These posts are about the songs that fell just short of crossing the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41.

There were a few ironclad rules of rock stardom in the nineteen-eighties. One rule was to always agree when Hollywood came calling with an offer to contribute to a major motion picture soundtrack. Another rule dictated that the inevitable compilation of greatest hits must include at least one track that the devoted fans didn’t already have in their music collection, even if they possessed every last studio LP issued to that point. In 1987, 38 Special fulfilled both of these directives with a single song. But, also in a very rock star way, it was a little messier than that.

Through the eighties, Jim Vallance was the main songwriting partner of Bryan Adams, and the success of the Canadian rocker’s 1985 album, Reckless, heightened the interest other artists had in seeking out his services. Pat Benatar asked Vallance to swing by and help write some new tunes for the intended follow-up to her own 1985 album, the middling performer Seven the Hard Way. According to Vallance, both Benatar and her husband and creative partner, Neil Giraldo, weren’t especially engaged creatively when he visited, but he and Benatar did work up the basics for at least one song. Vallance took the fragments with him when he returned to Canada and his regular work with Adams. The two finished the song, which was titled “Back to Paradise.” Rather than having Adams record the song, Vallance gave it to Don Barnes, the lead singer of 38 Special.

“I programmed the bass, drums and keyboards and Don played all the guitars and sang the lead vocal,” Vallance writes on his webpage. “Vancouver session singers Marc LaFrance and Paul Janz provided backing vocals.”

The producers of Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise wanted the cut for their movie. Even in that booming soundtrack era, the comedy sequel didn’t have an accompanying album release. At around the same time as the film’s release, though, 38 Special was slated to put out their first best-of collection, Flashback. Although “Back to Paradise” was essentially a solo single for Barnes, it was officially credited to 38 Special and included on Flashback. Released as a single, it climbed right to cusp of the Billboard Top 40 without quite breaking through the all-important threshold.

It turned out the other members of 38 Special weren’t thrilled with a Barnes solo effort being presented as a product of the band. Around the time of the compilation’s release, the group broke up. Barnes and the rest of the band parted ways. After Barnes’s planned solo album was shelved by his label, A&M Records, and 38 Special had a Top 10 hit with a new lead singer (and a song Barnes had previously rejected as not suitable for the band’s sound), Barnes evidently had a change of heart about how his rock career should proceed. He was back in the 38 Special lineup by the end of 1992. His solo album, Ride the Storm, was finally released in 2017, almost thirty years after the date it was originally supposed to drop.

Other entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Top 40 Smash Near Misses” tag.