I’ve always thought The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot was a weird song to be a hit. A long dirgy song about a freighter sinking on a great lake seems liek an unlikely hit single…
I’m surprised no one has mentioned “Everybody Was Kung Foo Fighting.”
Worst. Song. Evah.
Carl Douglas, late 1973 or early 1974. I have the 45. Kind of fun, but maybe not for everybody.
I’m reminded also of a couple of spoken word recordings, though I have no idea if they charted. They are, however, a couple I do remember hearing on Top 40 radio, so they might have charted somehow–maybe somebody knows? Anyway, here they are:
“Desiderata.” Cannot recall the artist, but it’s a spoken-word recording of the Max Ehrmann prose poem, with music in the background. National Lampoon lampooned it (sorry!) with their “Deteriorata.”
“The Americans.” By Gordon Sinclair. A Canadian broadcaster takes the media–all media–to task for insulting the USA at every opportunity. Needless to say, it was quite popular in the US.
Anybody know for sure?
“A Day In The Life” by The Beatles. It’s like a bunch of completely different songs in one.
I had the “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” 45. And “DOA.” And “They’re Coming To Take Me Away Ha Ha” (which Kate Bush joked was the first rap single). And …way too many of these. I was a late 60’s-early 70’s 45-buyin’ teenybopper.
“A Day in the Life” was a top-40 song?
The Laughing Gnome - David Bowie
Popcorn - Hot Butter
In the Year 2525 - Zager and Evans
Let’s Take a Walk - Kim and Tommy Leonetti
99 Luftballons - Nena
Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft - The Carpenters
There Are Too Many Saviours On My Cross - Richard Harris
My Boomerang Won’t Come Back - Charlie Drake
In 1973 “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” hit #16! :eek:
*"Crossin’ the highway late last night,
He didn’t look left, he didn’t look right.
Didn’t see the station wagon car,
Skunk got squashed, and there you are.
You got yer dead skunk in the middle of the road…"*
I swear I read somewhere someone claimed they were really chanting Who got sucked off instead of ooga chaka. Rumor?
I LOVE that song! It so crystalized the early 70’s for me, with the decadence, groupies, e tc.
Ah, maybe not. I can’t find a cite. I heard it the other day in my neighborhood market. I figured any song that I could hear playing overhead while searching for the Tandoori Paste must have been in the Top 40.
From 1967, a song by Ed Ames titled “Who Will Answer?” made it into the Top 40. I liked it and Ed Ames does a good job singing it.
It starts out in a Gregorian chant style:
*From the canyons of the mind,
We wander on and stumble blindly
Through the often-tangled maze
Of starless nights and sunless days,
While asking for some kind of clue
Or road to lead us to the truth,
But who will answer?
*<snip>
As the song progresses the chanting evolves into singing:
*High upon a lonely ledge,
a figure teeters near the edge,
And jeering crowds collect below
To egg him on with, “Go, man, go!”
But who will ask what led him
To his private day of doom,
And who will answer?
*
This song was taken by some people as deeply religious (Ed Ames even sang it on the Mike Douglas Show !!) but it seemed to raise a lot of questions but gave no answers. (Well, it was the 1960’s)
It was highly unusual for Top 40 songs (even for the 1960’s).
That would be Wilson Bryan Key that claimed that. He had a string of paranoia fueled books about subliminal messages everywhere, from top 40 songs to the word “SEX” imprinted on Ritz crackers. While I do think subliminal messages in media do exist, he seemed to go a bit over the top in seeing them literally everywhere.
(Here’s a Straight Dope article on Key).
And don’t forget their follow up hit single, “The Bertha Butt Boogie–Part I”!
Ernie- Drove The Fastest Milkcart in The West. Benny Hill I think. (stretching the memory).
I mentioned that in post 19…The Birdy Song 
OK, I’m listening to Rock On (Jimmy Dean) right now. This is a really otherworldly song. It does have percussion in it, but it sounds like some kind of weird hand drums and a hi-hat. 43 seconds in, we hear a jarring “ssssssssSSSSSSHHHHHHHhhhhh!!!” and then the vocals begin.
At 55 seconds, more conventional percussion pops in for about a measure. The bass track and percussion tracks are layered over in a complex way that sounds like a slower version of something Amon Tobin might do. There’s also a lot of creepy reverb and echo in the voice.
At 1:33 we hear the eponymous “James Dean.” It’s in a low voice with a weird filter effect.
Then comes the instrumental. Synthesized strings, slightly off key, play a version of the melody. Horns (saxophones and brass) come in with a very jazzy rendition of the same melody, layered over the still playing strings which pop in and out. At 1:58 the string part does a very spacy glissando effect where it “slides” all the way up in pitch before dissipating.
The “and where do we go from here” (which serves as the bridge) is repeated, except the line “prettiest girl I ever seen” now sounds like it’s being sung by 10 burly men in unison.
At 2:22, after “Jimmy Dean,” we get a bar of dead silence, then a throbbing bass drum burst. Then another bar of silence and another drum burst.
Then the fadeout begins, layering all the songs’ earlier musical motifs over each other, and adding some new ones (like sporadic rapid-fire jungle drum beats.) At 2:50, more synth strings come in to punctuate the beat, but these are lower-pitched and more cello-like. The song fades out with the repetition of “rock on.”
This song is very unique and definitely ahead of its time. I hear a lot of stuff like this in up-to-the-minute electronica, 30 years later. David Essex, or whoever did the editing and arrangement for this song, is a studio wiz.
Spoons-
Les Crane’s Desiderata- #8 in 1971.
Gordon Sinclair’s Americans peaked at #24 in 1974. A version by Byron Mcgregor (who?) peaked at #4 same year.
Richard Harris - Macarther Park
Chumbawumba - TubThumping
Paul Hardcastle – “19”
Btw, that was hilariously parodied by Jiminy Cricket on “Disney’s House of Mouse”.
Gordon Sinclair was the head newscaster at CFRB, Toronto. His is the original record, taken from an editorial he broadcast. The cover is by Byron McGregor, the head newscaster at CKLW, Windsor. The main difference is in delivery and presentation.