Don’t Turn Off the Radio (Part II)

I don’t know who hit upon the idea of the radio countdown show, but it’s both simple and brilliant: play the top songs of a week, or a year, in reverse order. Because each song is supposed to be more popular than the last, the thinking is that the music keeps getting better and better, so listeners can’t bring themselves to turn off the radio. So it was with the New Year’s Eve countdown, and many were the years I sat by my radio with paper and pencil to keep track of the year’s top songs. This year, we’re using the yearend surveys from Cash Box magazine to chart the years from 1964 through 1986. (Part one, covering 1964 through 1971, is here.)

1972
#1: “American Pie”/Don McLean
#100: “Use Me”/Bill Withers
Comment: This chart is full of reasons why I love me some classic Top 40—wimp-pop monuments “Alone Again Naturally” (#2) and “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” (#4) sit right there in the Top 10 with “I Gotcha” by Joe Tex (#6), and you could follow “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” (#20) with “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (#19). On the radio, you’d never segue the last two, however. That’s what jingles are for.

1973
#1: “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree”/Tony Orlando and Dawn
#100: “I Wanna Be With You”/Raspberries. (Now that’s how you start a radio show, although perhaps it’s not the best way to end one.)
Best segues: Lots of them on this chart—”My Love” (#6) into “Touch Me in the Morning” (#5); “Killing Me Softly With His Song” (#21) into “Will It Go Round in Circles” (#20); “Dueling Banjos” (#55) into “Photograph” (#54); “Behind Closed Doors” (#72) into “Let’s Pretend” (#71), and the pure AM radio glory that is “Heartbeat It’s a Lovebeat” (#83) into “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day” (#82).

1974
#1: “Show and Tell”/Al Wilson
#100: “Midnight Train to Georgia”/Gladys Knight & the Pips (placed at #15 on the 1973 chart)
Comment: By the mid 70s, rock records were pretty scarce on Top 40 radio, and rarely scarcer than on the 1974 chart. I count only about a dozen, including “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band (#10), “The Loco-motion” by Grand Funk (#13), and “Band on the Run” by Paul McCartney and Wings (#37). But that number also includes a rare Led Zeppelin single, “D’yer Mak’er” at Number 90.

1975
#1: “Love Will Keep Us Together”/Captain and Tennille
#100: “Saturday Night”/Bay City Rollers
Comment: This was the year of the parenthetical title, apparently. I count nine of ‘em. The highest-ranking is at Number 25, “They Just Can’t Stop It (The Games People Play)” by the Spinners, a record that is still my favorite song of all time. Here it is, lip-synched on Soul Train:

1976
#1: “Disco Lady”/Johnnie Taylor
#100: “Something He Can Feel”/Aretha Franklin
Weirdest entry: “I.O.U.”/Jimmy Dean (#70). Before he was a sausage magnate, Jimmy Dean was a country singer and TV star of the 1960s. “I.O.U.” is a spoken-word recording in which a guy talks about his debt to his mother for all the things she’s done for him over the years.

1977
#1: “You Light Up My Life”/Debby Boone (The top single not just of 1977 but of the whole decade, even though it seemed to annoy people more than “My Ding-a-Ling” and “Disco Duck” put together.)
#100: “Disco Lucy”/Wilton Place Street Band (The theme from I Love Lucy, done disco style, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time; decide for yourself here.)
Comment: This was another year in which rock is largely absent from the top of the chart. I count only seven rock bands in the Top 40, and several of them are doing ballads, although rockers are better represented in the bottom half of the chart.

1978
#1: “Night Fever”/Bee Gees (and “Stayin’ Alive is Number Two, and Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” is Number Three)
#100: “You Make Lovin’ Fun”/Fleetwood Mac
Best segues: “Slip Slidin’ Away” (#54) into “Thunder Island” (#53); “What’s Your Name” (#51) into “I Just Wanna Stop” (#50)

Coming tomorrow: We’ll see in 2009 with a look back to the last of the 70s and much of the 80s.