EVERY Billboard #1 hit discussion thread 1958-Present

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by alphanguy, Jan 29, 2016.

  1. Hoover Factory

    Hoover Factory Old Dude Who Knows Things

    Location:
    Spokane, WA
    Kenny Loggins enjoyed a career resurgence thanks (in part?) to the movies. For awhile, it seemed like every hit movie featured a Kenny Loggins song. They were all very similar - catchy, up tempo pop rock. I liked them, but never purchased any of them whereas I did own a couple of Loggins & Messina albums.

    A side note - “Footloose” is one of my Mom’s favorite movies. I have no idea why - my Mom was in her 50s when it was released, so it’s not a nostalgia thing. She just likes it.
     
  2. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    It's amazing to me how well Loggins adapted to the '80s. You'd have thought he'd have drifted off with the Yacht Rockers, since he ultimately came out of that whole Sweetheart of the Rodeo school of country rock that brought us Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles. He certainly found a way to tweak that to make it fit seamlessly into the '80s. And Hollywood absoultely loved this guy. First Caddyshack and now Footloose. And he wasn't even done with big movie singles yet (although his non-soundtrack work largely stiffed from here on out).
     
    The Slug Man, pablo fanques and Grant like this.
  3. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    He was pretty hot when he was younger, but man, the coke was already taking quite a toll wasn't it? This was a great cut though and a pretty huge hit. As with Donna Summer and "She Works Hard For The Money", it seemed like KC might be staging a comeback. And then that was it.
     
    SomeCallMeTim and pablo fanques like this.
  4. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I bought mine in 1985.
     
    pablo fanques likes this.
  5. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    The open on the 45 of "Footloose" was a bit different . . .

    We are now in a time where what mix you hear on a song was totally up in the air, and contingent on which radio station you were tuned in to (some had either the LP or 45 version, not both).
     
  6. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I was watching MTV constantly in early 1984. They played "So Bad" like crazy. Radio played "Keep Undercover" and "The Man".
     
    AppleBonker and pablo fanques like this.
  7. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I'm one of the few people who don't much care for "Give It Up". I know the song was their introduction to K.C. and have no knowledge of their huge 70s hits.
     
  8. boyjohn

    boyjohn Senior Member

    Oh god this is terrible (and there is worse to come), before it finallly gets better, but that will take some TIME
     
  9. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I had both the 45 and the Footloose album so I had both. But, it frustrated me for decades because you just couldn't get the single mix, which is just a different intro.
     
    pablo fanques and sunspot42 like this.
  10. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!


    I like the song. The film, not so much.

    It was weird when I finally went to see the film at a local theater. Four years had passed between when I graduated from high school and had been a night creature working graveyards and going to college. When my head rose above water and was finally among a youthful crowd, the difference of four years really hit me hard. Suddenly I was around a bunch of teenagers girls wearing bright pastel colors and really big hair, and clean-cut guys with skinny ties, like I had walked into the Valley Girl movie. Yikes! I was gettin' OLD! My mindset was still in the 70s as far as fashion was concerned. It wasn't even that bad when I was out in L.A. just two years before! Well, I did own a pair of parachute pants that I bought in an Orange County mall, but that's another story...
     
  11. Hey Vinyl Man

    Hey Vinyl Man Another bloody Yank down under...

    Didn't see the movie until about 20 years later (when my then-girlfriend was amazed I hadn't seen it and set about to change that), but I always liked the song. Since I'm not big on '80s top 40 in general, at this point I'm used to my favorites being other people's least-favorites of the era. Looks like this is another of those.
     
    Lance LaSalle likes this.
  12. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    I can’t tell you how excited I was every time a new batch of those Have a Nice Day cd’s came out. If memory serves, they came out in threes. I would slowly read the track lists, not wanting the list to end! I got into cd’s from day one, when there were only 12 Warner’s titles and a few CBS available, but the real fun started when Rhino started kicking out those great, high quality compilations. I also bought the Nice Decade set, with the shag carpet on the front. Though I mainly spin vinyl, I still play all those Rhino discs on occasion, and those inspired me to have a One Hit Wonders section in my vinyl collection. It’s funny how awful most of those one hit artists albums in the 70’s were. Edward Bear (Last Song), Albert Hammond (Never Rains In CA), Bo Donaldson (Billy/Hero) but some like Jigsaw (Sky High) and Pilot (Magic) were fun surprises.
     
    pablo fanques and Grant like this.
  13. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    We didn't even have cable yet in our neighborhood, believe it or not. Phoenix is vast, like 30 miles across or whatever, so it took ages for cable to reach everywhere. I don't think it hit our neighborhood until maybe '85, if then. The trench they dug in our front yard did perk up the lawn in the patch that had burned a few years before, though. I guess they dug up some richer soil. :laugh: (Or maybe they just broke up the clay soil - it tended to form a hard layer near the surface - allowing water to penetrate faster and deeper. )

    I'd only see MTV while visiting friends in distant neighborhoods who had cable. Or if I was at a mall or something that was wired already (or had satellite).
     
    DesertHermit and pablo fanques like this.
  14. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    My big fashion wake up call in the '80s came I think in the summer of '84. I started going a lot farther on the bus than I ever had before, all the way over to visit friends in Scottsdale and up to Paradise Valley Mall. It was on one of those excursions to Scottsdale that I stopped by the immense, sprawling Scottsdale Fascist Square mall for the first time in many years - I think we'd been there once before when I was a kid - and took in a very different scene from West Phoenix. Literally every teenage girl was a Madonna clone - bracelets, tousled hair, a crucifix or ten, the works. This was based just off her look mostly in the "Burning Up" video, and I guess "Borderline" to some degree. I'd completely dismissed her up until this point. Being surrounded by Madonna clones in the wealthiest zip code in Arizona woke me up to the fact she was a much, much bigger deal than I'd realized.

    But within a few months, you wouldn't need to visit a mall in Scottsdale to know that Madonna was a very, very big deal.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2020
  15. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    Well, his solo albums were just abysmal so he deserved it, which was a real bummer for me as I really enjoyed every one of the KC/Sunshine albums. Give It Up was a great song to go out on though. I didn’t know he had a big drug problem. Glad he got through it.
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  16. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    It really upset me when I read an interview by Gary Stewart or Richard Foos, one of those guys, where they said they scraped the bottom of the barrel and weren't going to release more than 25 volumes. I knew he was wrong. At the time he said that, there were still scads of 70s hits that hadn't been digitized at that point, at least not domestically. Well, we have Eric Records to take care of that nowadays, but this is after the labels virtually stopped licensing things and gripping everything with an iron fist, or raising their rates so high that it's not cost-effective for any indie label to do a comp anymore.

    I also bought the entire Soul Hits of the 70s series as well as the Phat Traxs, Pop Hits of the 80s, New Wave Hits Of The 80s, History Of Funk, History of Rap, Big ol' Box Of Soul, Poptopia, the Billboard series, and several other sets I can't even think of. The 90s were a wonderful time to collect high quality CD comps. I miss those days. I would sometimes blow a couple hundred dollars just buying CDs.
     
  17. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    To this day i've never seen Top Gun and younger people wonder what's wrong with me. I've also never seen Star Wars. Their eyes just pop in disbelief over when I admit that.
     
    pudgym, SomeCallMeTim and John54 like this.
  18. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Wow. We had cable as far back as 1969. Well, we got it in '69, but it came to our town in '68. Take that! Phoenix!
     
  19. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I remember back in 1980 when the mall in Mesa between Longmore and Alma School was considered upscale. I first shopped at the Fascist (haha!) Fashion Square in 2007 to check out the then-new Microsoft store and no one batted an eye of me being there. Here I was driving a mid-priced Chevy among a sea of BMWs, Mecedes, and Audis. Saw a Lexus or two. Maybe a caddy.:)
     
    pablo fanques likes this.
  20. The Slug Man

    The Slug Man Forum Resident

    Location:
    North Carolina
    Around spring '84 was when I started watching MTV specifically for ZZ Top's "Legs." I loved that song and its video. However, once my local radio station (G105 in Durham) started playing "Legs," they were playing a more pop-oriented mix, with much lighter guitars and a seemingly faster beat. It was so dorky to me. It made the one they played on MTV sound like Black Sabbath.
     
  21. The Slug Man

    The Slug Man Forum Resident

    Location:
    North Carolina
    "Footloose"

    '80s Loggins is a different beast compared to '70s Loggins, that's for sure. He's lucky he found that soundtrack niche for several years. I don't know the backstory behind his getting involved with "da movies," but he must have just lucked into it to an extent. I remember the Rolling Stone album guide saying Footloose was about a hip kid who moves to a small town and teaches them all how to dance...an astonishing premise for a movie with a Kenny Loggins theme song. :D

    "Footloose" seemed like a fun, summer hit several months before it was even summer. It was popular at my school, but not Michael Jackson/Van Halen level popular. This was also around the time that break dancing (or "breakin") got popular.

    I saw Footloose a few years later on HBO and was surprised at how dark it was compared to most of the music featured on it. This was not a typical teen movie like Fast Times, Porky's, or Ferris Bueller. At least that's how I remembered it at that time.
     
  22. The Slug Man

    The Slug Man Forum Resident

    Location:
    North Carolina
    I meant to say yesterday that for me, Cyndi Lauper jumped the shark around '85, when she got really involved with wrestling. I know that she had some wrestlers in her videos from the very start, but it wasn't as overt. At one point she was emceeing matches and participating in the made-up soap operas going on between the players. Of all the mid '80s fads, I never got into wrestling.
     
    pudgym, SomeCallMeTim, ronm and 2 others like this.
  23. Cheevyjames

    Cheevyjames Forum Resident

    Location:
    Graham, NC
    Kenny Loggins - Footloose

    Ah, the king of 80's soundtracks. I'm not going to deny that he wrote a lot of catchy songs during this decade. All of those soundtrack songs are permanently ingrained in my brain. I know I liked them as a kid. Little kids like stupid catchy songs. When I hear this now I do hear the hooks, but damn that chorus is obnoxious with all those forced rhymes. The overly-country vocal in the verses doesn't work for me either. I'd be fine with never hearing this tune again. Footloose was Loggins' only #1 - he has another huge hit coming up in a couple of years, but that one topped out at #2. I think that one's a much better song too.

    Video thoughts: nothing but scenes from the movie, which consists of Kevin Bacon drinking and then dancing alone. Utterly boring.

    That video looks like it cost less to make than than Van Halen's Jump!
     
    AppleBonker and sunspot42 like this.
  24. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    :agree:
     
  25. AppleBonker

    AppleBonker Forum Resident

    Location:
    Seattle
    Ah, my mistake, that was the adult contemporary chart where it got to #3. Don't know why it gave me the wrong chart when I searched this time. Carry on!
     
    sunspot42 likes this.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine