STUDS #4💪: Let's Dance!
Grab your boogie shoes and join me and guest collaborator Jackie Ralston on the dance floor!
Hi Wormheads!
Before I get to this fourth special installment of STUDS, I want to share the results of STUDS #3: Automatic.
In the immortal words of Aretha and Annie, sisters are doing it for themselves! With an assist from you, The Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic” steamrolled the competition. Jessie Ware followed with a respectable 21 percent of the vote.
This week, I am thrilled to announce my very first STUDS guest collaborator! Let’s all give a hearty welcome to Jackie Ralston, the writer of the always exciting and surprising Music of the Day newsletter. Like me, Jackie is also a huge Rush fan, which is how we first connected, a couple of years back.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of Jackie’s writing is her witty, prolific use of footnotes. I am happy to share that this skill/talent will be utilized here as well!
Jackie: Thank you, Steve, and especially for your kind words regarding MotD.1
My memory is that your writing about earworms really connected with me, and then our paths crossed in the comments on a post at Lara’s One a Day Rush newsletter. That was a fun project!
Even though there have been just a few so far, I’m really enjoying your STUDS series, so when you remarked that you’d “love a guest curator,” I was immediately interested. How a STUDS collab might work intrigued me almost as much as the possibility of interesting musical explorations. The dance between coauthors to choose a title, select the songs, write it up, etc. It’s an opportunity too fun to miss. That thought2 was the seed that blossomed into our theme and title for this collab: Let’s Dance.
Steve: I love this STUDS choice! I was familiar with only one of our chosen contestants’ versions of “Let’s Dance” prior to assembling this post. Discovery is the name of the game here!
Which is the main reason that we are leaving out the obvious choice here, as everyone surely knows David Bowie’s version from his 1983 classic album by the same name. I’m including it at the end of the playlist (along with a couple of bonus tracks) to encourage you to check it out!
Jackie: Yep! It’s a great tune, but it’s more fun to explore other music. So what about you, Steve? Are you happier as a literal or metaphorical dancer?3
Steve: As a shy kid, I was deathly afraid of the dance floor. I never went to school dances or the prom. There was one exception, though, which I wrote about a couple of years ago, in an earworm essay about Joe Jackson’s “Happy Loving Couples.” The song is more about convincing oneself that it’s perfectly fine not to have a romantic partner, but it inspired me to find my own dancing voice by, in the words of Billy Idol, “Dancing With Myself.”
Now I dance with myself all the time. And with others if they happen to be nearby.
I started hosting Zoom dance parties during the pandemic and still do that a couple of times a year.
I used to do step aerobics4 at the gym and even taught the class for a couple of weeks when the teacher was on vacation! So my dance repertoire tends to incorporate aerobics-inspired movement.
Jackie: Barely into this column and the earworms are wriggling—gotta love it! And it’s neat that you got into step aerobics; it looks like fun. Like you, I was shy and very self-conscious about dancing, which didn’t improve when I took a ballroom dance course with my then-husband. ‘Nuff said. Shall we waltz over to our STUDS contenders?
Steve: Let’s dance!
Here’s the playlist of the songs for both Spotify and YouTube, so you can hear them all back to back.
STUD #1: Chris Montez
Steve: This is the one song I think I knew before. Chris Montez was an early rock and roll star in the early 1960s. “Let’s Dance” hit #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962.
He had toured with Sam Cooke, The Platters, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. From the Beatles Encyclopedia (2000)5, it says that The Beatles opened for Montez, to which Montez commented, “Who are these guys, The Beatles? I try to keep up with the British scene, but I don’t know their work.”
Jackie: Great first choice, Steve. I don’t know how I didn’t know about him before.
STUD #2: Benny Goodman
Jackie: Confession time: I let out a big whoop when I saw Benny Goodman near the top of my search results. He’s one of the masters of swing. My parents may have had this song on an album, but I don’t recall hearing it before.
Steve: I’m sure I’ve heard this, as it was Goodman’s opening theme to his live performances for more than 50 years. IMO, you can’t go wrong with any Benny Goodman. Little-known fact: Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame was Benny’s illegitimate son.
Another little-known fact: It’s never good to trust me with little-known facts.
STUD #3: West Street Mob
Steve: This 1981 dance jam from the iconic Sugar Hill label reached #22 on the dance chart and #57 on the Billboard Black Albums chart. It’s literally impossible not to dance to this one. Like the song says (in classic vocoder style), “Shake your pants and dance.”
Jackie: Horns + vocoder = yum. My body’s moving!
STUD #4: Vanessa Hudgens
Jackie: Shall we polka into the confessional box? The video for this song made me laugh, because the first thing that came to mind was that it could be in a Weird Al polka medley, like “Polkarama!”
Steve: Now I can’t watch or listen to any songs from High School Musical without seeing Weird Al in every singing role.
STUD #5: Little River Band
Jackie: An interesting find. This song didn’t make it on any of their albums, but it must have been popular in concert, because Little River Band included it on the 1980 live album, Live in America. Not one of their strongest tunes in my opinion, but I used to adore their tight harmonies and songcraft, and it’s good to be reminded of them.
Steve: I’m a huge LRB fan. I would put “Cool Change” in my top-20 songs of all-time list. No comment on this live-only track. I’m hoping it gets some votes. Let’s just say that there’s probably a reason they didn’t include it on any studio albums.
Jackie: Steve, thank you so much for being such a gracious host and for cutting a rug with me. I’m eager to see what your readers decide is the best of these songs.
Steve: It’s been amazing to have you, Jackie! And if anyone else wants to be a guest curator/collaborator, let me know, and we will make it happen!
I feel I must end this, though, with an actual image of me dancing. And not by myself. And not only with others, but on television!
A local San Francisco TV Station, KOFY, hosts an American Bandstand-style themed dance party show. Twelve years ago, a bunch of friends and I stood in line for three hours to be part of an ’80s-themed show. I found a pair of shiny silver pants, a multi-colored speckled tank top, a skinny red tie, and a mullet wig, and tapped into my inner extrovert.
The show even used a photo featuring me for their promotional materials! I had a copy of the show at one point and was hoping to include it, but alas, I couldn’t find it. I think the song I was dancing to was Kool Moe Dee’s “I Go To Work.”
Don’t forget to vote for your favorite track!
Are there other “Let’s Dance” songs that should have made the poll? Bonus songs from Miley Cyrus and The Adicts are available in the playlists.
Come subscribe to Jackie Ralston’s Music of the Day newsletter! So much great tuneage and stories!
It’s a weird little corner of the Musicstack space.
At the risk of losing what little music cred I might have, I confess it took me a while to realize the dance metaphor provided a perfect STUDS title.
Whether in the dark or not
No, there is no video of me doing this. But here’s an example of Step Aerobics. I was tempted to see if AI could create a video of me doing aerobics, but I already lose enough subscribers as it is. https://youtube.com/shorts/vOc2vWEj-yQ?si=p0eHm1KizxZN5HJE
https://www.vitalsource.com/products/the-beatles-encyclopedia-kenneth-womack-v9798216052012?duration=180&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=VST%20Tier%20Two%20ShoppingGoogle-US&msclkid=fd5a39da33c01aaa569b53d8625ac216
Great collab. I had only heard the first two before. But LRB won me over in the end.
Loved this, collab, Jackie and Steve. We need a STUD that brings Rush in (In the Mood?)!!! I went with the West Street Mob. That is a great jam. And Steve, you may have inspired me to tell the most embarrassing and kind of awesome story at some point about dancing!