3/19/77 and 4/5/80 Charts

When I started writing things down, I was listening to AT40 on Sundays. As an artifact of that, my charts through around September 77 bore Sunday dates, whereas the Billboard Hot 100 was always “for the week ending” on a Saturday. Here in March of that year, I’m still experimenting with form, almost from week to week. This time, I’m redundant, with both last week’s position and change in position listed.

I have no idea what the “Winning Sweepstakes Numbers” references. Looks like it was a pretty average week of prediction success.

This past weekend they played 4/5/80 for the 80s show. It was just the second week in the existence of the Harris Top 50 (in reality, I made this chart about 15 minutes after the one for March 29). Let’s check out the top 25:

I didn’t do too well in terms of respecting length of time on the real chart when I started this project off, e.g. “Set Me Free” at #6 after only a couple of weeks on (I really liked it!). “Heartbreaker” was #1 the week before, and “Romeo’s Tune” would have been a long-running prior #1 had I started doing this earlier in the year; “Refugee” and “Lost in Love” are the only future #1s here. “Another Brick in the Wall” peaked at #16, and I’d also burned out on “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by this point. I think one reason I’m not all that jazzed about early 80 now is that I didn’t care much for any of the #1 songs, “Call Me” (high of #17) included. I’m saddened that I didn’t let “Pilot of the Airwaves” get higher than #8.

As for the real thing:

There was a several-week period around this time when I wasn’t listening much to Casey, including this show (note no LDDs or Extra)–I never heard the Wayne Newton or Cliff Richard songs back then. I’ll probably write about my not-so-secret source for chart information sometime before too long. This was a bad week for predictions.