She had her own music coming out, and a duet with Robert Palmer would step on those plans. Khan came in to record the song with him, and they planned to release it together, but her label objected. Palmer wanted to sing “Addicted To Love” as a duet with Chaka Khan, who he met at a club. Instead, this love addict as a sweating heart, a shaking body, and an inability to sleep or eat or breathe. It’s not a joke, exactly, but it’s not sincere, either. Palmer just sings that someone is addicted to love. The song itself isn’t terribly sophisticated. He woke up and hummed it into a tape recorder, and then he wrote the rest of the song around it. Palmer later said that the “Addicted To Love” riff came to him in a dream. “Addicted To Love” also has Andy Taylor on guitar and Tony Thompson on drums. Chic bassist Bernard Edwards produced the Power Station’s album, and then Palmer recruited him to produce Riptide as well. If the Power Station were pissed about Palmer ditching them, they didn’t hold a grudge. Des Barres even sang with them at Live Aid. (Palmer only sang live for the band once, on Saturday Night Live.) But the Power Station were successful enough that they did want to tour, so when they played live, they brought in future MacGyver actor Michael Des Barres to replace Palmer. It’s a 6.) Palmer didn’t have any plans to tour with the Power Station, and he wanted to get back to making his own album. Rex’s “Bang A Gong (Get It On)” peaked at #9. The Power Station’s debut album went platinum, and it launched two top-10 singles. Palmer made it to #16 with his boring 1978 quasi-reggae hymn “ Every Kinda People.” For years, though, Palmer’s biggest hit was a 1979 cover of Moon Martin’s efficient stomper “Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor).” Palmer’s version of the song peaked at #14, and it sounds a whole lot like a dry run at “Addicted To Love.” Palmer dabbled in soul and jazz and reggae, but his growly and intense voice was probably best-suited to horny, propulsive riff-rock. At some point, he moved to Nassau, in the Bahamas, and he bought the house right across the street from the famed Compass Point studios.
#Dion palmer musition series
Over the next decade, Palmer worked with a series of great musicians: Little Feat, the Meters, James Jamerson. As soon as the band splintered, Palmer signed a solo deal with Island. Vinegar Joe recorded a few albums for Island and then broke up in 1974. As a teenager, he sang for a series of groups, and he caught his big break when he fronted an early-’70s soul-rock band called Vinegar Joe. Palmer, the son of a British naval officer, grew up listening to soul on American armed forces radio. Palmer was in his late thirties before he ever even made the top 10, but everything in his career lined up just right to turn “Addicted To Love” into a monster. Instead, Palmer was a fairly successful journeyman - a rock yowler with a clearly-evident love for Black American R&B who was a little too stiff to work as an R&B singer himself. Robert Palmer had been around for years before that “Addicted To Love” video seared itself into the cultural consciousness, but he’d never been a star. It’s been referenced and parodied again and again, in videos from people like Tone Lōc and Shania Twain and Bowling For Soup. The “Addicted To Love” video became a pre-internet meme. Robert Palmer went back to that image again and again in the years that followed “Addicted To Love.” So did a lot of other people. But the image imprints itself on your brain the first time you see it. It’s just that one visual image and nothing more. The “Addicted To Love” video - the static-sunset backdrop, the barebones set, the blank-faced and disinterested models arrayed behind business-casual Robert Palmer - is actually pretty boring. The song is “Addicted To Love,” and it’s one of those tracks that will never exist outside the context of its music video. Perhaps in solidarity, Robert Palmer, the guy standing in front of all of them, does a piss-poor job lip-syncing the song. They clutch instruments, but the things they’re doing with those instruments only incidentally align with the song they’re supposed to be playing. Those models are all dancing, but they’re dancing to slightly-different beats, none of which quite align with the song they’re supposed to be playing. When one of them licks her lips, it’s not really seductive. The five models, all dressed and made up to look identical, stare off into the middle distance and move robotically. Instead, the whole spectacle is brittle and cold and alien. Watching it, you don’t think of human beings sweating and grunting and rubbing up against each other. ***It’s not sexy - or, if it is, it’s some bizarre Lynchian version of sexy. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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