By Curt Alliaume
Several big hits, a couple of should-have-been hits, a few songs you’ll never hear again, and one that shouldn’t be here at all.
The Eagles, “Heartache Tonight,” #1, 11/10/1979
First single from the band’s long-awaited album The Long Run, and arguably the best song on the album (don’t get me started; my review of the album on Amazon years ago got lots of disagreement). Cowritten by band members Glenn Frey and Don Henley with longtime ally J.D. Southern and Frey’s old pal Bob Seger, it’s a third-person look at the good and bad things that happen in romance every night. In his book To the Limit: The Untold Story of The Eagles, Marc Eliot quotes J.D. Souther about the song: “Glenn and I were walking around my living room just clapping our hands, without any instruments, which is pretty much how we recorded it. I always though ‘Heartache’ would have been a perfect song for Sam Cooke. Bob Seger, by the way, gave us the title.”
Donna Summer, “Dim All the Lights,” #2, 11/10/1979
Third single from her album Bad Girls, and it’s pretty awesome—this gets lots more airplay today than either “Bad Girls” or “Hot Stuff.” Summer had cowrites on many of her big hits, but she wrote this one herself, and it would seem she wrote it about her flame, Bruce Sudano (they would marry in 1980 and remained together until Summer’s death in 2012). The only reasons this missed hitting the top of the charts were a glut of superstar releases at the time, and the fact that one of them was Summer’s duet with Barbra Streisand, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” which was climbing the charts rapidly at that point. But this song deservedly is on all of her best-ofs—and shows that she’s a really awesome singer (and can hold a note!).
The Knack, “Good Girls Don’t,” #11, 11/10/1979
On the other hand, this gets almost no radio play today—it’s regarded as the smutty follow up to “My Sharona.” The song is written from the viewpoint of a high school boy putting the make on a high school girl, who turns out to be more than willing to succumb to his advances. Many of the band’s songs were written from this perspective, which was one of the reasons public opinion turned against the band (Doug Fieger was 27 by this point, so his fixation on having sex with high school girls was getting icky); resentment from more established acts toward these newcomers also accounted for some of the backlash. Anyway, this had to be edited to get on the radio, the line “wishing you could get inside her pants” became “wishing she was giving you a chance,” and on the bridge, “when she puts you in your place” is “till she’s sitting on your face.” (Of course, the edited version is almost impossible to find nowadays.)
Jennifer Warnes, “I Know a Heartache When I See One,” #19, 11/10/1979
First single from Warnes’ album Shot Through the Heart; it’s a mournful look at romance. Warnes writes some of her own material (she contributed three songs for this album), but this one was cowritten by Rory Bourke, Kerry Chater, and Charlie Black. Andrew Gold contributed guitar, tambourine, and backing vocals to the song, which was coproduced (as was the rest of Shot Through the Heart) by Rob Fraboni, who served as the best man at the wedding of Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd Harrison earlier that year. On a sad note, this may have been one of the last top 40 songs drummed by Jim Gordon, whose schizophrenia eventually sidelined him from music (he murdered his mother in 1983 during a schizophrenic episode and has been in prison ever since).
The Crusaders, “Street Life,” #36, 11/10/1979
Great late-night club song, when the tempo slows just a bit and couples get closer together. This song was sung by Randy Crawford. The Crusaders were primarily a jazz band, not an R&B group (although they charted seven songs on the pop charts and 15 songs on the R&B side), but this one broke all boundaries (including in the United Kingdom, where it became a top five hit). Originally a quintet, by the time “Street Life” (and the parent album of the same name) was recorded, they were a trio—Joe Sample on keyboards, Stix Hooper on drums, and Wilton Felder handling saxophone and bass, along with plenty of studio help. This song was probably boosted by Herb Alpert including his own recording of “Street Life” on his Rise album, which released concurrently. I have this on three Crusaders albums (Street Life and two different box sets); my only wish is I also had the single edit too (the album version runs over eleven minutes).
The Sports, “Who Listens to the Radio,” #45, 11/10/1979
One-hit (in the United States, anyway) new wave/power pop band out of Melbourne, Australia; this song came from their second album Don’t Throw Stones. Written by band members Stephen Cummings and Andrew Pendlebury, it appears to have two different versions (the “original” has a piano in its arrangement, the other version uses electric keyboards). Released on Mushroom Records in Australia (not the same label that originally released Heart’s records), punk/new wave label Stiff Records in the United Kingdom (and, weirdly, fairly conservative Arista Records in the U.S.), the band charted nine singles in Australia during its run between 1977 and 1983, but nothing else crossed over, and they broke up after that.
Earth, Wind, and Fire, “In the Stone,” #58, 11/10/1979
I can only attribute this single flopping in the U.S. due to radio stations all of a sudden getting sick of the band (which, admittedly, had been all over the place for several years), because this is one of their very best songs. “In the Stone” contains a hot horn arrangement and great harmony vocals, so it’s hard to see why the song was such a letdown after the #2 “After the Love Has Gone”—all I can think is EWF was unfairly being lumped into the disco backlash. It took two years until they had their next top 40 hit with “Let’s Groove” Cowritten by Maurice White, Allee Willis, and David Foster.
Cory Daye, “Pow Wow,” #76, 11/10/1979
How on earth did this get played on the radio? With its chorus lyric “Gonna have a pow wow/Pass the peace pipe,” it’s not far from 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “Indian Giver,” which was a top five hit in the late 1960s but is now pretty much banned from radio for obvious reasons. Anyway, Cory Daye was part of Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band (and would later become part of the successor group Kid Creole and The Coconuts), but as a solo act, she worked with Sandy Linzer, who had plenty of success in the 1960s working with The Four Seasons, The Monkees, and Jay & The Techniques (and who would later cowrite “I Believe in You and Me” for The Four Tops, which later became a huge hit for Whitney Houston), and Linzer’s material didn’t cut it this time around.
Funkadelic, “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” #77, 11/10/1979
One of Funkadelic’s weirder songs, and that’s saying something (anybody listened to Maggot Brain lately?). From their album Uncle Jam Wants You (which hit the top 20 on release, but is inexplicably out of print and unavailable for download today), this one picks up where Chic’s “Le Freak” left off lyrically (“She was a freak, never missin' a beat, yeah/She was a freak, boy was it neat, yeah/Not just knee deep, she was totally deep/When she did the freak with me”). Written by George Clinton, the song runs fifteen minutes long (and was split in two for the single release). It was sampled on De La Soul’s 1989 song “Me Myself and I.”
Wilson Bros., “Another Night,” #94, 11/10/1979
And this is an error on my part—this song actually peaked at #94 nearly a full month before November 10; I had the date wrong on my Excel spreadsheet. Sorry about that, folks. Anyway, that’s probably more interesting than the story of this song (written by Allan Clarke, Terry Sylvester, and Terry Hicks of The Hollies; their version hit #71 in 1975). The Wilson Brothers, Steve and Kelly, recorded their Another Night album in 1979, produced by Kyle Lehning (Firefall). Steve Lukather of Toto played guitar on every song except this one.
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