There’s the list. Pick a tune, what difference did it make to your worldview, if any?
I like #48: Alice Cooper’s tender side. “Popcorn” is genius.
I Like Dreaming showed me you can have a hit song even if you have a lisp and I’m Your Boogie Man opened my eyes to the fact that white people really can be genuinely funky.
Oh my God, there were a lot of great songs released in 77!
77 was my spring freshman and fall soph year of college. Ever song on that list has some memory attached. #21 theme from Rocky, the movie was the 3rd or 4th date with my new girlfriend, now wife.
Al Stewart - Year of the Cat
I worked at a distributing warehouse that sent out promotional copies of the LP for GRT (Great Records and Tapes). Everyone that worked there snagged a copy for themselves. I really like the title track but my favorite song from the album is On The Border.
GRT stood for General Recorded Tape (they made records too).
1977 was the breakout year for punk. Not on the charts obviously, but if you were cool, you were listening to the Ramones, not Leo Sayer or Pablo Cruise.
I had yet to discover Basie, Miller, Satchmo…or Ella, nor the king of all Sir Duke, so that song had the most profound impact. After that, Carry on My Wayward Son as a kapow at the end of that movie with Fonzie. Also, just generally great now and then, Strawberry Letter 23, Dreams, Lido Shuffle, Night Moves and I Wish.
For me personally, the big music event of 1977 was the release of Elvis Costello’s debut album, My Aim Is True.
Difficult to choose. But narrowing it down to one, it would have to be “Hotel California.”
Say it a different way, that top 100 playlist was the genesis of American Hardcore. Christ, what a fucking bland top 100.
There were the Ramones, Iggy and Stooges were out, Black Flag formed, the American hardcore era start, The Clash first album was in 1977.
I still say “Hotel California” but am surprised Bob Seger’s “Mainstreet” did not make the list. At the time, one of my hangouts was Main Street Saloon, so they used that song in their radio ads. That would be my No. 2 for the year.
None on the list had particular impact on me. At that point, I was listening to new wave and punk. Offhand, I’d pick *Psycho Killer," but I’m probably forgetting something.
Having been an AM Top 40 DJ in 1977, I played these songs hundreds of times. With a handful of exceptions, this is a really bland list. Seeing them all together…well…it was worse than I remember. In the 1960s, Top 40 radio mainly catered to teens and young adults, perhaps into their early 20s, people who grew up on Elvis and the Beatles. Sure there were hits by middle-of-the-road artists like Herb Alpert, but those records were bought mainly by people who hadn’t grown up on teen pop/rock and didn’t relate to it. When wall-to-wall Oldies stations developed in the 1980s, their playlists reflected the music that related to teens back in the day. If they played a song from 1963, it was by the Beach Boys or the 4 Seasons, not the Singing Nun.
In the 1970s, Top 40 programmers began to notice that the coveted 18-to-34 demographic was well within reach, due to boomers getting older but still listening to their local pop station. That, combined with the emerging popularity of Album Rock FM stations around the country, caused a lot of major market Top 40s to adopt a more mellow approach, catering less to their younger listeners and more to the older side, because that’s where the money was. And since there’s rarely been an original thought in the world of radio programming, stations in smaller markets followed suit. Hence the Kenny Nolans, Mary MacGregors and Peter McCanns, one-hit wonders who were forgotten immediately after their song fell off the charts. Even “Soul” music was stripped down to the bland offerings of Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis. Rock-oriented music is barely represented on that list. Unfortunately, this more mellow approach really didn’t work out in the long run, and Top 40 radio, by then on FM, flipped to a more rock-oriented approach in the 1980s, with most of what is on that 1977 list was relegated to the dust bin.
And every known copy of “Muskrat Love” by the Captain and Tennille should be throw into a bonfire.
Hell, I was ten in 1977.
I’ll just be honest and say the opening titles to Star Wars had the biggest impact on me. But there’s a lot of quality pop music on that list.
Or if you weren’t cool, and didn’t know they were part of a “movement” or anything like that, but the Ramones were just a great local band, and they played a lot at a place that was easy to get to and didn’t check IDs (and 18 was the drinking age back then anyway) and had a low cover charge and cheap beer. . .
Seriously. 1977 was the year I graduated from high school. The Ramones were definitely *not *the band followed by the cool kids, the jocks, etc.
I was also 10 at the time, so these would be “the soundtrack of my childhood”. Every song brings back a memory though I can’t think of any particular “impact”.
1977 was my sophomore/junior year of high school. Just about every one of those songs takes me on a time travel journey. School dances, football and hockey games, and parties at the beach or some other out of the way place. Feathered hair, hash jeans, Earth shoes, Levi’s cords, giant comb in the back pocket, ski jackets, Bonne Belle Lip Smackers, puka shell necklaces, feather earrings, TJ Swann wine, tape decks, turntables…the list goes on.
1977 was my junior/senior year in high school. I absorbed nearly all of those songs through osmosis from someone else’s car radio, but current pop was not much of a thing for me at that point.
I remember listening to Zappa and The Band and the Grateful Dead; 10-year-old rock and pop (I am a hippie); tons of bebop and post-bop (because I was reading Ginsberg and Kerouac and Corso); and familiarizing myself with the Big Music Names of the Western Canon — yer Bachs, Mozarts, Beethovens, Brahmses, Mahlers, Schoenbergs, etc.
Lots of good songs here, they bring me back to high school and just starting to drive, and my first minimum wage job (after years of morning newspaper delivery).
Carry On Wayward Son — Kansas
Undercover Angel — Alan O’Day
Good tunes.