Top 5: Cripes, Here He Goes With 1971 Again

I probably spend altogether too much time, for some of you, writing about the early 1970s on this blog. I’ll risk it again, because 1971 is one of my favorite years of the decade. The 1960s are over, in more than just the calendrical sense; the Beatles have become four solo acts with vastly different styles; the Motown assembly line is down to two reliable hitmakers—the Jackson Five and Diana Ross—while Marvin and Stevie (and to a lesser extent, the Temptations) chart their own increasingly idiosyncratic courses; the brief heyday of soul is lingering; the influence of bubblegum lingers although its glory days are over; the Top 40 charts are as adult (as “adult” was defined at the time) as they have been since before the British Invasion; this is the seventh clause I have added to this sentence by using a semicolon.

So let’s warp back there again, courtesy of a new chart from the folks at ARSA—from KIKI in Honolulu, dated March 15, 1971.

1. “I’m So Proud”/Main Ingredient. (peak) It would be over a year before the Main Ingredient’s major American breakthrough, “Everybody Plays the Fool”—this is a cover of the Impressions’ hit, a cover that got only to Number 49 on the Hot 100. (For an interesting list of other hits that were big in Hawaii but not so much in the rest of the country, click here.)

6. “Oye Como Va”/Santana. (falling) Of the 30 records on the KIKI chart this week in 1971, only two can rightfully be considered rock records—this and George Harrison’s “What Is Life” down at Number 21. That’s what I mean by an adult chart. There’s kids’ music here, yeah, but also plenty of stuff that wouldn’t upset their parents.

8. “I Dig Everything About You”/The Mob. (climbing) The Mob was often compared to Blood Sweat and Tears in their day, albeit with nothing like BS&T’s success. They were big enough in the winter of ’71, however, to get a shot on American Bandstand playing this song, which made it only to Number 83 nationwide. Their greatest claim to fame might be that the group’s Jimmy Holway had written “Kind of a Drag” for fellow Chicagoans the Buckinghams.

11. “When I’m Dead and Gone”/McGuinness Flint. (climbing) I bought this record on a 45 back then—it’s very odd, mostly acoustic, and while it was a smash in the UK, it barely made the Top 50 over here, and the fact that it did that well is pretty amazing, since it’s so very, very English. Tom McGuinness had been in Manfred Mann; Hughie Flint had played with John Mayall. Not long after “When I’m Dead and Gone” hit, the group’s principal songwriters, Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, left the band to record as a duo (and to score big in the UK but again, not so much over here). I would love to be able to post this—but my 45 is incurably warped. (And 300 miles away, back in Wisconsin, at that.) If anybody else out there has it, help a brother out and post it somewhere.

16. “Pushbike Song”/The Mixtures (debut) I might have heard this only three or four times in the spring of 1971 but I never forgot it, and I never heard it again until late in 2006, when it turned up on the Live365 WLS Airchecks station. (Which, by the way, is no longer broadcasting—a shame, truly.) The Mixtures, an Australian band, had covered Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” with great success the year before in Oz, so they recorded this original in the same vein. You can hear a bit of it here, as the soundtrack to a sketch from The Paul Hogan Show on Australian TV.

In the spring of 1971, I was a relatively new Top 40 listener, just having discovered WLS the previous fall. Almost every new record I heard was exciting, and, as this post shows, even the most obscure tended to stick with me. It was already the best toy I’d ever found—and I had already figured out that I wanted to be on the radio when I grew up.

I’d make it to the radio, someday. One of these days, I should probably look into growing up.

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