What was the best-selling classic rock song of 1988?
Looking back on old press reports from the 1950s, when rock and roll was making its first emergence onto the airwaves, is like reading disparaging tech reports from the early days of the internet; they had no idea what was coming, and had no way of predicting that multiple decades later, rock and roll would still be a dominant force within the music industry.
Even during the pop-centric age of the 1980s, when multiple musicians were laying down their battered old guitars in favour of newfangled synths and shoulder pads, rock was still a consistent presence over the transatlantic pop charts. In fact, it was also during the early 1980s that the term ‘classic rock’ first came into the fold, typically by radio stations distinguishing their old-school, baby boomer-focused offerings from the contemporary rock of the day.
Now, of course, a lot of the rock records which topped the charts over the course of that neon-hazed age are considered classic rock, too, if only for the fact that the 1980s ended nearly 40 years ago, and we are currently further away from that decade than those in the 1980s were from the very first rock and roll records of the 1950s. Still, the question of which classic rock song sold best in 1988 depends on your exact definition of that term.
In the UK, for instance, the ever-unreliable British music-buying public made Cliff Richard’s monstrous Christmas single ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ the best-selling single of the year. Cliff Richard is, of course, incredibly old – so that suits the ‘classic’ side of things – and he was, admittedly, a part of the first wave of British rock and roll musicians who emerged back in the 1950s.
Even still, though, it feels sacrilegious to view any of his 1980s-era output as being within the rock realm, particularly the classic rock realm.
That being said, the British charts weren’t overly dominated by rock – classic or otherwise – back in 1988. It was, after all, the age of manufactured pop, where the Stock, Aitken, and Waterman production line churned out fresh-faced pop stars at a moment’s notice, all sounding exactly the same as one another.
Once you have sifted through the likes of Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue, though, the best-selling song that could arguably be considered classic rock comes in the form of ‘First Time’, Robin Beck’s Coca-Cola power ballad, which spent three weeks at the top of the charts. Thus, the most popular classic rock song of the year was far from rebellious.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the classic rock scene was a lot more cut and dry. While the Billboard Year-End list was topped by George Michael’s post-Wham masterpiece ‘Faith’, it was closely followed by INXS with ‘Need You Tonight’ and, a little further down, Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, which is, in many ways, the archetypal classic rock song.
At that time, Axl Rose’s outfit were still relatively new to the rock realm, with their landmark Appetite for Destruction having been released only the year prior. It didn’t take very long, though, before Guns N’ Roses represented the pinnacle of mainstream rock in America, and, since 1988, they have certainly come to embody the ‘classic rock’ tag.
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