Old Music Friday: 3/14/85

"Back in Stride," Maze featuring Frankie Beverly (No. 95, peaked at No. 88)
If you're any kind of pop chart geek, you're already well aware of the many ways in which racism drew a hard, artificial line between pop and R&B. In rock's infancy, it was common for white acts to record (inevitably inferior) covers of R&B hits, and enjoy far higher chart placements; later, CHR program directors simply ignored most Black artists, holding their singles out of heavy rotation regardless of how popular they might have been on R&B stations. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly were a perfect case in point: Between 1977 and 1993, they had more than 15 Top 20 songs on the R&B chart, but their biggest Hot 100 hit was "Feel That You're Feelin'," which peaked at No. 67 in 1979.

"Back in Stride," the leadoff single from 1985's Can't Stop the Love, is a particularly egregious example of pop stations ignoring Maze — the song was a No. 1 R&B hit, and listening to it now, I can't think of a single good reason for it to peter out at No. 88 on the pop chart. This is a terrific song, and it's funky as fuck in a perfectly 1985 way. Millions of white kids would have roller-skated their asses off to this if they'd only been given the chance.

(I'm embedding the full album version rather than the single edit, because it rules.)

"'Til My Baby Comes Home," Luther Vandross (No. 90, peaked at No. 29)
Of course, right after I get on my high horse and yell about how racist the pop charts were, here comes one of the small handful of Black artists who managed to make his way past the gate on a semi-regular basis. Although Luther Vandross definitely had an up and down relationship with the Top 40 — particularly during the earlier years of his career as a solo recording artist — he started making inroads with his first single, "Never Too Much," and when he released 1985's The Night I Fell in Love, he was coming off a No. 27 hit with "How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye," a duet with Dionne Warwick.

Luther was good about ping-ponging between ballads and uptempo numbers (sometimes within the space of the same single — I'm looking at you, "The Power of Love/Love Power"), and he did that here, serving up an uptempo number co-written with Marcus Miller as a chaser after "How Many Times." As an added bonus, the song features Billy Preston on organ. There is absolutely no reason to argue with this song.