40-Year-Old Songs: Aint Even Done With the Night

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Happy August! The new month brings a new countdown. Two, in this case, as I celebrate “old music” (as a joke to those who claim “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons is an “old song”) with singles from 1980 (this countdown) and 1970 (the next one), most of which still get airplay. A quick note: some of these songs will be from albums that came out before or after 1980 (and, in the case of the 50-year-old songs, there’s a song from an album that was released in 1967 that didn’t become a single until 1970), but I am concentrating on when the single was a hit. Let’s start with someone still making music. Ain’t Even Done With the Night - John Cougar On April Fools’ Day 1984 Weird Al Yankovic took over MTV for an hour. One of his “MTV News” items was to report that the man who’d been known as “John Cougar” since his first album and had recently become “John Cougar Mellencamp” (Mellencamp being is real name) was going to, with each subsequent album, add a new name to his name. His next album, Weird Al said, would be under the name John Cougar Mellencamp Schwartz. (If you didn’t see that, the only thing Weird Al played all hour long was “Leave It” by Yes, which had 12 different videos made for the song.) Along Interstate 65 near his hometown, the sign simply says, “John Mellencamp Highway.” Kids probably don’t know that he was John Cougar....or John Cougar Mellencamp. We had a hard time (as Weird Al alluded to) keeping up, however. In 1980, the Hoosier boy was still just “John Cougar.” This single, from his second album, wasn’t the one that pushed him into superstardom (needless to say: most don’t remember this one). Still, I loved it better than things that came before it (“I Need a Lover”) or after it (“Pink Houses”). Ain’t Even Done With the Night Written by John Mellencamp Recorded by John Cougar From Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did, 1980 It’s time to go home: