While I was researching Ian Hunter for my post on his birthday earlier this week, I tripped across the fact that today was, wonder of wonders, Ellen Foley’s birthday.

She’s 58 today, not that you’d know.

“Ellen Who?”

How, or whether you know anything about Foley depends on where you were and what you were doing between about 1977 and 1990ish.

Her first claim to fame was serving as Meat Loaf’s female foil in his ’77 trash-rock classic, “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” (heard, but not seen, in this video, which features Carla DeVito lip-synching Foley’s part), which counterbalanced the fairly useless Mr. Loaf with one of my favorite supporting casts in rock history; Utopia’s Todd Rundgren and Kasim Sultan on guitar and bass, the E Street Band’s Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan on drums and keys, and of course Foley singing the part of the eternally hard-to-get girlfriend.

If you were into Ian Hunter, you remember Foley as one of Hunter’s background singers on a number of his albums back between ’77 and ’79; he also produced her 1979 debut album, Nightout, an album that…well, sounded like Ellen Foley singing Ian Hunter songs, jammed full of classic, American-pop inspired sounds lifting heavily from the Phil Spector oeuvre.  

If you’re into freshman-level music trivia, you know that she dated Mick Jones of the Clash, sang backup on their Sandinista album (“Hitsville UK”), that they returned the favor (playing on her second solo album, Spirit of Saint Louis), and that “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” was written in her honor by a befuddled Mick Jones (and answered “Go!” by a generation of guys of a certain age at the time).

Graduate-level music trivia?  Ian Hunter brought her in to sing backup on the Iron City Houserockers’ classic second album, Have A Good Time But Get Out Alive, singing backup on their longtime signature “Junior’s Bar“.

Fans of really, really bad music?  Foley had something in common with Bonnie Tyler, Meatloaf, Air Supply and Barry Manilow – her “We Belong To The Night” was butchered by a bombastic, overblown Jim Steinman production job; of all Steinman’s victims, only Foley really survived artistically, if not commercially.

Not into music?  She was also Billie Young, on the first season of Night Court, kicking off a decades long controversy that was only settled by a 2005 session of the National Institute of Standards that unanimously declared “Ellen Foley was way hotter than Markie Post“. 

As I noted in writing about Foley last year, it’s one of the great injustices of the eighties that Pat Benetar became a fairly enduring star, while Foley languished in obscurity and now teaches vocal technique at a music tech school in New York.

Still – thanks for the memories!

Happy Birthday, Ellen Foley!