Sunday Blasts from the Past

Cluttered Brain (also known as Mrs. Natural Deficiency of Moral Fiber) has started a new regular Sunday post that is kinda fun, picking a random year to review the top ten on American Top 40 with Casey Kasem.

I too used to listen to American Top 40 on Sunday afternoons back in the Seventies, and the AM station in my little hometown ran a couple of hours of Alison “The Nightbird” Steele’s syndicated show after that, so most Sunday afternoons from probably around 1973 until 1979, I was usually listening.  By 1979, the AM stations weren’t really playing what I wanted to hear anymore – Cheap Trick, Devo, the Ramones, The B-52s, etc. – so I moved on from making a point of listening to the weekly American Top 40 around that time, though of course anything after that won’t be stuff I didn’t ever listen to.

This week, CB picked 1974 and said she recognized about 50% of the songs in the Top Ten – I unfortunately remember all of them, except for the #10 song (“Sideshow” by Blue Magic), but then again we weren’t exposed to a lot of R&B and Philly Soul on AM radio in West Tennessee in the Seventies.

I remember very well that, back then, the Pop chart and the R&B chart were always separated and it was very rare you’d see the same artist on both, with a few exceptions (The Jackson 5, for instance).  My local record store had a printed sheet every week (I guess it was the Billboard charts) printed by the distributor out of Memphis, with the Pop chart on one side and R&B on the other, and their stock of 45 RPM records behind the counter was numbered in accordance with that week’s Pop chart, and that’s what you had a choice of buying.  Those little pieces of vinyl were about 50 cents each for years, and then by the time I was winding down from buying 45s anymore they had risen to about 99 cents.

It hasn’t been that way in a long time and will never be that way again.  Kids today’s heads would explode under those circumstances of having to get and play your music.

Anyway, be sure and check out Cluttered Brain’s blast from the past every Sunday looking back on random years of the Top Ten in American music.  I sure will be!