Katrina and the Waves - “Do You Want Crying”
1985
Heard “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves in 1985 driving up Highway 59 to my summer job at the Detroit Lakes Hardee’s. It was on Q-98 out of Fargo, my mid-eighties summer station where I heard a few nuggets outside of their standard hard rock/classic rock* fare that stuck with me over the years: REM’s “Can’t Get There From Here”, Russ Ballard’s “Voices”, The Call’s “I Still Believe (Great Design)”, Big Audio Dynamite’s “The Bottom Line” … sure a guy in the dorm once cracked that Q-98 just lifted the KQRS playlist, but damn it was my summer radio standby and was leagues better than any station I’d tune into when I returned to Grand Forks for school.
And yeah “Walking” is a cute little ditty — better than I recall from forty years ago — and destined to be put on an Eighties Fun Playlist. But then while tracking the Power Pop Essentials playlist on Apple Music, I heard the Waves’ “Do You Want Crying.” And yeah, this is the stuff: Great beat, ringing guitars, sparkling vocals. All over in the ideal 3.5 minutes and has an Everly Brothers reference to boot. If I ever make it to your eighties dance party and you play this, I might just have to tap my foot.
*Of course back then it wasn’t called “classic rock.” As my line goes: “I’m so old that when I was a kid, ‘classic rock’ was just called ‘rock.’”