The first Billboard singles chart was published on this day in 1940. It was 85 years ago that Billboard began compiling and publishing the National Best Selling Retail Records chart. It became the first official national music chart. Wiki says: Debuting in the issue dated July 27, it marked the beginning of the magazine’s nationwide tracking of record sales in the United States. Initially titled the “National List of Best Selling Retail Records”, the weekly ten-position chart was tabulated using sales figures received from a selection of merchants across the country. Prior to its introduction, The Billboard had produced lists ranking music by various metrics such as performance in vaudeville venues, jukebox plays, sheet music sales, and regional airplay.
The first number one single was “I’ll Never Smile Again” from the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. It featured the Pied Pipers and a singer who would go on to be a musical icon – Frank Sinatra. The song topped the chart for twelve consecutive weeks and elevated Sinatra to national popularity.
They performed the song together in the 1941 film Las Vegas Nights.
All these years later, Billboard is still ranking records/singles. Of course, the music from the past is a lot better that what is on the charts today. (My opinion – don’t be hating!)
As I celebrate birthday 54, I am borrowing (ok, stealing) an idea from another blogger. I have altered the idea a bit, and may decide to change it up after a few posts …
I am calling the feature “The Music of My Life.” I plan on starting with the year I was born and picking 10 favorites from that year. I will move on through the years one by one. I doubt I will go too deep in the more modern years, so I’m not sure how long this will go on.
Right now, I am hoping to do this once a week. That’s a bit adventurous of me, but I am really hoping to be able to work ahead on these.
So what sources am I using to choose my songs? First, I am looking at the Billboard Year-End Top 100. This can be a problem as some of the songs from the list may have been released the year before. Next, I am looking a lists from various sources with all the songs released as singles for each year. Finally, my buddy Max (who may or may not be the blogger I stole this idea from), gave me a cool website to check out. It is acclaimedmusic.net
With that being said, let’s take a look at some of my favorites from the year I was born…
1970
I may as well start with the song that was number one on my birthday – American Woman by The Guess Who. It was released in January of 1970 and was the third biggest song of the year. A cool thing about this song – the whole thing was improvised on stage during a concert after Randy Bachman was tuning his guitar after breaking a string!
American Woman – The Guess Who
Next, a group that never had a number one song. That has always baffled me. CCR had a few hits in 1970. Travelin’ Band was released in January of 1970 and has a very 1950’s sort of sound to it. John Fogerty has been said to have channeled a bit of Little Richard in the vocal delivery of this song. Coincidentally, CCR was sued by the publishing company that had the rights to Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly,” because they sounded so much alike. The case was settled out of court.
Travelin’ Band – CCR
I always loved the sound of Dave Edmunds I Hear You Knocking. In 1970, he was getting ready to cut a version of Wilbert Harrison’s Let’s Work Together, when he heard that the group Canned Heat had just cut it. As he was driving in his car, a radio station played the Smiley Lewis’ 1955 version of I Hear You Knocking. He realized just how similar it was to Let’s Work Together and knew he wouldn’t have to change much and recorded it. He played all the instruments on the song (except maybe the bass guitar).
I Hear You Knockin’ – Dave Edmunds
Another group I have always liked is Badfinger. The song was recorded in May of 1970 and released in October. The band loved this song, but some of the folks at Apple records had no interest in releasing it. In August, the American director at Apple in New York heard the tape and liked it. The song was remixed and released as a single. It was a Top 10 single.
No Matter What – Badfinger
Released in January of 1970, Norman Greenbaum had a Top 5 Hit with Spirit in the Sky. Jesus is mentioned many times throughout the song, so I remember being surprised to read that Norman was Jewish! In a 2006 interview, he said that he was inspired to write the song after watching country singer Porter Wagoner singing a gospel song on TV. He said that he thought, “I can do that,” and wrote “my own gospel song.”
As far as the unique sound of the opening guitar lick? Normal used a Fender Telecaster with a fuzz-tone circuit built into the body to generate the song’s characteristic guitar sound. Because of the song’s length and religious tone of the lyrics, the record company was initially reluctant to issue the song. They came to their senses and finally released as a single after two other singles from the album had poor sales. The rest … is history.
Spirit in the Sky – Norman Greenbaum
Edwin Starr is one of my favorite Motown singers. In 1970, he released a song co-written by another Motown artist, Barrett Strong. The song is basically a protest song as the Vietnam War was still going on. The song was recorded originally with the Temptations singing it, however, the label decided to withhold the Temptations’ version from single release so as not to alienate that group’s more conservative fans, and had Edwin Starr record and release it.
War – Edwin Starr
By the time I was born, the Beatles were getting ready to call it quits. However, in March of 1970, they released Let It Be. At the time, the song became the highest debut ever on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It entered the chart at number 6 and went straight to the top. This was the final single released before Paul announced he was leaving the band.
Let It Be – The Beatles
One of the great song intros in classic rock belongs to All Right Now by Free. The song was recorded in January of 1970 and released on my birthday in the UK (May 15). Drummer Simon Kirke said: “‘All Right Now’ was created after a bad gig in Durham. We finished our show and walked off the stage to the sound of our own footsteps. The applause had died before I had even left the drum riser. It was obvious that we needed a rocker to close our shows. All of a sudden the inspiration struck (Bass Player Andy) Fraser and he started bopping around singing ‘All Right Now’. He sat down and wrote it right there in the dressing room. It couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes.” It’s a great jam!
All Right Now – Free
This song fits exactly what many blogger friends and I do often – Turn Back the Hands of Time through music, movies, and nostalgia. One of R&B’s greatest was released in February of 1970 by Tyrone Davis. The song was Davis’ second big hit. It went to number one on the Billboard R&B Chart and went to number three on the Pop Singles Chart.
I’ve always loved the way the intro starts with drum and bass, then adds guitar and keyboard (xylophone?) and finally the strings before Tyrone’s smooth vocal. And who doesn’t sing along with the background singers when they come in? I know I do.
Turn Back the Hands of Time – Tyrone Davis
Finally, we grab a cut from Van Morrison’s 1970 album, Moondance. Into the Mystic is just such a cool song. I guess this would fall into the category of “Yacht Rock” today. It has a spiritual feel to it. One article compared it to Yesterday by the Beatles describing it as “another song where the music and the words seem to have been born together, at the same time, to make one perfectly formed, complete artistic element.”
Van said the use of homophones really lent the song to have alternate meanings. He states: “Originally I wrote it as ‘Into the Misty’. But later I thought that it had something of an ethereal feeling to it so I called it ‘Into the Mystic’. That song is kind of funny because when it came time to send the lyrics in WB Music, I couldn’t figure out what to send them. Because really the song has two sets of lyrics. For example, there’s ‘I was born before the wind’ and ‘I was borne before the wind’, and also ‘Also younger than the sun, Ere the bonny boat was one’ and ‘All so younger than the son, Ere the bonny boat was won’ … I guess the song is just about being part of the universe.”
Into the Mystic – Van Morrison
I hope you enjoyed giving these songs a listen. Picking just 10 was harder than I thought. What about your favorites from 1970??
Back in 1964, something amazing happened on the Billboard chart!
The Beatles held the top 5 spots! This is something that has never happened before or since!
My friend Ken also pointed out: they also had seven other songs in the top 100 for a total of 12 tunes!
That same week, The Beatles also held the top two spots on Billboard’s albums chart with Meet The Beatles! and Introducing The Beatles. These U.S. chart records have never been broken, even after 58 years!
My first job was a paper route. I delivered for both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. I guess I was probably about 10 or 11. Some of your customers paid the paper directly, but most of the time, you had to go door to door to “collect” for the week’s deliveries.
My dad decided since I was making money, I’d need to have a bank account to put the money in. He went with me and I opened an account at Michigan National Bank. I think he had hoped that I would put money in there and save it for when I needed a car or something. The fact that the bank was basically in the parking lot of the Hoover Eleven shopping center, which was almost directly across from my paper route, was probably a bad idea!
There were two stores in the shopping center that ended up with most of my money. The first was Circus World, a long gone toy store where we bought the latest Star Wars toys, Matchbox cars, and toy guns. The second store, and the one that got most of my money, was a record store called Harmony House. Oh, Harmony House, how I miss you!!!
When I had my paper route, Harmony House was located in the original wing of the shopping center. I had a turntable in my bedroom and I would go and buy 12 inch LP’s, 45 singles, cassettes, and eventually CD’s. Some of the music blogs I follow have often said, “You never forget the first album you bought with your own money.” I can say that isn’t true. I don’t remember mine. I can tell you the ones I bought, but don’t remember my first. This is probably because many of the albums my dad had ended up in my collection.
What I remember is walking in and there was a wall which had a pegboard on it. On the pegboard, there were pockets which had the new 45 singles on it. Each pocket contained about 20-30 45 records in it. On the front of the pocket was the title of the song and the artist. If you were to compare that wall to the Billboard chart, it was basically the Top 30 or 40 songs that were being played on the radio. I remember buying “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen on 45.
The above pic is not really what the wall in Harmony House looked like, but it gives you an idea. Looking at the picture, it reminded me that I lost the adapter that you put on the turntable to be able to play 45’s. With an LP album, there was a small hole in the middle of it that the spindle went through. In the above picture you can see that hole on the “Creepers” record. The hole on a 45 was much bigger, as you can see in the majority of the 45’s shown in the picture. It seems to me that I had about 50 of those yellow 45 adapters at home for my collection! It snapped in the record so you could play it.
The singles were often released in hopes that you’d buy the album when it came out. I was buying albums from artists that my dad introduced to me like Roy Orbison, Elvis, and others. If I had to take a good guess, I would imagine one of the first albums I ever bought was from the Beatles. Probably Beatles 65 or Beatles VI – both of which I loved! In elementary school we had a “Record of the Week” which each class voted on and we could all bring songs in for the class to vote on. I remember bringing in a Beatles Album.
I used to spend hours in Harmony House! I remember that occasionally there would be a huge cardboard cut out of a local DJ (like Arthur P from WRIF) with a spot for 45’s. It would be their “Pick of the Week”. They had a listening station where you could put headphones on and listen to the 45’s and you could probably find me there 50% of my visit! I used to love talking about music with the people who worked there and became good friends with them in doing so. It was always cool to have one of them say, “If you like that … you will really like _____!”
Vinyl sales started to decline with the rise of cassette tapes and cassingles (a single song on a cassette). I used to take a vinyl album and record it to cassette so I could play it on my Walkman. Then, I just started buying albums on cassette. I DO remember the first album I bought on cassette –
Eventually, CDs became the way to get your music. I remember when they first came out, they came in a HUGE box! The CD would sit at the bottom of the packaging, and the top half of it was pretty much nothing. Now, when you buy a CD, all you have to do is remove the cellophane around it – back then you had to crack open that huge box!
Let me preface this by saying I realize that I am probably gonna sound like an old man here, but I hate the fact that more and more music is being delivered digitally. That being said, I will say that in some cases it is great – like for DJing. All my new music is downloadable and clean edits. It does make that very easy. However, I miss the days of listening to an entire album from start to finish. I miss picking out the songs I hoped I would hear on the radio. I miss comparing “notes” with other friends who bought the album to hear what songs were their favorites and why.
It seems that there is little interest in albums anymore. Hell, back in the day, there was a radio format called “AOR” which stood for “album oriented rock” and you got to hear those cuts that weren’t being played anywhere else! My Tune Tuesday blog this week about Dwight Yoakam was about a song that never played on the radio, but it is still a great song and one of my favorites! Think about growing up – no doubt you have an album that you could put on and play it from start to finish and you loved every song!! Right??
I guess one of the things I miss most about record stores, aside of the music that I bought, is talking with people about music. I loved being able to talk to staff members about music that had just come out. I remember talking to a guy at Harmony House all the time about the “Future Releases” that were coming out. We’d look at the list each week and talk about it. It was always a great conversation when an artist would do something “different” from what they normally did (Pat Benatar’s True Love album comes to mind).
I had the same experience later on with a place in Roseville called Record Time. My buddy Ken was the manager of the Oldies Department there and would steer me toward great imports and hard to find songs. I had so many rare and hard to find CDs in my collection because of him. Even though our music preferences weren’t always the same – it was always great to share thoughts with him.
The other great thing about a record store is bumping into other music lovers. So many times I’d be looking at the back of an album and another customer would walk up and say, “That’s a great LP!” Those random conversations could also lead to discovering new music too.
It is nice to see that vinyl records are making a comeback. I think it’s crazy that they are trying to sell them for $30 an album, especially when you can get the CD for $15-$20! There is something to be said about hearing a song on vinyl, though. I don’t really even know how to describe it, maybe you can help me do that, but the best I can do is – it sounds “fuller” and more “real”. I don’t know, maybe that’s just the old man in me….
Today, I am forced to look for CDs (if I am buying any) at Walmart, FYE (which is slowly becoming non-existent), Barnes & Noble (which is usually WAY overpriced), or online. It’s not the same. If I am at Walmart, the guy next to me looking at CDs is really there to buy toilet paper, not there solely to buy music. With the internet, we have instant access to album reviews, which can be useful if you know what you are looking for. I miss hearing about something that I didn’t know about from a fellow music lover. I miss walking into the record store and hearing something playing in the store and wondering “Wow! I like that! Who is this and how can I get it?!”
Thank goodness there are still a few stores around that sell used CD’s, records, and even movies. Sadly, they are as close as we’ll come to Harmony House or Record Time.
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 