Danny Spanos - "Hot Cherie"

OK.....after all this talk about "Hard rock, heavy metal, in-your-face blah blah blah" on the opening blog post, I've decided to go a tad poppy (but still rockin') for my first entry. Let's get to the details (words in yellow are links to click on):

Artist - Danny Spanos                                         

Song - "Hot Cherie"

Album - Actually an EP, Passion In The Dark, released on the Epic label in 1983.

There's not a ton of information on Mr. Spanos on the internet. Danny was actually born George Spanos, and according to his Wikipedia.com entry, he was born and raised not too far from home here, in South Lyon, Michigan. He got his start in music as a drummer, landing a spot in the 70's group Redbone, whose claim to fame was the million-selling hit song "Come and Get Your Love" in 1974. According to some music info sites, he was also credited as the percussionist on the theme song to the "Starsky and Hutch" television series. According to the interview on this site, he also worked with Sly Stone and, later on, the 3 surviving members of The Doors. Sometime after all of this, around 1979, Spanos decided to trade in George for Danny and hit the solo trail. He released his first solo album on Windsong Records - the self-titled Danny Spanos - in 1980. Although it didn't set the world on fire, he was picked up by Epic Records (Redbone's label at the time when he was in the group), who released the Passion In The Dark EP in 1983. The EP produced a video, for the track "Excuse Me", that was played on MTV in the early part of 1983, and he had 2 tracks that landed on movie soundtracks - the first one, "This Could Be Our Last Chance" was in the Tom Cruise movie All The Right Moves in 1983, and the track "One Track Heart (Passion In The Dark)" was on the soundtrack to the movie Up The Creek in 1984. Although there are a few web sites that say "Hot Cherie" was a Top 40 hit in 1983, I can't find any evidence to back up this claim, including research on Billboard.com and the Whitburn's Collectors List, a highly popular list used by collectors to find and catalog songs on the internet.

"Hot Cherie" was actually a cover song, first recorded by Canadian band, Streetheart.....the band directly responsible for giving us Loverboy, more or less. Even though the original version is listenable and wasn't released until after Spanos' version appeared (that's Loverboy's guitarist Paul Dean and drummer Matt Frenette on the original track), Spanos' version just hit the mark much more squarely, in my opinion. The band Hardline did a version of "Hot Cherie" on their Double Eclipse album in 1992, featuring the talents of  Mr. Neal Schon, former guitarist of Santana, Journey and Bad English. I'm a big Neal Schon fan, but even with him on board, I'm not a fan of this version.

Spanos had one more release on Epic, the full album Looks Like Trouble, in 1984, and that was it. Kind of sad, because I thought he was a pretty good vocalist.

As far as I can tell, both albums and the EP remain unavailable in CD format. However, Spanos' version of "Hot Cherie" was included in a compilation CD from Renaissance Records, entitled Heard It On The Radio, Vol. 2, in 1999.

I don't know what it is about this song, but it's always been one of my "long lost" favorites. I hope you enjoy it as well!