Dan Hartman —“Second Nature”

Entered Top 40:  March 23, 1985
2 weeks 
Peaked at: 39

Dan Hartman had been in the Edgar Winter Group, playing on their chart-topping, spliced-together jam “Frankenstein” and writing and singing their #14 hit “Free Ride.” Going solo in 1976, he had a couple of disco #1 hits with 1978’s “Instant Replay” and 1980’s “Vertigo/Relight My Fire.” But he’s probably still best known for a song people might think is sung by a Black doo-wop group. Hartman wrote and performed “I Can Dream About You” for the 1984 Streets of Fire soundtrack album. “I Can Dream About You” reached #6 and had two music videos; one featuring the fictional “Sorels” lip-syncing in their in-film performance intercut with other movie scenes; and another featuring Hartman. I am certain I never saw the Hartman version in 1984-85; MCA/Universal really wanted to promote Streets of Fire, so the movie video was the one that stayed in heavy MTV rotation. The film turned out not to be the hit they were looking for.

Look for young Mykelti Williamson and Robert Townsend as backup Sorels.
In the film itself, they’re lipsyncing to yet another singer, Winston Ford.

Hartman followed “I Can Dream About You” with another #1 Dance single, “We Are The Young” (#25 overall; by the way, he was 34 at this point, but okay). And then there was “Second Nature.” In addition to being an ill-fated Third Single from his I Can Dream About You LP, few favors were done by its bizarre music video, involving the aftermath of a pickup truck spilling its payload of watermelons. Yes, that’s correct.

This was Dan Hartman’s final Top 40 song; he’d die of a brain tumor in 1994, at just 43. Just before his death, the British boy band Take That covered “Relight My Fire” with Lulu. It reached #1 in the UK. Ricky Martin also covered “Relight My Fire” in 2003 with Loleatta Holloway, who’d sung on Hartman’s original.