The AT40 blog/September 22, 1984: The era of 'multiple-hit' albums was thriving

By the mid-1980s, the era of putting together material for at least one album a year was over. The costs had already begun to skyrocket and the record companies weren't willing to shell out the bucks to freely have an act come in to the studio to record a 12-song package, much to the consternation of the act's agents/managers who believed in pushing their act to the brink of exhaustion.

So with less albums being produced, record companies were gambling more on their acts churning out numerous hits from those albums. And it was this week that 18 of the 40 songs in the countdown were the second or third or fourth or even fifth singles from the act's albums.

No. 38 All Of You--Julio Iglesias & Diana Ross: The follow-up single to his debut duet with Willie Nelson, "To All The Girls I've Loved Before" was from Iglesias' breakthrough album 1100 Bel Air Place, which also featured a collaboration with the Beach boys on the Hollies' classic "The Air That I Breathe."

No. 37 Flesh For Fantasy--Billy Idol: It was late in 1983 when Idol's breakthrough album Rebel Yell, and though the title cut missed the Top 40, the follow-up, "Eyes Without A Face," sure didn't. It got to No. 4 in the summer of '84. "Flesh For Fantasy" was the follow-up and peaked at No. 29.

No. 36 Who Wears These Shoes?--Elton John: The venerable Mr. John released his 24th album, Breaking Hearts, in the summer of '84 and produced the Top 10 hit "Sad Songs (Say So Much)." The follow-up, "Who Wears These Shoes?" would get as high as No. 16. This song, like the previous hit, was co-written with his legendary writing partner, Bernie Taupin.

No. 33 Bop 'Til You Drop--Rick Springfield: Since his 1981 breakthrough in "Jessie's Girl," Springfield was non-stop on the chart. He had three Top 40 hits from that album, Working Class Dog, three more from Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet, and three more from Living In Oz. From the movie soundtrack of his debut film, "Hard To Hold," Springfield had hit the Top 10 with "Love Somebody" and Top 30 with "Don't Walk Away." "Bop 'Til You Drop" would get as high as No. 20 as the third single from this soundtrack.

No. 31 Some Guys Have All The Luck--Rod Stewart: The album Camouflage was Rod Stewart's fourth solo album of the decade and produced the Top 10 hit "Infatuation" during that summer of '84. "Some Guys Have All The Luck," the perky remake of the 1973 Persuaders' Top 40 hit smash, would also be a Top 10 hit, peaking at No. 10.

No. 29 I'm So Excited--The Pointer Sisters: Talk about unique hit songs. "I'm So Excited" was a follow-up release on not one album, but two. In 1982, it was a Top 30 smash from the album "So Excited!" and was the follow-up to the Top 20 "American Music." Then their record label slipped the song back in thanks to an edited and remixed version for their 1984 album "Breakout," and was the third release after "Automatic" and "Jump (For My Love)." This time, the song made the Top 10, peaking at No. 9.

No. 25 The Lucky One--Laura Branigan: In the early summer, Branigan's first release from her third album, Self Control, the title cut, peaked at No. 4. "The Lucky One" was her fifth top 40 hit in two years, peaking at No. 20.

No. 19 Torture--The Jacksons: It had been over three years since Marlon, Jackie, Tito, Randy and Michael had a Top 40 hit with "Heartbreak Hotel" (not the Elvis song). Then came the album Victory and the first single, "State Of Shock," which featured Michael and Mick Jagger on vocals. "Torture" was produced and co-written by Jackie and features brother Jermaine, who was uncertain of his availability on the album until the last moment, and Michael on lead vocals. It got as high as No. 17.

No. 17 When You Close Your Eyes--Night Ranger: This song was actually the third release from the album Midnight Madness as the first song, "(You Can Still) Rock In America" got to No. 51. It was the second release, the '80s classic "Sister Christian," which peaked at No. 5 that finally got the band into the Top 40. The follow-up, with Jack Blades on lead vocal, was "When You Close Your Eyes." It got as high as No. 14.

No. 16 Lucky Star--Madonna: The self-titled album for the woman we would come to know as the "Material Girl" gave us the Top 20 hit "Holiday," and the No. 10 hit "Borderline." She was about to continue her upward climb to fame and fortune with the hit "Lucky Star," highlighted by a memorable music video that would punctuate the "Madonna look" of the mid-1980s. "Lucky Star" would get to No. 4.

No. 14 Hard Habit To Break--Chicago: Now sailing again with a second wind starting with 1982's No. 1 hit "Hard To Say I'm Sorry" and with Canadian writer-producer David Foster behind the controls of the band production-wise, Chicago released Chicago XVII in late spring of 1984 and "Stay The Night" went as high as No. 16. But the follow-up was the emotional "Hard Habit To Break," featuring Peter Cetera and Bill Champlain on co-lead vocals. It would get as high as No. 3.

No. 12 Stuck On You--Lionel Richie: By now, Richie's Can't Slow Down album was running out of steam, though "Penny Lover" was waiting in the wings to become the fifth Top 40 hit from that album. "Stuck On You" gave Richie an audience he rarely ever touched -- country music fans. After the dance-happy hits "All Night Long (All Night)" and "Running With The Night" and the No. 1 ballad "Hello," Richie got his cowboy hat and boots on for "Stuck On You," which peaked at No. 3 and was on its way down the chart at this point.

No. 11 Cover Me--Bruce Springsteen: Little did anyone know that The Boss was going to break the bank with the album Born In The U.S.A. by releasing an insane seven singles from it. In the early summer of '84, Springsteen and his merry E Street Band mates were bounding into the Top 10 with "Cover Me," the second Top 10 hit from the album and follow-up to the No. 2 smash and biggest hit ever, "Dancing In The Dark."

No. 6 If This Is It--Huey Lewis & The News: The band from Marin County, California was already up to their fourth release from the No. 1 album Sports. They hit the Top 10 with "Heart And Soul," "I Want A New Drug," and "The Heart Of Rock 'N Roll." Then came the summer-driven "If This Is It," complete with a music video featuring the band at the beach. It peaked at No. 6 as "Walking On A Thin Line" was in the on-deck circle ready to become the band's fifth Top 40 hit from the album.

No. 5 Drive--The Cars: The sassy "You Might Think" started off as the first single from the Boston-based band's fifth studio album. The hard-driving "Magic" became a summertime smash, peaking at No. 12. Then came the beautiful "Drive" with bass player Benjamin Orr on lead vocal after Ric Ocasek sang lead on the first two hits. "Drive" would peak at No. 3.

No. 4 What's Love Got To Do With It--Tina Turner: Dropping from the No. 1 spot after three weeks at the top, this Grammy Award-winning smash was really the second release from Turner's comeback album Private Dancer. Her remake of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" was a Top 30 hit in the late winter of '84, her first Top 40 hit in over 10 years when she was still married to Ike.

No. 3 She Bop--Cyndi Lauper: The album She's So Unusual gave us the fun-packed "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," which went to No. 2, and the beautiful "Time After Time," which went to No. 1. This time around, Lauper needed a chaperone because she couldn't "stop messin' in the danger zone." "She Bop" hit No. 3 as the third single and she still had two more releases to go ("All Through The Night" and "Money Changes Everything") from this breakthrough album.

No. 2 Let's Go Crazy--Prince & The Revolution: From the soundtrack of the movie "Purple Rain," the first single, "When Doves Cry," which was still in the Top 40 at this point, gave His Purple Majesty the first No. 1 of his career. "Let's Go Crazy," the second release from the soundtrack, was the follow-up and a week away from becoming the second No. 1 hit for Prince. Purple Rain would give us five Top 40 hits.

Of course, that's just the songs that were "follow-up" singles. There were also "first" releases from albums ("Strut" by Sheena Easton at No. 40, "Swept Away" by Diana Ross at No. 35,  "On The Dark Side" by John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band at No. 32, Prince's "When Doves Cry" at No. 23, "Caribbean Queen" by Billy Ocean at No. 22, "Sunglasses At Night" by Corey Hart at No. 20, "Lights Out" by Peter Wolf at No. 18, "Dynamite" by Jermaine Jackson at No. 15, "I Just Called To Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder at No. 9, "The Glamorous Life" by Sheila E. at No. 8 and "Missing You" by John Waite, which went to No. 1 for its only week in this particular week) that would also spawn multiple Top 40 hits.

That's 29 songs in the Top 40 that week from albums that gave us multiple hits.

Yes, as you can see, the times of "an album a year" were definitely a-changin'.

The AT40 Blog/September 13, 1980: Two iconic early '80s hits take huge jumps

They are two of the most iconic songs of the early part of the 1980s. And for the week ending September 13, 1980, they were the two biggest movers within the American Top 40 countdown, one song heading to the Top 10, the other heading straight to the top.

The biggest mover in the Top 40 was Kenny Loggins' first foray into movie music. "I'm Alright," the big track from the motion picture Caddyshack, starring Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight and Bill Murray, jumped a hefty 15 notches from No. 27 to No. 12 on its way to peaking at No. 7. It would be Loggins' actual first Top 10 solo hit, even though 1978's No. 5 hit "Whenever I Call You Friend" was listed as a Loggins solo effort. He had help on that song from Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks.

"I'm Alright" would help establish Loggins as a bonafide star of singing movie music. Throughout the 1980s, it was his voice that gave life to movies such as Footloose (the title track, "I'm Free"), Over The Top ("Meet Me Halfway"), Top Gun ("Danger Zone") and Caddyshack II, which got him yet another Top 10 hit from that movie with "Nobody's Fool."

And hey, who doesn't remember the gopher dancing to "I'm Alright" after he helped to ruin the golf course at the end of the first Caddyshack and Dangerfield famously announced, "Hey everybody! We're all gonna get laid!"

The second biggest mover of the week was the third single to come from Queen's "The Game" album. It seemed as if the luster of the No. 1 song "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" had worn off after "Play The Game" only got as high as No. 42 in the mid-summer of 1980. Didn't look as if the album was going to carry on.

But there was a hidden jewel on the album that was ready to be the third release, a funky, dance record that bass player John Deacon composed that seemed like a throwaway on the album. Deacon composed one of the more popular songs the band had four years earlier in "You're My Best Friend," and he was about to do it again with a song that picked up quite a bit of radio airplay in the second half of the summer. I can still remember 99X WXLO-FM in New York playing the tar out of this dance tune.

And how I loved "Another One Bites The Dust." It's Deacon's bass complementing Roger Taylor's drums that make this tune memorable. Then you add the amazing and theatrical vocal of the late Freddie Mercury and that song would become one of the reasons we loved the 1980s musically.

"Another One Bites The Dust" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 16, 1980 at No. 67 and two weeks later, it was debuting in the Top 40 at No. 28. Two weeks later after that, the week of September 13, 1980, it leaped 14 places from No. 23 into the Top 10 at No. 9 to give Queen its fourth Top 10 hit (sadly, it would be the band's last Top 10 hit as "Bohemian Rhapsody," the band's classic 1976 Top 10 smash, would be re-released thanks to the "Wayne's World" soundtrack and hit No. 2 months after Mercury's passing).

Three weeks after it hit the Top 10 in a splashy way, "Another One Bites The Dust" would get to No. 1 and spend three weeks at the top and make the band first to have two No. 1 hits in the 1980s. "Another One Bites The Dust" would spend a mesmerizing 15 weeks in the Top 10.and since its release in the summer of 1980, it has become one of the biggest sports anthems of all time.

As for the very top of the Top 40 this weekend, Diana Ross held at the top with her fifth No. 1 hit after leaving the Supremes and her 17th overall No. 1 hit with "Upside Down," while Australia's Air Supply moved into the No. 2 spot with their second straight big hit "All Out Of Love" and the Rolling Stones held firm at No. 3 with the title track from their album "Emotional Rescue."

The AT40 Blog/September 3, 1983: When " Human Nature" made history

There's that so-often told story of something being "the last" or "the last-moment substitute" that makes history and does well.

And so is that story of "Human Nature," the fifth single release from Michael Jackson's memorable 1982 album Thriller. But how did "Human Nature" even make its way to Jackson's album in the first place? This is the story.

"Human Nature" was co-written by Steve Porcaro of the group Toto and John Bettis, who wrote a number of hits in the 1970s and early 1980s for the Carpenters as well as the Pointer Sisters' big 1981 No. 2 hit "Slow Hand." But "Human Nature" was not really a "finished" project. Porcaro put down the song in a sketchy form on a cassette tape, not much in lyrics, most likely thinking producer Quincy Jones, the superstar behind Jackson's success for 1979's Off The Wall would even give the song a second look, but might give him an opinion to what he thinks which direction the song might go in.

So after completing the sketchy recording, Porcaro reportedly handed the tape over to Toto pianist-singer and leader David Paich to hand to Jones with two songs that Paich had put together for Jones and Jackson to listen to for approval.

Jones and Jackson were already in the process of recording Thriller while Porcaro and Paich and the rest of Toto were enjoying monster success with the album that would win the Grammy for Album of the Year, Toto IV. So Jones received the demos from Paich ... and stunningly rejected both of Paich's songs! Then he heard the sketchy melody and words to "Human Nature."

Something clicked. In the notes of the re-released Thriller 25 in 2008, Jones said, "All of a sudden, at the end, there was all this silence, there was: 'Why, why, dah dah da-dum dah dah, why, why.' Just a dummy lyric and a very skeletal thing—I get goosebumps talking about it. I said, 'This is where we wanna go, because it's got such a wonderful flavor.'"

So he had Porcaro and Bettis pursue the song further. A couple of weeks later, Porcaro brought Jones the finished version of "Human Nature," for which he would play the synthesizers and keyboards as a session musician. And in a last-second judgment, Jones substituted a song that was already set to be placed on the album, "Carousel," for "Human Nature."

"Human Nature" provided a perfect balance for Thriller as a slower song alongside "The Lady In My Life" and "The Girl Is Mine" against the funky dance songs like "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)," "Wanna Be Startin' Something," the title track and "Billie Jean" along with the fire of the Eddie Van Halen guitar-driven "Beat It."

But only one album in the history of popular music had ever seen more than four releases from it hit the Top 40 -- that was the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which featured four No. 1 hits, three by the Bee Gees and the other by Yvonne Elliman, while the other Top 40 hits came from the Trammps, K.C. & The Sunshine Band and Tavares.

Never in the history of music had one album generated five Top 40 hits by one artist. Fleetwood Mac scored four Top 10 hits from its landmark 1977 Rumours with "Go Your Own Way," "Dreams," "Don't Stop" and "You Make Lovin' Fun." And Jackson did it with four Top 10 hits from Off The Wall with "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," "Rock With You," the title track and "She's Out Of My Life." The Grease soundtrack in 1978 generated four Top 10 hits as well, two being duets by the stars, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, along with a solo single by Newton-John and Frankie Valli's No. 1 title track.

So as the wintertime release of Thriller turned into the spring of '83, then the summer of '83, and the first four songs were all Top 10 hits -- "The Girl Is Mine," a duet with the great Paul McCartney, "Billie Jean," "Beat It" and "Wanna Be Startin' Something" -- the executives of CBS/Epic Records made a big decision. Thriller was huge and selling a trough full of albums each day through the summer of '83. They didn't want this party to end at four Top 40 hits knowing there was more hit potential from the album.

So on Tuesday, July 5, 1983, "Human Nature," the last-moment substitution for the album that originally came to its producer as a sketchy demo, was released after the power of the dance-happy "Wanna Be Startin' Something." This brooding moody ballad that had Jackson's vocals on full display about life in the city and his relationship with it, made its Hot 100 debut on July 23, 1983 and a week later, debuted at No. 35 in the Top 40.

And it kept climbing until Labor Day weekend. It was on that weekend it leaped from No. 13 to No. 10, making it the record fifth Top 40 hit from the album. A couple of weeks later, it would peak at No. 7. But even then the CBS/Sony execs didn't want the party to end. Soon after that, "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" was released and hit No. 10. And in the winter of 1984, the title track hit No. 4.

That would be seven Top 40 releases and seven Top 10 hits from Thriller. The seal was broken -- you could release more than four songs from an album if the album ... and the popularity ... were right and the right time.

But while Thriller was finished selling albums on an insane pace daily, another CBS album was being released in the late spring of 1984. It was Bruce Springsteen's Born In The U.S.A. and the company, too, made the landmark decision to go beyond four Top 10 hits from the amazingly great album after it became a smash. "Glory Days" did the trick with a Top 10 hit in the summer of 1985, followed by Top 10  followups "I'm Goin' Down" and "My Hometown," matching Jackson's seven Top 10 hits from Thriller.

Still, as they say, you always remember your "first." And in the case of Thriller, the record label took a chance on that sketchy, brooding, beautiful song "Human Nature" and it broke the glass ceiling for Top 10 hits from one album.

Yet another reason why Thriller will be judged as the greatest album of all-time if not one of the greatest.