Category: American Bottom 60

I Like to Rock

On By jbIn American Bottom 60, Record Charts11 Comments
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(Pictured: Bo Derek in the movie 10.)

Here we go with the customary dive into the Bottom 60 of the Top 40 featured in a post last week, from February 9, 1980.

41. “Looks Like Love Again”/Dann Rogers
56. “Better Love Next Time”/Dr. Hook
62. “Three Times in Love”/Tommy James
65. “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again”/George Burns
85. “Where Does the Lovin’ Go”/David Gates
87. “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”/Willie Nelson
91. “Holdin’ on for Dear Love”/Lobo
Many of the songs popular during the winter of 1980 put me back into the studio at KDTH in Dubuque, Iowa, where I worked my first paying radio job. It was a fabulous place for a young broadcaster to start, with a lot of talented veterans to learn from. At the time, however, I am pretty sure I neither appreciated it enough nor learned all that I could have. (The latter is kind of disturbing, because as it was, the young idiot I was learned a lot.) The station’s music format was mostly country most of the time, although it played a lot of pop records too (Dann Rogers, Dr. Hook, Tommy James, David Gates, and Lobo among them, as well as Dionne Warwick, Barry Manilow, Dan Fogelberg, and Neil Diamond from the week’s Top 40). “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again,” which made the KDTH phones blow up, went to #15 on Billboard‘s country chart, and “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” would hit #1.

48. “Flirtin’ With Disaster”/Molly Hatchet
50. “When a Man Loves a Woman”/Bette Midler
51. “I Thank You”/ZZ Top
54. “Back on My Feet Again”/Babys
57. “Cool Change”/Little River Band
58. “Voices”/Cheap Trick
59. “You Know That I Love You”/Santana
61. “Can We Still Be Friends”/Robert Palmer
67. “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”/Aerosmith
70. “Rockin’ Into the Night”/.38 Special
71. “Come Back”/J. Geils Band
73. “Baby Talks Dirty”/The Knack
78. “Jane”/Jefferson Starship
80. “I Don’t Like Mondays”/Boomtown Rats
82. “Even It Up”/Heart
90. “I Like to Rock”/April Wine
96. “Babe”/Styx
97. “Dirty Water”/Inmates
99. “Head Games”/Foreigner
107. “You Won’t Be There”/Alan Parsons Project
But my weekend job was a sideshow to the one I cared about the most: being program director of the campus radio station. It had been a Top-40 station when I started on it a year earlier before an uncomfortable semester as an album rock/R&B/funk/jazz hybrid. It had gone to a full-blown album-rock format in the fall of 1979. When I took over, we expanded the library to something like 2,000 songs, going deep and wide on what we considered to be the best AOR artists, but at the same time making sure we frequently played the strongest AOR cuts: your Free Birds, Laylas, and Stairways to Heaven.

I was not especially interested in new music discovery, and I wasn’t alone. Most of us wanted to play the hits. I left the programming of current music to the station’s music director, at least at the beginning. We would eventually have our disagreements, as his taste was vastly different from mine. What I perceived as input he perceived as meddling—and vice versa. It occurs to me now that, like the KDTHers, he was somebody from whom I could have learned a great deal. But while I recognized that people at KDTH had a lot to teach me, I walked around the campus station as if I already knew it all.

As I have said before, it’s a wonder I have any friends left from that time.

(“I Like to Rock” borrows riffs from the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” and the Stones’ “Satisfaction” just before the fade. I’m not sure I noticed that 41 years ago, but I did while writing this post.)

49. “Give It All You Got”/Chuck Mangione. When “Give It All You Got” hit the chart in January, we already knew that it would be ABC’s theme music for coverage of the 1980 Winter Olympics, which opened during the week of this chart.

81. “Lost in Love”/Air Supply. Someday I will assemble the entire list of songs I have claimed to be completely irrational about.

86. “Peanut Butter”/Twennynine Featuring Lenny White. After leaving the fusion band Return to Forever, White formed Twennynine to play R&B and funk music. “Peanut Butter” was a big R&B hit but would stall at #83 on the Hot 100.

101. “Ravel’s Bolero”/Henry Mancini. “Ravel’s Bolero” was famously used in the movie 10, which had been released the previous fall. I didn’t see it until I moved off campus and my TV-engineer roommates pirated an HBO subscription. I don’t recall that it left much of an impression on me. It would have taken more than Bo Derek to get me to stop thinking about radio.

Superstars and Not

On By jbIn American Bottom 60, Bubbling Under Adventures3 Comments
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(Pictured: Jeff Fenholt and the Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar.)

Having spent time on the American Top 40 show from January 30, 1971, last week, it would be our usual practice to look at the Bottom 60 from that week’s chart. This time, however, I’d like to revisit the Cash Box Looking Ahead chart, equivalent to Billboard‘s Bubbling Under the Hot 100. If there’s anything you recognize on the January 30, 1971, Looking Ahead chart, it’s probably “Treat Her Like a Lady” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose or “Revival” by the Allman Brothers Band. But there are other records worth taking note of.

2. “Wooly Bully”/Canned Heat. After scoring a hit with “Let’s Work Together,” Canned Heat decided to cover another song that most working rock bands of the era would have known. Compared to the hard ‘n’ heavy “Let’s Work Together,” “Wooly Bully” is almost light, and while it’s got some good playing on it, Sam the Sham still owns.

7. “We Can Make the World (A Whole Lot Brighter)/Gravy. Gravy was the songwriting team of Robert John and Michael Gately; John later scored hits under his own name, including the #1 hit “Sad Eyes,” while Gately recorded an album with musicians including Al Kooper, Herbie Flowers, and Paul Kossoff. “We Can Make the World (A Whole Lot Brighter)” would reach a far larger audience after the Brady Bunch sang it on TV in 1972 and later put it on an album.

(Do I need to repeat that the Brady Bunch records were roundly ignored in the 70s, and that it was only in the 1990s, when kids who had grown up on the show discovered them, that they came to be considered “hits”? I think not.)

10. “Nothing Rhymed”/Gilbert O’Sullivan
25. “Brand New Day”/Rufus
A couple of years before “Alone Again (Naturally),” Gilbert O’Sullivan was already moping around on “Nothing Rhymed.” Rufus spent a lot of time in the weeds before breaking through in 1974. “Brand New Day” is their first release; the female voice on it belongs to Paulette McWilliams, who left the band in 1972 and recommended her friend, Chaka Khan, as a replacement.

12. “Theme From Love Story“/Peter Nero. Two versions of the Love Story theme, by Henry Mancini and Francis Lai, were already on the Cash Box and Billboard charts in this week and other versions, by Andy Williams and Tony Bennett, would also get some chart action. With the novel atop the fiction best-sellers list and the movie raking it in at the box office in January 1971, peak Love Story was not far away.

13. “When I’m Dead and Gone”/Bob Summers. Summers was the brother of Mary Ford, Mrs. Les Paul. After Les and Mary divorced, she went on the road solo, but with Summers playing Les Paul’s parts. By 1970, Summers was a producer and arranger at MGM Records, which released his “When I’m Dead and Gone” single and album. (The thoroughly English folk-rock version of “When I’m Dead and Gone” by McGuinness Flint was just outside the Cash Box Top 40 in this week.)

19. “Something to Make You Happy”/Mason and Cass. Dave Mason and Cass Elliot’s lone album together, which I have not heard, supposedly sounds like a Dave Mason solo record with Cass providing a few backing vocals. “Something to Make You Happy” sounds like a lost classic, though.

21. “Medley From Superstar (A Rock Opera)“/Assembled Multitude.  Jesus Christ Superstar was a snowballing cultural force in the winter of 1971; the album would spend three non-consecutive weeks at #1 in February and again in May, and two songs, “Superstar” and “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” would become significant hit singles. Producer Tom Sellers put together the Assembled Multitude from Philadelphia studio musicians and scored a big hit with “Overture From Tommy” in the summer of 1970. You can hardly blame a guy for going to the next well over and trying again, although “Medley From Superstar“ is not as compelling as “Overture From Tommy” had been. It probably didn’t matter to the Philadelphia studio cats, however. They were about to find themselves playing on dozens of far bigger hits.

22. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”/Otis Redding. Recorded at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, this isn’t so much a record as it is a force of nature.

If you are a fan of Looking Ahead or Bubbling Under, you will want to keep an eye on Songs in the Key of E, where Erik has just begun a series on Bubbling Under songs from the 80s that never made the Hot 100. It’s been pretty great already.

Rolling Home

On By jbIn American Bottom 60, The 1976 Project10 Comments
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(Pictured: Grace Slick, 1975)

As is customary around here after discussing an American Top 40 show, let’s see what else we can see on the Hot 100 during the week of January 10, 1976.

42. “Take It to the Limit”/Eagles. Most people never take anything to the limit, ever. Considering Randy Meisner is singing about how he’s going to take it to the limit one more time, implying that he’s done it before (whatever “it” is), no wonder he sounds so weary.

49. “Play on Love”/Jefferson Starship. Grace Slick sings the hell out of “Play on Love” and I’ve always liked that, but I wish the arrangement behind her had more going on, on the order of “Miracles” or “Runaway.”

51. “Tracks of My Tears”/Linda Ronstadt
52. “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)”/Bee Gees
59. “The Homecoming”/Hagood Hardy
61. “Break Away”/Art Garfunkel
62. “Back to the Island”/Leon Russell
The challenge for me in writing this post is finding new things to say about records I like instead of repeating things I have said before.

54. “Love or Leave”/Spinners. From the album Pick of the Litter, released in the summer of 1975, which contains the magnificent “They Just Can’t Stop It (Games People Play).”

58. “Feelings”/Morris Albert. This record had peaked at #6 back in the fall, but here it is moving up again, from #64, in its 30th week on the Hot 100.

67. “Don’t Cry Joni”/Conway Twitty. A few years ago, we noted that Conway Twitty had 40 #1 country singles, the second-most of all time, but never became cool on the level of George Jones, Johnny Cash, or Merle Haggard. Incredibly sappy records like “Don’t Cry Joni” probably didn’t help.

(Digression: “Don’t Cry Joni” tells a fairly predictable story—young girl falls for older boy and asks him to wait for her til she’s grown, he says he’s too old for her and moves away but realizes years later he’s in love with her, he moves back home, and he finds out that she didn’t wait. Even a predictable story can be made enjoyable if the author is just as careful about what he leaves out as what he puts in. The last verse of “Don’t Cry Joni” makes it clear where the story will end, but the last line is the lyricist saying to the audience, “I don’t think you’re smart enough to get this unless I smack you upside the head with it.” My instantaneous reaction at the moment I heard it: “oh for chrissakes.”)

71. “Bohemian Rhapsody”/Queen. Here it comes, in its second week on the Hot 100.

73. “This Old Man”/Purple Reign
95. “The Little Drummer Boy”/Moonlion
Friends, that’s a disco version of a nursery rhyme and a disco version of a Christmas song. “This Old Man” peaked a week earlier at #48 and was now in its eighth week on the Hot 100. We’ve mentioned “The Little Drummer Boy” at this website previously. (It’s not terrible.) Disco adaptations of already-familiar tunes were thick on the ground during disco’s formative years; although the phenomenon never disappeared completely, it became less prevalent as disco grew in popularity.

74. “Free Ride”/Tavares. Here’s a cover of the Edgar Winter hit from 1973 that’s not as different from the original as you’d expect.

77. “Fire on the Mountain”/Marshall Tucker Band. This country-rock classic had peaked at #37 on the Hot 100 and spent three weeks in the Top 40, but was heard on American Top 40 only once, on the show dated December 20, 1977. The other two weeks of its run corresponded with the 1975 yearend countdown shows.

(Further digression: surely there must have been a few songs during the AT40 era that made the Top 40 for a single week but were never heard on the show because they charted during a week when Casey was doing a special countdown of some sort. Would anybody with a better work ethic than mine like to research that?)

81. “Dream On”/Aerosmith. “Dream On” had run the Hot 100 for nine weeks between October and December 1973, getting as high as #59. Now here it is again, in its first week back.

90. “This Old Heart of Mine”/Rod Stewart. The album Atlantic Crossing was Stewart’s first without Ron Wood, Ian McLagan, and the rest of Faces, but Rod rounded up some decent players: members of Booker T and the MG’s, the Memphis Horns, and the Swampers. The album didn’t contain any big American hits, although “Sailing” and “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” were #1 in the UK, and this made #4. If you think you remember hearing “This Old Heart of Mine” on the radio, you might: Rod recut it for the 1990 Storyteller box set with Ronald Isley and released it (a far-better version) as a single.

Butterflies and Evergreens

On By jbIn American Bottom 603 Comments
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(Pictured: Dolly Parton, 1974.)

Instead of the usual look at the Bottom 60 of the Hot 100 that follows an American Top 40 post, I’m gonna go back to a chart I’ve wanted to revisit for a while: the Cash Box Looking Ahead chart, more-or-less equivalent to Billboard‘s Bubbling Under. Both are fine sources of the sort of obscure records we like around here, but Cash Box often seems to cast a wider net. Here’s some of what was on Looking Ahead during the week of November 2, 1974.

103. “Love Is Like a Butterfly”/Dolly Parton. Dolly hit #1 on the Billboard and Cash Box country charts three times in 1974: “Jolene” in January, “I Will Always Love You” in June, and “Love Is Like a Butterfly” in November. A fourth single with her old partner Porter Wagoner, “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me,” was also #1 during 1974, but only in Billboard.

105. “Voodoo Magic”/Rhodes Kids
124. “Careful Man”/John Edwards
The Rhodes Kids were on the GRC label; John Edwards was on Aware. Both labels were run by one Michael Thevis who, at one time, controlled 40 percent of the legal and black-market pornography market in the United States, an enterprise worth $100 million. (The record labels were legitimate businesses used to launder money; before the whole thing collapsed, GRC would score one gigantic hit: “Chevy Van” by Sammy Johns.) The Rhodes Kids, a seven-member family group discovered by Thevis, claimed to have no knowledge of his porn connections, and to have severed their connections with him when they found out. With and without him, they played Vegas, did TV including American Bandstand, and enjoyed some modest success until the late 70s, when the oldest kids decided to go to college instead. There’s more about the Rhodes Kids here. Edwards was in the Spinners from 1977 to 2000, and he’s on their hit versions of “Working My Way Back to You” and “Cupid.” There’s a good overview of Thevis’ career here.

106. “Please Mr. Postman”/Pat Boone Family. Well knock me over with a feather. There is no reason to believe this version of “Please Mr. Postman” would be any good at all, but it kind of is. It catches more of the Marvelettes’ soul than the Carpenters did.

107. “Walking in the Wind”/Traffic
119. “Train Kept A Rollin'”/Aerosmith
125. “Sally Can’t Dance”/Lou Reed
At this time, Looking Ahead and Bubbling Under were sales charts. (Only later did Billboard start incorporating airplay into its big chart calculations.) These songs were far more likely to be heard by, and be of interest to, album fans than buyers of singles. So just how many 45s of each did the record labels have to move in order to make this chart? It couldn’t have been very many.

110. “He Did Me Wrong, But He Did It Right”/Patti Dahlstrom. As it happens, one of the leading experts on the career of Patti Dahlstrom is part of our little circle of nerds, so I refer you to whiteray at Echoes in the Wind.

112. “Evergreen”/Booker T. In 1974, Stax Records had yet to collapse, but Booker T. Jones was already gone. He moved to California and signed with Epic to release Evergreen, which one website calls “a laid-back roots album . . . far from the greasy soul-funk sound of the MGs.” Nevertheless, the instrumental “Evergreen” has that unmistakable Booker T. feel.

115. “Shoe Shoe Shine”/Dynamic Superiors. “Shoe Shoe Shine” not only appears at #115 on the Looking Ahead chart, it’s also at #99 on the regular Cash Box chart in this same week. (Proofreading and fact-checking are hard, a truth proven again and again over the 16-year history of the website you are reading.) The Dynamic Superiors were a Washington, DC-based group on Motown, fronted by Tony Washington, an openly gay man in a time before such a thing became widely accepted. His story and the story of the group, which is mighty interesting, is here.

122. “Roses Are Red My Love”/Wednesday. This group was big in Canada, where their cover of the death-rock classic “Last Kiss” went to #2. It was #34 in the States (in Billboard), but a smash in Chicago, where WLS charted it at #1 for a week in March 1974. The group went back to the well less successfully with “Teen Angel” that summer. “Roses Are Red My Love,” the old Bobby Vinton hit, was their last shot in America.

123. “My Eyes Adored You”/Frankie Valli. In its first week on the Looking Ahead chart, “My Eyes Adored You” would make #1 in both Cash Box and Billboard in the spring of 1975.

A Little Magic

On By jbIn American Bottom 60, Record Charts2 Comments
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(Pictured: I’m always happy to have an excuse to post a picture of Linda Ronstadt.)

Here we are below the Top 40 during the week of September 13, 1980. There’s even more yacht rock and urban cowboy country than there was in the Top 40, along with a few records we have never stopped hearing.

42. “Jojo”/Boz Scaggs
57. “Late at Night”/England Dan Seals
62. “Thunder and Lightning”/Chicago
71. “Leaving L.A.”/Deliverance
88. “If You Should Sail”/Nielsen-Pearson
100. “Steal Away”/Robbie Dupree
105. “Givin’ It All”/Player
More yacht rock, although one might argue whether “Thunder and Lightning” is a little too heavy. I don’t know if the various yacht rock stations streaming or on Sirius/XM play “Late at Night,” “Leaving L.A.,” “If You Should Sail,” or “Givin’ It All,” but how could they not? All sound like perfect examples of the form, to the extent that I care about it.

43. “Make a Little Magic”/Dirt Band
45. “Why Not Me”/Fred Knoblock
“Why Not Me” made Billboard‘s country chart, briefly; “Make a Little Magic” did not, although we played it at KDTH. Knoblock’s next hit, a duet with actress Susan Anton called “Killin’ Time,” would make the country Top 10; in the mid 80s, the Dirt Band, back to its original name of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, would reel off a string of big country hits.

47. “You Better Run”/Pat Benatar
54. “Games Without Frontiers”/Peter Gabriel
55. “Misunderstanding”/Genesis
58. “I Hear You Now”/Jon and Vangelis
73. “Turn It on Again”/Genesis
74. “Tulsa Time”/Eric Clapton
93. “Coming Up (Live at Glasgow)”/Paul McCartney and Wings
95. “I Can’t Let Go”/Linda Ronstadt
I spent the summer of 1980 on the night shift at an album-rock station. All of these songs were part of that summer. “Tulsa Time” was a live version. “I Hear You Now” was a record I fell in love with and put on our air, trying to make a hit out of it. It peaked at #58, so I must have helped.

49. “Shining Star”/Manhattans
60. “Whip It”/Devo
67. “Little Jeannie”/Elton John
80. “You Shook Me All Night Long”/AC-DC
Yup, there sure is a lot of stuff here that hasn’t been off the radio in 40 years all right.

41. “Take a Little Rhythm”/Ali Thomson
50. “Midnight Rocks”/Al Stewart
Do they let Brits on the boat? I’m inclined to say yes to “Take a Little Rhythm” for its white-guy-dancing vibe, and no to Al Stewart, who is sailing in a different direction entirely.

65. “This Beat Goes On”-“Switchin’ to Glide”/The Kings
101. “Turning Japanese”/The Vapors
If you came in for your show at the college radio station and the person before you had recently played one or the other of these, you might just break format and play ’em anyway. I wrote about “Beat/Glide” in the fall of 2008. The next spring, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from John Picard of the Kings (also known as Mister Zero), and our correspondence turned into a lengthy e-mail interview. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever done at this website, and if you want to read the whole thing, all four parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

51. “The Legend of Wooley Swamp”/Charlie Daniels Band
52. “I’m Almost Ready”/Pure Prairie League
79. “Don’t Misunderstand Me”/Rossington Collins Band
85. “Under the Gun”/Poco
90. “Angeline”/Allman Brothers Band
110. “Longshot”/Henry Paul Band
By 1980, the terms “country rock” and “Southern rock” were ceasing to mean much. Beyond some lead singers with strong Southern accents, there’s not much country or Southern about any of these. I would remind you that “The Legend of Wooley Swamp” is one of the world’s worst songs; the 1980 edition of Pure Prairie League featured Vince Gill on vocals; the Rossington Collins Band was a successor to Lynyrd Skynryd and the most-hyped band of the summer, at least on album-rock radio, where new wave had little impact; Henry Paul had been in the Outlaws during “Green Grass and High Tides” days.

69. “On the Road Again”/Willie Nelson
72. “Could I Have This Dance”/Anne Murray
87. “True Love Ways”/Mickey Gilley
91. “Stand By Me”/Mickey Gilley
97. “Theme From ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ (Good Ole Boys)”/Waylon Jennings
106. “I Believe in You”/Don Williams
The movie Urban Cowboy made pop country trendy in the summer of 1980. Gilley’s two hits had already gone #1 country (and “Stand By Me” had made #22 on the Hot 100); the other four would all make #1 country in the next couple of months.

94. “The Breaks”/Kurtis Blow. Earthquakes start deep below the surface. “The Breaks” would peak at #84, but as the first rap record to be certified gold, its influence would be felt for decades, and down unto the present day.

Hold On

On By jbIn American Bottom 6014 Comments
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(Pictured: San Francisco band the Sons of Champlin, best known back in the day among readers of music magazines and browsers of the cutout bins.)

Mid-August 1976 was a busy time in the life of 16-year-old me. My family took a short trip, an overnight in Chicago and then a day at the Wisconsin State Fair in suburban Milwaukee. We got home and watched Gerald Ford hold off Ronald Reagan to win the Republican presidential nomination (because it was all there was to watch in the days of three-channel universe). And I listened to the radio as much as I could before I wouldn’t be able to listen to it as much—we’d go back to school on August 25, nearly two weeks before Labor Day.

Here are some of the songs outside the Top 40 during the week of August 7, 1976.

41. “Getaway/Earth Wind and Fire
42. “Devil Woman”/Cliff Richard
46. “With Your Love”/Jefferson Starship
51. “Still the One”/Orleans
73. “Magic Man”/Heart
74. “Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”/Alan Parsons Project
75. “I Never Cry”/Alice Cooper
83. “Don’t Fear the Reaper”/Blue Oyster Cult
Some of the songs that will take us through autumn and into the winter are already in the Top 40 this week. Some of the rest are lining up outside.

48. “Hold On”/Sons of Champlin. Bill Champlin was a member of Chicago from 1981 until 2009, but he also led this band, formed in mid-60s San Francisco. The Sons of Champlin released their first album in 1969. They split up in 1977 before a new millennium reunion starting in 1997. They were planning another reunion show for this past April, which I presume did not actually happen. “Hold On” is one of two Sons singles to make the Hot 100. It peaked at #47.

54. “Ten Percent”/Double Exposure. Double Exposure was a group of Philadelphia journeymen who signed with the Salsoul label in 1975. Although it was not a big radio hit (#54 Hot 100, #63 R&B), “Ten Percent” is nevertheless an important record in the history of disco as one of the first (if not the first) commercially available 12-inch single, and for its groundbreaking nine-minute remix, which helped it reach #2 on Billboard‘s dance chart. It’s a safe bet that some of the musicians on “Ten Percent” are on many other famous Philly soul joints.

70. “Light Up the World With Sunshine”/Hamilton, Joe Frank and Dennison. Poor old Alan Dennison finally got his name on the marquee after replacing Tommy Reynolds and singing without glory on the #1 hit “Falling in Love” and the group’s 1976 hit “Winners and Losers,” which we recommend you listen to whenever possible.

79. “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”/The Deadly Nightshade. Early in 1976, the Deadly Nightshade, a three-woman country rock and bluegrass group, was doing a live radio performance and waiting for guitarist Anne Bowen to change a broken string. To fill time, bassist Pamela Brandt started riffing that that their next record would be a disco version of the theme from the soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which was a national rage at the moment. The audience response was so positive that the band joked to their manager that they should actually do it. But he took it to RCA Records and the label bit, so now the Deadly Nightshade had to write it for real (although they were forced to sign away their songwriting credit). Jazz player Mike Mainieri, a friend of the band, offered to produce, and he rounded up some major New York studio cats to play on it. Brandt says, “And there we were with our washboard.” Whole story here, song here.

87. “Popsicle Toes”/Michael Franks. I first learned about Michael Franks and his slyly swinging “Popsicle Toes” from a Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders compilation. These sets contained big stars and hits as well as new music by lesser-known artists, were sold exclusively by mail, and generally cost two bucks apiece. (From this list of 35, I count 10 in my collection.) “Popsicle Toes” is from Franks’ first Warner/Reprise album, The Art of Tea. “Popsicle Toes” is his lone Hot 100 hit, although “Your Secret’s Safe With Me” was #4 on the AC chart in 1985.

102. “Rose of Cimarron”/Poco
105. “I Don’t Want to Go Home”/Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes
106. “Cherry Bomb”/Runaways
110. “Did You Boogie”/Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids
Behold the glorious variety of pop music in the summer of 1976. “Rose of Cimarron” is an forgotten gem that would jump into the Hot 1oo the next week and then fall right back out again. “I Don’t Want to Go Home” is the title song from the Jukes’ first album. “Cherry Bomb” looks toward rock’s future; “Did You Boogie,” which features the voice of Wolfman Jack, throws back to its past.