The AT40 blog/April 21, 1984 ... The debut songs alone!

This week's Premier Radio American Top 40 rebroadcast from the 1980s is from April 21, 1984. And here are some statistics that will set you up for your re-listening pleasure on the radio station you will hear this countdown on ...

1) Six of the songs in the Top 10 were by foreign acts. Fourteen of the Top 40 songs were by foreign acts.

2) Eleven songs in the countdown were the first Top 40 hits or only Top 40 hits for the acts who did them ... and that includes Journey lead singer Steve Perry's solo debut, "Oh, Sherrie."

3) Six songs were either former No. 1 hits, the current No. 1 or were on their way to No. 1, four of those being the first No. 1 hits in the careers of those artists.

4) Only 14 of the 40 songs in this countdown were by artists whose lead vocalist was in their 20s. The "older" crowd was still ruling the charts for the most part.

5) The only female solo artist in the Top 10 this particular week was not really a singer ... actress-comedienne Tracy Ullman would go on to bigger things other than singing, even if she had a huge one-hit wonder called "They Don't Know."

But what stands out most of about this particular Top 40 countdown were the five debut songs to the countdown this particular week. So let's meet them:

No. 40 It's My Life--Talk Talk: Another of the acts to be a part of the second British Wave of the early-to-mid 1980s, Talk Talk had two songs of note. There was "Talk Talk," which was a chart hit but didn't make the Top 40. Then there was this synth-happy tune that would not even make it past No. 31. But while Talk Talk has had an alternative music staple for well over a generation, the song got a second chance to do something 20 years later. In early 2004, the California-based band No Doubt re-worked the song and took it to No. 10, but to the Top 5 on the Billboard Top 40 mainstream and track charts. Apparently, Gwen Stefani's interpretation of the song was either better or clearer than that of Talk Talk lead singer Mark Hollis.

No. 39 Runaway--Bon Jovi: I'll be honest -- I thought these guys from Sayreville, N.J. who did their recording at New York's famed Power Station studios were nothing more than pretty-boy hard rockers who had no shot at a big-time career. Shows you how much I knew! This keyboard-driven song backed by lead guitarist Richie Sambora's hot licks intertwined beautifully with lead man Jon Bon Jovi's voice. But I figured that was it, especially when the follow-up song called "She Don't Know Me" barely cracked the Top 50. I thought that song was better than "Runaway," which spent exactly one week in the Top 40 before dropping away. And even if the band did a video of "In And Out Of Love" in my beloved Seaside Heights in 1985 for the not-so-successful "7800 Degrees Fahrenheit" album, I didn't think they had much of a shelf life. Then came the ever-so-slight softening of their hard rock image and the "Slippery When Wet" album in 1986. As they say, the rest is history.

No. 36 Time After Time--Cyndi Lauper: Where the debut "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" (which dropped from No. 11 to No. 17 in this countdown after peaking at No. 2) was sassy, raucous and fun, "Time After Time," co-written by Lauper with Robby Hyman of the Philadelphia-based group The Hooters, was and still is one of the most beautifully crafted songs of its time. Lauper's lead vocals set to the moody backdrop of letting someone know that they will never be forgotten and if needed, they'll be there for you was one of the best songs of the year, if not the best song and actually was the perfect "going-away" gift as the No. 1 song in America on the day I graduated from high school on Friday, June 15, 1984. Still gets me to this day, especially the line of "If you're lost you can look and you will find me, time after time. If you fall I will catch you I'll be waiting, time after time." I've always equated this song to my high school graduating class, no matter how different we are as people in our lives and what our ideologies are ... I believe we would be there for one another.

No. 33 I'll Wait--Van Halen: Van Halen already had a huge reputation as a rock band. Then came the release of the "mainstream rock-friendly" album "1984" as producer Ted Templeman's way of telling the band that they would be better off by expanding their fan base. Whether the die-hard VH fans thought it was a good idea or not, it doesn't matter. The plan worked, starting with the No. 1 song "Jump," which was still in the Top 40 at No. 14. Continuing the pattern of "Jump" with Eddie playing keyboards (Edward Van Halen on keyboards!!!!!???), "I'll Wait" was synthesizer-heavy again with an even heavy dose of his brother Alex on both percussion and drums and Eddie balancing his work on the keys with his lead guitar work. It practically made David Lee Roth's lead vocal a mere afterthought. Still a great-sounding tune to this day.

No. 32 Sister Christian--Night Ranger: One year after the Bay-area band Night Ranger scored their first Top 40 hit with "Don't Tell Me You Love Me," it was "Sister Christian" that made the band stars. The song lives today through both the musical and movie "Rock Of Ages," but in 1984, you couldn't get enough of this song on the radio. I still get chills hearing lead vocalist-drummer and the song's writer, Kelly Keagy, knocking out the beat and yelling, "You're motoring!! What's your price for flight?! In finding Mister Right. You'll be alright tonight." Keagy wrote the song for his younger sister who was growing up a bit too quickly and was giving advice to slow things down a bit. The song also got a memorable run near the end of the 1998 movie "Boogie Nights."

Those were the five debut songs. The rest of the Top 40 is a Who's Who of the "soundtrack of our lives in the 1980s." Madonna's breakthrough Top 10 hit "Borderline" was moving up to No. 37. Berlin's debut hit "No More Words" was moving up to No. 31. Steve Perry's "Oh, Sherrie," another "Rock Of Ages" song, leaped nine places to No. 27. The Go-Go's last big hit, "Head Over Heals," jumped up from No. 22 to No. 20 and the Alan Parsons Project's last big hit, "Don't Answer Me," jumped up from No. 21 to No. 19. The first Top 40 hit for "Weird Al" Yankovic called "Eat It," his parody of Michael Jackson's 1983 No. 1 hit "Beat It," dropped from No. 12 to No. 15.

Oh, and there were those songs in the Top 10 that need no artist tied to the song's title -- "Here Comes The Rain Again," "Hold Me Now," "Miss Me Blind," "Automatic," "Love Somebody," "Somebody's Watching Me," "Hello" and the No. 1 song in the country, the powerful ballad "Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now" by Phil Collins from the awful movie of the same name.

As a matter of fact, there were six movie songs in the Top 40 that week -- and four came from the same movie called "Footloose," the biggest pop culture event of the time. "Holding Out For A Hero" by Bonnie Tyler was No. 34 again that week, Shalamar's "Dancing In The Sheets" was up from No. 39 to No. 30, Deniece Williams' future No. 1 hit "Let's Hear It For The Boy" was the Top 40's biggest mover from No. 38 to No. 23 and Kenny Loggins' title song, "Footloose" dropped from No. 1 to No. 2 to make way for Phil Collins.

The other movie song in the Top 40 that week? Rick Springfield's "Love Somebody," which jumped from No. 13 to No. 8.

A lot of memorable Top 40 songs this particular week ... particularly the five debuts that became iconic '80s hits.

AT40/April 8, 1972: A starry, starry hit

One of this weekend's Premier Radio re-broadcasts of "American Top 40" this weekend is from April 8, 1972. The biggest mover in the Top 40 that weekend belonged to the man best known for his oral recitation of the history of rock 'n roll up until then, Don McLean, who hit No. 1 with his classic eight-minute opus "American Pie.

"Vincent" moved up 10 places from No. 35 to No. 25 and would just miss out on the Top 10 a few weeks later, peaking at No. 12. "Vincent" is about the renowned Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, whose life and time were filled with little happiness and mostly torment in spite of the beautiful paintings he put on canvas, such as "The Sower," "Sorrowing Old Man," "The Potato Eaters" and "The Starry Night," the beautiful but dark work that inspired McLean to pen "Vincent."

Born March 30, 1853 in Zundert, a town in the southern part of the Netherlands, van Gogh showed an affinity to paint at an early age and wanted to pursue that love of it, but always found resistance to his work from other well-known artists of the time. Meanwhile, he was suffering from an identity crisis as a youngster and would later claim that his youth was "gloomy and cold and sterile." As a late teen, he fell in love with the daughter of a landlady he was staying with, but she rejected him. Another woman who was seven years older than he was and who befriended van Gogh later in life, also rejected the idea of getting married and refused to see him ever again. His ideas of religion were met with resistence, so much so that he failed tests twice to become a pastor at two theological institutions.

He had little money in his life and whatever money he had, he spent it on his craft and artwork and rarely ate. He never ate meat, according to his story, and was withering away as an adult from excessive pipe smoking, a poor diet, too much drinking and overwork. Committed to mental institutions twice for a short time, he spent a good amount of his adult life just getting any kind of recognition from the artists of the day, including fellow post-impressionist and Frenchman Paul Gauguin. Gauguin had a love for van Gogh's work and the two would swap exchange works while making what little money they had off of them.

By the end of his life, though, van Gogh had just about given up. And as a reported "gift" to Gauguin when he found out that the artist was leaving France before Christmas 1888, the 35-year-old van Gogh one night cut his left ear off to give to him. For years, the story had been reported (including by Casey Kasem on AT40) that van Gogh had cut his ear off for the admiration of a young prostitute at a Paris brothel, but van Gogh, now having his head wrapped in a bandage, walked to the brothel both he and Gauguin had frequented and gave the doorman the so-called "gift" to give to the fellow painter.

It was fair to say that van Gogh was suffering through more and more psychotic episodes. In July 1890, van Gogh took a revolver that reportedly and strangely was never found and shot himself in the chest. Taken to a nearby hospital, he would die 29 hours later on July 29, 1890, his last words to his brother Theo being, "The sadness will last forever."

McLean was always intrigued by fellow artists, though they painted for a living and he wrote words and music. And he read a book on van Gogh, fascinated enough that he took references of the artist's famous paintings and made references of the finer points in those paintings in this song ("weathered faces lined in pain / are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand" and "sketch the trees and the daffodils"). McLean realized how dark and gloomy van Gogh's work was and in "Vincent," he made van Gogh into a beautiful but tragic figure. It was in those paintings, though, that McLean realized that what van Gogh was doing even in the darkest of pictures was "setting people free" from where they were, who they were and what they were doing in them.

This is why the album "American Pie" is a great work but sometimes under-appreciated because most people know the title song and that's it. "Vincent" was as much tragic and beautiful as "American Pie" was nostalgic and driving.

And while the song may not have gotten total adulation in the U.S., across the Atlantic in England, the song was truly accepted. It was a No. 1 hit in early June 1972, something "American Pie" never did there.

Most people who hear the lyrics -- like myself for a long, long time -- knew "Vincent" as a tragic figure in art history. But to read the story, you can understand why Don McLean had those feelings for Vincent van Gogh. He was a beautiful artist tormented by personal demons that won out in the end.

McLean conveyed that persona in a beautiful song that has lived on for three generations now.

March 31, 1979: When disco ruled the day

Amazing how that 35 years after disco was at its biggest and brightest time period ... and loathed ... people would desire having that music back over what's on the radio these days.

I knew it would happen. I knew it 10 years after the fact. It just took others longer to realize it wasn't such a savage beast as it was ridiculed and made out to be as the 1970s were coming to an end and a whole bunch of people wanted something new to cling on to.

But back in 1979, I could understand the whole disco backlash. In the Top 40 from March 31, 1979 (which most Premiere radio stations are airing this weekend, others airing April 3, 1971), there were 18 songs that practically had disco written all over it. Eighteen! That's almost half the chart.

The problem was not that there was so much of it. It was just that because disco was the big thing of the day, everyone, it seemed, wanted to jump on the bandwagon and ride it down the road until the foundation over the wheels snapped in two and everyone crashed to the hot blacktop.

Examples? Plenty of them!

Paul McCartney, for crying out loud, decided to give disco a whirl when he debuted with Wings' "Goodnight Tonight" on the entire Billboard Hot 100 at No. 38! Wait a minute!! Paul McCartney?! You mean, Beatle Paul wanted to get down, get funky??!! Noooooooooooooooo!

Moving up seven places from No. 32 to No. 25 was Cher with her disco anthem "Take Me Home." Cher?! I knew she was cutting edge ... but did disco help her image that much?

And then, of course, there was Rod Stewart still getting his disco schwerve on with "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" at No. 7 after it had gone to No. 1 four four weeks, which he always claimed he sang in the "third-person narrative" and never in his own self-confident first person. Mod Rod went disco, too?! Really?

Many were believing the apocalypse was upon us. I mean, c'mon -- McCartney, Cher and Rod Stewart? Who next? Don't tell me Barbra Streisand wants to do a disco record, too! (Yeah, you kinda know the answer to that one.)

Disco music was becoming very much like disco's most famous hangout in the late 1970s, New York's Studio 54. Once upon a time, it was a simple disco for all the people of the city to hang out and have a good time at night, but by the time disco became bigger than it can handle being, all the famous people wanted to see and be seen at the fashionable club.

The era of disco was growing enormously out of control. It would take someone's simple pin prick to send the balloon falling helplessly to the ground with no chance of ever coming back to life. And that would come in the summer of 1979.

The first incident was on Thursday, July 12. It was the infamous "Disco Demolition Night" at the old Comiskey Park in Chicago where rock station DJ Steve Dahl, who had enough of disco and the beast it became, had teamed up with White Sox owner Bill Veeck and Veeck's son, Mike, to hold a stunt in between games of a doubleheader between the Sox and the Detroit Tigers in which all disco records Dahl collected would be put into a case and blown up. The problem was, though, that most of the people who came to the ball park that night were not baseball fans -- they were looking for an excuse to come to the park and get drunk off their shameful asses. The promotion went forward with all those vinyl records being blasted. But no one had the smarts to figure out that a) there'd be cleanup on a lot of aisles, if you know what I mean, and b) the drunks who showed up and made idiots of themselves during and after the promotion would not get off the field. This forced Veeck and the Sox to forfeit the second game of the doubleheader with the Tigers in what was one of the most embarrassing moments Major League Baseball ever encountered.

The second came via the Billboard Hot 100. "Ring My Bell" by Anita Ward was at No. 1, then knocked out for five weeks by "Bad Girls" by Donna Summer, which in turn for one week was knocked out of the top spot by "Good Times" by Chic. But come the week of August 25, 1979, there was a new No. 1 song in the land ... "My Sharona" by the Knack. That was the biggest indicator that disco was about to die a sad, tragic death thanks to this rocker with New Wave roots. There would still be some disco songs that would climb to the top in 1979 ("Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," "Rise" and "No More Tears"), but not comparable to the heavy dosage in the first eight months of that year.

A number of artists who rode that disco wave in the mid-to-late 1970s became the biggest casualties come the 1980s. And one of pop music's biggest stars, the Bee Gees, were so stained by the "haters" of disco that they would not recover from the era until they put out a Top 10 hit called "One." That was in 1989, 10 years after their last Top 10 hit, the No. 1 "Love You Inside Out," gave Barry, Robin and Maurice their sixth straight No. 1 song.

The Bee Gees persevered even through the dark times after disco. Now in 2014, many appreciate how great they were as Barry is the lone living brother. They appreciate everything that is Bee Gees -- especially the disco era and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack music they made iconic for generations.

As for the March 31, 1979 Top 40 chart, there were seven debut singles including debuts by half the famous Fab Four -- McCartney's band Wings with the disco-laden "Goodnight Tonight" and George Harrison and his familiar guitar on "Blow Away" at No. 32. The highest debut of the week was a song that is getting a rebirth these days thanks to a tax company's commercial usage of it -- Peaches & Herb's future No. 1 hit "Reunited" at No. 26. The biggest mover within the Top 40 was George Benson's "Love Ballad," his remake of the LTD hit of just over two years earlier, which jumped nine places from No. 38 to No. 29.

And No. 1? You guessed it! A disco song as the Bee Gees' "Tragedy" made it five No. 1 hits in a row for the Gibbs. Right behind it, though, was the disco anthem for women everywhere, "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, a former No. 1 hit that was primed to get back to No. 1 by the next week. As a matter of fact, the entire Top 5 was disco-laced -- even the Doobie Brothers made us get down and dance to "What A Fool Believes" at No. 3, the band's future second No. 1 hit and a true indicator that new lead singer Michael McDonald made the rest of the band sell their souls harshly for his own solo purposes. Donna Summer was still ruling as the Queen of Disco on "Heaven Knows" at No. 4, her collaboration with Brooklyn Dreams that included her boyfriend, Bruce Sudano, who she would marry the next year. And at No. 5 was Peaches & Herb's other hit at the time, the dance-soaked "Shake Your Groove Thing."

Looking back 35 years after disco became a bit big for its britches, it was understandable how its crash was inevitable with a backlash as big as some overthrows of governments in other countries. Too much of it only meant its demise was practically mere moments away.

But most of it wasn't bad at all. You still recognize those songs today. And you still bop your head or tap your toes to those songs. C'mon now, admit it!!

Makes you appreciate it almost two generations after its popularity came and went.

It wasn't as bad as the savage beast it was made out to be.