 | Pink HousesJohn (Cougar) Mellencamp |
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DavesMusicDatabase.com is devoted to ranking, rating, and reviewing music of all genres and eras. The DMDB blog serves up album and song reviews, best-of lists, music history snapshots, and music-related essays.
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Saturday, October 29, 1983
John Mellencamp “Pink Houses” charted
Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton hit #1 with “Islands in the Stream”
 | Islands in the StreamKenny Rogers & Dolly Parton |
Writer(s): Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb (see lyrics here) First Charted: August 27, 1983 Peak: 12 US, 12 CB, 2 RR, 14 AC, 12 CW, 7 UK, 12 CN, 11 AU, 8 DF (Click for codes to singles charts.) Sales (in millions): 4.0 US, 0.6 UK, 4.7 world (includes US + UK) Airplay/Streaming (in millions): 3.0 radio, 90.82 video, 204.05 streaming |
Awards:Click on award for more details.
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About the Song:The Bee Gees were one of the most successful acts of the 1970s, but by 1983 they were a relic of the then-passe disco era. Had anyone bet the trio would ever again top the U.S. pop charts – much less the country charts – any sensible person would have taken that bet. Those people would have lost – kind of. Even at their peak, Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb wrote for others, including #1 songs for Yvonne Elliman, Samantha Sang, Frankie Valli, and their brother Andy. In the 1980s, they wrote Barbra Streisand’s #1 pop hit “Woman in Love” (1980) and the #1 adult contemporary hit “Heartbreaker” for Dionnne Warwick (1982). Their most successful non-Bee Gees song, however, was “Islands in the Stream,” a #1 pop, country, and adult contemporary hit for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. The tune, whose title came from a 1970 Ernest Hemingway story, would be the last country song to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 17 years, when Lonestar hit #1 with “Amazed.” SF Rogers had been interested in working with Barry Gibb a couple of years earlier. He envisioned recording a duets album singing with Gibb, Parton, Willie Nelson, and others. While that project didn’t work out, Rogers still kept Gibb in mind and when he was looking for a new collaborator, he tapped him as the producer for his first album on the RCA label. FB The resulting Eyes That See in the Dark album was introduced with the single “Islands in the Stream,” a song originally written in an R&B style for Marvin Gaye. WK It was the first time Rogers and Parton worked together, but both had plenty of success on their own. Both artists had topped the country charts multiple times and each had hit #1 on the pop charts in 1980 – Rogers with “Lady” and Parton with “9 to 5.” It ended up the only song in 1983 to be certified platinum. FB It also won the American Music Award for Best Country Single and the Academy of Country Music’s Single of the Year and Vocal Duet of the Year. In 2005, it topped CMT’s poll of the best country duets of all time. WK Resources:
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First posted 3/21/2020; last updated 10/29/2022. |
Sunday, October 23, 1983
John Cougar Mellencamp Uh-Huh released
Uh-Huh |
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Released: October 23, 1983 Peak: 9 US, 92 UK, 9 CN, 57 AU, 13 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): 3.30 US, -- UK, 3.30 world (includes US and UK) Genre: classic rock |
Tracks:Click on a song title for more details.
Total Running Time: 32:59 |
Rating: 4.127 out of 5.00 (average of 16 ratings)
Quotable:“His first terrific album.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic.comAwards:(Click on award to learn more).
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About the Album“Since American Fool illustrated that John Cougar was becoming an actual songwriter, it’s only proper that he reclaimed his actual last name, Mellencamp, for the follow-up, Uh-Huh. After all, now that he had success, he wanted to be taken seriously, and Uh-Huh reflects that in its portraits of brokenhearted life in the Midwest and its rumbling undercurrent of despair. Although his lyrics still have the tendency to be a little too vague, they are more effective here than ever before, as is his music; he might not have changed his style at all – it’s still a fusion of the Stones and Springsteen – except that he now knows how to make it his own.” AM“Uh-Huh runs out of steam toward the end, but the first half…makes the record his first terrific album.” AM The album kicks off with “Crumblin’ Down,” a “dynamic rocker” AM that became Mellencamp’s third top-10 hit. It’s followed by “Pink Houses,” Mellencamp’s “best protest song” AM and another top-10 hit. He also delivers “the melancholy ‘Warmer Place to Sleep’.” AM and “Jackie O,” a songwriting collaboration with John Prine.
The SongsHere’s a breakdown of the individual songs. |
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Crumblin’ DownJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp, George Green Released: 10/15/1983 (single), Uh-Huh (1983) B-Side: “Golden Gates” First Charted: 10/7/1983 Peak: 9 BB, 8 CB, 8 GR, 6 RR, 2 AR, 9 CN, 5 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 16.38 streaming About the Song:John Mellencamp kicked off his seventh album, Uh-Huh, with “the dynamic rocker Crumblin’ Down.” AM With its “kidding cynicism” AZ the song became his third top-ten hit on the Billboard Hot 100 after the success of “Hurts So Good” (#2) and “Jack and Diane” from previous album, American Fool.
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Pink HousesJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp (see lyrics here) Released: 12/10/1983 (single), 3/17/1984 (B-side of “Authority Song”), Uh-Huh (1983) B-Side: “Serious Business” First Charted: 10/29/1983 Peak: 8 BB, 12 CB, 8 GR, 9 RR, 3 AR, 15 CN, 69 AU, 1 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- US, -- UK, -- world (includes US + UK) Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 27.50 video, 125.46 streaming |
Awards:(Click on award to learn more).
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About the Song:John Mellencamp “perfected his angry-young-populist-meets-the-Rolling-Stones sound and persona” DM with “Pink Houses.” He’d struggled to find his sound early in his career before going “back to his Midwestern roots for the American Fool album” TC in 1982. With the #2 hit “Hurts So Good” and the chart-topping “Jack and Diane,” Mellencamp suddenly achieved superstardom.With the follow-up album, Uh-Huh, he chalked up another top-ten, platinum seller buoyed by a couple more top-ten-hits (“Crumblin’ Down” and “Pink Houses”). Mellencamp’s small-town Indiana heartland vibe was coming out even stronger. He “made it all right to be comfortable with middle-class America. He was not complacent, however.” TC He managed to write “a letter-perfect description” DM of “a part of a country long infested by the Ku Klux Klan” DM where “blacks are unknown” DM and “unwelcome.” DM He explained how the song was inspired, saying “I…saw this old man early in the morning, sitting on the porch of his pink shack with a cat in his arms. He waved and I waved back.” TC The result was a song about the American dream and how all Americans have a right to that dream. He took a “stand on behalf of the common man’s aspirations in the face of many obstacles” SS and made it perfectly respectable for the average American to simply dream of finding a place to settle down and call his own, “little pink houses for you and me.” |
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Authority SongJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp Released: 3/17/1984 (single), Uh-Huh (1983) B-Side: “Pink Houses” First Charted: 2/18/1984 Peak: 15 BB, 12 CB, 14 GR, 12 RR, 15 AR, 3 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 57.01 streaming |
Awards:(Click on award to learn more).
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About the Song:John Mellencamp always had a certain brash anti-authority vibe about him and truly embraced it on “Authority Song,” the third single from his Uh-Huh album. It gave him another top-20 hit after he’d had top=10 success with the album’s previous singles “Crumblin’ Down” and “Pink Houses.”
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Warmer Place to SleepJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp, George Green Released: Uh-Huh (1983) Peak: 38 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 0.67 streaming |
Jackie OJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp, John Prine Released: Uh-Huh (1983) Peak: 32 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 0.60 streaming About the Song:This was a rare songwriting collaboration for John Mellencamp. He wrote the bouncy, quirky “Jackie O” about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis with help from folk-rock songwriting legend John Prine. |
Play GuitarJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp, Larry Crane, Dan Ross Released: Uh-Huh (1983) First Charted: 2/4/1984 Peak: 28 AR, 3 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 8.55 streaming About the Song:“With his Stonesy band crackling behind him, the newly minted superstar also shows that he gets the joke of his ‘serious business’” AZ on “the garage rocker Play Guitar,” AM “which might have been the album’s fourth hit single if not for its admonition to ‘forget all about that macho shit.’” AZ |
Serious BusinessJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp Released: 12/10/1983 (B-side of “Pink Houses”), Uh-Huh (1983) First Charted: 12/8/1984 Peak: 34 AR, 9 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 0.74 streaming About the Song:It wasn’t a single, but became a minor hit at album rock radio, giving Mellencamp five songs from Uh-Huh to reach that chart. The “serious business” in question is none other than “sex and violence and rock and roll.” |
Lovin’ Mother fo YaJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp Released: Uh-Huh (1983) Peak: 38 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 0.44 streaming |
Golden GatesJohn Cougar Mellencamp |
Writer(s): John Mellencamp Released: 10/15/1983 (B-side of “Crumblin’ Down”), Uh-Huh (1983) Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, 0.47 streaming |
Resources/References:
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First posted 1/20/2009; last updated 2/15/2026. |
Friday, October 21, 1983
Olivia Newton-John “Twist of Fate” released
 | Twist of FateOlivia Newton-John |
Writer(s): Peter Beckett, Steve Kipner (see lyrics here) Released: October 21, 1983 First Charted: November 4, 1983 Peak: 5 US, 5 CB, 4 RR, 57 UK, 4 CN, 4 AU, 1 DF (Click for codes to singles charts.) Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 12.28 video, -- streaming |
Awards:Click on award for more details. 
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About the Song:As a teenager, my two favorite acts were Styx and Olivia Newton-John – a point reflected when I started doing personal weekly charts in 1982. The next year, Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” became my longest-running #1 (12 weeks) in the roughly ten years I maintained my charts. By year’s end, Olivia came close with “Twist of Fate” logging 10 weeks atop my charts. The only other song to surpass it was 1985’s “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears (11 weeks). Over time, “Twist of Fate” hasn’t maintained the same lofty status as “Mr. Roboto” and “Head Over Heels,” which still rank in my top 100 songs of all time. It still appears in my Grand Library (my top 1000 of all time), but has been surpassed by some half-dozen other Olivia songs, including “Physical,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks, “Magic” and “Xanadu” from the Xanadu soundtrack (my first cassette), and “Heart Attack,” a #3 hit on Billboard from Olivia’s 1982 greatest-hits set. Because of the monstrous success of 1978’s Grease movie and soundtrack, fans were eager to see stars Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta together again. The 1983 Two of a Kind movie paired the two in a romantic fantasy crime comedy film in which they have to show compassion for one another in order to delay God’s judgment upon Earth. If it sounds like the makings of a flop, it was. The soundtrack, however, was a success, selling a million copies on the strength of the top-5 hit “Twist of Fate” and top-40 hit “Livin’ in Desperate Times." The synthesizer-driven, rock-oriented material was in keeping with the direction Olivia’s music had been going, but it was a long way away from her ‘70s fare which drew much of its appeal from adult-contemporary and country radio listeners. “Twist of Fate” came about when Peter Beckett, who wrote and sang the #1 hit “Baby Come Back” by Player, was writing with Steve Kipner and got a call from Olivia’s manager needing an uptempo song for Two of a Kind. They wrote lyrics to suit the movie, specifically referencing the twist that brings Olivia and John Travolta’s characters back together after their initial meeting. SF Resources:Related Links:
First posted 8/6/2022. |
Friday, October 14, 1983
Cyndi Lauper released She’s So Unusual
| First posted 5/30/2008; updated 11/26/2020. |
She’s So Unusual |
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Released: October 14, 1983 Charted: December 24, 1983 Peak: 4 US, 16 UK, 12 CN, 3 AU Sales (in millions): 6.0 US, 0.1 UK, 16.0 world (includes US and UK) Genre: pop |
Tracks: Song Title (Writers) [time] (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts.
Total Running Time: 38:42 |
Rating: 4.114 out of 5.00 (average of 16 ratings)
Quotable: “One of the great new wave/early MTV records.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide Awards: (Click on award to learn more).
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About the Album: “If Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual evokes memories dominated mostly by her cartoonish image, then try to get over it so you can pay attention to the music.” BB “The title of Lauper’s debut isn't self-deprecating or even self-parodying; it’s self-congratulatory. Listen to it again, and you'll find this pleasure to be far from guilty.” BB The album is “one of the great new wave/early MTV records,” STE “a giddy mix of self-confidence, effervescent popcraft, unabashed sentimentality, subversiveness, and clever humor. In short, it’s a multifaceted portrait of a multifaceted talent, an artist [who’s] far more clever than her thin, deliberately girly voice would indicate.” STE “Her vocals have an impish quality, but there’s also tremendous strength, articulation, and nuance.” BB This album “captured her persona better than anyone could imagine.” STE It is especially impressive how much Lauper’s personality comes through when one realizes how many of these songs are covers, including All Through the Night (Jules Shear), Money Changes Everything (Bad Brains), When You Were Mine (Prince), and even a song from the 1929s, He’s So Unusual (Helen Kane). Most impressively, however, is how Lauper doesn’t just put her stamp on Robert Hazard’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun, but makes it her defining song. “Lauper’s voice suits her musical persona, since its chirpiness adds depth, or reconfigures the songs whether it’s the call to arms of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ or the tearjerking Time After Time.” STE The former went top 10 in 19 countries and hit #1 in 10 countries. WK while the latter hit the top ten in 15 countries. WK “Time” has been covered by everyone from Everything But the Girl to Miles Davis, “if you need further proof of her credibility.” BB The front half of the album is dominated by the singles whether it be the “longing” BB “All Through the Night” or “intense” BB She Bop. Lauper became the first female singer to land four top 5 singles from one album on the Billboard Hot 100. WK Unusual “is astonishing in its consistency, so strong that it makes the remaining tracks – all enjoyable, but rather pedestrian – charming by their association with songs so brilliantly alive.” STE “The instrumental arrangements are quite inventive and rich, and although the musicality is pointedly ‘80s, the album sounds more winsome than dated.” BB The only problem is “when a debut captures a personality so well, let alone a personality so tied to its time, the successive work can’t help but pale in comparison. Still, when it’s captured as brightly and brilliantly as it is here, it does result in a debut that retains its potency, long after its production seems a little dated.” STE Not surprisingly, Lauper won the Best New Artist Grammy. She also took home the prize for Best Recording Package and earned nominations for Album of the Year, Record of the Year (“Girls”), Song of the Year (“Time”), and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (“Girls”). “Girls” was also named Best Female Video of the Year by MTV and was nominated for Video of the Year. Notes: The 2000 reissue adds live versions of “Money Changes Everything,” “She Bop,” and “All Through the Night.” |
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