With a predilection for parethenticals (a man after my own heart), Billy Ocean is best remembered for smashes like “Caribbean Queen (Love On The Run)” and “There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry),” as well as “Suddenly,” “Loverboy,” and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car.” Remove the Trinidad-born singer’s extended run of hits from the radio, and the decade wouldn’t have sounded the same.

Alongside “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car,” a #1 hit in 1988, another lengthily-titled tune ranks as my favorite of Ocean’s oeuvre. “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going” arrived two years earlier, the theme to the Romancing The Stone sequel, The Jewel Of The Nile. Like “Get Outta My Dreams,” the song was co-written with Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the producer best known for his work with AC/DC, Def Leppard, and The Cars (and much, much later, Shania Twain).

This week in 1986, “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going” peaked at #2, just missing the top spot as the singer had only a year earlier with another Lange co-write, “Loverboy.” Signed to Jive Records, Ocean was kept from #1 by a talented lady from his Arista label family, Whitney Houston, who was happily ensconced in the penthouse with “How Will I Know.”

Whitney’s smash had a neon-splashed music video in its favor, but “When The Going Gets Tough” had a little something special too. The clip features Jewel Of The Nile stars Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito as Ocean’s white-suited backup singers, but was banned in Britain, where non-musicians weren’t allowed to appear as musicians in performance-clip videos.

Thank goodness there was no such prohibition against sax breaks in songs during the Eighties, because the one in “When The Going Gets Tough” rules. And there’s no mistaking this is a “Mutt” Lange production, with the shadow of Def Leppard looming large in the song’s intro:

I recall an out-of-state business trip years ago, driving in a rental car with the radio on, when one of my co-workers said he bet we’d hear some Billy Ocean. I kid you not, “Caribbean Queen” came on within 15-20 minutes tops.

Though Ocean has returned to recording after taking a 15-year break to raise his family, it’s his string of classic pop/R&B hits that will forever be his musical legacy.

Purchase Billy Ocean – “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Gets Going” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.

[NOTE: Revised from an original post on January 21, 2011.]