Sometimes, when all seems lost, a twist of fate spins you around.

But before digging into the fertile loam of this particular song, please allow me to relay my own brief — but related — spadeful of a side note [This turned out not to be brief at all — Ed.].

When deciding what to write about from week to week, I like to work from a pool of hundreds of songs, broken up into folders by decade, and then divided again between Song Of The Week and the slightly more obscure curios of Hey, What’s That Song. Unfortunately, the pools I constructed years ago resided on a long-gone laptop, so prior to relaunching this electrical magazine, it proved necessary to start from scratch, stockpiling songs I already knew, as well as considering thousands more with which I had a passing acquaintance, had forgotten entirely, or had simply never encountered at all.

Ahhh, the thrill of the chase! Like Indiana Jones in pursuit of the archeology of music, brushing away decades of dirt to uncover the treasures beneath. . . but without the bullwhip and fedora.

While brushing away at the lower half of the US Billboard chart for 1983, I spied a title I didn’t know, by a group I didn’t know called Sheriff. Listening to this obscure track, I thought to myself, “Hey, this song sounds like it would have been a huge hit if it been released in the power ballad, hair metal era. Even the name Sheriff would have fit perfectly in between Warrant and Poison. If only they’d been around 5 years later.” Placing the song in my Lost Artifacts of the 1980’s folder, I moved on.

Fast forward a couple of months. Perhaps a few of you already know what I’m about to discover.

While attempting to narrow down my options for a song to write about, I decided to look up Sheriff in the digital universe with the hope that some tiny nugget of information might exist somewhere about this forgotten band from 40 years ago. Imagine my surprise upon immediately finding a Wikipedia page whose very first sentence states that the song “When I’m With You” went to #1 in the US in 1989.

Come again? That can’t be right. Do the guys in that picture look like they’re from 1989? But I double-checked — even though the Wikipedia entry contained multiple footnotes with supporting sources — and found it was, indeed, true.

An astonishing 32 different songs reached #1 that year in the US, and of that 32, I knew 28 (not too bad considering I basically ignored contemporary music in 1989 in favor of my newfound passion, spelunking in the heretofore unexplored — by me, anyway — caverns of Classic Rock). Of the remaining four unfamiliar songs, three were by well-known artists with multiple, better-known — and more oft played — number 1 hits, so I didn’t feel too badly about not recognizing those particular tunes (mostly saccharine ballads), but it did shock me to learn that somewhere along the line — way back then, and for the following 4 decades or so — I had missed Sheriff entirely.

Sheriff formed in Toronto in 1979 and released their first (and only) album in 1982. The third single from that album, “When I’m With You,” reached the Top 10 in Canada in 1983, but only climbed as high as #61 in the US. While #61 may sound decent given the hundreds and hundreds of singles released every year, anything that falls outside of the Top 40 receives little in terms of national airplay or sales and is, more often than not, lost to the musical mists of time. Alas, Sheriff broke up in 1985 due to the usual group tensions, a general lack of widespread success, and all the encroaching mists.

And then a funny thing happened on the way to the end of the decade.

In 1988, a radio DJ in Las Vegas for some reason began playing “When I’m With You” — a now 6 year-old ballad — and the audience responded immediately. DJs in other cities followed suit. The single wasn’t even available to buy, but at some point the buzz became so buzzy that Capitol Records decided to re-release it. This occurred during the peak of the video years, and yet, this song by an unknown band with no video, no promotion, and no album, began to climb the charts. Fate, ever unpredictable, was in full twist.

Songwriter and former Sheriff keyboardist Arnold Lanni was playing a gig with his new band at a high school in the middle of nowhere when he heard the news that “When I’m With You” had reached #1 in The US. (He originally wrote the song back in 1982, in about 5 minutes, for a girl he had recently met and fallen in love with. He played it for her on his piano on Valentine’s Day and two years later they married.)

Lead singer Freddy Curci (who recorded his vocal in one take) was working as a courier and heard himself singing his old song on the radio at an office while delivering a package. The secretary asked him why he was suddenly laughing and he asked if she knew the song. She answered in the affirmative and said she loved it. Curci said, “That’s me.” She didn’t believe him and told him to get out.

Despite entreaties to reunite, Sheriff 2: Electric Boogaloo never came to fruition due to the lingering tensions from the original break up. Curci went on to form the group Alias with the lead guitarist from Sheriff and together they hit #2 a few years later with another ballad, “More Than Words Can Say” (not to be confused with the song by Extreme).

You’re probably wondering why I’ve spent such an inordinate amount of time on this one song. First of all, it’s just such a rare occurrence — not for a single to get re-released and then become a hit the second time around, but the way in which it happened. Almost every other time, it occurred because a band became bigger over the intervening years (e.g. The Cure with “Boys Don’t Cry), or the band had a big hit internationally, but barely dented the US charts, and then a few years later it finally became a big hit in the US (e.g. UB40 with “Red Red Wine”). It’s downright bizarre, however, for a single to flop, a band to flop, and then five years later you’re #1.

Secondly, I’m a super jaded music geek and live for rare surprises such as this. Palpable excitement — just look at my word count. Fetch me a fedora and a bullwhip!

So twist around the mist, and let your world stand still. . . with Sheriff.