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.
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