American Top 40 PastBlast Redux: 4/4/81

Before I started this blog, I posted about songs from old AT40s on Facebook, January-July 2017.  I’ll be moving them here over time.  This entry has been edited a little from the original.

About a dozen years ago I started assembling playlists of AT40 countdowns between June 76 and May 86 (when I started writing down the charts through my college graduation). I wound up buying a number of compilation CDs from that timeframe. Two particularly good takes on this genre are Barry Scott Presents: The Lost 45s of the 70s and 80s, Volumes 1 and 2. This one comes from the second disk. While I remember it from back in the day, listening to it again after 20+ years made me realize that I had seriously, thoroughly underestimated it at the time. It’s a totally fabulous pop gem (though the video is fairly lame).

Phil Seymour was long-time buds with Dwight Twilley; they shared the vocals on “I’m On Fire” in the summer of 75. He can also be heard doing backup for Tom Petty on “American Girl” and “Breakdown.” This was his only US solo hit, here at its peak of #22. He died of lymphoma in 1993, only 41.

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