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If Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter receives a Grammy nomination for album of the year, which seems very likely, it won’t be the first time a genre-defying Black superstar has been nominated in that marquee category for a country album. Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was nominated for the award in 1962. (Charles’ enduring classic lost to Vaughn Meader’s The First Family, a hit comedy album about the Kennedy family — which would have been seemed dated pretty quickly, even if the unthinkable hadn’t happened in Dallas just six months after the album’s Grammy win.)
Charles’ album topped the Billboard 200 for 14 consecutive weeks and spawned a pair of smash singles on the Billboard Hot 100: “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” which logged five weeks at No. 1, and “You Don’t Know Me,” which peaked at No. 2. Both songs had been country hits for other artists. Don Gibson, the writer of “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and country queen Kitty Wells both had separate hits with that song in 1958. Eddy Arnold had a country hit with “You Don’t Know Me” in 1956. Arnold, the top country hitmaker of the 1940s, co-wrote the song.
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None of the songs from Charles’ album made of Billboard’s Hot C&W Sides chart, as Hot Country Songs was then known. But they did make Billboard’s Hot R&B Sides chart: “I Can’t Stop Loving You” logged 10 weeks at No. 1, while “You Don’t Know Me” reached No. 5. Charles’ recording of “I Can’t Stop Loving You” won a Grammy for best rhythm & blues recording. It was also nominated for record of the year and best solo vocal performance, male.
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A little more than six months after the release of Modern Sounds, Charles released Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music (Volume Two). It also did well, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and spawning another pair of top 10 hits on the Hot 100, “You Are My Sunshine” and “Take These Chains From My Heart.” “You Are My Sunshine” was co-written by Jimmie Davis, who released a classic recording of the song in 1940. Charles’ B-side to “You Are My Sunshine” was a cover of another top-tier country classic, Hank Williams’ “Your Cheating Heart.” Hy Heath and Fred Rose co-wrote “Take These Chains From My Heart,” which Williams took to No. 1 on the Country Best-Sellers chart in 1953, five months after his death.
Charles was in his early 30s when the Modern Sounds albums were released. Beyoncé is a decade older than that now – 42. Both artists were born and reared in the South (Charles in Georgia; Bey in Texas), so country was a big part of the music of their youth.
Just as Beyoncé had recorded a country-flavored song (“Daddy Lessons” on Lemonade) before she recorded Cowboy Carter, Charles had a history of recording country songs both before and after his Modern Sounds albums.
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In 1959, he recorded a cover version of Hank Snow’s 1950 country classic “I’m Moving On.” Charles’ version, with the title tweaked slightly to a more down-home country “I’m Movin’ On,” made No. 40 on the Hot 100.
Charles followed the Modern Sounds albums with a version of Harlan Howard’s “Busted” (a 1963 hit for Johnny Cash with The Carter Family) and Buck Owens’ “Crying Time.” Charles’ versions of both songs won Grammys for best rhythm & blues recording. Charles had another big hit with a song written by Owens, the top country hitmaker of the 1960s: “Together Again.”
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Charles continued releasing country-leaning material, though without the same degree of success. His 1965 album Country & Western Meets Rhythm & Blues reached No. 116 on the Billboard 200. Love Country Style hit No. 192 on that same chart in 1970.
Charles didn’t make Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart, as it was then called, until 1980, when “Beers to You” — a song he recorded with Clint Eastwood for Eastwood’s film Any Which Way You Can (a sequel to the film star’s 1978 smash Every Which Way but Loose) — reached No. 55.
Two years later, Charles had a top 20 hit on Hot Country Singles with “Born to Love Me.” That song brought Charles a Grammy nod for best country vocal performance, male – his first and only Grammy nomination in a country category.
In March 1985, Charles finally landed a No. 1 on Top Country Albums with Friendship, a duets project. The album included “Seven Spanish Angels,” a collab with Willie Nelson, which topped Hot Country Singles that same week. The titans have much in common: a mastery of multiple genres, and success with one song in particular. Both had No. 1, Grammy-winning hits with “Georgia on My Mind.” Charles’ 1960 version topped the Hot 100. Nelson’s 1978 version headed Hot Country Singles.
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Four other songs from Friendship reached the top 20: “We Didn’t See a Thing” (a collab with George Jones with Chet Atkins), “Rock and Roll Shoes” (with B.J. Thomas), “It Ain’t Gonna Worry My Mind” (with Mickey Gilley) and “Two Old Cats Like Us (with Hank Williams, Jr.).
In 2000, Ray Charles – The Complete Country and Western Recordings (1959-1986), released on Rhino Records, received a Grammy nod for best historical album.
Charles was one of the 10 inaugural inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2021, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He is, to date, the only Black artist in both Halls. Will Beyoncé one day join him? I wouldn’t put it past her, would you?
Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor Melanie, who died on Jan. 23 at age 76, by looking at the pop star’s lone No. 1 hit as a recording artist: the charming (but risqué for its time) “Brand New Key.”
Melanie’s sing-song pop smash “Brand New Key” seems pretty innocuous today, but when it was released in 1971, it was considered fairly risqué. “Skates” and “key” were pretty obvious sexual metaphors, and this stanza was rife with sexual innuendo: “Don’t go too fast, but I go pretty far/ For somebody who don’t drive/ I’ve been all around the world.”
You have to keep in mind that this was a full decade before Olivia Newton-John’s sexually provocative “Physical,” which the Grease star fretted was going too far practically until the moment it was released. In 1982, Madonna arrived, eventually bringing gender parity to the whole notion of songs about lust. “Brand New Key” might have been the first step down the road that took us to Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and countless more.
Melanie (whose full name was Melanie Safka) acknowledged the possibility of fans hearing sexual innuendo in the lyrics, but has denied that was her intent. The oldies site Superseventies.com quotes Melanie as saying that she wrote the song in about 15 minutes one night: “I thought it was cute; a kind of old [1930s] tune. I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols, and pretty obvious ones at that. There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it.”
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In addition to helping to make top 40 radio safe for racier songs by female artists, “Brand New Key” changed Melanie’s image. Prior to “Brand New Key,” she had been seen as cool by contemporary pop and rock audiences. She was one of just three solo women on the bill at the Woodstock festival in 1969, along with Joan Baez and Janis Joplin (who was backed by the Kozmic Blues Band).
As it began to rain during her performance on the opening night of that epic, three-day festival, hundreds of candles suddenly appeared, which inspired Melanie’s breakthrough hit, “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” In July 1970, that song became her first top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching No. 6. The Edwin Hawkins Singers, best known for their 1969 hit “Oh Happy Day,” were featured on the record, giving it a gospel quality that balanced her folkie sound.
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In September 1970, Melanie made the top 40 on the Hot 100 with her follow-up, “Peace Will Come (According to Plan).” The following month, The New Seekers landed a top 15 hit on the Hot 100 with another Melanie song, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma.” (Melanie had recorded the song under the title “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” on her 1970 album Candles in the Rain.) The New Seekers followed that hit with their versions of two more Melanie songs, both of which also made the Hot 100 – the flower-power anthem “Beautiful People” (No. 67) and “Nickel Song” (No. 81), which Melanie would later have a No. 35 hit with.
Melanie performed at the Isle of Wight festival in August 1970 as well as the Glastonbury Festival (then dubbed Glastonbury Fayre) in June 1971. So, Melanie was a star even before the song that became her biggest hit.
People who just know Melanie from “Brand New Key” might be surprised to hear her other songs, which she sang in a husky voice and in an idiosyncratic style. “Brand New Key,” which Melanie wrote by herself, smoothed out the rough edges of her other records. It is more of a pure pop record, which is probably why it did so well.
The song, produced by Melanie’s husband Peter Schekeryk, was the first release on their own label, Neighborhood Records, following her departure from Buddah Records. The song (arranged by Roger Kellaway) opens with a simple piano intro, before Melanie lays out her predicament. She needs a key and she needs it bad. Her frustration is apparent as she sings, “It almost seems like you’re avoiding me/ I’m OK alone, but you’ve got something I need.” More than 40 years later, in “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepsen would capture that same sense of frustration, pining for a disinterested guy.
The chorus of “Brand New Key” is very sing-songy, which some found charming and others found grating. The wordless bridge lends some interest, “Oh, yeah, yeah/ Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah…” And in the final repetition of the chorus, Melanie omits the lines “I’ve been looking around awhile/You’ve got something for me” and replaces them with “La-la’s.”
In the week ending Oct. 30, 1971, “Brand New Key” entered the Hot 100 at No. 87. Eight weeks later, it dethroned Sly & the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” to become the No. 1 song in the land. It held the top spot for three weeks, bridging 1971 and 1972. Incredibly, it held Don McLean’s instant-classic “American Pie” to the No. 2 spot for two weeks before “Pie” was able to dislodge “Key.” And then “Key” stayed at No. 2 for three weeks, giving it a total of seven weeks in one of the top two positions – longer than any other song by a female solo artist in the first three years of the ’70s.
“Brand New Key” is a very short single — it runs just 2:26, shorter than any other No. 1 hit of 1971 or 1972. It’s ironic that “Key” was followed in the No. 1 spot by “American Pie,” which ran 8:37, which made it the longest No. 1 hit in Hot 100 history until recently. “Brand New Key” also reached No. 1 in Canada and Australia and climbed as high as No. 4 on the Official U.K. Singles Chart.
“Brand New Key” is easily Melanie’s best-remembered hit, but it was hardly the sum total of her chart impact that year. In the week ending Feb. 26, 1972, Melanie had three songs in the top 40 on the Hot 100: “Brand New Key” dropped from No. 14 to No. 24, “Ring the Living Bell” (the proper follow-up to “Key”) jumped from No. 39 to No. 34 and “Nickel Song” (which Melanie’s former label Buddah Records released to capitalize on her newfound success) leaped from No. 43 to No. 36. Melanie was just the second solo female to have three songs in the top 40 at one time (following Mary Wells in 1964), and the only woman to achieve the feat in the ’70s.
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Critic Paul Gambaccini led his Singles column in Rolling Stone (March 16, 1972) with a discussion of Melanie’s three simultaneous hits. Under the headline “Melanie laughs all the way to the bank,” Gambaccini wrote “It has long been fashionable for rock critics to knock the recorded efforts of Melanie, but the woman with the little girl’s voice now has the last laugh. While most artists consider themselves fortunate to have one hit single, she has three.”
In his weekly American Top 40 countdown for week in question, Casey Kasem made note of Melanie’s triple play and said words to the effect that “Last year was the year of Carole King. It looks like this year will be the year of Melanie.”
In one sense, Casey was right. On Billboard’s year-end charts for 1972, Melanie was No. 1 on the Top Singles Female Vocalists chart, ahead of three legends – Cher, Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin, who held down the next three spots. But if Casey was suggesting that Melanie was moving up to superstardom, as it appeared at that moment, that didn’t come to pass. After those three early 1972 hits dropped off, Melanie logged just one more top 40 hit, “Bitter Bad,” which reached No. 35 in the spring of 1973.
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Some of Melanie’s original fans had disdain for the novelty-shaded pop direction of “Brand New Key,” while her newfound pop fans proved fickle. Widely read industry pundit Bob Lefsetz wrote an assessment following Melanie’s death in which he opined that he “had some respect for her” prior to “Brand New Key,” but lost it with that one song. “Melanie had been a deep thinker, anything but light,” he wrote. “And now she’s released this adolescent, no, strike that, kiddie song about roller skating.”
Melanie made her final Hot 100 appearance in the first week of 1974 with a fine cover version of Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” She made her final appearance on the Billboard 200 in her lifetime that June with Madrugada.
In 1990, “Brand New Key” appeared on Vol. 7 of Rhino Records’ 25-volume Have a Nice Day series, which collected pop songs from the 1970s. I wrote the liner notes for that entire series (as well as the Grammy-nominated 1998 box set Have a Nice Decade, on which “Brand New Key” also appeared.)
Here’s what I wrote in 1990 about “Brand New Key”: “Melanie, whose ‘Brand New Key’ hit #1 in December 1971, wasn’t a one-hit wonder. She is, however, Exhibit A in the case of artists whose careers were hurt more than they were helped by hit records that projected the wrong image. The whimsical, nostalgic nature of ‘Brand New Key’ gave Melanie a lightweight, novelty image which was at odds with the contemporary pop/rock persona she had cultivated with her 1970 hit, ‘Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).’ It didn’t help that the follow-ups ‘The Nickel Song’ and ‘Ring the Living Bell,’ were also very light. Still, one imagines that the coy innuendos of ‘Brand New Key’ resonated for, say, Madonna, in a way that Carole King or Roberta Flack never did. In fact, it’s a small step from the tongue-in-cheek sass of ‘Brand New Key’ to ‘Like a Virgin.’”
In one interview, also featured in that Superseventies.com piece, Melanie expressed some ambivalence about the song. “I used to love singing ‘Brand New Key,’ at first,” she said. “It had great shock value, dropped in the middle of one of my concerts. I’d be singing along about Suffering and the Trials of Man, and then suddenly, ‘I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates…’ It had a great effect. After it became a hit, though, the fun kind of wore off, at least for me. Some things, I think, are better left a surprise.”
While Melanie struggled commercially after “Brand New Key,” the song itself has had an afterlife. A parody version titled “Combine Harvester,” recorded by a comedy folk act dubbed The Wurzels, topped the Official U.K. Singles Chart for two weeks in June 1976. The song depicts two farmers with one saying to the other, “I’ve got a brand new Combine Harvester/ And I’ll give you the key.” (If “Brand New Key” is novelty-shaded, this loopy track goes all the way.)
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Melanie’s original recording was heard in the acclaimed 1997 film Boogie Nights, which was set in the 1970s. The song was used as an informal theme for Heather Graham’s Rollergirl character. (Roller skating became a genuine pop-culture fad during the disco era, long after Melanie’s song had run its course.) Country singer Deana Carter covered the song on her 1998 album Everything’s Gonna Be Alright, which went gold. The song has also been featured in the TV shows Family Guy and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Melanie’s legacy extends beyond “Brand New Key,” however: “Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma,” which she also wrote, was a much-admired and much-performed song of that era. The great Ray Charles recorded a marvelously funky and fresh version of the song that reached No. 65 on the Hot 100 in August 1972 and received a Grammy nod for best R&B vocal performance, male. In October 2012, Miley Cyrus released a video of an acoustic version of that song as part of her Backyard Sessions series. In 2015, Melanie joined her to duet on the song, in addition to “Peace Will Come.”
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Melanie had other successes. too. In 1989, she won a Primetime Emmy (in tandem with Lee Holdridge) for outstanding achievement in music and lyrics for the “The First Time I Loved Forever.” They wrote the ballad for the CBS series Beauty and the Beast (not to be confused with the later film of the same name).
In 2010 and 2011, Melanie performed at 40th anniversary editions of famous festivals she had performed at originally – Isle of Wight and Glastonbury, respectively. She also endured as an avatar for Woodstock, playing a big part in the informal revival of Woodstock ’89. According to Variety, Melanie was in the studio earlier this month working on her 32nd album, Second Hand Smoke, a collection of cover songs.
Melanie died on Jan. 23 at home in central Tennessee. She is survived by her three children, daughter Leilah (named after the Derek & The Dominos classic “Layla”), daughter Jeordie and son Beau Jarred. Schekeryk, her husband of 42 years, died in 2010.
“She was one of the most talented, strong and passionate women of the era and every word she wrote, every note she sang reflected that,” her kids posted on Facebook. “Our world is much dimmer, the colors of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today, but we know that she is still here, smiling down on all of us, on all of you, from the stars.”
Barry Manilow turned 80 this year, but don’t think for a second that he’s slowing down. He’s too booked to even consider it. Tonight (Dec. 11) at 10 p.m. ET/PT, NBC will air Barry Manilow’s A Very Barry Christmas.
The show was filmed about five weeks ago at Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino where he performs his long-running show, Manilow: Las Vegas – The Hits Come Home! The special consists of half holiday songs (“Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Feliz Navidad” and “White Christmas”) and half Manilow hits (his three Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits – “Mandy,” “I Write the Songs” and “Looks Like We Made It” – and what is probably his most famous song “Copacabana”). The special was directed by Matt Askew, who directed Weekends With Adele.
A Very Barry Christmas is Manilow’s third Christmas-themed TV special. He has also released three Christmas albums and was planning to record another one this year, but didn’t get it done. “I started to lay out all the songs that I was going to do, and then this year happened,” Manilow told Billboard. “This year was like the craziest year ever.”
Manilow was honored by the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall in May. He played five consecutive nights (there are no nights off for this trouper) at Radio City Music Hall in May and June – and he’s already booked for five more shows at the legendary venue in April 2024. He was a presenter on the Tony Awards in June. Harmony, the stage musical he wrote with longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman, which had spent decades in development hell, finally opened on Broadway in November.
Manilow has probably done more TV – and used it more effectively – than just about any other pop music performer. He won a Primetime Emmy in 1977 for his first special, The Barry Manilow Special. The show, which featured Laverne & Shirley star Penny Marshall, was seen by 34 million viewers. He won his second in 2006, for the PBS show Manilow: Music and Passion.
He won that first Emmy, at least in part, because he was hot as a pistol in 1977, with a No. 1 single on the Hot 100 (“Looks Like We Made It”) and a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 (Barry Manilow/Live). He won his second, at least in part, because his fellow professionals respected the way he had survived the ups and downs of a long career. He had “made it through the rain,” to borrow the title of one of his best songs – one that a longtime Fanilow (that would be me) ranked No. 6 on this list of his 25 top 40 hits on the Hot 100 that we posted in June to coincide with his reaching the big 8-0.
Manilow talked to Billboard on the eve of tonight’s special. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did this new special for NBC come about?
NBC executives came to see my regular [non-holiday] show at the Westgate and we were talking afterwards, and they were saying they were looking for Christmas product because everybody was on strike. And I said, “I have a Christmas show. We’ve been doing it for the last four years, and everybody seems to love it.” We sent them a video of it and they loved it. Before we knew it, we were taping the show.
You’ve taken this Christmas show on the road too.
It’s always received really well. I figured out a way of not only doing Christmas songs but my hits. It goes back and forth. It still always feels like a Christmas show, even when I’m singing “Copacabana.”
Christmas songs are right in your wheelhouse because so many of them are filled with yearning and emotion.
Even the [up-tempo] ones feel emotional because we’ve heard them all of our lives. That’s the only way I write, arrange or perform. If it doesn’t make me feel something, and if it doesn’t make the audience feel something, whether it’s sad or happy, then I’ve missed; then I haven’t done it right.
When did you tape the special?
About four or five weeks ago. We did two tapings. When I did my first batch of specials back in the ’70s and ’80s, there were about five cameras. [On this one,] they brought in 12 cameras. They had every angle they possibly could. It’s a beautiful-looking special. It looks otherworldly.
Any guests?
No, but we have Santa, little children, loads of Christmas trees — and it snows on the audience.
Why do you think TV works so well for you?
I try to be as genuine and as honest with every word and everything I say as I possibly can. If I’m right, that works to the camera, just like it works to an audience. If I can’t feel that I am being truthful in every lyric that I sing, then I shouldn’t be on the stage.
Last night I watched your 2019 interview for the Television Academy’s The Interviews series. You talked about how that first special in March 1977 took you to another level of fame and recognition – which is saying something, because you had had two No. 1 hits by that point.
The next morning [after the special aired], I went to the airport and everybody was yelling at me, “Barry! Barry! Barry!” The day before that, nobody paid any attention, but after that, it changed.
Did ABC ever offer you a summer replacement TV show, like a lot of music stars did back did back then?
They did, but I turned it down. I didn’t think it was the right thing to do — but I told them I would love to do one special a year, and they were OK with that. I didn’t think summer replacement [series] were helping the artist, and I didn’t want to be the guy that introduced people and did comedy sketches. That’s really not what I do. I would be terrible at that.
I didn’t realize the term “Fanilow” came from your 2003 appearance on Will & Grace.
One of the characters [played by guest star Sara Gilbert] was waiting [in line with Will, played by Eric McCormack] for tickets to a show of mine and said she was a Fanilow. It was a joke. It was clever and people picked up on it.
That phrase was a gift to you, because it’s catchy and affectionate.
I didn’t like it in the beginning. I thought it was kind of a put-down. But people would come up to me and say, ‘I’m a Fanilow,’ and they’d be so proud that I began to like it. And now I do like it.
I’m impressed that, 50 years into your career, you played five nights at Radio City.
For a New York guy like me, just to do [one night at] Radio City would have been enough — but to sell out five nights, that was really a thrill.
I’m also impressed that you played five consecutive nights. Artists half your age take nights off.
Oh please. I don’t even worry about that. I never get tired. I don’t sleep and I don’t eat. That’s my secret.
Harmony finally opened on Broadway this year. When did you and Bruce first write it?
We got the idea in 1997. It took awhile for us to put it together. And then the producer couldn’t get [it to Broadway] so we’d put it back in the drawer. Then there was another producer waiting to try it. Most of the time, we signed with a production company for three years. Every time we had to wait [until the previous deal was up]. Most of the time they just couldn’t get it to New York.
Dionne Warwick [whose 1979 comeback album Manilow produced] got the Kennedy Center Honors last week. The ceremony will air on TV later this month. It seems to me that if they base their selections on artists who have risen to the top in many different fields of entertainment, you should have gotten it by now. You went to the top in recordings, TV and live performances. If you ever do get that call, what would it mean to you?
Well, it’s quite an honor. No, they’ve never called and asked, and I don’t think they ever will. Maybe I just don’t do the kind of thing they want their honorees to do. I don’t understand why. If they did, would it be the top of the line? It would be pretty close to the top of the line to get an honor like that.
10/18/2023
The King of Pop rewrote the record book, but records are made to be broken.
10/18/2023
Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Terry Kirkman by looking at the No. 1 hit he penned for ‘60s pop group The Association: the sweetly melodramatic ballad “Cherish.”
The Association’s “Cherish” was one of the prettiest pop songs of the 1960s, a choral pop classic that has long been a wedding reception staple. It made you swoon from the opening notes. But the song isn’t as simple as it first appears. Listen closely and you’ll learn that it’s a tale of an unrequited romantic obsession in which the protagonist finally blurts out “you are driving me out of my mind.”
“Cherish” is, in some ways, the 1960s equivalent of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” where some people hear a song of undying devotion and others hear a song about an unhealthy, stalker-like obsession. Songs can be more complex than they seem on the surface.
The Association was formed in Los Angeles in 1965, evolving out of a 13-piece folk/rock group, The Men, that was briefly the house band at the famed Troubadour club. The Association quickly veered toward polished, mainstream pop – its music is often called “sunshine pop.”
“Cherish” was written by the group’s Terry Kirkman, who died on Saturday (Sept. 23) at age 83. Kirkman also sang lead on the smash, which was the group’s follow-up to its breakthrough hit, “Along Comes Mary,” which reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1966. Russ Giguere sang harmony vocals on “Cherish.” Session musicians were called in to play on the instrumental track. They included Mike Deasy on guitar, Jerry Scheff on bass and Jim Troxel on drums. Curt Boettcher produced the single, which was released on Valiant Records.
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The song demonstrated Kirkland’s love of intricate wordplay. Consider the opening lines of the first two verses: “Cherish is the word that I use to describe” and “Perish is the word that more than applies.”
Both the first and second verses have lines that are repeated three times with slight variations. In the first verse: “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I had told you/ You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I could hold you/ You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I could mold you…” In the second: “That I am not gonna be the one to share your dreams/That I am not gonna be the one to share your schemes/That I am not gonna be the one to share what seems…”
“Cherish” has two bridge sections, the second leading to a modulation in which the key rises a step. The lyrics in the bridge sections are melodramatic, as the protagonist comes to realize that his love is unlikely to be ever be returned. Many pop songs in this era had a similar life-or-death quality. Among them: The Righteous Brothers’ “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” Vikki Carr’s “It Must Be Him” and Little Anthony & the Imperials’ “Goin’ Out of My Head” and “Hurt So Bad.”
The song ends with the phrase “cherish is the word,” over a sustained vibrato electric guitar chord. The album version ran 3:27, but the single was trimmed for time because program directors of the era were skittish about playing a song that went much past the three-minute mark. (One of the repetitions of “And I do cherish you” near the end was removed.) The label copy on the single listed its running time as 3:00, but that was just an attempt to fool the PDs: The single actually ran 3:12.
Writing about the song in his Number Ones column in Stereogum in 2018, Tom Breihan knocked the song, hard, calling it “the moment that [The Association] dissolved into absolute fluff.
“There are things about “Cherish” that should be good — things that look nice on paper,” Breihan observed. “The Association were singing in lush, Beach Boys-esque harmonies, and they were doing it over intricately layered guitars and banjos and horns. But ‘Cherish’ is a bloodless affair, a sickly-sweet melody backing up a somewhat creepy lyric about fixating too hard on a girl. The narrator of ‘Cherish’ … [is] talking about her from afar, and he knows that he’ll never get a shot from her. So there’s some bitterness in the way he talks about her: ‘I want you / Just like a thousand other guys / Who’d say they loved you / [With] all the rest of their lies.’ Easy there, bud.”
Breihan makes some good points. The protagonist is fixating too hard on this girl. And his feelings are complicated, with some bitterness seeping in. But people have been known to fixate and obsess and have unhealthy, unrequited feelings for the wrong people at the wrong time. While the song may on the surface appear to be a simple love song, it turns out it’s more than that. It’s about a surprisingly messy, complicated, f—ked up situation. That just might be to its credit.
Billboard
“Cherish” was the second-highest new entry the Billboard Hot 100 in the week dated Aug. 27, 1966. It opened at No. 66, one rung behind The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” It sprinted to No. 1 in its fifth week on the Hot 100 (in the issue dated Sept. 24), dislodging The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” It held the top spot for three weeks, before it was dislodged by another all-time Motown classic, Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” (Four Tops covered “Cherish” on their hit 1967 album Four Tops Reach Out.)
“Cherish” appeared on two albums by The Association that made the top five on the Billboard 200 – And Then…Along Comes The Association (No. 5 in November 1966) and Greatest Hits (No. 4 in February 1969).
In early 1967, the track received three Grammy nominations – best performance by a vocal group, best contemporary (R&R) recording and best contemporary (R&R) group performance – vocal or instrumental. (R&R stood for rock and roll, which “Cherish” most decidedly wasn’t, though it had a contemporary pop sound, which was close enough for the Recording Academy at that time.) It didn’t win any of the awards, which went to (respectively), the Anita Kerr Singers’ “A Man and a Woman,” New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral” and The Mamas & the Papas’ “Monday, Monday.” The latter two titles were also No. 1 hits on the Hot 100.
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The Association returned to the No. 1 spot in July 1967 with the breezy “Windy” (which was written by Ruthann Friedman, who was just 22 when her one and only hit was released). “Windy” truly was “sunshine pop.” The group just missed landing a third No. 1 in October 1967 when “Never My Love” peaked at No. 2 for two weeks. (Now, that one would be perfect for wedding receptions.)
Kirkland went on to write three more Hot 100 hits for The Association – “Everything That Touches You” (which became the group’s fifth and final top 10 hit in 1968), “Requiem for the Masses” and “Six Man Band.” Kirkland departed the group in 1972 and returned when the band reunited in 1979, before leaving again in 1984.
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David Cassidy covered “Cherish” in 1971 as his first solo single apart from The Partridge Family. His version, produced by Wes Farrell, reached No. 9 on the Hot 100. Other artists to have covered the song include Dizzy Gillespie, The Lettermen, Nina Simone, Ed Ames, Petula Clark, Carla Thomas and Kenny Rogers & The First Edition.
The song has been revived in recent decades on the soundtrack to Fried Green Tomatoes (where it was performed in new jack swing style by Jodeci); Glee (where it was paired with a Madonna song with the same title); Barry Manilow’s The Greatest Songs of the Sixties (where it was performed in a medley with “Windy”); Rita Wilson’s AM/FM, a collection of some of her favorite songs, mostly from the 1960s and ’70s; and Pat Metheny’s What’s It All About, the 2011 Grammy winner for best new age album.
The Association’s smash has been featured on the TV shows The Wonder Years, The Nanny, The Simpsons, Crossing Jordan and Six Feet Under and in the films The Sweetest Thing and He’s Just Not That Into You. It also titled the 2002 dark comedy Cherish, starring Robin Tunney as a young pop obsessive with a stalker.
The potency of “Cherish” as a title had already been confirmed in the 1980s, when two different songs with the that title reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 – one by Kool & the Gang and the other by Madonna. Madonna even gave a little nod to The Association’s prior hit with the line, “Cherish is the word I use to remind me of your love.”
“Cherish” may not be the best song to play at a wedding reception – though many have tried – but it remains a pretty and impactful record, with gorgeous harmonies and a cleverly constructed lyric about a situation that, alas, just about everyone goes through at some point in their life.
06/16/2023
The entertainer turns 80 on Saturday. To mark the occasion, here are all 25 of his singles that made the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, fearlessly ranked by an OG Fanilow.
06/16/2023
Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we remember the late Irene Cara with an extended look at her lone Hot 100-topper: the era-straddling soundtrack classic “Flashdance…What a Feeling.”
Flashdance didn’t invent movie/music synergy, but it perfected the formula for the MTV generation. MTV, after all, wasn’t even two years old when Flashdance premiered in the spring of 1983.
Footloose, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Dirty Dancing and other mega-successful music-driven movies of the 1980s all owe a debt to Flashdance, an unexpectedly huge movie with no established stars and a fairly thin – but as it turned out, very relatable – plot. The film told the story of Alex Owens, a young woman who works as a welder and dreams of becoming a ballerina, but first must overcome her fear of auditioning before a panel of judges.
Irene Cara’s propulsive “Flashdance…What a Feeling” was released in March 1983 to build anticipation for the film, which was released on April 15. The song was just right for both the movie and the moment – a time when Black pop music was reaching new commercial heights thanks to Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Prince and many more star artists.
The film debuted at No. 2 at the box-office in its opening week, and spent the next three weeks at No. 1. Cara’s single reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late May, the soundtrack album topped the Billboard 200 for two weeks starting June 25 – and a second song from the soundtrack, Michael Sembello’s “Maniac,” topped the Hot 100 for two weeks in September. That is what you call a movie/music grand-slam.
Cara, who died on Friday (Nov. 25) at age 63, had enjoyed a comparable success three years earlier, when she introduced the rousing title song from Fame. That smash reached No. 4 on the Hot 100 in September 1980. But she didn’t co-write that song – Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford did, winning the Oscar for best original song for their efforts. As a co-writer of “Flashdance…What a Feeling,” Cara shared in her second film smash’s Oscar glory.
Disco don Giorgio Moroder composed the melody for “Flashdance…What a Feeling” and produced Cara’s single. The instrumental backdrop has echoes of Moroder’s electronic film score work. But it’s warmer and more triumphant-sounding than Midnight Express, for which Moroder won an Oscar in 1979, or say, Donna Summer’s 1977 smash “I Feel Love,” which Moroder co-produced with his long-time creative partner, Pete Bellotte.
Cara co-wrote the lyric with Keith Forsey, Moroder’s frequent session drummer and a future star writer/producer in his own right, with No. 1 Hot 100 hits for Simple Minds and Billy Idol in the back half of the ’80s to his credit. Cara’s warm vocal conveys yearning and humanity, which offsets the occasional chilliness of the synthesized backdrop.
Jerry Bruckheimer, who co-produced Flashdance with his late partner Don Simpson, contacted Moroder in 1982 to see if he would be interested in composing the music for Flashdance. The two had previously teamed on 1980’s American Gigolo, which spawned Blondie’s “Call Me,” also a No. 1 hit on the Hot 100.
Cara had been somewhat reluctant to work with Moroder because she didn’t want to trigger comparisons to Moroder’s star client, Summer. “Giorgio approached me right after ‘Fame,’” she told me in an interview for Billboard that ran in the March 10, 1984 issue. “The only reason I didn’t go with him at the time was all the comparisons. But with ‘Flashdance […What a Feeling],’” we were thrown together by Paramount.”
Cara and Forsey were shown the last scene of the film, in which Alex auditions at the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory, so they could get a sense of what the lyrics should be. They both felt that the dancer’s ambition to succeed would work as a metaphor for anyone hoping to achieve any dream.
“Flashdance…What a Feeling” wasn’t the first or last motivational anthem to reach No. 1, but it’s one of the best. The lyric “Take your passion and make it happen” is excellent career and life advice. Also, the line “in a world made of steel, made of stone” is an apt nod to the day job of Jennifer Beals’ welder character.
Moroder felt that the oft-repeated lyric “what a feeling” was right for the story but tried to persuade Cara and Forsey to incorporate the title of the film into the lyrics. The word “flashdance” never appears in the song – it’s a tough word to rhyme – but the words “flash” and “dance” do appear separately. It was only after the song was completed with the intended title “What a Feeling” that the word “Flashdance…” was tacked onto the title, for its promotional value.
The song wound up being used over the climactic scene Forsey and Cara had previewed, as well as during the opening credits. “Flashdance…What a Feeling” is what we hear as a young woman rides her bike through the streets of Pittsburgh just after sunrise, and as she starts her shift at the steel mill.
Cara had a good, well, “feeling” about the song. “I knew when we were recording it that we had something special with the song,” she said in an interview for BBC Radio 2’s Electric Dreams: The Giorgio Moroder Story. “Some things you just feel, you know? You can’t really dissect it or analyze it. It’s a spiritual thing that you sense, and I did sense that I had something special with this song.”
Bruckheimer also immediately sensed the song’s potential. On the Special Collector’s Edition DVD release of Flashdance (2010), Bruckheimer said, “When you first heard it, you said, ‘It’s a hit.’ It’s one of those things you just heard, and you just couldn’t get it out of your head. And it just got us all so excited. We kept playing it over and over and never got tired of it. To this day, I’m not tired of that song.”
As Cara had fretted all along, “Flashdance” drew comparisons to Summer’s hits of the era – and not just because of Moroder’s involvement. The song’s balladic opening, which segued into a rousing dance section, echoed a formula Summer and Moroder had perfected on hits like “Last Dance.” That Thank God It’s Friday highlight had won the Oscar five years earlier.
But while “Flashdance…What a Feeling” is very much in Summer’s wheelhouse, Cara sang it with an approachability and conviction that made it her own. She takes the listener on a journey from timidity and fear (“First, when there’s nothing/ But a slow-glowing dream”) to joy and abandon (“Pictures come alive/ You can dance right through your life”).
Even snarky critics were (mostly) won over by the single. Writing for Rolling Stone in 1984, Don Shewey called it “1983’s cheapest thrill… a patently ludicrous ode to instant gratification that Cara’s youthfully urgent, desperately soulful vocal rendered transcendent.”
“Flashdance…What a Feeling” was the second-highest new entry on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending April 2, 1983. Only Duran Duran’s “Rio,” first released in 1982, got off to a faster start that week. “Flashdance” reached No. 1 in its ninth week, dethroning David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” and stayed on top for six consecutive weeks – until it was in turn booted by The Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” “Flashdance…What a Feeling” was the longest-running No. 1 hit of 1983 by a female artist. It also was the only 1983 single to log 14 weeks in the top 10.
At the end of the year — and this is almost too perfect — Cara’s single and the film achieved identical rankings on key year-end charts. On Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 singles chart for 1983, “Flashdance…What a Feeling” ranked No. 3 behind “Every Breath You Take” and Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” On boxofficemojo.com’s accounting of the top-grossing films of 1983, Flashdance ranked No. 3 behind Return of the Jedi and a 1982 holdover, Tootsie.
When the 26th Annual Grammy nominations were announced, Cara received four nods – record of the year and best pop vocal performance, female, both for “Flashdance…What a Feeling” and album of the year and best album of original score written for a motion picture or a television special, both for Flashdance.
At the Grammy telecast on Feb. 28, 1984 – the highest-rated Grammys in history, in large part because the red-hot Jackson was expected to sweep (and did) – Cara won the female pop vocal award and shared in the award for original score. She also performed “Flashdance” as the final performance of the night.
The female pop vocal category was highlighted on the show, with performances from all five of the nominees – Cara, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Tyler, Sheena Easton and – you guessed it – Summer. Cara seemed genuinely shocked when Bob Seger and Christine McVie announced her as the winner. “Are you sure?,” she charmingly asked, before saying, “Um, I can’t believe this.”
Five weeks later, on April 9, 1984, Cara performed “Flashdance…What a Feeling” on the Oscars. She was accompanied by 44 boys and girls from the National Dance Institute. The number was sensationally staged, and was interrupted by applause six times.
When Flashdance star Beals and Matthew Broderick announced “Flashdance…What a Feeling” as the winner, Cara became only the second person of color to win an Oscar for best original song – following Isaac Hayes for his 1971 classic “Theme From Shaft” – and the first woman of color to do so.
In her acceptance speech, Cara graciously saluted a legendary lyricist/composer team that was also nominated with two songs from Yentl. “Just to be nominated with the likes of Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand is an honor enough.”
In the wake of “Flashdance,” Cara landed just one more top 10 hit on the Hot 100. “Breakdance,” which Cara and Moroder co-wrote to capitalize on the breakdancing phenomenon, reached No. 8 in June 1984.
It’s hard to know why Cara didn’t sustain as a successful recording artist. Her two tentpole smashes were so ubiquitous they may have simply been too hard to follow. Summer dominated the dance/pop space in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to the degree that it was hard for anyone else to step out of her shadow. Also, 1983-84 saw the emergence of a new MTV class of visuals-forward pop artists, including Madonna, Jackson, Prince, Cyndi Lauper and Culture Club. That may have left Cara, whose two big hits had visuals defined more by their movies than her own star power, trailing a little behind.
In the interview she did with me the week after winning two Grammys, she cited sexism in the music industry as a source of frustration, even then, at the pinnacle of her career.
“It’s very hard being female in this business,” she said. “They don’t want to know that you can play an instrument, which I do, or that you can write. They want you to look pretty and sing, and I’m not about just being a chick singer.
“That’s why I have tremendous respect for Donna [Summer] and Barbra [Streisand],” she continued, “and the women who are out there trying to have some control over their own careers.”
Cara saw the frequent comparisons to Summer – who was also 63 when she died in 2012 – as rooted in sexism. “A lot of people like to rival other female artists,” she said. “I listen to the radio and I hear one song after another by all the male artists and I can’t tell one voice from the next, but no one says anything about that.”
Whatever career frustrations and roadblocks Cara encountered, her talent and charisma at her peak — as seen in her recordings and those award show performances — are forever there for all to hear and see. She took her passion and made it happen.
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