Pour Some Sugar on Me Edition Part 1

Hey there, Hit Parade listeners! What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at once? The day it drops? Sign up for "Slate Plus." It supports not only this show, but all of Slates acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to Slate.com/HitParadePlus. You'll get to hear every Hit Parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus, hit parade the bridge, our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again, to join that Slate.com/HitParadePlus. Thanks! And now, please enjoy part one of this Hit Parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine. About the hits from coast to coast, I'm Chris Malanfee, Chart Analyst, Pop Critic, and writer of Slates Why is this song number one series. On today's show, 37 years ago, in March of 1988, British hard rock band Death Leopard were scoring the first top 10 American pop hit of their career. When hysteria, the title track from their latest smash album rose to number 10 on Billboard's Hot 100. Their breakthrough hit sounded sleek and polished. That same week on the pop chart, five spots higher and rising, was a more danceable, exuberant and very kitschy song by Trinidadian R&B singer Billy Ocean. It was his comeback to the charts after a string of mid 80s hits, and he was a couple of weeks away from scoring another number one. The punchy, knowingly silly name of the song at number five that week, get out of my dreams, get into my car. On the surface, these hits wouldn't seem to have much in common. The death leopard song was chiming hair metal with synth pop overtones. The Billy Ocean hit Clattery Dance Pop with Husky Soul Vocals, but both hits had the same sonic craftsman, their producer and co-writer, a man from South Africa who, over the course of the 1980s, was taking the British and now the American charts by storm. Born Robert John Lang, his friends and colleagues called him Mut Lang, and when it came to making hits, Mut was a pop star's secret weapon. These wouldn't be Lang's last hits of 1988, or the 80s, or indeed the next three decades, when artists across the genre spectrum wanted a hit that made fans throw their hands in the air they called in Mut. Even Mut Lang's power ballads were designed to get stadiums swaying and lighters waving. In addition to his hair metal, R&B and synth pop successes by the 90s, Mut was scoring on the country charts too, mostly through his partnership, professional and personal with country megastar Shinaya Twain. Twain's Twangie hits had Mut's signature stadium rocking qualities too. Today on Hit Parade, we will uncover as much as we can of the mystery man of pop production. Even as he was hiding from the media, Mut Lang's signature sound was taking over the radio. A crunching pumping sound he mined for hits from the 1980s deep into the 21st century. And it all started 45 years ago when Mut took the reins behind the boards for a Perial Australian band whose leader duck walked on stage in a schoolboy's uniform. All that band wanted was to rock a crowd. Mut Lang gave them a new way to command an arena and shake it all night long. And that's where your Hit Parade marches today. The week ending November 8, 1980, when you shook me all night long by ACDC peeked on the hot 100 at number 35. The first American top 40 hit for both the band and its producer Robert John Mut Lang. Mut would score many more hits across billboards charts, establishing himself as the author of an anthemic brand of global pop. Why did his sound work on so many charts? Join us as Mut Lang works his magic, pours some sugar and puts you back in black. We guarantee you'll get rocked. Stick around. Over the years Hit Parade has focused on several hit making producers who are so successful and larger than life they have the profile of front line artists. For example, Phil Spector, whom we've touched on in multiple episodes. The legendary wall of sound producer worked with everyone from the Ronets to Tina Turner to the righteous brothers. He even had a Christmas album named after him, 1963's "A Christmas Gift for You" from Phil Spector, packed with songs that are now holiday classics. Of course, the name Phil Spector is now also infamous. In 2021, Spector died in prison. Where he'd been incarcerated for a dozen years after being convicted for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Few legendary producers have quite such checkered histories. Many are more revered figures, such as the late Sir George Martin, who until recently held the record for most number ones among producers, thanks largely to his work, Manning the Boards for The Beatles. As well as later hit makers like 70s soft rockers America. As the unofficial fifth beatle Martin had a very public profile. So did Quincy Jones. We devoted a whole hip-a-rayed episode to the man known as Q, who was both a front line artist and a producer. Jones scored hits under his own name, like 1978's R&B Smash stuff like that. But Quincy was far more famous for producing everyone from Leslie. Gorg. Two, of course, Michael Jackson. Quincy was ahead of his time as a producer/artist. The hip-hop era has generated several producers who moved from the mixing board to the mic. We covered a trio of producers turned artists in a prior hit parade. The Virginia Beach polymaths, Forell Williams. Missy Elliott. And Timberland. You will recall disco band Sheik, whose leaders, Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards went from scoring their own hits to producing everyone from Madonna to Robert Palmer, Diana Ross to David Bowie. And Jack Antonoff, formerly of the band, Fun. He's produced a plethora of millennial and zoomer megastars like Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Vincent Kendrick Lamar, Lorde and Sabrina Carpenter. And yet Antonoff still finds time to release his own music as the band bleachers. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Max Martin, Swedish pop craftsman who recently beat Sir George Martin as the producer with the most number one hits. To be exact, Max now has 26 career hot 100 toppers versus Sir George's 23. Over more than a quarter century, as we noted in our Britney Spears episode of Hit Parade, Max has sprinkled his mathematically precise maximalist pop sound on modern classics from Britney and Backstreet Boys. Kelly Clarkson. And even The Weekend. So, there are many ways for producers to express their artistry through their own work and the work of others. But the subject of this hit parade episode, Mut Lang, both embodies these super producer tropes and defies them. He briefly tried being a frontline artist then basically gave it up for life. You're never going to see a Mut Lang album with his name above the title like Quincy Jones, Mark Ronson or Tim Beland. Lang is also a musical polymath like Nile Rogers, Bernard Edwards or Jack Antonoff. He's worked in an array of genres, but arguably more than any of those guys, Mut makes those genres sound like him. Whether the song is by Death Leopard. Or Shania Twain. Those songs bear Mut's stamp. Even though his name is only in the fine print, these hits sound like Mut records. The overriding theme of every Mut Lang production is rock maximalism. Even when the genre is not rock. For example, around the turn of the millennium, Mut made the Winsom Irish sibling pop quartet "The Cores" sound like they should be commanding a fist-pumping army in a stadium. Soon enough, they were. Indeed, Mut helped define what came to be known as Arena Rock. That term and the subgenre Arena Rock predated his heyday. But he arguably perfected Arena Rock. From the breakthrough of ACDC right through his 21st century work with bands like Maroon 5 and Nickelback. And yet, for all the ostentatiousness of his signature sound, Mut Lang has largely remained invisible throughout his career. In this, he most resembles Max Martin, who for all his chart success is notably camera and journalist Shy. But Mut makes Max look like a chatterbox, remarkably little photographic evidence of Mut Lang even exists. In case you're curious, here's what Lang sounds like. This is an excerpt from one of the very few interviews he sat for, a 1989 BBC documentary about deaf leopard. Busters, I can tell, this is the only video footage of Mut still on the internet. Maybe Lang didn't sit for interviews because as a mercenary craftsman always looking for the most commercial hit, he could sometimes come off as crass. In Fred Bronson's Billboard book of number one hits, a "attributed to Mut about a 90s hit he was working on with Brian Adams" was "it's pretty good, but I can't see them dropping their knickers for it in Kansas." Hey, at least Mut was honest about his goal. Mostly, Mut Lang's media reclusiveness seems motivated by an intense desire for privacy. And while some of the tabloid gossip about him is unflattering, we'll get to his highest profile divorce later, he is no full specter in the toxic male department. As we'll also note later, Lang was something of a hero to deaf leopard when a near tragedy befell the band in the 80s. Bottom line, like the music he made, Mut Lang was unrelentingly goal-oriented, which makes him, well, a textbook producer. But his results were anything but textbook. Once you've identified the sound of a "mut hit" you can't unhear it. So, think of Mut as the mystery man of pop production, a background figure who is never fully in the background. But for all the pomp and grandeur of his hits, Mut's start was quite humble. It took him nearly a decade to find his sound and break through as a chart force. This is Slim Whitman, an American country and western star in the 1950s known the world over for his yodeling vocal. Wittmann was popular not only in America but across Europe and even parts of Africa. Among his young fans was a boy-born Robert John Lang in Rhodesia, the country now known as Zimbabwe, and raised in Durban, South Africa. Though he was known to his friends by his middle name, John, his parents, both German expatriates, a mining engineer father and a mother from a high society German family, nicknamed him "Mutt" at an early age. Young Mut loved country music and the keening vocals of Slim Wittmann in particular. Which would echo in the high-pitched hard rock vocals that would later crop up in Mutt's production work? By the way, a fun footnote. In 1955, Slim Wittmann set a chart benchmark in England when his hit Rose Marie spent a record 11 weeks at number one on the UK singles chart. That chart record would not be beaten for 36 years until a hit by Brian Adams in 1991 spent 16 weeks at the official UK chart and that single was produced by you guessed it, "Mutt Lang." But I'm getting ahead of myself. Mutt started forming bands in high school, but he only finally began recording after school when he moved to the Johannesburg area and took a job producing commercials. His first band to put music on wax was Sound Reason. Here's their 1969 single "Glide Greatly" when Mutt was 20 going on 21. He played bass. It's pretty catchy. Mutt and friends formed the band "Hocus," which released a few more singles. Mutt played bass again, but he was starting to take a greater interest in how studio production worked. Here's "Hocus's 1971 single "Roll Me Over." The female harmony vocalist in "Hocus" was Stevie Van Kirkkin or Stevie Van, who Mutt had known since middle school. They would marry not long after "Hocus" broke up. Looking to focus on his production work "Mutt" and his new wife moved to London, where they found greater opportunity. They briefly tried recording as a duo, Buckingham Nicks style, but it didn't go anywhere. Here's a single credited to "Mutt and Stevie Lang." My heart is yours. It was the end of the road for Mutt and Stevie as a couple. They split and Stevie Lang moved to LA to sing lead for the band "Night," who briefly made the American top 40. "Nights" single "Hot Summer Night" with Stevie Lang on vocals made it to number 18 on the Hot 100 in the summer of 1979. It was the last time Stevie Lang would have greater chart success than Mutt Lang. But by then, Mutt Lang wasn't doing badly at all. He still hadn't quite found his signature sound, but his production work was beginning to make waves. The first album of any renown that Lang produced was "Heat Treatment," the 1976 LP by British Soul Rocker Graham Parker and his band "The Rumor." As we discussed in our hit parade episode about the so-called "angry young men" of 70s British new wave, Graham Parker and Mutt Lang were an odd fit. Mutt was already earning a reputation for meticulousness in the studio, and Parker didn't like Mutt's stiff instrument by instrument recording approach. Still, "Heat Treatment" won critical acclaim and got both Parker and Lang onto the charts. The LP cracked the Billboard album chart at number 169, and the single "Hold Back the Night" peaked at number 58 in 1977. Around the same time, Lang became attached to the Birmingham band "City Boy." This group would get Mutt into the American top 40 for the first time, and more important began to coalesce elements of the Mutt Lang sound. "City Boy" hit the charts in 1978 with 5705, titled after the last four digits of a phone number for a would-be hook-up. You can think of this song as a prototype for Tommy Two-Tones 1982 hit 8675309 Jenny. "City Boy"'s single reached number 27 on the Hot 100, and it foreshadowed the sound Mutt would take to the bank in the 80s, an intricate, high-pitched vocal arrangement paired with an explosive fist-pumping chorus. Lang would go on to produce "City Boy's first 5 LP's," which built his reputation as a fastidious producer with a rich production sound. His work on "City Boy's 77-Day-View" album also got him hired by an Irish band with a different punkier sound. They were led by an "Rassible Irishman" named Bob Guldoff, who would later become famous as the instigator of the 80s charity mega-projects Band-Aid and Live Aid. But in the late 70s, Guldoff was known as the frontman of "The Boomtown Rats." Paired with Mutt Lang, the "Boon Town Rats" began scoring UK hits right away. The Irish band's singles with Mutt had the crunch of punk but with a punchy new wave sensibility. Their 1977 debut single "Lookin' After Number One" just missed the British top 10 at number 11, and soon they cracked the winner's circle with, like "Clockwork," a number 5 UK hit. And "Rat Trap," a horn-inflected spring-steen-esque classic rocker which became the first UK number one hit for both the "Boon Town Rats" and Mutt Lang in the fall of '78. Mutt produced most of the "Boon Town Rats" first three LPs. However, he didn't produce the song that became their biggest and most well-remembered hit. and even briefly got them on the American charts. 1979's controversial melodramatic single, I don't like Mondays. ♪ Tell me why I don't like Mondays ♪ ♪ Tell me why I don't like Mondays ♪ ♪ I want to shoot ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ The whole day down ♪ Missing out on the Boomtown Rats biggest hit could have been a career blow for Mutlang. He ceased working with the band after their third LP. Fortunately for Mutt, by the summer of '79, he had switched his focus to a band that would blow him up globally, much bigger than the Boomtown rats ever had. ♪ Tell me why I don't like Mondays ♪ More in a moment. Through the mid-70s, AC/DC, the five-man hard rock band from Australia led by Scotland-born brothers Malcolm and Angus Young had released several albums of no frills, no bullshit rock and roll. They were beloved by their fans, especially on the live circuit. You may recall guitarist Angus Young appearing on stage in a schoolboy uniform, but they were not selling well in America. Through 1978, none of AC/DC's LPs got higher on the Billboard album chart than number 113. ♪ Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah ♪ As we discussed in our AC/DC rule episode of Hit Parade, executives at Atlantic Records, their label, were convinced the band could go from a live draw to a major US chart-topper if they worked with a more radio-friendly producer. So Malcolm and Angus sent a tape of their material to mutt Lang, who agreed to take them on. It worked out well for everybody. Released in the summer of 1979, "High Way to Hell" changed everyone's fortunes. When it peaked on the album chart at number 17 in November 79, "High Way to Hell" became the first top 20 LP and first US Platinum album for both mutt Lang and AC/DC. Lang figured out how to condense AC/DC's sound in the studio down to its essence. And to showcase the piercing vocals of AC/DC lead singer, "Bong Scott". The sound was crisp, sleek, but still muscular, the quintessence of the mutt sound. ♪ Oh, oh yeah, oh yeah ♪ As it turned out, mutt Lang was also good at shepherding bands through catastrophe. Just six months after the release of "The High Way to Hell" album in February 1980, "Bong Scott" was found dead of alcohol poisoning at age 33. Understandably, AC/DC considered disbanding. "Bong Scott" was a celebrated frontman, considered as critical to the band's image as Malcolm Young's riffs or Angus's strutting schoolboy routine. But after friends and family encouraged AC/DC to soldier on, it was mutt who nudged them to replace "Bong Scott" with another shrieking singer. ♪ Things I can say, get down, I'll have to ♪ ♪ Get down, I'll have to ♪ Brian Johnson, a British vocalist, formerly of the band "Jority", who possessed an even higher pitched whale than "Bong Scott", made his debut on 1980s "Back in Black", produced by mutt Lang and sporting a non-more black album cover, the LP would serve as both a funeral eulogy to Scott and the welcome party for new vocalist Johnson. "Back in Black" would also wind up not only AC/DC's biggest LP ever, but one of the top-selling albums, period of all time. ♪ We're here, we're here, we're here ♪ ♪ You're so fucking crazy, you're here ♪ ♪ We're here, we're here, we're here, we're here ♪ Mutt Lang was pivotal to that success. He honed AC/DC's sound to a diamond hard core. To this day, producers consider "Back in Black" a reference standard for hard rock acoustics. You can hear it on "Back in Blacks 2" most iconic songs. First, the down and dirty, raunchy dance anthem, you shook me all night long, which mutt gave a compressed but crisp crunch. ♪ You shook me all night long ♪ ♪ You shook me all night long ♪ ♪ Yeah, you shook me all night long ♪ And the LP's strutting rifftastic title track, which mutt arranged with spaced out, syncopated grooves like a funk record. Back in "Back in Black" the song was so funky, it would later be sampled in more than 50 hip-hop tracks. ♪ I'm gonna travel the track and I'm beating the fire ♪ ♪ Nobody's gonna give me another ride ♪ ♪ So let it be now, I'm just making my play ♪ ♪ Don't try to push, I just gotta wait ♪ ♪ Over and high ♪ ♪ Yes ♪ Both songs not only got heavy album rock radio play in America, they even cracked the pop top 40. You shook me all night long, reached number 35, and "Back in Black" hit number 37. On "American Top 40," Casey Kassam counted them down. ♪ Number 40 ♪ It's by a five-man Australian band who find that they sometimes have to explain their name, ACDC, the initials for alternating current and direct current. They say they chose it because it tells people they're electric. They viewing now at number 40 with their second top 40 hit, "Back in Black" here's ACDC. ♪ "Back in Black" peaked on the Billboard album chart at number 4. To this day, it just keeps selling. As of this recording, it's been on the Billboard 200 for nearly 650 weeks, and it's certified double diamond in America alone with sales and streams of 27 million. Globally, it sales are estimated at 50 million copies. It would not be the last LP produced by "Mutt Lang" to go double diamond. The massive success of "Back in Black" gave "Mutt" unparalleled music business clout. Now, bands that were already top sellers were calling on him to refine their sound. The first was "Foreigner," led by guitarist and songwriter Mick Jones and virtuosic vocalist Lou Graham. In the late 70s, "Foreigner" had already racked up three platinum top five LP's, packed with strutting Arena Rock Jams. ♪ Hey, I'm hot-blooded, check it and see ♪ ♪ I gotta be the other hungry ♪ ♪ Come on baby, do you do it? ♪ But, going into the 80s, "Foreigner" had never had a number one LP. "Mutt Lang" would change that by making their sound both bigger and more polished. He produced their fourth album, "Simply Titled Four." ♪ Love the night, this day, you'll be ♪ ♪ So urgent ♪ ♪ So urgent ♪ On "Eurgent," the album's first single, "Mutt" worked with Mick Jones to perfect the interplay of the Twangie guitars and ghostly synth riffs. For the bridge, Lang brought in legendary Motown saxophonist, Junior Walker, to play a smoking solo. Mutt pieced it together from multiple takes. It sounded raw, but was in fact painstakingly assembled. Urgent reached number four on the Hot 100 in the late summer of 1981, sending foreigners for album to number one, where it stayed for ten weeks. During its long run on top of the album chart, an even more meticulous follow-up single set a new benchmark for Mutt, his first major power ballad. Waiting for a girl like you was heartbreaking in more ways than one. Lou Graham's aching vocal played off of the dreamy keyboards, which were played and arranged by a new session player Mutt brought into the studio, Thomas Dolby, who would later score hits of his own. Like the 1983 top five hit, she blinded me with science. By bringing him in for the foreigner sessions, Mutt effectively launched Dolby's career. But waiting for a girl like you was also heartbreaking as a chart phenomenon. It spent ten weeks stuck at number two on the Hot 100, parked behind the number one hits physical by Olivia Newton-John. And I can't go for that by Darryl Hall and John Oates. To this day, waiting for a girl like you still holds the Hot 100 record as the longest running number two hit without ever reaching number one. It's tied with Missy Elliott's 2002 hit "Work It", which also stalled at number two for ten weeks. Still, the foreigner ballad kept their album for parked at the number one spot for most of the rest of '81 into early '82. How Hot was Mutt Lang by the end of 1981, so hot that he interrupted himself at number one on the album chart. The third consecutive LP he produced for ACDC, for those about to rock we salute you, dropped just before Christmas of '81. And it blew up immediately. In under a month for those about to rock became ACDC's first American number one album, knocking out foreigners for from the top spot. After three weeks on top, the Mutt produced ACDC album gave back the number one spot to the Mutt produced foreigner LP. After for those about to rock and for Mutt Lang moved on from ACDC and foreigner, he never produced an LP for either group again. But there was one more album by a British hard rock band that Mutt produced in 1981. At the time, it made far less of a splash. In 1981, it didn't even go gold, much less platinum, or generate any pop hits. But this band from Sheffield would have a much deeper impact on Lang's career. Arguably, they became the archetype for Mutt's brand of sleek, synthetic, and themic uberpop. The album was called "High and Dry" and it was by a band who called themselves with some creative misspelling "Death Leopard". As we discussed in our "Hair Metal" episode of "Hit Parade", "Death Leopard" were originally part of a late 70s early 80s movement called "The New Wave of British Heavy Metal". In composing such edgy bands as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. But starting with Leopard's second album in 1981, Mutt Lang helped transform them into an efficient conduit for cybernetic gleaming glam metal hooks. Bring in on the heartbreak, a 1981 single from "High and Dry" that wouldn't become a chart hit for several years, helped break the band in 1981 anyway. Thanks to the then brand new video channel MTV. Unlike both AC/DC and Foriner, "Death Leopard" produced polished, glossy music videos led by their "Telegenic Frontman" Joe Elliott. MTV Exposure got "High and Dry" into the top 40 by late 81, and it rode the album chart for much of 1982. Then in '83, Lang and Leopard teamed again for the band's third album, and Mutt pulled out all the stops to make the band actual pop stars. Got a full of braille, but too. He used innovative sampling techniques to make the drums sound bigger. He co-wrote all of the songs and even provided backing vocals as part of the masked chorus of singers behind Joe Elliott. You could hear all of that detail on the LP's first single "Photograph", which, in the opinion of your humble hit parade host, is the greatest hair metal song of all time. Thanks to Mutt Lang, "Photograph" has a soaring pre-chorus that's better than most songs' choruses. [Music] "Photograph" was a huge MTV hit, a massive rock radio hit. It spent six weeks atop Billboard's album rock chart, and even a sizable pop hit, reaching number 12 on the Hot 100 in the spring of '83. By then, the album was scaling the LP chart. Deaf Leopard and Mutt Lang named the album after a lyric in "Rock of Ages", the LP's second single. They called it "Pyromani". [Music] "Pyromani" rose all the way to number two on the LP's chart. It would have gone to number one if not from Michael Jackson's blockbuster "Thriller". And it spun off three top 40 pop hits, an unprecedented feat for a metal album at the time. "Rock of Ages" got to number 16, even with its very strange opening lyrics. [Music] That, by the way, is much. Lang, saying Gunther Gleben-Glautn-Globen, his pigeon German way of counting the band in instead of 1, 2, 3, 4. Anyway, after Rock of Ages, whose title, by the way, would be borrowed two decades later for a Broadway musical about 80s Rock, the follow-up single "Full-In" reached number 28. Pyromania wound up one of the 10 best-selling albums of 1983, going sex-touple platinum in America in its first year. Two decades later, it went diamond for sales of 10 million copies. Mutt Lang was now so busy, he turned down Death Lepords' request to work on their follow-up LP. At first, hold that thought because Lang and Lepard would reunite eventually. Though he was mainly associated with hard rock bands at this point, Mutt was prolific and versatile enough that he became a gun for hire for much poppier acts. Like, for instance, the San Francisco barband turned new waivers Huey Lewis and the news. In 1982, between Death Lepard LPs, Mutt gave the news their first ever top 10 hit. A song Lang wrote by himself that he adapted from a song he'd previously penned for "Supercharge." Do you believe in love? A number seven hit in the spring of '82. Then, in late 1983, after Pyromania's success, Lang took on the most accomplished band he'd worked with to date. The Cars. Through their first four platinum LPs from 1978 through '82, the Rick Ocasic-led quintet from Boston had worked with British producer Roy Thomas Baker, famed for producing Queen. For their fifth LP, Ocasic hired Mutt, who brought his famed studio discipline to the cars, including sampled and synthesized drums and layered vocals. The result was 1984's Heartbeat City, which became the most hit-packed album to date for both the Cars and Mutt. Heartbeat City generated five top 40 singles in 1984 and 1985. You'll probably remember the three biggest ones, which are classic hit radio staples to this day. The number seven MTV Smash, you might think the number 12 Summer Anthem Magic, and the biggest of them all, the Cars' first major power ballad, a song written by Rick Ocasic for his bandmate Ben Oar to sing, set off by epic Mutt Lang production, the number three hit draw. Heartbeat City was tripled platinum by 1985. If there was any downside to the album, it's that the cars found Mutt Lang's meticulousness impossible to follow up. The band split three years later. Meanwhile, Mutt kept diversifying his portfolio. In 1984, his friend and fellow South African record executive Clive Calder introduced Mutt to a rising Trinidadian singer signed to Calder's Drive Records label named Billy Ocean. The Drive team was looking for a single that could follow up Ocean's number one pop and R&B smash Caribbean Queen, which was helmed by R&B producer Keith Diamond. Teaming with Diamond and Ocean Mutt took Billy in an entirely different direction with a sleek space-age sound. Love a boy. Fused the dance pop Billy Ocean had been doing, with the synth rock Mutt Lang had developed for Deaf Lepard and the Cars. Appropriately, its video looked like an extension of George Lucas' Star Wars universe. Love a boy reached number two on the Hot 100 in early 85. Ocean and Lang so enjoyed working together when Ocean was invited to contribute to the soundtrack of the 1985 Kathleen Turner Michael Douglas film Jewel of the Nile, Mutt teamed with him again on the bouncy bop when the going gets tough the tough get going. Another number two hit for Billy Ocean. These Billy Ocean singles were all one-off projects for Mutt Lang, but strangely, Mutt went almost four years between 1984 and 1987 without producing a full released album. What slowed Mutt down wasn't any change in his chart fortunes. It was his total focus in the mid-80s on a new LP by one of his previous clients. It turned out to be the most painstaking and misfortune-plagged project of his career and yet not incidentally one of the biggest albums in glam metal history. When we come back, Mutt Lang and Death Leopard bounce back from a near tragedy and later you thought Lang producing Billy Ocean was diverse. Wait till you hear what happens when Mutt meets and marries a country singer from Canada. I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited, and narrated by Chris Malanfi. My producer is Kevin Bendis. Our supervising producer is Joel Meyer and the executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Mia Lobel. Check out Slate's roster of shows at Slate.com/podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts in addition to finding it in the Slate culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. We'll see you for part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the vlog. I'm Chris Malanfi.