Songoftheday 2/1/15 - I gave you silk suits, blue diamonds and Gucci handbags, I gave you things you couldn't even pronounce!

"The Rain" - Oran "Juice" Jones
from the album Juice (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's Song of the Day comes from the thirstily-named R&B singer Oran "Juice" Jones, who went from a career in the Navy to being the first non-rap artist to have success on the nascent hip-hop label Def Jam. Releasing a single under just "Juice" in the spring of 1986, "You Can't Hide From Love" dented the R&B chart at #75. However, adding his full name, Oran put out five minutes of campy soul bliss with "The Rain", with his falsetto balancing his gruff spoken-word expose' of following his love through her infidelity to getting tossed on her ass decades before Beyonce's "Irreplacable"...

Not only did "The Rain" climb to #1 on the R&B chart for two weeks, the record crossed over to the pop list as well, reaching the top ten on the Hot 100 in November of 1986. The remix also made it to #7 on the Dance Club Play chart in Billboard as well. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Male Performance, losing out to James Brown's "Living In America". Internationally, the song did even better in England, reaching #4 on the British singles chart, and made the top-10 in Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

However it would be Oran's only time on the entire Hot 100, earning him true "one-hit wonder" status. He even fell short of the top-40 on the R&B chart for the rest of his career, coming one notch away with "Cold Spending My Money" from his misguided "harder" sophomore album GTO: Gangsters Taking Over. In 1989, switching over to Columbia Records, he went to #47 on the R&B list with "Pipe Dreams", before fading from the soul limelight. But no matter, Jones can be proud of the total awesomeness that is "The Rain".

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Here's the 12" version I owned and prized in my Chicago years...

That same year, R&B singer Miss Thang released an "answer record" to "The Rain" called "Thunder & Lightning", and peaked at #48 on the soul chart, and was quite hilarious...

Ten years ago jazz/soul singer Ledisi did a quite funky cover of "The Rain", even bringing Oran on board...

And I guess I'm not the only one who adored the track, as Jimmy Kimmel had the singer on for his birthday last November...

Up tomorrow: A Canadian hottie is close at hand.