Month: June 2018

In the realm of popular music, there seems to be a little something more impressive about songs that make the top ten. A retrospective on an artist’s or group’s career will often include the # of Top 10 hits he/she/it had. In some ways, it’s a quick, possibly unfair measure of success.

I got to thinking about such things when I noticed that this song by the Fortunes stalled out at #15. (It’s #20 on this chart.) I think I heard “Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again” on the radio plenty throughout the 70s; I suppose that led me to assume it had easily reached that exalted Top 10 status. As I’ve gotten more familiar with AT40 shows prior to the time I started maintaining my charts, I’ve found a number of other songs from the 1970-75 period that felt like top-tenners to me but weren’t. Here are ten of them, along with peak position. I grant you this exercise is wholly subjective and is almost certainly based on some combination of personal appeal and the vagaries of recurrent lists in the Cincinnati market.

–White Plains, “My Baby Loves Lovin’.” British vocalist Tony Burrows sang lead on several one-off studio pop groups right around this time. Without doing any research, I’m thinking all the other songs climbed higher than this. (#13, Jun 70)

–Cat Stevens, “Wild World.” Beyond this one, “Peace Train,” and “Morning Has Broken,” I’m not that much of a Stevens fan. I’d have thought, though, this would have done as well as those other two, which soon after made #7 and #6, respectively. (#11, Apr 71)

–Grass Roots, “Two Divided By Love.” I’d put this up there with “Sooner or Later,” which made #9 earlier in the year (in fact, the latter is on the show this week). (#16, Nov-Dec 71)

–Raspberries, “I Wanna Be With You.” I got familiar with this from Fantastic, a fun K-Tel album. It totally rocks, and I probably like it better than their #5 hit “Go All the Way.” (#16, Jan 73)

–King Harvest, “Dancing in the Moonlight.” This one is the song that initially gave me the idea for this post. Encountered it a decent amount over the years; just always assumed it made it bigger. (#13, Feb-Mar 73)

–Charlie Rich, “Behind Closed Doors.” I guess I figured any country song that broke through into my consciousness before the age of 10 had to have been a huge pop hit.  I nearly included Donna Fargo’s “Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” on the list for the same reason. (#15, Jul 73)

–Edgar Winter Group, “Free Ride.” My impression is definitely shaped by subsequent airplay for this song. Heard this lots more than I ever did “Frankenstein.” (#14, Oct 73)

–Bachman Turner Overdrive, “Takin’ Care of Business.” How did this not get higher? You can hardly avoid it on 70s stations now. (#12, Aug 74)

–Pure Prairie League, “Amie.” Purely a function of PPL having roots near Cincinnati, where it got plenty of exposure. It was decidedly underrated at the time nationally, though. A very different lineup had a #10 song, “Let Me Love You Tonight,” five years later. (#27, Apr 75)

–Abba, “SOS.” This might be my very favorite of theirs; it’s simply magic to me. Would definitely have pegged this as a top 5 song. (#15, Nov 75)

Granted, my impressions weren’t all that far away from reality for the most part, but as I noted, extra weight seems to be given to songs that get at least to #10. Would love to get reactions/hear about other “slighted” hits below (I winnowed mine down from one that was over twice as long initially). I stopped with 75 because the week-to-week encounters that began in 76 allowed me to have an immediate reaction about tunes which I didn’t think peaked high enough.

And don’t feel too bad for the Fortunes. They had four Top 10 songs in their native England, and “You’ve Got Your Troubles,” which sounds just barely familiar to me, made #7 on this side of the pond in 65.

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 somewhat from the original.

I felt kind of…naughty…posting this one on FB last year, but had to do it just to see if I could get the same reaction from Warren as he had back in the day (he had told me that he blamed Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra” for godawful guitar solos like the one in this song). “Naughty Naughty” is at #24, and would peak one position higher.  Parr would go all the way to the top later in the year with “Man in Motion,” from the flick St. Elmo’s Fire.

I occasionally listen to a station via the iHeart Radio app devoted exclusively to playing old AT40 shows (called, appropriately enough, Classic American Top 40). The channel cycles through almost 180 shows, evenly split between the 70s and 80s (though right now they play two 80s shows for every 70s show). Both of the shows being featured by Premiere Networks this weekend are in those rotations, and I’ve heard at least parts of each there more than once.

That’s how I know that on this show Casey reveals the source of this band’s name: it comes from the title of a short story by science fiction writer Frederik Pohl. We also get a brief plot outline of “The Day the Icicle Works Closed.” Just in the nick of time, too, as “Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)” was in its last week on the countdown, at its peak of #37. Icicle Works never hit again.

This is the fifth week in a row that the featured 80s track climbed no higher than #28 (and I’d expect the streak to go to six next Sunday). Apparently late spring/early summer was a prime time for low-peaking songs that I really liked.

My spring of 76 was full of musical discoveries. Along with learning of the existence of AT40, I also found that on weekends the Cincinnati Enquirer would print Billboard’s Top 10 pop, country, and soul singles, as well as the Top 10 albums, all for the week just ended. It was definitely a reason to make a dash for the arts section of the paper every Sunday morning.  I suppose in some ways it spoiled the last 40 minutes of the show, but somehow I couldn’t resist. I wish I’d thought to save at least a couple of those newspapers—I can still picture the lists in my head. My own records will have to do…

This was one of the first few shows I wrote down (as you might suspect, I’ll post it a picture of my chart sometime soon). I was in thrall during those early weeks of record-keeping; I can remember trying to discern patterns in the rise and fall of the various songs played as the weeks passed.  Those 45s popular in June and July of 76 became fairly well etched into my memory.

One thing that particularly stood out on the June charts was a relative lack of movement at the top. On 6/5, “Silly Love Songs,” “Get Up and Boogie,” and “Misty Blue” sat at #2, 3, and 4, respectively. They all moved up one position the following week and then stayed locked together at the top for the rest of the month. Those three weeks, so early in the time I was paying close attention, made an indelible impression. In some respects, Dorothy Moore’s beautiful, soulful ballad of lost love—one of the great songs of its or any other era—has been at #3 for me ever since.

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.

Tough to pick one song out from this excellent countdown! Debuting at #38 is Jackson Browne’s second AT40 hit.  It comes from his LP The Pretender, and it’s probably less well known now than the title track, which got to #58 later in the year.  Tragedy struck while JB was recording the album: his wife, Phyllis Major, committed suicide.  Unrelated but at least a little interesting is the fact that Ms. Major’s mother shares writing credit on this tune.  It peaked at #23.

1) When I was 16, our family took a two-week vacation to Hawaii. We went with a tour group of maybe around 30 people; Amy and I were the youngest by a fair margin. It was my first time on an airplane. On the way out, we had stops in Chicago and San Francisco, and the layover at the latter was long enough to take a quick bus tour of the city. On one of the legs—I can’t recall now if it was ORD -> SFO or SFO -> HNL—we got bumped up to first-class, still my only experience of that kind.

We visited Oahu, the Big Island, and Maui.  Some of the moments I can recall include visiting Pearl Harbor, going out on a boat for a few hours’ cruise off the Kona coast (I spent much of it listening to the 6/21/80 AT40 on the radio I’d thought to bring with me, even as Amy and I jumped into the ocean to swim next to the boat for a while), seeing Jim Nabors in concert, and valiantly attempting—but overall failing—to converse en español con una niña about my age I had met on Ka’anapali Beach (I had recently finished my second year of studying Spanish).

2) This show, if you add enough qualifiers, is notable in some sense. It’s the final Casey-hosted, non-special, non-year-end 80s show to be rebroadcast on terrestrial radio as a part of the Premiere Networks series (which started in April 2007). According to this site, there were 51 times during the 80s when a guest host filled in for CK; to date only one of those shows, that hosted by the late Gary Owens in September 81, has been offered up to stations. The 7/5/80 special (AT40 Book of Records) hasn’t seen the light of day yet, nor has the first half (#100-#51) of the 86 year-end countdown; I’d bet on the latter to crop up in December.

For the record, I count 26 regular Casey-hosted shows yet to be aired in the 70s series, plus all of the 72 and part of the 78 year-enders. They could work it out so that all were rebroadcast by the end of 2019, but I kinda expect it will bleed into 2020.

3) The penultimate show to appear for the first time was 5/16/87, which I noted last month wasn’t so much my cup of tea. The chart for 6/14/80 (the day my family departed for the 50^th state) is in some ways the opposite; it’s much harder to narrow it down to a single song to feature. I’m sorely tempted to go with that clever ode to technology, “Answering Machine,” by Rupert Holmes, which debuts at #35. Instead, I chose one that unjustly peaked at only #39, here in its second and final week on the countdown.

Spider, a South African/American band with Amanda Blue on vocals, hung around for two albums but had only this one foray onto the Top 40. They had two members with notable post-Spider careers: drummer Anton Fig later joined the World’s Most Dangerous Band, and on keyboards there was Hall of Fame Songwriter Holly Knight. While there are a few crimes against humanity in and amongst her oeuvre, several of her tunes (some which she only co-wrote) land on my guilty-pleasure-to-very-very-good spectrum, including “Never,” “The Warrior,” “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Change,” and “Better Be Good to Me.” The latter two appear on Spider’s second LP.  John Waite made some changes (pun intended, I guess?) for the better IMO when he covered “Change.” I love Tina’s version of “BBGtM,” but it’s striking how very similar her arrangement is to the original.

“New Romance (It’s a Mystery)” sounds so good that it’s a mystery to me why it didn’t break out more. Maybe about a year later, I called in to a fairly new Top 40 station in Cincinnati (anyone remember WYYS—Yes 95?) to request it. The DJ expressed sympathy for my plea—she said she’d played it at her previous job in Atlanta during its run—but told me there wasn’t anything she could do to put it on the air in that spring of 81. Sigh; while I’d like to think not responding to requests is what led to a switch in formats to soft rock just a few months later, I know in reality they were simply getting eaten alive in the ratings by WKRQ.