That didn't seem to apply to Benny Mardones ("She's just 16 years old / Leave her alone, they say"), especially if you've seen the music video. Apparently the record company wanted someone younger to play his role in the video, but Benny insisted on doing it himself.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Song you wondered how they they ever got played on Top 40 radio
- Thread starter secondchoice
- Start date
Huh, interesting... I've always enjoyed her songs a lot. Loved "Angie Baby" when I heard it as a kid on a Casey Kasem's AT40 rerun. Some of them aren't great, but overall I think she had some pretty solid hits. I still spin her Capitol 45s on my show and even get requests for her songs occasionally.
When the record was new, the edit was rare. We were still in an era where radio listeners resented edits, and beyond that MTV was driving the music culture.
Both the MTV video and the commercial single edit included "the little f***ot" line.
The edit was rushed when they encountered resistance in conservative markets:
And again, after everything that I listed from 1969-1975, how is that a reach in 1987? George was sharing the charts with Prince and it had been two years since Sheena Easton's got to the Top 10 with this (written by Prince under a pseudonym):
"I Want Your Sex" was positively quaint by that point.
Maybe. Either way. It was buried, not explicit, and by 1981, we were way beyond innuendo keeping a record off the air, weren't we?
The big difference: The 31-year-old in the Goldsboro record followed through with the 17-year-old:
We sat on the sand
And a boy took her hand
But I saw the sun rise as a man
The Mardones record has a whole lotta "if":
It's like having a dream
Where nobody has a heart
It's like having it all
And watching it fall apart
And I would wait 'til the end
Of time for you
And do it again, it's true
I can't measure my love
There's nothing to compare it to
But I want you to know
If I could fly
I'd pick you up
I'd take you into the night
And show you a love
Like you've never seen, ever seen, yeah
Heck, he's even saying he'll wait. Mainly because he can't fly, but still...
And honest to God, for all the crap Top 40 took about being racy and immoral, how 'bout Conway Twitty, who at 40, is seducing a virgin. Now, any Country listener knows that the odds of her having made it to 18 in that state are slim, but even if she's 20, she's half his age:
That not only went #1 Country, but made it to #22 on the Hot 100 in 1973, with airplay from Top 40 stations like KJR, Seattle, KIMN in Denver, WPGC in Washington, D.C., KROY in Sacramento, and pretty much every Top 40 in the South.
I have the 12" promo disc which includes the "Long Edit", "Edit", and "LP Version":
I met and interviewed Helen in 1978. Lovely woman, and I liked several of her records---but the "crazy women" triology---"Delta Dawn", "Leave Me Alone" and "Angie Baby"---was tough to take.
Way overproduced and not a drop of nuance (apart from maybe "Angie Baby") in what were otherwise interesting short stories. I'm way more inclined to lay the blame on her management (her then-husband), producers (Tom Catalano and Joe Wissert) and Capitol Records. They seemed designed to be performed on TV variety shows.
I loved Angie Baby. Like so many other story songs that were popular at the time (eg Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia, Run Joey Run) they probably didn’t age well enough to be played much if at all on oldies stations.
But much of her catalog, especially songs like Don’t Know How To Love Him, I Am Woman and You And Me Against The World I think have aged well and could easily be played today by the few remaining oldies or adult standards stations.
I'm not sure that they're radio friendly today. I'm with you on "I Don't Know How To Love Him", though that kind of evaporated along with any mass public awareness of "Jesus Christ, Superstar". None of those songs seemed to stand on their own.
"I Am Woman" is a much better song than I gave it credit for after it had been played every hour and 40 minutes for three months straight back in 1972. I had the opportunity to hear it recently and it's actually really solid.
"You and Me Against the World", if you trim off the thing with the kid at the beginning---yeah. I mean, it's a Paul Williams song.
This is still my favorite of hers, and other than a dated horn arrangement in the chorus, I think it holds up pretty well:
And it might be a tie:
Not necessarily - KCFX or KY (I listened to both and don't remember) used to play the unedited version of "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits discussed earlier, and the unedited version of "Money" by Pink Floyd too, with the lyric "don't give me that do goody-good bullshit". I also listened to V100 out of Topeka sometimes, but I don't remember if they played those songs unedited or not.
Maybe. Although, KHJ in Los Angeles edited that, too. The line is:
"When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school"
...and the KHJ edit was brutal, cutting out "the crap" and creating an obvious jump and break in the beat to make it:
"When I look back on all I learned in high school"
I have no idea what KHJ was thinking. Every other Los Angeles radio station just played it with "crap".
Everyone that didn't wait for the edit of "Money for Nothing" played the unedited 45. I was living in Las Vegas at the time, and going to L.A. often. It was three or four weeks before the edit became available.
I'm not sure why a Top 40 would play the unedited "Money", given that the edit was available from the start, but Album Rock stations almost always played it unedited.
In 1975, KKDJ in Los Angeles decided it wanted to play the Isley Bros. "Fight The Power", which says "bullshit", instead of the radio edit, which had an annyoing bleep. Production Director Don Elliott took the unedited record into the production room, laid it onto reel-to-reel tape, then took the stretch of tape where "bullshit" was, cut it out and then spliced it back in backwards. No profanity, no break in the beat, no problem.
In fairness, though, there wasn't really a revival of interest in Olivia Newton-John's music when she passed almost three years ago, either.
And I'd argue that more of Livvy's stuff holds up better.
In this live performance, Paul changed the line in "Still Crazy After All These Years" from "crapped out" to "tapped out". Was this song ever also edited on radio to cut the crap?
And since it was also included in that set, Paul's various explanations of exactly what he and Julio were doing down by the schoolyard range from vague to bizarre... sexual activity, drugs, explosive devices, etc...
There was an even more brutal edit of "Money" for Top 40 AM stations which absolutely needed to get it down to three minutes and change:
I never heard a radio edit of "Still Crazy After All These Years". It only made #40 on the Hot 100, but it peaked at #5 on the Easy Listening chart.
There's a difference in usage, however subtle, between "all the crap I learned in high school" and "crapped out". In the first case, you can swap out words---"all the s**t I learned in high school" works. But whether it's a machine or a person, I have often heard "crapped out", and I suppose "pooped out", but never "I'm really s**tted out" in the same context.
Artists change lyrics in live performances sometimes.
The thing about Paul is that he has a wicked sense of humor but is so low-key that it blows by a lot of people. That sounds like him having as much fun as he can with what was a thing at the time "Me and Julio" was released. There were a lot of rumors and a lot of jocks asking "What were they doing"?
My answer, then and now? It's fiction. Ain't no Julio.
That's actually what most of us played.
Everyone knows Sheena was the witch who went after Hansel and Gretel after they tried to eat her house.
That was Paul Simon's "Kodachrome." WBZ in Boston did an edit of the first verse, putting in a line from the second verse. It became "When I think back on all the girls I knew when I was single..." It was a bad edit, as it put an extra beat into the song.