EVERY Billboard #1 hit discussion thread 1958-Present

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by alphanguy, Jan 29, 2016.

  1. boyjohn

    boyjohn Senior Member

    I may be in the minority here but I love Tragedy, it's exhilarating.
     
  2. alphanguy

    alphanguy Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Missouri
    I actually like it better than many of their disco hits. It certainly chugs along at a really exciting pace.
     
  3. tommy-thewho

    tommy-thewho Senior Member

    Location:
    detroit, mi
    Tragedy is a very good song.

    Well deserved # 1.
     
    Grant likes this.
  4. Lance LaSalle

    Lance LaSalle Prince of Swollen Sinus

    "Tragedy" is another amazingly catchy melody-fest.
     
  5. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    I love Tragedy. One of those Bee Gees songs that’s catchy all the way through. Even the intro and instrumental breaks are beautifully constructed. I much prefer it to their previous #1, Too Much Squealing. Though anyone not over keen on the falsetto should avoid the album these songs came from, Spirits Having Flown.:D
     
    joemarine, Jrr, Grant and 3 others like this.
  6. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    I hate artists that are so full of themselves over “artist integrity” and only recording what they think is right for them when their records don’t sell as a result. It’s a business and a label isn’t going to put out records repeatedly by an artist that doesn’t sell. And Clive proved more than capable at hooking artists up with songs that sold, and he still let them record songs they wanted as well. If you want to record stuff no one wants to hear, don’t accept the advance money and instead buy a cassette recorder and record your songs into that and listen to them yourself! The album that contains Don’t Cry Out Loud is pretty awful imo. That was the only good song on it. Even the cover is drab. Clive had the same problem with the notoriously difficult Jennifer Warnes. She left Arista and Clive put out a compilation album that included two songs I gather she didn’t want to record. They were going to be on her next album but Jennifer didn’t want to do anything else he suggested. That’s fine, but both of those songs are great commercial songs (I still love both, I think one is called Could It Be Love and both are about as good as Right Time Of The Night, which I love as well) that would have done well had she stayed, finished the album and let Arista promote it. You can’t be on a commercial pop label and expect to do narrow demographic kinds of songs. I get the sense over time that Clive isn’t well liked around here but I guess because I appreciate a well produced, quality pop song I have always enjoyed the work of many of the artists he nurtured.
     
  7. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I have a love/hate relationship with this one. Undeniable drama sure, but also the most toupee-frazzling, polyester-melting vocals of any of their big hits. It's certainly an interesting response to Giorgio Moroder's computer disco though, and to some degree it presages the coming high-energy, more electronic music of the early '80s. They weren't just staying in one place and repeating "Stayin' Alive" over and over, that's for sure.

    But at the same time, that screeching overload added ever more fuel to the disco bonfires that were now just months away.
     
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  8. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Wow! Haven't heard "Stumblin' In" in decades and forgot all about it. What an odd, discofied song for Suzy to have her one and only big US hit with.

    Unfortunately, this thing sounded dated on release, and following the collapse of disco completely vanished from the radio by '81.

    No memory of this one at all, but the skinny ties have shown up! I've been saying for some time now that the transition between the '70s and the '80s happened faster and was more dramatic than any other decade's transition (in my lifetime, anyhow), and here's more evidence of it. Fashions changed seemingly overnight, and during just a 12-month period centered roughly on January, 1980 what was and wasn't considered hip underwent a radical readjustment. The closest I've seen to anything like that since '79/'80 was the arrival of grunge and its associated baggy stylings, but that didn't happen until the Christmas season of 1991, almost two years after the start of the decade. The '80s proved harder to kill than the '70s.

    When I'm in the mood for it I love it. Those pumping, grinding synths would be back with a vengeance soon enough from a slew of mostly new acts. But when I'm not in the mood for "Tragedy", listening to it is like having a migraine.
     
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  9. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    You could always try the Steps version of Tragedy if the falsetto puts you off.:D



    This was a UK #1 too!
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2019
  10. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    The explosion sounds heard towards the end, were Barry doing multiple takes of doing that sound effect uber close to the microphone.

    Given @Bobby Morrow's contribution here, this also made #1 in Britain (prior to the one that just made the top here), and can be found in the discussion starting here in the 1979 UK #1's thread. The variant copy I have of this is, as usual, from CBS Pitman:
    [​IMG]
     
    joemarine likes this.
  11. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    I love that song, but I really don’t know why. It’s really a pretty basic, boring and meandering song but I still like it a lot. I’m sure Chinn/Chapman being involved had something to do with it as I always seemed to like their work then no matter who they worked with. But putting it ahead of Tragedy? Well, sorry, that I can’t do. As the great George Martin famously has said, Tragedy is the perfect pop record.

    To me, yup, this is as good as a hit top 40 type of record gets from that era. I heard this for the first time when I walked (rushed is more likely) home from school on new release day knowing the new Bee Gees album would be stacked up at my local record store. I got home with it, and up to then I had only heard Too Much Heaven. I don’t know if this says more about my taste in music, or that the song is really that good, but I can say I had never before been so blown away by a song the first time I heard it, and few times since, than when Tragedy pulsed through my stereo that day. I just couldn’t believe how incredible it sounded. I loved the whole first side. I still enjoy it to this day, though I can’t play it that much as I’ve heard it hundreds of times. Back then the falsetto didn’t bother me. To me it was just another sound on the record and I thought it sounded great. Apparently so did millions of other people. This would be the absolute pinnacle of their career.
     
    joemarine likes this.
  12. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    RSO in the U.S. In Britain it was issued on Mickie Most's RAK label (the home in the UK to Exile's "Kiss You All Over"), whereby this got no higher than #41. Here are the labels to compare:
    [​IMG] [​IMG]
    Notice the order in the songwriting credits on each issue.
     
  13. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    The title of this would serve as the opening line of a hit several years down the road when one of the Babys would go solo. When we get there is when the specifics of this will become evident.
     
  14. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    There was also another single on RSO released around this time, that was issued as a tie-in to a short-lived TV show that sought to cash in on the Saturday Night Fever phenomenon. This one won't be heard (and make its chart peak) for another few months, by which time the show in question was cancelled and the song appeared in a "sleeper" hit movie. Stay tuned for more details.
     
    thecdguy likes this.
  15. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I dig it too. For me, those "strings" sounded creepy when I listened to the song at night.

    Let me guess: the reason a lot of people don't like it is because they don't like Barry's falsetto. Well, they need to get over it because the song jams!

    The musical backing is understated and that works well for the song. The secret is in the subtleties.
     
    joemarine likes this.
  16. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I like the song too, bit it used to annoy me when Chris Norman's voice came in. It sounded a bit too gruffy for her smooth voice, but I guess it all works out.

    Like "Tragedy", the musical backing is understated.
     
  17. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I like it, but I felt that the song was a copycat of "Isn't It TIme".
     
  18. Wildest cat from montana

    Wildest cat from montana Humble Reader

    Location:
    ontario canada
    Minority , maybe. But I like it too.
     
    Grant likes this.
  19. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    To be fair, Davis did have a number of artists on his roster that did have a limited following like The Dixie Dregs. But, for his mainstream artists, he had his hand in the batter. Eric Carmen had issues with him when Eric asserted his artiste side. I always come back to that "Tonight You're Mine" album cover.
     
    Jmac1979 likes this.
  20. Hey Vinyl Man

    Hey Vinyl Man Another bloody Yank down under...

    "New York Mining Disaster 1941," "I've Gotta Get a Message to You", "Odessa", "I Started a Joke"...and then they go and put out a song called "Tragedy" which is about a guy who can't get a woman to go out with him? Geez, guys, way to lose perspective!

    (Totally indifferent on the song on its own merits, but it does make me laugh for the above reason.)
     
  21. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Nowhere in the lyrics does it say or even suggest that. How do we know the woman and he didn't break up? How do we know she wasn't in some terrible accident or had died.
     
  22. bare trees

    bare trees Senior Member

    George Martin was right. "Tragedy" is a perfect pop record. The intro, verse and chorus follow together brilliantly and each section is a pop hook unto itself.
     
    LoveYourLife, Jmac1979, Jrr and 2 others like this.
  23. Wildest cat from montana

    Wildest cat from montana Humble Reader

    Location:
    ontario canada
    It's a .....Tragedy!
     
  24. Hoover Factory

    Hoover Factory Old Dude Who Knows Things

    Location:
    Spokane, WA
    Exhibit #1 how the vocal stylings of Barry “Squeaky” Gibb ruin a potentially great song. Sorry, but it sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me - it hurts my head just thinking about the song.
     
  25. tmoore

    tmoore Forum Resident

    Location:
    Olney, MD
    Of all the songs that we've discussed recently, the only one I still like nowadays is "Every Time I Think Of You".

    All of the songs mentioned recently are ones I heard an awful lot, maybe too much.

    As has been discussed already by several posters, "I Will Survive" has become a women's anthem.
    The several men I know who have dated divorced women have all said that when that song came on, their lady friends would change (they'd get up and (big-time) dance to it with other women, even if they didn't dance to anything else).
     
    Hoover Factory likes this.

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