See, here’s what I like about writing this column. Some weeks I give you a song you haven’t heard or a factoid about a band that you didn’t know. Other weeks you guys give me information I don’t know and turn me on to music that’s missing from my life. Of course that happened last week with the Replacements chatter in the comments.
So far I’ve been able to get to two of their albums. I know you guys recommended I start with Tim (1985), but I haven’t been able to hit that one yet. I have, however, listened to Let It Be (’84) and Pleased to Meet Me (’87), with pleasing results.
I went with Let It Be first and thought it was decent, but it doesn’t flow very well at all. I dug “Favorite Thing” and the cover of Kiss’s “Black Diamond” the most.
Then I moved to Pleased to Meet Me, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The first three tracks — “I.O.U.,” “Alex Chilton,” and “I Don’t Know” — are killer, with the latter being my favorite of the three. Pleased certainly feels more like an album than Let It Be, and based on just those two records I can pretty much tell I’m going to like the major-label-era Replacements the most.
Either way, both records were very much worth my time, and I will listen to Tim soon, so thanks to everyone for the recommendations and for turning me on to a band I never would’ve listened to otherwise. That’s part of what this series is all about.
Here’s our third week of artists whose names begin with the letter R, as we continue to look at songs that charted no higher than #41 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the 1980s.
Cliff Richard was the Kylie Minogue of his time – and a lot of other people’s times – in that he racked up hit after hit after hit in his native UK (born in India to British parents, technically), while scratching and clawing his way into the American Top 40 a mere nine times. Nine times, compared to…wait for it…one hundred and twenty-five Top 40 hits on the UK charts (number spelled out for dramatic effect), including a staggering 70 Top 10 hits. Wow. Just…wow. That’s insane. And it will never happen again.
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…