The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager!

by Tom Harvey

  Don’t Worry, Be Happy by Bobbie McFerrin (1988)

  She’s Like The Wind by Patrick Swayze (1988)

  Love Song by The Cure (1989)

  OK, so before you rush to your computer and fire off an email to me with the title, “You missed this one dumbass!” I offer a disclaimer. Though easy enough to do, I have not searched online for a listing of One Hit Wonders by the years 1980-1989 and relisted it here. And I have no doubt that entire books can be dedicated to a discussion of the One Hit Wonders of the Eighties.

  A few comments:

  Herbie Hancock is more than just a jazz musician, he’s a jazz genius. I list his song, Rockit because it was revolutionary in 1983. A song with no words, for as good as it is to listen to, the music video is even better. Take a trip out to YouTube and tell me if this isn’t the coolest video of all time? Go ahead and see for yourself.

  Admittedly, my Top Thirty has holes. There are true One Hit Wonders by definition–artists that had one hit on one album/cassette/CD then disappeared–and there are bands that kept at it.

  A true one hitter is Frida with Something’s Going On. In 1982, Jason Patterson cranked this song in his slammed-to-the-ground, ice-blue, late-70s, Lincoln Continental in the high school parking lot. An only child, Jason had the best of everything and the piercing, wailing voice of Frida cranking through his $5,000 car stereo,28 was, in a word, memorable. Five thousand dollars was a helluva lot of money in 1985, especially to a high school kid. It was akin to something along the lines of the Pied Piper. People gravitated to the music and, soon, he had two dozen kids milling around. Jason was the conduit; Frida was the muse.

  CDs were just beginning to make their appearance in late 1982. Up to that point, the latest and greatest was the cassette tape. And we went through a lot of them since they were constantly melting inside our locked cars on hundred degree Central California days.

  The cassette tape did give way to the compact disk, and, eventually, everybody that was anybody bought the first ever CD player for the car: the Sony CDXR-77. The only problem with this first generation car CD player was that it didn’t have buffer protection. The laser skipped with every bump and jolt. Something as small as the round white lane indicators in the road caused the music to stop for a second. When you had Madonna or Sammy Hagar or Van Halen cranked to the hilt, a skipping CD was unnerving.

  Speaking of Madonna, the first CD I ever held in my hands was her self-titled CD released in July, 1983.

  Falling in the dual Multiple Hit and Hairband Categories, Whitesnake came into the mainstream with Here I Go Again in 1987.

  I remember sitting in Nina’s white, convertible 1987 Mazda RX-7. Oh, that car was cool. She knew it and she loved it. The car looked like a Porsche 944–one of my all time favorite cars–straight out of the John Hughes movie, Sixteen Candles. As we sat in her car at Zalud Park in Porterville, I said, “Take a listen to this.” I loaded the self titled Whitesnake cassette and turned up Here I Go Again. The song was climbing the charts at the time and ended up at #1. She listened intently. After a minute, she started the car.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’re going to buy me this cassette. Right now!”

  It is a simple statement of fact that my Whitesnake cassette lasted longer than my relationship with Nina.

  Now if I had to choose just one song from my Top Thirty list–and here’s where the pain comes in–I’d have to go with I Ran by The Flock of Seagulls. I think it has a lot to do with 1982. It was my first year of high school with newfound freedoms, new friends, and lots of pretty girls. Simply, the song sounds good cranked up loud and it was a departure from the pure rock sound I was accustomed to. Back then, we called it “new wave” and the “new wave” sound took a large place in the music that later defined the decade (with bands such as Depeche Mode, The Clash, The Cure, Adam and the Ants, and Oingo Boingo–to name a few–leading the way).

  I have to mention one more one hit wonder because it was so unique: Paul Hardcastle’s 19. This unlikely song was a worldwide smash and peaked at #15 in the U.S. in 1985. What made it so bizarre was that Hardcastle sang about the atrocities of the Vietnam conflict with a beat that’s almost impossible not to dance to. He even incorporates an interview with a soldier who talks about getting splattered with another guy’s brains–and still we danced on!29 Truth be told, I still listen to this groovin’ song–the stutter (nu-nu-nu-nu-nineteen, su-su-su-su-Saigon) and the flute solo are irresistible. Outside of Jethro Tull, when do you ever hear a flute solo?

  OK, so now that we’re knee-deep in talking about music, let’s dive into the not-quite-as-obvious Two-Hit-Wonder list, in alphabetical order:

  Dead or Alive: You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) (1985) and Brand New Lover (1986)

  Falco: Vienna Calling (1985) and Rock Me Amadeus (1986)

  Golden Earring: Radar Love (1973) and Twilight Zone (1982)–technically an eighties one hit wonder, but the 1973 song is worth mentioning

  Information Society, The: What’s On Your Mind (Pure Energy) (1988) and Walking Away (1988)

  Level 42: Something About You (1985) and Lessons in Love (1986)

  Naked Eyes: Always Something There To Remind Me (1983) and Promises, Promises (1983)

  Parr, John: Naughty, Naughty (1985) and St. Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion) (1985)

  Planet P Project30: I Won’t Wake Up (1983) and Why Me? (1983)

  Power Station, The: Some Like It Hot (1985) and Get It On (Bang A Gong) (1985)

  Romantics, The: What I Like About You (1980) and Talking In Your Sleep (1983)

  Scandal: Goodbye To You (1982) and The Warrior (1984)

  Slade: My Oh My (1983) and Run, Run Away (1984)

  Twisted Sister: We’re Not Gonna Take It (1984) and I Wanna Rock (1984)

  And, if that weren’t enough, let’s talk about Three-Hit Wonders.

  Human League, The: Don’t You Want Me (1981), (Keep Feeling) Fascination (1983) and Human (1986)

  Klymaxx: The Men All Pause (1984), Meeting in the Ladies Room (1985) and I Miss You (1985).

  Midnight Star: No Parking on the Dance Floor (1983), Freak-A-Zoid (1983), and Operator (1985)

  Mr. Mister: Broken Wings (1985), Is It Love (1986), and Kyrie (1986)

  Quiet Riot: Bang Your Head (Mental Health) (1983), Cum On Feel the Noise (1983), and Mama Weer All Crazee Now (1984)

  Simple Minds: Don’t You Forget About Me (1985), Alive and Kicking (1985), and Sanctify Yourself (1986)

  I specifically mention the Three-Hit-Wonder category because my second favorite song of the decade is contained within the list: Simple Minds’ Don’t You Forget About Me. From the very first note–the sharp beat of a snare drum–the song just feels right.

  It’s happy.

  It’s joyous.

  It makes me feel young.

  It’s also the theme song of, in my opinion, the best movie of the decade: The Breakfast Club.

  The glaring omissions from this music discussion are obvious: Michael Jackson, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were beyond huge. Just a notch behind them were Billy Joel, Lionel Richie, and Bruce Springsteen. You’ll have to wait for the revised version of this book when I dive deeper into the impact these superstars enjoyed. Fret not my friends! I’ve also neglected my favorite CD of the decade, Paul Simon’s Graceland, so I feel your pain.

  When Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, the duo better known as Milli Vanilli, released their album “Girl You Know It’s True” in March 1989, there is no denying that they made a big splash.

  Huge.

  Their music, a mix of pop and funk sprinkled with a dose of rap, was a welcome alternative to their contemporaries–I’m thinking of Skid Row, specifically. After their self-titled song peaked at #2, three songs reached #1: Baby Don’t Forget My Number, Blame It On The Rain, and Girl I’m Gonna Miss You.

  I can hear Casey Kasem’s giddy voice now. Seriously, I can.

  What a debut! The CD went platinum six times over and they won the Grammy for Best Ne
w Artist in February 1990. Fab and Rob were on top of the world.

  They were fit and trim; hell, they were exotic. They looked like professional athletes and, donned in their signature spandex, had the calves of Adonis.31 Yeah, Fab and Rob were hitting on all cylinders during their brief rise to the top.

  It’s too bad, for them anyway that their recording skipped at the most inopportune time–in front of a live audience. And it’s too bad that they freaked out and ran off stage, but what choice did they have?

  There’s no denying that Fab and Rob were lip-syncers extraordinaire. As quickly as their star rose, it plummeted back to earth in a God-awful thud of embarrassment and shame.

  Stripped of their Grammy.

  Purged by Arista Records of their very existence.

  A class action lawsuit from “defrauded” fans.

  Ridiculed.

  So it wasn’t them singing.

  So what?

  They were entertainers. They weren’t selling the cure for cancer. So they couldn’t sing. Homeboy’s could dance, though. Why wasn’t that good enough?

  It wasn’t good enough because they weren’t truthful–OK, they lied–about their act. It’s unlikely that the true singers–whomever they were (and, honest to God I don’t care who they were)–would have enjoyed six million record sales with Fab and Rob acting as The Solid Gold Dancers.32

  To be honest, I liked Milli Vanilli even more after the scandal. Did I feel duped? A little. What I felt even more, though, was respect for a couple of entertainers. What a couple of jokesters!

  Were they phonies? Is that how you remember them?

  In an informal office poll–the two girls on either side of my cubicle walls–I heard very different opinions. Brandy said they were “Sellouts. Lame, with a bad weave but pretty eyes,” and Dawn said America was way too hard on them. Posing the question on Facebook (“What do you think of when you hear the words Milli Vanilli?”), almost all the responses were negative–i.e., “Fakers!” and “Guys with better hair than me who couldn’t sing!” and “Losers with blue contacts!”

  I’m not here to persuade you one way or the other but I will say this: I cherish my Milli Vanilli cassette tape and look for backups every time I peruse the Goodwill or a decent yardsale. Long live the lip-syncers of the world.

  [March, 2012 update: Just scored the Milli Vanilli CD at the Bellevue Goodwill for $2.99! Mint condition! Bitchen, man!]

  APPENDIX 2

  There were hundreds of movies that made up the decade and as far as bona fide blockbusters go, we’d have to include ET–the Extraterrestrial, The Empire Strikes Back, and the Indiana Jones movies. Commercially successful movies, aside, I’d rather mention the select few that were most memorable to me. In chronological order:

  Perhaps the greatest sports related comedy of all time, Caddyshack, set the bar high in the wee days of the decade. With the all-star cast of Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Ted Knight, and Rodney Dangerfield, Caddyshack is the classic story of underdog boy does good and gets the girl (more than one girl, at that). I (and, arguably forty million other guys) still have fantasies about Lacey Underall. Enough said.

  A movie packed with one of the greatest eighties soundtracks ever is The Last American Virgin. With hits from Devo, Journey, REO Speedwagon, The Human League, The Cars (the list goes on), this 1982 movie centers around the age old, “Boy meets girl, other boy gets girl, first boy won’t give up” storyline. Joe and I saw this in the theater and instantly loved it. With one of the best all-time lines (“Come here my big burrrrrrito …”), it’s great fun–even if the movie ends with our hero driving off in tears. Still a virgin. Still a loser! The movie isn’t well known because absolutely no one was a star (unless you count Steve Antin who is, perhaps, best known as “Jessie” in the Rick Springfield music video. Someone had to be Jessie. It may as well have been Steve Antin). Applying relational logic learned in my college philosophy class, Steve Antin is to Brad Pitt as The Last American Virgin is to Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Think about it.

  I was sitting next to Joe in Algebra 2 our junior year and he could not stop laughing. “What?” I whispered loudly. Mrs. Cotta’s Algebra 2 class was hard enough without his distraction.

  “I just saw the funniest movie ever. You have got to see it.” He began describing the hilarious scenes in Top Secret! That night, in 1984, we went to the Porter Theater and watched it. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

  I don’t know if Top Secret! was what launched Val Kilmer’s career, but we became instant fans of this tall, blonde unknown actor. Slapstick humor, at that point was few and far between (the most notable being Airplane!).

  One movie that I watch every time I come across it channel-surfing is the 1984 movie, The Woman in Red. I would test the unscientific theory that every American male in their early forties loves Gene Wilder. We grew up adoring him as Willy Wonka, The Waco Kid, and Dr. Fron-ken-steen. His collaborations with Richard Pryor (especially Silver Streak and Stir Crazy) are classic. Throw in Miss Kelly LeBrock, with her English accent and full, pouty lips, and any red-blooded, sixteen-year-old boy couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. Watching our lovable underdog hero, goofy blonde perm and all, try to woo the prettiest thing of our generation is irresistible fun. An added bonus is that if you pause the movie at just the right moment, you can see Kelly LeBrock’s bush. How cool is that?

  Long before we knew him as Gil Grissom on CSI, William Peterson starred in the 1985 cult classic To Live and Die in L.A. The movie revolves around a rogue Secret Service agent hell bent on nailing a counterfeiter, played by the sinuous Willem Dafoe. Dafoe murders Peterson’s partner and our hero stops at nothing in his quest for revenge. Wang Chung, of all guys (or is that a band?) provides a pounding soundtrack to the nonstop action.

  Spoiler alert.

  The thing that hooked me is the ending. How many heroes take a shotgun blast to the face? The day the movie came out on DVD many years later, I bought three copies: one for me, one for my brother, and one for my friend Mike. Turns out director William Friedkin didn’t kill off our hero in one version. Unknown to us aficionados, but available to us on the DVD, Mike and I watched William Peterson take that same blast to the stomach then find him recuperating in a remote snow covered shack. Pale, sickly, and bored, but recuperating, nonetheless. Blasphemy I say! We preferred the shotgun blast to the face. So, too, did the director based on his final released version. Our hero lived fast, broke the rules, and ultimately crashed and burned–but what a ride!

  The Breakfast Club deserves mention in everyone’s short list of eighties movies. I am not alone since this 1985 movie is ranked No. 1 on Entertainment Weekly’s list of the “Fifty Best High School Movies.” That says a lot about a movie that takes place, in real time, inside a school library on a quiet Saturday. The cast includes members of the beloved “Brat Pack”–Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, and Anthony Michael Hall. It’s a fun coincidence to me that, as different as The Breakfast Club is to To Live and Die In L.A., both movies have Wang Chung music.

  I had the pleasure of meeting Molly Ringwald when she came to Bellevue to sign her book, Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family, and Finding the Perfect Lipstick. Does it count as meeting someone if you’re a star struck guy in a line of all women waiting to have a book signed? She was very sweet and sincere with me. I made her laugh when I nervously blurted, “You are ten days younger than me and I just have to say, you look absolutely fabulous.” I could almost hear Molly’s French husband grinding his teeth, five feet away.

  Another movie released at the same time as The Breakfast Club gained cult status as well: Vision Quest. This coming-of-age high school movie introduced us to Matthew Modine, Madonna, and the song Lunatic Fringe. It’s your classic underdog story, complete with the tension of high school athletics, wooing a seemingly unimpressible older woman and beating the adversary.

  Note: If actor Frank Jasper was 168 pounds in that movie, I will eat a whole cantaloupe–and
I hate cantaloupe.

  It’s impossible not to love Matthew Modine. He’s clumsy, thoughtful, happy and humble. We saw him later as Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam drama, Full Metal Jacket. I mention this not for his role, but for his line which was trail-blazingly sampled by The 2 Live Crew in the 1989 song, Me So Horny. The answer, if you don’t know, to Modine’s question is “every ting you want!”

  One movie that is suitable for the whole family, save one word uttered by Mandy Patinkin toward the end, is the timeless classic, The Princess Bride. The story weaves its way along with much humor and love. Our hero does not die of a shotgun blast to the face. Oh, he dies but is brought back to life to save his true love. How charming is that?

  One movie that pokes serious fun at the stereotypical casting of black actors–before the likes of Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Halle Berry gained super-stardom–is Robert Townsend’s 1987 movie, The Hollywood Shuffle. Mr. Townsend funded the movie with his own credit cards. Despite this–or, maybe, because of it–the movie comes off as campy and hilarious. When actor Grand Bush (now there’s a name), a graduate of “Black Acting School” rattles on about all the roles he’s recently played (gangbangers, drug dealers, and convicts) art imitates art as he’s all these things in the 1988 movie, Colors.

  The last of the 1987 movies is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Charlie Sheen is just plain cool. Not quite Steve McQueen cool, but cool none-the-less. Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko character is so over-the-top–how can anyone not love the slicked back hair and the shit-eating grin? What strikes me as funny is the scene with Michael Douglas watching the sunrise from his beachfront home. He’s talking on the phone–but not just any phone–one of those brick-sized first generation cell phones. Even then they looked ridiculous. Gecko says that $800,000 is a day’s pay–and there he is, speaking into the lamest phone known to mankind. My step-grandpa had that same phone and when he died in 1995, it was offered to me as a keepsake. I respectfully declined.