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| DEREK AND THE DOMINOS - Layla This album also featured appearances by Duane Allman, former Muscle Shoals session whiz and now guitar hero of the Allman Brothers Band. He and Clapton reached their apex on Layla, which was Clapton's plea to Patti Harrison, Beatle George's wife, with whom he had fallen in love. The guitars duel in a frenzy and then mesh in soft-spoken resignation. Ultimatley the song's magic worked; Patti Boyd Harrison eventually left her husband for Clapton, finally marrying him in 1979. But Layla failed as a single in 1970. By the time it hit in 1972, Derek and the Dominos were long gone, and Clapton had dropped out of the scene while he battled his drug addiction. -Sounds of the Seventies (1972) Time-Life Music TWISTED SISTER - We're Not Gonna Take It Strutting around the streets of New York in shoulder-length teased blond hair, lipstick, rouge, mascara and nail polish, Twisted Sister's Dee Snider had to be ready to fight for his right to party, but to just leave the house. No surprise, then, that this glittery in-your-face singer's lone hit single should be his band's 1984 hit in-your-face anthem of defiance, We're Not Gonna Take It. Born of the same early '70s glam-metal mini-movement that produced hard-rock behemoths Kiss, Twisted Sister kicked around for a decade before striking a blow for all noisy eccentrics with We're Not Gonna Take It from their classically rude album Stay Hungry. -Sounds of the Eighties (1984-1985) Time-Life Music OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN - Magic Olivia Newton-John had already been through several incarnations in the U.K. asa a folk and pop singer before Americans discovered her in 1973 as a country singer from Melbourne, Australia. By the end of the decade, Ms. Newton-John had gone through even more transformations, from doe-eyed Country Music Association Best Female Singer (1976) to John Travolta's gum-snapping chick in the movie Grease (1978). Olivia started the '80s sexier and more pop than ever with the sultry Magic, and within a year would raise even more eyebrows with her slinky--and sweaty--ode to body language, Physical. -Sounds of the Eighties (1980) Time-Life Music LYNYRD SKYNYRD - Free Bird Free Bird first appeared on Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1973 debut album as a tribute to Southern-rock hero Duane Allman, who had died two years earlier. The song, an ideal jamming vehicle for the band's three-guitar attack, became, in turn, a concert favourite, a belated hit single and a Southern-rock anthem. But in 1977, the unthinkable happened. Ronnie Van Zant, the band's charasmatic writer and singer, was killed in a plane crash, along with guitarist Steve Gaines, backup singer Cassie Gaines and manager Dean Kilpatrick. The remaining members dissolved the group. but the Rossington Collins Band was formed in 1980 by four surviving members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The band ended its concerts with an instrumental version of Free Bird that was a stirring tribute to Van Zant and a fond farewell to Southern-rock in general. -Sounds of the Seventies (1975) Time-Life Music RICHARD MARX - Right Here Waiting The ability to recognize the commercial potential of a song is a talent Richard Marx was probably born with. His father wrote TV jingles for chocolate bars and peanut butter, and as a kid Richard sang on some of the ads. At 18, Marx left his native Chicago for L.A., where the like-minded Lionel Richie took him under his wing, and after singing on several Richie hits, and having his songs recorded by the likes of Kim Carnes and Kenny Rogers, Marx landed his own recording contract. His debut album yielded four top-10 hits, and its follow-up, Repeat Offender, spawned three more, including Right Here Waiting, written as "a love letter" to his wife, actress Cynthia Rhodes. -Sounds of the Eighties (1989) Time-Life Music STARSHIP - We Built This City If someone had crashed Jefferson Airplane's hippie pad in 1965 and told them that in 20 years they'd be known as Starship and feature a guy who sang just like Grace Slick, he'd probably have been tossed out on his bell-bottomed behind and warned to lay off the brown acid. Truth, however, is stranger than psychedelia, and in 1985, after surviving enough personnel changes to fill a Trekkie convention, Starship was indeed still rocking Haight-Ashbury with songs like We Built This City. Listen to Thomas on the first verse and Slick on the second and you'll quicly understand why Starship was the first band to navigate its own musical time warp successfully. -Sounds of the Eighties (1985) Time-Life Music BAY CITY ROLLERS - Saturday Night Timing also played a major role in the U.S. breakthrough of the Scottish bubblegum band the Bay City Rollers. While the tartan-uniformed quintet from Edinburgh was immensely popular with teenagers throughout the U.K., "Rollermania" did not spread to America until late 1975, when the group sang Saturday Night on a Saturday night network TV variety show. The phenomenon proved short-lived, though, and by the end of 1977, the Rollers and their cheerleader-chant music had slid off the charts, never to return. -Sounds of the Seventies (Pop Nuggets - Late '70s) Time-Life Music JOEY SCARBURY - Greatest American Hero When he was still a boy, Joey Scarbury's mother told just about everyone who walked into the family's Southern California furniture store about her son's singing abilities---and after one of those visitors turned out to be the father of famous '60s song-writer Jimmy Webb, 14-year-old Joey found himself in a studio recording his first single, with hitmeister Webb at the controls. But it took him until he was almost twice the age to find real success (after long years of working as both a solo singer and backup vocalist) via Mike Post's Theme from The Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not). Scarbury wasn't "walkin' on air" long, either; the song was his one and only top-40 hit. -Sounds of the Eighties (TV Themes of the '80s) Time-Life Music ALICE COOPER - Poison He was born Vincent Furnier, but to the millions of young hard-rock fans that he was delighted over the years with his ghoulish mix of music and mayhem--as well as the equal number of parents that he has disgusted with the same--he is known only one unforgettable name: Alice Cooper. With such loud and rude albums as Love It to Death and Killer, Cooper helped redefine the sound of rock 'n' roll during the post-hippie era of the early 1970s, and with such props as live boa constrictors and working guillotines, he helped redefine the nature of arena-rock as well. The typically raunchy Poison stems from Cooper's platinum-selling '89 comeback album, entitled (what else?) Trash. -Sounds of the Eighties (1986 - 1989) Time-Life Music NORMAN GREENBAUM - Spirit In The Sky Spirit In The Sky was a witty, infectious cry for salvation by Norman Greenbaum. He, along with other members of that good-timey Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band, had a hit with The Eggplant That Ate Chicago in 1966. Greenbaum lived as a chicken farmer in the hippie Promised Land of Marin County, just north of San Francisco--in the town of Petaluma, the self-proclaimed "Egg Capital of the World." -Sounds of the Seventies (1970) Time-Life Music QUIET RIOT - Cum On Feel The Noize Their major-label debut album, Metal Health, featured a cover boy nattily dressed in a straightjacket and matching hockey mask. When it zoomed to No. 1 on the album charts, mainly on the strength of a delirious, nostril-flared cover version of the British group Slade's Cum On Feel The Noize, one of the guys in Quiet Riot--an L.A. band that kicked around for nearly a decade before hitting the big time--jokingly predicted that Metal Health would be followed by a live album, then a "greatest hits" package, and then a the band would break up. As it turned out, he wasn't far off. Within a year, Quiet Riot disappeared from the charts. -Sounds of the Eighties (1983) Time-Life Music SHANNON - Let The Music Play In college, Washington, DC native Brenda Shannon Greene known to audiences as Shannon, majored in accounting and minored in music, and her studies in both voice and business paid off handsomely when Let The Music Play, a song she had recorded in the fall of 1983 for little Emergency Records, was picked up by the bigger Mirage Label. Early the next year, the unreleased dance track zoomed up the pop charts, where it eventually cracked the top 10. While she never had another record that big, Greene scored numerous medium-sized pop and R&B hits througout the mid-'80s--enough to finance a career in business when her contract ran out and the music finally stopped playing. -Sounds of the Eighties (The Mid-'80s - Take Two) Time-Life Music BOBBY BROWN - Don't Be Cruel Bobby Brown started out singing about Popcorn Love and Candy Girl with the New Edition in the early '80s, but by the time of his 1988 solo hit Don't Be Cruel, his romantic concerns had matured considerably. Since New Edition had been modeled loosely on the Jackson Five, it was probably inevitable that Brown, the member of the group most like Michael Jackson, would be first of the Boston quintet to off on his own. His Don't Be Cruel album featured an impressive mix of grinding tracks and swoon-inspiring ballads. The title track, co-authored by up-and-coming hitmeisters L.A. Reid and Babyface, neatly captured both ends of Brown's impressive two-way play. -Sounds of the Eighties (1988) Time-Life Music DEEP PURPLE - Smoke On The Water Deep Purple surfaced in 1968 as a pseudoclassical pop band and then evolved into a heavy-metal guitar outfit (fronted by Ritchie Blackmore). By the mid-'70s, the Guinness Book of World Records had listed them as the loudest band, Smoke On The Water, which was about a fire that interrupted a live recording session in Montreux, Switzerland, was their first Top-40 record since their two singles in 1968, Hush and Kentucky Woman. The song actually appeared in four different versions--long and short studio takes, and long and short live takes. -Sounds of the Seventies (1973) Time-Life Music WILD CHERRY - Play That Funky Music Meanwhile, Wild Cherry typified the white novelty aspects of disco with Play That Funky Music. Leader Bob Parissi, who took the group's name off a box of cough drops while he was in the hospital, had already seen one incarnation of his band dissolve; he was getting frustrated with audiences on the Cleveland-to-Pittsburgh disco circuit that the rockers were playing. Discussing the problem backstage one night, drummer Ron Beitle repeated a cry they often heard from the audience; "Play that funky music." Only in jest, he added the phrase "white boy." Parissi dashed off the song on a napkin at the disco where his band was playing, and it was later recorded as the B side to a cover version of the Commodore's I Feel Sanctified. But the white-boy disco track got all the radio action, providing Wild Cherry with the third platinum single (one-million units sold) ever as well as their only Top 40 hit. -Sounds of the Seventies (1976) Time-Life Music THE MANHATTAN TRANSFER - The Boy From New York City Were it not for the back seat of a New York City taxicab, it is unlikely that The Manhattan Transfer would ever have become stars. Tim Hauser had been singing professionally since the late '50s, but in 1972 he was working as a cabbie--and it was through conversations with some of his passengers that Hauser hooked up with singers who eventually became the longstanding line-up of that quartet. Deftly combining aspects of jazz, blues, folk, rock, pop and Latin music, Hauser, Janis Siegel, Alan Paul and Cheryl Bentyne went on to garner 10 Grammys for their work--the eclectic qualities of which are neatly showcased in their hip cover of the 1965 Ad Libs hit, The Boy From New York City. -Sounds of the Eighties (The Early '80s) Time-Life Music GLORIA GAYNOR - I Will Survive The year also produced some disco anthems. Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive became the theme song at Studio 54, the glitzy, exclusionary Manhattan club that symbolized the music's excesses and celebrity fixations. The song also marked a comeback for Gaynor, who'd been known as the "Queen of Disco" in the early '70s. She recorded I Will Survive for her album Love Tracks while recovering from spinal surgery following an onstage fall. Initially, this was the B side of Substitute, but disco DJs flipped the single to create a new hit. -Sounds of the Seventies (1979) Time-Life Music EDIE BRICKELL - What I Am Like their name, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians exuded a beatnik-type cool that made them the darlings of the Dallas, Texas, college scene in 1985. While they were quickly signed to a record deal, their jazz-influenced, improvisational style proved hard to capture in the studio, and it took until 1988 for the band to finish their debut album, Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars. While the smart and breezy single What I Am made it to the top 10, the band's future began to cloud when Brickell became romantically involved with superstar Paul Simon. They married in 1992, by which time Brickell had opted to go solo, thus ending the Bohemian's finger-snapping brief career. -Sounds of the Eighties (The Late '80s) Time-Life Music WHITESNAKE - Here I Go Again When David Coverdale sang "I don't know where I'm going but I sure know where I've been" on Whitesnake's power-pop ballad, Here I Go Again, he wasn't kidding. A veteran of England's hard-rock and heavy-metal circuits, the rough-voiced Coverdale first made his mark when he replaced Ian Gillan as lead singer of Deep Purple in 1973. Whitesnake, the band he formed with Purps Jon Lord and Ian Paice, kicked around for nearly a decade before striking gold with Here I Go Again, a remake of a song they had first recorded in 1983. Of course, if Coverdale had had sultry model-actress Tawny Kitaen draped all over him on the original video, the song might have been a hit in 1983. -Sounds of the Eighties (1987) Time-Life Music THE BEE GEES - Night Fever The Bee Gees had written a tune called Night Fever that seemed a perfect fit for the John Travolta disco movie, Saturday Night Fever, produced by their manager Robert Stigwood. But Stigwood thought the title sounded pornographic. He had heard the group perform a song in Bermuda called Saturday Night, Saturday Night, whick evolved into Stayin' Alive. Manager and band decided to combine the "Saturday Night" title with the name of the new song and call the film Saturday Night Fever. By the end of the year, it was one of the biggest grossing movies in history. The Bee Gees set new records for producing No. 1 hits for themselves and for other Stigwood acts such as Yvonne Elliman. -Sounds of the Seventies (1978) Time-Life Music HALL & OATES - Rich Girl Daryl Hall and John Oates stayed on a roll with their "blue-eyed" soul. Rich Girl was released after the first single from Bigger Than Both Of Us fizzled. Hall wrote this hit about the fast-foods heir who had once been the boyfriend of his current lover, Sara Allen. But he changed the gender after concluding that he couldn't get away with saying "you're a rich boy" in a pop song. On a more grisly note, the tune was cited as an inspiration by David Berkowitz, New York City's infamous "Son of Sam" serial killer. -Sounds of the Seventies (1977) Time-Life Music TACO - Puttin' On The Ritz Legendary pop composer Irving Berlin's Puttin' On The Ritz was over a half a century old when Taco's campy remake hit the top five in 1983. Born in Indonesia to Dutch parents, Taco Ockerse grew up in Hamburg, Germany, began his career in musical theater and became a celebrity on the European supper-club circuit by dressing in white tie and tails and performing dance versions of old American standards such as Cheek to Cheek, Singin' in the Rain and Puttin' on the Ritz. Although he was pictured on his debut album wearing a white glove, Taco was no Michael Jackson, and soon this one-hit wonder had soft-shoed his way to obscurity. -Sounds of the Eighties (1983 - 1984) Time-Life Music MEN AT WORK - Down Under Once hailed as the next Beatles, Men At Work were really just amiable Australians in the right place at the right time in 1982. Like Duran Duran (the other next Beatles that year), Men At Work showed up with some of those new novelty items--music videos--which then infant, material-starved MTV ate up like Vegemite sandwhiches. In the blink of an eye, the group's debut album zoomed to No. 1, as did two of its singles--Who Can It Be Now? and the reggae-by-way-of-the-outback Down Under. -Sounds of the Eighties (The Rockin' Eighties) Time-Life Music M - Pop Muzik As anyone who listens to the radio regularly can attest, what causes a song to be classified as "pop" has quite a lot to do with the musical environment in which it appears. By definition, a song that is a pop hit is one that appeals to a broad audience--and during the second half of the 1970s, pop listeners showed particularly wide-ranging tastes. So much so, in fact, that just before the decade ended, an enigmatic performer calling himself M (in reality, British musician Robin Scott) scored a chart-topping hit with a song that celebrated just about every kind of musical style imaginable--a song that was entitled, appropriately enough, Pop Muzik. Country, disco, folk, funk: In the late 1970s, pop nuggets came from all over the musical map. -Sounds of the Seventies (Pop Nuggets - Late '70s) Time-Life Music |
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