(Pictured: Carly Simon and James Taylor, 1973.)

On Monday, I wrote about how pop music, at least as it was heard on the radio via the American Top 40 show from May 4, 1974, was retreating from the innovation and ferment of the previous decade, citing the incredible blandness of many of the most popular songs, and the fact that certain significant artists and styles of the earlier period were ceasing to be as popular. In this post, there’s evidence that the thesis in my earlier post could be completely full of it.

40. “Touch a Hand, Make a Friend”/Staple Singers
35. “Mighty Mighty”/Earth Wind and Fire
32. “For the Love of Money”/O’Jays
27. “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing”/Stevie Wonder
19. “My Mistake”/Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye
17. “You Make Me Feel Brand New”/Stylistics
5. “Dancing Machine”/Jackson Five
4. “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”/Gladys Knight and the Pips
Sure, Aretha Franklin and James Brown were coming down from the peaks they had reached in the 60s and early 70s, but there was a whole raft of stars who were either 60s mainstays doing fine, emergent stars in the 70s at a peak, or future hitmakers on the way up. In defense of my original thesis, I will say that in 1974, some of these acts were not especially long for the charts. For example, Philly soul would cease to be as powerful a force as disco rose, and Michael Jackson would swallow his brothers whole not too long after.

38. “Thanks for Saving My Life”/Billy Paul
23. “Help Me”/Joni Mitchell
2. “T.S.O.P.”/MFSB
And there were still innovators at work in this period. Joni Mitchell hired jazz musicians for her band because they were the only ones capable of keeping up with her explorations. Billy Paul came up as a jazz singer, which explains the way he sings ahead of, behind, and all around the swingin’ band backing him on “Thanks for Saving My Life.” That band, MFSB, made up of Philadelphia session players, had jazz chops to burn. (Listen to the sax solo on “T.S.O.P.”) Outsiders and outside styles continued to influence pop just as they had in years before.

33. “Mockingbird”/Carly Simon and James Taylor
31. “A Very Special Love Song”/Charlie Rich
21. “I Won’t Last a Day Without You”/Carpenters
One might consider these to be emblematic of the bland, adult-contemporary direction of Top 40 music as 1974 unfolded. Charlie Rich had taken that same sensibility to the top of the country charts: Casey mentions that in a recent week, Rich held the top three positions on the country album chart. (Of all his hits in the 1973-1974 period, “A Very Special Love Song,” which had been to #11 on the Hot 100 in April, might be the best of the bunch.) I did not lump the Carpenters with the previous post’s examples of records dull enough to stop time, even as it sounds exactly right alongside of them. That’s because by 1974, the Carpenters’ record-making craft was so accomplished—seriously, they were approaching McCartney levels by this time—that I’m impressed by it even when it’s in the service of a song that’s not especially memorable.

As for Carly and James, leave it to nerds such as we to consider where  “Mockingbird” fits on a creative spectrum or within the course of history. In 1974, they had hit the quinella of being young, beautiful, talented, stoned (just JT), and in love, so good for them.

29. “Let It Ride”/Bachman-Turner Overdrive
22. “Band on the Run”/Paul McCartney and Wings
3. “Bennie and the Jets”/Elton John
1. “The Locomotion”/Grand Funk
Here are more stars who were either just starting a run of success (BTO) or in the middle of one. But they also represent the only real rock music on this chart. Does “Bennie and the Jets” even count? I am almost convinced that “The Locomotion” is more akin to the novelty cheese of “The Streak,” which would knock “The Locomotion” from the #1 position during the week of May 18, 1974, and stay in the Top Five until July.

While there are some specific exceptions, in general I find the radio pop from first half of 1974 hard to love. It gets better as the year goes along, but I can never be sure that doesn’t have as much to do with the pleasant associations I have with the music as it does with the music itself. If I’m onto anything here, it’s the idea that there was a degree of qualitative retreat going on in that year, moving in a direction that would necessitate new innovations—disco, new wave, MTV, take your pick—in not too many years after.

(Pictured: John Denver, outdoors.)

Popular music runs in cycles, periods of innovation followed by retreat, which inspires new innovation. It’s always been true, as David Wondrich demonstrates in Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843-1924. Innovations bubble up into the mainstream and change the course of it, but after a while, the innovations (and the inventive spirit that inspired them) get co-opted to various degrees by the keepers of orthodoxy until the next new bubbling innovations come along. In Wondrich’s book, it happens to minstrel music, coon songs, and ragtime. Although eras don’t break cleanly and there are always individual exceptions, in later years it went generally like this: the Jazz Age and Swing Era (from the 20s to the start of World War II) was followed by an era of mostly sweet and unthreatening pop songs (to 1954), which was followed by the birth of R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, which was followed by another era of mostly sweet and unthreatening pop songs (late 50s/early 60s), which was followed by the British Invasion, the rise of soul, and the whole ferment of the 1960s. That latter period lasted longer than it seems. I believe that certain innovations and spirit of the 1960s persisted as late as 1973. It wasn’t until 1974 that pop music became truly quiescent, in need of new bubbling innovations.

It’s easy to say that the bland and escapist pop of 1974 was birthed by the psychological weight of outside historical forces coming down—Vietnam, Watergate, energy crisis, etc.—and that’s probably part of it. Wondrich notes how the outside force of Jim Crow in the 1890s changed the nature of racist coon songs. But the biggest historical force driving co-optation at any point is probably capitalism, in which somebody hopes to profit by making an outsider art form palatable for a broader, less sophisticated audience. Top 40 radio, the main means of music discovery for a generation, was transformed by that desire to profit. By 1974, some of the big stations increased their efforts to achieve truly mass audiences by bringing more soft rock/adult contemporary music into the Top 40 mainstream to attract the olds, while others went all-in on attracting teenagers, which kept bubblegum and teenybopper acts alive (and which drove young adults away from AM to FM rock stations, another historical force in motion).

All that explains something, but not everything, about the the American Top 40 show dated May 4, 1974 (a show I’m sure I heard on the weekend it first aired).

39. “My Girl Bill”/Jim Stafford
37. “I’m a Train”/Albert Hammond
28. “Seasons in the Sun”/Terry Jacks
26. “Keep on Singing”/Helen Reddy
25. “The Lord’s Prayer”/Sister Janet Mead
20. “Sunshine on My Shoulders”/John Denver
14. “Come and Get Your Love”/Redbone
7. “Hooked on a Feeling”/Blue Swede
6. “The Streak”/Ray Stevens
This right here is the reaction, or the co-optation, or whatever you want to call it, in response to the years since 1964. With these records, it didn’t feel like pop music had lost an edge as much as it had actively stopped trying to hone one. Even “Hooked on a Feeling” and “Come and Get Your Love,” catchy though they are, feel a little enervated. The very topical “The Streak” was on its way to #1 as one of the top hits of the year, but it generates a chuckle at most. In the aggregate, the blandness of these records is enough to stop time.

36. “I’m in Love”/Aretha Franklin
34. “Tell Me a Lie”/Sami Jo
30. “The Payback”/James Brown
And here are some casualties of the reaction, two stars and one style (deep Southern country-soul) that had been ascendant in years before but would never be quite so dominant again.

11. “The Entertainer”/Marvin Hamlisch
8. “Tubular Bells”/Mike Oldfield
The blandness was not all-consuming, however. Any era in which both The Sting and The Exorcist were playing in your town (and in which Chinatown was a coming attraction, to open in June) was a good one. The Sting drove the success of “The Entertainer,” originally a ragtime piece written in 1902, but as a retroactive argument for the blandness of radio pop in the spring of 1974, you can’t do better, even if “Tubular Bells” represents a dissenting view.

Cherry-picking the charts in search of support for a particular thesis is a dangerous occupation. You can prove anything by selectively interpreting your source material. And in fact, what I’ve suggested here is probably a gross oversimplification of what was happening back there in the spring of 1974. Coming in the next installment (and I desperately did not want this to require two posts but gasbags gotta gas and I’m sorry), I’ll suggest that my whole thesis could be wrong.

(Pictured: Laura Branigan, 1982.)

Old AT40 shows often seem to me to be both very far away and very close in time. So it is with the weekend of April 9, 1983, itself, for that was the weekend The Mrs. and me became Mr. and Mrs. We didn’t hear American Top 40 that weekend, but America did, and here’s some of what was on the show.

39. “I Don’t Care Anymore”/Phil Collins
30. “Lies”/Thompson Twins
21. “Change of Heart”/Tom Petty
20. “Little Too Late”/Pat Benatar
18. “I’ve Got a Rock and Roll Heart”/Eric Clapton
13. “I Know There’s Something Going On”/Frida
8. “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”/Journey
6. “We’ve Got Tonight”/Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton
3. “Hungry Like the Wolf”/Duran Duran
2. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me”/Culture Club
We’ve discussed how early 80s Billboard charts hardly moved at all some weeks; in this week Casey mentions several songs that had been in the same spot for a while: four weeks for Journey, two weeks for Petty, and three weeks each for the rest of these.

38. “Some Kind of Friend”/Barry Manilow. Like him or not, you gotta admit that Barry Manilow’s arrangements gave his records their own distinctive sound—which he abandons entirely on “Some Kind of Friend” in favor of a cutting-edge-of-the-80s rock track that could be by anybody.

36. “Make Love Stay”/Dan Fogelberg. Behold some of the most dreadful rhymes in all of pop music:

Moments fleet, taste sweet within the rapture
When precious flesh is greedily consumed
But mystery’s a thing not easily captured
And once deceased, not easily exhumed

But even cannibalism and necrophilia aren’t as gross as the saxophone that’s slathered all over the record like mayonnaise.

29. “Let’s Dance”/David Bowie
28. “Overkill”/Men at Work
Both of these are debuts on the show: “Let’s Dance” is Bowie’s first Top 40 hit since 1976; “Overkill” is new on the Hot 100 in this week, making the highest debut since John Lennon’s “Imagine” came in at #20 in 1971.

26. “Solitaire”/Laura Branigan. Casey tells an amusing story about Branigan’s appearance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade the previous year. She sang her hit “Gloria” riding on a float with her name on it, but she says she told the organizers, “You’d better put ‘Gloria’ on it too, or nobody will know who I am.”

LDD: “Ships”/Barry Manilow. Casey reads a long letter from a woman who took a temp job at the circus when it came through her town and fell in love with an injured French acrobat who had fallen off the trapeze, only to have him move on after five days. If that’s not a Hallmark movie plot, my name isn’t whatever my name is.

15. “Twilight Zone”/Golden Earring
9. “Jeopardy”/Greg Kihn Band
7. “One on One”/Hall and Oates
One of these is the best record on the show (and “Jeopardy,” Casey says, is #1 on the dance and disco chart in this week). How did I not know that future Stars on 45 impresario Jaap Eggermont was the drummer in Golden Earring until they fired him for incompetence?

LDD: “Don’t You Wanna Play This Game No More”/Elton John. From a guy in Chicago to his former co-workers at a pizza restaurant in Connecticut, for whom he used to play “Don’t You Wanna Play This Game No More” on the jukebox after closing. I can’t think of a more obscure song to be featured as an LDD, with two weeks on the chart in 1980, peaking at #39. At least it’s one of those that sounds familiar even if you don’t know it.

5. “Mr. Roboto”/Styx. There is not enough of the word count left for me to talk about how much I hate this record, and the toxic self-regard that drove Styx and their label to make it and release it.

1. “Billie Jean”/Michael Jackson. It seems deeply weird that “The Girl Is Mine” was the first single from Thriller ahead of two all-time bangers like “Beat It” (on this show at #10) and “Billie Jean,” until you consider that Paul McCartney was a bigger star than Michael at the end of 1982, and it made sense from a marketing standpoint. Now, however, “The Girl Is Mine” is widely considered the worst track on the record. “Billie Jean,” on the other hand, in its sixth week at #1 here, raised the bar—not just for dance music and music video, but for pop stars themselves, and what would they have to do if they wanted to keep pace with Michael. Even Paul couldn’t do it.

I have some more AT40s from the 80s in my archive, so look for more posts along this line, especially written for those amongst the readership not as deep in the tank for the 1970s as I am.