This week we go back to my last days of kindergarten. An okay time. Also, there are a few songs here that were on the second-ever BGC. It's hard to believe I've been doing this for almost a year.
40 - "You and Me," Alice Cooper
39 - "Whatcha Gonna Do," Pablo Cruise
38 - "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)," Waylon Jennings
37 - "(Your Love has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher," Rita Coolidge
36 - "You're My World," Helen Reddy
35 - "Knowing Me, Knowing You," ABBA
34 - "Slowdown," John Miles
33 - "Hollywood," Rufus featuring Chaka Khan
32 - "Southern Nights," Glen Campbell
31 - "I'm in You," Peter Frampton
We start out with rock. Alice Cooper reappears after all these months with his tender ballad about a working man who, after a long day, just wants to eat popcorn and watch TV with his mate. Oh, and also "take (her) to heaven." I guess he means that in a good way. This was a somewhat domesticated Alice at this time. And Peter Framptom made his highly-anticipated return to the charts after Frampton Comes Alive with this ballad about being so close to a lover that they are actually inside one another. It's sweet and catchy, and I'm sure it seemed like the jumping off point to proving that he wasn't just a one-LP wonder. Sadly, it wasn't. But he'll always have memories of his heyday, when his hair was the envy of many a man, and probably a lot of women as well.
A giant heap of MOR here. Pablo Cruise are here with their first hit, asking someone what will become of them when their woman leaves. If I were that guy, I wouldn't dignify this boring drivel with an answer. Rita Coolidge, as I've said before, sucked everything good out of a Jackie Wilson classic. Helen Reddy had her last American hit with a cover of the only U.S. hit by U.K star Cilla Black. I've never heard the original, but our Helen pours out her heart on this one. Good way for her to go out. And Anna-Frid, Benny, Bjorn and Agnetha are here with a dramatic bit of disco-lite about a couple on the verge of a breakup. Definitely in my ABBA Top 5
Two country stars are here. Waylon Jennings scored his second pop hit with a song about wanting to ditch the superstar life and get back to simple things, like drinking and listening to country music with "Waylon and Willie and the boys." Willie himself shows up for the last verse. Oh, and the actual Luckenbach, Texas has never had a population above 500, and now basically exists as a tourist ghost town. And Glen Campbell is back from last time (not the first time) with his New Orleans funk workout about idyllic evenings in Dixie. You wouldn't think "Glen Campbell" and "funk" would go together, but somehow, they do.
We end with some disco and funk. British rocker John Miles scored his only American hit with a song that asks the listener to decrease their pace. His message is tempered somewhat by the song's frantic disco pace. It's all right. The guy sounded a bit like Sammy Hagar to my ears. And Rufus are here with a slow jam that tells the familiar story of someone going to L.A. full of hopes and dreams only to end up disappointed. But still, it's Chaka Khan singing. Nothing wrong with that.
30 - "Theme from Rocky (Gonna Fly Now)," Maynard Ferguson
29 - "Hello Stranger," Yvonne Elliman
28 - "Back Together Again," Daryl Hall and John Oates
27 - "Ariel," Dean Friedman
26 - "I Just Want to Be Your Everything," Andy Gibb
25 - "High School Dance," The Sylvers
24 - "Love's Grown Deep," Kenny Nolan
23 - "Do You Wanna Make Love," Peter McCann
22 - "My Heart Belongs to Me," Barbra Streisand
21 - "Slow Dancin' Don't Turn Me On," The Addrisi Brothers
We'll start in the discotheque. Canadian jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson had his only pop hit with his version of the rousing theme from Sylvester Stallone's cinematic breakthrough. This wasn't the version used in the movie, but Ferguson's take came out before the film's soundtrack got an official release, so it got airplay while stations waited for the real thing. It would come out eventually, though, as you'll see later. Yvonne Elliman had her second-biggest pre-"If I Can't Have You" hit with this Barbara Lewis cover whose beat and delivery foreshadows the greatness to come. After scoring three Top Tens with blue-eyed soul, Hall and Oates tried to hop on the disco bandwagon. That was mistake number one. Number two was letting Oates sing lead. Anyway, this fell short of the Top 20, and began a four-year period when they couldn't get back to the Top 10. But when they did, in 1981 with "Kiss on My List," they became a staple of the upper reaches of the charts for most of the eighties. Andy Gibb declares that all he wants to be is the only thing that matters in your life on the first of the three #1's that kicked off his career. On the "other sibling" scale, he's below Janet Jackson, but well above Jimmy Osmond. And speaking of family groups, the nine Sylvers siblings (yes, I know, technically they should have called themselves The Sylverses, but I can't blame them for their choice) had their last Top 40 single with a fun ode to those secondary school shindigs and all that came with them. High school dances, as I remember them, were a lot more awkward than this makes them sound. But escapism and idealism are fine with me.
Of course, we've got plenty of the easy stuff. It was bad enough knowing that Kenny Nolan had one hit with the somnambulant "I Like Dreamin'" But now I find out that he had another one, and it's even more sappily boring. Ugh. Peter McCann decided that the world needed someone to carry on the legacy of Bread, so he put out this MOR trifle asking his would-be lover how serious she wants their sex to be. Apparently, he would rather have the more meaningful relations. Oh, you're so sensitive, Pete. Barbra Streisand is here with a ballad on which she declares that while she loved her man and loved him well, he cannot possess her, and she feels it's time to move on. This was from the album Streisand Superman, the cover of which looked like this. I'll let you judge it for yourself. And Don and Dick Addrisi, the former acrobats we encountered in 1972 with "We've Got to Get it On Again," return five years later with their second and last hit, in which they ask a deejay not to play slow stuff, but rather some rock n' roll, so they can go up to ladies who "wear their jeans so tight and wiggle their class," and "shake and bake (their) soul(s)." Definitely a candidate for the decade's cheesiest lyric. And what's more, the song itself is...a slow song! How did anyone take this seriously?
Then there's "Ariel," the only American hit by New Jersey singer-songwriter Dean Friedman, which I'm putting in it's own category. Lyrically, it's a tale of a man who falls in love with a Jewish girl (possibly the first mention of a lady's religion in a pop hit, as it hit about a year before Billy Joel sang about the Catholic Virginia in "Only the Good Die Young) who's a great singer, a vegetarian, and a cannabis enthusiast ("I said 'Hi.'/She said 'Yeah, I guess I am.") Anyway, he invites her to see his band play, then he takes her home, makes her spaghetti (because they had "the munchies") and then they make love just as the TV station they were watching was signing off (remember when stations did that? All those years missing out on infomercial money). Musically, it's a throwback to the 60s and groups like the Four Seasons, with that style of backup singing and lots of sax. Even Dean, whose voice is pretty high throughout, goes reaching for Frankie Valli territory on the choruses. Anyway, it's very different from everything else on this week's list, and you know what that means: Dean Friedman and his subversive anachronism scoop up this week's Uneasy Rider award.
Tomorrow: Booze city, double Eagles, and a couple of not-so-innocent angels.
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