1985 was the year when The Hooters exploded into the mainstream consciousness. Their breakthrough album Nervous Night was released on 6 May 1985, and it went on to achieve platinum status around the world. It also spawned several hit records, and to top it off, they performed a memorable gig at Live Aid just a few months after the album’s release. Everything aligned to give their album campaign a glorious send-off, and they took off like a rocket.
Nervous Night was the band’s first release on a major label, with big PR campaigns and proper distribution worldwide. This made many assume that it was their first album, a notion that still lives on today amongst music fans at large and more casual Hooters fans. This is quite understandable, as their actual first album Amore (1983) was released independently and has always been somewhat hard to track down (especially internationally).
And We Danced was the first track on Nervous Night. It was the second single, released on the exact same day as the album (All You Zombies having been the first single as early as March). It went all the way to #3 on the US Mainstream Rock charts, giving the band instant mass recognition. It was a perfect song to come out with, being extremely upbeat and overall positive, designed to cheer up just about anyone who hears it.
The distinctive sound that leads off the song and plays throughout is a Melodica, a combination keyboard/harmonica instrument that The Hooters would frequently use. The band called it a Hooter, and this is where they got their name from.
Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman are the founding members of the band as well as its main songwriters. Songwriters do different things to enable them to write. Bazilian and Hyman would take road trips.
“We would get away and especially since the band was playing so much, we would just kind of hole ourselves up,” Rob Hyman told Songfacts. “In this instance, we went into the Poconos outside the Philadelphia region and we rented a couple little cabins, brought some recording gear, set up a 4-track studio and threw around a lot of ideas.”
This was during the summer of 1984. Their stay in the Poconos was productive, resulting in about a dozen tracks. The last thing they did on the last day was to write the chorus to And We Danced. It was instantly clear that they had found something really special.
“I think we knew immediately that we had the germ of something special,” says Eric Bazilian, “though there were a lot of versions between that one and the one we now know.”
“It had a slightly different feel, but materially it was there,” Rob Hyman said. “That was the strongest bit we brought back from that writing trip. We had that flash – this is something really great, we’ll finish it another day. Had we just stayed with it that moment more, maybe we would have done it, but it ended up taking a lot more time. We threw around a lot of verses and rhythmic ideas. It was a different feel, and then it got into more of a rock and roll feel.”
The lyrics tap in to the happy, carefree nature of the music very well. They are nostalgic in the sense that looking back brings up happy memories of carefree days when life was easy and a new relationship was in full bloom.
The fact that the song’s creators struggled to recall where the lyrics came from indicates that they were never meant to be describing anything deep beyond a certain feel. “I honestly don’t know where the lyrics came from,” Eric Bazilian admitted to Rediscover The 80s in 2011. “The verses were written last, when we were already mixing the rest of the album and were down to the wire. I think we just liked the way “she was a be bop baby” sounded.”
The lyrics are however full of references that places the song in a specific context. Rob Hyman told Songfacts, “The be-bop baby on a hard day’s night, the union hall – we just felt it was kind of a basic, workingman’s rock and roll record. In a sense, a bit of territory that maybe Springsteen or somebody would cover, a little of that nostalgia, a little of the no-frills kind of straight ahead lyrics.”
She was a be-bop baby on a hard day’s night
She was hangin’ on Johnny, he was holdin’ on tight
I could feel her coming from a mile away
There was no use talking, there was nothing to say
When the band began to play and play
And we danced like a wave on the ocean, romanced
We were liars in love and we danced
Swept away for a moment by chance
And we danced and danced and danced
The song does not say much about how the romance in the song ended. That’s not really the focus, which is all about the happiness that existed during a specific time and the happiness those memories still hold. These nostalgic workingman look-back songs seemed to be in vogue in the mid-80s, with Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days and Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69 being other prominent examples of looking back at “the best days in my life”.
There’s no doubt that The Hooters stood out from the crowd with their instrumentation. Hyman said, “I think the ornamentation and the embellishments that the band did with the melodica and the mandolins and the sounds that we were dabbling in put a different flavour to it. But at its heart, it’s a simple rock and roll song that evokes some of those same feelings that Chuck Berry or The Beatles had. I think those images were just straight-ahead pictures for us.”
A music video was produced of the song, featuring live footage of the band filmed at the now-demolished Exton Drive-In in Exton, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1985. It got high rotation on MTV, and was even nominated for the Best New Artist in a Video award at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards. They predictably lost out to a-ha’s Take On Me, but several other accolades waited in the wings – such as Rolling Stone Magazine naming them the Best New Band of the Year.
With the success of the album and single, The Hooters were slotted to play at Live Aid in 1985. They were the first band to perform on the Philadelphia stage, going on after an introduction ceremony that included Joan Baez singing Amazing Grace. But the list of artists looking to play there was very long. How did The Hooters end up in the prominent opening slot?
“That was a stroke of genius on the part of our manager Steve Mountain,” Eric Bazilian told Songfacts. “He managed to finagle that with Bill Graham and Larry Magid to get us on that stage. Our first record was just coming out, and it was the perfect time. That was our moment in destiny.”
The song they opened with was – of course – And We Danced.
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