Ah, bedtime for Zeeba!

Has the heat got your summer started off as a bummer?  Well, let The Nest bring you relief in the form of another windy earworm!  It’s Monday, so it’s time once again to scoop up another lost song that got fried on nostalgia’s sidewalk and serve it up in that giant outdoor cafe of good old music we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive!  DJ Scratchy is ready to have you sweating to the oldies, while the Sponkies refuse to come out of their air conditioned rooms.  It may not be late September, but it’s time to take you back to earworm school…

I first started paying attention to music around 1983 or so, and as far as I was concerned, the artists who I was hearing on the radio or watching on MTV were all a part of the same musical era.  Paul McCartney singing along with Michael Jackson was just as totally 80’s as ZZ Top and that new band Chicago with the cool hit “Stay the Night.”  Of course, I’d learn later on in life that Sir Paul, ZZ Top, Chicago, and even an 80’s legend like The King of Pop had already been in the music business for decades, performing songs before I was even thought of…

I just called to say I love you…. hey, not a bad first song, Stevie! You’ll go places!

One of the many artists who’d been around for a while that got lumped in with all the other 80’s artists I adored is Rod Stewart.  Stewart was an even more extreme case for me, though, as it wasn’t until the early 90’s that I learned he even had a singing career in the 1970’s, let alone was more successful then.  Doesn’t matter, though, because this will always be what I consider to be Rod the Mod’s very first song…

“Baby Jane” was released in 1983, and got a lot of airplay on the music video shows.  It was a #14 hit in the US, and his last #1 in the UK, where he’s known as Sir Rod or some such nonsense.  Despite it being the first of a long string of songs I knew him for in my decade (“Infatuation,” “Some Guys Have All The Luck,” “Love Touch,” “Forever Young,” etc…), it’s largely forgotten and no longer heard in the US anymore.  Actually, most of 1980’s Rod Stewart seems to have been lost in the black hole of shittiness that is modern corporate radio.  If you hear Rodney’s raspy voice these days, it’ll probably be crooning one of his 70’s songs…

Do you think I’m sexy?

As for the “Baby Jane” video…. well, it’s totally 80’s, packed with all of the cheesy visual effects so many other videos had that made you wonder if you needed to adjust one of the ten knobs on your big box TV set.  That includes Rod and his band’s gaudy 80’s fashion, and of course the titular Jane in a hot pink spandex bodysuit…

Madame Onassis got nothing on you, Jane!

Alright all you young turks, be sure to tune in next Monday for another totally mod lost hit…