Sweet Sensation "If Wishes Came True"

*****Number One, September 1st, 1990*****

After last week's subterfuge, perpetrated by a pair of sneaky Dutch fakeout artists, I feel the need to right a wrong.  You see, I was tricked by some gouda-loving hucksters into believing that their single week atop the charts had been the work of a true underdog-type one-hit-wonder.  Scant memories of the tune lead me down a dusty country road where I hoped to find momentary brilliance in a unique cabin.  Instead, the path turned out to be an eight-lane superhighway, and I quickly discovered a monstrosity of a dwelling at its end.

This number one song was built on lies, not creativity.  And, the lincoln logs used in the construction were stuffed with gold and genius, not hard work and stick-to-itiveness.  They cheated, using Beatles-rated materials to assemble their hit, and I want revenge.

Some day, I will get it.  Yes, I will.  Some day.

Anyway, for now, I'd got a blog to blog.  So, in lieu of the last post's disappointment, I decided from the outset of this enty that I would only select a true needle in the haystack.  I just had to hope that the randomizer would dump at least one of these among the almost-weekly five-pack I request of it.  And, fortunately, it did.  Barely.

This meant that, sadly, and perhaps unfairly, some of these top tunes I received would have to be immediately discarded.  I wouldn't even consider whether or not they had value.  A good, Breakdown-worthy song might have to be flushed, all because of the work of some Holland charlatans (Hollatans).  I hope these rejected artists take out their anger at the transgressors with all the swift fury that world-famous musicians should have about not having some nonsense about them typed out by me and read by nearly a full dozen people. They really hate that.

Apropos of this, here are the mega-stars that I won't be chatting about this time.

*June 20, 1971*

Carole King "It's Too Late / I Feel the Earth Move"

*July 11, 1988*

Cheap Trick "The Flame"

*April 12, 2018*

Drake "God's Plan"

Thus, you missed out on possibly hearing the whimsical anecdote of mine about being second row at a Cheap Trick concert when they opened for Winger (yes, Winger) at a theme part amphitheater and their nutty guitarist Rick Nielson threw picks by the handful out to the crowd and despite me being so close I didn't get one and it would be years and years later before I caught anything like that at a rock show.

Oh, wait, guess you've heard it now.  Huh.  Well, hope the Dream Police didn't hit number one, or I'm sunk.

No wonder he had so many picks

This left me two lesser-known chart toppers to choose from.  Lucky for me, one bowed out because of a technicality.

*January 4, 1963*

The Tornados "Telstar"

This is actually a pretty cool song, especially considering the date it came out.  It has sort of a sci-fi meets surf style, and is definitely evocative of the subject matter (Telstar was what the first communication satellites were called).  And, the band's name is freaking great.  The Tornados!  Yeah, I'd totally by that shirt if they had some merch.

Alas, I couldn't pick them as the official song o' the week.  It seems that this fun ditty is an instrumental.  While that makes it extra impressive to reach the summit, it also disqualifies it from selection.  As you might have noticed, near the top of this site's crappily designed banner, I make mention of the importance of lyrics.  If it isn't immediately obvious by the depth of my rambling to date, I'm a word guy.  The music is great, but I need some text to get me through.

And then, there was one.  

Thus, with three tunes disqualified and one, um, not qualifed, we're going to take a look at the last toy in the box.  That is, the hottest hit from the first day of September some thrty years ago, Sweet Sensation's "If Wishes Came True."

This is just seconds before being beamed up, apparently

This begs the question...who?  Cause I really have no idea.  And I should!  This song was on the airwaves as I was in prime music assimilation mode.  Though my preferences at the time took me more to the rock and/or roll side of things, I still consumed enough radio and television to at least be aware of pretty much everything.  It was close to around the time I began wasting my life as a music/video store clerk (yes I saw Clerks and felt so seen you guys!  I'm not even supposed to be here today either!!!).  Anyway, Sweet Sensation?  That's a big nope.

Perfect.

That allows me to take a fresh look at what I can only assume are fresh-faced ladies singing about fresh wishes coming true.  Or, something to that effect.  At any rate, I think that this all calls for a fresh review of the lyrics of this tune in a truly non-fresh way.  Yup, we're going with immediate read and response!  The first of the season!!!

I played this game a few times in the first year of the Breakdown (initially, I believe with, Kesha), and it's a fun/easy way to get to know a tune.  The process is, I bring up in a separate tab the words of a song that I don't know at all.  Then, I get all sorted and comfortable here in the blog window.  I copy/paste stanzas from the lyrics into the text, read them for the first time, and add my immediate impression.  I feel like it's an honest way to respond to something new.  And it's totally not a way for me talk about a song that has little-to-no information in Wikipedia.  

Certainly not.

Like this, but with lazy

So, here we go.  This should be sweet!  See what I did there?  Of course you did.  Never mind.

If Wishes Came True

• All alone silence fills my room
• Same.  The dog is asleep
• But in a memory, I hear you calling me
• Hmm, ok, so, is it a memory of someone calling you?  Or, is it a person calling you today from that memory?  Is it your memory?  I hope this is explained
• Close my eyes and I'm there with you
• It is technically impossible to remember anything with your eyes open.  This checks out.
• Like it was yesterday, but then fades away
• Maybe, when the memory calls, you should write it down.  Like the Memento guy!  You see that film?  Oh, you don't remember?  Of course you don't.

Early returns, eh, not good.  Kind of Inceptiony, so maybe there will be a neat twist.  Second stanza:

• Take me back, turn back the hands of time
• You're asking the memory to do this?  Or...
• When you kissed me in the warm September rain
• Warm September rain?  Look, I'm sorry the syllable count for June, July, and August didn't work for you.  But, try a bit harder, especially for those of us in the northwest.  My flanned-covered arms are crossed at your dialogue
• Back before my heart was filled with pain
• Alright, jeez, guess I've been a little hard on you.  Maybe it was actually warm in that particular September.  Sorry.  I hope you feel better
• If only we could be in love that way again
• Man, this song is surprisingly not very sweet

Ok, well, this is a bummer.  Maybe the chorus will give us something to grab hold of.

• If wishes came true, 
• Then all the dreams at night of love were real, I'd be holding you
• If wishes came true, 
• Then I would be that someone always special in your heart and we would still be lovers, not apart
• If wishes came true
• Um, hang on.  I'll be right back.

<watches music video, vomits into own mouth>

Right, sooooo, that show at the amusement park!  Winger and Cheap Trick!  Yeah, that was a good concert.  Potentially.  Maybe.  Possibly.  I mean, rollercoasters and hairspray and leather pants (the band, not me).  How could it not be a good time?

Sigh.  

This week's song, and video, are decidely not.  It exudes all the cheesy words, slow-motion wind-machine aided dancing, and awful late-eighties synthesizer that this era foisted on the masses.  It really is quite dreadful, and well worthy of being lost to history.  It's just...oh look, sailboats!  These bland and priviledged actors and singers are traipsing around a waterway.  Egads.  Maybe I was too hard on the Dutch.

Hmm.

Nah.

But I shouldn't have let them get to me.  Clearly!  Next time, I won't pick a song out of spite.  Especially if wishes are involved.  They are, quite literally, not a sweet sensation.

If you need a Winger image, you might as well Britta it

Stars on 45 "Stars on 45"

*****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:

1. Post the blog
2. Celebrate completion of task by drinking my brain's weight in Scotch
3. Sleep for 24 hours
4. Run the ramdomizer, and list out the five number one songs that I next will choose from
5. Select the winner and come up with an angle to approach it.
6. Repeat step two
7. Repeat step three
8. Set aside a couple of hours to cobble together some barely coherent text and images
9. 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.

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. 

*March 1, 1962*

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.