I heard the last two in close succession this afternoon on an Internet station.
Old songs never die; they just go on Easy Listening playlists. 
Even I have standards. Jeez! 
My family and I saw Barbara Eden in concert in the early 70s (yes, Jeannie), and I vividly remember her singing “Spinning Wheel”. Of course, when she was in her prime, she could’ve sung a restaurant menu and I wouldn’t have cared.
In addition to great songs, the 70s had all these songs that people REMEMBER were awful. That means that they were memorable.
It was not as good as the 60s, but Better than any other decade IMO. The earlier in the 70s the better the music generally. Do you think it would be as much fun to post about 80s or 90s music? It was so thin it isn’t even worth remembering. And the sheer variety of the awfulness in the 70s is simply breathtaking.
“Billy Don’t Be a Hero” is notable for being the last major protest song about the Vietnam war, and it was released after American involvement in the war had wound down quite a bit (The song came out in '74 and the war officially ended in '75). It’s in an extra-special category with Hunt for Red October (the last Cold War movie), Agent of Influence (the last Cold War thriller) and Black Hawk Down, the first major war movie to release after 9-11.
I think Bobby Darin’s big antiwar song released before “Billy”, but it wasn’t much of a hit. Bobby Darin’s entire career was about missing every important boat he wanted to be on.
Most obscure #1 song? I’ll go with “We’ve Got Tonight” by Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton. It was eclipsed almost immediately by “Islands In the Stream” by Rogers and Dolly Parton, and soon afterwards Kenny Rogers’s career and Greatest Hits album (he was the most popular singer in the country at the time) was steamrolled by Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
A better example might be Ugly Kid Joe’s “Everything About You,” a pretty big hit (though not #1), totally atomized by the arrival of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
I didn’t even know they covered this (I have heard the Bob Seger version a bazillion times). But it was only #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Country chart doesn’t count).
I still think, even if my OP is not the actual champ in this category, it’s got to be something released since the modern music era began (not sure what year exactly to start that, but no earlier than late Fifties), that you could play for a random sample of the population and a majority of people wouldn’t know the song or have ever heard of the artist. So cover songs by singers as famous as Rogers and Easton wouldn’t make it, IMO, even if they were actual Billboard #1s. This also means it is probably, in practical terms, limited to songs released before about 1980.
RE: “Billy don’t be a schmuck” from Wiki: Because the song was released in 1974, it was associated by some listeners with the Vietnam War, though it actually refers to an unidentified war. But the drum pattern, references to a marching band leading soldiers in blue, and “riding out” (cavalry) would seem to be referencing the American Civil War.
Paul Hardcastle’s “19” came out in 1985, though the war had been over for ten years.
I actually have this song on a playlist. It came up the other day on random shuffle while I was driving home, and I thought to myself, “I would bet my life I’m the only person in the world listening to this song right now.”
I liked that song. But Rogers had one line, “I know your plans don’t include me,” where he paused briefly, making it sound like “I know your plans. Don’t include me.”
I have a friend who changed it to:
“We had joy, we had fun,
Now I’m carrying a gun…”
I’m ten years older, but still in the right range. It began as a pair of columns, but Dave expanded it into one of his funniest (and, unfortunately, shortest) books ever.
It wasn’t about Vietnam at all. I had a friend back in the 70’s who would read "Teen Beat’ and such trash, and I recall being told about articles that claimed the song was written about the American civil War. And it wasn’t supposed to be a protest song either.
ETA: They played the snot out of that song on AM (yes, AM) radio back in the 70’s.
Yeah, it’s been covered. In the day the idea that it was about Vietnam was inconceivable. It was a bubblegum song for one thing. And so unpatriotic. It was clear it was a historical song and not contemporary social commentary at all. To sing along with it, or play it on the radio, knowing it was about Vietnam would have been really tone deaf at that time.
it was written by Mitch Murray, the ultimate English hack songwriter. (He wrote How Do You Do It)
The funny thing is I can’t recall the melody of the verse at all. the chorus I have been running over. I just can’t make it happen from memory.
Most likely because they were both on the same K-tel compilation album?
Holy crap, I never saw that before; I was just going by 45-year old memories!
[quote=BaldDudePeekskill]
My family and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean in 1975. I’m fairly sure one of the lounge combos played “Billy” at least once.
But I vividly remember it being played on the radio.
“The Man” ranked #3 on Canadian country charts and #72 on US standard charts.
“Waco” ranked #50 on the US country charts.
drad dog writes:
> In the day the idea that it was about Vietnam was inconceivable.
No, it wasn’t. I remember it playing on the radio. Many people did think it was about Vietnam. This may not make sense if you don’t think about the song very much, but a lot of people don’t think carefully about a song. “Keep your head low and try not to get killed” is the philosophy of many people.
Wait, weren’t there plenty of “unpatriotic” and antiwar songs that had already become popular in the years immediately preceding 1974?