The 1980 Listening Post - Tommy Tutone - Tommy Tutone

Tommy Tutone - Tommy Tutone

#53

Reviewed by Craig Fitzgerald

February 17 1980

Tommy Tutone

Tommy Tutone

Allen’s Rating: 3 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 2 out of 5

Genre: Great Value Rick Springfield

Allen’s Highlights:

Angel Say No

Craig’s Highlights:

The Blame

Rachel

By Craig Fitzgerald

This entire album sounds like a bunch of rejected songs that the songwriters wanted to sell to bands like .38 Special, Greg Kihn and The Tubes. This whole record clocks in at 33 minutes 38 seconds. It felt like an hour and a half.

The opening track is a wildly forgettable song called "Angel Say No," which apparently hit number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 21, 1980, a week after my 12th birthday. It was beat out by such classics as Rupert Holmes's "Answering Machine," "Two Places at the Same Time" by Ray Parker and "We Were Meant to Be Lovers" by some band named Photoglo. 

Like every song on this record, "Cheap Date" has a decent opening riff and then dies when the lyrics come in. This song is a trainwreck. It begins with a guy asking some chick named June for a date, and ends with her father jumping six stories to his death. What is this even supposed to be?

"Girl in the Back Seat" includes the cringeworthy lyrics "There's a girl in the back seat/Goin' down slowly/Lookin' for the promised land/Do the roly-poly/Sally's on the see-saw/Johnny's actin' holy."

Ugh. Gross.

"The Blame" is one song that's not half bad, in that its lyrics don't sound like the script to a bad porno film. "Dancing Girl" has what might be the single most uninspiring bass solo ever committed to acetate. 

Almost every song on this record sounds like a collection of stuff sampled from other songs. The coda at the end of "Dancing Girl" is from "Talk You You Later" from the Tubes. The end of "What 'Cha Doin' to Me" is the same as the end of Link Wray's "Rumble." "Hide-Out"'s opening riff is put to much better effect 25 years later in the Soledad Brothers' "Teenage Heart Attack." "Am I Supposed To Lie" is an inverted "Jessie's Girl."

On the plus side, there's some really good rock and roll guitar playing by Jim Keller on this record, but it's surrounded by such shit it's easy to miss it. That, and Tommy Heath's unmistakable voice have to be the only reason this band got a second bite at stardom a year later.

https://open.spotify.com/album/1B04IYAKg68BlApikAIU9J?si=V46rx30iQ9ORVMobWQ7qOw