Premiere has been flooding the airwaves these last few weeks with shows from my charting years. Let’s take a quick look at the four most recently played (yet another is scheduled for this weekend), along with some other odds and ends.
First up, 5/30/81:
Even though I like the Photoglo song plenty, that’s a pretty weak set of debut songs.
As for my own rankings:
That’s a super-solid top 11, depending on how you feel about Stars on 45, but having T. G. Sheppard get so high makes me cringe now (I think I had “I Loved ’em Every One” climb up to #9). I clearly had trouble fitting John O’Banion’s song in the space allotted.
It’s been a while since I showed what Q102 was playing back then, so here’s something from as close to this 81 countdown as I have:
Gotta say this is mighty non-adventurous. I distinctly remember them playing that Styx LP medley all the time.
Much more over the fold, with stuff from 76, 77, and 82.
Next up, 6/4/77 (I’ve said this before, but I didn’t put Saturday dates on charts until October 77):
I knew the previous week’s positions of the debut songs because Recordland, one of the music stores in the Florence Mall, kept a copy of the Hot 100 on display each week (there’s more to it than that, and I’ll give greater detail someday). It was a place I visited a lot throughout the late 70s and early 80s.
Because we’d missed school for all but one day in January due to snow, we were still going the week after this show played (schools are ordinarily done for the year before Memorial Day in Kentucky–of course, we’re starting in mid-August). I’d already been to Recordland for the week, so I was able to tell my homeroom teacher as we were being dismissed on the last day of class that my prediction for #1 turned out to be correct.
Moving on to this past weekend’s 6/5/82 show:
And as I indicated on Wednesday, Tommy Tutone was atop my own chart. “Rosanna” was closing in and would supplant Jenny in a couple of weeks. The most interesting thing might be the Cars’ #41 hit making my top 10.
And lastly, my 6/12/76 chart.
This was not originally created in June of 76; it looks like maybe it’s from 2-3 years later. Clearly, I went back and corrected it in the early 90s after learning about “Dance Wit Me.”
The Music of My Life 