Top 95 of 1985 list offers glimpse into heartland rock time capsule

So, while looking for something else in a box in the basement recently, I came across an odd artifact: A dot-matrix printout of “KGGO’s Top 95 of 1985.” For those who didn’t grow in Des Moines, that means it is a list of what were deemed the 95 best songs of 1985 by Des Moines’ best album-oriented rock radio station, KGGO (it’s now dubbed “Classic Rock that ROCKS,” mostly because it froze its playlist around 1989.  Want proof? Right now as I write this on Tuesday night, they’re playing Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” That’s No. 7 on this list). These were probably the 95 songs (KGGO was at 95 on the FM dial) that received the most spins.

Here’s the top 10:

1. Money for Nothing – Dire Straights
2. Fortress Around Your Heart – Sting
3. Don’t You For Get About Me – Simple Minds
4. Everybody Wants to Rule the World – Tears for Fears
5. That Was Yesterday – Foreigner
6. One More Night – Phil Collins
7. Boys of Summer  - Don Henley
8. Lonely Ol’ Night – John Cougar Mellencamp
9. Power of Love – Huey Lewis and the News
10. Glory Days – Bruce Springsteen

It’s a fascinating list, in part because of the pop culture time capsule it provides, but also because it is a time capsule into my own formative years of music listening. 1985 is probably the last time I relied on the radio to provide the soundtrack to my day. I had been buying albums (yes, the big black slabs of vinyl) for a while at this point, of course, but that year and into the next is where you would mark the pretty clean break on the timeline of my life. You can thank the acquisition of two albums: The Replacements’ Tim and R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant the following year. Those two benchmarks, along with a handful of others, pushed me toward the need to hear my own music rather than be limited to what the local radio station deemed worthy of airplay. So, while I owned or taped from friends 15 of the albums from which some of these songs were pulled, the part of my collection not represented on a list like this from a Midwestern AOR station was growing.

I made the playlist below (which includes 10 of the top 11 because Foreigner’ “That Was Yesterday” wasn’t available) and found that listening to it took me right back to my teenage years. But it didn’t conjure nostalgia, but rather relief. If things had fallen a different way for me, I could still be living in Des Moines listening to KGGO (and, it’s clear, still hearing these songs). Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but I’m glad for the alternate course that found me constantly searching for new sounds, still able to enjoy many of the songs on this list despite the cheese factor that kept them from aging well (or, truth told, starting out very well).

A list today of my favorite music from 1985 would include things like Tim, R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction, the Minutemen’s 3-Way Tie for Last, Hoodoo Gurus’ Mars Needs Guitars and maybe Psychocandy from the Jesus and Mary Chain. But a lot of that was hindsight. If given the choice, I’d pick any of those over anything on this list. but if push comes to shove, there are still several songs here I wouldn’t turn off if they came on the radio. There’s a lot of Bruce Springsteen here, and I’ve always had a soft spot for Sting, Simple Minds, John Mellencamp, the Cars, Jon Fogerty and Hall and Oates. Some things I liked as a teenager are cringe-inducing now (I’m looking at you, Mr. Mister) while some bands I  ignored back then have become favorites (the mighty Cheap Trick).

So, 25 years on, here’s a snapshot of Midwestern rock ‘n’ roll. Here’s the list in full, and here’s a playlist from the top 10 (or so):