Janis Ian's 'At Seventeen' and War's 'Why Can't We Be Friends', are 2 great songs that were top 10 when 'Get Down Tonight' topped the chart. Anyone remember that 'How popular were War' argument that was raging for pages in this thread a while back.
Ah yes, "At Seventeen," which way outperformed Ms. Ian's prior hit from '67, "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)." Jumping a bit ahead on the timeline, Ms. Ian would perform this on the debut edition of a show still running to this day, NBC's Saturday Night Live, as aired Oct. 11, 1975. The other guest on that first show: Billy Preston, performing a prior chart-topper, "Nothing From Nothing."
In an interview, Harry Casey explained why the choruses were simple and almost chant-like. He had worked in a record store a few years before he became famous and mentioned that on more than one occasion, he would hear "What's the name of the song that goes like...... ". When he was writing hits a few years later, he wanted to make sure that the title was front and center during the chorus.
Number 3...good showing but that’s another one that I think should have gone straight to the top. Just a beautiful song all around. Perfect lyrics to melody, fantastic production and if you get the right pressing it sounds great too. If I put together a top ten list of all time favs, I would have to include this. They did have anothere hit in Love Fire, which was an awful lot like Sky High. For anyone that loves Sky High, there is one more song they did that I don’t believe charted called If I Have To Go Away that is a very nice song as well. I believe it came out on their debut (and only) album for 20th Century Records, but as good as those songs are, that was about it. Which leads to an interesting point: I’m always amazed how a group can come out with such a strong song and then poof, nothing else of the same quality! Glad to see this one mentioned.
Very interesting....thanks for mentioning it. It’s a signature part of their production, as many of us have noted, so I figured it was done by design. However, not all melodies sound appealing when they are repeated like that. I think earlier on they put more effort into production elements, so songs like Get Down Tonight were interesting to hear repeatedly even with the structure the way it was done. By the time they got to some later albums, songs like It’s The Same Old Song just went on way too long (and on top of that, it was around five minutes in length, way too long for what it contained). An album I highly recommend that did not do well is the one with their last number one song we’ll get to later, Do You Wanna To Go Party. Hooked On Your Love is the opening song, which I really like, and there are some other good songs as well. As this is a SQ forum, I always wondered why TK Records almost always used the worst vinyl they could possible find! Good luck getting some of their later albums decently pressed. Many can still be found sealed, but of course that doesn’t make a difference. I doubt most people cared but it really took a lot of effort just to find the album I just mentioned on quiet vinyl. Was great to see MFSL put one of them out. Talk about a random title for them to release! I assume somebody at MFSL was a huge fan.
I still feel for the rockers out there who must have had a hard time listening to AT40. Perusing the chart for this particular week, there's less than a handful of true rockers there and this one is probably as rockin' as it got. Points deducted for trying to rhyme Tush with much. Bush, push, hell even whoosh fellas.
"At Seventeen" was an incredible single, but representative of a dying breed of literate, mellow, jazz-tinged pop and singer/songwriter material on the radio. Your Janis Ians and Roberta Flacks would have a hard time penetrating the singles charts from here on out. You still lots of got grander-scale work from Steely Dan and the like along the male-dominated Yacht Rock axis though, while singer/songwriter mutated into something popper and rockier with Fleetwood Mac and some other Yacht Rockers.
Great song. Love the energy it has. Art Bell, who hosted a great national overnight radio show in the 90s, use to play that song in his commercial bumpers.
Sister Golden Hair This is my favorite song by this group. Whereas they famously sound like Neil Young on Horse with No Name, here they sound uncannily like a lesser George Harrison song, right down to production by George Martin. The guitar in particular reeks of George's 70s efforts. Lyrics were never their strong point, and this set of words is only slightly better than the ludicrous blatherings they came up with for Horse. For kicks, I decided to look them up, because sometimes I wonder if my memory was just filling in words I couldn't understand with nonsense syllables. Nope, pretty much they said what I thought they were saying. According to the internet: I been one poor correspondent, and I been too, too hard to find But it doesn't mean you ain't been on my mind OK, I thought it was I been foreign correspondent, which would have also made no sense, but would have been a tad more clever. But what the heck does this mean? It seems like it should mean something, but how does being hard to find mean anything about his thinking about this lady? Let alone the correspondent part, which is a total non sequitur for the next two lines. The whole song is like this. But in this case I find I can ignore the words and enjoy the music, which has an airy, faux Beatle quality. I'll thank the Georges (Martin and Harrison) for that as much as Beckley.
Love Will Keep Us Together I probably have no good reason to like this song, but I do. It has enormous nostalgia value for me. Man, do I remember being in 4th grade and hearing this repeatedly. I think late 1975 was the point when I really became aware of the wider culture. I knew individual elements before, but for the first time I was really watching a lot of prime time TV and listening to the music. So yeah, I watched the Captain and Tennille's silly show and liked it. I remember being astonished one episode when the Captain finally removed his hat for the first time. I thought, like Kiss removing their makeup, that was something that would never happen. It was definitely water fountain talk at school the next day! As far as Sedaka goes, I like this song much more than Laughter in the Rain. And count me as someone who really likes the synth heavy arrangement here. It gives it a little more oomph than the typical easy listening number of the time had. Oh, and to thoroughly destroy my cred, I love Muskrat Love, too. More nostalgia; I always loved imagining the cute furry animals the song talks about. And now, because I love y'all, here is a version of the song that will make you all acclaim the genius of Daryl Dragon and his wife by comparison. This comes from the movie Sextette, which was released a year or two after this song. It was the final movie of Mae West, the 30s comedienne who was 84 or so at the time of the filming. If you haven't seen it, and have a fascination for campy weirdness from the 70s, it is worth a look, but be warned: It is DIRE. And even the Village People might find it too campy, that's how out there it is. There's a random team of male athletes staying in the same hotel, working out for the cameras from time to time. You get the idea. Also, Dom Deluise does a version of the Beatles' Honey Pie. Yep, Deluise does the White Album. Ringo, Keith Moon and Alice Cooper are among those making awkward appearances (well, Moon seems to be enjoying himself; it was his final film before his death). Anyway, Mae plays a sexpot with a notorious record of marrying and divorcing famous men. Yeah, pretty much the role she always plays, and it gives her a chance to toss out the same bon mots she has been recycling since the twenties. Her latest flame is played by Timothy Dalton, in the most embarrassing role of his career. Their honeymoon is covered by the movie's press like Prince Andrew's wedding; look out for Regis Philbin in a small role as a reporter. But away from prying eyes in their suite, they do a duet of Love Will Keep Us Together. Well, it's mostly Dalton, but I'm sure she feels the same way. Ah, "young (??) and beautiful" indeed...
Guess I'm the only one, but I just find this song so boooooring. It's well written, but it's like an aural sedative for me. Diff'rent Strokes I guess!
Thank you!!! After three pages of discussion about the Eagles, I needed something rocking to lift me out of my stupor! Let's GOOOOOOO! PS - I love this version of the song, it's the best, but I don't mind watching Tia Carrere rip it up in her cover, either. Well, mainly, I don't mind watching Tia Carrere, full stop!
Yeah, I love this song, sue me. But I like the below video more, it really adds something to the song to see the female character squawk out the lyrics. (yep, you come onto this thread and you get TWO clips of Run Joey Run! More you could ask?)
How did we get through the summer of 1975 and not mention Alice Cooper? I was thoroughly stunned when Alice Cooper (his legal name) released "Only Women [Bleed]". Even with the innocent title, he still managed to anger people. A lot of people thought he was talking about menstrual periods. No, he was talking about physical and emotional abuse from their spouse. Great song, and KBBC played toe long version of it. And, from the same 45 RPM single, we get the song "Cold Ethyl" which was more in line of his usual fare. But, since the song is directly about necrophilia, the song was banned by many radio stations. But, my local station played it. I had pretty liberal radio stations out here.
My understanding was that the "ethyl" in "Cold Ethyl" referred to ethyl alcohol (thus the spelling), the kind that's in alcoholic beverages. Tricking us into thinking he's got a dead girl in his fridge was just more of Vincent Furnier being Alice Cooper (who, despite publicity claims to the contrary, was not a 17th century Salem witch, but a random name the band came up with when "Nazz" turned out to already be in use by Todd Rundgren's band).
Listen to What the Man Said This song is my favorite of Paul's solo #1s. I just love it. Pop perfection. It moves, it has romantic tendencies, and accumulates more hooks than a pirate ship. For me, Wings reached their apotheosis at this time: this song, the album Venus and Mars, and the live album Wings Over America. Wings has always for me been a separate entity from the Beatles. Paul tried, bless him, to make it a real group, and the other members get their chances to shine on Venus and Mars and Speed of Sound (Linda even does a song!). But at some point, I suspect Paul realized the truth: that the group always rose and fell based on what he brought to the table. And what he was bringing by this point was pure pop goodness as only Paul could deliver. Venus and Mars is the Wings album I most remember from my childhood. I bought it circa 1978, when I finally got tired of disco and moved permanently into Beatles super-fandom. I was thrilled to discover that Listen to What the Man Said was a Paul number. I didn't remember who had done it when it originally came out, probably didn't even know who he was back then; but boy, did I recall the song when I heard it on V + M the first time. As a kid, I owned a bunch of Wings albums, mostly from their later days; weirdly, I didn't even buy Band on the Run until I was out of college. But this is the one I most loved. How can you beat a song about Marvel villains, Magneto and Titanium Man? (Stan Lee promised in his Soapbox column that Paul had a 'groovy Daredevil disc' upcoming as a sequel, but I don't think he ever released it, unless he changed the lyrics). I didn't really understand Rock Show, but it sounded mighty good. Love In Song is haunting; Spirits of Ancient Egypt weird but cool in a faux psychedelic way. And I loved how the Venus and Mars song came back on side two in an extended version. Now, I do agree with those who say that Wings had an inherent fluffiness about them that made them hard to take entirely seriously. Paul always seemed to be winking and giving a thumbs up sign while he was singing -- no Plastic Ono Band catharsis here, folks. His solo lyrics were only rarely as clever as he was capable of. He could still do it: You Gave Me the Answer contains the nifty 'I love you and you/you seem to like me', albeit encased in yet another thirties pastiche. But Listen's lyrics are pure nonsense. What exactly does the man say? And who, for that matter, is 'the man'? The fuzz? Paul isn't really telling us to listen to the cops, is he? Paul says listen to him, but later says that 'people will find a way to go/No matter what the man said'. Huh? So don't listen to him, then? Whatever. It might be crap, it might be genius, I'll still listen to what the man (ie, Paul) sings. The wonder of it all, baby. Yeah yeah yeah. PS - the weird slow ending of the song is actually because Paul joins the song on the album into another song, Lonely Old People, which is considerably slower. It's kind of strange that he didn't just fade out the single of Man Said before that part, because each time I hear it on the radio I'm expecting the next song to start and it just ENDS, right before the next song's lyrics start. No worries, the Beatles and Paul both liked surprises, so it still works. Fun rumor: Paul recorded the album in New Orleans. He sounded out John (Lennon of course) about coming down and joining him there. John considered it, but his May Pang idyll ended and Yoko said 'NO'. Ah well.
Maybe, but the lyrics are pretty explicitly about a dead girl, he even sings 'she's cool in bed/she oughtta be, cause Ethyl's dead!' It seems odd that that he would sing explicitly about a more controversial topic than the 'secret' meaning of the song!
I watched that out of morbid curiosity and I wonder how on earth they got radio to play that thing? That said, I did own a copy and it’s a pretty killer chorus. But still, it proves that Big Tree Records was very good (like Bell) at one thing: hearing a very strong melody and signing an act for that one strong song and getting radio to jump all over it. I read a story about the owner of Big Tree. There was a writer (I wish I could remember who) and the owner at Big Tree heard him singing what he was working on and signed him to a deal. And of course, it was their only hit (I think it was LeBlanc & Carr’s Falling). I always wondered if pressing the LP’s ended up costing more than profits made from selling the 45’s? They must have put out a lot of doggie doo albums! But without Bell and Big Tree Records, a lot of those awesome one hit wonders many of us here love so much never would have come out. Certainly not Run Joey Run.
