Guilt trips Our readers come clean about the best of their worst BY MATT ASHARE AND PHOENIX READERS

A few weeks back, we asked a handful of our crack music critics to weigh in on their favorite guilty music pleasures. It may be a touchy topic for some. After all, as we said at the time, there’s a certain amount of elitism that comes with the territory when you start talking about music you hate to love or love to hate. But everyone set his or her guilt issues aside and wrote lovingly about such hard-to-love artists as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Chicago, Foreigner, Rod Stewart, and Elton John.

As part of our plan to unearth some of the more popular guilty pleasures that the pop world has produced, we also asked our readers to e-mail us their own favorites with the intention of publishing a list of sorts of the winners (or losers, depending on your point of view). Some readers, as we expected, sent a list or a single pick. But many others were moved to write short essays of their own on the topic — which appears to have struck a nerve out there. So instead of a simple list, we’ve decided to publish excerpts from some of the better responses that came in. Some are simple one-sentence answers; others are edited-down versions of longer and more thoughtful ruminations. But they all say a lot about the impact pop music has had and continues to have on our lives and our culture.

— Matt Ashare, Music Editor

ABBA

When I went off to college in 1978, I brought all my albums . . . except for the Abba albums. I didn’t want anyone to think I was uncool, and nothing seemed uncooler than Abba. This was before they were reappraised as composers of masterful pop singles. Abba were bubblegum AM radio fodder, and how could I let my new roommates know I secretly grooved to "Waterloo" and "Fernando" as much as the punk I outwardly adored? I had to keep my Abba hidden. But not for long. By sophomore year, I brought Super Trouper and stored it proudly alongside the Ramones and Bowie.

— Bruce Derfler

America, etc.

I’m from the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Who, Dylan, AC/DC, Bowie school, but I’ve got a boat load of guilty pleasures. America, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, Cheap Trick, Culture Club, Deep Purple, Def Leppard, Duran Duran, Electric Light Orchestra, the Fixx, Foghat, Grand Funk Railroad, Hall & Oates, Heart, Jethro Tull, Journey, Kiss, Loverboy, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Steve Miller Band, the Moody Blues, Robert Palmer, Queen, Rush, Bob Seger, Styx, Supertramp, the Supremes, Van Halen, Edgar Winter, Yes, and Neil Young. And those are only the ones I found skimming my own CD collection, which numbers on the north side of 3000, in 10 minutes!

— John Farrell

Bread

Yup, I fell hard for those sickly sweet lyrics and orchestral arrangements. I bought their albums as a pre-teen and can’t remember many of the song titles, except for "Make It with You," which always managed to reduce me to tears.

— Lisa Faretra

Donovan

No pop fan should apologize for liking Donovan’s music — the hits like "Sunshine Superman," and all those baroque, hard-to-pigeonhole album tracks he did with Mickie Most, like "House of Jansch." He did tend to do things like call upon youth to "Heed the quest to seek the sun," which is sort of silly. But it was the ’60s, after all (would you rather he’d said, "Seek Richard Nixon"?). The guilt comes with songs like "Superlungs My Supergirl" ("She’s only 14 but she knows how to draw"!!) and the live version of "Mellow Yellow," where he comes right out and says, "I’m just mad about 14-year-old girls." Yikes. It’s pretty creepy. So, yes, I still like the songs, but I do hope his taste in women has changed.

— Peter Mork

Flashdance: Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture

The first thing I remember about Flashdance was water. Lots of it. And Jennifer Beals, in silhouette, sitting on a chair, her body soaked like a mermaid reclining on the shore. It was 1983, and I was four years old. Severely censored TV ads were my sole exposure to this alluring tableau.

But there was the music, and with Irene Cara’s "Flashdance . . . What a Feeling" permeating the airwaves, my sister was given the soundtrack for Christmas. Like all the records in Amy’s collection, the Flashdance soundtrack would soon become mine! I reveled in the five songs on the album’s second side. Laura Branigan’s "Imagination" and, ahhh, Donna Summer, the diva of my dreams at four years old, singing "Romeo" induced me to jump around the living room lip-synching the lyrics. Amy had to explain what "seduce" meant in Cycle V’s "Seduce Me Tonight." I didn’t get it, but I loved singing it. I liked Kim Carnes’s "I’ll Be Here Where the Heart Is" even though it was too slow because she also sang "Bette Davis Eyes." And even though I didn’t know what Michael Sembello was singing about, "Maniac" had a great beat and I could dance to it.

Irene Cara? Laura Branigan? Kim Carnes? These songbirds are hardly ever heard on the radio anymore. But what was the last time their voices graced my CD player? Probably not more than a month ago. . . . They may not sound contemporary, but they’re much more satisfying than Britney or Christina or Beyoncé. Call me old-fashioned at 24, but I still revel in watching the vinyl and the decorative Casablanca logo spin at 33-1/3 rpm. I’m a Flashdance fan, and I’m not ashamed of it.

— Christian John Wikane

Journey

I couldn’t believe that no one mentioned Journey as a guilty pleasure, as they seem to be having something of a resurgence this year (see the film Monster and the TV show Scrubs). This past year wasn’t the best, but I knew that I could get a quick pick-me-up if I popped "Don’t Stop Believing" on the stereo. It’s my inspirational themesong, and I play it at top volume if I need some motivation. My neighbor’s hatred be damned! It almost made me think twice about Wesley Clark. A man who loves Journey can’t be all bad.

— Stephanie Kirschner

Manhattan Transfer

On those glorious mornings when you wake up to find three buddies just waking up on your living-room couches in front of a coffee table that looks like a Pop Art masterpiece with beer bottles and cigarettes and poker chips, you can find me in the kitchen making coffee and singing along to the Manhattan Transfer. To try to justify my love for the vocal jazz quartet, I tell people that it’s my "morning music." I suppose that’s true. For me, nothing make a good morning turn into a better morning the way Manhattan Transfer can. So though I hate to love them, when I have my coffee in hand and "Java Jive" playing in the background, my buddies can sigh all they like.

— Anthony Gonsalves

ProcOl Harum

The first woman I was ever in love with had a beautiful voice, low and smoky like the one Lauren Bacall affected in To Have and Have Not. She used to listen to Procol Harum obsessively. She would put "A Whiter Shade of Pale" on automatic replay and let it go for hours. This behavior did not drive me insane. I was in love.

I was a music-nerd teenager in a small Florida beach town in the late 1960s. My two favorite bands were the Velvet Underground and Procol Harum. The usual reaction to the Velvets among my friends was, "What is this shit?" Procol, on the other hand, would get the backhanded compliment reserved for all successful second-tier rock bands: "They’re pretty cool." Thirty years later, the VU are demigods while Procol have faded into a nostalgic period phenomenon, a one-hit wonder saddled forever with one big single.

Procol would stay together for 10 years and release 10 albums. As with so many rock acts, entropy set in. Important members would be lost. And even before they called it quits in 1977, punk and disco had already made their music sound quaint and staid. But the glories are still there in those first three albums. Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize that Procol is really just high-class drinking music, but to a dumb-ass Florida stoner boy, "A Whiter Shade of Pale" seemed damned smart. And with all the flash and trash that now dominates pop music, it’s still a pleasure to just sit and listen to a well-written song. And remember first loves.

— G. Gogel

Helen Reddy

Mine is "Ruby Red Dress," by Helen Reddy. Cheers and cheese.

— Christina Angell

38 Special

"Hold On Loosely"/"Caught Up in You." How to explain? Did I do something in the back of a car while these were playing that I can’t remember?

— Grant Blaisdell

Frank Zappa & LESLEY GORE

Having been a faithful reader for a few decades now, I am always thankful for your excellent coverage of politics, art, and music. And, yes, I am guilty too. Although I am listening to Patti Smith’s Easter right now, it was preceded by Freak Out! by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. And I will eventually listen to Lesley Gore sing "It’s My Party." It’s great old stuff that brings back memories of early adolescence, when I was just learning there was an alternative out on Cambridge Common. Still, this music speaks of those tumultuous days of first girlfriends, first kisses, first beers. Having reached the half-century mark, those memories get more precious every day. After all, it’s our party, and we can cry and/or laugh if we want to. Thanks for running a feature that really rang true. On the 40th anniversary of the British Invasion, all you need is love.

— Stephen Fisher