Remember the good old 1980s when the United States and the Soviet Union could have blown each other, and the world, to kingdom come? How wouldja like to hear a song about it?
In 1985, Sting was in the early stages of his solo career. After the breakup of The Police, his first solo effort was The Dream Of The Blue Turtles. The album included upbeat fare like “Love Is The Seventh Wave”, “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”, and then this joyous little ditty about Mutual Assured Destruction.
In “Russians”, we get signs of the beginning of Sting’s Pretentious Period, which, as far as I can tell, is still going on. Sting’s hope that “the Russians love their children too” is nice, but I think it’s pretty obvious they did. The sentiment was echoed by my young man’s heart then, but that’s changed as I’ve become older and hopefully wiser. Despite what the Beatles told us, love is not all you need to win against the most murderous ideology in the history of the modern world (Stalin and Mao, anyone?).
But I digress.
“Russians” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart this week in 1986, and peaked at number 16 in March.
Talking Heads’ excellence as a band didn’t translate into many hits on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Only “Burning Down The House” made it into the Top 10 in late 1983. Perhaps it was the success of that song that led the music programmers at KQIZ (Z-93) in Amarillo Texas to add “Take Me To The River” to the playlist.
“Take Me To The River” peaked at number 26 on the chart in 1978, but I didn’t hear it on the radio until I was in my high school years. It was a few years after that when I discovered it was a cover of a song by an artist named Al Green. I looked around for other songs Green did, and when I heard them, I instantly became a fan. If it wasn’t for Talking Heads covering that song, I may have never discovered my favorite soul singer of the 1970s (sorry, Marvin). So thanks to David Byrne, to that unknown Z-93 program director, and of course, to the Reverend Al.
Here’s Talking Heads performing the song at a 1983 Rome concert:
And Al Green getting funky with it at the 1999 Montreaux Jazz Festival.
It was this week in 1991 that an unlikely hit record made its way to number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart.
Susanne Vega originally recorded “Tom’s Diner” on her 1987 Solitude Standing album as an a capella track, barely two minutes long. Suzanne explained the genesis of the song in an interview from that same year:
“Tom’s Diner” was written in Tom’s Restaurant, it’s really about Tom’s Restaurant, on 112th Street and Broadway in New York City, and it was really written from the point of view of my friend Brian, who is a photographer, and had made a comment to me one day that he felt that as a photographer, he saw his whole life through a pane of glass, and always felt like he was the witness to a lot of things, but was never really involved in them. So I was sitting at Tom’s Restaurant one morning, and suddenly I guess I got this weird feeling, it came over me, and I thought, ‘well, if I were Brian today, how would I be perceiving these different things? And in a way it was supposed to be slightly humorous, and not entirely to be taken totally seriously. And also I thought of it from a male point of view. I’d originally heard it with piano in back, but I don’t play piano, so it’s a capella.”
“Tom’s Diner” may have been forgotten by everyone but Vega’s fans, were it not for a couple of secretive record producers…
In November of 1984, the charts we’re dominated by Wham!, Chaka Khan, Hall & Oates and Lionel Richie. Among this somewhat varied crowd was a single that stood out…one that sounded like it belonged on a radio station of 25 years prior.
When I first heard “Sea Of Love”, I thought the DJ had pulled an oldie from the shelves. I was intrigued he they said it was a new recording by a band called “The Honeydrippers”. My jaw dropped when the DJ went on to identify the members of the band. Robert Plant? Jimmy Page? The Led Zeppelin guys? Really? No way!
I wanted to hear more of this project, so I bought the EP, and I liked it quite a bit. Granted, I already liked the songs of the early rock-and-roll/R&B era that the Honeydrippers covered, so the style wasn’t anything jarring to me. Sadly, there was only one album. A second album was discussed a few years ago, but Plant has said it’s not likely.
“Sea of Love” was at number 13 on the Billboard Charts this week in 1984. It would peak at number 3 in January 1985.
