Deferred listening: 1979 AOR trifecta

It's 1979: I'm in the eighth grade, I've finally figured out how to listen to popular music, settling into my own niche at DC AOR powerhouse WAVA; I've started buying records but I don't have enough money to make a habit of it; how do I collect all the songs I want, twenty years before instant downloads?  Tape 'em off the radio, baby!  I had persuaded my parents to get me a TEAC cassette deck for [my birthday/Christmas], so I plugged it into Dad's receiver, tuned in WAVA FM 105, and waited with my finger on the pause button until I recognized the opening chord of one of my must-have songs.  Those tapes disappeared long ago, and I've spent the intervening years (not including the 80s, when I was too cool to listen to AOR) seeking those songs again.  I think I got them all on the original Napster; I got six hundred of my favorite oldies on Napster, stored them online on myplay.com (back when that's what the site was for), then lost my account due to inactivity!  AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!  And by that time, of course, Napster was shut down.  But today I have finally completed my trifecta of most-wanted 1979 AOR (now known as "melodic hard rock") songs; I'll start with the most elusive, "I Do Believe In You" by Pages:

Pages were formed by Richard Page and Steve George, who would go on to form... Mr. Mister!  (Whose drummer, Pat Mastelotto, would later join... King Crimson!  A natural progression from Mr. Mister, yes?)  (8/28: Listening to this again, it strikes me that it has an extremely proggy guitar solo for such a mainstream song; you never know where prog is going to turn up.)

Then there was "All Us Boys" from Toto's second album, Hydra, chock-full of great riffs and leads:

At the time I had no way of knowing that lyrics like "Mothers tell your daughters to stay away from rock and roll" were (a) ridiculous, and (b) especially ridiculous coming from Toto.  (There are some live clips of Toto performing this song on YouTube, but actually seeing them kind of ruins it for me.)

Back in March I alluded to a future return of keyboardist Michael Fonfara to these pages; well, the future is now!  After backing up Lou Reed for a few albums, Fonfara joined AOR band Tycoon, whose minor hit "Such A Woman" (Billboard #26) was one of my sought-after songs that I didn't manage to capture.  Tycoon's sound has been much maligned (sample comment from Adamannapolis: "This is unintentionally funny studio rock. Very intense in its pussytude."), but I am powerless to resist that hook in the chorus:

So that wraps up the trifecta, and no matter what you think of these songs I'm sure you will agree that they all belong together.  (And so do several other songs I've posted, accessible via the handy-dandy AOR tag.)

Now, on to the footnotes: Michael Fonfara's history is even more colorful than playing with Lou Reed and an also-ran AOR band: manning the organ for Rhinoceros, he was one of the purveyors of one of the all-time great rock instrumentals, 1968's "Apricot Brandy"--

"I Do Believe In You" did not make superstars of Pages, but it was good enough for America, who covered it on their 1980 album Alibi:

That's pretty lame, I think; they stripped from the song the little bit of bite the Pages gave it, and it just doesn't make it.  As for that album cover: WTF?