Hold on to your bell bottoms, kids. The year is now 1976; there’s a funny little man on the back of all the quarters, Ronald Reagan wants to run for president (like that’ll ever happen, right?) and the Age of Disco has arrived in full force - to this day, my mother likes to brag about how she got sent home from high school one day for wearing a shirt that said “Disco Sucks”. (“Sucks” was a bad word back then, you see.)
By the middle of this year, the top of the charts began to calm down somewhat from the crazy back-and-forth it’d been having since 1974, and so we only have 26 songs to choose from - but boy, what a weird mix of songs it is.
More mediocre than 1974-level awful, although it does boast Afternoon Delight which is epically awful.
Like Love Rollercoaster. Am not going to apologize for liking Play that Funky Music - I made too many bar-gig tips playing that in bands ;). I am a sucker for the Sylvers’ Boogie Fever - I remember seeing them on TV with the biggest blown-out afros I had ever seen. Fun song.
Need to think about this - a really meh bunch overall…
This list screams “listening to the radio on the bus while being taken to and from the cornfields to detassel corn” to me. I know it’s corny but I always liked “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.” Still do.
Shameful admission time. Back when I was in high school, I was a fan of punk. I didn’t go overboard - I wasn’t shaving my head or putting safety pins through my nose. But I liked the genre.
Like many things you love when you’re a teenager, you look back on them twenty years later with a twinge of embarrassment. I can now see the silliness in much of punk. (But the Clash are still great.)
But when I look at this list of what was the pop mainstream, I remember why punk seemed like a good idea at the time.
Well, this must be about when I stopped listening to the radio. Until about 1991. Ugh. Perhaps a pity vote for John Sebastian for all the great songs he wrote that weren’t Welcome Back? Or a lifetime achievement vote for Paul Simon, though I really dislike 50 Ways.
John Lennon wrote “How Do You Sleep?” as a criticism of Paul McCartney. McCartney, as legend has it, responded with “Silly Love Songs”, in which he apparently forgot to add the lyrics: “How do I sleep? By writing the number 1 song of the year, bitches!”
There are quite a number of songs on that list that I like, but I had to go with “You Should Be Dancing” by the Bee Gees. I know that a lot of people found their “helium sound” to be annoying, but I was always a big fan of the Gibbs’ trademark “disco / falsetto” songs.
This is the year that I really started to get into the Beatles. I was 14, and had sort of missed them the first time around, but after getting the Red 1962-1966 album for Christmas this year I got majorly hooked. And now I can see why. What an awful year for pop music this was.
There are so many songs that are all at about the same level of meh, that even finding one that stands out is nigh impossible. I’ve winnowed it down to this short list after some thinking.
Paul Simon - “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”
Chicago - “If You Leave Me Now”
The Steve Miller Band - “Rock’n Me”
Rod Stewart - "“Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)”
I guess I’ll have to go with:
Paul Simon - “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”
for no particular reason, other than I found it somewhat amusing at the time.
I personally went with “Theme from SWAT” - I’ve never seen the show it’s named after, but it’s a great instrumental that just seems to straddle the line between funk and disco in just the right way.
Runner-up to “Saturday Night”, which has one of the catchiest refrains of any pop song ever (S! A! T-U-R! D-A-Y! NIGHT!) and was supposedly the inspiration for the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”.
Another list of childhood memories. I can’t hate any of these songs! (Okay, maybe “Disco Duck.”)
Gotta vote for “Convoy,” though. That song influenced a lot of my 11-year-old life, and I still have (and listen to) all my C. W. McCall albums (updated to CD).
Hey my sister and I did the exact same thing around this time! Actually, I think it was a year earlier, in 1975. We had several old Beatles albums given to us, and had started becoming belated fans of the Fab Four. Fun memories!
