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 Timeline, No. 44: Billie Holiday, Triumph and Tragedy

This one feels right.

“Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing.”
- PBS.org, American Masters Series (June 2006)

If your first experience of a piece of music or a particular performer happens decades after they impacted music, the fuss doesn’t always translate. Billie Holiday broke molds, minds and ran headlong into barriers her entire life. It’s a minor miracle she made it to adulthood, never mind an iconic place in pop culture. Because most of the fuss happened before the internet, I expect I’ll struggle to do her justice, but this feels like a good place to start.

“If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.”
- Billie Holiday (Biography, 7 Things You May Not Know About Billie Holiday)

While minor questions exist, most sources agree Holiday was born to two unwed teenagers in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915. She spent more of her childhood with her mother, Sarah Julia “Sadie” Fagan – her father, Clarence Halliday, left to pursue a career in music was she was very young - but, even given those circumstances, her home life veered between unstable and outright dangerous, as well as various cities (mostly Baltimore). Sources also generally agree spent her tween-to-teen years in a reform school (sometimes for her own protection) and doing chores and running errands at a brothel (and even getting arrested for prostitution, though that could be a wrong place, wrong time thing). The Biography piece claims she worked for a chance to listen to the madam’s Victrola instead of getting paid. Holiday recalled Bessie Smith’s “West End Blues” as a favorite, but she loved Louis Armstrong too.

After moving to Harlem to live with her mother again, Holiday, then 17, found work as a dancer-for-hire. When the dancing work slowed down, she asked the manager to let her sing. Though lacking in musical education of any kind, Holiday’s talent immediately came through. Over the next couple of year, she partnered with a tenor sax player named Kenneth Holan, working small venue and building a reputation. She took her stage-name from two sources: “Billie” from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and “Holiday” from her long-estranged father, who performed under that name. (She met him as an adult when he played with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra.) With the Harlem Renaissance in full-swing, people in a position to help her took notice – including John Hammond, the famous impresario/Svengali who played a major role in pushing black jazz and blues into mainstream musical culture. Hammond wasted no time in getting her into a recording studio; Holiday was still 17 years old when she recorded her first songs – “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch” – both with a then-unknown Benny Goodman.

One Hit No More, No. 112: Soft Cell, More Tainted than "Tainted Love"

Odd pair, but, damn, it worked.

This single spent 43 consecutive weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100. That record no longer stands. Not even close, really.

The Hit
“We were living in a crummy Housing Association bedsit. The view from my bedroom window was the wasteland where the body of The Yorkshire Ripper’s last victim was found – there was still police tape on the site.”
- David Ball, 2018 interview, Classic Pop Magazine

That introduces the multiple incongruities around “Tainted Love,” one of the few natural pop songs Soft Cell ever wrote. The real/radio single opens with the unmistakable synth blast - three simple chords, the shortest of progressions – before Ball fills in the sound-scape with longer synth tones to ground it and the simplest electronic kick/snare you’re ever likely to hear. Marc Almond’s voice comes in, clear and cool, but also defiantly wounded; the synth blasts pulse into the verses, appropriately intrusive. It’s a little anti-melodic, musically, or rather Soft Cell rely on Almond to provide the melody – particularly in the extended version, which goes out on a reworking of The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go.”

That last detail seems less out of place if/once you know “Tainted Love” is a cover of a largely-forgotten song Northern Soul singer named Gloria Jones. Even that has a whole “circle of life” aspect to it, in that both Ball and Almond were big fans of T. Rex back when, and Jones was romantically involved with Marc Bolan (and driving the relevant car, if memory serves) when he died.

According to at least one source (Wikipedia), “Tainted Love” also represented something of a last chance for Almond and Ball. After making a little noise in the “northern” scene, they signed to the UK label Phonogram and recorded, "Memorabilia" (which video features a certain famous, Cindy Ecstacy) a single that did all right on the club circuit (particularly in the States, oddly enough), but that didn’t impress the label so much. Soft Cell came back with “Tainted Love.” There they were, two lads just out of Leeds Polytechnic and here they had a No. 1 hit in 17 countries, some for nearly all of 1981. Apparently.

The Rest of the Story
The oddest thing about Soft Cell could be where they came up – Ball in Blackpool, UK, Almond in Southport. Both men figured that setting informed their sensibilities, if in expected ways. As Almond recounted to On: Yorkshire Magazine:

One Hit No More, No. 111: Tommy Tutone, Who Married Someone Named Lisa

They are both Tommy Tutone.

I can get a song stuck in your head in seven numbers...

The Hit
“I saw her about five years ago and asked her if she wanted anybody to know who she was and she said no.”

First, yes, there was a real Jenny. Also, Tommy Heath (wait for it) told classicbands.com that 867-5309 was her parents phone number, which makes you worry a little. I remember hearing rumors about what happens when you dial 867-5309 (also, is it stuck in your head yet?) back in early ‘80s suburban Ohio – some trafficking in the ridiculous shit pre-teen boys make up when they try to sound worldly before they’ve seen much of it – but calling a random number from a song also sounded like something people would do (and then we got the internet and now we get that shit on loop.)

The rumors were true: people really did call the phone number Tommy Tutone made famous – and in nearly every area code, apparently – and at least one person who interviewed him repaid the favor:

“It caused a lot of trouble, which I learned about because people who were mad at me put my phone number in their article about me. I had to change it. I’m sorry folks, we were just messing around.”

Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny/867-5309” has a wide enough grip on a certain period of pop culture that if you fed 100 random strangers the number “867,” I’m guessing most could come back with “5309” - though some might refuse to along because you just got the damn song stuck in their head.

50% song, 50% punchline. I remember mocking Heath’s vocals at the time – sounded like he gargles milk before picking up the mic (says the long-time Elvis Costello fan) – but it’s not a terrible song. I comes from a fairly specific, short-lived sub-genre of 80s rock – post-dad-rock (e.g., Foreigner), but with new-wave tones/production on the guitar and about one-third to one-half the tempo of punk – and I don’t hate that sound...maybe it’s the way the hook takes over until it’s all you hear that makes it what Heath acknowledges it to be:

“I don't know about people who never heard of me. Maybe people that didn't take it too seriously. It's a novelty song basically.”

One Hit No More, No. 110: Why The Vapors Floated Away

Probably what you remember.

What was the most “’80s’ sound” of the 1980s? If it was new wave...

The Hit
David Fenton remembers the inspiration for his famous song – i.e., sitting in a flat in Guildford, UK, thinking about holding the photograph that’s all you have left in a relationship – and he recalled having the melody, but struggling with the lyrics. One night, he woke with the phrase “turning Japanese” in his head. He wrote down the words and, over the following days, pushed the song as close to final as he could before passing it off to his bandmates for polishing.

As it turns out, the phrase “turning Japanese” didn’t mean anything in particular. As Fenton put it in a recent interview with Songwriting, “It could have been anything! It could have ended up as Turning Portuguese.”

The Vapors’ famously frenetic 1980 hit, “Turning Japanese,” never meant anything, as it turns out. According to some annotated lyrics, the song kicks around themes of obsessive behavior and separation...which doesn't offer an obvious connectoin to becoming “Japanese” apparent, so I kept thinking. As I listened to the song several times over the past week, I thought the connection might follow from old ‘80s stereotypes about Japanese tourists – i.e., the joke went they took pictures of everything, a trope you can see in movies from the early to mid-1980s – but no one mentioned that, so I’m moving off that one, and with relief.

The other rumor swirled around the song’s lyrics, particularly here in the States, held that alluded to masturbation. From that same interview:

“It was weird when people started saying it was about masturbation. I can’t claim that one! That happened when we went to America – for some reason they thought it was an English phrase for masturbation. I thought that was quite interesting, and it made people talk about the song and created more interest, so it didn’t hurt I don’t think, but that wasn’t the intention.”

Crash Course No. 40: Digable Planets, A Short-Lived, but Brilliant Solar System

Vibe of their videos...

Some Basics
“I was basically thinking the music we made was something people could dig, so Digable. I was listening to a lot of George Clinton and Sun Ra, so I was on some space shit, cosmic. I was thinking of each person as a planet, we are all in a solar system, a galaxy and trying to orbit around each other. That was my imagination for those words.”
- Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler

“Digable Planets performed with live musicians and showed audiences that there isn’t any box that hip-hip should fit in. There wasn’t ‘conscious hip-hop’ and ‘gangsta rap.’ The group proved through their music and their style that they could be hardcore b-boys and b-girls, intellectuals, and party people all at the same time.”
- Ericka Blount Danois, okayplayer (2018)

The members of Digable Planets found one another through two different meetings: Butler, who originally hailed from Seattle, met Craig “Doodlebug” Irving while interning at Philadelphia’s Sleeping Bag Records; Irving had met Mariana “Ladybug” Vieira at DC’s Howard University. They all had similar upbringings – all three had parents involved in the Black Liberation movement (Vieira’s from their/her(?) native Brazil) – and, not surprisingly, they all felt the pull of music, whether from obsessing over the radio dial (Ladybug) or raiding their parents’ record collections (Butterfly and Doodlebug). Ladybug found further inspiration from the breakthrough of some famous female rappers of the late 1980s (e.g., Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt & Pepa (and Spinderella, dammit!).

Officially formed in 1989, the first demos recorded as “Digable Planets” featured only Butler, but he and Irving vibed all right (“once we got cool”), so Butler made his pitch and worked his connections. From Irving:

“He asked me to join him in putting this new group together and after hearing the demos he put together I was hooked. Eventually Ladybug joined the group and Butter through the connects he made while being an intern at Sleeping Bag records, was able to parlay a meeting with Dennis Wheeler, an A&R at an up and coming label called Pendulum and the rest is history!”

History took a few years to start, but they put out work and garnered attention (there’s something about a “Rosie Perez co-sign on In Living Color” in the interview with Vieira, but she leaves it hanging) until Pendulum Records signed them in 1992 and Digable Planets relocated to Brooklyn. They had a good bond early. From Vieira:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 43: Kay Kyser, the Big Band Era's Funnest Bandleader

The Ol' Perfessor

For this last chapter of the Big Band leaders of the late 1930s-early 1940s, the topic turns to the happiest and, all things considered (Exhibit A and Exhibit B) the least sociopathic.

“This band was secure enough to be downright silly, something the Millers and Goodmans would never have done.”

I’m not sure why they dragged Glenn Miller into this. He seemed like one of the nice ones. Also, this:

“He was one of the most outrageous, over the top performers of the whole swing era. From the late 30s to the late 40s he was the physical embodiment of the word success, with eleven #1 records and thirty-five top tens! He starred in seven feature films with such co-stars as Lucille Ball, John Barrymore, Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre. Kyser kept his radio show, Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge in the top ten for eleven years on NBC, yet if you ask the average swing fan about him today, they'll likely reply, ‘Kay Kyser. Who's she?’”

James Kern Kyser, who later found fame as Kay Kyser, was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina to a solid middle-class, two-income family; his mother, Emily Royster (nee Howell) was the first female licensed pharmacist in the state of North Carolina. Unlike the titans of the swing era, Kyser had neither a favored instrument nor a deep passion for music. He did learn the clarinet and played well enough to record a couple sides early in his career, but the role of master entertainer was his true calling. And he would lean into that eventually.

Kyser met North Carolina’s most famous bandleader, Hal Kemp (profiled here) while still in college and Kemp would give him two major lifts to his career. Recognizing his charisma and indefatigable energy, Kemp handed the reins of the University of North Carolina’s band, the Carolina Club Orchestra, to Kyser when he departed to start his own professional band in 1927. Kyser walked in his mentor’s footsteps after graduation, forming a band of his own (ft. saxophonist Sully Mason and with George Duning handling the arranging) and, by touring night spots across the American Midwest, he built up his own following.

Kemp handed Kyser his second break – and this was the big one – when he recommended Kyser’s band to take over his spot at Chicago’s famous Blackhawk Restaurant in 1934. Having a stable job helped him land talent – he had Merwyn Bogue, aka, “Ish Kabibble” (a spin on “Ish Ga Bibble” which loosely translates to “I should worry”) since 1931, but he added future stars Ginny Simms and “Handsome” Harry Babbit during his time at the Blackhawk – and the band started to record Duning’s arrangements, the most famous being the song that would become his theme, “Thinking of You.” But it took a brainstorm Kyser, et, al. to make him a household name during the war years.