(Pictured: Billy Joel picks up a guitar, 1986.)
It’s a reasonably common literary trope, I guess: that fading, end-of-summer vibe, the last couple of weeks of summer vacation when you were still in school, or an August week or weekend spent away from work, at the lake or in the mountains in adult life. Such tales almost always involve something slipping away, changes coming, holding on to something precious, that kind of thing. It’s a fertile field for a memoirist to plow, and you’ve read a lot of stuff like that. (And not just at this website, where we specialize in it.)
What we can’t always see clearly is what those times felt like while we were living them. Did I look at the calendar back there in, say, August 1972, see the first day of school looming there, and think, “I should hang onto these days because they will soon be gone”? How about August 1976, as my summer of all summers turned toward the autumm of all autumns? Or August 1986, by which time I was out in the working world? Did it feel to me like summer was fading, or was I too busy with the day-to-day routine of programming a radio station and hosting a morning show?
Today, there are narratives, but they’re retroactively applied. For 1986, it’s not just the narrative of a summer, but of the arc of my career and ultimately, my life. Today, I know that I had already made a critical choice that would change the course of my career. And the narrative had a second part that had nothing to do with the first: leaving my radio station in December and moving to a new city in January 1987.
If, in my head, the summer of 1986 had a narrative while I was living it, it wasn’t either of those.
That’s a weird way to introduce a few thoughts about the American Top 40 show from August 16, 1986, but it’s what I found myself pondering as the show went along. I have just enough of the word count left to get started; we’ll finish it up in a future installment.
40. “Two of Hearts”/Stacey Q. During the football season of 1986, I made a bet with a DJ friend on the outcome of a game between the colleges in the towns where we worked. The loser had to sing along with “Two of Hearts” on the winner’s show. I hated “Two of Hearts” back then. Today I realize that what I hate is the stuttering electronic “I-I-I-I-I-I need you” effect. The rest of the song isn’t nearly so awful.
(I won the bet.)
38. “Take It Easy”/Andy Taylor. I have utterly no memory of “Take It Easy,” but I do remember the spate of Duran Duran side projects, including Arcadia, Power Station, and various solo singles. Apart from Power Station, none of them did much for me, and I dug Power Station because I was a Robert Palmer fan.
37. “Modern Woman”/Billy Joel. “Modern Woman” is probably meant to sound like a progressive take on 80s relationships but it comes off smug nevertheless; Billy can’t hide his condescension even though “she’s got style and she’s got her own money.” Notable lyric line: “After 1986 what else could be new?”
36. “Digging Your Scene”/Blow Monkeys
34. “The Captain of Her Heart”/Double
I adored “Digging Your Scene” back then, and I still like it today, even though the Blow Monkeys sound to me like they want to be funky but not break a sweat. “The Captain of Her Heart” represents an impressive level of white-boy soul for two dudes from Switzerland.
35. “Hanging on a Heart Attack”/Device. Device was fronted by Holly Knight, who would become one of the most esteemed songwriters in the business over the next three decades. I can’t say whether or not I like “Hanging on a Heart Attack,” but I can tell you that few records sound more like 1986.
Coming in the next installment: songs of the summer, songs that disappeared, and a ton of iconic 80s stars and hits including Huey Lewis and the News, Genesis, Wham, Lionel Richie, Madonna, and a bunch of others. Stay tuned.
[jingle out]
The Hits Just Keep On Comin' 
I do not, based on titles alone, recognize a single one of those songs.
I only do one better than spinetingler: I recall – and still like very much – “The Captain Of Her Heart.”
I recognized—and similarly dug—“Digging Your Scene” and “Captain of Her Heart”. But beyond that—this list rings zero bells.
This post brings back that unfortunate period in the late ’80s when Billy Joel began getting pictured playing guitar onstage. Never understood why the guy who practically copyrighted the name “Piano Man” should want to give up his franchise like that.
I remember practically all these songs except the last, and especially liked “Digging Your Scene.” I associate that one with a summer nerd camp I went away from home to for a couple of weeks; perhaps I heard it on the radio during that time.
I had all six of those 45s. I regret half of them.
I don’t mind Modern Woman at all these days. And, I still love Captain Of Her Heart from Double (pronounced Due-blay) as I recall.
Casey said “double.” I have always said “double.” I have occasionally heard “doublay,” but I think it would need an accent on the “e” to be pronounced that way, and the French word “double” doesn’t have one. Without it, the word would be pronounced “doub-luh”, with the second syllable swallowed so it’s not really a separate syllable. (This may be the first time since 1979 that my five years of French have been in any way useful, but I’m not 100% sure I’m right.)
The radio deejays I heard in the Greensboro-High Point-Winston-Salem market all pronounced the group as “Dou-blay,” which I’m sure I remember because it was the perfect mellow, mid tempo song to segue in and out of virtually every other song on the top 40 in 1986. I recall “Two of Hearts” getting a lot of airplay too, and unfortunately it seems to have influenced some of the dance hits of today like ones by Pink in the most irritating way possible.
And it would please me to no end to learn if someone made a Long Distance Dedication to hear “Hanging on a Heart Attack” on AT40, though I’m 99% sure it never happened.
Bobby Ocean on KFRC pronounced it “Double”. So that’s Casey and Bobby Ocean.
As a francophone who makes his living as a translator, I can assure you that you are entirely correct in this case. English speakers often try to pronounce (or spell!) French words using Spanish or Italian rules. Musically-speaking, I dig the Blow Monkeys and *love* Device. Their sadly lone LP was excellent throughout, imho.
Yeah, the more I think about “doublay,” the more I think it’s DJs deciding on their own that’s what it should have been. If I still had Kurt Maloo’s e-mail (he was the lead singer and we corresponded a bit many years ago), I could ask.
I thought most of the music of 1986 really sucked, but I’m biased because I had to play those songs on a radio station that really sucked—WMQT in Marquette, Michigan. Making me even more biased was being the one who lost that bet on the Stacey Q song.
While you guys all ponder whether it’s “Double” or “Doublay”, I’ll just throw it out there that we used to often refer to “Two of Hearts” as “Two Hot Farts”. Weird Al really missed the boat on that one.
we used to often refer to “Two of Hearts” as “Two Hot Farts”.
Ah, now I remember that song, sort of.