This has been an interesting trip so far. Since I’m talking about the songs that reached the Hot 100 but not the Top 40, I know there are some stinkers. But since I’m doing it in alphabetical order, I was really curious how the quality would turn out. We’ve had one really good week in post #1 and one pretty bad week in #4, but for the most part there’s been a good mix of hits and crap each week.

So, continuing with the story … it’s 2001 and I’ve completed what I originally set out to do — get a hard copy of every song to hit the Billboard Top 40 in the ‘80s. But that wasn’t enough for me, so I decided to expand my search to encompass the entire Hot 100.

This is the point where the real fun of collecting began. It wasn’t difficult at all to get the songs in the Top 40. But the songs we’re talking about in this series are a completely different story: approximately 4,230 songs hit the Hot 100 in the 1980s. Now, of course, having greatest-hits CDs and a ton of full albums meant I had a good start in my quest, but I quickly realized the rarer songs from the early ‘80s would have to be found on record, as many of them have never been issued on CD. I’m not made of money, so the challenge was not only to locate them but to do so on the cheap. Finding those bottom-of-the-chart Bananarama songs from last week was simple, but locating something like “Fools Like Me” by Lorenzo Lamas was not. The only format I wouldn’t accept was cassette, only because I had nothing to play them on.

So, over the next five years I scoured record shows and eBay for Dana Valery singles and Frank Stallone’s self-titled debut record. My then-girlfriend — now my wife — would get totally pissed at me as she came home every day to find a half-dozen packages blocking the door, but hey, it’s all for the love of the art, right?

Next week we’ll skip ahead to 2006 and talk about how I “finished” my quest. Until then let’s continue with artists whose names start with the letter B, as we look at the songs that made it into the lower three-fifths of the Billboard Hot 100 in the ’80s.

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