In the summer of 1973, I presume I played baseball, went to summer band rehearsals, spent a week with my cousin and another with my grandparents, and drove a tractor on the farm to earn some spending money, but I’ll be damned if I can remember. That summer, unlike the rest of the summers when I was a kid, is an almost-complete blank. I do recall my parents having a lot of loud, angry arguments that summer. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve decided that they probably weren’t really about what they seemed to be about to me. Whatever their cause, they were such a departure from the norm that maybe I’ve blocked the whole summer. As I sit here right now trying to remember the first days of eighth grade 35 years ago this week, I can’t remember a thing, either. It’s all gone. Fortunately, I’ve still got some of the tunes, as heard on WLS during the week of August 25, 1973:
1. “Brother Louie”/Stories. (holding at 1) I used to have a mid-70s aircheck from a station in Tijuana, Mexico, recorded from long distance, on which “Brother Louie” sounded like a living thing straining to escape from the radio and strangle you in your house. Few records were ever so scary good on the radio. Here’s the original 1973 TV ad for the album.
4. “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”/Chicago. (up from 7) Last week I said that Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4″ makes Van Halen sound like pussies. So does this. It’s four minutes of controlled fury, and it might be the greatest thing Chicago ever did. Here they are working on it in the studio at Caribou Ranch in Colorado, from a July 1973 TV special called Chicago in the Rockies.
The special also starred Al Green; in 2002, when Chicago VI was re-released, it included the band’s recording of “Tired of Being Alone” with Green.
8. “Delta Dawn”/Helen Reddy. (up from 11) In the summer of 1972, 13-year-old Tanya Tucker took this into the Top 10 on the country charts; a year later, Helen Reddy took it to Number One pop, managing a fairly convincing gospel swing despite being almost terminally white. Here she is on the second-season premiere of The Midnight Special, September 14, 1973, introduced by Sly Stone—about whom there’s more below.
22. “Playground in My Mind”/Clint Holmes. (down from 18) Truly, there is no explaining the 1970s sometimes. This thing had risen all the way to Number Two on the Hot 100 in June, kept from the top only by Paul McCartney’s “My Love.” How the whole country didn’t end up diabetic, I don’t know.
23. “If You Want Me To Stay”/Sly and the Family Stone. (holding at 23) And yet this deeply funky record made it onto the radio too. The album, Fresh, contained a cover of Doris Day’s 50s hit “Que Sera Sera,” and at the same time, Sly was rumored to be romantically involved with Day, who was 19 years his senior. In June of 1974, he got married at Madison Square Garden (not to Day, but to Kathy Silva, who gave birth to his child), and advertised that tickets were available. Twenty thousand people eventually showed up. The marriage didn’t last out the year.
I hope you have a fine holiday weekend. I’m going to be doing most of the Top 93 Classic Album Sides countdown on The Lake, so tune in. Use this link to listen; the “listen now” link at the station’s website isn’t working.
Filed under: Record Charts, Tracks, YouTube
Wow. I’d almost forgotten how they would air television commercials for albums (that marketing approach was going by the wayside as I became interested in music). I do remember seeing one for Queen’s “News Of The World,” which, as a kid, I found to be a bit menacing (the commercial, that is).