*****Number One, June 15, 1981*****
So, the creation of this particular number one song post has gone a tad askew.
You see, typically, my blogging schedule goes something like this:
- Post the blog
- Celebrate completion of task by drinking my brain's weight in Scotch
- Sleep for 24 hours
- Run the ramdomizer, and list out the five number one songs that I next will choose from
- Select the winner and come up with an angle to approach it.
- Repeat step two
- Repeat step three
- Set aside a couple of hours to cobble together some barely coherent text and images
- Post the blog, restart the cycle
Usually this takes about a week. And, for this post, it seemed to be progressing right on time. I had actually reached step eight in the process, and had gotten about halfway through said cobbling.
And, then, I looked up the history of this tune.
Oh.
Then I listened to it.
Ohhhhhh.
Right, um, let's back up a bit. When those pesky internet gnomes left the package of five random top tunes on my doorstep, I unwrapped the box quickly and surveyed the results. It's always interesting to see the mix, and observe any unexpected connection. In this instance, something unusual did stand out to me. That was, the involvement of several true heavyweights of music history. While they weren't all of the same ilk, four of the artists/songs I was given had made a serious impression on the charts and the overall world of rock and/or roll. The fifth selection, by my recollection, had no such importance.
However, I did remember it. Kind of. Barely.
Eh, not really.
To be honest, all I knew about the song, which stood out in this instance for its one-hit wonderness, was that I had a bit of the chorus stuck somewhere in the back of my brain. I don't know why, or where exactly it came from. Perhaps my pre-pubescent classmates really liked it and sang it incessently? Maybe those leggy Solid Gold dancers had grabbed my attention so acutely that I absorbed whatever nonsense track their movements were syncopated to? I really don't know for sure. All I can say for certain is that the following has been lodged in my noggin, somewhere behind the towering stacks of baseball statistics, for nearly thirty years.
"Stars on 45, keep on burning(?) in your eyes(?)
<something something something> Ha ha ha ha"
That's it. That's all I had. But it was something! And, I was excited to revisit this almost entirely forgotten part of my youth. Unfortunately, what I recalled proved to be woefully little and incredibly uninformed.
Which brings us back to the present. I figured that this seemingly lost and unknown gem would be a great contradiction to the hugely decorated musicians filling out the rest of this week's options. When I saw that this band was, according to Wikipedia, a "Dutch Novelty Pop Act", well I was thrilled that much more. If the fourth most popular parody-folk duo out of New Zealand could be so good, surely some quirky persons from the Netherlands would be as well.
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| I know, guys, I know. At least they weren't Aussies |
Thus, I started making with the keyboard tappity-tap-tap working towards the goal of painting an image of rediscovering some long lost awesome musical artifact. I decided to describe the non-chosen songs in such a way that their remarkable history would make it more reasonable as to why I would not write about them. I even included an additional top hit I almost got from the machine (per the dates), just to help prove that point.
Suffice it to say, well, you know what they say about plans. Anyway, here are those thoughts on those other number ones, provided here so you can see exactly why this concept went catapulting off the rails in such an extreme way.
Gene Chandler "Duke of Earl"
Laugh if you wish at the bombastic baritone of this mid-twentieth century single, but it was massive. Even though it grasped the top spot for only three weeks, it is held in such high regard that it was voted into the Grammy's song hall of fame (apparently a thing) AND chosen as one of the 500 songs that shaped rock and roll. It was also used in a quite annoying way to sell Hellman's Dijonnaise creamy mustard blend (also, apparently, a thing). So, you know, massive.
*January 17, 1974*
Steve Miller Band "The Joker"
I've already, um, covered this group once here in The Breakdown Season 2 (The Blogpire Blogs Back). The truly abhorrent "Abracadabra" was dumped in my general direction a month or so ago, and I spent an unpleasant hundred-plus words discussing that debacle. However, despite that, it is fair to note that this band is considered among the very largest of their dinosaur rock genre (a brontosaurus, perhaps). They've sold over twenty-four million albums in the US alone, and Steve Miller has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As a solo artist. Clearly, he deflected the blame for the crappy magic song onto his poor, unsuspecting backup musicians. Abracadabra indeed, evil sir.
*NOT June 15, 1981*
Kim Carnes "Bette Davis Eyes"
Here's your almost. This tune held the top of the charts for over two months in the summer of '81. However, in the midst of its song of the year run, it lost the top spot. For just one week in June, right around the fifteenth in fact, it was displaced by a weird novelty song. It promptly returned to number one the next week. However, because of this, while Bette Davis is among the biggies of the Billboard charts era, it will get no more words from me this time.
*January 2, 1984*
Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson "Say Say Say"
Six weeks at number one. Michael and a Beatle near the top of their game. Top ten in over twenty counties. A truly wackadoo-yet-epic music video. How could I possibly do this justice?
*May 22, 1993*
Janet Jackson "That's the Way Love Goes"
Oh yeah, that other Jackson. The one with the longest running number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 of ANY member of the Jackson family. Ok, maybe Michael is the other one. Grammy, BMI, American Music, and pretty much every other award-giving organization heaped it's oddly-shaped statuette on this hit. I think it even won a World's Greatest Grampa. A peak hit during the peak period of a peak career. Truly remarkable. And yet, I'm giving it a pass.
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| Don't cry guys, we're getting to the point |
And that, dear friends, is when I clicked on the history of Stars on 45.
Harrumph.
The story starts interestingly enough, as most things in Holland do. We find out that "the band...of studio musicians under the direction of Japp Eggermont, formerly of Golden Earring, popularized medley recordings made by creating hit songs as faithfully as possible and joining them together with a common tempo and underlying drum track."
Ok, that's curious. So, a former rock star worked with a bunch of pros to create new tunes by some sort of proto-sampling method. Cool, that's intriguing, and a bit unexpected. Let's continue.
"Jaap originated the concept after Willem van Kooten (music company executive) visited a record store in the summer of 1979 and happened to hear a disco medley being played there."
Sigh. Disco.
You know how I feel about disco.
This doesn't bode well. And, it gets worse.
"The medley contained original recordings of songs by The Beatles, The Buggles, The Archies, and Madness...and in fact was a bootleg release. Van Kooten decided to bootleg the bootleg and create a licensed version of the medley by using soundalike artists to replicate the original hits."
The takeaway, this dude wanted to Milli Vanilli his way to number one, but do so by stealing a string of already known hits and tying them together with a cheesy beat. A cheesy disco beat, at that.
Ugh, why did I think this would be a good one?
This is completely awful to me for two large reasons.
- They didn't sample these songs. It wasn't grabbing a chorus here or a hook there. There's an art to that, as you're creating something new from parts and pieces. They recreated songs. These two false artists essentially lifted whole segments from other tunes, had some Dutch rejects sing them, and then laid them out from end-to-end. They sprinkled in a chorus and some drum machine nonsense to make it "theirs". It's like if I wanted to write a book about a whale and stole three chapters from Moby Dick. Absurd.
- Not only did they use other songs, they used songs by The Beatles!!! I mean, how do you feel good about yourself for doing this? You made it to number one using tunes from the most popular band of all time. Congrats, that's really an accomplishment. Oh, how many of their hits did you need to cram into your bogus faux-music to make it to the top? EIGHT OF THEM!?!?!?! Oh, wow, you must be really talented.
So, I skipped a review of a Paul McCartney song to instead talk about eight Paul McCartney songs, none of which he is actually performing on. Sheesh.
If you think I'm overselling the fact that they profited off of what is essentially an unedited Beatles medley, I invite you to go listen to it. I don't even want to link to the tune, just type Stars on 45 into Google. I'll just sit over here being grumpy, and re-evaluating my former fondness for the land of windmills. I once visisted that country, and have often considered going back. Now, I guess I'll just go to the UK instead.
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| Pfft, I bet this coffee is British too |
Oh, by the way, about those lyrics that were wedged somewhere inside my brainage? Here is the actual chorus of this dumb song that I obviously misheard all those decades ago.
The stars on 45 keep on turning in your mind
Like "We Can Work it Out"
Remember "Twist and Shout"
You still don't "Tell Me Why" and "No Reply"
These are the only words actually written by the songwriters. And, even still, they aren't original.
Man.
I really do hate disco.
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