(Pictured: James Taylor on The Johnny Cash Show, 1971.)

I said a couple of weeks ago that I was going to listen to the American Top 40 show from November 13, 1971, but maybe not write about it. How silly of me.

Casey opens the show by thanking Dave Hull, who filled in the previous week when Casey was late returning from a film shoot. It was the first time AT40 ever used a guest host; a charming memo included with the cue sheet for the 11/6 show explains that Hull “has logged 69 consecutive weeks of emergency standby status.” The movie in which Casey was acting, which he referred to as That Lovin’ Man Jesus, was eventually released under the title Soul Hustler, but not until 1973. It apparently includes a scene with Casey in a speedo. 

Now on with the countdown:

40. “Cherish”/David Cassidy
21. “Family Affair”/Sly and the Family Stone
13. “Got to Be There”/Michael Jackson
8. “Have You Seen Her”/Chi-Lites
3. “Imagine”/John Lennon
2. “Shaft”/Isaac Hayes
There’s a lot of chart action in this week. “Cherish” and “Family Affair” are in their second week on the Hot 100. “Family Affair” was up 29 spots from #50, but “Cherish” was up 47 from #87. “Got to Be There,” meanwhile, is in its third week on the Hot 100 and has gone 89-39-13, the biggest mover within the Top 40 this week. “Have You Seen Her” has gone 60-21-14-8. “Imagine” debuted on the Hot 10 at #20 three weeks earlier then went 6-4-3, but will go no higher. “Shaft” went 50-9-5-2, and is holding at #2 this week on its way to #1 next week.

36. “Long Ago and Far Away”/James Taylor
31. “A Natural Man”/Lou Rawls
Casey introduces each of these with what the AT40 staff called the “tease and hook.” The one for “Long Ago and Far Away” is a doozy: “Coming up in the next 10 minutes, the current hit by a superstar whose mother nearly died of bee stings because his father was at the South Pole with Admiral Byrd.” Taylor’s father, a physician, was an amateur beekeeper, and he left Taylor’s mother to take care of the bees while he accompanied Byrd on an expedition during the late 50s, during which an accident happened. For “A Natural Man,” Casey says it’s “the current hit by a singing star who lost his memory in a car accident one night and didn’t regain it until he was out of the hospital and back on stage, in the middle of a song.” The tease is pretty much the whole story; at the end of the telling, Casey pretends not to be able to remember Rawls’ name.

26. “Absolutely Right”/Five Man Electrical Band
20. “Only You Know and I Know”/Delaney and Bonnie
15. “Desiderata”/Les Crane
Fifty years’ time means that a lot of this music will sound dated now. But some of it would sound dated within a couple of years.

22. “Rock Steady”/Aretha Franklin
18. “Easy Lovin'”/Freddie Hart
17. “Tired of Being Alone”/Al Green
16. “Everybody’s Everything”/Santana
14. “Do You Know What I Mean”/Lee Michaels
10. “Superstar”/Carpenters
5. “I Found Someone of My Own”/Free Movement
4. “Maggie May”/Rod Stewart
Any one of these could be the best song on the show. OK, “Easy Lovin'” is clearly not the best, but I will always fanboy for it, and the best song might be “A Natural Man” or “Have You Seen Her” anyway. And get a load of “Maggie,” in her ninth week among the top four songs in the land.

12. “Never My Love”/Fifth Dimension. Writing about it last month, I called “Never My Love” a live recording. I’m grateful to our friend Wesley for a correction. “Never My Love” was a studio recording with applause dubbed in, although it appeared on the group’s live album.

EXTRA: “Poor Side of Town”/Johnny Rivers. This is an modern-day extra offered by Premiere Radio Networks to help affiliates fill time. Casey says it’s the #1 song “five years ago today.” But it wasn’t part of the AT40 show dated 11/13/71. It’s taken from the 11/20 show, when it technically wasn’t the #1 song of five years ago anymore, having been knocked out by the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” on the chart dated 11/19/66.

1. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”/Cher. “I was 16, he was 21 / Rode with us to Memphis / And Papa woulda shot him if he knew what he’d done.” I started wondering the other day if 11-year-old me understood what that meant. I hadn’t gotten the talk yet, I don’t think. I was just another innocent sixth-grader, but one with an obsession, glued to my radio every moment possible, as autumn began to turn toward Christmas.

We’re not quite done with this season yet, I don’t think.

(Pictured: record producer Mickie Most in 1975 with a Teac A-3300 tape machine, once a fixture in radio stations and recording studios.)

If you visit the American Top 40 archive at Charis Music Group, you can see the original cue sheets for the shows from the very first one in 1970 to the end of Casey’s run and beyond. For the earliest shows, you see something even more interesting—the rundown sheets used to plan and execute the show. The one for the show dated October 30, 1971, has handwritten calculations of the show’s running time. It also includes master log sheets, which indicate that each hour of the program was delivered on two reels of tape, with the audio on each tape preceded by a series of tones to help radio stations calibrate the output of the tape machines on which the show would play.

Syndicated shows that were delivered on tape often had to be returned to the syndicator so that the tapes could be reused. If that seems a little bit crazy, it probably was, although we didn’t think much about it back then. In an analog world, sound quality was as good as we could make it, and that didn’t necessarily mean it was pristine. Shows like American Top 40 were high-speed duplicates—they were not mastered in real time—and that meant a certain loss of audio quality. And while there were certainly methods of quality control to make sure damaged tapes weren’t reused, it was not unheard-of for a station to receive a copy of a syndicated show that had a splice in the tape, or a distortion from a slightly stretched tape.

At some point in the 70s, it became feasible for shows such as AT40 to be pressed on to vinyl discs. These often had calibration tones, and some shows were lock-banded, meaning that at the end of each segment, the needle would not advance to the next segment without being manually moved.

(In my personal library, I had a vinyl copy of some old show with calibration tones, and I used it to set levels on my cassette deck before making mix tapes. There are people reading this post right now who are nodding and thinking, “Yup, I did that.”)

It was not until the turn of the 90s that it became common for shows to be delivered on CD, although vinyl and even tape delivery continued, depending on what the syndicator chose to do. Today, shows are delivered via an audio server; for American Top 40, you log onto a password-protected website and download it. Some shows are even delivered automatically, directly to whatever automation system a station is using, at a predetermined time.

But back to the handwritten rundown sheets: one of the endearing things about the early days of AT40 was that it was basically a live radio show captured on tape. If Casey flubbed his last line of a segment, they’d go back and record the entire segment, which meant sitting through the records and revoicing the other lines too. (This maybe explains some of the oddball errors and near-mistakes that slip through: “aw hell, it ain’t that bad, leave it in.”) The on-the-fly nature of the early shows is also seen in the handwritten notes on the rundown sheets. They were up against the clock every hour. On 10/30/71 and other shows, rundown sheets have one title scratched out and replaced with another, either for purposes of time or for some other spur-of-the-moment reason.

And there’s also this: during the first year or two of AT40, Casey would sometimes play a track from the #1 album of the week. During the week of October 30, 1971, it was John Lennon’s Imagine. Based on the rundown sheet, it looks like the AT40 staff didn’t decide what cut to play from Imagine until they’d started taping the show. They may have picked “Oh My Love” because it was the right length to help fill out the first hour.

(However they chose it, “Oh My Love,” which credits George Harrison on guitar, is the deepest cut I’ve ever heard on AT40.)

We’ve heard from AT40 staffers who say that at the time, they weren’t thinking about any of the minuscule stuff we notice here—they were just making a radio show. I’ve said myself that the shows were never intended to be examined on a molecular level. But, as you know from your own obsessions, nuts and bolts can take on an incredible fascination. So it is with the most popular syndicated radio music show of all time, and nerds such as we.

There’s nothing intrinsically special about round numbers. We are the ones who assign significance to 10, 20, 50, or 100 that we don’t give to 9, 22, 49, or 101. We find round numbers aesthetically pleasing, and so they make attractive denominations for the days of our lives. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed listening to the American Top 40 show from September 4, 1971, more this past week than I might have a year ago, or a year from now.

Casey notes that there are eight new songs on the show, but his audience doesn’t get to hear all of them. What I mean is that nearly every song in the first hour is either edited or faded early. I suspect this was done in 1971 and not by his modern-day producers because he needs to get 13 songs in, and one of them is the full 6:10 of Tom Clay’s “What the World Needs Now/Abraham Martin and John,” the novelty rage of the summer. I’ve mentioned it before; it’s made up of news clips from the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, backed with music and including the voice of a little girl who is unable to define terms like segregation, bigotry, and prejudice. Clay was a Los Angeles DJ who produced “What the World Needs Now” for his local show on KGBS, but after Motown made it the first 45 release on its new West Coast imprint Mowest, it blasted into the national Top 10. It scratched some national itch in the summer of 1971 and then disappeared from the radio as fast as it had come. And it’s a long, tedious listen today.

The first hour has some spectacular 1971 flavor: well-remembered hits like Carole King’s “So Far Away” and Tommy James’ “Draggin’ the Line”; oddballs like the Guess Who’s “Rain Dance” (which features the enigmatic line, “I’m still sittin’ with my next-door neighbor sayin’, ‘Where’d you get the gun, John?'”), Bobby Russell’s domestic novelty “Saturday Morning Confusion,” and “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”; plus a couple of records that should be better-remembered than they are: the Jackson Five’s “Maybe Tomorrow” and the Moody Blues’ “The Story in Your Eyes.”

The second hour has another long song to fit in, Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” with a label time of 5:15. Casey gets the whole thing on, likely because it’s the hottest record of the week, up to #19 from #36 the week before. Also in the second hour: former #1 hits “Indian Reservation” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” George Harrison’s highly topical “Bangla Desh,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

There are some weird little oddments in this show. There’s a 1971 network commercial for American Top 40’s Double Dozen, a compilation of 50s and 60s hits with liner notes by Casey, sold by mail order. It was heavily promoted on the show during the summer of 1971, although the spots, which sometimes appeared outside of the normal break structure, are usually cut from the modern-day repeats. Also, coming up short at the end of the second hour, Casey chooses to repeat the titles of the eight new songs from the first hour, which he’s already recapped once before.

There’s another one of those incredible AM radio streaks at the end of the second hour and into the third, starting with “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Maggie May” back to back, and then:

18. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”/Joan Baez
17. “Stick-Up”/Honey Cone
16. “Sweet Hitch-Hiker”/CCR
15. “Beginnings”/Chicago
14. “Riders on the Storm”/Doors
13. “Mercy Mercy Me”/Marvin Gaye
12. “Mr. Big Stuff”/Jean Knight
11. “Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get”/Dramatics
10. “I Just Want to Celebrate”/Rare Earth
9. “Liar”/Three Dog Night
8. “Signs”/Five Man Electrical Band
7. “Take Me Home Country Roads”/John Denver
6. “Ain’t No Sunshine”/Bill Withers
Either “Mercy Mercy Me” or the astounding “Stick-Up” is the best thing here, but taken altogether, this is why you turned the radio on in the summer of 1971, and a good reason to do it today. Donny Osmond’s future #1 “Go Away Little Girl” is at #5; it’s awful, but all things considered that summer, it was never not going to end up a smash. Without it, the streak goes all the way:

4. “Spanish Harlem”/Aretha Franklin
3. “Smiling Faces Sometimes”/Undisputed Truth
2. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”/Bee Gees
1. “Uncle Albert-Admiral Halsey”/Paul and Linda McCartney
“Go Away Little Girl” will commit the grave injustice of keeping “Spanish Harlem” at #2, although Aretha will make #1 in many cities. Meanwhile, “Uncle Albert” jumps to #1 from #12 the previous week in only its third week on the chart, taking out the Bee Gees after four weeks at the top.

Your mileage may vary, but it occurs to me that a Top 20 with only one certified clunker puts the week of September 4, 1971, into the discussion of best weeks ever.

(Pictured: Tina Turner in 1984.)

The mid-80s are Casey Kasem’s Imperial Period. American Top 40 is on hundreds of radio stations coast to coast and around the world, and Casey possesses The Most Famous Voice in America, even if, in his early 50s, he sometimes sounds like a friendly but out-of-touch dad trying to relate to his teenage daughter by telling her something he read in a magazine. Here’s some of what he was telling about on the show from September 1, 1984.

37. “There Goes My Baby”/Donna Summer
33. “I Just Called to Say I Love You”/Stevie Wonder
Casey does a feature on the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” the first record of the rock ‘n’ roll era with strings, and he talks about Stevie’s 1973 car wreck and coma. Each of them is fine although they both go on too long, and they come awfully close together. Casey plays only nine songs in the first hour of the show.

32. “Panama”/Van Halen
26. “We’re Not Gonna Take It”/Twisted Sister
Exhibits A and B for what can happen when people take pop music too seriously. Twisted Sister wasn’t going to single-handedly corrupt American youth no matter what the Parents Music Resource Council claimed. Meanwhile, David Lee Roth’s hilariously stupid monologue in the middle of “Panama” (“I can barely see the road from the heat comin’ off”) makes me think that Van Halen was basically a novelty act that happened to include a generationally great guitarist. It’s as if Charlie Parker played in the Spike Jones Orchestra.

30. “Torture”/Jacksons
29. “Dancing in the Dark”/Bruce Springsteen
22. “Cover Me”/Bruce Springsteen
20. “Dynamite”/Jermaine Jackson
18. “State of Shock”/Jacksons
8. “Let’s Go Crazy”/Prince
5. “When Doves Cry”/Prince
Casey notes that three acts have two songs on the survey, crediting Jermaine for his return to the Jacksons on “Torture.” (He’s not on “State of Shock.”)

25. “Sad Songs (Say So Much)”/Elton John. Casey says Elton has hit the Top 40 for 15 consecutive years since 1970, trailing only Elvis, who did it for 22 years. Elton’s streak would eventually reach 30.

24. “Sexy Girl”/Glenn Frey. A man should not call a grown woman a girl, unless she’s his daughter. So that’s one strike against this record. And if Frey’s girl really is a girl, under the age of 18, that’s strike two. Strike three is repeating the phrase “sexy girl” maybe 50 times (estimate) in three minutes as if he were doing aversion therapy.

LDD: “Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not)”/Joey Scarbury. Casey takes nearly two minutes to read a letter from a 17-year-old boy about four older women he used to work with at a toy store. The letter implies that they helped him grow up; unfortunately, it doesn’t say that they turned him into a man. Now that would be a letter worth reading.

17. “Rock Me Tonite”/Billy Squier
14. “Drive”/Cars
11. “The Warrior”/Scandal
10. “If Ever You’re in My Arms Again”/Peabo Bryson
One of these is the best record on the show, if it isn’t “Sad Songs (Say So Much),” or the one of the top two songs below.

13. “Lights Out”/Peter Wolf. Casey introduces this by correcting his previous week’s list of solo acts whose names are also animal names (“from Adam Ant to Eddie Rabbitt,” he says, which is making me cringe even without hearing it) to include Ronnie Dove.

9. “If This Is It”/Huey Lewis and the News. Which baseball fan Casey introduces by telling that Lewis and band sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the recent major league all-star game, and helpfully reports that the National League won the game 3-1.

7. “Sunglasses at Night/Corey Hart. Which Casey introduces with a story about aspiring songwriter Hart losing $200 while seated next to Carly Simon at a blackjack table. He hoped to sell her one of his songs. She hoped he was a better songwriter than blackjack player.

LDD: “Heartlight”/Neil Diamond. From a schoolteacher to her little brother, who was befriended by late New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, although what that’s got to do with the letter beyond name-dropping I couldn’t tell. A complete waste of time.

4. “Ghostbusters”/Ray Parker Jr. Down to #4 after three weeks at #1. Ghostbusters was still #2 at the box office after a whole summer in theaters, and the only people who hadn’t seen it by Labor Day weekend were either in monasteries, nursing homes, or jail.

2. “Missing You”/John Waite
1. “What’s Love Got to Do With It”/Tina Turner
Thirty-seven years on, I’m still playing “What’s Love Got to Do With It” on my radio shows maybe twice a week. When 80s music finally starts falling out of style, these two records, perfect in every way, will be among the last to go.