Benny Mardones - Into The Night

crapfromthepast wrote: 1980 (and 1989?) commercial 45 I'm a little hampered by not having the vinyl for this track. I have a file from Aaron for this track. The 45 is an edit of the album version that cuts out the second repetition of the intro by editing out 0:09 to 0:24 (cymbal hit to cymbal hit). That would put the 45 length at about 4:15. Can anyone confirm? Is this true for both the 1980 Polydor and 1989 Polydor 45s? (Was there even a 1989 Polydor 45? I may be confusing this with the "Unchained Melody" Verve/Curb 45 debacle.) 1980 (?) promo 45 version I have another file from Aaron for this track. The promo 45 starts with the same edit as the commercial 45. At the end of the song, the promo 45 cuts out Benny's screaming, and loops a few measures of just background singers singing "Fly, to the night" to form the last 12 seconds of the promo 45. The promo 45 runs 3:45. I assume that this promo 45 came out in 1980? Can anyone confirm? Was there a 1989 promo 45 or promo CD single?

Ron, this is totally a goof up by me on that file. The 45, as far as I know,
is the same as the full LP version. I was using it to create the promo
edit, which is correct, and somehow my original file was mistakenly
saved after I made the first edit. I didn't notice this until a couple years
later. The only edited version is what appears on the promo 45. Sorry
for the confusion!

Confirming what cmmmbase posted, there is a 1989 Polydor 45. The 1980 original has the catalog number 2091 and lists a time of 4:29 on the label. The 1989 re-release has the catalog number 889 368-7 and lists a time of 4:30 on the label.

The 1989 Polydor 45 is a regular 45, not part of the oldies/reissue "Timepieces" series. I am assuming it was also released as a cassette single, as one would have expected any regular single release from that time period to be. If it hadn't been, given the rapidly declining sales of 45s in that era, I don't see how it could have gotten as high on the chart as it did (#20 Hot 100, #17 in Sales). My Joel Whitburn Hot 100 book (of late '90s vintage) states that the re-recording was released as a single on Curb 10549. I assume the Curb version came out on cassette single. It may have also been available on 45, but if a Curb 45 exists, it's pretty obscure; I've never seen one.     

In the case of "Unchained Melody", the 45 that was commercially available from Polydor was a Timepieces series reissue. I believe this happened to already be in the catalog as an oldies reissue, and wasn't released specifically to capitalize on the song's use in the movie "Ghost". For some reason Polydor did not want to officially re-release "Unchained Melody" as a regular single (presumably to force people to go out and buy a Righteous Brothers compliation album?), and the Timepieces release was only available on 45, not cassette. Since most Top 40 listeners in 1990 were buying singles on cassette, this created an opening for the Curb version, which was available in that format. This resulted in a situation where most of the airplay was the original version, but most of the sales was the Curb re-recording. Taken together, the song was probably a top five hit, but because the sales and airplay were split across two distinct releases, both peaked outside the top ten. (Billboard, which at the time required a single to be commercially available to chart on the Hot 100, allowed the original to chart based on the existence of the Timepieces 45, even though it was only available in a format that was of little to no interest to most Top 40 consumers in 1990. At some point after this, apparently without making any kind of formal announcement, Billboard decided that availability only as a vinyl 45 was no longer sufficient to count as "commercially available" for purposes of the Hot 100.)         & nbsp;   

MCT1 - I do have the Curb 45, so I can confirm the
existence of it (picked it up about a year ago).

crapfromthepast wrote: "Into The Night" was one of a handful of songs revived between 1987 and 1989, along with "What About Me", "Send Me An Angel", "When I'm With You", "Red Red Wine", "Valerie", "At This Moment", "Where Are You Now", "In Your Eyes", and others. It was the original 1980 recording of "Into The Night" that was a hit again in 1989.

I've always been fascinated by this era and why so many songs came back.

Does anybody know why DJs were so enthusiastic about reviving old hits around this period? I can understand something once in a while coming back, maybe from a movie soundtrack or greatest hits album being released, etc., but to have so many at the same time...it seems every week I was opening up Billboard and another golden oldie was re-entering the Hot 100.

I don't think there's ever been another period with so many old songs re-entering.

torcan wrote: I've always been fascinated by this era and why so many songs came back. Does anybody know why DJs were so enthusiastic about reviving old hits around this period? I can understand something once in a while coming back, maybe from a movie soundtrack or greatest hits album being released, etc., but to have so many at the same time...it seems every week I was opening up Billboard and another golden oldie was re-entering the Hot 100. I don't think there's ever been another period with so many old songs re-entering.

As far as I know, this period is indeed unique for reviving past hits and non-hits.

The idea of digging up a unjustly-forgotten gem wasn't new at the time. I think it was Scott Shannon (pre-Z100) that revived Charlene's "I've Never Been To Be" in 1981, years after it flopped in 1976 or 1977.

As I recall, the one song that opened the floodgates was "At This Moment", which didn't do much on its first release in 1981. It was used on a TV episode of Family Ties in 1985. The folks at Rhino Records realized that there was literally no way to buy the song at the time, because Alfa Records went belly-up in the US in 1982. So they rereleased Billy Vera's By Request album and put out a 45 of "At This Moment", which hit #1 in early 1987. It became Rhino's first and only hit single.

I think individual DJs were responsible for "When I'm With You" and "Red Red Wine" (Scott Shannon again?) The remixed "Valerie" was a hit because Island Records needed a single to promote the Chronicles greatest hits album. "In Your Eyes" was from the soundtrack of Say Anything - that's the song playing on John Cusack's iconic overhead boom box. "Send Me An Angel" was Curb Records cashing in; Curb also put out the first Real Life record in 1984, and I don't know why they chose to rerecord. As for "Where Are You Now", "What About Me", and "Into The Night", I have no idea who brought them back, but it was definitely a trendy thing to do for a while.

I forgot about Modern English rerecording "I Melt With You" in 1990. Bleh. I seem to also remember "The Felony" by Fanatic making a second go-round around that time.

And "One Simple Thing" by the Stabilizers got significant airplay in Minneapolis in 1991, four years after it wasn't a hit in 1987. Still don't know why.