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| ELTON JOHN - Little Jeannie A former Royal Academy of Music prodigy, Reginald Dwight changed his name to Elton John, hooked up with a lyricist (Bernie Taupin) as prolife with words as Elton was with melodies, and built an outrageous live act. All that glitter has brought him a whole a lot of gold since his debut in 1970. And, regardless of trends, fads and changes in eyeglasses fashions, popmeister John has kept churning out the hits--such as the fine 1980 ballad Little Jeannie, one of the few John chart toppers not penned by Taupin. -Sounds of the Eighties (1980) Time-Life Music BERTIE HIGGINS - Key Largo In 1981, Kim Carnes invoked the spirit of a Hollywood legend and scored a major hit with Bette Davis Eyes. The following year, singer-songwriter Bertie Higgins drew upon the image of one of Tinseltown's most celebrated couples, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and achieved similar success with Key Largo. A native of the Florida Keys, the setting of the 1948 Bogey and Bacall movie that inspired the song, Higgins began his career in the early '60s as the drummer in Tommy Roe's backup band, the Roemans. All told, he sailed the musical waters for nearly 20 years before his mellow, breezy ballad--his lone top-40 hit--helped his ship come in at last. -Sounds of the Eighties (1980 - 1982) Time-Life Music EXPOSE - Seasons Change If ever a song title was apropos of the artists who recorded it, it had to be Seasons Change by Expose. The guilding force behind group was Cuban-born Florida DJ Lewis Martinee, who put together a singing trio in 1985, dubbed them Expose and saw several of their singles become sizable dance-floor hits. When it came time to record a whole album, though, disagreements between Martinee and the women led him to fire them and search for replacements. Jeanette Jurado, Gioia Carmen and Bruno and Ann Curless eventually were hired to be the new Expose, and, with Jurardo on lead, Seasons Change became a No. 1 ballad in the winter of '88, proving the old saying, "change is good." -Sounds of the Eighties (1986 - 1989) Time-Life Music PAUL SIMON - 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Paul Simon's 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover was, he insisted, "just a fluke thing I slipped into by accident," but the single and the album it came from, Still Crazy After All These Years, seemed to dwell on the recent breakup of Simon's marriage. -Sounds of the Seventies (1976) Time-Life Music THE DOOBIE BROTHERS - Listen To The Music The Doobie Brothers ("doobie" being slang for marijuana joint) came from the blue-collar town of San Jose, California, with a reputation as a Hell's Angels party band. The Doobie's ability to play boogie with folk harmonies and their appreciation for production values endeared them to mainstream rock fans. With Listen To The Music, they added to the growing body of rock songs about rock. -Music of the Seventies (1972) Time-Life Music SISTER SLEDGE - We Are Family Sister Sledge was a group of four sisters from Philidelphia who'd been around most of the decade with scant results. Produced by the hot team of Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, We Are Family became the Pittsburgh Pirate's theme song as that team came from behind to take the World Series from the Baltimore Orioles that fall. It also became the anthem of gay activists marching on Washington, DC. -Sounds of the Seventies (1979) Time-Life Music JEFF HEALEY BAND - Angel Eyes Canada has always been a breeding ground for hard boogieing, blues-based rock 'n' roll--and in 1989, one of the most electrifying acts in the history of Canadian rock, Jeff Healey Band, emerged from the blues clubs of Toronto. Healey, a blind musician who played the guitar by laying it flat and "walking" on the fretboard, quickly earned acclaim for his remarkable talent. His sensitive reading of John Hiatt's Angel Eyes became a top-5 hit and helped his debut album, See The Light, go multi-platinum. Along the way, he won the praise of such superstar American guitarists as B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Not bad for a kid from the Great White North. -Sounds of the Eighties (1989) Time-Life Music DREAM ACADEMY - Life In A Northern Town Their avowed mission was to bridge '60s sensibilities and '80s technology, and for a few pie-in-the-sky (or was it Lucy in the sky?) moments in 1986, England's Dream Academy did just that. Talk about getting a little help from your friends: Academy leader Nick Laird-Clowes learned musical theory from Paul Simon, and the group's debut album was co-produced by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. Life In A Northern Town, the trio's lone U.S. top-10 hit, showed the influence of both mentors--folk-rock from an orbiting galaxy probe. By 1988, the group members had all left for postgraduate work with other bands and the Academy's paisley doors closed forever. -Sounds of the Eighties (1986) Time-Life Music NENA - 99 Luftballons Ever since Domenico Modugno's Valare topped the Billboard charts in 1958, foreign-language hits have had an interesting way of capturing (if only momentarily) the imagination of English-speaking audiences. To those who understood the native tongue of the German New Wave band Nena, 99 Luftballons was a rousing anti-nuclear protest song. To those who didn't understand anything but the title, the song just had a good beat and was great to dance to--just like Ca Plane Pour Moi by Plastic Bertrand and Sukiyaki by Kyu Sakamoto. -Sounds of the Eighties (1984) Time-Life Music GRAND FUNK RAILROAD - We're An American Band We're An American Band was written by drummer Don Brewer after a besoted late-night argument with tourmates Humble Pie, in a bar in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The song touched off a string of successful collaborations with Rundgren, although it was the only No. 1 single for Grand Funk, as they now called themselves. The references to all-night poker, hotel-wrecking and dalliances with a Little Rock groupie just about summed up the early '70s ethos of these marauders. -Sounds of the Seventies (1973) Time-Life Music NICK GILDER - Hot Child In The City Mike Chapman produced Nick Gilder's Hot Child In The City. Gilder, a veteran of the Canadian band Sweeney Todd, had moved to L.A., where he noticed many young prostitutes and their pimps on Hollywood Boulevard. But he was unable to turn his tale of a streetwise Lolita into an effective song until he rewrote it from the point of view of an aging lecher. -Sounds of the Seventies (1978) Time-Life Music GLEN CAMPBELL - Rhinestone Cowboy The Rhinestone Cowboy was a wistful tale of the commercialization of cowboy culture that was genial singer and guitarist Glen Campbell's first No. 1 pop hit. The song had come to Campbell's attention when he heard the original 1974 version by the song's writer, Larry Weiss, over an L.A. radio station and fell in love with it. Ironically, while Campbell was still trying to track down a copy of Weiss's recording, his own record company, unaware that he had heard the song, pitched to him at a song meeting. -Sounds of the Seventies (Pop Nuggets - Late '70s) Time-Life Music ASIA - Heat Of The Moment Heralded as the first supergroup of the 1980s, Asia came into existence with a full progressive-rock pedigree. Guitarist Steve Howe had been a mainstay of Yes; drummer Carl Palmer was formerly the "P" in ELP--Emerson, Lake and Palmer; bassist John Wetton spent time with Roxy Music and King Crimson; and Geoff Downes, another Yes alumnus, had also been the keyboardist for the Buggles, creators of the classis Video Killed The Radio Star. Asia hit the ground running; their radio-ready debut album sold well over two million copies and spawned the top-5 single, Heat Of The Moment. Like the sun in the Far East, Asia not only rose early but set early, breaking up before the decade was half over. -Sounds of the Eighties (1982) Time-Life Music KATRINA AND THE WAVES - Walking On Sunshine There haven't been too many rock 'n' roll bands borne of military installations, but such was the fortuitous case with the half-British, half-American Katrina And The Waves. Katrina Leskanich and Vince De La Cruz were headbanging Air Force brats whose dads were stationed in England in the early '80s. Kimberley Rew and Alex Cooper were refugees from several artsy New Wave bands. Ironically, once they pooled their resources, they emerged as a savvy rock 'n' roll band, fueled by Rew's energetic song writing and Leskanich's muscular, full-throated vocals. The rollicking Walking On Sunshine was their lone hit--and it still sounds as hot as a St. Tropez beach in mid-August. -Sounds of the Eighties (1985) Time-Life Music ERIC CLAPTON - After Midnight Eric Clapton had been a member of the English blues-rock trio, Cream, one of the first bands to achieve so-called "supergroup" status. He then helped found Blind Faith, the first working band consciously put together as a "supergroup" (they broke up after one album). Clapton, seeking anonymity and purity, then toured Europe as one of the many guest guitarists with Deleaney and Bonnie, who had fused country blues and gospel with a rock setting to become the tastemaking acto of the moment. That union also yielded Clapton's first solo, album and hit single, After Midnight, written by laid-back Oklahoman J.J. Cale and recorded with Delaney and Bonnie and producer Leon Russell. -Sounds of the Seventies (1970) Time-Life Music RATT - Round And Round In the early 1980s, Los Angeles's fabled Sunset Strip was home to a lively--and noisy--hard-rock scene that produced a number of nationally successful glam-metal bands. One of the more memorable was Ratt, a rude and raunchy quintet led by singer Stephen Pearcy and guitarist Robbin Crosby that scored the first of their four platinum-selling albums in 1984 with Out OF The Cellar, source of the creepy-crawly hit Round And Round. Helped along by an unforgettable video in which a young woman mutates into a rodent, the song made the group instant MTV faves, which they remained until Pearcy's departure in 1992 effectively ended Ratt's tale. -Sounds of the Eighties (The Mid-'80s - Take Two) Time-Life Music BROWNSVILLE STATION - Smokin' In The Boy's Room Brownsville Station's Smokin'In The Boys Room was writer-gutarist Cub Koda's tribute to his childhood practice of sneaking cigarettes on Friday nights at the Clinton Theater in Detroit. -Sounds of the Seventies (1974) Time-Life Music TOTO - Africa In 1978, after bumping into each other in just about every recording studio in L.A., instrumentalists David Paich, Steve Lukather, David Hungate and brothers Steve and Jeff Porcaro decided it was time they stopped playing other people's music and started making their own. They formed Toto, and th group hit the yellow brick road running with their multiplatinum debut; in 1982 they found Oz on the multi-Grammy grabbing Toto IV, which included both Rosanna and the 1983 single, Africa. Ironically, Toto decided to bolster its sound with its own hired gun, singer Bobby Kimball (that's him wailing on Africa's choruses). -Sounds of the Seventies (1983) Time-Life Music JACK WAGNER -All I Need Like Rick Springfield, his costar on the afternoon soap opera General Hospital, Jack Wagner surprised a lot of people when he burst into the top 10 with the 1984 love song All I Need. But theman known by millions of viewers as freewheeling Frisco Jones was, like Springfield, a talented songwriter and singer as an accompolished actor. Actually, Wagner's first love growing up was athletics, and he seemed destined to become a professional golfer until he got bitten by the stage bug while in college. Success as both a TV and music star didn't spoil him, either, as evidence by the tongue-in-cheek title of his 1987 album, Don't Give Up Your Day Job. -Sounds of the Eighties (The Mid-'80s) Time-Life Music STEELY DAN - Peg Not all music in 1978, however, was influenced by disco. Eccentric L.A. musicians managed unprecedented commercial success. Steely Dan--by now consisting of Donald Fegan, Walter Becker and various studio musicians--had their first platinum album with Aja, which yielded three hit singles, including Peg. -Sounds of the Seventies (1978) Time-Life Music CYNDI LAUPER - Time After Time Cyndi Lauper splashed onto the music scene late in 1983 with the bubbly Girls Just Want To Have Fun, a ditty that bopped right up the charts to No. 2, helped along by MTV exposure. Lauper was born for the video age--she played to the cameras, projecting a colorful persona that was exuberant and self-confident, but endearingly wacky, the sort of girl everyone wanted as a friend--though it was never entirely clear if she was playing a character or just being herself. Either way, her recording success was certainly helped by the fact that her Queens, New York, inflection didn't surface in her singing. Her debut album, She's So Unusual (1983), generated four top-5 singles--distinguishing her as the first female singer to hold that honor. The second single, the chart-topper Time After Time, with its aching chorus and Lauper's unhurried vocals, revealed a more grown-up talent and depth than Girls made evident, and hinted things to come. -Body Talk/Forever Yours Time-Life Music |
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