CIRCUIT BREAKER [1979]

Just last week, HERC's tiny secondary fridge, the one in the garage primarily used for beverages, stopped working. HERC quickly determined that a circuit breaker had been tripped, so he reset it and things have been hunky dory ever since.  And now this week's featured album from the Kollection is titled Circuit Breaker.  That album, from 1979, was not part of HERC's life until about a decade ago but he counts six of the fifteen songs found on it among his favorites.

You may notice, as HERC did, the two slips of paper that someone had taped on the back cover in the above scan. The one in the lower left corner lists a few of the songs, the respective artists and several other columns of info which HERC was unable to read clearly.  The paper in the upper right hand corner was much more legible and noted each song's peak position and weeks spent on Hot 100. Except there's an error: it appears that the person typing up the info skipped the second song on side two entirely, putting the information for track three in its place then repeated the info for track four twice before continuing on.  Another mystery solved here on the K-Tel Kollection site.  The album is available for listening via Show N K-tel's Mixcloud site HERE. Although HERC favors a few of the songs, he knows many of them were never Top 10 and a few missed the Top 40 altogether.  Let's see what the K-Tel Scale says about Circuit Breaker...

Circuit Breaker [1979]		K-tel Scale:				26.33
		Billboard Top 40s
		Pop	R&B	Disco	AC	CB	WLS
I Was Made For Dancin'	Leif Garrett	10			38	15
Shake It	Ian Matthews	13			21	10	17
What You Won't Do For Love	Bobby Caldwell	9	6		10	10	26
You Needed Me	Anne Murray	1			3	4	4
Bluer Than Blue	Michael Johnson	12			1	10	19
Because The Night	Patti Smith Group	13				10
Right Down The Line	Gerry Rafferty	12			1	8	19
Hot Blooded	Foreigner	3				4	3
Dancin' Shoes	Nigel Olsson	18			8	17
Every Time I Think Of You	The Babys	13			36	8	20
Strange Way	Firefall	11			24	11	26
Mary Jane	Rick James		3
Don't Hold Back	Chanson	21	8	11		20
A Little Lovin' (Keeps The Doctor Away)	The Raes			5
Dance (Disco Heat)	Sylvester	19	4	1		30

Four Top 10 hits, only one #1 and two songs that failed to make the Top 40 altogether.  Half of the songs have Adult Contemporary crossover action though only a few cross over to the R&B or Disco charts.  Cashbox had eight of the songs in the Top 10 with none of them reaching #1.  A disappointing score of 26.33 keeps Circuit Breaker out of the K-Tel Scale Top 10.  

The 8-track version of the album (left) swapped the songs around a bit and it appears no one has seen fit to scan in images of a cassette version so HERC cannot definitively say if one even exists.  Canada O Canada put out both a vinyl and 8-track version (right) of Circuit Breaker with (you guessed it) differing tracklists from their American counterparts; instead of 15 tracks, our neighbors up North got 16 tracks when they plunked down their moose antlers or whatever the currency is in Canada.  The artwork was slightly different as well.

 

Despite the inclusion of HERC's latest new old fave (Nick Gilder's "Here Comes The Night"), the K-tel Scale score for the Canadian configuration of Circuit Breaker was less than 17.00 with seven of the sixteen tracks missing the US Top 40 completely, including the song mentioned above. Join us next time when HERC features Hitline, the penultimate K-Tel album from 1979 and a double album at that!