(Pictured: Tom Petty on stage in 1980.)

In memory, the winter of 1980 is weird. At the time, it seemed like one of the greatest seasons of my life. I had a hot girlfriend, I was the boy genius program director of the campus radio station, and I had a paying radio gig that showed the world my superior talent. But as I relive that season via the American Top 40 show from the weekend of February 9, 1980, I can’t say that I’m exactly enjoying it. The 2021 me, conscious of how the plans and dreams of 1980 worked out, wants his egotistical, headstrong, and exuberant young self to pump the brakes a little bit.

39. “99”/Toto
32. “Another Brick in the Wall”/Pink Floyd
26. “Why Me”/Styx
24. “Third Time Lucky”/Foghat
22. “Fool in the Rain”/Led Zeppelin
8. “The Long Run”/Eagles
5. “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”/Queen
Lots of rock superstars were selling 45s in this week, and we’ll get to Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac in a bit.

38. “Send One Your Love”/Stevie Wonder
29. “Wonderland”/Commodores
4. “Cruisin'”/Smokey Robinson
Motown superstars too.

37. “Ladies Night”/Kool and the Gang
36. “Him”/Rupert Holmes
31. “Refugee”/Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
27. “Too Hot”/Kool and the Gang
12. “Escape”/Rupert Holmes
10. “Don’t Do Me Like That”/Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Somebody with a more searchable database or a better work ethic might be able to say if having three acts on the chart each with two separate, non-double-A-sided singles is some kind of record.

Casey answers a letter about whether any song has ever topped the pop, soul, and country charts. The answer is yes: Elvis in 1957 with “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” and the Everly Brothers in 1958 with “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Before you go thinking this could never happen again, remember “Old Town Road,” which topped the Hot 100 (for 19 weeks, the longest run in chart history) and the R&B/Hip Hop chart in 2019. Had it not been disqualified from the Billboard country chart after it reached #19, it might have done the deed too.

Digression: I did not write about “Old Town Road” at this website, although I tried. It was a little absurd for Billboard to say it wasn’t country enough, given the proliferation of trap beats and faux R&B in the genre over in the last decade. Nevertheless, I remain unwilling to draw a straight line from country’s black pioneers, your DeFord Baileys and Charley Prides, to Lil Nas X, although other writers I respect are not.

LDD: “Rise”/Herb Alpert. In which Georgina tells about meeting Bill, a shy young rock musician. She wanted a relationship with him but it didn’t work out because (loose translation) he just wanted to bone. Bill ended up on drugs and she hasn’t seen him for 11 years and even though she’s married to someone else now, she still loves him and thinks about him, and “Rise” is the right song to get her feelings across. (Seems to me that Bill’s interest in rising was the problem, though.)

34. “Lost Her in the Sun”/John Stewart
17. “Daydream Believer”/Anne Murray
This week represents peak John Stewart, with his most beautiful single and his most famous song both in the Top 40.

20. “I Wanna Be Your Lover”/Prince. Casey tells the story of how “Roger Nelson” turned down four record labels before signing with Warner Brothers. That’s OK. Casey will have the next decade to get Prince Rogers Nelson’s name right.

16. “Romeo’s Tune”/Steve Forbert
7. “Sara”/Fleetwood Mac
One of these is my favorite song on the show, unless it’s “Don’t Do Me Like That.”

LDD: “Daniel”/Elton John. In which a girl, forbidden to see her older brother, a blind and legless veteran who hasn’t spoken a word in the six months since he was injured, bursts into his hospital room screaming his name. As the doctors and nurses drag her out, the brother speaks her name. The brother’s name is in fact Daniel, and Bernie Taupin has said the song is about a wounded veteran, but that doesn’t make the LDD any less horrific and tasteless.

3. “Coward of the County”/Kenny Rogers
2. “Do That to Me One More Time”/Captain and Tennille
1. “Rock With You”/Michael Jackson
There’s not much action at the top of the chart; the top five and eight of the top 10 are in the same positions as last week. Michael and the Captain and Tennille hold for a fourth straight week, and Kenny is at #3 for a third week. In 1975, the Dragons did four weeks at #1 with “Love Will Keep Us Together.” “Do That To Me One More Time” would be #1 for only a week, but its eventual two months in the top three makes it hard to argue that it wasn’t the bigger hit.

(Pictured: Judy Collins performs on TV, 1969.)

We continue here with a look inside the American Top 40 show from January 30, 1971, in which we find some key differences between the show as it was heard back then and the version that is repeated today.

EXTRA: “Isn’t It a Pity”/George Harrison
EXTRA: “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”/Shirelles
At the end of the first hour of the original 1971 broadcast, Casey played “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” as an extra, part of a feature on the #1 songs “10 years ago today.” On the repeat, it was snipped and offered as an extra at the end of the third hour. The extra included with the first hour of the repeat was “Isn’t It a Pity,” the flip side of “My Sweet Lord,” introduced as a track from the #1 album of the week, All Things Must Pass. But here’s something weird: “Isn’t It a Pity” wasn’t heard on the original 1/30/71 show at all. While on later shows extras are voiced by modern-day announcer Larry Morgan, extras from the earliest shows are often segments voiced by Casey and snipped from original shows. The 1/31/71 extra must have been taken from either January 23 or February 6, when All Things Must Pass was still #1, and when it looks from the cue sheets as if Casey played both sides of the single, albeit a shortened version of “Isn’t It a Pity.” (He had also played both sides on the December 26, 1970, show, including the whole seven minutes of “Isn’t It a Pity,” but that required him to drop a song from the top 40.)

26. “Amazing Grace”/Judy Collins. What does it mean for 50 years to pass? Imagine how unlikely it would be today for a hymn, recorded unironically by a singer with a pure, clear voice and backed by a choir, to be a vast pop success. “Amazing Grace” did three weeks at #1 at WHBQ in Memphis, and also hit #1 in San Bernardino, California, and Birmingham, Alabama. It was a top-10 hit in Dallas, Wichita, Portland, Oklahoma City, Orlando, St. Louis, Fresno, Tulsa, Columbus, Seattle, Kansas City, Phoenix, New Orleans, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and smaller cities including Madison, where it made #3. It would peak at #13 in Cash Box, #15 on the Hot 100, and #5 on Billboard‘s Easy Listening chart.

25. “Watching Scotty Grow”/Bobby Goldsboro. Me, 2018: “I’d rather listen to ‘Honey’ 100 times than ‘Watching Scotty Grow’ once.”

18. “Mr. Bojangles”/Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
17. “Born to Wander”/Rare Earth
16. “Immigrant Song”/Led Zeppelin
12. “Black Magic Woman”/Santana
11. “If I Were Your Woman”/Gladys Knight and the Pips
10. “Stoney End”/Barbra Streisand
7. “I Hear You Knockin'”/Dave Edmunds
5. “Rose Garden”/Lynn Anderson
4. “One Less Bell to Answer”/Fifth Dimension
Each of these had a particular sound on my green plastic Westinghouse radio. “Born to Wander,”  “Immigrant Song,” and “Black Magic Woman” came sizzling in like transmissions from another reality, which for 10-year-old-me, they were.

15. “I Think I Love You”/Partridge Family
EXTRA: “Theme From A Summer Place“/Percy Faith
14. “Love the One You’re With”/Stephen Stills
EXTRA: “We Can Work It Out”/Beatles
On the original 1/30/71 broadcast, Casey ends the second hour of the show as you see here. Percy Faith is on as part of a feature about the two acts that have had the #1 song for the entire year twice: the Beatles in 1964 and 1968 (“I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Hey Jude”) and Faith in 1953 and 1960 (“Song from Moulin Rouge” and this). After “Love the One You’re With,” he recaps the top five from “five years ago today” and plays “We Can Work It Out.” It’s all kind of awkward. (The Percy Faith record was snipped from the repeat and offered as an extra.)

13. “It’s Impossible”/Perry Como. Down from #10 the previous week, and his biggest hit since 1958. He would return to the Top 40 one more time, with the Don McLean song “And I Love You So” in 1973.

9. “One Bad Apple”/Osmonds
3. “Lonely Days”/Bee Gees
“One Bad Apple” vaults to this lofty position from #34 the week before, but Casey reports that it’s already #1 in Salt Lake City. He does something similar after “Lonely Days,” name-checking someone at an affiliate station “on the coast of Maine” who says the song is #1 there.

8. “Your Song”/Elton John. In the second of what would be four weeks at #8.

2. “My Sweet Lord”/George Harrison. On the green plastic Westinghouse, this sounded like God himself playing a 50-foot guitar.

1. “Knock Three Times”/Dawn. In its second week at #1. Casey introduces it in an oddly downbeat fashion, musing that most young American males have been in the position of falling in love with a woman they’ve never met or spoken to. “That’s what this song is about,” he says.

I hadn’t been there yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

(Pictured: Van Morrison at work in 1971.)

Before we get into the American Top 40 show from January 30, 1971, let me stipulate for the rest of this year/decade that I can’t believe it’s been a half-century because it doesn’t seem that long ago to me, etc. and so forth.

With this show, American Top 40 reaches the end of its seventh month on the air. It’s still evolving: in spots, Casey still talks too fast and it feels like he’s ad-libbing, but he’s miles better than he was, and he and his producers are starting to figure out the template that the show would use throughout its long life, one that countdown shows everywhere still use today.

40. “Somebody’s Watching You”/Little Sister
39. “Precious Precious”/Jackie Moore
38. “Tears of a Clown”/Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
36. “Do the Push and Pull”/Rufus Thomas
35. “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved”/James Brown
This show gets jumpin’ with a soul-music party. In AT40‘s earliest days, Casey would say that the Billboard Hot 100 is based on sales data from 100 record stores across the country. That does not seem like a lot, and I am betting that the bulk of them were in major metros. And so I wonder if that might have skewed the chart performance of hard R&B records with little pop appeal, like “Do the Push and Pull” and “Get Up, Get Into It,” which were more likely to sell in New York or Chicago than in, for example, Dubuque or Allentown.

37. “1900 Yesterday”/Liz Damon’s Orient Express. Right in the middle of all that soul shoutin’ comes a record as ethereal as the cigarette smoke mentioned in the lyric. This original video, made in the group’s native Hawaii, really doesn’t fit the song, but watch it and see if you can identify the actor reading the newspaper in it. (Answer below.)

34. “Games”/Redeye
31. “Amos Moses”/Jerry Reed
30. “One Man Band”/Three Dog Night
23. “For the Good Times”/Ray Price
20. “We Gotta Get You a Woman”/Runt
I would have heard these songs on my first radio, the fabled green plastic Westinghouse tube-type, and as I listen to them today, I can see it sitting in its spot next to my bed. Casey tells how Jerry Reed commutes from his home in Nashville to Los Angeles every week to tape episodes of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, on which he’s a guitarist in Campbell’s band. Casey says Reed prefers the 1800-mile round trip to actually living in Los Angeles.

32. “Domino”/Van Morrison
I’m halfway sure that “Domino” was the first record I ever bought with my own money, unless it was “Love the One You’re With,” on this show at #14.

29. “River Deep, Mountain High”/Supremes and Four Tops
21. “Stoned Love”/Supremes
19. “Remember Me”/Diana Ross
Diana Ross left the Supremes at the end of 1969 but it didn’t hurt them much. Jean Terrell stepped into the lead-singer slot and the group’s hits (so to speak) just kept on comin’. As for “Remember Me,” it’s another one of those green plastic Westinghouse records.

28. “If You Could Read My Mind”/Gordon Lightfoot. Which Casey introduces in his FM-radio register, so mellow he’s barely audible.

On the original 1971 broadcast, “If You Could Read My Mind” was followed by a national commercial for MGM Records. MGM was of the show’s earliest major sponsors and plugging the new Eydie Gorme album, It Was a Good Time. In a radio world where formats and audiences were not as fragmented as they would become, it’s not the craziest buy I can think of. The Eydie Gorme spot appears three times on the show in all.

The Increase label also had three spots on the show to plug its Cruisin’ series of 50s and 60s oldies compilations, which also feature DJ patter. The series was the brainchild of Ron Jacobs, one of the co-creators of American Top 40. The first seven volumes of Cruisin’ came out in 1970; featured DJs included Dick Biondi, Hunter Hancock, and Joe Niagara. Once upon a time, the Cruisin’ albums were ubiqitous in used-record stores, although I imagine they’re pretty pricey nowadays.

It will take us another installment to get through all of this show, so stop back tomorrow.

(Answer to the question above: the actor reading the newspaper in the “1900 Yesterday” video is Gilbert Lani Kauhi, who billed himself as Zulu, and is most famous for playing Kono in the first four seasons of the original Hawaii Five-O. )