Scandal featuring Patty Smyth – Goodbye to You (1982)

Radio barely touched it, MTV couldn’t stop playing it — and three years later, Van Halen asked the woman singing it to be their new lead singer.

In 1985, Van Halen needed a new lead singer. David Lee Roth was out, the biggest hard rock band in America was suddenly headless, and Eddie Van Halen reached out to a singer from New York: Patty Smyth. She said no. She was eight months pregnant, she was a New Yorker with no interest in Los Angeles, and by her own account the band’s legendary chaos didn’t help the pitch. Sammy Hagar got the job instead, and rock history forked. That such an offer landed on Smyth’s doorstep at all traces back to one three-and-a-half-minute kiss-off from 1982 — a single that barely cracked the Top 65 and still made her one of the most recognizable voices of the MTV era. It was called Goodbye to You.

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Scandal was formed in New York City in 1981 by guitarist Zack Smith, who wrote most of the band’s material and needed a frontwoman who could sell it. He found one with a downtown pedigree money can’t buy: Smyth had grown up around Greenwich Village music royalty — her mother managed guitar pioneer Link Wray and ran Village clubs including the Café Wha? — and she delivered Smith’s songs with a grin that could cut. Goodbye to You, released in September 1982 as the band’s debut single, was Smith’s breakup song turned inside out: no heartbreak, no pleading, just a woman cheerfully showing a relationship the door over a bouncing new wave pulse. It was cut at Mediasound in New York and tucked onto the band’s self-titled five-song EP for Columbia.

The hit radio didn’t make

Then the record split American media in two. Radio programmers largely passed, and the single stalled at No. 65 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a number that surprises almost everyone who lived through 1982, because the song was inescapable. The reason was a young cable channel desperate for American rock acts, especially female-fronted ones: MTV put the clip in heavy rotation, and Smyth has always credited the network, not radio, for breaking the song. The truer chart tells the story — No. 5 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks — and so does the retail ledger: the little Scandal EP kept selling until it stood as the best-selling EP in the history of Columbia Records. By December 1982 the band was playing it on American Bandstand, and a group with no album to its name was one of the most visible acts in the country.

The follow-up Love’s Got a Line on You charted in 1983, and in 1984 came the full-length Warrior — billed, tellingly, as Scandal featuring Patty Smyth. Its title track The Warrior went to No. 7 in America and No. 1 in Canada, the band’s commercial summit. A year later, worn down by turnover and the usual frictions, Scandal dissolved.

The call from Eddie

Which is when the phone rang. The Van Halen invitation remains one of pop history’s great what-ifs — an arena-rock giant offering its microphone to a new wave singer from Queens — and Smyth’s refusal, for the most grounded reasons imaginable, sent Van Halen into its Hagar era and sent her toward a second act of her own. Her 1992 duet with Don Henley, Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough, spent six weeks at No. 2 on the Hot 100, held off only by Boyz II Men’s End of the Road, and her writing later earned Oscar and Grammy nominations. In 1997 she married John McEnroe, completing one of New York’s more improbable power couples. And no, for the record that always needs setting: Patty Smyth of Scandal is not Patti Smith, the punk poet of Because the Night — two Manhattan singers, one letter and one universe apart.

The original video on this page, from the band’s own channel, is the artifact that did the work radio wouldn’t: Smyth in that red dress, singing the goodbye directly at her bandmates, three minutes of pure early-MTV electricity. The chart books say No. 65. Everyone who had cable in 1982 knows better.