So quickly, in fact, that they became one of the first bands of the CBGB crew to sign a deal with a major record label. They released ten albums for Sire Records over the next eleven years, placing three songs on the Billboard Top Forty, including “Burning Down the House.”
The song started as a funk jam in the group’s rehearsal space. Chris Franz, who had recently attended a Parliament-Funkadelic concert at Madison Square Garden, was hyped on the hard-kicking funk sound of the group. To paraphrase one of P-Funk’s best-known tunes, they “tore the roof off that sucker.”
The fabled CBGB in New York City. As punk rock’s premier showcase club, this Lower Manhattan nightclub has been described as “the archetypal dive — dark, worn, graffitied and odorous of beer.” Talking Heads used this venue as a springboard for mainstream success.
Still pumped from the concert, Franz led the Heads in a hard-driving, yet upbeat, jam. Talking Heads had recently come off a world tour where they had been joined by R & B and funk side players like Bernie Worrell on keyboard and Busta Jones on bass. That experience honed the group’s funk chops, and Franz knew how hard the band could play. Pushing them to really let loose, he yelled “Burn down the house,” a P-Funk crowd chant. Singer Byrne liked the sound of the chant, changing the line to “Burning down the house,” for the finished version of the song. Layering an urgent bass-guitar line against quickly paced drumbeats, Talking Heads produced a prime slice of eighties’ blue-eyed funk.
The energetic song broke into the Top Ten, partially due to an innovative video that garnered heavy rotation on MTV. Expanding on the song’s enigmatic themes of anxiety and self-denial, Bryne crafted a visually unique video for his band’s biggest hit. Shot in Union City, New Jersey, the clip featured surreal images of Byrne’s face alternated with flames projected against the side of a house, intercut with performance footage.
“I guess it was a good title,” Franz told Rolling Stone, “because I heard it on classic-rock radio twice today.… Hey, it was a classic title.… What we really wanted to do was rock the house.”
Maniac
Michael Sembello
Michael Sembello was a Grammy award-winning session musician before he penned a tune about a mass murderer that hit the top of the charts. “Maniac,” a cut from the multiplatinum Flashdance sound track, topped the Billboard charts for two weeks in 1983.
After a seven-year stint as Stevie Wonder’s guitarist, Michael Sembello was looking to expand his horizons. Working as a sideman was a shadowy existence. Life on the edge of the spotlight, while lucrative, wasn’t enough. He wanted to write and perform his own music — to take center stage. In 1982, he had written “Mirror Mirror” for the Pointer Sisters. To his surprise, they turned it down, calling it a “hokey nursery rhyme.” He believed in the tune, using his connections to get it released. Diana Ross heard it and turned it into a Top Ten hit, convincing Sembello he had what it took to write and perform hit songs.
One night in late 1982, Sembello and his writing partner Dennis Matosky took a break from the studio to watch a movie. Horror aficionados both, they decided on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the ultimate slasher flick. It’s a grisly account of a circle of friends in the Texas desert terrorized by a family who manufacture and eat luncheon meats made of human flesh. Critics hated this movie. Panned for excessive violence, they noted the “rib-tickling dialogue” and “bloody special effects that are disgusting rather than frightening.” According to Harry and Michael Medved, authors of The Golden Turkey Awards: The Worst Achievements in Hollywood History, the low-budget film is most notable as one of the worst films ever made. Others, however, consider the film to be a classic of the genre.
Nonetheless, it inspired the two songwriters to head back to the studio to create a song based on the theme of the movie. Once in the studio, Sembello crafted a song about a homicidal maniac who takes pleasure in dismembering people. Playing with unusual time signatures, Sembello thought the tune might fit on the sound track for an upcoming slasher flick. Committing the song to tape, it was filed away on a shelf in the studio.
Several weeks later, producer Phil Ramone approached Sembello to submit some material for a movie sound track he was working on. The film was Flashdance, the unlikely story of Alex (played by Jennifer Beals), ironworker by day and exotic dancer by night, with aspirations of one day joining the Pittsburgh Ballet. Sembello agreed to take on the project and worked up some musical ideas in his home studio.
Asking his wife (Cruz Baca, a former backup singer for Sergio Mendez) for help, she grabbed a tape from the shelf, dubbed the new material and couriered it to Ramone at Paramount. By the end of the week, Paramount called, raving about one of the songs on the demo tape. It was a perfect fit for one of the dance sequences in the film, and they were prepared to make an offer. As the songs on the demo were untitled, Sembello asked the executive to give him some details on the song. “It’s the one at the end of the tape about the maniac,” was the reply.
Sembello was dumbfounded. He hadn’t intended to send “Maniac” to Paramount. Sembello soon figured out that Baca had used the old “Maniac” tape to dub the new material without realizing it was at the end of the cassette. It was a happy accident, and the tune (with certain lyrical changes) was used in one of Flashdance’s elaborately choreographed dance scenes.
Flashdance became a national sensation, earning millions of dollars at the box office. From a pop-culture perspective, the film had more than just a monetary impact. Spawning the off-the-shoulder oversize T-shirt look, Flashdance changed the way many women dressed (at least in 1984). And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it also inspired at least two porno movies: Fleshdance and Flashpants. More importantly, for Sembello, the song earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Song and a Grammy nomination for Best New Song of the Year. He walked away empty-handed in those categories, although he did share a Grammy with other artists on the Flashdance sound track for the Best Album of Original Score for a Motion Picture.
Baca laughs when she notes that her husband isn’t much of a dancer, but, ironically, it was a dance song that propelled him to the top of the charts and gave him the taste of fame he craved.
Billie Jean
Michael Jackson
An emotionally disturbed fan inspired Michael Jackson to write the song that went to Number One, earned a Grammy for Song of the Year and broke the color bar on MTV. “Billie Jean” was the single that launched 1983’s Thriller into platinum orbit.
The letters started arriving in 1981. Jackson received hundreds of fan letters a week — some intimate, others winsome — but these were different. A teenage woman wrote dozens of notes to Jackson, enclosing pictures of a baby she claimed he had sired. In the dispatches, she wrote of her love for the singer and how happy they could be raising their love child if only he would respond to her. At first, Jackson ignored the letters, but as they began to pile up, he realized how beset this mystery woman was. In one letter, she noted some physical resemblance between the singer and the child and angrily wondered how the former child star could ignore his only heir.
As the months passed, the language in the letters became more urgent, more disturbed, and Jackson became concerned for his safety. Ever since John Lennon’s fatal run-in with Mark David Chapman, obsessed fans were treated as a menace by musicians.
Her last message to Jackson came packaged neatly in a box. Inside was a photo of the woman, a weapon and a note begging Jackson to use the weapon to kill himself at a certain date and time. She would do the same, right after she killed her baby. In the next life, maybe they could all be together, she wrote.
Jackson’s concern turned to outright fear with the arrival of that final parcel. He had nightmares about the woman showing up at his home, trying to fulfill her bizarre suicide pact. He framed her picture, placing it on a coffee table so he could study her face and never forget it. Copies of the photo were turned over to his security people in case the woman showed up at the front gates of his home.
Although Jackson never met this crazed fan (she was sent to an insane asylum), he did use the experience as the basis for “Billie Jean.” In the lyrics, Jackson didn’t refer to the girl or the incident specifically for fear of inspiring more harassing mail from troubled fans. Instead, he turned the story into a generalized tale about false allegations, hearsay and paternity-suit paranoia.
The lyrical images conjured up a very real picture for Jackson. So intense was his feeling for “Billie Jean” that he was able to record the tune’s remarkable vocal in just one take. “His voice quivers and shakes; at times, he’s singing so hard he can barely spit out the long conversational lines,” wrote Dave Marsh in The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made.
Ironically, the song that turned Michael Jackson into a megastar almost wasn’t included on Thriller. Producer Quincy Jones didn’t think the song was strong enough for an album cut, let alone a single. In Michael Jackson: The Madness and the Magic, J. Randy Taraborrelli writes that the singer “was extremely angry about this and still has not forgiven Quincy for questioning his judgment.”
Jackson and Jones also differed over the tune’s title. Quincy felt people might assume Jackson was singing about tennis pro Billie Jean King and wanted the title changed to “Not My Lover.” Once again, Jackson disagreed, but not before consulting sister LaToya who, in a moment of psychic clarity, advised him to stick with the original title.
Pumped from his victory over Quincy Jones, Jackson took on an even bigger challenge: MTV. In its formative years, the successful twenty-four-hour music station had a strict “it’s gotta be rock and roll” policy, meaning that very few videos by artists of color were ever aired. In MTV’s first year and a half of production, less than 3 percent (twenty-five of 750) of all videos shown featured black performers. The music policy was so restrictive that video director Bob Giraldi called MTV “a bunch of racist bastards, pure and simple.” When “Billie Jean” was first submitted to the network, it was rejected until CBS allegedly threatened to pull all their videos. Bowing to corporate pressure, MTV began running “Billie Jean” in heavy rotation on March 2, 1983. Michael Jackson had broken MTV’s color bar, clearing the way for other African-American acts.
Buoyed by frequent play on MTV and a stunning appearance on the NBC special Motown 25 - Yesterday, Today and Forever in March 1983, Jackson set a new standard for himself, taking “Billie Jean” to the top of the Billboard charts for seven weeks — his biggest hit to date.
She Blinded Me With Science
Thomas Dolby
Thomas Dolby thought audiences might be finding his music too demanding. A technocrat who had been fiddling with computers and homemade synthesizers since the age of eighteen, he set out to dumb down his compositions and in the process, scored his lone Top Forty hit. “She Blinded Me With Science” reached Number Five on the Billboard Hot One Hundred in May 1983.
Thomas Morgan Dolby Robertson was born in Cairo, Egypt to archaeologist parents. As a child, he tagged along with his parents, traveling the world. The only constant in his life was the piano lessons he took at each new boarding school. He loved music but had other interests as well. Always fascinated with electronics, he started fiddling with ham radios as a child, graduating to computers and elaborate tape machines as he got older. In university, his eclectic interests included meteorology and projectionism. Bored with structured education, he dropped out of school without earning a degree to embark on a career in the music business.
Using a homemade PA system, he worked as sound engineer with many British new-wave bands including the Fall and the UK Subs. Inspired by Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, he built a high-tech recording studio in his home, learning the craft of record production. His reputation as an electronic genius soon spread, and he found himself producing records for the Thompson Twins, the Camera Club and Lene Lovich (for whom he wrote “New Toy,” a hit in Europe). With those successes behind him, Dolby set out on a solo career in 1981 with the release of “Urges” on the Armageddon label. He found time to produce records for Joan Armatrading, M and Foreigner while releasing a stream of electro-pop discs.
In the media, he cultivated a mad-scientist image, surrounded by a bank of computers with blinking lights. Playing up on that perception, he penned “She Blinded Me With Science” as a novelty song in hopes of broadening his audience.
“I think it’s the most meaningless song I’ve ever written,” he told Creem’s Michael Goldberg. “It’s about a sort of fuddy-duddy old scientist who gets obsessed with his lab assistant. When I made that song, it was with the thought in my head that people were finding my music too demanding, and that maybe I should let loose and make a record that was basically nonsense like everything else on the charts. And it’s just a sad reflection on the state of things that it was successful.”
The ascendancy of the song owes a great deal to the accompanying self-directed video. Visually rich, the video shows Dolby visiting a home for deranged scientists. There he is given shock treatment and receives counseling from famed British scientist Magnus Pike who also supplied the shouted refrain “Science” in the song. Dolby’s father puts in an appearance as, no surprise, an archaeologist. The video was in heavy rotation on MTV as the song slowly climbed the charts, peaking at Number Five on the Hot One Hundred on May 14, 1983.
It was his last visit to the rarefied strata of the Top Five, although he has continued to record, produce records and score films.
Boy George flippantly dismissed one songwriter who claimed Culture Club had ripped him off. “Handy Man” composer Jimmy Jones cried foul over the group’s “Karma Cameleon,” a 1983 Number One. “I might have heard it once,” George told Rolling Stone, “but it certainly wasn’t something I sat down and said, ‘Yeah, I want to copy this.’ We gave him ten pence and an apple.”
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Eurythmics
At the time of its release, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” was considered to be a high-tech masterpiece. Cool. Semiotic. Icy. European electro-pop that rode an impossibly catchy riff to the top of the American charts. But the high-gloss electronic veneer masked the tune’s decidedly low-rent beginnings.
Musician Dave Stewart first met Annie Lennox in a health-food restaurant in the Hampstead area of London. Lennox, a classically trained flautist, took his order for a plate of cabbage but denied his second request that she marry him — immediately. Nuptial bliss may not have been on the menu that night, but a romantic and professional relationship did come out of that first meeting. They soon moved in together, forming the Tourists (with Peet Coombes) in 1977. An energetic new-wave act, the Tourists registered a British Top Five hit with a remake of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be With You.”
The song’s sentiments aside, the Tourists had split by 1980, and the romance was on the rocks. Lennox reports that the day her relationship with Stewart ended, Eurythmics began. The unusual name is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “… the choreographic art of interpreting musical composition by a rhythmic, freestyle graceful movement of the body in response to the rhythm of the music.” By defining the name, they announced a new direction, steering away from the new-wave pop of the Tourists into murkier, more complicated rhythmic music. A critically acclaimed album, In the Garden was released in 1981. The pressure of constant road work to promote the album with little commercial reward left Stewart with reoccurring health problems, while Lennox suffered a nervous breakdown.
Women of the Eighties: “The Beautiful Ones,” an album track from Purple Rain’s sound track, was rumored to be Prince’s favorite cut on the record. It should have been – he wrote it for his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin, sister of his guitarist Wendy. Toto’s 1982 chart topper “Rosanna” was written for actress Rosanna Arquette who was then dating guitarist Steve Lukather.
After a short hiatus, the duo regrouped, assembling a makeshift eight-track warehouse studio in the Chalk Farm section of London. One night, after s
everal weeks of work, the pressure became too much. A terrible fight broke out between the ex-lovers. Stewart, always a techno-hipster, retreated to the comfort of the recording console, while Lennox withdrew to the far end of the cavernous warehouse.
Noodling around on the synthesizer, Stewart came up with a throbbing rhythm layered over a chunky synth bass riff. Lennox, sensing that Stewart was on to something, set aside her animosity and joined in, improvising the now-famous synthesizer riff. It sounded so good that Lennox began singing, adding a stream-of-consciousness lyric over the catchy melody. “Sweet dreams are made of this,” she sang, “who am I to disagree.” Thirty minutes later, the song was finished. It was the fastest tune they had ever written. Lennox commented, after the fact, “it is not often that complete ideas come out like that.”
Getting the tune on tape was more complicated. Below the jerry-built studio was a timber factory, and the pair had to wait until the workers downstairs had turned off their ban saws before they could record the vocals. Stewart later joked that if the sound of the factory could be heard on the record, it was because he had forgotten to close the windows.
The song’s hook may have been supplied by synthesizers, but old-fashioned glass milk jugs added texture to the chorus of the song. Stewart filled several milk jugs with different levels of water, pitched to specific notes. Banging them with a mallet provided an industrial-sounding counterpoint to Lennox’s vocal.
The warehouse tapes were meant to be used as a demo, a rough blueprint for a more-detailed production in a proper studio. But the tapes so impressed RCA that they elected to release them with only a minimum of rerecording. The entire recording budget of the Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) long player added up to roughly $700, a small fraction of what is spent on most major label releases. “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” sat on the Billboard charts for seventeen weeks, spending one week in the top spot in September 1983.
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 15