The 1981 Listening Post - Tommy Tutone - Tommy Tutone 2

 Tommy Tutone - Tommy Tutone 2

#404

September 23 1981

Tommy Tutone

2

Genre: Power Pop Rock

4 out of 5

Highlights:

867-5309/Jenny

Shadow on the Road Ahead

Which Man Are You

Only One

How did he get away with this? Movies, for eons, have had to use “555” as a prefix to avoid prank calling (and immediately escort you out of the reality of the movie) and yet, here’s Tommy providing the aural graffiti wall to every douche-nozzle who decided to ring this one up.

Did you? I never did. Is there someone out there with this number? Do they hate their lives? Do they enjoy the randos calling any time of day, month, year?

Here’s a tidbit: Tommy (Tutone) Heath did not write the monster hit. That was his guitarist, Jim Keller and Alex Call. 

Another bit of tid: Springsteen so obviously nicked this riff for his trash single “Radio Nowhere” that it started me on a real ire fest of the subject of Bruce. He followed it by ripping of a KISS riff for a song on Working on a Dream and just recently appeared in a “We should all find a way to the middle” Jeep commercial. Bruce doesn’t need the money and I’m not ready to reach across the aisle to normalize people who acted seditiously while wearing “Camp Aushwitz” t-shirts. I apologize for the politics but, I wouldn’t care what party it was, if they do that, they earn my anger. 

Which means I now hate Jeep.

And, although I will see him in concert, I declared that I would consider not this morning. 

Also, Keller should have sued Bruce. Bruce has Jeep money, man.

I want to smack them for sounding like John Mellencamp on “Shadow on the Road Ahead” but, I don’t think John had really refined his sound and they are already doing it better.

I don ’t think anyone really realizes how close Tommy Tutone flirts with southern rock. If they just committed to it, they probably could have been on the vanguard of that scene.  (“Which Man Are You” “No Way to Cry”)

There’s nothing bad on this record. I almost listed “Only One” as a highlight cuz, it’s a nifty little tune, too. In fact, the whole rekkid is an exemplar of well crafted late 70s/early 80s Power Pop. Screw it. Let’s add it!

https://music.apple.com/us/album/tommy-tutone-2/268543713

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