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(Pictured: the hottest mom in the neighborhood, circa 1985. Hang on, I’m being told that’s Pat Benatar.)

I wasn’t really gonna tap out of the American Top 40 show from August 31, 1985, so here’s the rest of it:

40. “No Lookin’ Back”/Michael McDonald
37. “Every Step of the Way”/John Waite
36. “Live Every Moment”/REO Speedwagon
34. “State of the Heart”/Rick Springfield
27. “There Must Be an Angel”/Eurythmics
24. “Mystery Lady”/Billy Ocean
16. “Dare Me”/Pointer Sisters
14. “Freedom”/Wham
9. “You’re Only Human”/Billy Joel
4. “We Don’t Need Another Hero”/Tina Turner
Many artists with iconic records are on this show, but with songs that either aren’t all that great, or are largely forgotten.

35. “When Your Heart Is Weak”/Cock Robin. “When Your Heart Is Weak” didn’t do much for me in 1985, but hearing it again for the first time in a long time, it sounded a lot better.

32. “Glory Days”/Bruce Springsteen
31. “Saving All My Love for You”/Whitney Houston
11. “Don’t Lose My Number”/Phil Collins
10. “Money for Nothing”/Dire Straits
8. “Cherish”/Kool and the Gang
3. “Freeway of Love”/Aretha Franklin
Here are some icons being iconic. “Saving All My Love for You” might be the best of Whitney’s 80s singles, although its jingly keyboards and luxuriant saxophone make it sound dated now. “Don’t Lose My Number” is probably the most Phil Collins-y of all his 80s hits. I’m not sure anybody needs to hear “Money for Nothing” again, but there hasn’t been anything that sounds like it since.

29. “Cry”/Godley and Creme
26. “Oh Sheila”/Ready for the World
I’m indifferent to most of what’s on this show, but I actively dislike some of it. “Oh Sheila” is boring as hell but would end up #1 anyway. “Cry” stops any radio show’s momentum dead, and its octave-jumping conclusion should be shot into the sun.

28. “Take on Me”/a-ha
19. “Every Time You Go Away”/Paul Young
7. “Never Surrender”/Corey Hart
One of these could be the best record on the show, but keep reading.

25. “Shame”/The Motels. Which Casey introduces with a long and not-all-that-interesting feature on lead singer Martha Davis, in which he casually mentions that she got married when she was 15 and now, at the age of 34, has daughters who are 19 and 17.

17. “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”/Motley Crue. A bad and unnecessary but inevitable remake, which Casey follows with a feature on the 1955 hit “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” I might have put the feature nearly anywhere else in the show.

15. “What About Love”/Heart. “The two-woman, three-man band formed in 1972 in Seattle, and that’s where they’re based, Seattle, Washington.” Later in the show Casey will say, “Here’s Aretha, Aretha Franklin, with “Freeway of Love.” The repetition is a bit, right? It’s gotta be a bit.

12. “Invincible”/Pat Benatar. Casey introduces “Invincible” with a lengthy story about how Benatar was discovered, which repeats her name unnecessarily only once and is written in clear and direct English.

LDD: “Count on Me”/Jefferson Starship
LDD: “One Hundred Ways”/Quincy Jones with James Ingram
Casey believed that apart from the music, the Long Distance Dedications were the most valuable thing on the show, although there were dissenting opinions on his own staff. If we’ve got to sit through the sort of mawkish letters featured on this show (one of which contains details that sound fake), it helps if the songs are good. In fact, it’s “One Hundred Ways” that’s the best thing on the show.

6. “Shout”/Tears for Fears. At the end of the show, when Casey reviews the #1 songs on the other charts, he notes that a disco remix of “Shout” is #1 on the dance chart this week. “These are the things I can do without”? Yeah, I’d say so.

5. “Summer of ’69″/Bryan Adams. “Summer of ’69” is probably the single most enduring record on this show, unless it’s “Take on Me” or the song at #1. Casey introduces it with clips of the five songs that hit #1 in the summer of 1969: “Get Back,” Henry Mancini’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “In the Year 2525,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Sugar Sugar.”

1. “The Power of Love”/Huey Lewis and the News. If Huey never had another hit, we’d still be playing this one on the radio several times a week today because it’s perfect: seriously, you can’t name a single thing that would improve it. It was featured in the perfect place (Back to the Future) and at the perfect time, blasting out of radios across a hot-and-happening American summer.

Looking back across the whole show, however, I didn’t enjoy it all that much. Mid-80s Casey is hard to take, with his announcer-y delivery. And despite 1984 to 1986 being my Top-40 radio years, I find myself decades later respecting a lot of the music, but loving very little of it.

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We are fortunate, out here on this quiet corner of the Internet, to have a few people amongst the readership who worked on American Top 40 or for Casey Kasem on other shows. One of them, briguyx, commented on Monday’s post, in which I edited a long bit of a 1985 show:

When I wrote for Casey, it was very important to take the listener step by step, from one thought to another in each of the long intros, without skipping a step. You might call that spoon fed!

That’s an excellent definition of the process of informational writing: moving step-by-step from one thought to another without skipping a step. It’s the way to proceed when presenting a concept you want people to learn. In my two decades as an educational writer, it’s something I did all the time.

In education, we talk about scaffolding: building on a base of existing knowledge to introduce new concepts. It’s how any of us gets proficient at anything. We learn the basics, about building a birdhouse, or about biology. Then we learn other stuff that builds on it, until eventually we can make a chair or create a vaccine.

A teacher or instructional designer has to account for the fact that students’ scaffolds differ. Imagine a lesson about that old social studies favorite, triangular trade. A lesson for high-school seniors will be qualitatively different than one for fifth-graders. Although every student’s learning style is a little different, there are some valid assumptions you can make. For example, because upper-level students have a greater background in history and/or economics (theoretically), there are some things you either needn’t explain at all, or you need mention only briefly to refresh the recollection you expect them to have. Also, you can use more advanced vocabulary, because they know more and bigger words. In short, high-school students have a more elaborate scaffold upon which to build.

That doesn’t mean you won’t still spoon-feed—or, to use a better and more accurate term, that you won’t elaborate on certain ideas, explaining them in greater detail. Which ideas get elaborated depend on the age and/or proficiency of the student. The youngest ones (or beginners of any age) get elaboration on practically everything, because they gotta start somewhere. As students get older and/or more experienced, the elaborated concepts are likely to be more complex ones. We also tend to elaborate key ideas that need to become part of the scaffold, so that the students will be able to build on those ideas as their studies continue. Elaboration is meant to illuminate an idea, expand a student’s understanding, and help them connect it to the scaffold. It’s not mere repetition.

The central or main idea of the Casey bit is this: in her new song, Lisa Lisa uses a bit of an old song by a famous singer. Casey wants listeners to understand how Lisa Lisa and the old song and its singer relate. That’s a legitimate purpose, and you can argue that he accomplishes it. After all, I didn’t change a word of his original text, and I added only one word. But I did take out the stuff that sounds like, or perhaps was intended to be, elaboration that helps the listener better understand. I would argue that elaboration isn’t needed here. Casey’s audience of adults and young adults can follow and understand just fine: Lisa Lisa has a new song that is related to this old song by Ella Fitzgerald, and here’s who Ella is. The “elaboration” doesn’t illuminate the main idea, it belabors the point. That’s not good teaching; it’s just bad writing.

Depending on your purpose, taking your reader (or listener) step-by-step from one thought to another without skipping a step is absolutely a valid way for a writer to go. (And if it’s what the boss or the client wants from you, you’ll have to do it.) But for that approach to be truly effective, it has to account for the expectations and capabilities of the audience. Assume too much, be too complex, be unclear, and your piece will fail to accomplish its purpose. But you can also assume too little about your audience’s capabilities—and end up insulting their intelligence. That’s my gripe with the Ella Fitzgerald bit.

Am I overthinking this? Maybe. In any event, we will get around to a more mundane discussion of the AT40 show from August 31, 1985, on Friday. 

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(Pictured: Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam backstage in 1986: Alex “Spanador” Moseley, Lisa Velez, and Mike Hughes.)

On the air, we marshal words for particular purposes: to entertain, to inform, to make people think or feel. Even when we’re ad-libbing, we are (one hopes) doing so with some goal in mind, some particular thing we want to accomplish.

Compared to ad-libbing, scripting our words in advance is a luxury. It gives us the chance to carefully choose the right words, and it helps ensure that we’ll deliver those words in the right way. It doesn’t guarantee that, however. Behold, a bit of the American Top 40 show dated August 31, 1985:

“Now we’re up to the current hit song that borrows some of its melody from a nursery rhyme. Listen. (Clip.) That’s a piece of the current hit song by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force, a song called ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ And you heard Lisa Lisa singing the melody from a great old nursery rhyme. Nearly 50 years ago, that nursery rhyme became the first big hit for the woman who would become the most famous female jazz singer in history. Listen. (Clip.) From way back in 1938, that’s a jazzed-up version of ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’ by legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. For more than 50 years, Ella’s been a major jazz star, probably best known for her scat singing on records, in the movies, on television, and of course in concert. And she also got noticed for breaking crystal with her voice on the Memorex TV commercials. Today, at age 67, Ella Fitzgerald is still wowing audiences around the world, and the melody of a nursery rhyme she recorded to get her first big hit, ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket,’ now shows up again, at least the melody does. It’s the song at number 38 this week by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force, ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.'”

Here’s how a former professional editor of your acquaintance might streamline that:

“Now we’re up to the current hit song that borrows some of its melody from a nursery rhyme. Listen. (Clip.) That’s a piece of the current hit song by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force, a song called ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ And you heard Lisa Lisa singing the melody from a great old nursery rhyme. Nearly 50 years ago, that nursery rhyme became the first big hit for the woman who would become the most famous female jazz singer in history. Listen. (Clip.) From way back in 1938, that’s a jazzed-up version of ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’ by legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. For more than 50 years, Ella’s been a major jazz star, probably best known for her scat singing on records, in the movies, on television, and of course in concert. And she also got noticed for breaking crystal with her voice on the Memorex TV commercials. Today, at age 67, Ella Fitzgerald is still wowing audiences around the world, and the melody of a nursery rhyme she recorded to get her first big hit, ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket,’ now shows up again, at least the melody does. It’s [in] the song at number 38 this week by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force, ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.'”

This is one of the most egregious instances of the repetition that plagues the four-hour AT40 shows. It’s just wretched writing. It’s almost as if Casey and company feared we couldn’t follow the bit unless they spoon-fed it to us. And did he really say that the melody of Ella’s song “now shows up again, at least the melody does”? If the last phrase is an ad-lib, it’s a brain fart. If it’s scripted, I can’t even.

The lengthier bit fills time, at least, which as we know was a major concern on the four-hour AT40s. But one song earlier, Casey says, “Here’s another debut. It’s the fourth Top 40 hit for John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. It’s a song about living in the city, and they spell it out, “C-I-T-Y.” Debuting at number 39, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.” He does this over the introduction of the record, so it doesn’t fill time. This repetition treats the listeners as if they were completely lacking short-term memory.

So I’m three songs into the August 31, 1985, show and I’m already deeply annoyed by it. Will I listen to the rest of it and write about it here? Stay tuned.

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(Pictured: Gilbert O’Sullivan, who performed in sweaters with the letter G on them.)

Here’s more about the American Top 40 show from August 26, 1972. (First part here.)

18. “Where Is the Love”/Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
14. “Back Stabbers”/O’Jays
13. “The Guitar Man”/Bread
12. “Motorcycle Mama”/Sailcat
10. “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me”/Mac Davis
6. “If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right)”/Luther Ingram
5. “Hold Your Head Up”/Argent
3. “Long Cool Woman”/Hollies
By this point, two hours into the show, I’m there, 50 years ago, transported in a way that doesn’t happen with every AT40 show, or every season. “Where Is the Love,” “If Loving You Is Wrong,” and “Hold Your Head Up” radiate heat and light as the last days of summer slip away. “Back Stabbers,” “The Guitar Man,” “Motorcycle Mama,” “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me,” and “Long Cool Woman” put me slightly later in time, seeing the sun through a school bus or classroom window.

Earlier this summer, I wrote about a 1978 show in which Casey answered a question about the artists who most successfully remade their own hit. He answered a similar question on this show: has anyone ever hit with a remake of their own earlier hit? It’s happened three times, he says. Tommy Edwards remade his 1951 hit “It’s All in the Game” in 1957; the Ventures remade 1960’s “Walk Don’t Run” in 1964; and Barbra Streisand remade “Where You Lead” as part of the “Sweet Inspiration” medley heard earlier in the show.

11. “Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.”/Donna Fargo. I don’t think I had an opinion on “Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” in 1972 (although I remember that it sounded great off a jingle) but today I like it out of all proportion to its enduring value. Its sweet joyfulness is, as I wrote a couple of years ago, “an antidote to this dark time in which we are living.” It runs only 2:27 but Casey cuts it short anyway, which was especially annoying given the six minutes he devoted to the Streisand medley in the first hour.

8. “Coconut”/Nilsson. Here again we encounter the question of just how Nilsson’s name is pronounced. Harry himself pronounced his surname with a short “i,” but Casey says “Coconut” is from the album “neel-son schmeel-son,” which makes me squirm like nails on a chalkboard. (Over the years, Casey pronounced it both ways, and earlier in 1972 he used both on the same song.)

7. “Goodbye to Love”/Carpenters. I played “Goodbye to Love” on the radio the other night and was reminded again how insanely great it is. (Have I mentioned here that I do a 70s music show Saturday nights from 7 til midnight on my station? That I not only host it but program it too? You should probably listen sometime.)

EXTRA: “Ben”/Michael Jackson
EXTRA: “Use Me”/Bill Withers
One of the extras offered in the modern-day version of this show was Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love,” snipped from the original 8/26/72 broadcast. Commonly, extras are future hits not part of the original show, like “Use Me” and “Ben.” The extras are usually introduced by voiceover guy Larry Morgan. But on this show, Casey himself introduces them. Neither appeared on the 8/26/72 show, so where the intro bits came from I can’t say.

4. “I’m Still in Love With You”/Al Green. As much as I love Al Green, I sometimes mix up “I’m Still in Love With You, “Look What You Done for Me,” and “You Ought to Be With Me,” all of which followed “Let’s Stay Together” up the charts in 1972. In his Green biography Soul Survivor, author Jimmy McDonough says that about this time, producer Willie Mitchell was told that his stuff with Green all sounded the same. He responded, “I will ride this horse until it falls dead.”

2. “Alone Again (Naturally)”/Gilbert O’Sullivan
1. “Brandy”/Looking Glass
Gilbert and the Looking Glass had been 1-2 for the preceding four weeks but have now changed places, although “Alone Again (Naturally)” will return to the #1 position next week and hold it for two more weeks. Six weeks at #1 would be the longest run of the year, equaled only by Roberta Flack’s “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in the spring.

With summer fading into the fall of 1972, it was time for young me to take a tentative step into a further widening world, to a new school, with new teachers, new friends (new girls too), and great expectations. But I still had my old friends from that time. And when I wasn’t in school, I spent hours with the radio, which turned out to be the best friend of all.

New Sidepiece went out this morning. Check your spam filter. It knows what’s what.

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(Pictured: Three Dog Night performs at the Grammys in March 1972.)

Fifty years. I can’t get my brain around the concept, particularly as it relates to songs (and to times) that do not seem so far gone. Travel back with me to the end of summer with the American Top 40 show from August 26, 1972.

40. “Honky Cat”/Elton John
39. “This World”/Staple Singers
38. “Sweet Inspiration–Where You Lead”/Barbra Streisand
37. “Run to Me”/Bee Gees
36. “You’re Still a Young Man”/Tower of Power
This show gets off to a rough start. “Honky Cat” and “Run to Me” are both fine and will become big hits, but “This World” is more shouty than funky, and “You’re Still a Young Man” just kinda sits there. Casey plays all six deadly dull minutes of “Sweet Inspiration” and “Where You Lead,” a medley recorded live at a McGovern-for-president rally earlier in the year. In six minutes you could play Barbra’s vastly superior 1971 studio version of “Where You Lead” twice, and you should.

35. “Gone”/Joey Heatherton. My 45-buying habits 50 years ago are amusing to me today. In 2012, I wrote about buying “Gone”:

It’s not especially difficult to understand what drew me to this record—the horn blast that opens it could knock down the walls of Jericho and it sounded great on the radio. The song had been a big pop and country hit for the splendiferously named Ferlin Husky in 1957, but Heatherton finds drama in it that Husky never perceived. When she comes back one last time with “Oh, what I’d give for the lifetime I’ve wasted,” even a 12-year-old who knows practically nothing about love or girls or any damn thing can tell that whatever the singer is feeling, it’s as serious as a heart attack. So maybe it’s not so peculiar why I bought it, when other things I liked better I never did.

34. “Pop That Thang”/Isley Brothers. Which Casey introduces by suggesting that the Isley’s 1969 hit “It’s Your Thing” helped popularize that particular use of the word “thing.” “This time,” Casey says, “they’re singing it and spelling it with an accent: T-H-A-N-G.”

32. “When You Say Love”/Sonny and Cher
17. “Rock and Roll Part 2″/Gary Glitter
Sonny and Cher don’t sound all that interested in singing “When You Say Love.” Nobody could have known it would have a 50-year afterlife in Budweiser commercials and down unto this very day at the University of Wisconsin, as a popular song at sporting events: “When you say Wis-consin, you’ve said it all.” “Rock and Roll Part 2” also became a sports anthem, although it is frequently banned for inspiring obscene chants. And it hasn’t been on the radio much since Glitter’s 2006 conviction for child molestation.

31. “Lean on Me”/Bill Withers
30. “Too Late to Turn Back Now”/Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose
29. “Small Beginnings”/Flash
28. “Go All the Way”/Raspberries
27. “Power of Love”/Joe Simon
26. “How Do You Do”/Mouth and MacNeal
25. “Baby Let Me Take You”/Detroit Emeralds
24. “Beautiful Sunday”/Daniel Boone
There’s glorious AM-radio pleasure right here, although your mileage may vary regarding whether “Small Beginnings” qualifies.

And the pleasure continues:

23. “Black and White”/Three Dog Night. Zooming into the 40 from #47 the week before. Casey introduces it by mentioning songwriters whose careers have been boosted by Three Dog Night, including Harry Nilsson, Laura Nyro, and Randy Newman. He then says that “Black and White” was written by “D. Arkin and E. Robinson” and to “keep your eye on ’em.” But David Arkin, the father of Alan and grandfather of Adam Arkin, never wrote another popular song. Earl Robinson had already written the labor anthem “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” but was known mostly for classical music. A phone call to ABC/Dunhill Records might have been all it took to learn their first names, their significant backstories, and that the song was written years before in response to Brown v. Board of Education, although maybe Casey told those stories in later episodes.

21. “School’s Out”/Alice Cooper
20. “Saturday in the Park”/Chicago
Casey says that “School’s Out” is currently #1 in England, and that “Saturday in the Park” is the biggest mover within the 40 this week, up 13.

A listener asks which artist has hit the Hot 100 the most without cracking the Top 40. The answer: Steve Alaimo, who’s done it nine times. Casey says, “I really hope Steve hits soon with a big one, and he will.” But Alaimo would never hit the Hot 100 again.

Welp, I have reached my entirely arbitrary word limit and we’re only halfway through this show. Please join me for part 2, eventually.