118. Mr. Snuggleupafuss

118. "How Much I Feel" by Ambrosia

Writing about my "Eye in the Sky" first slow dance experience has put me in the mindset needed to write about the next song on the countdown--"How Much I Feel" by Ambrosia. This song belongs to a particular oxymoronic genre of we-broke-up-but-I-still-love-you songs. The lyrics in these songs have many lines--and especially the chorus--that express how the singer will always have a place in their heart for a former girlfriend/boyfriend even though the two just couldn't seem to muster enough love and commitment to figure out how to stay together in the first place.

Don't get me wrong. Even though these songs don't make logical sense, I think it's a great genre, and I really like a lot of them, including:

"Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" by Billy Joel (which happens to be Billy's favorite Billy Joel song)

"Send Her My Love" by Journey

"Happy Anniversary Baby" by Little River Band

"The Flame" by Cheap Trick

You've already seen a few songs like this on this Top 200 list (Quiche Lorraine?), and you'll see many more before its finished. In fact, the closer we get to number #1, the more likely you'll see a song of this genre.

I did NOT include "How Much I Feel" on my list because when I heard it the first time it reminded me of a girl that I broke up with but still loved. It was 1978 when this song started playing on the radio. I wasn't even a teenager then. I hadn't yet lived long enough yet to meet any girls that would like me enough to get to the point where anything resembling a break-up was even possible.

This song is on my list because it is the one with the most Ambrosia sound that produces a potent time-travel effect that I can't help but enjoy in my adulthood. If I lay on my bed and close my eyes while I listen to this song, I am transported back in time to 1978. It feels so real that sometimes, when I open my eyes during the song, I see bell-bottoms and perms.





Other late 70s songs with this time-travel power include, but are not limited to:

Leo Sayer -- How Much Love
Alan O'Day -- Undercover Angel
Pablo Cruise -- Whatcha Gonna Do

Mmmmmm! So good! These songs even bring back the smell the chlorine from all the swim team meets I went to in the summer of 77. With Pablo Cruise, I also smell Solarcaine.



But even though I like sentimental old-lover-I-still-love songs, I have to admit that there is something about these soft rock songs that I find disturbing and, in some cases, physically discomforting. If I'm lying on the bed with my eyes closed with visions of old girlfriends in flared jeans and crocheted halter-tops running through my head, and if my wife decides to join me and snuggles up to me while she listens, there's this moment of hesitation where I have to wonder if I should snuggle back. That's because the music sounds romantic on the surface, but the singer's professing love for an old flame, and it's kind of weird to snuggle back when the lyrics make me think about old girlfriends and not my wife. Then that thought begins to make me wonder if she might be thinking about old boyfriends while she's snuggling up to me. And like most people I know, I really don't want to snuggle back if someone's using me as a snuggle proxy for an old flame. Consequently, these songs are basically snuggle kryptonite to me. And if the playlist isn't quickly changed to another genre of soft-rock songs about people that actually love their current lover, there's a real danger of experiencing severe snuggle-interruptus. And it takes at least two cans of Solarcaine to take away that red-hot pain!

So caution is in order as you continue on with this Top 200 list. Whenever a song like "How Much I Feel" comes up, it's probably best not to listen to it while you're resting in bed with your current lover and/or spouse. If you do, you'd better have a first-aid kit handy, and it better be well-stocked with salves, lotions, ointments, oils, petroleum jellies and/or sprays with prescription-strength benzocaine! Otherwise, you'll find out just how much you feel. And it will feel something like this--

119. Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

119. "Sirius/Eye in the Sky" by Alan Parsons Project

The Chicago Bulls pretty much ruined the song "Sirius" for all Jazz fans, but it is another one of those instrumental segue songs that make the following song even better, so I can't exclude it, even though it causes flashbacks of late 90s anguish.

There is no official video of the song that includes Sirius as a lead-in, so here's a live version featuring Alan Parsons singing with his old-man-singing-live voice, which is obviously not as smooth as the studio-enhanced voice we hear on the studio recording of the song. But to be fair to Alan, he wasn't the voice on the studio recording. It was his partner Eric Woolfson. Alan started out as a producer, not a singer. And he brought in lots of other people to sing on the songs, so he never really took the attitude of "I'm the best singer in the world, so listen to me dammit!" In fact, it was Woolfson, that gave it the name "Alan Parsons Project." Alan was supposed to be the engineer and producer on the records, and Eric was going to write the songs and be the lead musician in the "project." When the project first got started, they never toured. It was just studio work by Alan and Eric and all the other musicians they invited to join in on the songs. But now Alan is old and needs money, and Eric is off doing something else with his life with music theater, so Alan formed a touring band, and he's singing the songs, because that's what the audience expects.




Okay. Enough with the project trivia. There's a really good reason this song is on my list.

It was my first slow dance ever!

It was August around the time school started. Randy had come to live with us. A stake dance had been announced for all 16-year-olds and older, and I was told I needed to go and take Randy with me so that he could meet all of the nice Mormon girls and they could meet him. The dance was out in some sagebrush field in the lava rocks between Arimo and McCammon, which I thought was a ridiculous place for a dance, but since I wasn't on the planning committee, I didn't get to choose the place. Randy came to the dance reluctantly, but I was more reluctant to actually dance than he was. I had always avoided slow dancing at school or church dances I had gone to in the past, but I couldn't avoid it with this one. It was inevitable. I was going to have to slow dance with someone, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it, and I knew it. I was dreading the moment because I had no idea who was going to be the one to ask me, and I didn't have the guts to ask the girls I really wanted to slow dance with. And that's why I breathed a sigh of relief when "Eye in the Sky" started playing and Mary Barlow walked up to me. She didn't ask as much as just grab me by the hand and pull me to the dance area where we proceeded to slow dance for four-and-a-half minutes.

What was I thinking during that song while I was dancing with Mary? I was thinking about a previous time when Devon Maughan had, for reasons I don't know, stopped to pick up Mary Barlow and took her with us to go tubing down the Portnuef river at Lava Hot Springs. It was the only time I can remember that a girl joined us on those trips, and Mary seemed to always be trying to get her tube closer to mine. But I knew the river and could go wherever I wanted lickety-split, and she didn't, so I pretty much kept her at more than arms length. After ending our tubing at Lava, but before we took Mary home, we stopped at a swimming hole by the McCammon turnoff, which is about half a mile away from the dump. We all plunged into the hole, where I had had been swimming before, so I knew where to jump in and where I could swim to.

My favorite stunt was to swim out into the middle of this swimming hole, do a surface dive while someone was watching and then swim underneath this small waterfall nearby. I'd stay there where nobody could see me for a few minutes, and then I'd dive down and swim back out to the middle of the swimming hole and pretend like I'd been underwater the whole time. I don't remember if I was able to pull this joke on Mary at the time, but she somehow found out about the waterfall. And when I had swam underneath it this one time, Mary swam in to join me. I started to move away from the rock ledge I was holding onto like I was going to swim away. She then said, "Daren, don't you like me?"--because I was leaving as soon as she got there. I said, "Yeah, I like you," and then I dove underwater and swam away.

At the time of the waterfall encounter, I didn't know if she asked me that question because she wanted me to be her boyfriend or just what that was about. But while I was dancing with her to Eye in the Sky I reflected on that incident and thought, "You could have been slow dancing with her under the waterfall, you dipstick!" And after the dance I considered asking Mary out to see if we could ever make it back underneath that waterfall again. But she ended up getting a steady boyfriend, and I never pursued it any further. I figured she'd found the boy she liked, and I wasn't going to be able to convince her she'd have a better time with me.

I do have a few other good memories of Mary, mostly surrounding the Mz. Marsh Valley contest, which she produced, and some encounters in the hallway where I'd crack a joke and she'd laugh. The last time I saw Mary was at the Smith's grocery store in Logan when I was in graduate school. She worked there as a clerk, and I ran into her by the salad section. We exchanged niceties about what we were doing with our lives and what was going on with our families. Then she needed to get back to work, so I grabbed a bag of lettuce, said it was nice to see her again, we smiled at each other for a second, and then I walked away.

(Cue Dan Fogelberg "Same Old Lang Syne" song.)

And so now whenever I hear "Eye in the Sky," I think of Mary and how grateful I am that she was my first slow dance. If she could have read my mind during it, she might have found out the real reason I swam away from her at the swimming hole--I was afraid if I stayed there with her under that waterfall for any longer, I'd make a fool of myself by trying to make her my first kiss.

120. Turn Up the Clock Radio

120. "Gemini Dream" by The Moody Blues

In 1981 this song topped the charts at #1. In Canada. And in our barn. For reasons I will never fully understand, when I hear this song, it triggers memories hearing it on the old clock radio I had installed in the barn to entertain me while I milked the cow, fed the calves, and did whatever other chores happened to be on Dad's list of things that needed to be done every day but don't really get noticed when they don't. I remember being really happy when this song came on the radio because I had wanted to hear it while I did my chores that day, and I turned it all the way up and started to dance around in the barn while I fed the calves and mucked the barn--kind of like that dance scene in that Footloose barn at the end of the movie, only without all those girls and glitter and gymnastics. And a hell of a lot more manure. But the exact same number of black people.

121. The Dabney Coleman of Rock 'n' Roll Songs

121. "We Built This City" by Starship

This may very well be the worst song in rock 'n' roll. And I'm not alone in that opinion. VH1 put it at #1 on their list of the "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs...Ever." In 2011, a reader's poll for Rolling Stone magazine voted it as the worst song of the 80s. And in 2016, GQ magazine identified it as the "the most detested song in human history." Even Grace Slick hated it.

Grace Slick (Starship vocalist; ‘Vanity Fair,’ June 2012): I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober, which I was all during the '80s, which is a bizarre decade to be sober in. So I was trying to make it up to the band by being a good girl. Here, we're going to sing this song, “We Built This City on Rock & Roll.” Oh, you're shitting me, that's the worst song ever.

But while Grace and most of the other 7.5 billion people on the planet love to hate this song, I hate to love it. The song came out while I was in Sweden, which meant I was only supposed to hear rock 'n' roll music when I was out in public or if people played it while we were visiting them. So when I had a chance to listen to a new rock song, I really paid attention to it and tried to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the experience as I could. And this song got really lucky and just happened to play on the radio when my companion and I were riding home in the back seat of Lars Nordlof's Saab right after we baptized him. His girlfriend Annalee liked the song, so she turned it up, knowing that the two missionaries in the car would also like to hear it played loud. She was a member and had been around missionaries all her life, so she kind of figured out that a lot of missionaries liked to hear something beside the tabernacle choir from time to time. My companion and I just grinned at each other when she turned it up. We rocked the song while driving at high speed down a Swedish country road in the dark. It may very well be the happiest moment of my mission.

And that's how the "worst song ever" became a song that I can't help but love.

But even though I love the song, I do hate the video. If you took everything bad you'd ever seen in an 80s video and spliced it all together, you'd still have something ten times better than this. Human language is incapable to describing the level of awfulness that this video attains, so I won't even try. I should probably not post it here or even encourage others to watch it, but it's an 80s video trainwreck you really can't force yourself not to look at.



Fear not, dear reader, as this is the last time you'll hear a Starship song or see a Starship video on the countdown. It will NOT, however, be the last time you'll hear or see an actual starship. But none of the starships you will see will be from a Starship album cover, because for some reason beyond reason, there are no images of starships on any of their four album covers. And I'm not sure why, but I'm okay with that.

122. Agalmatophilia

122. "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship

For a #1 charting song, I don't think this song is very good. The music video for it is even worse. And the movie "Mannequin"--upon which the music video is based and in which this song is played during the closing credits--is even worser. It's all one huge heap of rock 'n' roll mediocrity.

But that's a good thing.

I'll explain why after the video.



If the movie hadn't been painfully bad, I never would have gotten bored watching it the first time I ever saw it. And if I hadn't got bored, I wouldn't have started thinking about what I could be doing besides watching the movie that would be more fun and exciting. And if I hadn't started thinking about fun and exciting things to do, I wouldn't have had the idea to try to kiss my date that was watching the movie with me. And if I hadn't kissed my date, she wouldn't have kissed me back. And if she hadn't kissed me back, I wouldn't have asked her out again, fallen in love with her, and then married her. Consequently, every time I hear this song, I think about kissing my wife for the first time, which happens to be infinitely more pleasurable than the second-most fun thing I've ever done while watching a video about a paraphilia involving sexual relations with dolls--which is chuckle in bemusement at the video for this song I heard in Sweden.



So I say thank you, Grace Slick, for leaving Jefferson Airplane to join Jefferson Starship, and then leaving Jefferson Starship to join Starship, which was featured in a stupid movie that Leonard Maltin said was "absolute rock-bottom fare, dispiriting for anyone who remembers what movie comedy should be" (after which you left Starship to reform Jefferson Airplane again). Because if you hadn't done all that band-hopping, I wouldn't be married today to a wonderful woman who still lets me kiss her from time to time during boring movies. Instead, I'd probably have to satisfy my soul with a cryin', walkin', sleepin', talkin', livin' doll, which I'm sure would eventually lead to me being bashed over the head mercilessly by hammer-toting brits and/or publicly criticized and humiliated by Leonard Maltin and/or photographed by Pete Welsh.

123. Why does everyone think angels play baseball?

123. "I Do' Wanna Know" by REO Speedwagon

The Speedwagon had some massive chart-topping hits during my high school years, and this song wasn't one of them. The single came out just a few months before graduation, so it didn't have a lot of time to rack up the old high school memories either. But the timing of its release is why it's in my top 200. I think it was sometime in February of 1984 that I decided to renew my membership in the He-Man Woman-Haters Club, and I stopped going to dances of any kind and swore off dating. I also stopped caring about my classes, my classmates (except for the Arimo Mafia), church, scouts, and, truth be told, my family. Hanging out with the Arimo Mafia, running track, and going on band tour were the only things I cared about. I had also adopted a rebellious attitude toward pretty much every adult I knew, except for Uncle Wayne and Ivalue. I was turning 18 and was ready to claim my independence of everything and everyone. And that's why this song perfectly distills my general frame of mind during those last three months of high school.

This song also reminds me of the school trip to Lagoon when the Musik Express operator played the same REO Speedwagon song over and over and over and over as we went around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around. Because he had it turned up so loud, we also heard it anytime we rode nearby rides, like the Wild Mouse or Collossus or the Centennial Screamer or the Rock-o-plane or the Sky Ride. I'm pretty sure it was this song and the trip was our senior sneak. But I could be wrong. My brain got pretty scrambled from all those rides, and as a result my four years of high school Lagoon memories may be completely jumbled.

Hey kids! If you like jello, baseball, Benny Hill, death by toaster, holy mullets, and Satan Claus, then this is the video you've been waiting for! Click it now! And please keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Have fun!

124. In Case the Reds Decide to Push the Button Down

124. "New Frontier" by Donald Fagen

In 1981 Steely Dan broke up. Don't worry. They got back together again in 1993 and are still together today. But after the breakup, Donald Fagen went off and wrote himself a humdinger of a jazz-rock album--The Nightfly. Because of the way it was recorded and mixed in the studio, the entire album, but especially the song "I.G.Y.," is a favorite among audiophiles. Now I'm a country boy, so I don't understand why someone would have such an unnatural attraction to hi-fi stereos, but apparently audiophilia is an actual thing. I'm sure Pete Welsh has a picture of an audiophile in the act, and I DON'T want to see it!

Only a few of the songs on the album hit the charts, and my favorite among them was "New Frontier," probably because the video depicted what it would be like to party in an underground bomb shelter like it was 1959. At the time this song charted--early 1983--as a nation we were still concerned that the Soviet Union might bomb us to oblivion, so the song definitely touched on contemporary themes in the early 80s, even though it harkened back to the late 50s. I would guess that most teenagers in 1983 at one time or another wondered if they'd like living in an underground bunker for several months (or years?) until the radiation from the nuclear bombs got back down to tolerable levels. To a small extent, teenagers thought about getting nuked so much in 1983 because of this song and video, but mostly they thought about it because that's when War Games came out in theaters. After seeing that movie, I was pretty sure I could survive a thermonuclear war if I had a girlfriend like Ally Sheedy. Or Annabeth Gish. I can never tell which one is which now.

Okay. Time out. I have to say that in my teenage years, I would have been very capable of telling the difference between the two girls below (I think the girls are the ones on the left).

But in my older years--as well as their older years--I have a very difficult time telling the two women apart. I watched halfway into season 9 of the X-files while wondering to myself, "Am I looking at Alley Sheedy or Annabeth Gish?"

Agent Gisheedy

Can you immediately tell which one is which in the pictures below? Or do you have to look at them several times before you think you know who you're looking at?

I suppose my confusion is all part of the dementia slowly destroying my 50+-year-old brain. Pretty soon, I won't be able to tell the difference between Maureen McCormick and Christine Taylor either.

Hopefully, my dementia will be miraculously cured by high doses of radiation from the nuclear bombs dropped on us after Donald Trump causes an international conflict by tweeting something incoherent in the middle of the night.

Anyway, here's what I hope my life in the bunker will be like for me and my jazz-loving girlfriend.




About three years after this song came out,  I was shopping in a grocery store in Sweden when I saw this album in a bin full of discounted tapes. I said to myself, "When I get home, I'm going to buy this album and listen to it as much as I want."

And guess what. I did.

In fact, I had my Swedish companion Elder Skinner come visit me in Pocatello after he got off his mission. He was studying jazz music at Berklee College of Music in Boston. He always talked about jazz music the two months we were together. During our visit, when he saw all of the other music I had, he basically turned up his nose at it all and would only listen to The Nightfly. I took him to Yellowstone Park, and this was the only tape he wanted to listen to on the way. He also listened to it in his Walkman when we got back home to the Standrod House. I haven't heard from him since that visit. But I always imagine that he's probably somewhere playing Ruby Baby on the saxaphone at some jazz club somewhere in Sweden. And I hope he survives the worldwide nuclear conflagration of 2019, because we've got to have some music on the new frontier!

HOLY CRAPOLEY! On a whim I googled "Adam Skinner jazz Sweden" and found my old companion playing a Billy Joel song on the piano!



He's got the right dynamic for the new frontier!