Chart entered : 27 February 1988
Chart peak : 50
Number of hits : 15
I've never seen the late eighties / early nineties as a golden age. For all the excitement around acid house, Madchester and grunge, you also had some utter mediocrities managing to rack up a fair number of hits and here's one of them.
Richard was born in Chicago in 1963. His father composed advertising jingles and Richard started singing on them from the age of 5. As a teen he sent out demo tapes and somehow attracted the attention of Lionel Ritchie who invited him down to L.A. Richard sang backing vocals on Ritchie's first two solo albums including the mega-selling Can't Slow Down. He subsequently provided backing vocals for Madonna and Whitney Houston. In 1984 he was hired by Kenny Rogers and took the opportunity to offer him a couple of songs. He wrote Rogers' s 1984 US hit Crazy. After that, he started working for producer David Foster and provided songs for Chicago and Freddie Jackson. His persistence in hawking his own demo tapes finally paid off when he signed with Manhattan / EMI in 1987.
Richard went into the studio to record his debut album with help from The Tubes; Fee Waybill and Joe Walsh, Randy Meisner and Timothy B Schmidt from Eagles. Their influence is all over the first single "Don't Mean Nothin' ", and not just in Joe's slide guitar solo . Richard himself said he thought it could be slipped on to The Long Run and he's not kidding. It's competent AOR rock but there's something profoundly depressing about a 24 year old guy trying to recreate the sound of a nine year old album. It didn't do anything here but got to number 3 in the U.S.
"Should've Known Better ", the next single, is particularly infuriating because it's such an obvious rip-off of one of the eighties' best singles, Don Henley's The Boys of Summer . It's all there , the same tempo, upfront drum track, plaintive vocal and very similar guitar work in the middle eight. However, Richard doesn't attempt to replicate Henley's exquisite lyric about baby boomer disillusionment - probably he didn't understand it - and instead serves up a string of cliches as he reproaches a lost love . It's unbearable and I'm going to have to run to "the original" to wash out the taste.
I only know Marx by his subsequent hit "Hazard", and when I cued this up I didn't quite see the "Boys of Summer" link. But when the vocals started - you're right on the money. That someone so vapid scored a decent run of huge hits in the US says a lot about the corporate pop industry!
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