1986 Top Ten Songs: Swallowed By the Cracks (#10)

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For songs you will know and love, you’ll have to travel back another ten years to 1976. For a deep dive into what I was listening to and being overwhelmed by 40 years ago, you’re in the right place. Poor people. Here we go into the top ten! #10: Swallowed By the Cracks - David + David We love happy endings, don’t we? This song doesn’t have one. In fact, there aren’t any happy endings to be found on the only album that David Baerwald and David Ricketts released together. This is one depressing album. But oh, it’s soooo good. (It’s like a book I read in Young Adult Literature class in college, The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier: you know it’s not going to end well, but you can’t stop reading.) This song is one that a lot of people can so easily identify with, especially people who moved to a new place full of dreams and ended up falling “so far down like the rest of those clowns begging bus fare back.” We have three people — the narrator, his girlfriend Eileen, and her brother/his best friend Steve — who are, respectively, a dancer who’s going to choreograph, an actress, and a writer. Reality: Steve ran off, “Eileen took a job in a store, while I became this drunken old wh*re.” We aren’t told how their plans failed, just that they did. A cautionary tale about trying to get into the entertainment industry that chews people up and spits them out like flavorless gum. Baerwald went on to write music for others and work in television and movie scores. He wrote a novel (The Fire Agent), which was released in 2022. Ricketts teamed up with then-girlfriend Toni Childs for her debut album, and in 2004 he won an Emmy for co-writing the song “Because You’re Beautiful” for a show. Their commercial success wasn’t much, or enduring, but they did not suffer the fate of the characters in the song. Swallowed By the Cracks Written by David Baerwald and David Ricketts Recorded by David + David From Boomtown, 1986 Telling lies and singing along with the jukebox: