Song Of The Day 9/8/2014: Roger Voudouris - "We Can't Stay Like This Forever"

Let's Go Sacramento!: Roger Voudouris (1954-2003) began his music career in Sacramento playing a place called The Elegant Barn. An architectural conceit that sounds more appropriate for the Midwest, but I trust it was barn-like and can't speak for its supposed elegance. With '70s progressive rock being a gigantic component of Sacto's musical DNA at the time, Voudouris started out in that general direction or lack thereof. By the time his first solo album came out he'd swung over to the Doobie Brothers side of what we now know as "yacht rock," although the final song on that record was a fairly crackers 8-minute epic called "We're Out Of Time." Check out Peter Pfiefer's gloriously manic snare drum repetition that happens once the song picks up and you realize you're going to be here for awhile.

Voudouris scored a minor hit in 1979 with a nice piece of Boz Scaggs-style crooning called "Get Used To It," which hit the Top 10 in places like Phoenix and Memphis and shimmied up to #21 on the Billboard charts. But Australia ate the song up, especially after a promo clip for "Get Used To It" appeared on the pop music TV show Countdown and gained him some fleeting but intense Down Under fame. On the first take for this video Voudouris' bangs kept concealing his eyes, so someone on the set had the bright idea to point a wind machine at him to keep his hair aloft. So the final draft saw Roger dancing in a crisp red sweater as machine-generated wind streaks through his unpretentiously long hair for the entire duration of the clip. This perfect storm turned him into a sex symbol in Australia for at least a few weeks and shot "Get Used To It" into that country's Top 5. If only it were still so easy.

"We Can't Stay Like This Forever" was from the same album, Radio Dream. I like it. Voudouris also had a following in Japan, as have we all, and composed music for Pia Zadora's The Lonely Lady, as have only a select lucky few of us. When he passed away far too early from liver disease in 2003 Voudouris had been out of music for two decades.