About The Song
John Conlee wrote only two of his 25 Billboard Top 20 chart entries. The first was his debut hit “Rose Colored Glasses” and the second was “Backside of Thirty,” a tune about a divorced man trying to re-establish a life for himself.
“Backside of Thirty” was written over three years before it became a hit, and since Conlee hadn’t been married up to that point, the song wasn’t composed around a divorce situation. Instead, it had been based on a couple of relationships that didn’t work out for him. As John said, “There wasn’t a ‘piece of paper to tear apart,’ but still a break-up is a break-up,” and to that degree, Conlee felt those things in the song (except, of course, the reference about the wife and son).
Conlee was going through one of those broken relationships during the time he wrote both “Rose Colored Glasses” and “Backside of Thirty.” The incident brought forth quite a lot of emotion in him, but from a writer’s standpoint, it was merely observation. Several of his friends had actually gone through what these songs were about (the break-up of a home) and John happened to be just on the other side of 30 years old when he wrote them.
“Backside of Thirty” needed two individual attempts to attain hit status. Conlee secured his recording contract with ABC Records in 1976 through Dick Kent, a disc jockey at WLAC-FM/Nashville, where Conlee was working in the same capacity. Kent introduced John to ABC executive Jim Fogelsong, who signed him and released three singles by July of 1977, however none of them charted. “Backside of Thirty” was one of these.
Then, at last, the fourth single “Rose Colored Glasses” broke through in May of ’78 and reached #5. The follow-up in November, “Lady Lay Down,” brought Conlee to #1. After the first chart-topper, in an extremely rare move, ABC Records decided to re-issue “Backside of Thirty” (which had completely stiffed before), but this time it soared all the way to the summit of Billboard’s country singles chart on May 5, 1979, marking John’s second of an eventual seven Billboard number one hits.
A couple of significant events were tied to “Backside of Thirty.” MCA Records absorbed ABC Records on March 5, 1979, two days after Conlee’s single entered the chart. His was the last ABC release to land at number one. That same week the Academy of Country Music named John “Best New Male Artist.”
Conlee continued to chart in the high numbers consistently after that, although in the interim, Billboard’s number one spot eluded him for over four years. He fell into the dreaded, so-called “Number Two Curse,” peaking at #2 four times with “Before My Time,” “Friday Night Blues,” “She Can’t Say That Anymore” and “Miss Emily’s Picture.” Each of these records stayed at #2 for two weeks, but didn’t quite have enough momentum to reach the top. It wasn’t until “Common Man” on May 21, 1983 that John Conlee finally made it back to number one.