldn’t have come anywhere near the Number One slot if not for their utter prurience. So let’s get on with it, and I’ll try to get through without too many Quincy moments. (more…)

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Over the past several months I’ve been engaged in a Vision Quest on this tiny slice of the Internet, attempting to locate and suitably disparage the worst Number One songs of the Rock Era. That quest will reach some sort of fruition next week with a rundown of the worst-bests of our current decade; however, the process of reviewing the top songs of the last two decades has compelled me to focus on the myriad changes that have rocked the music industry – and the pop singles charts – since my brief tenure as a copy editor and writer at Billboard in the early 1990s. In order to understand those changes more clearly, I decided to enlist the guru himself – Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s Director of Charts and Senior Analyst.

If you’re a chart obsessive like I am – and if you’re still reading this, you probably are – you likely are aware that, beginning around the time I worked at the magazine (really, I swear it’s not my fault), dramatic changes rocked the seemingly well-oiled machine known as Billboard’s Hot 100. The magazine began using computerized analyses of both airplay and sales at that time, in an effort to make the Hot 100 and its other charts more accurate than ever; paradoxically, though, changes in the practices of those who spun, manufactured and sold music conspired at that time to make the magazine’s flagship chart a less-accurate reflection of the public’s musical tastes.

By the end of the ’90s, the chart which had defined American popular music for four decades would be, arguably, a shadow of its former self – victimized by advancing technologies, fragmenting radio formats, declining sales and panicking record companies. These changes manifested themselves in ways that were clear to anyone who followed the charts closely. For one thing, singles began achieving longer stretches at Number One than had previously been the norm; whereas exactly one song (Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”) had spent as many as 10 weeks atop the Hot 100 between 1958 and 1991, no fewer than 15 have done so since then. Similarly, since 1995 a dozen singles have debuted at Number One; no single had done that in the first 40 years of the rock era.

On the other hand, since the ’90s it has been common for singles to advance all the way to the top of the Hot 100 without receiving airplay on hundreds of the stations that participate in the chart’s radio panel. And, in the development that was perhaps most disturbing to chart-watchers, during the ’90s many of the biggest radio hits – particularly songs by rock-oriented acts – failed to chart at all. (more…)

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Man, I’ve got a headache. Maybe it’s a hangover from the most recent installment in this series, when so many readers joined me in sifting through the effluvial of the ’80s that I briefly thought they were clicking over to Popdose to revel in my rapier wit, rather than to hear “Kokomo” one more time. Having been disavowed of this notion by the Pulitzer committee, which dropped me in round one of their deliberations over the coveted “Best Performance by a Wise-Ass Pop Listmaker” medal, I drank through my pain and decided to soldier on to the 1990s.

It was an era when…hmmm… What happened in the ’90s, anyway? I mean, apart from Bill and Hill and Newt and Monica and all that? Isn’t there a VH1 show somewhere that can remind me why this decade is worth discussing? Oh, of course – and the I Love the ’90s web page lists the decade’s pop-culture “highlights” primarily as a series of rivalries: Tonya and Nancy… Amy Fisher and the Buttafuocos… Pee-Wee and his wee-wee… Sharon Stone and her cooter…

Bleah. Of course, the recording industry in the ’90s had its own share of rivalries – Mariah vs. Whitney, Hammer vs. Vanilla Ice, Garth vs. Billy Ray, Biggie vs. 2Pac, Puff Daddy vs. P. Diddy, Britney vs. Xtina, Backstreet vs. N’Sync, Kurt vs. the shotg… sorry. Too soon? (Speaking of “too soon,” it’s worthwhile to note that while ’80s nostalgia was already rampant by the mid-’90s, no such yearning for the halcyon days of Showgirls and 90210 has yet emerged nearly a decade post-millennium.)

For the purposes of this column, at least, the biggest music-biz rivalries of the decade featured Top-40 radio formats diverging and competing for listeners, and major record companies declaring war on… their customers. I’ll go into more detail on these phenomena next week in this space; for now, here’s a brief rundown. On the radio side, a trend toward narrowcasting divided Top 40 radio into multiple mini-formats, with the result that by the late 1990s songs could reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 while receiving airplay on only a fraction of the format’s stations. Meanwhile, radio playlists shrank through the early ’90s at the same time that Billboard began tracking airplay electronically rather than relying on radio stations’ own reports; as a result, the biggest hits sat atop the chart for months at a time.

At retail, panicky record labels responded to a sales slowdown by ending the production of singles for many of their biggest rock-oriented acts. Because Billboard was slow to change its Hot 100 eligibility policies to include radio hits that hadn’t been released as commercial singles, the charts of the 1990s failed to properly recognize some of the era’s biggest hits – including the two biggest pop-radio hits of the rock era, the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” and No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.” Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles books, in their most recent vintages, list those and other radio-only chart-toppers of the ’90s as Number Ones; Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book of Number One Hits, on the other hand, continues to focus solely on the Hot 100. Contradicting my own policy, established in my column on the ’50s, I’ve chosen this time to favor Bronson and remain Hot 100-centric. So sue me.

On that note… as Casey Kasem used to say after one of those wretched Long Distance Dedications: On with the countdown! (more…)

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A few weeks ago in this space, I located the origin of my personal anglophilia in the syndicated radio show Rock Over London, which introduced Americans to ‘80s-era British acts both major (Tears for Fears) and minor (that Boy George imitator, Marilyn). For me, the visual equivalent of Rock Over London was the Rock Yearbook series, which was published (in the U.S. at least) by St. Martin’s Press each autumn between 1980 and 1988. Many were the early-December days during college when I would blow off studying for finals to stalk the local bookstores for the latest edition, then immerse myself in the intimate details of Prefab Sprout or the Blow Monkeys’ chart positions instead of re-reading Dostoevsky or sifting through histories of the Boer War.

My grades tended to reflect these priorities, but no matter: The education found in the Yearbooks’ glossy pages eventually proved at least as valuable as the one for which my parents staved off retirement and depleted their bank accounts. For the Rock Yearbooks were a trove of both information and attitude, generously ladled by critics from the British rock rags Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Smash Hits. These Brits were uniformly snarky, self-indulgent and pleased with themselves, in contrast with an American crit-corps who (for the most part) took themselves and the music way too seriously to revel in the trinket-like gaudiness of ’80s pop.

The thrills of the Rock Yearbooks were manyfold: the Acts of the Year and Quotes of the Year reviews, the Best and Worst Album Covers, the “Thanks…but No Thanks” section (from 1985: “thanks” to the Who “for finally calling it a day,” and “no thanks” to Everything But the Girl – “Why did they always have to look so miserable?”).

But for me, the mother’s milk were the year’s worth of top-20 singles and albums charts – from Billboard in the U.S. and Music Week in the U.K. – and the collected snippets of album reviews culled from the aforementioned British music mags. With the charts, the fun was in the cross-cultural comparisons – how much time passed between a song’s appearance in one country and its debut in the other, for example, or how the U.S. and U.K. charts could be at times quite similar (“I Want to Know What Love Is” dominated both countries simultaneously), at others wildly divergent. Take, for example, these Top 5’s from June 1984: (more…)

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Like a lot of music buyers back in the late ’70s and early ’80s – a pre-Compact Disc era when recession, market oversaturation, aversion to disco, and other factors sent record sales plummeting – I tried to make wise decisions with my limited funds. Between a half-decent allowance and the profits earned from selling Cokes at Virginia Tech football games (where a really warm day could bring as much as $40, not bad for a 12-year-old in 1978), I was able to buy a couple singles a week and a couple albums a month. I would try to make sure I didn’t duplicate my efforts; if I was considering buying a single, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t later buy the same song on an album.

As a result, my collection of singles (long since moved to the garage, the poor things) is mostly a hodgepodge of one-hit wonders and low-charting songs by mid-level artists. Most of them climbed into the Top 40, thereby escaping the fate of appearing in my Popdose colleague Dave Steed’s “Bottom Feeders” series, yet many of them are nearly forgotten now. Except, of course, on those few occasions when I fire up the ol’ turntable and put that plastic ring over the spindle – or when I dip into the “Jon’s Singles” folder in iTunes, where I’ve stashed the digital versions of those haphazardly stored, half-warped 45s of my youth.

This occasional series will give some of these singles a moment in the sun. I don’t promise you’ll like them – in some cases I no longer know what I was thinking when buying them – but nobody ever said nostalgia and quality have to go hand in hand…

Eddie Schwartz, “All Our Tomorrows” (1982)

Jim Bartlett, a part-time DJ and full-time memory bank who maintains the excellent radio-related blog The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, stole my thunder by posting this track just a few weeks ago. I’m doing it anyway, just because it’s the perfect representation of a type of song you almost never hear anymore: midtempo, keyboard-driven pop. (more…)

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Something’s come over me as I’ve contemplated this, the fourth edition of what promises to be a six-part series (the invention of time travel seeming unlikely before I conclude, sometime around Memorial Day). My sentimental generosity toward music I once liked, whether I still do or not, has been replaced by a tendency to see the lameness of every single song on the charts. I only want to think about stuff that’s obscure, stuff with mopey vocals and jangly guitars and drone-y synths, songs that make me want to either have sex or kill myself. Plus, I’m starting to grow hair on my balls …

Of course! Adolescence!! That must be it: I spent most of the ’80s in full hormonal rage. The decade began in the middle of my freshman year of high school; Thriller and “Every Breath You Take” accompanied my high school graduation; Live Aid found me sowing summertime-on-campus oats; upon college graduation I still hadn’t found what I was looking for; etc., etc. As a teenage boy — and then as a college-paper rock-crit slacker — it was, of course, incumbent upon me to hate everything commercial and seek out the morose and the morbid. (Not that this always worked out; if my high school friends read this they’ll be happy to point out my Hall & Oates worship or the way I’d sing along with Rick Springfield in the yearbook room.)

My point is, you’ll have to excuse the fact that while it was difficult at times to come up with 10 chart-topping hits that I truly hated from the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s, I had a hard time finding 10 such singles to like from the 1980s. There were 241 number-one hits during those god-forsaken Reagan years, and I wanted to include about 220 of them on this list. In fact, before we launch into the bottom 10 (or so), let’s indulge in a chronological rundown of 30 songs that didn’t quite sink low enough to make the Big List, yet are richly deserving of mention:

“Do That to Me One More Time,” “Call Me,” “Sailing,” “The Tide Is High,” “The One That You Love,” “Abracadabra,” “Who Can It Be Now?”, “Hello,” “Ghostbusters,” “A View to a Kill,” “Miami Vice Theme,” “Separate Lives,” “That’s What Friends Are For,” “On My Own,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Who’s That Girl,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Anything for You,” “Hold On to the Nights,” “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” “Love Bites,” “Wild, Wild West,” “Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley,” “Look Away,” “The Living Years,” “Toy Soldiers,” “Batdance,” “Cold Hearted,” “When I See You Smile,” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

In tribute to the MTV decade, get ready for a YouTube fiesta — every one of the following songs poisoned not only our radios, but our TVs as well. (I could swear that one of these tunes, in particular, is actually responsible for blowing out my old Philco in 1988. Guess which one.) (more…)

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