Billy Squier - "Lonely Is The Night"
1981
Not many charting rockers had a weirder, yet at-times brilliant, run of genre-hopping songs than Billy Squier did in the first half of the eighties. He started off his chart success with a novelty song embraced by hard rockers, "The Stroke" (which is pretty much a remake of his embraced-by-hip-hoppers "The Big Beat" from his debut album.) Then he cleaned up this same song, inserted lyrics that actually made sense, and presto: "My Kinda Lover." (We shouldn't overlook that middle word. Is the lover his type of lover or is she "sorta, kinda" his lover? Maybe an on-the-sly romance?)
"Everybody Wants You" had the #2 revving-motorcycle sound of 1982 (after Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue") plus A-plus finger snapping - almost always an indicator of pop greatness. And the song never ever quits, three minutes and forty-seven seconds of riffing exuberance. "Emotions in Motion" was slinky suburban funk, topping Queen at their own suburban-funk game at the time, and it opened with whistling - almost always an indicator of pop greatness. "She's A Runner" was uniquely a non-ballady power ballad.
And then around the time that he was outed (falsely, as we learned) with his appearance in the "Rock Me Tonite" video, he turned in one of the finest singles of the summer of 1984: "All Night Long". Which is a remarkable feat, as THE SUMMER OF 1984 WAS THE GREATEST SUMMER OF SONGS IN MY LIFETIME.
"Lonely Is The Night" wasn't a single and hence didn't chart like the above songs, but it was an AOR smash in '81. More importantly, it stands as one of the best fake Zeps of the early eighties. It handles the heavy, crashing, thunderous side (complete with the well-timed pauses that Zeppelin mastered) of Led Zepdom as well as Zebra would handle the lighter, folksy side. (Next week's tune? Perhaps…) Like I said, "Lonely Is The Night" wasn't a single, but that's no excuse why it was left off of the first-half awesome Squier anthology 16 Strokes. It's almost like the recording industry wanted to go out of business.