Song of the Day 1/5: Billy Squier, “The Stroke”

The signs are obvious – the drooping right side of his face, his slack right-handed salute, his inability to flip a coin at the Army-Navy game – but the strongest argument for “something is wrong with Trump” is his panicky reaction to the media reporting on it. The smart money says that, among other things, at some point he suffered a stroke.

That’s not the kind of stroke Billy Squier sang about on his breakthrough single from his 1981 album “Don’t Say No.” And it’s not about the kind you’re thinking about, either. Squier said it was about the way record company people would stroke artists’ egos, the better to take advantage of them.

If you hear echoes of Queen in the song, it’s no accident. Squier was friends with the band and wanted Brian May to produce “Don’t Say No,” and Freddie Mercury was guest vocalist on one of his later albums. It’s not hard to imagine what Mercury would sound like singing it.

Squier was a commercial force in the early ’80s, recording three consecutive platinum LPs in a style that other bands evolved into hair metal, but he wasn’t an overnight sensation. Squier started out in the early ’70s playing lead guitar for a Boston band called the Sidewinders, fronted by singer Andy Paley, who went on to produce a lot of music with Brian Wilson in the ’90s. Squier left to form his own band, Piper, whose two late-’70s albums got some critical acclaim but failed to break out. This is a tune he wrote for the Sidewinders and recorded for Piper’s 1977 eponymous debut LP.

Squier’s star dimmed by the end of the ’80s, and while he’s still active he hasn’t released an album since 1998’s “Happy Blue,” which included this acoustic version of his first hit, retitled “Stroke Me Blues.”