I’m writing this week’s post on a Sunday afternoon. Why is that significant? Because it’s the absolute best day of the week for ‘80s music. My wife and I end up finding our way to the car around noon every Sunday to flip on her XM and listen to reruns of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. While it’s nice to hear the countdown in its original form, we both listen specifically for the long-distance dedication.

Quite frankly, it’s the finest moment of ‘80s radio, and the one thing in the car you’re not allowed to interrupt. Whether real or fake, the dedications are the pinnacle of cheesiness, and that’s what makes them wonderful. Every Sunday I listen to Casey read the week’s dedication in his finest heartbreaking radio voice, and I can’t help but think to myself how great a long-distance dedication writer I would have been. So I think it’s about time I lived out my dream. Let’s see …

“Today’s long-distance dedication comes to us from a shy 21-year-old girl in the tiny town of Pahrump, Nevada. She writes, ‘Casey, I have a problem. I’m in love with a guy that I can’t be with. We met three years ago when I was a senior in high school and our school hired him to be our janitor. Mike is his name and mopping is his game. He could remove gum from the floor like nobody’s business.

“One night after drama class, he was cleaning the stalls in the ladies’ bathroom and we started talking. It turns out he had dreams of one day owning a McDonald’s, just like me. He was short, kind of ugly, and smelled of bleach, but I slowly fell in love with the guy wearing the rubber gloves anyway. Everything was going great until January of this year, when Mike accidentally ran over a family of ducks with his tractor. He was given three years in prison for his crime.

“I visit him every week despite protests from my family and friends. Even though he told me before he left that fateful morning that he really hated ducks, I know he didn’t mean to hit more than one of them. I just want to let Mike know that I love him and that I will wait for him to be released. Would you please play Rick Dees’ ‘Disco Duck’ for the love of my life and let him know that I miss him every day? Sincerely, Tabitha.”

What do you think? That would have made it on the air, right?

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It’s amazing sometimes to see how music brings the world together.

I was food shopping with my wife last week and “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone was playing in the store. Even though I’m not a big fan of most of the larger hits of the ’80s, it was the only song that caught my ear the entire time I was there. After the song ended, I found myself whistling it through the next few aisles. About five minutes later, this goth-looking dude with a ton of tattoos passed me and was singing the chorus. Not long after that I passed a couple that had to be in their 70s, and the old man was repeating the famous phone number to his wife. So, at least five minutes after “867-5309″ was over, there was me, a goth kid, and an old man all still being entertained by it. Somewhere the guys from Tommy Tutone are smiling.

NEW SOUNDS FOR THE COLLECTION:
Riot, Restless Breed
Accept, Metal Heart
Europe, Wings of Tomorrow
Johnny Gill, Johnny Gill
Axe, Offering

This week we look at the final nine artists whose names begin with the letter C as we give you 15 more Bottom Feeders from the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ’80s.

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I turned on the radio the other day for the first time in months and the first thing I heard was “more music, less talk,” so that’s what we’re going with this week. Well, okay, it’s the same amount of music but less talk. But you get my point.

NEW SOUNDS FOR THE COLLECTION:
Garland Jeffreys, Escape Artist
Krokus, Change of Address
Aleese Simmons, I Want It
Art in America, Art in America

We stroll on with our next-to-last week of artists whose names begin with the letter C, looking at songs that missed the first 40 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ‘80s.

Rita Coolidge
“Fool That I Am” — 1980, #46 (download)

Many times it’s just so much more interesting to talk about everything but the music. What can I say about a boring track from some movie I’ve never heard of called Coast to Coast? Coolidge’s personal life is the story here — she dated Stephen Stills and then Graham Nash right after him, leading to the initial breakup of CSNY. But my favorite tidbit about Coolidge is that she starred in some television specials called The Christmas Raccoons and The Raccoons on Ice in the early ‘80s, which apparently led to the Canadian TV series The Raccoons. Here’s a clip from Raccoons on Ice, narrated by Rich Little and also starring … Leo Sayer!

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You know, there are times when even I’ve had enough of ’80s music. It’s hard to believe that since I’m still acquiring “new” music all the time, but sometimes I need something more.

One of those times occurred this past Saturday as I was sitting at a poker table in Atlantic City, New Jersey. My iPod contains every Hot 100 hit from the ’80s plus many more ’80s tunes, some random great albums from the past two decades, and a ton of metal. I rarely ever choose a single artist or a full album and listen to the whole thing since I love the randomness of the shuffle option. There’s just something about hearing a 17-minute track from doom metal masters Electric Wizard followed by a Flock of Seagulls tune that does it for me. But as I was sitting at the table, I actually started to see a trend — when Tiffany came on, I was playing passively and poorly, but when it shuffled to Slayer I was nice and aggressive and winning hands. So, there came a point when I got tired of losing money and just chose to listen to Exodus albums for the rest of the night. I never thought there would be a point where the ’80s just didn’t work for me, but I guess I’ve found it.

NEW SOUNDS FOR THE COLLECTION:
Isaac Hayes, Lifetime Thing
Captain Sky, Concerned Party No. 1
Tease, Remember
The Flirts, Made in America
Gayle Adams, Gayle Adams
Kano, Kano

Back to a full post this week as I invade your speakers with more Billboard Hot 100 Bottom Feeders from artists whose names start with the letter C.

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So here’s my question of the week for you — what the hell is a “fancy dancer”?

I’ve been listening to a lot of ‘80s funk and R&B lately and I keep hearing that term pop up. There’s One Way’s “Pull Fancy Dancer/Pull,” Twennynine and Lenny White’s “Fancy Dancer,” and before those two there was the Commodores’ own song from 1976 called “Fancy Dancer.” I still don’t know what a fancy dancer is, though. I assume it’s someone who dances in a non-boring fashion — maybe a person who wears some attention-grabbing clothing or is simply superfly.

However, I do know that I’ve been talking about fancy dancers for the past three weeks now, and every time my unborn child starts kicking my wife, she calls him a fancy dancer. So it’s about time I figured out what the true definition is. Can anyone help? Better yet, were any of you a fancy dancer in the ’80s?

NEW MUSIC FOR THE COLLECTION:
Mai Tai, Mai Tai
Curtis Mayfield, Love Is the Place
House of Freaks, Tantilla

This week, an abbreviated edition centering on the letter “C,” as we continue wading through the muck at the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ’80s.

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Every now and then I like to talk about what I have deemed “inappropriate ghetto moments.” These moments occur when I have the windows open in my car, the stereo turned up really loud (there isn’t any other volume), and some really bad song is playing as I’m driving through the ghetto.

Now, this doesn’t happen often. Most of the time I drive straight home from work and I don’t pass through the ghetto at all. But on days where I stop to get some food on the way home, I have to take the long way back and, well, there goes the neighborhood. We’re definitely talking a lot of 40 oz. bottles of fine malt liquor, one or two crack whores, and maybe someone starting a fight outside of the Fried Chicken Shack. Oh, and the homeless man with the broken right leg. Yet even with this sunny description of the area, my fat belly often yearns for a double cheeseburger from some grease pit, so I risk it.

Anyway, the story is not about the food I eat but rather the songs coming out of my speakers. The first time I ever spoke about “inappropriate ghetto moments” came as I was riding down the street and a group of thugs were stollin’ along the sidewalk while I was playing El DeBarge’s “Who’s Johnny.” (Yes, I realize this song comes up all the time in my posts. I swear I listen to it way more than anyone should.) Another time was a 12-inch remix of “Electric Youth” by Debbie Gibson. And it usually doesn’t hit me right away either. After a half dozen people give me weird looks, it’s only then do I realize the reason and stop singing along.

So how do I top Debbie Gibson, you ask? Well, I think I did last week. I had four dudes walking down the yellow line in the middle of the street as I pulled up blasting the very beginning of “Ears of Tin” by Jethro Tull, off their Rock Island record. If you don’t know this song, it starts off with a fierce flute passage (typical), and of course nothing says “I’m a big pussy, please carjack me” like Riverdance-sounding bullshit bumpin’ outta da hooptie. And this time I was going through the ghetto for nothing more than a sweet tea — if I’m going to die it’d better not be while listening to Jethro Tull and sipping sweet tea. That’s far less cool than my plan of dying when I’m 90 during an orgy with barely legal teens after realizing my Levitra-induced erection has lasted more than the four hours they warned me about on the commercial. This, of course, only holds true if they don’t create some kind of bionic penis in the next 60 years. If they do, then maybe death by Tull will have to do.

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Last week I talked about “the Shrink,” the guy at the record show who thinks he knows everything about every artist that ever recorded. This week we move on to another one of my favorite characters: Mr. Random.

Mr. Random is the dude who comes into the twice-a-year record show with thousands of records in milk crates all around the floor and gets pissed off when the records aren’t in alphabetical order. I don’t expect everyone to be a hardcore collector like me, but it still makes me laugh when I see people get angry at randomness. Mr. Random was probably in his mid-40s or so and came in with his wife and two children. He immediately asked the seller, “Are these in any sort of order?” The seller told him that they were by genre only and that he was in the rock and pop section, with country, jazz, easy listening, etc., over on the far wall. After the seller walked away, Mr. Random started loudly complaining to his family: “How does he think anyone will buy any records if they aren’t in order?” Then he started flipping through the crates, you know, like ten records at a time, kind of looking in their general direction and feigning a bit of interest before walking away seemingly disgusted.

I really just wanted to answer his rhetorical question to his wife. “Who’s going to buy them? Well, pretty much everyone who comes here, sir, since you are clearly the only one that just stumbled across this record show. The rest of us are here because of the show, and I’m sure all of us don’t mind not having anything in order, and in fact most of us enjoy the fact that they are random because that’s part of the fun of the search.”

And yes, I completely realize that I sound like a record-show snob at this point, but I’m really not. Ninety-nine percent of the people that were at the record show were totally cool and, really, I couldn’t have cared less what they were doing or buying, but it’s the 1 percent that make for a good story.

NEW MUSIC FOR THE COLLECTION:
David Hasselhoff, Lonely Is the Night
Atlantic Starr, Brilliance
Jethro Tull, Under Wraps
Jethro Tull, Rock Island

More “C” artists to come as we try to keep up with the quality of last week’s songs with 20 more from the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ’80s.

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A few weeks ago I was at a record show for a few hours flipping through thousands of $1 records. I fully admit that I am a nosy person — I like listening to conversations going on around me, and it’s almost impossible to avoid them in this setting. I pick up some of the worst-looking albums you could possibly imagine, so I usually don’t make fun of people for their purchasing choices, but sometimes it’s inevitable. The best time to do this is when people are flipping through records and loudly talking to their friends or family like they’re experts on every artist, album, and song ever made. They seem to be trying to impress the seller or other seekers to the point where we somehow magically ignore the fact that Debbie Gibson’s debut is in their hands. This brings me to my first character. We’ll call him “The Shrink.”

The Shrink was probably in his mid-20s and was there with a buddy around the same age. The friend picked up Michael Bolton’s The Hunger and held it up for show. The Shrink then went off on a tangent that I’ll attempt to re-create as much as possible here. He said, “Is that a greatest-hits album? If that’s a greatest-hits album you should put it back, because greatest-hits albums don’t truly reflect where an artist’s head is at the time, and that’s why you should be buying a ‘real record.’ Why would you want just pieces of albums thrown together when your purpose should be to listen to the artist’s mind-set in one period of time?”

Of course I had to let out a little chuckle, not just because of the Shrink completely ripping the greatest-hits concept — which I clearly am not against — but because a harmless Michael Bolton record is what set him off. I’m pretty sure there were no signs given off that this was indeed a greatest-hits record, because if it was, wouldn’t there be some sort of indication on the record sleeve?

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The other day Metal Sucks introduced me to Firewind’s cover of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac.” That in turn took me to iTunes to search for other covers and yielded the interesting remake of “Super Freak” by Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby. As much as I loathe most of the covers that were made in the ’80s, I love when someone does a good cover of an ‘80s tune. And I’m not talking about someone adding a club beat behind a track and calling it a remake; it seems like almost every really popular song was remade into a dance track by some DJ within the past decade. I’m talking about cool covers with some different sounds or ideas incorporated into the original sound; since I like the Firewind track, a good example would be power-metal covers of pop tunes. (One of these days Manowar is going to cover “Who’s Johnny?” and I’m going to be all over it.) So, help me out and let me know some of your favorite covers of ‘80s tunes so I can make a mix of my own.

NEW MUSIC FOR THE COLLECTION:
Big Big Sun, Stop the World
David Drew, Safety Love
Nitzer Ebb, That Total Age
Nik Kershaw, Human Racing
Dave Edmunds, Riff Raff

We continue on with our look at the bottom 60 percent of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ‘80s with more “C” artists.

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This past week I was like a pig in shit. Nine tracks from Chinese Democracy were leaked and I couldn’t be happier. See, Guns n’ Roses are my Led Zeppelin. They’re my Black Sabbath. Appetite for Destruction came out in 1987 when I was 11 and they were pretty much the first hard rock band I had ever really come in contact with. I’m not sure what music my dad liked. I mean, he gave me money to buy records, but I don’t really ever remember him buying anything for himself, so maybe he just liked me enjoying it. I know my mom liked The Moody Blues and Queen, so Queen was probably my first exposure to rock music — but GNR was the first hard rock that I can remember. Thinking about it right now, it was probably pretty cool of my mom to let a preteen listen to Appetite.

I’ve mentioned before how I don’t remember actually listening to much in the ‘80s. But there are two things I remember vividly. The first is coming home from school one afternoon and every hour on the hour huddling around the TV with my friends to watch the MTV premiere of the video for “Paradise City.” And the other was sitting on the back of the school bus and trying to convince all the kids that I had one of the “original” copies of Appetite for Destruction because “Paradise City” was much louder after the whistle on my version.

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