Forever No. 1: Robert John’s ‘Sad Eyes’

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Robert John with a look at his lone No. 1: The sweetly insensitive 1979 throwback smash “Sad Eyes.”

Perhaps it made counterintuitive sense that Robert John would finally score his career-making solo ballad at one of the most inhospitable times for downtempo pop music in the history of top 40. The year 1979 was defined first and foremost by disco: the thumping dance music that not only made stars out of the Bee Gees, Chic and Donna Summer but also convinced artists as far-flung as Herb Alpert, Rod Stewart and Blondie to get on the floor. All six of those artists topped the Hot 100 with disco (or at least disco-influenced) songs in 1979, and the charts’ biggest exception to disco’s dominance — power-poppers The Knack, who ended up with the chart’s year-end No. 1 with the irresistible “My Sharona” — was still just as propulsive and beat-driven. The Hot 100 certainly should not have had room at its apex in 1979 for a song as slow-paced, winsome and unapologetically retro as “Sad Eyes.”

But Robert John’s path on the charts had never exactly been a logical one. His career arc was atypically jagged and erratic for a pop singer, starting at an unnaturally young age and continuing for decades, but rarely for more than a hit song at a time, and often with many fallow years coming in between them. By 1979, John had technically been a hitmaker for over 20 years, but he also hadn’t reached the Hot 100 since 1972, and he had even given up on making music altogether for a stretch in the mid-decade. For him to return to recording and immediately top the Hot 100 for the first and only time in his career, with a song at about half the BPM of most of the hits surrounding it on top 40 at the time? Sure, why not.

In truth, it wasn’t like “Sad Eyes” was the only slow song making it on the radio in the late ’70s. There were still plenty of nuggets of AM gold to be found among the silver disco balls littering that era’s charts, sweetly harmonized gems like Walter Egan’s “Magnet and Steel,” Olivia Newton-John’s “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You.” Even disco stalwarts the Bee Gees kicked the year off with “Too Much Heaven,” one of the group’s most sentimental ballads, topping the Hot 100. Another such hit from the time that had just missed the top 10 in 1978, Toby Beau’s “My Angel Baby,” caught the ear of producer George Tobin, who felt a song like that would be a good fit for Robert John.

John would take some convincing. He was essentially retired from music at the time, and was working construction in New Jersey. John had become frustrated with the industry after 15 years of recording — dating back to the minor 1958 hit “White Bucks and Saddle Shoes,” which he recorded as Bobby Pedrick, Jr. when he was just 12 years old — which had failed to result in a consistently sustainable career for him. The final straw came following the success of his 1971 version of The Tokens’ Hot 100-topping 1961 smash “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which went to No. 3 on the chart and sold over a million copies — but still didn’t inspire much belief in him from his then-label, Atlantic Records. “The company didn’t have enough faith to let me do an album,” he told Rolling Stone. “I decided that if that’s what happens after [such a big hit] then I just wasn’t going to sing anymore.”

Tobin invited John to live with him as they worked on the song that would become his comeback single. They eventually came up with “Sad Eyes,” a breakup ballad built on a plush water bed of aqueous electric piano, twinkling glockenspiel, loping bass, buoyant guitar and a crisp drum shuffle. The production was lovely without being overwhelmingly lush, and John’s mostly falsetto vocal was its perfect match — particularly towards the song’s end, when the song modulates up and John uses his doo-wop background to hit some unreal upper-register ad libs as the chorus repeats to fade.

In fact, the song was so sweet that it was easy to miss just what a cad John was playing in its lyrics. The “Sad Eyes” in question belong to a lover who John is breaking it off with, presumably because his main squeeze is returning from afar: “Looks like it’s over, you knew I couldn’t stay/ She’s comin’ home today,” he explains in the opening lines. The song’s patronizing attempts to comfort the soon-to-be-ex on the verses (“Try to remember the magic that we shared/ In time your broken heart will mend”) turn to outright selfishness on the chorus (“Turn the other way… I don’t want to see you cry”) — but they never quite feel mean-spirited enough to the point of distracting from the song’s intoxicating sway.

After a false start with Arista, Tobin and John eventually caught the interest of EMI America, launched just the year before, which released the record in April 1979. The song debuted at No. 85 on the Hot 100 dated May 19, though it didn’t top the chart until 20 weeks later — tying a Hot 100 record to that point, set the year before by Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City” for longest trek to No. 1 — when it finally knocked The Knack out of the top spot after its six-week reign with “My Sharona.” (John also set a record with the longest time in between his first Hot 100 entry and his first No. 1, dating back 21 years to his “White Bucks and Saddle Shoes” debut in 1958, though Tina Turner would take that mark over a half-decade later with her “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”) “Sad Eyes” lasted just one week atop the listing, before the disco order was once again restored — as the song was unseated by Michael Jackson’s all-timer Off the Wall lead single, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.”

This time, Robert John at least would get to make a full album: a self-titled LP, also released on EMI in 1979, which peaked at No. 68 on the Billboard 200 that October. But the album failed to spawn another top 40 hit — the groovier “Lonely Eyes” peaked just outside the region in early 1980 — and John would only make the chart subsequently with a trio of covers, faring the best with his No. 31-peaking take on Eddie Holman’s “Hey There Lonely Girl,” from 1980’s Back on the Street. That album would prove to be his last, and John mostly retired from recording and performing again after that.

Robert John might never have gotten the sustained success or career stability he hoped for as a singer, but he did have hits in four separate decades, he did get his name multiple times in the Billboard record books, and he can claim to be one of just a few artists in the world to rule the age of disco with a not-even-remotely-disco record. Even he eventually turned the other way, that’s nothing to be sad about.