One Hit No More, No. 117: Thomas Dolby & More "Science" Than You'd Expect

The sensibility was always complicated.

Pretty sure this one never fully checked out of the Western zeitgeist, but you tell me.

The Hit
For whatever reason the aside, “Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful” remains one of my main memories of Thomas Dolby’s, “She Blinded Me with Science.” As people of a certain age know, that song was all over the place in the early 1980s (circa 1982), so I always thought of Dolby as a big star. He did better in the UK – and wasn’t too shabby on U.S. album sales at his peak – but that single was his only U.S. hit. It topped out a No. 5...but, swear to God, MTV had that on whatever’s denser than heavy rotation for a solid year.

Here's where I admit I didn’t mind it. It’s nicely busy, the tones perky, the rhythm bouncy and kind of fun; better, the whole thing feels a bit campy. And, if you ever thought Dolby came up with the video/concept before the song...ding, ding ding!

“Yeah, I came up with a storyboard for a video. I'd recently seen a Japanese magazine awarding a Young Scientist of the Year in 1981. I took that as kind of amusing. If I was going to be a scientist, I'd need a hot Japanese lab assistant and I'd need a cool vintage motorcycle hat, kind of an homage to deranged scientists. I phoned up this famous TV scientist for the BBC, Dr. Magnus Pike [to appear in the video]."

"The record execs liked the idea of the video, but said, ‘Where's the song?’ I said, ‘Oh, how about I bring it in on Monday morning?’ and went home over the weekend and did the first bit of the song.”

Fuck it. It’s fun. Moreover, it prefaced things to come in Thomas Dolby’s career.

The Rest of the Story
“I'm not a very proficient keyboard player, so the computer became my musical instrument ... None of the equipment is essential, though. In a way, I was happier when I just had one monophonic synthesizer and a two-track tape deck.”
- Wikipedia

One Hit No More, No. 113: Quarterflash, Hardened Hearted Local Legends

Fellini, MFs.

For at least the tenth time, a band cannot be a one-hit wonder if they release two hits. And that label falls all the way off if they’ve got three Top 20 hits, plus three more in the Top 100...

The Hit
“It wasn’t a personal story – just made it up. The chords are simple but voiced so as to make it sound more complex than it is. The whole song is really the groove which we called a shuffle in those days. Rindy came up with the sax line. The whole thing was written in less than a week and recorded in our basement for the Seafood Mama version. It sold 10,000 copies in Portland and Seattle and was the key to us getting signed to Geffen records.”

“The lyrics describe a situation where the singer finds strength to leave her man and is determined to do it without getting all emotional.”
- Rediscover the 80s, 2021 interview with songwriter/guitarist Marv Ross

I don’t always get a solid, detailed telling about how a band developed their hit, but I found really solid material of Quarterflash’s, “Harden My Heart”; if nothing else, I know what to call its tres-80s rhythm structure. To pick up the stray name referenced in the quote, Seafood Mama was Marv and Rindy Ross’ original band - less a pure (adult-oriented) rock band than Quarterflash and one that included Marv Ross’ violin teacher as a regular member – and the “Portland” referenced in that quote is Portland, Oregon. The version of the single that everyone knows was re-recorded at Sausolito’s famous Record Plant under the hand of John Boylan, a legendary producer (he helped stand up The Eagles) and, in Marv Ross’ telling, an all-around great guy.

The Rosses worked with session musicians on the first pass at Quarterflash’s debut album, but, when they returned to Portland to take a break between sessions (Geffen gave ‘em a long leash), they bumped into another local band called Pilot, did some playing together and heard good chemistry. So they kicked out the session guys and finished recording the album with Quarterflash’s original line-up.

Marv Ross, who did nearly all the songwriting for the band, borrowed the title, “Harden My Heart” from a collection of poems a friend had passed on to him; he only took the title and, to his credit, he paid his friend for the title. I remember the video from watching it on MTV, but its “Fellini-esque concept” went over my head (just caught up). One final bit of trivia on Quarterflash’s break-through single, this one from Classicbands.com:

Crash Course, No. 39: DEVO, The Art School Project that Got Real Big

I was witnessing genius...

I had a very satisfying project called One Hit No More, and that’s what steered me to DEVO. At the same time, hitting DEVO put that project into the realm of bands I grew up with, aka, bands I know fairly well. And DEVO fits that better than most.

Having grown up on early (the earliest, in fact) MTV, I couldn’t wrap my head around DEVO as a “one-hit wonder.” Part of that followed from the fact that MTV playe a lot of DEVO; between “Through Being Cool,” “Beautiful World,” “Love Without Anger,” “Freedom of Choice,” and “Satisfaction,” it simply never occurred to me that “Whip It” was their only Top 40 hit.

And that was despite all the visibly weird shit/themes they presented and played with. I remember watching it, understanding it was different, but, young as I was - their prime years hit when I was 9-11 years old - all of it went over my head. So, let’s fill in some blanks.

Somewhat Briefly
“…here are the five basic components of the Devolutionary Oath:

1. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one
3. The littlest may survive & the unfit may live
4. Be like your ancestors or be different
5. We must repeat”

Even if I, like everyone from DEVO, came from Ohio, I had no hope of wrapping my head around that. Then again, they had quite the head start…

The main members of DEVO - Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale - met at Kent State, when Kent State was Kent State, i.e., Casale was present for the university’s most infamous moment, saw his friends die, and lived through the hyper-reactionary backlash. Suffice to say, it changed him:

“Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season the students. We lived in fear.”

One Hit No More, No. 102: The Boomtown Rats, the Ghost of Woody Guthrie & Cod Reggae

Somewhere around their peak...

This chapter covers one of my favorite bands through the second half of high school. When someone told me the ‘keeper on my high school soccer team loved them as much as I did, I tried to bond with him, but he wasn’t having it. I took it well, honest. Both own-goals were totally unintentional…

The Hit
“A reporter reached Spencer by phone while she was still in the house after the shooting, and asked her why she committed the crime. She reportedly answered: ‘I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.’”

The “Spencer” in that quote refers Brenda Spencer, a troubled young woman who fired shots at the elementary school across the street from her house in January of ’79. A pair of Irish musicians named Bob Geldof and Garry Roberts caught wind of the story and decided to make a song out of it, and a statement. You can see Geldof very briefly explain in a 1981 appearance on Merv Griffin’s show (and do stick around for the banter at the end of it, because both men seem to get a kick out of needling each other). To wrap up Spencer’s story, it’s a sad one. She lived in squalor with a single dad who drank too much and what sound like some serious mental health issues. Suffice to say, her father wasn’t very supportive:

“Spencer later said, ‘I asked for a radio and he bought me a gun.’ Asked why he had done that, she answered, ‘I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.’”

The song was The Boomtown Rats' “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the only U.S. hit the band ever had. If you’ve ever heard Johnnie Fingers opening piano figures, you know it in an instant. It never occurred to me till that performance on Merv Griffin that the instrumentation doesn’t seem to go beyond what they had on stage: a piano, a swelling synth to fill in the sound and a timpani (or something similar) to give it a nice little boom. Still, it contains many touches of your average Rats song, most notably a knack for cutting to the bone of troubling subject-matter and the call-response in and around the chorus that…for lack of a better word, comes off like camp.

I never find a source that said how high “I Don’t Like Mondays” climbed up Billboard’s Hot 100 - though Wikipedia makes clear it stalled below the Top 10 - and I have no idea how long it stayed there. I do, however, remember coming back to that one sometime after hearing my first song by The Boomtown Rats, the radio edit of “Up All Night” that MTV played back in its early days (a lot, certainly the Geldof remembers). Suffice to say, I got the drift of The Boomtown Rats one big U.S. hit, even the lyrics aren’t entirely linear, far earlier than I figured out “Up All Night.” Sadly, “I Don’t Like Mondays” remains topical as the day he wrote it. From a 2020 interview with a site that was one called Hot Press:

One Hit No More, No. 95: The Buggles, Seeing the Future in Novels

A visual of the production equipment.

The Hit
MTV didn’t have to think too hard about the first video it aired for its August 1, 1981, launch; the song they chose even handed them a gauntlet to throw down. Released over a year earlier (January 1980), The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” had already topped the charts in 16 countries, giving it title/tune recognition for plenty of people across the Western world. Perhaps even more fittingly, everything about it screamed, “FUTURE.”

With all the bells ‘n’ whistles in its production, Trevor Horn, one of the song’s three co-authors, once estimated that it would take 26 musicians to recreate live. You have to listen real close to hear that; I mostly get the piano, the (theme-appropriate) compression on the vocals, a couple layers of keys, plus the usual accoutrements of your modern (or even post-modern) rock band, aka, the rhythm section; call in a couple back-up singers, and you’d feel like you’ve got it…then again, it goes without saying that some kid with sufficient motivation could recreate the same song on a modern laptop with the right software (and maybe top-line audio equipment). That only increases the “wow-factor” of Horn, guitarist named Bruce Woolley and keyboardist Geoffrey Downes pulling all that together with pre-1980 technology - i.e., before the Commodore 64 was even a glimmer in the consumer computer market’s eye.

Hearing a song that future-drenched reference “tuning into” someone one 1952 a wireless goes a little way to helping place it in time; it feels like the further back you go, the futurists of the time seem to have bigger, brighter, even happier dreams. (while those of us living in the future they imagined know it ain’t all it’s cut out to be). The Buggles composed a nice, bouncy, trebly tune around all that, with a chorus you can sing along to for days, and it parks in your head like any good pop-tune should. That belies the lightly dystopian theme, of course, something inspired by something Horn and Woolley had been reading:

“It was a nod towards technology. Trevor and Bruce were the other two writers of the song, and came up with the initial ideas. They had been reading some very obscure science fiction novels, and then I came in and did all the orchestrations and the intro, the bridge section. Once we got it into that shape, we felt it had some potential, and that was it. It just came about like that.”

That’s Downes describing the song’s creative arc. And, based on what I’ve read, that’s a fair description of the timing. And now…