RAINBOW [1980]

Released in 1980, Rainbow - The Soft Sounds Of Today's Rock was another in K-tel's line of soft rock or adult contemporary collections.  A simple watercolor rainbow graphic adorns the front and rear cover art while seven smooth tracks grace each side of the record itself.  Show N K-Tel and BillboardTopHits1980 have both featured their versions of Rainbow.  HERC's M!X is below.

The tracklist is one of the stronger ones featured on a K-tel soft hits album since 1978.  It is interesting to note that two songs found on Rainbow can be found on the Canadian edition of Images. While HERC doesn't see any Number One Pop hits among the fourteen shades of this Rainbow, there may be some chart-toppers on other charts used in computing the K-Tel Scale.  HERC's forecasting a score of 29 or 30.  For all he knows, this album could have been the source of all those slow dances during his freshman year of high school - he definitely remembers hearing "Cruisin' " at a few basement parties that year. 

RAINBOW [1980]		K-tel Scale:				31.82
		Billboard Top 40s
		Pop	R&B	Disco	AC	CB	WLS
With You I'm Born Again	Billy Preston & Syreeta	4	(86)		2	5	7
Deja Vu	Dionne Warwick	15	25		1	11	15
Lotta Love	Nicolette Larson	8			1	8	12
Him	Rupert Holmes	6			4	6	8
Fire In The Morning	Melissa Manchester	32			8	35
You Take My Breath Away	Rex Smith	10			11	7	7
Sail On	Commodores	4	8		9	1	5
Lost In Love	Air Supply	3			1	2	1
Yes, I'm Ready	Teri DeSario with KC	2	20		1	3	5
Cruisin'	Smokey Robinson	4	4		34	1	14
Special Lady	Ray, Goodman & Brown	5	1		17	7	8
I Pledge My Love	Peaches & Herb	19	37		33	25
Half The Way	Crystal Gayle	15			9	18	22
Do Right	Paul Davis	23			4	23

Almost good enough to break into Top 10 and decidedly above HERC's prognostication, Rainbow represents with nine Top 10 hits with six of them Top 5 but alas no Number Ones on the Pop chart.  Over on the Adult Contemporary chart there were ten Top 10's, seven Top 5's and four #1's. Smokey's slow jam masterpiece only hit #34 on the AC chart?  Inconceivable!  Additional Number Ones were seen on the R&B, Cash Box and WLS charts as well.

In a then innovative piece of marketing, a bonus fifteenth track is available on the cassette format of Rainbow.  As you can see in the image of the cassette cover above, there are eight songs on Side One and seven songs on Side Two - The Dirt Band's "An American Dream" is the unadvertised bonus track.  The running order of the tracklist is slightly reconfigured and with the addition of the bonus track, each side of the tape probably runs just under twenty-eight minutes.

The same bonus track appears on the eight-track version of Rainbow as well.  The tracklist is further shuffled to even out the four programs and ensure no song was interrupted with a big KA-CHUNK! right in the middle as the program changed. Though it looks brownish purple in the image above, the song listing on the back of the tape was actually black before aging and wear & tear.

The Canadian version of Rainbow has sixteen tracks on the eight-track tape as well as the vinyl album.  The playlist remains intact on the tape, identical to the vinyl.  The artwork was similar on the cover of the album as well although the back of the vinyl as seen below lacks any extras beyond the track listing when compared to the US edition above.  The Canadian tracklist also features three songs from the US edition of Images and seven songs from the US edition of Rainbow.

Next time out, HERC breaks out SoundWaves which contains some of his favorite songs of the period.