This is sort of a continuation of the Music of My Life feature. It focused on music from 1970-2025. It featured tunes that have special meaning to me, brought back a certain memory or a tune that I just really like. I found that with the first three decades, there were songs that I didn’t feature. So I sat down with my original lists and selected some songs that “bubbled under,” so to speak.
I figured a good way to present them was to focus on a decade. 10 years = 1 song per year = 10 songs. Last week we looked at the 70’s, and I thought we’d stay there one more week before moving on to the 80’s. So, let’s check out a few “Decade Extras.”
A hat tip to songfacts.com for much of the information.
1970
I suppose it wouldn’t be right to leave out the number one song for the entire year I was born, so we start off with Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. Paul Simon wrote this about providing comfort to a person in need. It started as a modest gospel hymn but became more dramatic as he put it together.
He wrote the song with just two verses, considering the song “a little hymn.” Art Garfunkel and producer Roy Halee heard it as more epic, and convinced him to write an extra section, which Paul did in the studio (the “Sail on, Silvergirl part”). This was very unusual for Simon, as he usually took a long time writing his lyrics. The song got a grand production, and after hearing it, Paul thought it was too long, too slow and too orchestral to be a hit. It was Clive Davis at Columbia Records who heard the commercial appeal of the song, and insisted they market it like crazy and use it as the album title.
In 1971, this won five Grammy Awards: Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Contemporary Song, Best Engineered Record, and Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists. The album also won Album of the Year.
My mom loved this song and I remember her singing along with it on car trips.
Bridge Over Troubled Water
1971
Many folks poked fun at Ringo Starr when he began a solo career. Of the four, people thought he was the least likely to have success as a solo artist. He proved them wrong and he still tours to this day. One of the songs that did well for him was It Don’t Come Easy.
Ringo is the only songwriter credited on this one, but he had a lot of help from George Harrison. George was very generous in giving his former band mate full writing credit. The track (less Ringo’s vocal and horn parts) was already completed when Harrison gave it to him, and it included a scratch vocal by George.
Fun Fact: Peter Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger sang on the intro to this song (“It don’t come easy, ya know it don’t come easy”). Badfinger was signed to The Beatles’ Apple Records, and helped out George Harrison’s first solo album.
It Don’t Come Easy
1972
Growing up there were a lot of Van Morrison songs that I liked, but never knew it was him. It wasn’t until I worked at my first radio station that I discovered he sang Moondance, Domino, and Jackie Wilson Said.
Listening to Jackie Wilson Said, I would have never guessed that the recording was unorganized. However, according to guitarist Doug Messenger the session was chaos! He told “Uncut”:
“Jackie Wilson Said was totally disorganized. He didn’t know where anything went, and no one seemed to know what to do with it. Van went away and the band worked on the basic structure. When he came back we went through it a couple of times and he was real happy because all of a sudden it seemed to be making sense. He said, ‘I think it’s coming together,’ which is what he always said when he felt it was working.”
“I remember he said to the drummer, Ricky Schlosser, ‘When I sing “boom boom boom,” hit the tom and the kick drum at the same time.’ We ran through it once or twice, and the first recorded take is what’s on the album. It was all over the place, but somehow it worked. Even when he ad-libbed at the end -‘One more time’- somehow we all kept it together. At the end, Van was smiling like a Cheshire Cat. ‘I think we got it!’ We tried a second take and – of course – it all fell apart.”
Give it a listen and see if you can hear the “disorganization.”
Jackie Wilson Said
1973
The next song makes me think of my oldest son. His mother would play songs from her iPod around the house and one of those songs was Let Me Be There by Olivia Newton-John. There would be times where he would take her iPod and listen to it in headphones. I still laugh when I think about him singing loudly and off-key “Let me be there in your mornin’, let me be there in your night!” It was really more of a scream than singing.
The was Newton-John’s breakthrough single in the US, where it landed in the Top 10 on the Hot 100, the Country chart, and the Adult Contemporary chart. At the time, she was still living in Britain and didn’t travel across the pond to promote the single or the album. Turns out she didn’t need much promotion at all. When the song hit it big, people had no idea who she was. That actually was a relief to the singer. “The one great thrill I had in America was that my music was accepted before I was ever seen, before I was on television, before I did live appearances,” she told Rolling Stone. “Therefore I had to hope it was my music and not my face.”
Keep in mind that this was five years before she starred in the movie musical Grease. She would win her first Grammy Award for song. This was surprising because she was up against country veterans like Tammy Wynette and Dottie West. She won for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.
Let Me Be There
1974
I was lucky enough to have never walk in on my parents when they were being intimate. My friends who have say it was a truly traumatic experience. On the TV series That 70’s Show, that exact thing happens to Eric, the main character. As he opens the door, Tell Me Something Good by Rufus and Chaka Khan. As a running gag throughout the episode, that song pops up a few times. I think of that episode when I hear this song.
Stevie Wonder wrote the song and recorded it himself on December 13, 1973 – he copyrighted it on January 3, 1974. His version was never released because he gave the song to Rufus, since Stevie was a fan of their lead singer, Chaka Khan.
Chaka Khan tells the story that Stevie was going to bring them a song in the studio, and when he dropped by and played her one he had written, she stunned her bandmates by telling the mighty Stevie Wonder she didn’t like it! So Wonder asked her astrological sign, and when she told him Aries, he delivered “Tell Me Something Good.” According to Chaka, she loved it and they worked out the song together in the studio, although Stevie is the only credited writer on the song.
Fun Fact: Rufus evolved from a group called The American Breed, who had the hit “Bend Me, Shape Me.” They took their name from a column in Popular Mechanics magazine called “Ask Rufus,” later shortened to Rufus when Chaka Khan joined the band in 1972.
Tell Me Something Good
1975
I remember playing Bad Blood by Neil Sedaka when I worked at the oldies station. I had no idea at the time that he had done anything other than those 60’s songs he was known for.
Sedaka wrote this song with Philip Cody. Phil said in a Songfacts interview that it’s his least favorite song. “I went to visit my family and I spent some time with my grandmother, who is an old Sicilian lady. She was telling stories about the lady up the street who used to be a witch, a Strega. And the whole idea of people being good or evil because of what goes on in their blood was just part of the superstitious nature of my Sicilian upbringing that I tried to stay as far away from as I could. (laughing) I just thought it would be an interesting way to approach a lyric: rather than from a place of enlightenment the idea is that love makes us stupid. And that’s where I went. It wasn’t (heavy sigh – pause)… I did it, and I didn’t think I did a very good job on it, and before I had a chance to do a re-write Neil was in the studio with Elton doing the song, and that was it. So I guess the best things are left undone.”
This song turned out to be Sedaka’s biggest hit, reaching #1 on the Billboard Top 100, remaining there for three weeks. He was helped by Elton John, who sang back-up for this song which ensured airplay. In an odd coincidence, this song was knocked out of its #1 position by an Elton John song, “Island Girl.”
Bad Blood
1976
More Than a Feeling was Boston’s debut single. It turned out to be a big surprise hit. Songfacts says: The group’s rise was sudden and unexpected; when “More Than a Feeling” was released, their managers spent a lot of time pitching it to radio stations, which is a very tough sell for an unknown band, but the song is so polished and radio-friendly that many stations put it on the air. It took off, and very soon this unknown band with an album recorded mostly in a basement was a major player on the rock scene.
Boston’s Tom Scholz worked at Polaroid, which made him enough money to buy equipment to create a basement studio. He did most of the recording of the first album there. He actually took a leave of absence from his job at Polaroid to complete the album. Once the album was released, he went back to work.
Songfacts says, “disco was big, so he wasn’t sure his rock record would find an audience. He got very excited when co-workers would summon him to let him know ‘More Than A Feeling’ was playing on the radio. After that happened a few times, he was confident enough to quit his day job.
The song is a classic rock standard and appeared on the soundtrack of the film “FM,” which was the subject of this blog on Monday.
More Than a Feeling
1977
Being born and raised in Michigan, Bob Seger’s music was everywhere when I grew up. When my dad played in a wedding band Night Moves and Trying To Live My Life Without You were songs that they played at gigs.
Mainstreet was a song that was always requested at the station. The actual street Seger sings about in this song is Ann Street, which was off of Main Street in Ann Arbor. Seger told the Chicago Sun-Times: “It was a club. I can’t remember the name of the club, but the band that played there all the time was called Washboard Willie. They were a Delta and Chicago blues band. Girls would dance in the window. They were a black band, and they were very good. That’s where I would go but I was too young to get in. It wasn’t in a great part of town but college students loved to go there.”
This was the second single from the Night Moves album, following the title track. Both songs are very nostalgic and a departure from high-energy rockers his fans were used to hearing. By this time, Seger had been at it in earnest for over a decade and was just starting to break through to a national audience. Live Bullet was his first album to find a broad audience; many who bought it snatched up Night Moves when it came out, and weren’t disappointed. Both albums ended up selling over 5 million copies, making Seger a star.
Mainstreet
1978
Kiss You All Over by Exile was another one of those songs that dominated pop and country radio. It was the perfect crossover song.
In an interview with Billboard, writer Mike Chapman said:
“It’s a very unusual song and is very much about what music in the US is all about in 1978. It’s MOR (Middle Of the Road) soft rock, slightly disco though not pure disco, and has a sensuous lyric line that Americans love. Americans are big lyric listeners and listen to every word.”
It is no surprise that the song has frequently been used as backing music for TV scenes involving various degrees of smooching or similar lip-caressing activities. Songfacts notes that the most creative use of “Kiss You All Over” goes to the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s use of the song in a 2007 montage of hockey players kissing the Stanley Cup. HA!
Kiss You All Over
1979
Many DJ’s will play the song Single Ladies when they do the bouquet toss at weddings. I always love using Ladies Night by Kool and the Gang. It had a funky beat that the ladies would dance to as they waited for the bride to toss her flowers.
Songfacts notes that disco was dying when “Ladies Night” was released at the end of 1979. That didn’t stop Kool & the Gang from using a disco groove on this track and mentioning the “disco lady” and “disco lights” in the lyrics. The song mixed in enough of their funk flourishes to stand out from the pack and bring them into the ’80s – it reached its chart peak of #8 in America the second week of 1980.
Like most Kool & the Gang songs, every member of the group is credited as a writer. “Ladies Night” started with a groove their multi-instrumentalist music director Ronald Bell came up with. His brother, Robert “Kool” Bell (the bass player in the group), gave him two ideas for lyrical themes: “Ladies Night” and “Hangin’ Out.” It was no contest – Ronald knew there were ladies nights everywhere, and loved the idea.
They fleshed out the song with the group, but struggled to find a hook. Ronald Bell remembered a piece of advice from his mother. He recalled to Billboard: “My mother, Aminah, had a hand in that one. Because she would say to me, ‘Always give the people nursery rhymes. Give them something they remember.’ She liked the Dells’ song, ‘Oh What A Night,’ so I put that in. When we were finished, we were all in tune that this was it. We just didn’t know how big!”
Of course, younger folks will always think of Jon Lovitz in the Wedding Singer when they hear this one.
Ladies Night
Yes, there are plenty of great songs I missed from the 1970’s, but next week, we’ll head to the 80’s. I’ll feature ten songs, one from each year of the decade. I hope you will join me next week.
Thanks for listening and thanks for reading.
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 