(Pictured: Andy Gibb.)

After my class reunion last month, we spent the night at Mother and Dad’s house. They put us in the bedroom that I occupied from 1972 until I moved away in 1980. It’s not their regular guest room, and so it had been a few years since we slept up there. It’s been painted and recarpeted since 1980, and there’s none of my stuff left in it, but the upstairs hallway and bathroom look pretty much the same. (My brother’s room, on the north side of the house, hasn’t changed at all; it has the same paint from the 70s and the same posters on the walls.) My room has two windows and a screen door out to a porch. The view of the dooryard and farm fields to the south and southeast is still beautiful, especially in the morning.

When I project myself back in time, I tend to have some standard landing spots. When I return to the summer of 1977, it’s almost always to that room. I had a little stereo system I’d gotten a couple of years before, which sat on my dresser. I also had a portable radio which sat on a nightstand near my bed. A black-and-white TV on a rolling cart went back and forth between my room and my brother’s. An antique table pushed up against one wall, and on it sat my typewriter—actually Dad’s, vintage late 40s or early 50s, which is here in the house somewhere now—although I didn’t use it much. Letters to my girlfriend in Europe were handwritten, and so was anything else I may have felt like composing.

In an earlier post, I started listening to the American Top 40 show from the week of July 30, 1977. Let’s go back and pick up the rest of the notable songs on that show, and in that room.

13.  “Easy”/Commodores. Either this or “Sweet Love” is my favorite thing by the Commodores. I love the line “easy like Sunday morning,” even though in the context of the song, I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean.

10.  “Whatcha Gonna Do”/Pablo Cruise. “Whatcha Gonna Do” is one of the great summer records of any decade; put it on even in the dead of winter and I’m looking out my southern windows at sunny skies and 80 degrees.

9.  “Higher and Higher”/Rita Coolidge. I will always fanboy hard for this record.

8.  “Margaritaville”/Jimmy Buffett. As great as “Margaritaville” sounded on the radio in 1977, it’s another song I never need to hear again. Casey played an edit, however, which provided a little novelty value. As best I can tell, there are a couple of edited versions: both snip out the instrumental bit in the middle and shorten the ending, but one of them speeds the song up a half-step. I am pretty sure Casey played the speeded-up one.

2.  “I’m in You”/Peter Frampton. Although “I’m in You” would spend three weeks at #2, I don’t recall hearing it much after it fell out of recurrents that fall. It’s not bad, really, just not as memorable as the hits from Frampton Comes Alive! had been. (Frampton’s followup single, a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed Sealed Delivered” is much, much better.)

1.  “I Just Want to Be Your Everything”/Andy Gibb. Pffft. “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” is catchy enough, but there’s nothing to it. Nevertheless, it spent nine straight weeks as one of the three most popular songs in the land, including four non-consecutive weeks at #1. It would stay in the Top 40 until late October and spend 31 weeks on the Hot 100 in all, from April to November.

Billboard doesn’t list “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” as the #1 song for all of 1977, although at least nine radio stations did, according to ARSA. (Billboard‘s November-through-October chart year made Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” #1 for all of 1977 when it more properly belonged in 1976.) There’s a case for Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” as the #1 song of 1977 as well, although it, too, got shorted by Billboard‘s chart rule. WLS in Chicago seems to have gotten it right, with Boone at #1 and Andy at #2 on the Big 89 of 1977.

(Pictured: Fleetwood Mac in the summer of 1977.)

People listen to American Top 40 for lots of reasons. You’re guaranteed three or four hours of highly familiar music and interesting oddities. Casey Kasem’s personality is engaging, and his feature bits are usually interesting. I enjoy all of those things, but I also use the shows to try and project myself back in time, to feel what it was like to live in that bygone week, whenever it was.

I have been listening to the American Top 40 show from the week of July 30, 1977, and in that bygone week, life was difficult, or it seemed that way to 17-year-old me. My girlfriend was in Europe and I missed her. While she was there, I lost both of my part-time jobs off the farm, each in the span of a couple of weeks. (I didn’t like either one of them, but still.) I must have spent the first couple of weeks of August, before my GF got home, lonely and feeling sorry for myself.

So I believe I will tread lightly around this show and try to think of some things I haven’t already said about the songs of that summer.

40.  “Float On”/Floaters. I don’t recall hearing “Float On” on the radio stations I was listening to back then, even after its unlikely rise to #2 on the Hot 100 in September. I hated it when I finally heard it, although now I respect its easy groove and the earnestness of the individual Floaters describing the kind of girl they like.

39.  “Christine Sixteen”/KISS. In 1977, “Christine Sixteen” wasn’t a cultural outlier; rapey crap of this type was mainstream. In the #MeToo Era, it’s unacceptable.

31.  “Black Betty”/Ram Jam. One of the classic-rock stations I worked for used to play this as part of its Southern rock weekends, even though Ram Jam was formed in New York City. Fine by me.

29.  “Smoke From a Distant Fire”/Sanford-Townsend Band. This is a record that cannot be improved upon, and its very existence in a state of such perfection is a sort of miracle.

25. “Give a Little Bit”/Supertramp. Casey played the 45 edit, which is labeled at 3:20, and which I had completely forgotten.

24.  “Telephone Man”/Meri Wilson. “Telephone Man” would make #18 on the Hot 100 later in August. It’s the kind of novelty that’s mildly humorous once, annoying the second time, and get-it-the-fk-off-my-radio after that. By the time it reached its Hot 100 peak, however, it had been to #1 at WCOL in Columbus and WKTQ in Pittsburgh, as well as at stations in Kalamazoo and Muskegon, Michigan. In an era when many Top 40 stations played their top hits every 75 to 90 minutes, you can imagine the horror of that.

22.  “Don’t Stop”/Fleetwood Mac
21. “Jet Airliner”/Steve Miller Band
20. “Barracuda”/Heart
This is a damn fine stretch of music right here, even though the AT40 engineer, either in 1977 or today, made a godawful edit in “Barracuda.”

Casey delivers more news than usual on this week’s show. He does a feature on the world’s most expensive single record, a 10-inch 78 of “Stormy Weather” by the Five Sharps, for which its owner recently turned down an offer of $2,000. (I found a couple of recent articles suggesting that the value of “Stormy Weather” is now $25,000, and there are only three copies in existence.) He updates the condition of Jackie Wilson, who suffered brain damage after a heart attack in 1975 and was still, as of 1977, confined to a rehabilitation center. And in a particularly rare move, he plugs two acting roles he has on NBC in the coming week, on Police Story and Quincy. (Late edit: be sure to read the comment from our friend and former AT40 staffer Scott Paton about these parts of the show.)

15.  “Undercover Angel”/Alan O’Day. Call this 70s cheese if you want, but the last verse, in which Alan hits the sheets with the girl of his dreams hoping to see the angel again, strikes me as truthful in a particular way. He tells her his story, to which she responds, “Whaaaat?” He says, “Ooo-wee.” She says, “All right!” The exclamation point is critical. She’s not angry or confused by his wild-ass story; she’s happy to go with it because she is ready and willing to get it on as he is. How many pop songs depict sex as playful, or fun? Songwriters are usually most comfortable imbuing it with more “significant” emotions—passion, contentment, regret. They’re less likely to acknowledge, as O’Day does here, that sometimes, we make love with laughter in our hearts.

Coming in the next installment: the room where most of the summer of ’77 happened, and more of what I heard there.

(Pictured: Al Green, 1989.)

The period around the Fourth of July is usually a busy one for me. It’s a big week for vacations, so I did a lot of filling in at my radio stations. As of today, I’ll have worked 12 days in a row, and after today I have at least 11 more to go.

You may recall that I once tried to get out of radio entirely.

I rarely have to be at the office all day, however, and last week I had time to devote to other stuff.

To name one: Jimmy McDonough’s 2017 biography of Al Green, Soul Survivor. McDonough is incredibly thorough, having tracked down every living soul who might be able to contribute to the story. The Green that emerges in the book is temperamental, infuriating, and frequently inhabits another plane entirely, although he’s just as easily capable of being compassionate, funny, and reflective. Unlike similarly gifted artists (Van Morrison, hello), Green recognizes the existence of his negative side, often speaking of himself in the third person, or in terms of multiple Al Greens. The various Greens uneasily coexisted back in the day, and they still conflict inside 72-year-old Al Green today.

In 2003, Green headlined an all-day blues festival here in Madison, topping a bill that also featured Canned Heat, Sonny Landreth, Susan Tedeschi, and Dr. John. I would like to remember it as a dream-come-true, bucket-list event, but I don’t. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, or the heat of the long day, but more than likely, it was because I realized on that day that what I love most about Al Green’s great 70s records is the brilliance of Hi Rhythm, the band backing him on those records, and the production work of Willie Mitchell. Even in the 70s, Hi Rhythm was not his touring band, and without them, the Al Green you got on stage was not necessarily going to be the Al Green you hoped to hear.

I’d like to read a full biography of Mitchell, actually. His brilliance in consistently getting the best out of Green even when the singer wasn’t immediately willing to give it is the greatest accomplishment of his career. The most revealing scene involving Mitchell in Soul Survivor is set sometime in the early 70s, when singer Denise LaSalle observes that all of his stuff with Green sounds alike. Mitchell responds: “I will ride this horse until it falls dead.”

And he did.

I spent part of the week listening to the American Top 40 show from July 3, 1971, the first anniversary of the franchise. Casey says it started with seven stations (the number most commonly reported today is five), but a year later, the affiliate list was up to 118. The show had become popular enough to inspire the marketing of a 24-song compilation called American Top 40’s Double Dozen Album of Hits, Volume 1, with liner notes featuring Casey’s commentary on each song. The album was promoted as part of the 7/3/71 show, although the promo was snipped from the recent syndicated repeat.

People who bash the 1970s as a decade of silly, stupid music need to account for 1971, and especially the summer. The Top 40 in this week includes soul superstars the Isley Brothers, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett, and the Supremes, as well as one-off hits including “Funky Nassau,” “She’s Not Just Another Woman,” “Mr. Big Stuff,” and “Want Ads.” Legendary rock figures are on the list too: the Stones, Ringo Starr, Carole King, James Taylor, Joe Cocker. It’s true that the Carpenters, Donny Osmond, John Denver, and the Partridge Family are a part of it, along with radio candy by the Grass Roots, Tommy James, Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds, and Three Dog Night—but if it doesn’t always fit together smoothly (and it doesn’t), so what? This sort of radio democracy exposed even a casual listener to different stars and styles every single day. And it turned some of us into omnivores—people who wanted to hear everything.

And finally: I learned last week about three young women from New York City who, in 1966, formed a psychedelic trio called the Cake. Although they made only two albums, they wrote some of their own songs at a time when few women did that, and the three members were connected to some of the most famous figures in rock. The Cake was successful enough to appear on The Smothers Brothers Show in October 1967. Their story is fascinating and wild, and you can read it here.