Song Number 45

Introduced by Lisa Resetar Miralia

The Riverside Class of 1980 Top 50 Countdown rolls on with Song Number 45, and this month’s entry announces itself before the music really even gets going.

It begins with the sound of a roaring concert crowd, a single big piano chord and then a slow, stomping groove that was unlike much of anything else on the radio during our high school years. There’s also an interesting Lake Erie connection to the story of how the record eventually became a major hit.

It’s another song that takes us back to the music filling our radios, cars, parties and everyday lives around Riverside.

So, what song did our classmates put at number 45?

Watch the next entry in our Top 50 Countdown below.

Welcome to the October 2026 edition of the Riverside Class of 1980 Top 50 Countdown of songs from our years in High School. Song number 45.

This one starts by making you think you’ve just walked into the middle of a packed concert. The crowd is already roaring, one big piano chord rings out, and then that strange, stomping groove starts to take over. 

Except that crowd wasn’t really there. It was added later to a studio recording, which somehow makes the whole thing even cooler. The piano punches instead of flows, the drums leave acres of space between the beats, and the vocal struts through it all like somebody who showed up at Riverside wearing something nobody else would dare wear and somehow made it work. 

By the time we were chowing down at Master’s Pizza, cruising through Concord, or catching a movie at Cinema 20, it had already become one of those records that sounded completely unlike anything else on the radio. 

And there’s even a Lake Erie connection. Before it became a huge national hit, the song caught fire on CKLW across the lake in Windsor, helping convince the record company that America needed to hear it as a single. 

Cool, weird, funky and just futuristic enough to make the mid-70s feel like the future had arrived a little early.

Now here to introduce the song from the porch of her Twinsburg, Ohio home is classmate Lisa Resetar Miralia. Lisa is now retired after a career partially in business management, but mostly in her own family management, and now spends even more time with her kids and grandkids and travelling with her husband Bill.