For this review of the many inane things locked in my head, we’re going to focus on lyric content and not titles or artists. To set some parameters, most of these songs are from the 70s and 80s. (Sorry, younger folks. You’ll discover as you get older that it’s easy to remember things from the days when you were fresh and dewy. Once you hit the downhill slope of bodily and mental decay, well, the mind simply refuses to accept new intel without a considerable amount of truculence.)
Fair warning, regardless of age: This challenge is a bit tough, so don’t be blue if none of this makes any sense to you. (“Tomorrow is another day,” paraphrased Scarlett O’Hara, as she flopped around in that turnip field or whatever the hell it was.) This lark is not meant as a means of validation in any way, but rather as a bit of whimsy on a late Friday night.
1. In Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana”, who was the victim of the “single gunshot”, Tony or Rico?
2. In Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen”, what did we cheat ourselves at?
3. What did Tony Orlando and Dawn want us to tie a yellow ribbon around? (Bonus question: How many people were in this musical “group”?)
4. In Vicki Lawrence’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”, a big-bellied sheriff got his gun and said what?
5. What can Sammy Hagar not drive?
6. In Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”, she tumbles out of bed and stumbles to the kitchen to pour herself a cup of what?
7. In Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon”, what three colors does Boy George keep repeating until you want to claw your face?
8. In Wham’s “Careless Whisper”, George Michael’s guilty feet have got no what?
9. In The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”, what was the female singer working as when she first met the male singer?
10. In The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat”, where does Belinda Carlisle tell us to jump?
11. According to one of Belinda’s singles, once she ditched the other Go-Go’s, where is heaven?
12. Billy Ocean wants you to get out of his dreams and get into what?
13. According to Michael Hutchence of INXS, what does every single one of us have inside?
14. According to Wang Chung, what should everybody have tonight?
15. Pharmaceuticals aside, Robert Palmer was addicted to what?
16. According to Jim Kerr of “Simple Minds”, what should we not forget about? (Bonus question and possible clue: Name the 1985 John Hughes movie that made this song into a huge hit.)
17. According to John Cougar Mellencamp in “Jack and Diane”, what goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone?
18. In REO Speedwagon’s “Take It on the Run”, what was “Baby” accused of doing, according to a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another?
19. In Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”, the dearly beloved have gathered here today to get through this thing called what? (Hint: The answer here is the same answer as one of the above queries.)
20. In “Only the Good Die Young”, Billy Joel would rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the what?”
Please do not scroll past the photo of Cleo the Cat, once again bored out of her mind because her daddies are not doing enough to entertain her, unless you are prepared to see the answers.
1. Tony
2. Solitaire
3. The ole oak tree. (Bonus question: Three.) Bonus trivia: On “The Carol Burnett Show”, the cast spoofed the group as Tony Tallahassee and Dusk, singing “Wrap Your Jammies Round the Old White Pine.”
4. “Why’dya do it?” (“Why did you do it?” is also acceptable, for the grammar purists out there.) Bonus trivia: Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” knocked Vicki Lawrence’s “Georgia” out of the top spot on the Billboard charts in 1973.
5. 55
6. Ambition
7. Red, gold and green. (If you’re bored, here’s a link to my snarky review of the video.)
8. Rhythm. (Trivia: George swore this song was about a girl. Uh huh. Yeah, I told those lies, too.)
9. Waitress in a cocktail bar. (Personal trivia note: I know the male singer is Philip Oakey. I have no idea what the name of the female singer is/was, even though I was a Human League fanatic during my younger years. Then again, I’ve always paid more attention to the guys than the girls, so to speak.)
10. Back
11. A place on earth
12. My car. (Beep beep, yeah.)
13. The devil
14. Fun
15. Love
16. Me. (Bonus question: “The Breakfast Club”.) Bonus trivia: Jim Kerr almost didn’t want to make this song because, paraphrasing here, “it didn’t sound like any of our other stuff”. Dude, I bought your next three albums after this, so shut the hell up. I think the popularity worked out okay for you. More bonus trivia: Kerr was married to Chrissie Hynde of “The Pretenders” when this song came out.
17. Life
18. Messin’ around
19. Life
20. Saints
Previously published, no changes made. Please share your thoughts in the comments. I’m not so much interested in the number of questions you managed to decipher correctly (although I will be majorly impressed if you got most of them), but I’m more intrigued by the memories that might have been triggered.
Categories: Music
Bonnywood Manor 
Just filling a little gap for you, re. #9. The brunette was Joanne Catherall and the blonde was Susanne Sulley. They both had relationships with Oakey, though apparently not at the same time. Allegedly…
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Thanks for the gap fill. The names instantly rang a bell, proving that my mind, which was once razor sharp, is now nothing but a slurry of fractured memories… 😉
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You’re welcome. Your mind sounds similar to mine…
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Nope, they didn’t ring any bells with me. I definitely only paid attention to the guys.
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What, Phil Oakey and his weird hairstyle? I thought Susanne was gorgeous 😊
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Well, I was ‘in love’ with Adam Ant and several members of Duran Duran, so draw your own conclusions … !
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You and countless others at that time, I imagine 😊
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As usual you and I are on the same wavelength, I knew all but #2. I will however damn you for the Barry Manilow memory of my mother dancing around the kitchen pretending to be Lola from Copacabana. It was not a good look for her.
🥴
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The damning is fully deserved, as it’s very possible that I was the one who choreographed your mother’s dance moves. (We were tight, back in the day, mmm hmm.) But I can’t be held responsible for her actual performance. I show the birds how to fly and I set them free… 😉
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I have no doubt you two were thick as thieves. She would have loved you…badly executed dance moves et al.
💕
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Now that was a trip down memory lane. I may not remember all those little details, but I do remember the songs. They were the sound track to life back then. To busy mature student days when I didn’t have time between classes and work to get deeply invested in music but the tunes would still find me.
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“Sound track to life” is exactly right. One thing about those days it that we basically all listened to the same songs, as we only had radio, and only certain songs made it ON the radio. Now? Anyone can put out a song on so many different platforms that many of us never hear the same things…
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So true. I hardly ever listen to music any more. These days I like the sounds of silence. 😜
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Amazing song choices. Now I have multiple earworms!
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But they’re GOOD earworms, yes?
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Over half right… that was fun!
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Bonnywood is all about the fun. And random trivia… 😉
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Sigh. Love it or hate it, the 80’s was my decade, and you definitely sent me off on a retrospective. So young, and as you put it, dewy. I knew the answers to all of these!
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Kudos on your perfect score! I love the music from the 80s. (Well, most of it.) To me, it was an explosion of creativity, with artists branching out in all directions and trying new things. (Some things worked, some things did not.) “Current” music all sounds the same to me, which is probably an over-generalization, but there’s just not much variety, in my eyes and ears…
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I got nineteen out of twenty, and I wasn’t even trying. J.
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Good on ya. Some of the questions were not all that easy, unless you’re someone like me who is obsessed with trivia, retaining nuggets of nothingness for decades but not remembering if I turned off the coffee maker this morning…
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That is exactly how my mind works. Like you, I can even remember the link between “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” and “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” But I stand in the shower trying to remember whether I already shampooed my hair. J.
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Seriously, I just had that SAME experience with the shampoo in the shower. Granted, I was heavily invested in singing a showtune at the time, so I was somewhat-justifiably distracted, but still. I suddenly couldn’t remember if I had shampooed, so I did a manual inspection, only to discover that the conditioner was already on my head. I had blanked out on TWO different applications. It was a humbling experience…
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Ah, now that brought back a few lovely musical memories back; misty coloured memories of the pop we heard. (Red gold and green.) Some great old tunes, some long lived lyrics. (Red gold and green.) Some unforgettable moments of Happy Days, when tomorrow was years away and today was all that mattered and you danced, oh, you danced and danced to that same special song that personally spoke just to you- oh how you danced, on and on, up and up with a pharmaceutically enhanced joy in your heart. (Red green and gold.) Un-for-frikkin’-gettable golden moments- red green and golden moments that pinged and wringed ’round your head till someone ripped the MTV from the wall socket.
Oh, by the way, as for number seven, just in passing, I agree with your critique of Culture Clubs endlessly painful refrain. Zip it George.
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First, terrific comment, working in the song lyrics and such. You take my breath away.
Second, Boy Girl does need to zip it, but “Karma Chameleon” is not his greatest Repetition Outrage. That dubious honor goes to “Miss Me Blind”, wherein he warbles “I know you’ll miss me” at least 400 times. I can distinctly remember a certain evening in my college days, with several of us lounging in a dorm room, and somebody popped in a Culture Club cassette. We decided it would be great fun to count the number of times La Diva did the deed. At the end of the song, we were so emotionally scarred by the constant deluge that we simply had to keep drinking our cheap, student-budget vodka. Not that we really needed an excuse to do so, but still…
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Yep, its no wonder the ‘shots’ game took off with such songs/TV shows. That ‘Miss Me Blind’ does repeat a tad, but then there is also ‘Sha Nah Nah Hey Hey Goodbye’ that sticks in the… mind after the first 5000 plays or so. Thank god this forgotten gem now lives on sporting arenas and in ice hockey rinks everywhere. Also student Vodka- only one step up from meths- that takes your vision away too, so ‘Miss Me Blind’ sorta ties in there too. Hows that for- yeah, I’ll say it- Karma?
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That is the saddest kitty I’ve ever seen.
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Trust, Cleo the Cat gets all the luxuries in life that she will ever need. She just gets upset when she isn’t the center of attention, and she resorts to dramatic poses until the spotlight swings back in her direction… 😉
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I did miserably, I’ve always thought I skipped the 70s and 80s musically.
Is that even possible?
Steady on, my friend.
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I’m sure you remember SOME songs from that time period. I just didn’t manage to find any of your personal triggers, which presents me with a challenge: Write a nostalgic music post that will speak to Sheila, personally. I’ll have my staff start searching the archives now for possibilities… 😉
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Solo comentar que la foto es de mi ciudad, Málaga (España) y que me encanta la música de los 80s
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I had to sing most of Copacabana. Even Barry Manilow asks “Who shot who?”
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Trust, I had to pull up the lyrics to make sure I was on the right path… 😉
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I didn’t know #s 1, 11, 13, 16, or 19.
Who is INXS? (13)…I didn’t listen to Prince (19)…and 15…wasn’t Robert Palmer looking for a new truck?…truck code name for some illegal substance maybe?
But…I sure knew all the other ones.
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Hey there!
To be fair, I retain an inordinate amount of trivia in my brain, so I didn’t really expect anybody to sail through this one.
As for Mr. Palmer, I would think he NEVER had to go looking for drugs. He had his people find them for him… 😉
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Oh! He was with Huey Lewis and the news! I looked up the song…um…sounds like he wanted a new drug that did everything but wash the dishes? Didn’t mention a truck though.
I was watching Longmire the other night and a deep, sexy voiced man started singing “the whole world’s sitting on a chicken farm” as the camera panned over acres and acres of pristine land. Now, I haven’t been grocery shopping in…well…a long time, but I hear eggs are about as much as a house payment, so a chicken farm made sense. Plant a chicken farm and make your own eggs.
I looked up the song and couldn’t find anything close, so I asked Siri. He sent me to somebody called “houses.” Wasn’t the right song.
So I kept looking. Ah! Found it. Sadly, the whole world is actually sitting on a “ticking bomb.” Oh well…so much for mis-heard lyrics.
(Don’t even ask about my “Hockabo” song. 🥴
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These are really good questions! I had to hum/sing my way through most of them to arrive at the answer…but even then I didn’t get a stellar score. Oh well! It was fab to revisit some of these tunes.
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Trust, I was humming and singing as well as I put this together. (And I spent an inordinate amount of time watching the related music videos on YouTube. For research purposes, of course.) And the score is never important. It’s always all about the journey…
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Wow. What fun is this? I had no idea on any of these.
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I most assuredly had fun putting this together. Then again, I have a VERY questionable obsession with trivia, going all the way back to my days as a wee bairn. I’m sure my mother was thinking “we have GOT to find this boy another hobby…” 😉
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You must clean up at pub trivia.
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