The final song in the accidental hit category this month is a little bit different. Kiss was supposed to be a hit, just not for the artist who ended up recording it.

How it all began

Mazarati was a band put together by Prince’s bass player, BrownMark, aka Mark Brown. They had signed a recording deal with the new label that Prince was starting in 1985. As part of the deal, Prince agreed that Mazarati could record a song that he’d written but had no use for called Kiss. They were given a bare-bones demo, just Prince singing the song, not in falsetto (the ridiculous ultra-high voice made so famous by the Bee Gees) just playing some simple chords on an acoustic guitar to accompany himself. The song was also a lot shorter, just one verse with the chorus.

The record producer on this album was David Z, a now-legendary producer, who was then known for his previous work with Prince. David heard the demo and started playing around with some effects, putting together the drum machine with guitar in a new way. The band got busy, and within the day the song was recorded and in the can. Finished.

Or that’s what they thought. The next day, David Z came into the studio to find Prince working on the song. He had taken the new funky guitar/drum combo and the backup vocals and was recording his own vocals on lead. He announced that he was taking the song back. He told Z that the song was too good for Mazarati. (Rude!) He offered the members of the band songwriting credits, since they had fleshed out the little he’d originally given them. But that never happened.

Once the new recording of the song was in Prince’s can, he then had to convince the record company to release it. They were not in favor of the song. It was too different. But Prince had power and he pushed it through. Kiss became his third number one hit, winning him a Grammy.

Not a fan

Prince does not come out of this story sounding good. He sounds like a double-dealing jerk. He was unbelievably influential as an artist, and his talent cannot be overstated. But I was not a fan of this song. I didn’t like the falsetto, and wished he’d sung the whole thing in his normal voice. When he starts the screechy-shouty-thing, it makes my throat hurt.

As I was researching this blog, I found the version recorded by Age of Chance. Dating from 1986, the band learned the song from hearing it in clubs and looking the lyrics up in Smash Hits, a British teen magazine. It’s not a bad take on the song. Even with the words from the magazine, they substantially changed them. But it’s fun.

In 1988, the avant-garde, synth-pop group Art of Noise heard Welsh singer Tom Jones singing Kiss on a TV appearance. They contacted Jones, and recorded Kiss featuring him singing lead. The song had been originally suggested to Jones by his son/manager in an effort to make him relevant again. It worked. The video for Kiss won Jones, then 48, an MTV award.

I much prefer this version of the song. I’ve honestly never been a Tom Jones fan, either. The raspy quality that he has makes me want to clear my throat. But I do love his take on the song.
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What is your favorite version of Kiss? Let me know in the comments below. I’ll be playing these and a few other Prince songs this week on my Minnich Music FaceBook page this week, so be sure to check them out.
 
Until next time!

Well I don't know why I came here tonight,
I got the feeling that something ain't right,
I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I'm wondering how I'll get down the stairs,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you

Yes I'm stuck in the middle with you,
And I'm wondering what it is I should do,
It's so hard to keep this smile from my face,
Losing control, yeah, I'm all over the place,
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

Well you started out with nothing,
And you're proud that you're a self-made man,
And your friends, they all come crawlin,
Slap you on the back and say,
Please, please

Trying to make some sense of it all,
But I can see that it makes no sense at all,
Is it cool to go to sleep on the floor,
'Cause I don't think that I can take anymore
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

Well you started out with nothing,
And you're proud that you're a self-made man,
And your friends, they all come crawlin,
Slap you on the back and say,
Please, please

Well I don't know why I came here tonight,
I got the feeling that something ain't right,
I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I'm wondering how I'll get down the stairs,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you,
Yes I'm stuck in the middle with you,
Stuck in the middle with you, here I am stuck in the middle with you.

Apparently, a lot of people out there think Stuck in the Middle with You was written and sung by Bob Dylan. Well, I hate to disappoint, but it was not. Stuck in the Middle with You was the brainchild of Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan of the Scottish band Stealers Wheel. They wrote the song as a joke in 1972, making fun of Bob Dylan’s paranoia. He also liked to refer to others in the music business as clowns and jokers. Gerry Rafferty, who sang lead even added some nasality to his tone, to sound more like Dylan. (Something this Cracked article says “sounds like Neil Diamond trying to eat oatmeal while having a stroke.” I like Neil Diamond, but I’ve got to admit that’s funny.)

Stealers Wheel was fortunate to have Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller as their record producers for their first album. Leiber and Stoller were legendary song writers and producers, writing over 70 chart hits out of their Brill Building offices. With the two of them behind the glass, it is no surprise that at least one song off that album made it onto the charts. The surprise is that it was the joke song – Stuck in the Middle with You.
In the music video for the song, it shows Egan lip-syncing the words to Rafferty’s vocals. By the time the album was released, Rafferty had left the group. But by the time the record had gone gold, Rafferty was persuaded to return to the band.

Unfortunately, nothing else they did ever came close to the success of that joke song. And Stealers Wheel broke up in 1975.

The group reformed in 2008, but without either Rafferty or Egan. And broke up again the same year. Like a lot of groups, there was a revolving door for the departing and returning band members during their active years.
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Do you have a favorite version of Stuck in the Middle with You? Let me know in the comments below. I’ll be playing some of these this week on my Minnich Music FaceBook page this week, so be sure to check them out.
 
Until next time!
 

Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Was a good friend of mine. I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him a-drink his wine. And he always had some mighty fine wine.

This Joy to the World has nothing to do with the holiday season just past. This is another song that was not supposed to be a hit. Instead, with more than 5 million copies sold, it is among the best-selling songs of all time.

Let’s start at the very beginning.

I hear that’s a very good place to start. Hoyt Axton was a singer/songwriter, guitarist, and an actor. There are some who feel that the original lyric began with Jeremiah was a prophet, but Axton, himself, denied that idea.
In his version of the story, (and I see no reason to doubt it) he had the chorus already written.

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls now.
Joy to the fishes in the deep, blue sea,
Joy to you and me.
 
He had the music written for the verse, just not the words. But he was recording the demo and needed something to fit the notes. So, he took a swig from the wine he was holding and started singing. These were supposed to be place-holder lyrics. He planned on writing others. He just never got the chance to do so.

Jeremiah was a bullfrog
Was a good friend of mine
I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him a-drink his wine
He always had some mighty fine wine
 
(Chorus)
Joy to the world
All the boys and girls now.
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea,
Joy to you and me.
 
If I were the king of the world,
Tell you what I’d do;
I’d throw away the cars and the bars and the wars.
And make sweet love to you.
Make sweet love to you.
 
You know I love the ladies,
Love to have my fun.
I’m a high night flier and a rainbow rider,
And a straight shootin’ sun of a gun.
I said a straight shootin’ sun of a gun.
 
Enter Three Dog Night.

The band was started in 1967 as Redwood, becoming Three Dog Night in 1968. (The story behind the name goes to an indigenous Australian concept of taking their dingoes to bed on cold nights. On a really cold night you would take two dogs. If it was freezing – three dogs. Hence – Three Dog Night.) The band was the dreamchild of Danny Hutton, Cory Wells, and Chuck Negron, all lead singers. It was an interesting conceit: three lead singers, taking turns on singing backup for each other. And it worked. 12 Gold albums and 21 consecutive Top 40 hits. They were huge.

And they thought that Joy to the World was one of the silliest, stupidest songs they had ever heard. But they liked another song of Axton’s that they were putting on this album (Never been to Spain) and they needed something to fill the last spot on the album. So, reluctantly, they recorded Joy to the World.

The album, Naturally, came out in 1970. The first single to chart off it was One Man Band. Then a DJ in Seattle was working on a tape of odd cuts from current albums, songs that would not normally get airplay. He also needed just one more song to fill a tape. Joy to the World was definitely odd and was the right length to finish the tape. Later, when he played the tape, the phone started ringing.

Joy to the World spent six weeks at the #1 spot on the Top 40.

All Good Things

Three Dog Night were at the top of their game in 1973 when things started slowing disintegrating. Band members began leaving and being replaced. Some left on their own, some were fired. Danny Hutton had serious health issues due to drug use. At one point, a nurse was hired to tour with them, to give Hutton vitamin B12 shots so that he could finish the current tour. He was then fired. Later that year, Chuck Negron was arrested on narcotics charges. By 1976, the band was done.

However, like so many other groups, by 1981, the band was back recording and touring. But, by 1985, Negron’s drug habit was unbearable for the rest of the band, and he was fired. (He now tours as Chuck Negron – formerly of Three Dog Night, and has finally beaten his heroin habit.) The rest of the band’s history is a recital of people leaving for this and that reason.

Sadly, Cory Wells, the only member of the band to not have a drug habit, died in 2015 of blood cancer. However, this has not stopped Three Dog Night. Danny Hutton, with one other original band member, still tours as Three Dog Night.

And now we get personal

In the summer of 1970, my father ran a summer school. Dad taught at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, WV, and this was a part of the Education Department’s summer program that year. Dad and Mom were both teachers, as was my older brother, Hal, and his soon-to-be-wife. (They were both Education majors.) I got to attend. Every session ended with music. And our unofficial theme song was Joy to the World. Dad, Hal and I would pull out our guitars, and we would lead the whole gang in singing. It was so much fun. And is a part of why this song has special meaning to me.

Fast forward to 2001. I was the music director for St. Mark’s Episcopal church in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We were working on Joy to the World, with the lyric change of Jeremiah being a prophet, along with a few others, when I got word that Dad was in the hospital, and I needed to get to Scottsdale. Fast. His transplanted kidney was failing. Dad did not make it. And I was not there when my choir sang Joy to the World. But, my two older children, both teen-agers at this point, were singing in the choir. That Sunday, the song was dedicated to the memory of my Dad.

Not long after that, we got to see Three Dog Night on tour at the state fair. It was a great show. Of course, they saved Joy to the World, their biggest hit, for the encore. When they announced the “song about that frog,” I cried, and sang along.
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Do you have a story about Joy to the World? Let me know in the comments below. I will be posting some of my favorite versions of this and other Three Dog Night songs on my Minnich Music FaceBook page this week, so be sure to check them out.
 
Until next time!
 

Welcome to 2020! The last couple of months of 2019 I had a theme for the month: I spent a couple of months writing about Tin Pan Alley, folk songs, and, of course, Christmas music. I thought I’d start off the new year with a month of songs that were never meant to be hits. Or not meant to be a hit for the person who ended up recording it.

But wait, aren’t all songs meant to be hits? No, all songs are not written equally. As I discovered when writing about Tin Pan Alley, there are songs that follow a specific formula and are designed to be hits. Most performers, however, cannot fill an album with nothing but hits. Even The Beatles and Queen had some less than stellar songs. Some songs are planned to be filler. And sometimes these songs, against all odds, (a song by Phil Collins that was designed to be a hit) take off and become hits themselves.

Happy New Year!

And since last week many of us participated in a countdown to the new year, I thought we’d begin with The Final Countdown.

Europe, the band not the continent, is a Swedish rock band. They had two albums out and were gaining a reputation as a guitar-centric hard rock band. Then came the third album.

Europe’s lead singer, the improbably named Joey Tempest (born Rolf Magnus Joakim Larsson), had written a keyboard riff years before. He’d kept playing with the baby riff, hoping it would grow into something. Finally, in 1985, the band’s bassist suggested that Tempest finish writing the song. The reaction from the band was mixed when Tempest presented them with the finished song, which originally clocked in at six and a half minutes.

The decision was made to use the song as a concert opener. And, looking at the video, it must have been spectacular at that. But when they went into the studio to record their third album, the powers-that-be wanted The Final Countdown to be a single. The band was against that. Keep in mind, they were a guitar band, and felt that The Final Countdown had too much keyboard. To make it worse, in the editing, the producer had turned down the volume on the guitars and turned up the keyboard.

The Final Countdown was a huge hit. Today, when most people think of Europe, they think of this one song. The band suddenly found themselves wearing spandex and Tempest was on teeny-bopper fan magazines. They lost all credibility as a serious hard rock band. One member, guitarist John Norum, left the band in anger and disgust at the direction the single was leading them into. (He started a solo career.)

Not all is rosy

Following ten years of touring, and tired of the pull in different directions that the group was feeling, in 1992, they broke up. The Final Countdown was their biggest hit but was such a bone of contention both within and without the band, that it was part of the problem that led to the breakup. (Hmm, kind of like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and The Beatles.)

Of course, the band got back together in 2003 and have put out six albums since then.

The Final Countdown for the Berlin Wall

The Final Countdown has some memorable bonus facts. It was played on German radio in the last hours before the Berlin Wall was brought down in 1990. It has been listed in several polls as both one of the best and worst songs ever. And it is played at many sporting events world-wide.

Invader Zim
For me, this remains the perfect song to be sung by GIR. GIR character from the animated series Invader Zim. And, while GIR never sang this song; he should have. I can hear him singing: “du, du, du, du, du” along with the keyboard riff – not singing the actual words.

What is your favorite version of The Final Countdown? Let me know in the comments below. I’ll be posting some of my favorite versions of this and maybe a few others by Europe this week on my Minnich Music FaceBook page this week, so be sure to check them out.
 
Until next time!