After a vacation summering in beautiful Silver Lake, California (aka, barhopping),  John C. Hughes and the world’s foremost Belinda Carlisle impersonator, a.k.a. his buddy Matty (or “Bearlinda,” if you prefer), return to review some singles, No on Prop 8 style. This week your rainbeaux duo take a listen to songs by Duran Duran, Office, Missing Persons, and Vanity 6, plus thrill to Matty’s note-perfect rendition of the Closet World jingle!  Enjoy, and as always, MP3s of the songs are below so you can follow along at home.

Duran Duran — “The Chauffeur (Blue Silver)” (download)

Office — “Wound Up” (download)

Missing Persons — “Words” (download)

Vanity 6 — “If A Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)” (download)

“But suddenly a mighty tumult arose, and there were cries of “The werewolf!” “The werewolf!” Terror seized upon all — stout hearts were frozen with fear. Out from the further forest rushed the werewolf, wood wroth, bellowing hoarsely, gnashing his fangs and tossing hither and thither the yellow foam from his snapping jaws…” - Eugene Field

Warren Zevon - “Werewolves of London”

Duran Duran - “Hungry Like the Wolf”

It’s week 27 of Bottom Feeders and you know what that means.

What? You don’t know what that means? Actually, neither do I. But what I do know is that we have only eight songs left to get through by artists whose names begin with the letter D, so I’m giving you a quickie this week and jumping right into it. Enjoy more songs from the ass end of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ’80s.

George Duke
“Shine On” — 1982, #41 (download)

George Duke has his jazz side and he has the funky side you hear on “Shine On.” Duke has an eclectic resumé: he’s worked with Jean-Luc Ponty, Frank Zappa, and George Clinton, and he did a few albums with jazz guitarist Stanley Clarke among countless other keyboard sessions with various artists.

Duke Jupiter
“I’ll Drink to You” — 1982, #58 (download)
“Little Lady” — 1984, #68 (download)

Why do I feel it’s been a while since we’ve had a really decent rock song in this series? Both of these could fit the bill since Duke Jupiter has a classic ZZ Top feel that’s helped along by “Little Lady,” which is about a girl and a car. The video didn’t hurt that notion one bit either. (It seemed to teach you how to handle tricky curves while drunk.) “Little Lady” is from Duke Jupiter’s album White Knuckle Ride, which has the distinction of being the first release on Morocco Records, the short-lived rock imprint of Motown.

Robbie Dupree
“Brooklyn Girls” — 1981, #54 (download)

I’ve heard on multiple occasions how Robbie Dupree’s style was a complete rip-off of the Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers. There are definite similarities, but Dupree handles himself well enough that he’s really a compliment to the Doobies’ sound. His first two records yielded three Hot 100 hits, but he didn’t make another album until 1989. The most startling piece of trivia about Robbie Dupree is that the WWF tag team Strike Force used his song “Girls in Cars” as their entrance music. Robbie Dupree isn’t the first person who’d come to mind if I wanted to commission a good song for wrestlers entering the ring.

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Yep, another Duran Duran post from Popdose’s resident DD fanboy (or Durannie, as we were once called). Between this, my White Label post on “Hold Back the Rain,” and John Hughes’ post on “My Own Way,” Popdose has officially covered one third of the band’s 1982 album Rio. I’m sure Lord Jefito never envisioned that when he assembled this alleged All-Star lineup of bloggers.

Now, I loved “Save a Prayer” as much as the next teenage girl, but when it came to Duran ballads, my heart lay with “The Chauffeur.” As pretty as “Prayer” is, the lyric never really meant anything to me (yes, I know that Simon’s lyrics didn’t really mean much to anyone). I was too young to call one-night stands paradise, and there was no reason for anyone to say or save a prayer for me.

Maybe the problem was that I just hadn’t heard the right arrangement of it yet.

In 1992, Steve Anderson, the Brothers in Rhythm member who made an earlier appearance in my White Label column on the Human League’s “Love Action,” assembled the most beautiful, absolutely fucking brilliant mix of a track I have heard before or since. Dubbed the “Thunder in Our Hearts” mix –- he samples Kate Bush in the intro, but not, strangely enough, “Running Up That Hill,” the song that features those words –- Anderson strips out the drum and bass tracks, replacing them with tasteful, electronic versions of each. Most of Nick Rhodes’ keyboard tracks are scrapped too, in favor of strings and piano. But it’s not just the new additions that make this mix so good; it’s Anderson’s arrangements and breakdowns that make the re-instrumentation so effective.

There really isn’t anything else to say. If you didn’t care for the original song, this might change your tune. If you are a fan of the song, prepare to be mindblown.

Duran Duran - Save a Prayer (DMC Thunder in Our Hearts Mix)

I can say without hesitation that today’s Hooks ‘N’ You was written more quickly and with less forethought in the history of the column, but whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is a judgment call that only you can make. I guess we’ll find out soon enough, eh?

Earlier this morning, I posted some photos on Facebook from my college days at the school which is now known as Averett University. (It used to simply be Averett College, but it’s clearly much cooler now than it was when I attended.) The majority of the shots are of the various folks who haunted the halls of Bottom Bishop, where I made my home from 1990 - 1992, but the series begins with four photos of my dorm room. When I arrived in Danville, VA, I had just spent a year working music retail for Record Bar, so I had more posters to put on my walls than I had available wall space…but believe you me, I took advantage of the opportunity to plaster every last inch with something cool. If the space wasn’t big enough for a poster, then I put up an album flat. If it wasn’t big enough for an album flat, I put up a magazine cover.

In short, it was a desperate attempt to look cool.

It would be a lie to claim that this attempt succeeded, because there have been very few occasions in my life when I have been able to pass for “cool,” but at the very least, the combination of my decor and the music that was regularly blaring out of my room managed to help me in creating a circle of friends who have remained my friends to this day. Indeed, several of them have already commented on some of these photos on Facebook (I’m sure they will continue to give me shit about a couple of them for quite some time yet), and since I’m in a reminiscing mood, I thought I’d just offer up a few comments about some of the posters that can be seen in the photos and how the music has aged over the years.

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Let’s just ask the obvious question: how the hell did this song become a hit?

This is not to say that the song is awful so much as it’s really, really lucky. In the spring of 1986, with America still in the throes of Duranmania, bassist John Taylor – who had admitted that he had not so much as burped on a record before – teamed up with Jonathan Elias (he would go on to co-produce the band’s 1988 album Big Thing) to deliver the sexy for Adrian Lyne’s 9 ½ Weeks. The song, “I Do What I Do,” is an odd little tune – sounding nothing like Duran or the side projects Arcadia and the Power Station – but it had two huge things working in its favor: it was the work of a member of Duran Duran, and it was the work of a member of Duran Duran. Simply put, if “I Do What I Do” had been recorded by any other singer, and released at that or any other time, it would have sunk like a stone.

Again, this is not to say that the song itself is awful (the writer doth protest too much, methinks), but let’s be frank – there ain’t much to it. The vocal covers about six notes, the lyrics’ attempts to be steamy are unintentionally funny (“Is my body heat the right intensity,” gawd), and while it possesses the components of a song – verse, chorus, bridge, solo, etc. – it’s not much of a song. But it’s from a member of Duran Duran! The cute one that plays the bass thingy! Eeeeeeeeeee!

And there you have it. The song becomes a Top 25 single, and an obligatory 12” single is issued to relieve teenage girls around the world of the last of their babysitting money. The direction for the extended mix appears to have been: make the song even less danceable than it already is. John doesn’t get to the first verse until after the four-and-a-half minute mark. What happens up until that point? A whole lot of stop-starting with a sax riff, some vocal snippets – and I do mean snippets – and a wall of electronic percussion. You might, might, be able to dance dirty (or have sex) to the album version. Try to seduce a girl with this mix, and she’ll suffer a grand mal seizure. (more…)

I know what you’re thinking … how can a Duran Duran song possibly be considered Lost in the ’80s? How about when the band itself basically dislikes the single so much they haven’t played it live in more than 20 years and didn’t even put it on any of their compilations? Don’t believe me? Take it away, John Taylor:

The only song from Rio you don’t play is My Own Way. Why not?

JT: Hmm. Not a favourite. We were doing it in a medley with Some Like it Hot for a while. Not a favourite.

Released between their self-titled debut and their big breakthrough, Rio, “My Own Way (Single Version)” (download) was meant to keep the momentum going on the charts while the band prepared their follow-up. With its hyper beat and sweeping disco strings, the single was slight, but pleasant, and served as the link between the group’s New Romantic beginnings and new, Roxy Music-meets-teen pop image.

The internal dissatisfaction with “My Own Way” must have been nearly instantaneous, since the band featured a rerecorded version (download) on Rio when it was released less than a year later. Slowed down to a more danceable funk beat with some changes in the arrangement and lyrics, the new version reflected the cosmopolitan, sophisticated gloss of the re-invented Duran. Still wasn’t enough to sway the band, though, since “My Own Way” didn’t make the cut on either the Decade compilation or Greatest (but “Serious” did?!). To add insult to injury, even the fun video, an important artifact in the evolution of the group, has been left off every DVD and video compilation since the original Duran Duran video LP in 1983.

Too bad, because the song was always a big favorite of mine (the Rio version, at least). But to this day, I still wonder — just where the hell is “45, between 6th and Broadway?”

“My Own Way” did not chart.

Get Duran Duran music at Amazon or on

Duran Duran, The Comeback: Take One

The late ’80s were strange and hostile times for the ‘and then there were three’ incarnation of Duran Duran. Yes, their 1986 album Notorious sold like hotcakes, and its title track went all the way to #2, but the party was over almost as soon as it had begun. The album’s second single, the slinky Prince-like “Skin Trade,” barely reached the Top 40, while the third single, “Meet El Presidente,” was the first time the band failed to crack the Top 40. “Skin Trade” is now widely considered to be one of the band’s best songs, but at the time, the little girls did not understand.

It would not be a stretch, then, to say that the band went into the sessions for Big Thing with a chip on their shoulders. In the place of departed members Roger Taylor and Andy Taylor were a bevy of session musicians (notably Missing Persons guitarist Warren Cuccurullo), and there is nothing sexy about session musicians. If they weren’t going to get unconditional adulation, then they damn well better get some respect, so they decided to make their most experimental record to date. First on the docket: a tribute to the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette,” the feisty “I Don’t Want Your Love.”

Thank goodness for them, then, that the then-ubiquitous Shep Pettibone got a hold of it before the American public did.

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If you know me, then you know that I loves me some Duran Duran. Even when they make an album as unlistenable as Liberty, Pop Trash or Red Carpet Massacre — you’d be wise to not get me started on how they let a 25-year-old “producer” positively manhandle them — I will be first in line when their next record drops. I will also be using this space in the near future to pimp my all-time favorite remix, which happens to be of a well-known ballad by the boys from Birmingham. But first, let’s go to the carnival.

When the band turned Rio in to the record company, Capitol knew they had a big hit on their hands. Still, they were not taking any chances; in an attempt to wash away any lingering stench of New Romanticism, the label hired David Kershenbaum to remix various Rio tracks, with the apparent goal of making the band both club darlings and “tough” enough for rock radio. The remix EP, titled Carnival, was not only a hit in the clubs but actually cracked the album charts, and subsequent versions of Rio included Kershenbaum’s remixes in place of the band’s original versions.

Finding those mixes on CD, however, is easier said than done.

You’ll have to hunt down the import CD single for “Rio” to find Kershenbaum’s mix of “My Own Way,” while his mix of “Lonely in Your Nightmare” has inexplicably never been issued on CD. And then there is his fantastic guitar-heavy seven-minute mix of “Hold Back the Rain.” It had gone missing for years, but was finally unearthed for the blink-and-you-missed-it Night Versions: The Essential Duran Duran CD in March 1998, only to be taken out of print six months later.

I didn’t blink.

So here you go, cassette-owning Rio fans. Here is Kershenbaum’s mix of “Hold Back the Rain” (download) in all its glory. According to Wikipedia, the song is about bassist John Taylor’s growing drug problems, though I don’t see a single lyric that would support that. I can see “Lonely in Your Nightmare” being about John and drugs, but not this. And besides, what a downer association that is to make with such a kick-ass song.