Top 5: A Music Massacre Montage of Something Else Beginning With “M”

(Edited to add a link.)

What makes old record charts endlessly enchanting to me is how they can be viewed as a montage of people, places, and moments. Take the chart from WGRQ in Buffalo, New York, dated October 1, 1973:

2. “Heartbeat–It’s a Lovebeat”/DeFranco Family (holding at 2). What radio people call the “news sounder” is out of fashion today. (Not unlike radio news itself.) In days of yore, stations would play some kind of attention-getting, authoritative musical theme to signal a newscast. When I was working for WXXX (which is not its name), somebody hit upon the idea of using the opening seconds of “Heartbeat–It’s a Lovebeat” as the station’s news sounder. It’s not a bad idea—certainly not as bad as starting an especially lightweight teenage bubblegum record with it—it was just weird.

3. “We’re an American Band”/Grand Funk (down from 1). For a period of years starting in junior high, I was tight with a kid we’ll call Kyle, because that is not his name. We both dug this song a lot. We went through high school together, but attended separate colleges and drifted apart. We’d see each other now and then as the years passed, but we had little to say to one another. In the new millennium, he found his way to my political blog, and he left a comment one day saying he was a Republican, I was wrong about everything, and goodbye forever. In my pantheon of personal losses, it wasn’t an especially big one since we were lost to each other by then anyhow, but I’ve always wondered why he felt the need to slam the door so hard.

13. “China Grove”/Doobie Brothers (up from 17). Sometimes it takes a psychiatrist to explain the images conjured up by the songs we remember. Since I’m not a doctor, I can’t tell you precisely why I associate “China Grove” with the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor, but I do. (The Massacre was just one event in a month jammed with history. As I put it at Popdose last year, “Egypt and Israel brought the world to the brink of war, Richard Nixon went nose-to-nose with the Constitution only to blink first, and Cheech and Chong had a hit single.”)

17. “Summer (The First Time)”/Bobby Goldsboro (up from 20). Each year at the campus radio station, a new crop of freshmen would come aboard. We veterans were always interested in sizing up the new talent to see who’d be a good fit. One kid, whom we’ll call Chad because that is not his name, was too eager to get involved. One day, he was in the studio watching one of the veterans while she was on the air. Sensing she was coming to the end of a talk break, he helpfully reached over and switched on the turntable for her. She didn’t murder him, although that seemed to us like an act of extreme forebearance, and less than Chad deserved.

The kid was not without talent, but he chafed at format rules. “Summer (The First Time)” was his favorite song, and he would frequently play it during his shows, despite the fact that we were running a classic-rock format. It’s also said that he once got to work at his commercial radio job on a Sunday morning and couldn’t get the transmitter on.  Instead of calling the engineers, he went to the transmitter building and broke in to see if there was anything he could fix. My suspicion is that the story got embellished by the time I heard it, but I dunno—it sounds like something he would have done.

24. “Touch of Magic”/James Leroy (down from 14). I’ve got no personal story about this song, but what the hell. It was a big hit in Canada for Leroy, a singer/songwriter who once toured with the Stampeders (“Sweet City Woman”). While on the road, Leroy and one of the Stampeders started fooling around with dueling Wolfman Jack imitations. That ultimately resulted in the Stampeders’ version of “Hit the Road Jack,” which features the real Wolfman Jack—and which keeps the Stampeders from being a true one-hit wonder by virtue of its having made Number 40 for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1976. As for “Touch of Magic,” it’s another one for the “how-did-this-fail-to-chart-in-America?” file.