“One More Try” by Timmy T (1991)

One person’s view:  “It sounds like he turned on his Casio, hit the ‘demo’ button, and started recording.” – DonKarnage @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.66 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1991

If 1985 represented the peak of overproduction, commercialization, and Icarus-like ambition in #1 singles, the success of Timmy T’s “One More Try” in 1991 marked the peak of the opposing trends that followed.  A typical 1985 hit like “We Built This City” was created by a team of songwriters and musicians who combined decades of experience.  “One More Try” was the product of one man:  a locksmith from Fresno who had taught himself to play a second-hand keyboard.  A 1985 hit such as “We Are the World” could have bold and unrealistic goals, like attempting to end hunger in Africa.  The goal of “One More Try” was to win back the love of a gas station cashier named Cindy, which was also unrealistic but not jabbing-your-finger-in-the-face-of-God unrealistic.  Many hits from 1985 were heard in motion pictures.  “One More Try” was mostly just heard on Cindy’s Walkman, until Timmy T mailed tapes of his music to radio stations and got signed by a small Canadian indie label.

There’s no debate that “One More Try” sounds like the cheaply produced record that it is.  There’s also no debate that Timmy T is not among the world’s great singers.  His range on “One More Try” is barely more than an octave, and his voice is so ordinary that he may as well be just some guy working in an office somewhere.  With a bit of searching you can find entire threads of discussion proclaiming the awfulness of this song, and bemoaning the fact that Timmy T has more #1 hits than Bob Dylan, Green Day, Nirvana, James Brown, and Led Zeppelin combined.  However, not everyone thinks that “One More Try” is one of the worst chart-toppers of its era.  Tom Breihan gave it a positive review in his Stereogum column, observing that the “hopelessness” in Timmy T’s vocal delivery is “terribly compelling.”  Timmy was feeling genuine pain from the whole Cindy situation, and he wanted the rest of us to experience it too.

Like Breihan, I’m going to take the minority viewpoint on this one.  “One More Try” is a simple and heartfelt song that doesn’t need an orchestra or an operatic tenor to get its point across.  While it’s almost as amateurish as “Hangin’ Tough”, that actually works in its favor to some extent.  Plus, the freestyle-influenced synth part gives it more character than most of the other ballads of the early 1990s.  Too bad no one asked Timmy T to spruce up snoozefests like “Because I Love You” and Surface’s “The First Time” with his garage sale Moog.

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the improbability of Timmy’s accomplishment.  I can’t think of any other person up until that point who wrote, performed, and produced a #1 single with so little creative help from anyone else.  Timmy T needed to be the ultimate do-it-yourselfer because Fresno wasn’t exactly teeming with musical geniuses who could mentor him.  Kevin Federline was living nearby but was only 12 years old and not yet in a position to share his once-in-a-generation talent.

A look at Timmy T’s Twitter feed reveals that many of the “bad” #1 hits of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s are now intertwined with one another in popular culture.  Timmy has performed freestyle shows on the same bill as Stevie B and the woman from Will to Power.  He has posted pictures of himself with Tiffany, Tommy Page, and Vanilla Ice.  He also has some kind of a feud with Richard Marx, but who doesn’t?  Whenever a remote tribe from the Amazon makes initial contact with our civilization, the first thing it does is get into a quarrel with Richard Marx.

Squirrels are something that Timmy T has no quarrel with at all.  He sometimes shares videos of the bushy-tailed rodents sitting in his hand or riding on his shoulder in his car.  Maybe now we understand why “One More Try” wasn’t enough to convince Cindy to stick around.  Women don’t like when they find strange hairs on their man, especially when those hairs are accompanied by fleas.

“Because I Love You (The Postman Song)” by Stevie B (1990)

One person’s view:  “Quite possibly the most boring number 1 to ever come out in the early 1990s.  Everything about it is forgettable:  the production, the lyrics, the singer, even the title isn’t all that interesting.” – cybershocker455 @ Reddit

The public’s view:  1.75 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1990

These days, southern Florida is known mainly for Burmese pythons, $10,000 home insurance bills, and the electrifying stadium-filling charisma of U.S. Senator and future five-term President Marco Rubio.  But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Miami was getting America’s toes tapping and ears ringing with the sounds of Latin freestyle music.  Exposé, Will to Power, and Company B were some of the best known freestyle acts to emerge from the region, and Stevie B (no relation to Company B) was one of the most prolific and enduring.  Yet, as with many of the other freestylers of his time, Stevie B’s biggest hit was not very representative of the freestyle genre.  It was also one of his dullest songs, and unfortunately it will make for a dull entry here.

Stevie’s collaborator Warren Allen Brooks wrote “Because I Love You” as a love message from God to a human.  He did so by imagining how God would react if Brooks were to send Him a letter in a time of personal crisis.  The Almighty’s response begins:  “I got your letter from the postman just the other day.”  This evokes a bizarre mental picture of a mail truck floating up to heaven to deliver the letter.  Has Brooks ever heard of that postage-free alternative known as prayer?  It’s a lot more efficient than sending God a letter or leaving Him a rambling voicemail.  And nobody wants to be the one whose envelope gives God a paper cut.

Of course, most people don’t know that this hit was originally intended as a spiritual.  They hear “Because I Love You” as a romantic ballad from one mortal to another.  In this interpretation, the opening line about the postman is more plausible but it raises questions about the singer’s claim that he will always be by the lady’s side.  If he’s always right next to her, why does she have to write a letter every time she wants to talk to him?  And why does he wait a few days before responding?  Unless he has a good excuse for the physical and emotional distance, like being in prison or on one of those Survivor-type reality shows, it’s hard to take Stevie B at his word.  But he doubled down on his message anyway with his follow-up single:  “I’ll Be By Your Side”.

This record continues the trend toward ultra-cheap do-it-yourself music production that we started to notice in the late 1980s.  There are only two instruments on the track, both of which are synthesizers played by Brooks.  The video was filmed in a large open room with big windows, bare floors, and a grand piano, which is the default setting that music video directors choose when working with a boring song and a low budget.  (See “Separate Lives”.)  But this room isn’t just a place for Stevie B to mope around and pretend to play the piano.  His bed is here, too, and this makes me feel sorry for him having to live in a drafty, uncarpeted loft that was probably not intended for residential use.  Not sorry enough to want to hear “Because I Love You” again, though.

“Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice (1990)

One critic’s view:  “With this one song, Robbie Van Winkle destroyed a cool Queen tune and set back the cause of white people in hip-hop a decade.” – John Nova Lomax @ Houston Press

The public’s view:  2.14 / 5.00, the fourth-worst #1 hit of 1990

“Ice Ice Baby” was the first true rap record to reach #1 on the Hot 100, but that’s just one of its notable achievements.  It was also the first of many #1 songs to be built around an obvious sample of another hit record.  It was the first of many #1 brag-rap records, with lyrics consisting of a misleading portrayal of the performer’s popularity, rhyming skills, and street smarts.  And, of course, it was the first of many #1 songs by white rappers.  Most people who achieve a historic “first” are remembered favorably, like Jackie Robinson, Neil Armstrong, and Annie Edson Taylor.  But Vanilla Ice is, fairly or not, viewed more like a Patient Zero who started a pandemic.

It’s easy to find fault with the lyrics of “Ice Ice Baby”.  (Why is he asking us to “collaborate and listen”?  Ice has already burned his rhyme onto millions of CDs, so the time for collaboration is over.  It’s all listening from here on out.)  It’s also obvious that Ice would be waxed like a candle in a rap battle with today’s talent.  But when you judge “Ice Ice Baby” in the context of 1990, it really isn’t that terrible.  The other huge rap hit from that year was MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This”, which was an even more blatant overuse of a sample with even less poignant lyrics.  Not to mention, Hammer’s pants appeared to be concealing several layers of diapers.  Not only can’t I touch this, I don’t want to touch it.

Neither Ice nor Hammer looks edgy in hindsight, but they were almost revolutionary when played on the radio alongside Wilson Phillips and Michael Bolton.  Some top 40 stations found “Ice Ice Baby” so scandalous that they initially confined it to evening hours.  Younger readers probably think I’m joking about this, but I am not.  Ask your grandparents.

Ice didn’t ask for permission before sampling “Under Pressure”, but this was solved to everyone’s immense satisfaction by selling 10 million albums and giving Queen and David Bowie a sizeable cut of the royalties.  Good thing he didn’t rip off a more sensitive artist.  Sampling “Hotel California” without consent would have caused a grave psychic injury to Don Henley that no amount of money could ever rectify, and Ice would have had to undergo a ritual disembowelment to appease Henley and his lawyers.

The reputation of “Ice Ice Baby” suffers not so much from the track itself and the surrounding copyright controversy, but from all of the hype that Vanilla Ice was thoroughly incapable of living up to.  This was a guy with maybe two-and-a-half commercially viable songs in his repertoire, but he was marketed like he was the rap version of Jesus – or even Elvis.  We didn’t particularly need a Cool as Ice movie that would earn a 3% score on Rotten Tomatoes, nor did we need a Vanilla Ice Electronic Rap Game.  I won a copy of this game in a radio station contest, so I can describe it for you in detail.  It contained a game board, a deck of cards with rhyming words like “chunk” and “stunk”, and a score pad.  The most interesting component was an oddly shaped yellow piece of plastic which emitted drum machine noises that were fuzzy enough to be transmissions from space.  The game’s participants were supposed to pretend that this sputtering device was a microphone, and rap nonsense into it after each line on the game board was completed using the cards.  “Yo!  Slam dunk!  She found her stunk!  He lost his chunk…”  It’s sort of like the Game of Life, but with a square that requires you to get a lobotomy if you land on it.  Word to your mother, and word to Milton Bradley.

“I’ll Be Your Everything” by Tommy Page (1990)

A common view:  “I can remember hearing every #1 song except for this one, but I don’t know how I could ever forget something with such lousy vocals.” – paraphrasing various comments from several websites

The public’s view:  1.34 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of the 1990s

As I previously told you, I was intrigued by Billboard Magazine and its music charts when I was a child.  My obsession caused me to set an overly ambitious and unattainable goal.  I believed that, with hard work and good luck and perhaps an unexpected inheritance, I might eventually be able to afford a subscription to the pricey weekly publication.  I didn’t know that there was a boy of the same age in New Jersey who shared my infatuation with Billboard, and he had an even more outrageous objective.  He vowed that his name would one day appear in the most coveted space in the magazine:  the very top slot on the Hot 100.  That boy was Tommy Page, and this is his amazing story.

Page had some talent, but not enough by itself to realize his pie-in-the-sky dream.  Let’s be honest:  he was no Joan Jett or James Ingram.  But what he lacked on the talent side, he compensated for with determination.  While in college, he worked in a coat room at a New York nightclub that was frequented by music industry decision-makers.  Any patron who was employed by a record label was apt to find a Tommy Page demo tape in his coat pocket when he got home.  Page did finally get a record deal, and – while chasing his goal of a #1 hit – adapted his musical style to the commercial tastes of the time.  This meant that he would have to tour as an opener for New Kids on the Block.  It was like selling his soul to the devil, except that the devil probably would have offered him a better percentage of gate receipts and merch.

You know how individuals such as George Martin and Billy Preston were sometimes called the 5th Beatle?  After a few months on tour, Tommy Page could be considered the 6th New Kid.  This was about as prestigious as being the 5,161st Beatle or the 785th guy in REO Speedwagon, but it fit into his plan perfectly.  Writing and recording “I’ll Be Your Everything” with the help of several New Kids was what let him succeed in his quixotic quest.  For one magical week in the spring of 1990, he was at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 as he had always wanted to be.  His success as a singer faltered after that, and “I’ll Be Your Everything” would fade faster than almost any other chart-topper of its time.  But the remarkable tale of Tommy Page was not finished:  he put the capstone on his career by ultimately becoming the publisher of Billboard!  It was an incredible journey from chart enthusiast to chart champion to chart dictator.  Meanwhile, the rest of us chart fanatics were auctioning off kidneys so that we could buy an occasional copy of Page’s magazine from a newsstand.

I don’t know of anyone else who pursued their childhood passion as thoroughly as Tommy Page did.  Let’s think for a minute about what other young people could accomplish with this level of gumption.  We have all met kids who are fascinated with watching things burn.  Imagine if one of them starts a massive blaze that destroys a $20 million airplane hangar, and then later becomes the fire chief of Los Angeles County.  He would be the Tommy Page of pyromaniacs.  Or let’s pretend there’s a science geek who synthesizes a new chemical element called craponium that has an atomic number of 33 1/3.  His discovery is quickly forgotten because craponium doesn’t have any practical uses and it smells bad.  But then he gets elected president of the American Chemical Society and says, “Ha ha, now the periodic table is mine to do with as I please!”  He’s the Tommy Page of scientists.

So let’s talk about Page’s hit song.  “I’ll Be Your Everything” currently has the worst Rate Your Music score of any #1 single from the first 56 years of the Hot 100, even though it is not amateurish, grating, insulting, or idiotic like many of the other songs that have been profiled here.  However, it is certainly the most forgettable #1 from an era that featured quite a few forgettable chart-toppers.  Page’s way-too-syrupy voice is like that of a hypnotist who says “When this record is over, you will remember none of it except for maybe a small part of the chorus.  Oh, and by the way, pick up a copy of Billboard next time you are at Waldenbooks.”

The ephemeral nature of “I’ll Be Your Everything” is probably why I didn’t mind listening to it a few times while researching this post.  All of the irritation it caused me in 1990 has been lost amid my amnesia for it, and now it’s like a brand new song without the baggage of radio overplay.  While I’m probably never going to be part of its target market of 11-year-old girls, I can’t be too angry with my fellow chart nerd Tommy Page for briefly subjecting all of us to it.  He was at least nice enough to not have any more top 40 hits after that.

“Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” by Milli Vanilli (1989)

One critic’s view:  “There are several songs on this list [of #1 hits of the 1980s] that should never have been a No. 1 hit.  But Milli Vanilli’s ‘Girl I’m Gonna Miss You’ – with instrumentation a pre-teen could slap together on Garage Band – should never have been a song.” – Troy L. Smith @ Cleveland.com

The public’s view:  2.06 / 5.00, the fourth-worst #1 hit of 1989

When thinking about frauds today, many people are reminded of disgraced ex-Representative George Santos.  The exposure of Santos’s fibs led to pearl-clutching gasps from the establishment, but as a congressman he was hardly any worse than average for his era.  Sure, his proposal to make the AR-15 our National Gun didn’t go anywhere, but at least he was working on legislation while most of his colleagues were shutting the government down, fighting in the congressional ladies’ room, or threatening to impeach the president’s dog.  Plus, we need to give Santos credit for sashaying through the glass ceiling that had prevented Brazilian drag queens from getting elected to high office for the first 246 years of U.S. history.  Thanks to his trailblazing courage, I’m looking forward to voting for Senator Samba Tinsel Divine (R-Oklahoma) in the 2032 No Labels presidential primary.

Much like George Santos, Milli Vanilli was a fake but was otherwise a fairly inoffensive product of its times.  If the ersatz singing duo had blasted onto the scene in 1983, there never would have been a scandal because its music was simply not interesting enough to make the charts in that awe-inspiring year.  Thomas Dolby, Taco, and Spandau Ballet would have demolished “Baby Don’t Forget My Number” on MTV and at the record store.  And if Milli Vanilli had emerged today, with Auto-Tune and A.I. deception everywhere, people would shrug and say “So what?  I know they’re lip-synching, but so is the hamster in that funny clip I saw on TikTok.”  A Milli Vanilli scandal could only have happened in 1989 and 1990, when the duo’s competition on the pop charts was weak but was still based on talent (or lack thereof) rather than trickery.

One of Milli Vanilli’s three #1 hits is now regarded as significantly worse than its late ‘80s peers.  I am therefore legally obliged to mention it on this blog, due to a clause that was quietly inserted into the Naval Munitions Appropriations Act of 2023 by Rep. George Santos.  But I’m not sure what I can write about “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”, a track that has maybe one weak hook in the chorus and very little else of note.  The verses aren’t melodic enough to qualify as singing, and not rhythmic enough to be considered rapping.  There’s not even one-thousandth of a Vanilli on display here; maybe they should have renamed the group to Micro Vanilli for this song.  Still, there’s nothing offensive, irritating, or unpleasant.  I don’t remember having any kind of reaction either way when I first heard “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”, or when Shadoe Stevens (Casey Kasem’s replacement) informed me that it had climbed to #1 on American Top 40.

Because there is so little to say about the song, I will summarize its accompanying video.  In this clip, one of the Milli Vanilli guys is an artist who is dating the beautiful owner of an art gallery.  He is supposed to make a painting of her, but when it is unveiled at a gala in front of all of her friends it turns out to be a rendition of a different woman.  Worst.  Gala.  Ever.  The clip ends with the artist wistfully looking back on the romance and burning the painting that triggered its demise.  There’s also a sailboat, but it doesn’t get burned.

This video confuses me.  Why did the artist sabotage his relationship, and why did he do it in such a vicious and publicly humiliating way?  Did I miss a key plot point because I couldn’t tell the members of Milli Vanilli apart?  I wish one of them had grown a mustache to make identification easier, like John Oates did so that people would stop mixing him up with Daryl Hall.

Perhaps this clip was intended to foreshadow Milli Vanilli’s fortunes in the coming year.  Just as the girlfriend was shocked by the artist’s betrayal, the hunky young duo’s pre-teen fan-girls were about to discover that the voices they fell in love with belonged to a couple of not-so-hunky middle-aged men.  And burning that painting was just the beginning of the physical destruction.  Milli Vanilli would soon become the first chart-topping act to have a big pile of its tapes and CDs ceremonially crushed by a steamroller.  What a way to bring in the 1990s!

“Hangin’ Tough” by New Kids on the Block (1989)

One person’s view:  “’Hangin’ Tough’ is one of the great embarrassments of popular music:  a song so preposterously ill-conceived and performed that it really is a marvel.  It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so annoying.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.61 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of the 1980s behind another song by New Kids on the Block

I thought my favorite radio station was trolling me.  That was the only explanation for the new song they were playing, which featured a boy whimpering “Please don’t go girl!” in a preposterously high voice.  “You would ruin my whole world,” the child added, as if anyone should be expected to give a shit about the emotions of such a whiney brat.  I checked the calendar to see if it was April 1.  Nope.  A feeling of dread washed over me.  What if this wasn’t a prank?  What if this was like that other absurdly pathetic song the station had played a couple of winters ago, in which some pitiable buffoon said he would subtract 20 years from his life for a woman?  That earlier record – Billy Vera & the Beaters’ “At This Moment” – was hilarious at first, but no one was laughing when it went to #1.  And I was right to be worried about “Please Don’t Go Girl”, because it proved to be the first stage of a crisis that would last for more than two years.

The name of that crisis was, of course, New Kids on the Block.  This group would ultimately have three chart-topping singles, which is approximately five more than they deserved.  Their first, “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” is the proud owner of a 1.49 score on Rate Your Music – the lowest of any #1 Hot 100 hit of the 1980s.  While “Hangin’ Tough” does slightly better by RYM’s measure, critics have savaged it as one of the most poorly performed and produced hit songs of its decade.  It has certainly earned the honor of representing NKOTB on the Bad #1 Hits blog.

With their first few singles, the New Kids cultivated an image as a safe and non-threatening act.  Grandma could buy their album for a 9-year-old with no worries that it might contain words like “reefer” or “poop”.  The group seemed like the type of teens who spent their free time cleaning up graffiti and litter without even being told to do so by a court.  But then they decided to destroy that façade with “Hangin’ Tough”, which recast the New Kids as a gang of ruffians who “stomped” anyone who crossed their path.  It was a clean break from the past, a calculated effort to prevent the act’s audience from tiring of the New Kids’ wimpiness.  The group didn’t want to go down the same path as Anne Murray, who had relied too heavily on gentle love ballads and found herself out of the limelight by 1989.  If Murray had recorded just one song threatening to bash the listener over the head with a whiskey bottle, she might have still had a vibrant career.

Many youthful acts have successfully shifted to a more mature image as they aged.  Justin Timberlake is probably filming an AARP ad as we speak.  But “Hangin’ Tough” was so transparently phony that it set the New Kids’ adolescence back by at least six months and likely forced the younger members into reverse puberty.  No matter how rough they claimed to be, these teens were always going to be about as fearsome as a beakless parakeet.  Even Peter Cetera’s widely mocked swagger in “Glory of Love” was more convincing than “Hangin’ Tough”.  Unsurprisingly, the New Kids reverted to their previous benign persona on their next release and never presented themselves as streetwise again.

The New Kids’ producer, Maurice Starr, was apparently operating with a single-digit budget on “Hangin’ Tough”.  He plays all of the instruments himself, including an extended interlude on the album version that sounds like he is testing a used keyboard at a church rummage sale to figure out which keys don’t work.  The guitar solo on the radio/video mix is slightly better, but only because it is shorter.  Both mixes are punctuated by shrill bursts of a whistle to signify the hoodlum behavior that we are supposed to now associate with the group.  Just as the police siren in “Straight Outta Compton” announces that Ice Cube has squeezed the trigger and bodies are being hauled off, the traffic cop whistle in “Hangin’ Tough” indicates that one of the New Kids has carelessly stepped into the street without using a crosswalk.

I try to find something nice to say about each “bad” #1 hit that I feature here, but sometimes I just give up.  On to the next entry.

“Wind Beneath My Wings” by Bette Midler (1989)

One person’s view:  “If someone ever wrote a musical tribute to me, I’d be pretty damn insulted if it’s even half as backhanded and self-serving as ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.04 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1989 that wasn’t by New Kids on the Block

Bette Midler is a gifted singer and a beloved entertainer, and “Wind Beneath My Wings” holds sentimental value for many people.  But just because a song gets everybody teary-eyed at weddings and funerals doesn’t mean it should be #1 on the pop music charts.  In fact, that’s a good reason it shouldn’t be #1.  Who wants to hear a funeral song in heavy rotation on the radio every hour and a half?  For those of us who can remember 1989, the saturation of “Wind Beneath My Wings” into every aspect of life was like a preview of hell.

I think that Midler and her producer, Arif Mardin, tried to keep “Wind Beneath My Wings” from becoming so ubiquitous.  They knew that excessive exposure would weaken the song’s effectiveness for the special occasions when it was truly needed, so they included a poison pill at the end:  the part beginning with “Fly… fly….”  For the final 45 seconds, it’s as if Midler no longer wishes to sing in a pleasing manner and is deliberately attempting to harm the audience.  The squawking groan and the pandering that follows (“Thank God for you”) should have sent a strong message of deterrence to any radio programmer who was considering playing the record.  Unfortunately, Midler’s best efforts at driving listeners away somehow weren’t enough to keep the song off the airwaves and out of #1.  Maybe a few well-placed curse words would have done the trick.

Aside from the painfully melodramatic ending, there’s another big turn-off in “Wind Beneath My Wings”.  The lyrics make the singer sound like an exploitative jerk.  She praises her friend privately, but in public she takes credit for everything that the friend does.  She gets “all the glory” while the other person has “a beautiful smile to hide the pain.”  By this point in the relationship, it isn’t enough just to tell the friend what a “hero” he or she is.  This individual also deserves an apology and possibly some monetary compensation.  That is why a funeral is the ideal setting to play the record.  You should never dedicate “Wind Beneath My Wings” to a living person who will realize how unfairly they’ve been treated, and who might hire a lawyer.

As you may have gathered, I am not one of the biggest fans of this song.  However, I am glad it existed because it led to Pinkard & Bowden’s improved version entitled “Wind Beneath My Sheets”.  If you think that this duo’s parody is too crude and that Bette Midler would never approve of jokes about such a horrible topic, I refer you to her flatulence-filled Mondo Beyondo scene with the Kipper Kids.  See why I say that she’s a beloved entertainer?

“Rock On” by Michael Damian (1989)

One person’s view:  “Michael Damian’s ‘Rock On’ might as well be a text book on how not to perform a cover song.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.23 / 5.00, in the bottom 25% of #1 hits of 1989

When most people think of actors who attempted singing careers, the likes of Don Johnson, Victoria Principal, Bruce Willis, John Travolta, and William Shatner come to mind.  Your ears probably hurt just reading about them.  But not every actor who tries to become a music sensation winds up as a punch line.  Remember, Jamie Foxx won an Oscar yet still managed to sing quite well on a couple of records.  Before that, there was J. Lo.  She was OK too, I guess, if you like that sort of thing.  The best rock stars to emerge from the acting world are Miley Cyrus and Rick Springfield, but they were both wired for music from the get-go.  Springfield only did the “Dr. Noah Drake” soap opera silliness out of necessity for a little while.  So how does Michael Damian compare to all of the other singing thespians?

Like the aforementioned Rick Springfield, Damian started out in music before getting diverted into an acting job on a daytime drama.  He was cast as the rock singer Danny Romalotti on The Young and the Restless, a character who suffered one indignity after another.  The gullible Danny was railroaded into taking responsibility for pregnancies caused by other men.  He was poisoned, resulting in him losing his singing voice before he miraculously recovered without any medical explanation.  In the most unrealistic plot of all, an enemy planted cocaine on Danny in an effort to derail his music career.  Drug possession was apparently the biggest scandal his adversary could think of to embarrass an ‘80s rock star.  If he had really wanted to wreck Danny’s future, he should have rigged the Grammys so that Danny would win the Best New Artist award.

After eight years of this tragicomedy, Damian was ready to leverage his success as a fictional rock singer into a rebirth of his real life rock singer persona.  As a result, we were blessed with the remake of David Essex’s 1973 hit “Rock On”.  The original “Rock On” was a haunting, minimalistic song that became a top 10 record despite seeming almost out of synch with itself.  But Damian had only one thing in common with Essex:  a massive pile of hair that probably attracted nesting birds, weighed down his head, and caused neck problems as he aged.  His cover version was a slickly polished synthesizer-laden effort that – by intention – lacked the unique aura of Essex’s original.  It was a perfect candidate for commercial success in 1989.  To #1 it went.

Damian’s “Rock On” checks all the boxes for a bad #1 hit that requires an entry on this blog.  It gets lousy reviews.  It has a poor Rate Your Music score, more than a full point below Essex’s version.  It dropped out of sight immediately after topping the Hot 100, and it rarely gets airplay today.  But I’m going to defend it, at least up to a point.

One of the key criticisms of Damian’s cover version is that it eschews the minimalism of the original.  But that’s exactly what made it worthwhile!  He selected a great but forgotten song, updated it for the production standards of the current day, and successfully brought it to a new audience.  This is one of the best possible rationales for recording a remake.  It isn’t Damian’s fault that the current day happened to be 1989, and that the production standards consisted of replacing musicians with machines and tossing in several unnecessary layers of sound.

The most surprising part of this endeavor is that, unlike other TV stars, Damian can actually sing.  His version of “Rock On” is a capable performance that should have gotten him expelled from the Screen Actors Guild for staying on-key.  Unfortunately, his voice is not particularly memorable and the eagerness in it reminds me a little bit of Shaun Cassidy.  Damian has something else in common with Cassidy:  his first Hot 100 hit (in 1981) was a remake of an Eric Carmen power pop song.  This raises the obvious question of whether Cassidy and Damian are really the same person.  It sounds crazy, but weirder things have happened among the young and restless citizens of Genoa City.  Perhaps Shaun Cassidy had surgery to change his appearance and became Danny Romalotti.  If so, Danny better not let anyone find out about his secret past as a Hardy Boy.  Otherwise he might be blackmailed into paying child support for Siamese quadruplets that were actually fathered by Dr. Noah Drake.

“Baby, I Love Your Way / Freebird Medley” by Will to Power (1988)

One person’s view:  “I thought the track was pretty awful and I avoided it at all costs.  Still do.  It is definitely one of the worst #1 songs of the 80s if not one of the worst songs of the decade in general.” – ArnieNuvo @ PopRedux80

The public’s view:  1.72 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1988   

When old-timers chew the fat and talk about ‘80s chart-toppers they hate, Will to Power’s so-called “Free Baby medley” is scarcely ever mentioned.  Yet here it is on the Bad #1 Hits blog, flaunting a Rate Your Music score that is the third-worst of any #1 song of the decade.  (The two records with lower ratings were both by a certain group who I will be covering soon.  Check your supply of ear plugs now.)  The retrospective reviews from critics are no kinder than the miserable feedback from RYM’s users.  Just as it was a sleeper #1 hit that came out of nowhere in 1988, it’s now a historically anomalous “bad” #1 for us to ponder.

Will to Power consisted of a Miami DJ named Bob Rosenberg, his girlfriend Suzi Carr, and various session musicians.  Rosenberg somehow determined that a 1975 Peter Frampton song and a 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd song had common traits and ought to be sewn together into a duet.  I would never have noticed a similarity between these two classic rock oldies, but Rosenberg is a DJ who mixes songs professionally and I am a guy who sits at a computer and types dumb stuff.  If he ever decides to merge a Carpenters tune with something by Judas Priest, I will just have to respect his genius.

“Baby, I Love Your Way” is (obviously) a love song, and Carr sings that part of the duet.  Rosenberg handles the “Free Bird” lines, which consist of a goodbye message from a man who is leaving town and leaving his woman.  Despite the opposing sentiments of the two songs, there is no tension or disagreement between the female and male on this track.  Rosenberg’s “Free Bird” vocal is so bland and emotionless that there is essentially nothing for Carr to argue with.  His lack of passion suggests that he isn’t truly committed to the vagabond lifestyle that the lyrics describe.  On the original Skynyrd version, Ronnie Van Zant was a restless dude who needed to see the world and couldn’t be held back by a clingy female or anything else.  Rosenberg sounds like someone who made a snap decision to move to Zanesville, Ohio after seeing a documentary about the city on TV, and who will meekly abandon this plan after realizing that Ohio gets kind of cold and he doesn’t own a winter coat.

The singers trade lines in the chorus near the end of the record, which is why I call it a duet despite it being billed as a medley.  When the woman sings “Ooh, baby I love your way,” the man responds with “’Cause I’m as free as a bird now.”  This couple might be talking to each other, but they aren’t communicating.  The guy thinks he’s as free as an eagle or a penguin, but in this smothering relationship he’s about as free as a chicken at Perdue Farms.  His girlfriend never reacts to any of his threats to leave, maybe because she knows just how unserious he is.  Will to Power may have successfully welded two songs together musically, but there is still an open seam in the lyrics.

I can understand why Skynyrd fans were not happy with Will to Power.  The group made a wimpy version of one of Skynyrd’s best loved songs and then took it to #1, obscuring people’s memories of the original.  For many rock bands this insult would be the most awful thing that had ever happened to them, but Lynyrd Skynyrd had probably been through worse.  Peter Frampton, on the other hand, was pleased with the duet.  He was entering the second decade of a career slump that should be ending any day now, and he appreciated both the attention and the royalties.

Despite its flaws, I don’t consider Will to Power’s #1 hit to be an unlistenable torture.  But if you’re into unlistenable tortures, don’t go away just yet.  We’re coming up on 1989 and 1990, and those might be two of your favorite years.