Over the weekend on the Northern Alliance, King Banaian, Ed Morrissey and I got together for the long-threatened “Worst Music of the Seventies” episode.

We picked some true horrors between us; “Last Song” by Edward Bear, “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” by Lobo, “Convoy” by CW McCall, and on and on.

But the general consensus was, the worst of the lot was “I’ve Never Been To Me” by Charlene, one of Ed’s nominations.

If you’re of a certain age, or were accidentally exposed by other means, you’ve heard the song.  But just in case you haven’t heard it, I’ll put it right here for you.

WARNING:  You can’t un-hear this song

I remembered the song all too well – although not as well as I thought I did, which only means that the human psyche is designed to protect itself.  It came out in 1977, not 1979, as I thought I remembered. But I wasn’t completely off; Mary McGregor, most famous for her 1978 hit “Torn Between Two Lovers) released, heaven help us, a cover of the song in ’79, which was the one I remember playing at my first radio job.

But as Ed, King and I played some of the worst music of all time, I took my mind off the pain by looking up factoids about the various songs.  And I learned some amazing stuff; careers started, lost and restarted; major names in the industry slumming between major breaks, or prostituting themselves to find their first major break.

And the story behind this wretched, wretched song was far from an exception.  It involves the classic story; a girl, a songwriter, a producer, and a douchebag disk jockey.

The Girl:  Charlene (born Charlene D’Angelo, although her first stage name was Charlene Duncan, after her her first husband, a justifiably obscure record producer.  She had some chops; she was 23 when she was signed to a subsidiary of Motown.

Yes, Motown.  Signed by no other than…

The Producer:  Berry Gordy, the Father of Motown and one of America’s legendary musical impresarios.  And he’s listed as one of “I’ve Never Been…”‘s producers.

Of course, not everyone Gordy signed was a Temptations or a Four Seasons or a Marvin Gaye, or even a Flaming Ember.  Gordy had his finger in a lot of different musical pies, and had a staff of people who cranked out music in all sorts of genres.

Which leads us to…

The Songwriters:   The song was written by Ron Miller and Ken Hirsch.  You may not have heard of them; not everyone can be Lennon and McCartney, Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King.  Someone has to be Freddie and the Dreamers, Billy Crudup, or Neil Sedaka.  And that was where Ron Miller and Ken Hirsch fit into the music business.

Not without success, mind you; Miller wrote a string of hits for Stevie Wonder (“A Place in the Sun”, “Heaven Help Us All”, and “Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday”), Diana Ross (“Touch Me in the Morning”) and a trove of other music that hovers just outside the edges of the American musical conscience.  And Hirsch was a professional co-writer, having teamed up with Hal David, Howard Greenfield, Doc Pomus, Gerry Goffin, Carole Bayer Sager, Paul Williams and a dog’s breakfast of lesser lights; he scored hits, albeit minor ones, for everyone from Ray Charles to Air Supply.

Together, they teamed up and, in the style of the times, wrote “I’ve Never Been To Me”.  And they gave it to…

…well, everyone.  R&B singer Randy Crawford did it first;  Nancy “Not The One From Heart” Wilson and Walter Jackson both did it the same year Charlene first released it, and the covers (including MacGregor’s, which was the only one to make serious bank before 1982) kept coming.

The lack of sales dogged Charlene; after her second album, Gordy dropped her.  She retired from the music business, and moved to England, where she married a Brit, Jeff Oliver.   Sh was working in a candy store in London in 1982.

The Douchebag Disc Jockey:  Scott Shannon is legendary in the radio business.  This may be good, or it may be bad, depending on your point of view; as a mid-market program director in the mid-eighties, he was one of the prime movers behind “CHR”, or “Contemporary Hit Radio”, which was what “Top Forty” became by the early nineties.  He also was one of the pioneers of the “Morning Zoo” format.   By the early nineties, he was one of the people that smaller-market program directors – including my boss at the time, at KDWB – worshipped and emulated.

If you don’t have a big background in radio, you might have heard of him one of three ways:  he had a really awful TV and radio countdown show back in the nineties; today, he’s one of the hosts of a show called “Dish Nation”, an ultra-cheapo knockoff of “TMZ” which takes footage from various morning radio shows around the country and edits them into a half-hour…well, ultra cheap knockoff of TMZ.  And he’s been the voice-over guy in all of Sean Hannity’s breakbeds since Hannity went national.

But in 1982, he was working as a program director in Tampa, looking to make a splash and make it to the bigs.  And while vaccuuming out the oldies bin, he came across Charlene’s 1977 flop.

And started playing it.

Nobody knows why.  Shannon officially said he liked the song; the more I read about the song’s resurgence, the more I think it involved an intoxicated wager that he, and the world, lost.

No matter; Shannon played it, and played it to death.  Major-market program directors in those days were basically herd animals; if they saw a PD adding a song to his playlist, they’d stampede to follow suit.  No, seriously; “Roxette” became a hit in the US because one PD, KDWB’s Brian Phillips, added them; dozens of other PDs ran in a panicked mob to add the song, not wanting to be left out of…well, whatever it was.

And so Charlene Oliver was dragged out of retirement, put into her wedding dress (really) and dragged out to an English major house to record a video, and became a star, briefly

The Aftermath:  The song went to #3.  And then disappeared.   As, basically, did Charlene.  Motown featured her in a huge publicity campaign, including the movie “The Last Dragon”, featuring cameos and music by a raft of new Motown stars (Vanity, DeBarge, Rockwell, and others, including Charlene).   The others garnered a brief career boost; Charlene faded back into obscurity.

So just remember, kids; talent and hard work might get you someplace.  But being in the right place at the right time has no substitute.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, February 11th, 2015 at 7:00 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.