In the Air
(Pictured: ELO performs “Mr. Blue Sky,” 1978.)
After the post earlier this week about the AT40 show from July 15, 1978, here’s the inevitable Bottom 60—songs on their way on to and off of Casey’s show, and plenty that never got there at all.
46. “Shame”/Evelyn “Champagne” King
52. “Boogie Oogie Oogie”/A Taste of Honey
56. “Macho Man”/Village People
76. “I Love the Nightlife”/Alicia Bridges
The disco train was rolling and some iconic records were aboard.
47. “I Need to Know”/Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “Breakdown” had spent a single week at #40 in February; “I Need to Know” would eventually peak at #41. “Listen to Her Heart” would get to #59 in the fall. After all that scratching at the door of the big chart, Petty would finally kick the door down in December 1979 with “Don’t Do Me Like That.”
49. “Mr. Blue Sky”/Electric Light Orchestra. I have never thought of it as a favorite album, but whenever ELO’s Out of the Blue comes up on shuffle or in the car, I find myself thinking, “Damn, this is great.” Also great: the 45 edit of “Mr. Blue Sky,” which omits the long ending and works a lot better as a result. It was available, at least for a while, on blue vinyl.
62. “Hot Child in the City”/Nick Gilder
64. “Just What I Needed”/Cars
72. “Kiss You All Over”/Exile
I associate these records (and several others on this chart, to be sure) with my first semester in college. I didn’t know it in the summer, but in December, “Hot Child in the City” would be one of the first songs I would ever play on the radio.
73. “An Everlasting Love”/Andy Gibb. It seems absurd that Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” kept “Baker Street” at #2 for six weeks, but taken on its own, “Shadow Dancing” is a pretty good radio record, and so is “An Everlasting Love.”
78. “Love Is in the Air”/John Paul Young
79. “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”/Chris Rea
There has never been anything else that sounds quite like these two records. “Love Is in the Air” repeats the same couple of ideas for several minutes to good effect, and the Disco Purrfection remix goes to another plane of existence entirely. It’s a shame that Rea’s album Whatever Happened to Benny Santini, produced by Gus Dudgeon, is officially out of print, because it’s really good, and “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)” is a record I never get tired of.
80. “I Can’t Wait Any Longer”/Bill Anderson. I’m glad to have a reason to write a little appreciation of Bill Anderson, who is one of the most likeable performers ever to come out of Nashville. Starting in 1960, Anderson hit consistently for nearly 20 years. His biggest country hits came back-to-back in 1962 and 1963, “Mama Sang a Song” and “Still,” each of which spent seven weeks at #1. “Still” went to #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1963. Between 1966 and 1974 he hit #1 or #2 country 12 times with songs that emphasized his soft-spoken style and frequently, clever wordplay. The latter is the major appeal of “My Life (Throw It Away If I Want To),” a #1 hit from 1969; “Quits,” which went to #3 in 1971; and “Sometimes,” an adulterous duet with Mary Lou Turner that was his last #1 country hit in 1976. “I Can’t Wait Any Longer,” with its big proto-disco beat and lustful lyric, was his final major country hit and pop crossover. In the late 70s, Anderson became a ubiquitous TV personality, appearing on Match Game and doing a three-year run on One Life to Live. He also hosted TV game, talk, and variety shows in the 80s, 90s, and the new millennium, and he’s still working today, at the age of 81.
97. “Roll With the Changes”/REO Speedwagon
98. “He’s So Fine”/Jane Olivor
99. “Trans-Europe Express”/Kraftwerk
100. “Shaker Song”/Spyro Gyra
More music, better variety: a heartland rock rager that became a classic-rock standard, a New York cabaret singer covering the Chiffons, and a pair of instrumental pioneers, one in electronic music and the other in smooth jazz. All four were on their way out of the Hot 100 in this week.
Experiences with the music can color our perception of the music. We can’t always tell if we like it or dislike it on the basis of what’s in the grooves, or because of the associations we have with it: who we were with and what we were doing while it was on the radio. I have that problem—if it’s a problem—with 1976, and I wonder if 1978, or at least the summer of 1978, isn’t the same way.
Long Live Rock, or Not
(Pictured: the Village People, 1979.)
It’s said that “data” is not the plural of “anecdote.” Nevertheless, we have already tried to make something out of a bunch of anecdotal information about the hits from the summer of 1979. In this post, about the Bottom 60 from the Billboard Hot 100 dated June 30, 1979, we will keep on keeping on.
42. “Is She Really Going Out With Him”/Joe Jackson
60. “Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya”/New England
63. “Heart of Glass”/Blondie
65. “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman”/Kinks
68. “Hold On”/Triumph
70. “You Angel You”/Manfred Mann’s Earth Band
73. “Highway Song”/Blackfoot
76. “My Sharona”/The Knack
80. “Let’s Go”/Cars
81. “Last of the Singing Cowboys”/Marshall Tucker Band
85. “Long Live Rock”/The Who
106. “Dreams I’ll Never See”/Molly Hatchet
“My Sharona” was a very big deal when it hit the radio. (I still remember the first time I heard it.) It scratched some primal teenage itch, and not just in me—it entered the Top 40 at #34 on July 21, then went 18-6-4-2 before hitting #1 for the week of August 25, a position it would hold for six weeks. We were pleased to discover that Get the Knack contained more primal teenage itch-scratchers. The “backlash” against the song and the band was confined largely to the rock press. On the front lines of radio, it was the kind of smash that lights up request lines and makes people stay tuned in hopes of hearing it again. To 19-year-old white guys such as I, “My Sharona” (and the other new records on this part of the chart) represented victory and vindication. My tribe had felt for a year or better that our music was under attack by the forces of disco, a threat to all we held dear.
44. “Married Men”/Bette Midler
46. “Go West”/Village People
47. “The Main Event-Fight”/Barbra Streisand
50. “Good Times”/Chic
53. “Disco Nights”/GQ
56. “Do You Wanna Go Party”/KC and the Sunshine Band
62. “Hot Number”/Foxy
69. “Heaven Must Have Sent You”/Bonnie Pointer
74. “Light My Fire”/Amii Stewart
77. “You’re Gonna Make Me Love Somebody Else”/Jones Girls
78. “Born to Be Alive”/Patrick Hernandez
88. “Motown Review”/Philly Cream
91. “In the Navy”/Village People
While there is plenty of stylistic variation among these records, 19-year-old white guys such as I would have lumped them together as disco records and called down a plague on all their houses. That, in our dislike, we did not differentiate between “In the Navy” and the infinitely superior “Good Times,” or between the faceless, monolithic 140 beats per minute of “Motown Review” and the far more interesting disco records at the top of the Hot 100, is further evidence that we cared more about labels than we did the music itself.
48. “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me”/Bellamy Brothers
57. “Suspicions”/Eddie Rabbitt
59. “Amanda”/Waylon Jennings
71. “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”/Charlie Daniels Band
82. “You’re the Only One”/Dolly Parton
97. “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right”/Barbara Mandrell
104. “All I Ever Need Is You”/Kenny Rogers and Dottie West
108. “When I Dream”/Crystal Gayle
This is the music I was playing on the radio back then, the first summer of my radio career. Every one of them had been or would be #1 on Billboard‘s country chart, except for “When I Dream.” In addition, current Top 40 hit “She Believes in Me” by Kenny Rogers had already been #1 by the end of June, and Anne Murray’s “Shadows in the Moonlight” would make it in July.
52. “Vengeance”/Carly Simon. Somehow I missed “Vengeance” entirely, both in 1979 and in the 40 years since, even though it got nominated for a Grammy for Female Rock Vocal Performance in 1980.
55. “Kiss in the Dark”/Pink Lady. It is blog law that whether you write about music or television, you are not allowed to skip over Pink Lady if ever they come into your purview.
To say that rock was “under attack” in 1979 was a gross exaggeration. Yes, disco was popular but hardly a destroyer of worlds. “Heart of Glass” had been a #1 single, and the Doobie Brothers had both a #1 single and #1 album. Supertramp’s Breakfast in America was a #1 hit also, and the last three #1 albums of the year would be by the Knack, Led Zeppelin, and the Eagles. Cheap Trick made their commercial breakthrough. But our perception was our reality: 19-year-old white dudes such as I concluded that legitimate rock music was making a welcome, inevitable comeback, even though it didn’t really need to make one.
You can, of course, draw any damn conclusion you want depending on how you cherry-pick the charts. You could do it in 1979, and you can do it today with a chart from 1979.
Don’t Bother, They’re Here
(Pictured: Judy Collins does a radio interview, 1975.)
As we do, let’s find a few records to talk about below the Top 40 from the week of June 28, 1975.
45. “I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo”/Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes. The people behind Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes are not the sort of people you would expect: writer/producers Bob Crewe, Denny Randell, and Kenny Nolan, plus a few prominent Los Angeles studio musicians and erstwhile Sugarloaf guitarist and singer Jerry Corbetta. The group was fronted by Sir Monti Rock III, a showbiz character who (according to Wikipedia, so who the hell knows) first came to prominence as a TV talk-show guest in the 60s. You can’t really call what he does “singing”; he’s more the ringmaster. Neither “I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo” nor the single that preceded it, “Get Dancin’,” (which made the pop Top 10 in February of 1975) was ever gonna make it onto your typical oldies station, but they were a hell of a lot of fun.
49. “Me and Mrs. Jones”/Ron Banks and the Dramatics. Some songs probably shouldn’t be covered because the original recordings are so definitive and/or just so damn good. Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” is one of them, although the Dramatics’ version did go to #4 on the R&B chart.
58. “Mister Magic”/Grover Washington Jr. We prefer straight jazz to smooth jazz at this website, but nobody called smooth jazz “smooth jazz” in 1975, and Washington’s Mister Magic album was a smash everywhere it went: #1 on both the jazz and soul album charts and #10 on the Billboard 200. It has all of the smooth jazz ingredients, however, and a lot of the major players, including Bob James, Harvey Mason, Eric Gale, and Ralph McDonald. The single edit of the title song ran 3:19, but here’s the whole nine minutes from the album (which had only four tracks in all.)
62. “I Don’t Know Why”/Rolling Stones. This is a Stevie Wonder song the Stones cut in 1969, during the Let It Bleed sessions, supposedly on the day they learned of Brian Jones’ death, in July of that year. “I Don’t Know Why” wasn’t released until Allan Klein cleaned out the vaults in 1975 for the compilation Metamorphosis. [Previously bad link fixed. —Ed.] It doesn’t sound like hit single material at all, although it’s got some fabulously bent slide guitar. There’s some question, apparently, about whether the slide was played by Mick Taylor or Ry Cooder.
74. “Jackie Blue”/Ozark Mountain Daredevils. In its 21st week and final week on the Hot 100, the oldest record on the list.
75. “Send in the Clowns”/Judy Collins. “Send in the Clowns” was offered to radio stations as an optional extra when the 6/28/75 American Top 40 show was repeated around the country last month. It may be one of the last new entries into the Great American Songbook before that ceased to be a thing. There were many, many cover versions of it for several years thereafter. As a single, it would sneak into the Top 40 of the Hot 100 for three weeks in August 1975 but reach #8 on Easy Listening; two years later the very same recording was reissued and spent eight weeks in the Top 40, reaching #19. A program director of mine once told me that the Eagles’ “Desperado” is one of the most difficult records to schedule on the radio because it’s so slow and so sparse. I am guessing that if there’s a difficult-to-schedule list, “Send in the Clowns” is probably on it for the same reasons.
78. “Third Rate Romance”/Amazing Rhythm Aces
79. “Fallin’ in Love”/Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds
80. “Ballroom Blitz”/Sweet
I could listen to this kind of thing all day.
107. “Top of the World (Make My Reservation)”/Canyon. A late period Kasenetz/Katz production, released on their Magna Glide label. Magna Glide seems to have released only a handful of singles, including two by Canyon, one by soul singer J. J. Jackson (famed for “But It’s Alright”), and, most intriguing of all, one by Tony Conigliaro, the Boston Red Sox slugger. As it turns out, Tony C was a clubhouse doo-wop harmonizer with some of his Red Sox teammates and got his first chance to record in 1964. He released several singles between 1964 and 1967—the same year he took a fastball to the face, which short-circuited his baseball career. His final single, “Poetry,” was released on Magna Glide in 1975, the same year he made his last appearance in the majors.
I seem to have drifted from Canyon. They were from Ohio, they released two singles on Magna Glide, and “Top of the World” would eventually get to #98.
Do You Know What Time It Is?
(Pictured L to R: Johnny Mandel, Jody Miller, and Herb Alpert, among the winners at the Grammy Awards in 1966.)
The June 26, 1971, edition of American Top 40 took two posts to get through, and we’re not done. Here are some notes about the bottom 60 from the same week’s chart.
42. “You’ve Got a Friend”/Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
51. “Love the One You’re With”/Isley Brothers
91. “Suspicious Minds”/Dee Dee Warwick
98. “I’m a Believer”/Neil Diamond
100. “The Sound of Silence”/Peaches and Herb
In 2019, movies and television are obsessed with reboots, but you hear precious few remakes on the radio anymore. Except for Neil Diamond, each one of these remakes takes a successful song from the pop market and rebrands it for R&B. The covers didn’t always work—“The Sound of Silence” doesn’t—but both “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Love the One You’re With” would do well enough to make the pop Top 30.
48. “Double Barrel”/Dave and Ansil Collins
58. “Summer Sand”/Dawn
71. “Do You Know What Time It Is”/P-Nut Gallery
I always wonder if the corporate-owned oldies stations in various cities around the country take into consideration the local performance of certain records in deciding what to program. (Then I chuckle to myself and wonder why I’d even think that.) In Chicago, for example, all of these records made the local Top 10 on WLS, vastly outperforming their national chart numbers. In defense of the corporate programmers, however, “Double Barrel” just isn’t going to fit alongside the Cars and John Mellencamp, and “Do You Know What Time It Is,” with its references to the Howdy Doody TV show and chorus of yelling children, isn’t going to fit anywhere. (Its popularity in 1971 had to do with the fact that Howdy Doody host Buffalo Bob Smith was touring college campuses at the time, entertaining students who had been children in the 1950s, when Howdy Doody was a thing.)
61. “Signs”/Five Man Electrical Band
62. “Rings”/Cymarron
If you want the distilled essence of the summer of 1971, you could probably get it with these two records alone.
65. “Walk Away”/James Gang. This song is on the radio more today, on classic-rock stations, than it ever was in 1971.
66. “Done Too Soon”-“I Am, I Said”/Neil Diamond
82. “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer”-“We Can Work It Out”/Stevie Wonder
Both “I Am I Said” and “We Can Work It Out” were big hits earlier in the year. In an era when double-sided hits were common, record labels would sometimes push both sides, and sometimes radio stations would flip the A-side in favor of the B-side on their own. There are 11 records on the 6/26/71 Hot 100 with both sides listed, including the #1 song, Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” and “I Feel the Earth Move.” A couple of years ago, I wrote about one of them: Tom Jones’ “Puppet Man”/”Resurrection Shuffle.”
74. “What You See Is What You Get”/Stoney and Meatloaf. Stoney is Shaun Murphy, Meatloaf is Meat Loaf. They were in the Detroit cast of Hair together, and made a single album on the Motown subsidiary Rare Earth. “What You See Is What You Get” is a burner.
75. “He’s So Fine”/Jody Miller. In the summer of 1965, Jody Miller’s first big hit was the Grammy-winning “Queen of the House,” an answer to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.” For several years around the turn of the 70s, she had a nice country-to-pop crossover career doing cover songs. Her versions of “He’s So Fine” and “Baby I’m Yours” made #5 on the country chart and the bottom half of the Hot 100, in addition to doing big business on Easy Listening. She also cut hit versions of “Be My Baby,” “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”
86. “Give Up Your Guns”/The Buoys. After outraging the public decency with the cannibal-themed “Timothy” earlier in the year, the Buoys were back in town with “Give Up Your Guns,” about a lawbreaker hiding out from the cops. The story is never resolved, however. The sheriff knocks at the door, and then there’s nearly two minutes of what sounds like movie soundtrack music (four minutes on the album version), then the record just kind of stops.
A few weeks ago, when I started doing what I’m calling American Bottom 60, I said I’d just sort of hit upon the idea. But I have since realized that Wm., whose fine Music of My Life should be on your reading list, has been doing it for a lot longer, under the banner of Songs Casey Never Played. I am happy to be able to acknowledge the debt.
Play That Funky Music
(Pictured: Nancy and Ann Wilson, 1976.)
In keeping with newly instituted custom, here’s some of the rest of the Billboard Hot 100 dated June 12, 1976, outside of the American Top 40 show I wrote about recently.
49. “Crazy on You”/Heart
52. “Last Child”/Aerosmith
79. “Still Crazy After All These Years”/Paul Simon
In the earlier installment, I wrote that Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” was the hardest-rockin’ record of the summer of ’76 with a couple of exceptions. Heart and Aerosmith (which was the highest Hot 100 debut of the week) are the exceptions. One week earlier, Heart and Paul Simon had peaked at #35 and #40 respectively. They spent but five weeks in the Top 40 between them—a remarkably short time for two records that are still getting airplay 43 years later.
54. “Got to Get You Into My Life”/Beatles
58. “Rock and Roll Music”/Beach Boys
These two records would ride the Hot 100 together. After debuting a week apart in June, they would stick around through the last week of September.
69. “TVC 15″/David Bowie. I listened to David Bowie’s Station to Station album again recently, and while I don’t think I love it as much as I did when I was 16, it’s still mighty good. Bowie might have kept recycling that soul-man vibe for the rest of his career and collected money in crates, but he and his muse had other fish to fry.
80. “Rain, Oh Rain”/Fools Gold. These guys played behind Dan Fogelberg going back to his days in Illinois, and at live shows, they often got a chance to play a few tunes of their own before Dan came on. The first of their two albums features guest appearances by Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh. Given all that, “Rain, Oh Rain” sounds exactly the way you’d expect it to, which is just fine, actually.
83. “I’ll Get Over You”/Crystal Gayle. “I’ll Get Over You” has been a favorite around here since always. It was #1 on the country chart during the week of June 12, 1976, but would make only #71 on the Hot 100.
91. “The Lonely One”/Special Delivery Featuring Terry Huff. Terry Huff and his brothers came up during the street-corner R&B boom at the turn of the 60s; they tried hard but didn’t make it and got out of the business. After a couple of years as a cop in Washington, DC, Huff took another bash at music and self-produced “The Lonely One,” which his label insisted on releasing under that awkward group name, and which is a lost soul gem in spite of it.
93. “Bohemian Rhapsody”/Queen. Because I am not on top of any trend of any kind, I didn’t see the Bohemian Rhapsody movie until earlier this month. I agree with many of the reviews that its somewhat squeamish attitude toward homosexuality is a distortion of Freddie Mercury’s life. Also, we never really learn how it was that Mercury became the incredible showman the film presents—it’s as if he just sprung up fully formed. But the film’s musical performances are great enough to make you forget all that. On June 12, 1976, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was in its final week on the Hot 100 after debuting on the first chart of the new year and peaking at #9 in April.
94. “Norma Jean Wants to Be a Movie Star”/Sundown Company. Featured in the 1976 theatrical biopic Goodbye, Norma Jean, which stars Misty Rowe (seen on TV in Hee Haw and in Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood parody sitcom When Things Were Rotten) as the titular character and future Marilyn Monroe. The film is apparently factually challenged, sexually exploitative, and poorly crafted. So the country-flavored “Norma Jean Wants to Be a Movie Star” almost has to be the best thing about it.
95. “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)”/Four Seasons. This debuted on the last chart of 1975, spent three weeks at #1 in March, and in the week of June 12 was at #95 for a third week in a row. The next week it would slip to #98 and then out.
110. “Play That Funky Music”/Wild Cherry. This record makes its chart debut in the last position on the Bubbling Under chart, maybe six weeks before I’ll first hear it and three months before it will climb atop the Hot 100. Goofball as it is, it’s not just a request or a command, it’s a promise, although I didn’t know it then. Songs from the summer and fall of 1976 promised to keep playing in my head for a long time to come.
Speak Softly
(Pictured: Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall in The Godfather.)
I recently wrote about the very entertaining American Top 40 show from the week of May 6, 1972. Here’s what’s interesting from among the other 60 songs on the Hot 100 in that same week.
41. “Taurus”/Dennis Coffey. Coffey’s “Scorpio” had been a Top-10 hit early in the year. “Taurus,” which is in its first week out of the Top 40, is a rager, three minutes of fiery guitar and pounding percussion, and a ferocious groove. And another one of my 45s.
42. “Pool of Bad Luck”/Joe Simon
44. “Ask Me What You Want”/Millie Jackson
46. “Hearsay”/The Soul Children
Will say again: anybody who dismisses the music of the 1970s as vapid and/or cheesy has to account for the glorious soul music that was still being made during the first half of the decade. Of these three, only Millie Jackson would make it onto American Top 40. But “Hearsay” is classic Stax, gritty and great—as is the music of the Soul Children in general.
45. “Love Theme From The Godfather (Speak Softly Love)”Andy Williams
74. “Love Theme From The Godfather“/Carlo Savina
86. “Speak Softly Love (Love Theme From The Godfather)”/Al Martino
Earlier this spring I wrote about the massive movie success of Love Story, and the three versions of the theme that rode the charts at the same time in 1971. One year later, the massive movie success of the moment was The Godfather, which premiered in late March and was #1 at the box office for 11 out of the next 12 weeks. Andy Williams had the biggest hit version of “Love Story,” and his “Speak Softly Love” would become the biggest hit of the Godfather themes—but it would make only #34, where “Love Story” had gone to #9.
48. “Let’s Stay Together”/Isaac Hayes
49. “Do Your Thing”/Isaac Hayes
Two separate singles that had charted about a month apart find themselves together on this chart, “Let’s Stay Together” at its peak and “Do Your Thing” on the way down. Hayes had been the talk of the Academy Awards earlier in the spring, performing his Oscar-winning “Theme From Shaft” in a vest of chain mail.
52. “You Are the One”/Sugar Bears. The Sugar Bears were a studio group assembled to sell Post Super Sugar Crisp cereal, but as was common in the bubblegum era, their songs were made far better than they had to be. Those performing on Sugar Bears records included former First Edition member Mike Settle and pre-stardom Kim Carnes. If you do not get the appeal of “You Are the One,” I don’t think we’re compatible, and perhaps we should start seeing other people.
55. “Chantilly Lace”/Jerry Lee Lewis. After a decade in the wilderness thanks largely to the scandal over his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, Lewis roared back to stardom in country music in 1968. I am not wild about his version of “Chantilly Lace,” which sounds like it was knocked off in one relatively indifferent take, but it went to #1 on the Billboard country chart.
59. “Old Man”/Neil Young. The former #1 “Heart of Gold” was still up at #22 in this week. “Old Man” would make it only to #31. If I were forced to pick a favorite Neil Young song, “Old Man” would probably be it, although I bought the 45 of “Heart of Gold” in the spring of ’72.
67. “Song Sung Blue”/Neil Diamond
72. “Someday Never Comes”/Creedence Clearwater Revival
77. “Automatically Sunshine”/Supremes
80. “Rocket Man”/Elton John
These were the top four debut singles on the Hot 100 in that week; “Song Sung Blue” and “Someday Never Comes” were offered to affiliates as extras during the recent nationwide repeat of the 5/6/72 show. “Song Sung Blue” would go to #1 and “Rocket Man” would reach #6; “Someday Never Comes,” the last Creedence single to chart, hit #25; “Automatically Sunshine,” written by Smokey Robinson, made #37. The Diana Ross-less Supremes wouldn’t make the Top 40 again until 1976 (for a single week), and that would be the last time.
68. “Telegram Sam”/T. Rex
69. “Long Haired Lover From Liverpool”/Jimmy Osmond
70. “Changes”/David Bowie
Only one of these records is going to make the Top 40, and it is “Long Haired Lover From Liverpool” because there is no God and we can’t have nice things. Bowie would actually miss it twice, getting as close as #41 in 1975, when “Changes” was re-released.
95. “Questions”/Bang. This record appeared on our Down in the Bottom series back in 2010, thanks to its chart peak of #90. As I wrote, “[T]hen-unknown Bang crashed a show in Orlando on a dare, playing an audition for the promoter around noontime and finding themselves a the bill with Deep Purple and Faces the same night.” A radio station in Fort Lauderdale charted “Questions” as high as #3.
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