TOP 40 DEBUT: November 10, 1979
PEAK POSITION: #19 (January 5, 1980)
Pablo Cruise didn’t need to reinvent themselves. Their brand was soft rock, and soft rock in 1979 was still a very big, and very lucrative, business. But by the beginning of that same year, disco was the biggest business of all. And Pablo Cruise decided to get a piece of it. The result? “I Want You Tonight,” a shameless piece of pop pandering, released solely to capitalize on an already imploding trend, and completely at odds with the rest of the group’s easygoing, distinctly non-disco back catalog. You’d be forgiven for assuming the song was a colossal failure, prompting Pablo Cruise to erase all traces from their legacy, their setlists, and, apparently, our collective memories. (I’m well into my forties, and until preparing for this entry, I had no idea this thing even existed.)
But here’s the bizarre twist: “I Want You Tonight” didn’t flop. It did exactly what it was designed to do. According to Billboard, it’s the fourth biggest single the band ever had. Pablo Cruise jumped on the disco bandwagon right as it was about to crash, wound up with a Top 20 hit, and still kept their career going afterwards. That’s a small miracle in and of itself; the fact that “I Want You Tonight” isn’t abjectly terrible is another.
Pablo Cruise formed in San Francisco in 1973, its members spun off from two other Bay Area outfits: ten-piece blues collective Stoneground and psychedelic rockers It’s A Beautiful Day. From the outset, all four members embraced the commercial aspirations their previous groups had rejected. Pablo Cruise were sleek, smooth, and streamlined to a fault, aping the mellow pop template of fellow Californians Bread and America while polishing away all the folksy parts. Their sound was a cliché even before they actually landed on the radio. (The year was 1977, the song was “Whatcha Gonna Do,” and it’s a 3.) Were you listening to Player, or Orleans, or Pablo Cruise? Impossible to tell.
“Love Will Find A Way” was their biggest, and best, song, peaking at #6 in the summer of 1978 while showing flashes of an actual band identity. They now groove, but not too hard; they rock, but politely. The opening low-end riff augmented by keys on top, coupled with David Jenkins’ impeccable guitar work, is about as good as this style of music gets. (It’s a 7.) Pablo Cruise followed up their signature hit with two lesser singles, then retreated back to the studio… where I assume they turned on the radio and panicked. Disco was dominating. They sounded nothing like disco. How would they ever compete?
A smarter band would’ve seen the wisdom of staying in their lane, growing the fanbase, and possibly expanding their palette in small, subtle ways. Pablo Cruise were not that band. “I Want You Tonight” takes its chips and goes all in on a pair of fours. It’s the thing that should not be, an unholy marriage of disco and soft rock plus about a dozen other random ideas thrown in for the hell of it.
The opening alone has cowbell and timbales and slap bass and an arena-rock guitar solo. The keyboards on the chorus want to be new wave, while the rhythm guitar wants to keep biting the hook from “Come And Get Your Love.” There’s a breakdown at 2:50 that turns briefly into yacht rock before we get a second guitar solo, and then there’s another breakdown at 3:52 which feels like the extremely white engineer listened to a 12” single once and said, “Gotcha.” I don’t know how Jenkins keeps a straight face while singing his vocal, but he does, and he is absolutely going for it. “I Want You Tonight” sounds like Pablo Cruise decided to glom onto every trend that was happening in late ’79. At the exact same time. The whole thing is absolutely, unbelievably insane. And…. It kinda grew on me?
Look, any good music critic knows better than to defend a band like Pablo Cruise, particularly when said band is smack in the middle of their “disco sellout” period. And in no way am I arguing that “I Want You Tonight” is a “good” song. But it’s also a song I find impossible to hate. Yes, like a brand-new puppy, “I Want You Tonight” tends to run around and sniff everything in sight and make a mess at the worst possible time. But there’s no way you can stay mad at it for long. As I listened to this track for the first, second, and third times in my life, I was flabbergasted. Then amused. And then, almost impressed. This isn’t high art, but it’s a hell of a lot more fun than the rest of Pablo Cruise’s snoozy catalog.
Despite the success of its leadoff single, Part Of The Game still stalled out at a disappointing #39 on the Billboard 200. By the next album, Pablo Cruise had safely reverted back to a close semblance of their original sound. We’ll be talking about their final Top 40 single down the line. I guarantee it won’t be half as interesting as “I Want You Tonight.”
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BITS: In 1980, the great soul singer Patti Austin (who will be showing up on this site in a couple years) released the kind of cover that takes a song from “surprisingly not terrible” to “legitimately great.” I feel vindicated now.