SOTD - I was your hero, and you were my leading lady...

Bertie Higgins - "Key Largo"
from the album Just Another Day In Paradise (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #8 (two weeks)

Floridian Elbert "Bertie" Higgins had the beachcomber song of 1982 with the nostalgic "Key Largo", which topped the Adult Contemporary chart and made the pop top-10. Higgins is the great-great-grandson of famed German scientist and poet Johann von Goethe ("Faust"), and in his younger years backed up "Dizzy" singer Tommy Roe.

Bertie's big break came by this romance-novel style ballad in which he yearns for his old love, taking a few liberties with plotlines from the Bogart/Bacall movie of the same name and cribbing the "Play it again" line from Casablanca. The rest of the album, including the midcharting title track, was a slight but entertaining soft-rock album, but "Key Largo" proved to be Higgins' only top-40 hit. Watch him rock the white suit before Don Johnson...



These days Bertie is making low-budget films with his son, and retains a local fanbase of "Boneheads".

Tomorrow, the debut of a San Francisco folk-rock gone bar-band that one backed Elvis Costello.