I was 14 when I first heard it. I was spending a week visiting with my aunt and uncle, and it came on the radio while we were in the car. It was stunning. It was kind of like what older people say about Elvis–there had just never been anything like it.
I lay awake half that night turning the song over and over in my head. Maybe it sounds like exaggeration now but that song changed everything.
(Second place goes to “Rapper’s Delight.” Although it also altered the course of music, it came out in 1979, a little too late to fit the criteria.)
The actual original song makes sense, if you catch the metaphor. Donna Summer covered it in a version that left out the parts that tie it together, and made it a mess that should have been covered - in a cat pan.
The original version is about a lost/failed relationship the singer is looking back on; in particular a vignette of a picnic in MacArthur Park. The cake has no physical existence; it is a metaphor for the relationship he worked hard to create, and is gone now.
Suspicious Minds
Kentucky Rain
or anything from the “Vegas Years” of Mr Hunka Hunka Burning Love - Elvis Presley .
it doesnt get any better than “Aloha from Hawaii Live via Satellite” - sequined suits with high collars, mutton-chop sideburns, barely restrained karate moves, a crack band, and That Voice which got better with age (like fruitcake does) - that, for me, was the 70’s.
Because this was the quintessential type of '70s music.
Songs like “Layla” and “Stairway to Heaven” were really the tail end of the Sixties from a musical perspective, since musically, The Sixties began with the Beatles.
And disco ruled for just a few years in the late 1970s. “Stayin’ Alive” may have been the quintessential Disco Era song, but it fortunately didn’t last very long, even though it clearly left an impact on our psyches.
But mellow rock that hinted at depths that it didn’t really have, from America to the Eagles to Jackson Browne to Gerry Rafferty - yep, that was The Seventies, from one end to the other.
