Top 5: Cry for Help

Just to stave off accusations that I’m irrevocably stuck in the 1970s, here’s a Top 5 from this week in 1991, when I was an adult-contemporary afternoon guy in Clinton, Iowa. I had a lot of fun in that particular corner of Nowhere—I worked for one of the best bosses I ever had, and was instrumental in building a little something out of what had been a great big nothing. Here are some of the records riding the Billboard chart during that week 17 years ago.

3. “Show Me the Way/Styx (up from 5). In February, after the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War but before its successful conclusion, while support-the-troops mania was at its height, a version of “Show Me the Way” interspersed with audio clips from soldiers and their families was all over the radio. It was not the official single release (and this wasn’t the official video, but you’ll get the idea), but it helped make the song into the biggest hit Styx has scored in eight years.

(The Gulf War affected the record charts to an extent unseen since Vietnam, and unduplicated by the Iraq War. Whitney Houston’s bombastic Super-Bowl rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was at Number 25 this week in 1991. Another support-the-troops record, the awkwardly titled “Voices That Care,” featuring an all-star group of singers, athletes, and actors also called Voices That Care, charted at Number 74. Another all-star record, an updated version of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” by the Peace Choir was at Number 54, but peace wasn’t as popular as the warriors were that spring.)

9. “Where Does My Heart Beat Now”/Celine Dion (down from 4). Her first American hit was an extremely restrained performance compared to what she would record in years to come.

27. “Baby Baby”/Amy Grant (up from 33). A textbook exercise in the killer hook: The first few times you hear it, you hum it long afterward. The next million times you hear it, you want to beat your head against something hard to chase it away. Amy was plenty damn cute in the video, though, which makes clear that the song is not, as pro-life propaganda at the time had it, about motherhood.

29. “Cry for Help”/Rick Astley (up from 36). Astley’s name has become shorthand for bad 80s pop, and justifiably so: “Never Gonna Give You Up” and its clone, “Together Forever,” are as awful as anything that decade produced. But Astley made a couple of records in the early 90s in which that big ol’ voice of his, which sounded so incongruous paired with those Stock-Aitken-Waterman dance arrangements, found an appropriate setting. The first was “Cry for Help”, in which he holds his own against a gospel chorus. A couple of years later came “Hopelessly,” his best pop song ever—but his career was pretty much over after that.

98. “Don’t Hold Back Your Love”/Hall and Oates (down from 80). Daryl Hall and John Oates had started running out of gas in the late 80s, and but in 1990 and ‘91, there was a little left in the tank. The album Change of Season featured their last substantial Top 40 hit, “So Close,” and two other singles did most of their business on adult-contemporary radio. Both were superb. The first time I played their version of Mel and Tim’s “Starting All Over Again” on the radio, I loved it so much that I played it a second time right away. As for “Don’t Hold Back Your Love,” it was the most ambitious and interesting single they’d released since “She’s Gone” in 1976—and next to “She’s Gone,” it’s the best thing they ever did.

“Don’t Hold Back Your Love”/Hall and Oates (buy it along with the rest of H&Os essential singles, here)