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Welcome! This is The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we take a look back at the top 10 songs of a year in Pop music as determined by our exclusive ranking that’s based on the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music biz’s top trade pub and chart authority, Billboard magazine. And this week we’re turning the clock back to 1989, aside from the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska in March, and the 6.9 earthquake in the Bay Area in October right before game three of the World Series, a year of remarkably few “breaking news” headlines. Which cleared newspaper column inches and broadcast minutes for ongoing human-interest stories like AIDS and homelessness and environmental concerns like acid rain and the ozone hole.

But as relatively quiet as things were here in the States, ’89 was a monumental year out in the world, as communism collapsed and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the new President, George H.W. Bush, declared that the Cold War over. All year, Americans watched in disbelief as massive protests rocked the capitals of Eastern Bloc countries Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Czechoslovakia and Romania. And since the Soviets for a change weren’t sending in the tanks, the communist regimes in those countries, one after the other, dissolved.

In East Germany, the symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, was dismantled. But not before Knight Rider and Baywatch star David Hasselhoff, wearing a piano scarf and flashing leather jacket, got to sing his hit “Looking for Freedom” in front of it on New Years Eve. There was even a massive Rock concert in the Soviet Union itself, the Moscow Music Peace Festival in August. The event inspired Scorpions’ 1991 hit “Wind of Change.”

Sadly, communist China’s pro-democracy movement: nipped in the bud when the tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June and between 200 and 2,600 protesters were killed, depending on who you believe.

South Africa, not a communist country, but the new president there released activist and future president Nelson Mandela from prison and desegregated public facilities as first steps to ending apartheid.

So the ’80s, closing out with some historic changes on the world stage, and music was changing too. Eight of Billboard’s top 10 albums of 1989 were first or second releases. So, lots of fresh faces on the charts and on MTV. In April, Liz Taylor dubbed Michael Jackson the “King of Pop” at the Soul Train Heritage Awards, but as he settled into his new Neverland Ranch in California, he seemed to be going off the deep end with skin bleaching, plastic surgery, O2 sleeping chambers and trying to buy Elephant Man bones. The UK Sun dubbed him Wacko Jacko, and it kinda stuck.

Meanwhile, Queen of Pop Madonna got in trouble when the Vatican condemned her blasphemous video for “Like a Prayer” and urged a boycott that got Pepsi to pull its ad campaign with the song. With its three weeks a #1 in April, “Like a Prayer” ought to be in our 1989 countdown, but with all the controversy it was off the chart completely just nine weeks after being #1, one of the fastest drops for a #1 single in Madonna’s career. MTV and video in the ’80s had brought pop culture into America’s living rooms like never before. The Culture Wars were only getting started.

#10 Soul II Soul – Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)

Our #10 record had only just entered the top ten December 2nd, which was the last week of Billboard’s 1989 “chart year,” so it didn’t make their ’89 year-end Hot100. And since those weeks before the cutoff didn’t count toward 1990, it’s only #42 on their 1990 ranking. Now here at Chartcrush, we don’t do “chart years;” instead, we factor every song’s full chart run in the calendar year it had most of its chart action, and that puts the song at #10 for 1989.

Billboard did have it as the year’s #1 Dance hit though: a taste of the Euro-Disco wave that was about to crest on the Pop charts in the early ’90s. It’s U.K.-based “sound system” collective Soul II Soul with singer Caron Wheeler, who co-wrote, “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me).”

Soul II Soul’s residency at South London’s The Fridge nightclub: credited with setting the tone of 1988’s so-called “Second Summer of Love” in the U.K., and also in Ibiza, the Spanish island famous for its club scene. After the wall came down, East Berlin also became a Techno Mecca.

“Back to Life” had the longest chart run of any song in our countdown: 28 weeks, peaking at #4, after their Hot100 debut, “Keep on Movin’,” earlier in the year. It started out as an a cappella but they completely reworked it with new lyrics and that groovy, shuffling backing track.

House music exploded onto the charts ’89 into ’90: Belgian outfit Technotronic, just three weeks behind “Back to Life” on the Hot100 with the dancefloor anthem “Pump Up the Jam,” which got all the way to #2 in January of ’90. Then Madonna’s “Vogue” and Snap!’s “The Power” in the Spring.

#9 Paula Abdul – Cold Hearted

Next up at #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1989’s biggest hits, the only act with two songs in the top ten. And since both songs’ chart runs were entirely within Billboard’s December to November “chart year,” they’re also both in Billboard’s year-end top ten: a rarity for ’89 relative to other years, comparing our Chartcrush rankings with Billboard’s. Reason being: some of the year’s top records were hits at the end of ’89 into ’90, so Billboard split their chart runs for ranking purposes between the two years.

Boy Band New Kids on the Block had six singles on the Hot100 in 1989 so they grabbed top honors on Billboard’s Hot100 artist ranking that combines all charting songs. But our newcomer at #9 was #2 overall and the top female. Her album, Forever Your Girl, was the biggest debut album in history up to ’89 with 10 weeks at #1 on the album chart. Here’s the first of two Paula Abdul hits we’ll be hearing in our countdown, the third of her three straight #1’s in ’89, “Cold Hearted.”

Paula Abdul started out in the early ’80s, a freshman in college who beat out 700 girls for a spot on the L.A. Lakers cheerleading squad (the Lakers’ ’80s dynasty years with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), graduating to head choreographer after less than a year, and then to choreographing music videos. It was, afterall, the dawn of the MTV era! “Cold Hearted,” #9 as we count down 1989’s top ten biggest hits here on this week’s Chartcrush Show.

#8 Debbie Gibson – Lost in Your Eyes

At #8, the last top ten hit by the singer whose first hit “Only in My Dreams” in ’87 signaled the start of the late ’80s Teen Pop explosion. New Edition and The Jets had already scored R&B crossover smashes in ’85 and ’86, but this wholesome girl Singer was pure Pop. And she remained one of top acts along with Tiffany, the aforementioned New Kids on the Block, and latecomer Kylie Minogue until Teen Pop petered out circa late-1990 as its fans matured and House, Grunge, Hip-Hop, plus the overarching cultural postmodernism that paralleled the end of the Cold War in the West, surfaced edgier poses from the underground. But in ’89, Teen Pop was at its peak, and its biggest chart hit that year was our #8 song: what Record Mirror called a “big, moodsome ballad,” Debbie Gibson’s “Lost in Your Eyes.”

Fun fact: Debbie Gibson is the sole songwriter on all her top 20 hits, and that was also her playing piano on “Lost in Your Eyes,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1989. It was the lead single from her second album, Electric Youth, which didn’t do quite as well as her triple platinum debut Out of the Blue. “Only” double platinum. And after two more top 20s from Electric Youth in ’89, Debbie Gibson faded from the charts. In 2020, though, at the age of 49, she was back in the top five on the Dance chart with “Girls Night Out.”

#7 Milli Vanilli – Blame It on the Rain

Now, speaking of the postmodern taste inversion I mentioned that rendered wholesome Teen Idols like Debbie Gibson passe in the early ’90s, Glam Metal bands had been pushing the sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll envelope for years, but in ’89, Miami Rap group 2 Live Crew dropped the mic on Pop smut with their aptly-titled As Nasty as They Want to Be, the first album ever to be ruled obscene by a U.S. District Court. The music world rallied, the ruling was overturned on appeal, and the album went Platinum, so straight-up porn and misogyny had a green light heading into the ’90s.

But a scandal that pop culture couldn’t abide in ’89 was the revelation that Rob and Fab, in fact, are not the ones singing on our #7 song, or the other three 1989 megahits from their album Girl You Know It’s True. It was a glitchy hard drive during a live concert on MTV that did them in. The recording stopped and skipped and it was obvious that they were lip-syncing. After that, they had their Best New Artist Grammy canceled and lived in infamy. But they sure were riding high in ’89. At #7, it’s Milli Vanilli’s fourth and biggest hit of the year, “Blame It on the Rain.”

German producer Frank Farian, the actual the culprit behind the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal. He liked their look (thigh-high boots, Spandex shorts and corn-row hair extensions), but not their vocals so much. So he brought in session singers but put Rob and Fab on the album cover and sent them out on the road. And Girl You Know It’s True went six-times platinum, yielded six top five hits and Milli Vanilli was Best New Artist at the Grammys before anyone was the wiser. Four of their songs, all from that album, were among the top 25 hits of 1989 according to our Chartcrush rankings. Elvis in ’56, The Beatles in ’64, The Jackson 5 in 1970 and Usher in 2004: the only other acts in Pop history who can say that. “Blame It on the Rain,” the fourth and last of those hits at #7.

#6 Richard Marx – Right Here Waiting

At #6 as we continue counting down the top hits of 1989 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush, the only song in our countdown that’s also in the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Adult Contemporary chart. He started out as a Songwriter, writing hits for Kenny Rogers and James Ingram, but once he decided to step up to the mic himself, he was an immediate success. His self-titled debut album went triple-platinum in 1987, its lead single, the Rocker “Don’t Mean Nothing” was a #3 hit, and he became the first male artist ever to make the top five with his first seven singles. At #6 it’s Richard Marx, “Right Here Waiting.”

Even after becoming a star himself, Richard Marx continued to write songs for other artists. In fact, he wrote “Right Here Waiting” for Barbra Streisand. But she rejected it! “I’m not gonna be right here waiting for anyone,” she said. So he cut it himself for his second album, Repeat Offender, and it was the #6 song of 1989, not bad. It was #1 for three weeks in August, but it just missed Billboard’s year-end top ten at #11.

#5 Linda Ronstadt featuring Aaron Neville – Don’t Know Much

12 of the top 20 Hot100 acts in ’89, on the chart less than two years—the most since 1971 for that metric. And as you’d expect in a year like that, some of the previous generation’s stars struggled. New albums in 1989 by Boomer icons Diana Ross, Paul McCartney and a reunited Jefferson Airplane bombed relative to expectations. But others thrived. Neil Young reinvented himself for the Grunge era on his album Freedom, and The Rolling Stones mended fences within the band and had ’89’s top tour: Steel Wheels, their longest ever.

Up next on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1989, a pairing of two Boomer legends who both burst onto the charts in 1967 with massive hits: Californian Linda Ronstadt with her Folk-Pop Hippie group The Stone Poneys on “Different Drum,” and New Orleans’ own Aaron Neville with his Soulful “Tell It like It Is.” Here they are together on the same record in 1989. At #5, “Don’t Know Much.”

Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville on 1989’s #5 hit, “Don’t Know Much” here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The song, co-written by legendary Brill Building Songwriters Barry Mann and wife Cynthia Weil, and versions by Righteous Brother Bill Medley in ’81 and Bette Midler in ’83 didn’t have much impact. But in ’89 it was a huge comeback for both Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt.

#4 Billy Joel – We Didn’t Start the Fire

And at #4, another chart veteran since the early ’70s, and by our point tally, the #5 Hot100 artist of the ’80s decade behind only Hall & Oates, Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson, in that order. It’s yet another hit that got a raw deal from Billboard’s year-splitting with their year-end charts, with its first eight weeks in their 1989 chart year (up to December 2), and the next 11 in 1990, where they have it at #35 on the year. But factoring its full chart run in the calendar year it earned the most points makes it our #4 song of 1989.

He wrote it after listening to a young Gen-Xer bellyaching about how nice it must’ve been to grow up in the ’50s when “nothing happened.” Huh? Want a list? Well here it is: exactly 118 things in chronological order, in Billy Joel’s list song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Billy Joel, obviously influenced by R.E.M.’s list song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” which for all its fame since the ’80s, barely scraped the Hot100 when it came out, just a few months before Billboard unveiled its Modern Rock Chart to finally start keeping track of what was on College radio.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire,” #1 for two weeks in December, and #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1989. Joel’s 11th top ten hit off his seventh straight top ten album, but only his third #1, and his last. After his final Pop album River of Dreams in ’93, he stepped away from the Pop chart game, but his Face to Face tours in ’94 and ’95 with fellow piano-man Elton John filled stadiums across America.

#3 Paula Abdul – Straight Up

At #3, the girlfriend of America’s hottest new late-night talk TV show host, whose syndicated show debuted mostly on the fledgling Fox network in ’89. Fox, only on the air a little over three years, struggling to get a ratings foothold against the big three, ABC, CBS and NBC, and Arsenio Hall went head-to-head against the undisputed king of late-night since the ’60s, Johnny Carson. He never beat Carson, but The Arsenio Hall Show‘s young, diverse audience made it the first major platform, certainly the first late-night show, that put African-American cultural sensibilities on an equal footing with mainstream America’s. Not many radio stations would play Hip-Hop in 1989, but Arsenio had the Fresh Prince, Tone Loc, MC Hammer, Young MC, even Ice-T. And his girlfriend appeared on just the seventh episode in January, right as our #3 song cracked the top 20. It was her breakthrough hit after the first two singles from her debut album Forever Your Girl went nowhere. Here again, Paula Abdul, “Straight Up,”

Paula Abdul’s chart breakthrough, “Straight Up,” took home four of the MTV Video Music Awards “moon men” trophies it was eligible for in ’89, the #3 song of 1989 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Her follow-up album Spellbound produced two more #1 hits in 1991, but her chart fortunes waned during peak Diva in the mid-to-late ’90s, only to become a household name all over again in the ’00s as one of the judges on the first eight seasons of American Idol.

#2 Janet Jackson – Miss You Much

Now as I mentioned earlier, before she was a Pop star, Paula Abdul was an in-demand choreographer of music videos, and her first client, who hired her out of the Lakers’ cheerleading squad, was our act at #2. Abdul choreographed the videos for all three of the upbeat mid-’80s hits that made her a star: “What Have You Done for Me Lately”, “Nasty” and the title song from her multi-platinum 1986 album Control. The lead single off her next album, Rhythm Nation 1814, came out in August ’89 and became the first of its seven singles to peak in the top 5 over the next three years. It’s Janet Jackson with “Miss You Much.”

“Miss You Much,” #1 for all of October 1989, four weeks, and the #2 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Janet’s first two albums came out in the early ’80s when she was still just in her teens and playing a young student in the TV show Fame, and most folks just thought of her as Michael Jackson’s little sister. The Bubblegummy music on those albums barely dented the charts, but in ’85, Janet parted ways with her family and her career took off, first with Control and then ’89’s socially-conscious Rhythm Nation 1814. By the end of the decade, Janet had not only stepped out of her brother’s shadow, she’d eclipsed him, and her run of massive Hot100 hits continued all the way ’til her wardrobe malfunction in the 2004 Superbowl halftime show got her blacklisted by Viacom President Les Moonves.

#1 Phil Collins – Another Day in Paradise

Now, in a 2014 piece, Billboard writer Kenneth Partridge argued that 1990 was the best year for music in the ’90s, despite two of the year’s biggest hits being 1989 “holdovers” by “Pop’s old guard” that left aging Boomers “feeling simultaneously guilty about their wealth and blameless for instigating the world’s problems.” The latter reference, to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and the former to the record we have at #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Well, as I pointed out when we heard “We Didn’t Start the Fire” at #4, it really wasn’t a 1990 hit at all; it was a 1989 hit. And so was the other one.

At #1, the seventh and final chart topper by the ’80s most unlikely Pop star, having started out as the drummer in a ’70s Prog Rock band. He became the front-man of that band, Genesis, after leader Peter Gabriel quit and went solo in 1975, and remained even after his own solo career took off in the early ’80s. Record of the Year at the Grammys, it’s Phil Collins’ exhortation to think twice and count your blessings when you see a homeless person, our #1 song of 1989 is “Another Day in Paradise.”

Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” the #1 song of 1989 according to our exclusive Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking that factors every song’s full Hot100 chart run into whichever calendar year it had the majority of its chart action. Now, we’re only able do that, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. Billboard‘s press deadline for their year-end issue forces them to end every “chart year” weeks before the actual end of the year on the calendar. “Another Day in Paradise” was in the top ten November ’89 through January ’90. They have it at #7 on their 1990 Hot100 recap. But it might’ve ranked higher than that had Billboard continued (in 1990) what they started in ’89: factoring the full runs for songs that were moving up the first week of their chart year.

I don’t want to get too far in the weeds with this, but the change was their attempt, after over 40 years doing year-end recaps, to finally give songs whose chart runs go from one year into the next a fair shake. The trouble with rolling that out in ’89, though: half the songs that ended up in their top ten were really 1988 hits. Even the #1 song, Chicago’s “Look Away.” So when the ranking appeared at the end of ’89, folks were like “Huh? That was #1 last Christmas!” And going down the list, Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” at #2 and Poison’s “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” #3, also 1988 hits, plus two more.

So there was a whole lotta head shaking from fans. The news media even ran with the story, and for 1990, Billboard reverted back to factoring only weeks in its chart year like they’d always done, and Soul II Soul, Ronstadt & Neville and Billy Joel joined the long list of year-straddling hits that’ve fallen through the cracks over the years. Only “Another Day in Paradise” made the top ten of Billboard’s 1990 ranking, but at #7 since its first five weeks of chart action weren’t factored.

#19 Milli Vanilli – Girl You Know It’s True

Of the seven songs from Billboard’s year-end top ten that weren’t in our 1989 countdown, only two were true 1989 hits. Billboard had the title cut and breakout hit off of Milli Vanilli’s album Girl You Know It’s True at #8.

“Girl You Know It’s True” was the Milli Vanilli’s only single before their lip-syncing scandal that didn’t get to #1. It peaked at #2 and is #19 on our ranking.

#13 Bette Midler – Wind Beneath My Wings

At #7, Billboard had another big Adult Contemporary smash.

Nine years after 1980’s “The Rose,” the title song of the film she starred in, Bette Midler repeated that trick with the movie Beaches and its song, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which lands at #13 on our 1989 ranking.

Well I hope you enjoyed our rough ‘n tumble 1989 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. That’s all the time we have. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and I want to thank you for listening! Hey, check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and links to stream this and all our Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus our full top 100 chart, chart run line graphs and other hella extras. Every week on this show, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1960, the first year of the ’60s, but like almost every decade’s year zero, it seemed more like a continuation of the previous decade than something new.

Still, something about that “6” seemed more modern. Folks liked seeing it in print and on TV and saying “It’s the ’60s, man,” as if they’d just turned a corner and gotten their first glimpse of a New Frontier. “New Frontier,” actually the brand label for John F. Kennedy’s agenda unveiled at the Democratic convention in the Summer. And on Inauguration Day in ’61, Kennedy became the first President born in the 20th Century.

The oldest Baby Boomers turned 14 and entered High School in 1960, and no one had any idea how that tsunami was gonna break. It was America’s largest generation yet, raised up in Eisenhower’s “Affluent Society” but under the threat of nuclear annihilation. ’60s counterculture historian Theodore Roszak later called that combination “crazy-making.”

But as the decade began, hopes were high, especially now that comic books and Rock ‘n Roll, the twin scourges that got the blame for corrupting youth morals and spiking juvenile delinquency in the ’50s, had been dealt with from on high in Washington. Comic Books first: congressional hearings in ’54 that led to the Comic Magazine Association’s strict “Comics Code.”

And then in ’59, the feds’ investigation into Payola became the tip of the spear in the battle against Rock ‘n Roll. Payola: when DJs take cash or gifts to play records on the air. It was widespread, and not just with Rock ‘n Roll, but for years, the blue-chip copyright clearance organization ASCAP had been complaining to feds about the preponderance of songs handled by rival licensor BMI on radio. BMI rep’d most R&B, Country and Rock ‘n Roll songwriters because ASCAP wouldn’t. And eventually, the investigation zeroed in on payola, with House Judiciary chairman Emmanuel Celler blaming payola for the “popularity of this cacophonous music called Rock ‘n Roll.”

Celler’s anti-payola legislation passed in the Spring, but radio had already started cleaning house. Even one of the nation’s top DJs, Alan Freed, got the axe: the “King of the Moondoggers:” the guy who coined the phrase “Rock ‘n Roll” in the early ’50s. After that, Program Directors and playlists were the rule in radio, and many stations stopped playing Rock altogether. WINS in New York played Frank Sinatra for three days straight.

Rock, already reeling from losing Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper in that plane crash in Iowa in ’59: Don McLean’s “the day the music died” from “American Pie.” Plus Elvis drafted; Chuck Berry in legal hot water; Little Richard now a preacher; and Jerry Lee Lewis, a pariah after marrying his 13 year old cousin.

And on top of all that, for the first time in 1959, albums sold more than Rock’s format, the 45 rpm single. Stereo was here and Sears-Roebuck now had affordable plug-n-play hi-fi systems in their catalog and stores. But Rock albums didn’t sell: not one among the top ten albums of 1960, but lots of Soundtracks, Jazz, Easy Listening and Rat Packers. Comedy albums were outselling Rock.

So with that in play, labels scrambled to produce more sophisticated-sounding singles: quality songs with strings and choruses. And not just Pop and Rock, but Country and R&B too: everyone looking to polish up their studio game, and New York’s “Brill Building” songwriting factory churning out Teen-targeted songs full-time, ready for the latest photogenic Teen Idol to record.

#10 Connie Francis – Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

At #10, a record that definitely shows some of that Early ’60s “Brill Building Pop” polish, but it’s more notable for being the first by a solo female to top the Hot100, which, granted, had only existed less than two years, but still a milestone.

Her album of songs sung mostly in Italian was out and on its way to becoming her bestselling career LP, so the label, MGM, put “Jealous of You (Tango Della Gelosia),” on the A-side, and it too cracked the Top 20, but this song on the B-side went all the way to #1. Kicking off our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show at #10, it’s Newark, New Jersey’s own Connie Francis, born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.”

#10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, voted #1 female Singer by American Bandstand viewers four years running, and the #1 Hot100 Artist of the Year adding up all nine of her charting records for 1960, Connie Francis, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.” It was the first of her three career #1’s, on top for two weeks, June into July, and her very next single was her second, “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” in September.

#9 Marty Robbins – El Paso

Now, the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” in ’58 and then the first Newport Folk Festival in ’59 crystallized Folk as its own genre, headquartered in the Northeast, San Francisco and college town coffee shops all in between, with an upscale, urban hipster fan base.

Our Singer at #9, originally from Arizona and one of the top Country acts of all-time, had already crossed over to the Pop charts with his version of “Singing the Blues” in ’56 (recorded before Guy Mitchell’s), and then a Teen-targeted Rockabillyish number, “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation).” But in ’59 he was all about getting back to his Western roots with a labor-of-love album project entitled Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.

He figured might sell 500, give-or-take, if he was lucky. But his label, Columbia, and his producer, Don Law (who was the head of Columbia’s Country division) disagreed and thought this cut from the album could be a hit. With good reason! “Tom Dooley” had started out as just an album cut but was in the top ten for 12 weeks after Capitol put it out as a single in ’58.

And then folksy story songs like Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans,” Stonewall Jackson’s “Waterloo,” The Browns’ “Three Bells” were all major hits in ’59. So Columbia followed suit, and despite our gunfighter ballad at #9 being over four and half minutes, it became the very first #1 of the ’60s. An edit omitting a verse was on the flip-side of the promo 45 for radio stations that had a problem with the length, but most didn’t and played the full version of Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.”

Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” #9 as we count down the top ten songs of 1960 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush. The Spanish guitar on that record, played by Nashville session man Grady Martin, who, on another Marty Robbins record later in 1960, accidentally invented fuzztone, the guitar effect made famous on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” A transformer in the studio’s console malfunctioned on his solo for Robbins’ “Don’t Worry,” and when they played back the tape, they liked what they heard, so they kept it, and a couple of the studio engineers went to work inventing the effects pedal that eventually evolved into Gibson’s Maestro Fuzztone.

#8 Elvis Presley – Stuck on You

OK, so let’s say you’re the guy who personified Rock ‘n Roll for two years, but then you got drafted for the next two years, and now that you’re back, things have changed. Singles aren’t selling as well, but even worse: now there’s a mainstream consensus that Rock ‘n Roll is corrupt, subversive and artless, and measures have been taken to reign it in. Laws are being passed. People are getting fired and in some cases, even fined and prosecuted!

But still, you have 50 million fans who love you and your music, and getting you back from Uncle Sam the first good news they’ve had in a long time. Some of them stand for hours in a blizzard at an Air Force Base in New Jersey just to get a look at you. And then, from there, they mob all the stops on your train route home to Memphis.

If you’re that guy, obviously, one of the first things you do is get yourself into a recording studio, and once you’re there you cut a new Rock ‘n Roll song. Yeah, you pull your punches a bit (don’t wanna scare anyone, especially in this climate!). But you deliver a solid Rock song because that’s what your fans expect. And after that you turn to Italian Opera! But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. At #8, the Rock song Elvis Presley cut his first week back in the studio after his discharge, which hit the charts in April, a month after he returned, and is the first of his two singles in our 1960 Chartcrush Top Ten countdown: “Stuck on You.”

“Stuck on You,” Elvis Presley’s first hit after returning from military service in Germany, #1 in its fourth week on the chart and our #8 song, here on our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It was a single-only release, not on his 1960 album, which was titled, what else? Elvis Is Back. Which was the bestselling Rock ‘n Roll album of 1960, but again, Rock fans weren’t buying LPs yet in 1960, so it’s only #16 on our 1960 album ranking, and the only Rock album among the top 50 albums of the year.

#7 Chubby Checker – The Twist

Elvis’s other major 1960 hit was in the Fall. We’ll be hearing that one later but spoiler alert: it’s not a Rocker. Rock fans did get another big treat before the year was out, though, and that’s our #7 song: the record that launched a string of Teen dance crazes that continued until The Beatles and beyond.

It’s a guy who was first noticed entertaining customers while plucking chickens at a South Philly poultry shop. His big break came when R&B group Hank Ballard & The Midnighters were unable to appear on the wildly popular live after-school TV show American Bandstand to do the upbeat B-side of their weepy Ballad “Teardrops on Your Letter” that’d just made the charts and was causing a buzz. So Bandstand host Dick Clark needed a stand-in do a cover, and the local chicken plucker who’d been doing it in his nightclub act on the Jersey shore that Summer, was perfect.

Ballard had written it after seeing kids doing the unusual hip-swivel dance in Tampa, but it was Chubby Checker who got all the glory after lip-syncing to his just-issued record of it on Bandstand and on Dick Clark’s primetime Saturday night Beech Nut show on ABC. At #7, “The Twist.”

American Bandstand out of Philadelphia had been driving songs to the top of the charts since going national on the ABC network in 1957 in its 3:30 PM timeslot. Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” just the latest in the Summer of 1960, #7 here on our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Dick Clark managed to survive the payola scandal by separating himself from other music-adjacent businesses he’d been a stakeholder in, and just being deferential and respectful in the Congressional hearings, unlike the fast-talking, chain-smoking Alan Freed, who destroyed his career.

“The Twist” helped shake Rock ‘n Roll from its post-payola doldrums in ’60, but then in late ’61 it caught on again after society pages reported on celebs and notables doing the dance in New York’s Peppermint Lounge and other niteries, whereupon it re-entered the charts after nearly a year for an even stronger run than in 1960. It’s the only record in Pop history to get to #1 a second time after dropping off the chart and re-entering.

Hank Ballard’s original of “The Twist,” which Checker copied to a “t”, did okay too, but not as well as Ballard and his Midnighters’ two other top tens in 1960: “It’s Finger Poppin’ Time” just as “The Twist” was breaking out, and then “Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go” in the Fall.

#6 Johnny Preston – Running Bear

So at #9 we heard the first “story song” in our 1960 countdown, Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.” At #6 is the other, which was ready to go in early 1959, but the label, Mercury, held it back ’til the end of the year after the guy who wrote it, J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. “The Big Bopper” of “Chantilly Lace” fame, was killed in the same early February ’59 plane crash in Iowa as Buddy Holly and Richie Valens. And Richardson didn’t just write the song, he discovered the Singer, playing in a club in Texas with his band. #1 for three weeks in January right after “El Paso,” at #6, it’s Johnny Preston revising Romeo & Juliet on “Running Bear.”

Many of the cover versions of “Running Bear” over the years from George Jones to The Guess Who have used some version of the “ooga chaka” Indian chant from Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear,” the #6 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. But in 1971, British Singer-Songwriter Jonathan King used it in his cover of B.J. Thomas’s hit “Hooked on a Feeling.” Why King thought that was a good idea? Unknown. But a few years later, Swedish Pop Group Blue Swede scored a #1 hit with a cover of King’s version of “Hooked on a Feeling,” complete with “ooga chaka’s.”

#5 Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown

At #5 is the biggest-selling single by the most successful duo in Pop history, until Daryl Hall & John Oates overtook them in the ’80s. Future Rock legends who were in their teens in the early ’60s, from Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, cite the duo’s close two-part harmonies as not just an influence, but one of the reasons they got into music at all in the first place.

After their one single for Columbia Records flopped in 1956 and they were dropped, they went on to be the top act on Archie Bleyer’s indie Cadence Records with a string of eight top tens from ’57 to early ’60. This was their first record on startup Warner Brothers Records after being wooed away from Cadence with a lucrative contract. And it didn’t disappoint: the best-selling single of their career, #1 for five weeks in May and the #5 song here on our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, it’s The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown.”

#5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1960’s top hits, The Everly Brothers, Phil and Don, who wrote it, “Cathy’s Clown.” The Everlys had six more top tens ’60 to ’62 but no more #1s. In 1984, Paul McCartney repaid the favor of being one of The Beatles’ top influences in their formative years, writing “On the Wings of a Nightingale” for them and playing guitar. That record got them their first Hot100 entry since 1967, peaking at #50.

#4 Jim Reeves – He’ll Have to Go

Our #4 song was a massive Country crossover hit, but more than that, it was vindication for Nashville’s push in the late ’50s and early ’60s to make Country records that appealed broadly enough to make the Pop charts on their own, as they were recorded in Nashville by Country artists, as opposed to, for example, Columbia’s A&R head Mitch Miller giving Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” to Tony Bennett, and scoring a #1 Pop hit with the song.

The smooth, strings-n-choruses so-called “Nashville sound” (or “Countrypolitan”) ruled the Country charts all the way into the ’70s. And “Country wearing city clothes,” as Time described it in 1960, produced many more crossover smashes. Berry Gordy, Jr., just getting Motown up and running in 1960, did the same thing with R&B. #1 on the Country chart for 14 straight weeks and in the top ten on the Hot100 for 12, here’s Countrypolitan’s “proof of concept” hit. It’s Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go.”

Now I don’t know too many men after, say, 1990 (and that includes men singing Country songs) who would continue the conversation if they heard another guy while on the phone with their lady. But in 1960, Gentleman Jim Reeves, who traded cowboy outfits for suits and ties pretty early in his career, was still giving her the benefit of the doubt.

Sadly, Reeves died in a plane crash in 1964, but he left behind a ton of unreleased stuff, and RCA continued putting out Jim Reeves singles for another 20 years. His last top ten on the Country chart was in 1982!

#3 Brenda Lee – I’m Sorry

Now the late ’50s were lean years for the ladies at the top of the charts. From Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind” in mid-1956 to Connie Francis’ “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” we heard at #10 in mid-’60, only two songs with female lead vocals got to #1: Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy” in ’57 and The Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him” sung by Carol Connors in ’58.

But not only was Connie Francis 1960’s top Hot100 act all charting singles combined; another female who’d just made her chart debut in late ’59 was the year’s second biggest act, and she was only 15, debuting on the charts after appearing regularly for a few years as a child prodigy on Steve Allen and Perry Como’s TV variety shows.

With 47 charting singles during the decade, she went on to be the #1 Hot100 solo female of the 1960s. Another example of The Nashville Sound, produced in Nashville by one of the Sound’s pioneers, Owen Bradley, it’s Brenda Lee at #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, “I’m Sorry.”

Brenda Lee, the biggest of her six charting records in 1960, “I’m Sorry,” her third of nine consecutive singles in the top 10 from 1960 to ’62, a record for a female solo artist that stood until Madonna in 1986.

#2 Elvis Presley – It’s Now or Never

And we’re down to #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1960: the only act with two songs in our countdown, the year he returned from his two years of military service overseas. After his obligatory Rock ‘n Roll single “Stuck on You” in the Spring, for his next, he decided to air out the extra octave he’d found in his vocal range while in Germany.

Bobby Darin set the template in ’59 when he abruptly switched from Teen Rock Novelties like “Splish Splash I’m Taking a Bath” to Sinatresque belting on “Mack the Knife,” which ended up being 1959’s #1 hit. It worked for Teen Idol Bobby Rydell and R&B singer Jackie Wilson too. Rydell’s “Volare” and Wilson’s “Night,” both #4 hits. And it worked for Elvis. His operatic song based on the Italian standard “O Sole Mio” that won over even his most dug-in adult detractors, at #2, “It’s Now or Never.”

The best-selling single of Elvis Presley’s career, and that’s saying something! “It’s Now or Never,” 1960s #2 song here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Also his biggest-ever international hit. His inspiration? Crooner Tony Martin’s #2 hit “There’s No Tomorrow” from 1950, also based on “O Sole Mio.”

To tease Elvis’s transformation from Teen Idol to cross-generational superstar, manager Col. Tom Parker booked him for a primetime Welcome Home Elvis TV special on ABC hosted by Frank Sinatra. It was his first TV appearance in three years and he got $125 grand for it, which raised even Sinatra’s eyebrows!

Presley continued scoring hits, of course, but his focus in the ’60s was on Hollywood and movies, not singles and albums, even after the British Invasion and Folk Rock took the music he’d popularized to new heights.

#1 Percy Faith – Theme from ‘A Summer Place.’

And that brings us to #1: an instrumental, and the theme from a movie, although not the version from the movie. And the song remains to this day the longest run at #1 (nine weeks) for an instrumental in Hot100 history. In a year that saw the Pop charts reflecting grownup musical tastes for the first time in the Rock Era, with albums eclipsing singles, stereo eclipsing mono and hi-fi systems in the Sears catalog, is it any wonder that the #1 hit of the year is an Easy Listening record by an Orchestra leader whose last top ten was in 1953?

Well at least it was a movie for Teenagers, one of the few out that year, with Sandra Dee fresh from the first Gidget film, and Troy Donahue in his first romantic lead. Here is Percy Faith’s “Theme from ‘A Summer Place.'”

Vienna-born composer Max Steiner was an Oscar winning veteran by 1960, having done scores for everything from Gone with the Wind to King Kong to Casablanca. Steiner wrote it; Columbia Records’ in-house orchestra leader through the ’50s sold 10 million records of it. “Theme from ‘A Summer Place,'” The #1 record of 1960, both by our Chartcrush ranking and according to Billboard’s published year-end Hot100 chart.

Which people, including us here at Chartcrush, have tried to reverse-engineer to ascertain their ranking method for 1960, but to no avail. Billboard’s is similar, but two of the songs we heard this hour did not make the top ten on their year-end Hot100. Connie Francis’s “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” our #10 song, was close, but shook out at #11 on Billboard’s published list. And Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” was only #15, since the first half of its chart run was in Billboard’s 1959 “chart year,” the set timeframe they consider for their ranking.

At Chartcrush, we don’t do “chart years.” How we do it is, we factor every song’s full chart run and rank it in whichever year it earned the most points, which makes “El Paso” the #9 song of 1960.

Now because we have two that weren’t in Billboard’s top ten, a couple from their top ten we didn’t hear, so in the time we have left, let’s have a look at those.

#17 Jimmy Jones – Handy Man

Billboard’s #8 song of 1960 was #17 on our ranking, best known for James Taylor’s cover in 1977. But the 1960 version wasn’t really the original either, even though it is by the guy who wrote the song. Confused? Stay tuned. I’ll explain after we have a listen to Jimmy Jones’ “Handy Man.”

Jimmy Jones, “Handy Man.” Jones wrote the song in the mid ’50s for his Doo Wop group The Sparks of Rhythm. But they didn’t record it ’til after Jones left the group to join a different group in 1956. But nevertheless, that version by The Sparks of Rhythm without Jimmy Jones is the first recorded version, unreleased until 1960 when the one we just heard started climbing the charts, at which point they put it out. But it’s completely different!

Producer Otis Blackwell re-wrote the music and Jones recorded the new version we just heard that was the hit. Incidentally, the flute player they hired was a no-show at the recording session for “Handy Man,” so that’s Otis Blackwell whistling throughout the song.

#15 Mark Dinning – Teen Angel

Our next bonus cut was Billboard’s #5 song of 1960: a respectable hit with 18 weeks on the chart including two at #1 in February between “Running Bear” and “Theme from ‘A Summer Place.'” We have it at #15.

It wasn’t, strictly speaking, the first “Teen Tragedy” record, but it was the first #1 Teen Tragedy record, which opened the door for many others. It was such a downer, though, that many radio stations, including Britain’s BBC, refused to play it. Which, of course, only made it sell better. It’s Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel.”

Mark Dinning’s big sisters Jean, Ginny and Lou were The Dinning Sisters, who charted four hits in 1947 and ’48. They’d dissolved years before, but Jean and her hubby wrote “Teen Angel.” Once they cracked the top ten, radio kind of had to play these songs but DJs put them down as “tear jerkers,” “death discs,” and “splatter platters.” The genre, though (that’s what it became after “Teen Angel” was a hit, a whole genre) had its roots in Folk Balladry. Teen Tragedy Records’ popularity followed in the wake of the Folk Revival that paralleled Rock ‘n Roll.

#24 Hollywood Argyles – Alley Oop

So those were the two songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten that weren’t in our 1960 Chartcrush Countdown, but we’re gonna wrap up this week’s show with an also-ran by two of the most fascinating behind-the-scenes figures in Pop in the ’60s, Gary S. Paxton and Kim Fowley: two young, manic, shameless Pop opportunists careening around in the same bizarre landscape, which happened to be the soon-to-be epicenter of Pop culture, Los Angeles, California.

Two versions of the song inspired by a comic strip about a time-traveling caveman debuted on the Hot100 May 30, the same week as Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” and a third version the following week, but this was the #1 hit: Billboard’s #16 song on the year; #24 on our ranking, credited to fictional group The Hollywood Argyles, “Alley Oop.”

Gary Paxton, who sings that exaggerated vocal, was Flip in the Pop duo Skip & Flip, and under contract with a different label so he had to conceal his involvement with “Alley Oop.” The studio where it was recorded was at the intersection of the Hollywood Freeway and tiny Argyle Avenue, so Hollywood Argyles.

“Alley Oop” at first glance seems like just a silly Novelty, but there’s just something about it that makes you want to lift the lid to see what’s going on in whatever world that came out of: a harbinger of both Garage Rock and at least the more demented side of Psychedelia later epitomized by another character from Paxton and co-producer Kim Fowley’s world, Frank Zappa.

Paxton’s next triumph was the 1962 Halloween classic, Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “The Monster Mash.”

Well, that’s gonna have to be a wrap for our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Thanks for listening. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. If you like what you heard this hour, check out our website, chartcrush.com for written transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other first-rate extras. We count down a different year every week on this show from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s, right on up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Each week on Chartcrush we do a deep dive into a different year in Pop music history, and count down the top ten according to our recap of the weekly charts published in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 2016, a year in which politics took center stage, even in pop culture: the epic faceoff between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton after Barack Obama’s two terms.

More on that in a minute, but first, 2016 also marked a major shift in the music biz: on-demand streams eclipsing CDs and even paid downloads as the industry’s leading format, on its way to becoming over half of all music biz revenue in 2019. Fans for the first time ever, could access almost any song ever released by any artist on any label: the ultimate jukebox. But like with actual jukeboxes, the user doesn’t own anything, not even ones and zeros on their hard drive. It’s a rental! Fans didn’t care; most of them just wanted to listen.

And with streaming, the industry finally began to recover from the disaster of filesharing and illegal downloading in the ’00s and early ’10s. Now this had a big effect on the charts. Except for the ever-shrinking sliver of physical music sales in the streaming era, the charts: almost entirely based on plays and listens, so the average top 10 song in 2016 was staying on the charts nearly 60% longer than in 1986, as listeners continued pressing “play” long after first hearing the song.

But as music fans got their stream on, elsewhere on the internet, the 2016 election got interesting in March, when Wikileaks, the whistleblower platform started in 2006 by Australian Editor-Publisher Julian Assange, created a searchable archive of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her illegal private server when she was Secretary of State, and that and other email dumps dominated news coverage, until Donald Trump’s lewd Hollywood Access video from 2005 leaked to the Washington Post a month before the election. Politics hadn’t been this juicy since Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress in 1998.

Well after a generation of Democrats understanding that politics are downstream of culture and making common cause with showbiz from Rock the Vote in ’92, to Obama becoming the “Hip-Hop president” in ’08 while Republicans sat there aloof and confused in the bleachers, no wonder that as all it all unfolded, Pop stars in 2016 were hashtag “WithHer.” Beyonce, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Cher and many others didn’t just signal their support; they actually showed up and  campaigned with Hillary, while Trump couldn’t even play a record at an event without getting an angry cease-and-desist letter.

But in ’16, the GOP candidate himself was a celebrity. Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice had helped keep NBC afloat in the mid-’00s, and remained a primetime draw all the way to 2015. So the pop culture-allergic bleacher-sitting Republican Establishment was dragged kicking and screaming into the fray. As one of Vanity Fair election post-mortem pointed out, only one celebrity mattered to Trump voters, and that was Donald Trump.

#10 Twenty One Pilots – Stressed Out

Well, no wonder so many in 2016 were… the title of our #10 song as we kick off the countdown, by an act who kept their politics to themselves. But in the hyper-partisan late ’10s, even silence was suspect. Here’s the duo Twenty One Pilots, “Stressed Out.”

“Wish we could turn back time to the good old days when our mama sang us to sleep, but now we’re stressed out.” Definitely an anthem for a generation, Millennials, known for taking its sweet time growing up. Twenty One Pilots songwriter-front man Tyler Joseph, born 1988, dead center of the Millennial generation. And 2016, the beginning of the transitional decade between Millennials’ pop culture dominance, and the up-and-coming Gen-Z “Zoomers.”

Twenty One Pilots started out as a trio in 2009 at Ohio State University. In 2011 two of the members left, but on his way out, the drummer recruited his replacement, and Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun continued as a Duo and built quite a following around Columbus, Ohio. Two years later in ’13, their third album Vessel got them to #20 on the Album chart and made them darlings of Alternative radio, but 2015’s Blurryface was their mainstream breakthrough, the #1 Rock album of the year, and “Stressed Out,” not its first, second or even third, but fourth single!

#9 Twenty One Pilots – Heathens

But their biggest hit in ’16 wasn’t on Blurryface at all. It peaked at #2 for four weeks, September into October, stayed in the top ten all the way to the end of the year, and was Twenty One Pilots’ only top10 in the U.K. A soundtrack cut from the third DC Comics Extended Universe blockbuster Suicide Squad. It’s a Twenty One Pilots twofer here on our 2016 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. At #9, “Heathens.”

“Heathens” from Suicide Squad at #9, the bigger of the two Twenty One Pilots hits in our Chartcrush Countdown of 2016’s top ten hits. Billboard called them a “Pop Duo that treats genres like a toddler treats Legos.” By the way, the second DC Extended Universe blockbuster also came out in 2016: Batman vs. Superman, which gave us the Sad Affleck meme, in which Ben Affleck, who played “Batman,” sits stoically as “Superman” Henry Cavill answers a question in a press junket. As the frame slowly zooms in on Affleck, the chatter fades and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” plays.

#8 Justin Bieber – Sorry

Next up, the first of two hits by the other Act with two songs in our 2016 countdown. But here, both records: released just a few weeks apart and in the top ten simultaneously for 18 weeks. This one got to #1 first, and when the other one topped the chart in February, it made the Singer only the twelfth Act in Hot100 history to replace him- her- or itself at #1 with a different record.

Just as Millennials had propelled their Teen Heartthrobs to the top of the charts in the late ’90s, Gen-Z made its first pop culture splash in the late ’00s and early ’10s, and as those Teen Icons matured along with their Zoomer audience, most became huge mainstream stars. Our act at #8: the poster boy of Zoomer Teen Pop, on the charts almost continuously since he was just 15 in 2009, and in 2012 he became the first artist ever to score five #1 albums by the age of 18.

It was a little touch-and-go for him on the reputation front over the next few years: vandalism, DUI, reckless driving, frequent dust-ups with paparazzi, abandoning his pet monkey in a German airport, and an old video of him telling a racist joke. Rolling Stone put him on its cover in early 2014 with the headline “Bad Boy.”

Well, he leaned in, embracing Hip-Hop fashions and the pseudonym “Bizzle,” but he was absent from the top ten from March of 2013 until the advance lead single from his 2015 album Purpose, “What Do You Mean?” debuted at #1. He ditched “Bizzle,” adopted a retro-’90s Grunge look, and Teen Vogue heralded his comeback with the headline “He’s come a long way from YouTube and purple hoodies.” At #8, the second single from Purpose, it’s Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.”

Hard to believe, but all the dozens of songs Justin Bieber charted in the early ’10s, he didn’t hit #1 ’til “What Do You Mean?” from Purpose. “Sorry,” the song we just heard at #8, his second chart topper just a few months later. And the third, which, again, replaced “Sorry” at #1, still to come here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show of 2016’s biggest hits.

The Tropical House “moombahton” sound on “Sorry,” courtesy of red-hot EDM Producer Skrillex, who co-wrote and produced.

Despite “Sorry” being a plea for forgiveness to his former girlfriend, Pop star Selena Gomez, Biebs posted pics with his new girlfriend in the Summer, and the ensuing flame war with fans (and Gomez herself) ended with Justin deleting his Instagram account.

#7 Sia featuring Sean Paul – Cheap Thrills

Carpool Karaoke was a recurring segment on CBS’s The Late Late Show that started in 2015 when James Corden took over from Craig Ferguson as host, and continued all the way ’til Corden left in 2023: Corden picking up Pop Stars in his car so he could drive in the carpool lane, and then they’d sing the Artists’ songs to pass the time.

Justin Bieber did it twice in 2015, but moving on to our #7 song, this Singer did Carpool Karaoke in her signature half-and-half black and blonde flat bangs wig that covered most of her face. They didn’t do this song, though, maybe because Corden couldn’t pull off Featured Rapper Sean Paul’s Jamaican-accent verses. They sang her breakthrough 2014 hit instead, “Chandelier.” But this became her first #1 in August of ’16. It’s Sia, featuring Sean Paul, “Cheap Thrills.”

Australian Singer-Songwriter Sia, featuring Jamaican Rapper Sean Paul with “Cheap Thrills,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2016’s top Pop hits. In 2015 just as the Presidential campaign was ramping up, Donald Trump hosted SNL the week Sia was the musical guest, and in a promo he dons a Trumpian version of her signature half-and-half wig and says “I love this hair.” The love didn’t go both ways, though, apparently. Sia politely declined to snap a picture with Trump and daughter Ivanka backstage, worrying that it might offend her Latino and LGBTQ fans.

#6 Justin Bieber – Love Yourself

At #6, the second song in our countdown from Billboard’s Top Male Artist of 2016 and #2 Artist overall, released as a promo single just three weeks after “Sorry” dropped, and on February 13, it replaced “Sorry” at #1. It’s a diss track to an unnamed narcissist, and all the more devastating thanks to its low-key delivery and arrangement: just a guitar and a smattering of horns. And backing vocals courtesy of Ed Sheeran, who’d just scored his own first top10s in ’14 and ’15 and co-wrote the song. Here’s Justin Bieber again: his biggest hit of 2016, “Love Yourself.”

One sign that Justin Bieber had made the transition from Bubblegum to Mainstream Pop: all the singles from his 2015 Purpose album also lit up the Adult Contemporary chart!

Now, on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 ranking for 2016 they had “Love Yourself” and “Sorry” at numbers 1 and 2, respectively. So how are they just 6 and 8 on ours? Well, five of 2016’s top10 hits still had a ways to go at the end of Billboard’s 2016 “chart year,” the last week of November ’16. And two others besides Bieber’s were already on the chart when the “chart year” began, first week of December ’15. Here at Chartcrush, we don’t do “chart years.” Instead, our ranking method factors every song’s full chart run and then ranks it in whichever calendar year it racked up the most points.

#5 Chainsmokers featuring Daya – Don’t Let Me Down

At #5 is the year’s #1 Dance hit. They’re a New York EDM DJ and Production Duo, the title of whose first Hot100 hit in 2014 helped introduce a new word to the language after it went viral on Soundcloud, Vine and Instagram. They’d noticed women in clubs saying “Let’s take a selfie.” But 2016 was their big breakthrough, in the top ten from May to October, peaking at #3 for two weeks in July, it’s The Chainsmokers featuring Indian-American singer Daya, “Don’t Let Me Down.”

From the main stage at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in March of ’16, Chainsmoker Andrew Taggart condensed what he called his “Kanye speech” to just one short admonition for the crowd: “Do not support Donald Trump!” Politics and music, intersecting like never before.

Chainsmokers’ finest moment was still to come. Their next big hit “Closer” featuring Halsey entered the Hot100 at the end of August 2016 and was in the top ten of Billboard’s year-end Hot100 two years in a row: their #10 song in 2016 and #7 in 2017. Again, at Chartcrush, we don’t split chart runs, so factoring its full run in the calendar year it earned the most points, “Closer” shakes out as the #3 song of 2017.

#4 Justin Timberlake – Can’t Stop the Feeling!

Next at #4, the first #1 hit in nearly a decade for the biggest star to come out of the late ’90s Boy Band craze. He’s an ‘NSYNC alum but as a solo act he scored two #1’s in ’06 and both were among the year’s top10 hits. He built an impressive movie acting resume ’08 to ’12, then turning back to music in ’13, “Suit & Tie” featuring Jay-Z, and “Mirrors” got him back into the top ten.

But now, midway through his 30s in 2016, he was back on top at #1. Here’s the other Justin in our countdown: Justin Timberlake at #4: the lead cut from the soundtrack of the DreamWorks feature Trolls, in which he voiced the main character, Branch: “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”

#4, the ’70s Disco-reminiscent “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” Justin Timberlake on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2016’s biggest hits, nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars, and Timberlake opened the awards with it. “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” one of the two hits in our top ten that debuted at #1.

#3 Adele – Hello

And at #3 is the other. But unlike “Can’t Stop,” which dropped to #3 its second week and never reclaimed the top spot, this one stayed on top for another nine weeks after its debut. The song was the lead single from one of the most hotly anticipated follow-up albums in Pop history. Her previous album from 2011 with its three #1s was eventually named the #1 album of the ’10s decade. Oh, and unlike Sia, she did sing her big 2016 hit on Carpool Karaoke. At #3 it’s Adele’s “Hello.”

“Hello,” Adele at #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2016, from her long-awaited third album 25.

It took a while for artists to come to terms with on-demand streaming. The revenue upside, much greater with physical sales and even paid downloads. Taylor Swift famously pulled her entire catalog off Spotify for nearly three years over its tiny per-stream artist compensation rate, and Adele didn’t allow 25 on any streaming platforms for seven months.

#2 Rihanna featuring Drake – Work

Well, we’re down to #2 on our 2016 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, from another long-anticipated album, the Singer’s eighth, expected “any day now” since the Summer of 2014, when she started teasing it on social media. When it finally came out for real in January 2016, Newsweek snarked that “this, apparently, is how big Pop albums are rolled out these days: an endlessly delayed, social media-driven ‘surprise’ release.”

Well, it actually was a surprise. Tidal, the streaming platform owned in part by the Singer, had an exclusive, and accidentally released the entire album instead of just its lead single. Whoops! Well, the song was Rihanna’s 11th #1 since 2006; 14th if you count features: the lead single from her long-delayed album Anti, A-N-T-I, “Work.”

Now back at #8 we heard Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” produced by Skrillex, the biggest Pop hit in 2016’s hot new buzzworthy sound, Tropical House. Rihanna’s “Work,” which we just heard at #2 on our 2016 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, hit the chart the same week “Sorry” dropped out of the #1 spot, and when Rolling Stone Tweeted out a link calling it a “Tropical House-flavored track,” the genre police pounced: a hail of counter-Tweets reminding the world that RiRi was from Barbados, and “Work” wasn’t just some EDM flavor-of-the-month; it was a glorious return to her rich Dancehall roots.

Dancehall, basically Reggae as it adapted to Disco in late ’70s Jamaica, was in the midst of a resurgence in the mid-’00s when Jay-Z and L.A. Reid signed then-17-year-old Rihanna to Def Jam. But she’d all but abandoned the sound to pioneer the turn of the decade’s EDM-anchored Pop on her third album, 2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad. So “Work” was a real treat for Dancehall fans, who hadn’t seen a #1 hit since Sean Paul’s “Temperature” in ’06. We heard Paul earlier, guesting on Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.”

#1 Drake featuring WizKid & Kyla – One Dance

But the Male Vocalist we just heard on “Work” is our Act with the #1 hit in our 2016 countdown, and it’s also Dancehall. His #2 hit “Hotline Bling” from the Fall of 2015 was supposed to be the lead single of his fourth album Views, but when the album came out in April ’16, “Hotline” was tacked on as a bonus track and the real lead single was #1 throughout June and July, it’s Canadian Rapper-Singer Drake’s very first #1 hit, featuring Nigerian Singer WizKid and British Singer Kyla, “One Dance.”

Before all was said and done, Drake’s album Views had racked up 13 weeks at #1 on the Album chart, the most of any Hip-Hop album since the early ’90s, and its lead single “One Dance,” our #1 song of 2016 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

None of the other songs on Views cracked the top ten, and critics didn’t much like it, but one exception hailed it as “compelling evidence that [Drake] is the defining Pop artist of the moment.”

Well, as such, in the heat of the Presidential race, he was under a lot of pressure to take sides and jump aboard the Trump-bashing train. Well, he didn’t take sides, even after the election as the entire music world but for Ted Nugent, Charlie Daniels and Rappers Kanye West and Azalea Banks were loudly, angrily and publicly mourning Trump’s victory. The week after the election, Drake’s Twitter feed was quiet except a plug for Drake Night at the Air Canada Centre: his hometown NBA team the Toronto Raptors hosting the Golden State Warriors.

Bonus

Well there you have ’em: our Chartcrush Top Ten Pop songs of 2016.

Now earlier I mentioned that Billboard had Justin Bieber’s two big 2016 smashes at numbers 1 and 2 on their year-end Hot100 ranking, since parts of several 2016 songs’ chart runs fell outside their “chart year” eligibility period, and counting their full chart runs reveals them to have been bigger hits. Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” for one, our #6 song, on the chart ’til the end of February ’17. Billboard only counted up to November 26, so it’s #11. Same story with our #9 song, Twenty One Pilots’ “Heathens.” It stayed on the chart 15 weeks after Billboard’s cutoff, so only #21. But adding those two songs bumps two from Billboard’s ranking out of the top ten.

What are those songs? Well as I mentioned, they had The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” at #10 and by our reckoning that one is a 2017 hit.

#11 Desiigner – Panda

The other one, though, just misses our top ten at #11. It was 2016’s big Trap hit, the year after Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” and the year before Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” Let’s give a listen, shall we? To Desiigner’s “Panda.”

Brooklyn Rapper Desiigner. “Panda,” because a white BMW X6 looks like a panda. Only his second song, uploaded to the audio sharing platform Soundcloud in December ’15.

The track caught Rapper Kanye West’s ear, and Kanye had already interpolated it into a cut for his upcoming Life of Pablo album, when he signed Desiigner to his Good Music label. Then “Panda” itself started scaling the charts and was #1 for two weeks in May before Desiigner had ever even appeared on TV. Well he made his TV debut at the 2016 BET Awards doing “Panda” at the end of June, and his follow-up “Tiimmy Turner” was a minor hit, but dwindling chart fortunes and legal woes rendered him a one-hit wonder.

Well that’s our 2016 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other top-notch extras. And check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year on this show, from the beginning ofthe charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on this show, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top10 songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine. Ahead this hour on Chartcrush we’re gonna count down the top10 songs of 1947, a pretty happy year in America.

And why wouldn’t it be? The War was over. Fascism in the rear-view. No one else had an atomic bomb yet. And you still hadda kinda read some tea leaves to see what was coming next in the Cold War over the next 40 years. No one even knew what a “Cold War” was until Bernard Baruch coined the phrase in ’47, selling President Harry S. Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” that committed the U.S. to opposing the spread of communism and Soviet expansionism.

Despite a nasty three-day riot over an integrated veterans housing project in Chicago, there were some big early Civil Rights victories in ’47. Jackie Robinson, #42, became the first Black player in the majors for the Brooklyn Dodgers and won Rookie of the Year. Congressional press galleries were opened up to Black reporters, and Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its landmark To Secure These Rights report.

Film noir was at a creative and commercial peak in the last year before TV: over 50 “melodramas” (as critics mostly called them at the time), in theaters: classics like Brute Force, The Kiss of Death, Dead Reckoning and Out of the Past featuring world-weary, cynical characters navigating desperate situations. Noir was so ubiquitous that there was even a parody, Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette. And a real-life noir-ish story out of Hollywood had newspapers buzzing all year: murder victim Elizabeth Short posthumously nicknamed the “Black Dahlia” after the title of a 1946 noir flick, Raymond Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the experimental Bell XS-1 rocket plane in ’47, but that wasn’t the most mind-blowing thing happening in the skies. Pilot Kenneth Arnold’s highly-publicized UFO sighting in Washington State, then just a few weeks later, the Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident sparked the flying saucer craze.

Against that backdrop, the U.S. economy boomed in 1947. 12 million returning G.I.s. had found jobs; wartime bureaucracies, price controls and regulations, dismantled and ended; government spending down 75%; taxes cut; factories back to making cars and appliances instead of fighter planes and bombs. And they couldn’t crank out those durable goods fast enough for a public finally emerging from a generation of deprivation and sacrifice.

From the end of the War to 1950, housing starts increased 20-fold, and all those new homes needed appliances and furnishings. And of course families. Who, once they had those homes, tended to stay in them with their Baby Boom toddlers instead of going back to the city to dance.

That’s band historian George Simon’s main theory as to why so many Big Bands dissolved. Bandleader Bob Crosby blamed the Bands themselves for straying from Dance music and becoming “concert Bands playing in dancehalls.” And songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen blamed union scale and pension plans making it impossible for Bandleaders to turn a profit. The feds slapping a 40% cabaret tax on dancing establishments definitely contributed to the mass conversion of America’s teeming dancehalls and ballrooms to bowling alleys, supermarkets and warehouses as well.

But despite that (or rather because of it), the record biz had by far its best year ever in 1947: over $200 million in sales: a milestone not reached again until 1955. And that alone qualifies 1947 as a landmark year in Pop history.

#10 The Three Suns – Peg o’ My Heart

At #10 as we kick off our 1947 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, the first of two versions of the same song we’ll be hearing this hour. There are actually two of those in our countdown: songs that were so popular that more than one version of them made the top10 records of the year!

This one is major label RCA-Victor’s answer to an offbeat instrumental by an unknown act that was an unknown label’s first release earlier in the year. Yet it was a hit thanks to a new studio gimmick that no one had heard on a record before. RCA correctly identified the trick and deployed it to even more dramatic effect on their version. See if you can guess what I’m talking about, what this gimmick was, as we have a listen to our #10 song, The Three Suns’ version of “Peg o’ My Heart.”

Reverb, the studio trick employed to pretty dramatic effect there on The Three Suns’ instrumental version of “Peg o’ My Heart,” a song made famous in Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies all the way back in 1913.

The Three Suns had had five minor chart hits on indie labels coming into 1947. Their success doing soundies in the mid-’40s got them signed to RCA-Victor. What’s a “Soundie?” Well, soundies were short films made for a kind of proto-video jukebox called a Panoram. For a dime you could watch a short film, usually a music video, rear-projected onto a 40-inch screen. No selector though, so if you wanted to see a specific video, it was gonna cost you up to eight dimes to cycle through the videos to the one you wanted. TV of course, ended Soundies in arcades, bars and Teen hangouts, but many Panorams found a new homes in adult peep shows in the ’50s!

#9 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Don Cornell) – That’s My Desire

At #9, the other song with two different versions in our countdown of 1947’s biggest Pop hits. Same story: upstart indie scores a hit with a new record of an old song, then the major labels all scramble to get their version out. Usually it was the other way around: majors with their A-list acts getting first dibs on Tin Pan Alley’s latest and greatest “plug songs,” and only after those hit the charts were indies permitted by the publishers to release their versions and maybe sweep up a few crumbs if they were lucky.

But in ’47, indie A&R guys flipped the script on that, ignoring the big-money “plug songs” and digging deep into publishers’ catalogs for offbeat B- or C-list material they could match up with one of their offbeat B- or C-list Acts. Well, once a few of those became hits, Billboard gave them a name: “material songs,” which were connecting, they said, because an increasingly “unpredictable public” was more interested in songs than Name Artists.

Here again, major label RCA-Victor’s version of a “material hit,” but this time, instead of an act people may or may not have heard of because they were in a few Soundies, it’s one of the ’40s top charting acts, on the charts almost continuously from 1945 to ’50. And unlike “Peg o’ My Heart,” this version overtook the indie label’s on the charts. Major label distribution and radio contacts, then as now, decisive.

But even though it outranked the original while they were both out, the original racked up more weeks, so when you add it all up, the original comes out at #8. So we’ll be hearing that one next, but now, at #9, here’s RCA-Victor’s version by Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye featuring Crooner Don Cornell: “That’s My Desire.”

The ’40s’ top charting “Sweet Band” (more Pop than Jazz), Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye. Their bandwagon-jumping version of “That’s My Desire” at #9 on our 1947 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Don Cornell on vocals along with Kaye’s vocal group, The Kaydettes.

Cornell had been singing exclusively with Kaye’s band since the ’30s, but “That’s My Desire” was only his second appearance on a chart hit. Billy Williams and Nancy Norman, the Singers on most of Kaye’s hits up to 1947. But for the next three years it was almost all Don Cornell, until he went solo at the height of Croonerdom in the early ’50s.

#8 Frankie Laine – That’s My Desire

And as previously teased, at #8 we have the original indie label version of “That’s My Desire” that hit the charts end of March, but dropped like a rock once Kaye and Cornell’s we just heard came out six weeks later. It rebounded, though, as upstart Mercury Records, then in business only two years, promoted the heck out of it.

Later as the record was completing its 29 week chart run (the longest of the year), the Singer found himself the focus of the latest “Bobbysoxer” Crooner craze as he made his way East after nine months at Hollywood’s Club Morocco. A reported 45,000 Teen girls showed up to see him at a record shop in Detroit. Here’s the record that made Frankie Laine a star, the first and biggest hit version, thanks to its longevity on the charts, of “That’s My Desire.”

Frankie Laine’s first chart hit and breakthrough, “That’s My Desire,” after a decade of, as he put it, “scuffling” from city-to-city, gig-to-gig, trying to break through as a Singer. Even as “Desire” was riding high and America’s DJs were voting Laine Most Promising Male Vocalist of the year, critics skewered his “oversinging,” “fervent throating” and “lusty vocalizing.” And his next several records didn’t fare too well.

But 45,000 Bobbysoxers and all those DJs can’t be wrong, can they? And Mitch Miller for one, got it. Amid all the turbulence and in-fighting of Mercury Records in its early years, by ’49, Miller had risen to head of A&R, and after Pop Crooner-Bandleader Vaughn Monroe scored that year’s biggest smash with “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” he gave Frankie Laine Western-type songs that would showcase his emotive singing style. “That Lucky Old Sun” and “Mule Train” were both #1 hits in ’49, and Laine scored nine more top10s over the next eight years.

#7 King Cole Trio – (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons

So ’47, a year of Civil Rights milestones, as I mentioned at the top of our 1947 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Well March 1, 1947 marked the first time that five or more the top10 records on the Pop charts were by Black artists, and it didn’t happen again ’til the end of 1957.

Now, four of those records were the same song, “Open the Door, Richard,” but the fifth, at #6 that week, was the first top10 by a Jazz Pianist who, legend has it, started singing when a drunk guy at a piano bar demanded it. And he became one of America’s top Crooners. No fewer than six versions of this song were on the charts in ’47, but this was the first, and the biggest. At #7 it’s Nat King Cole, still releasing records as the King Cole Trio until ’49, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.”

The King Cole Trio got their own network radio show in ’46, the first hosted by a Black Musician: another sign of things to come in Civil Rights that set the stage for their breakthrough success with the song we just heard at #7 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1947, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” That and all of Nat King Cole’s records throughout his long career, on Capitol Records.

#6 Ray Noble and His Orchestra and Buddy Clark – Linda

The Singer at #6 had been Crooning for Big Bands since 1932, but in ’38, after doing the popular Your Hit Parade radio show for two years, he became one of the few Singers besides Bing Crosby to score a hit under his own name in the Swing Era, before Frank Sinatra went solo.

After his three years in the military during the War he landed a record contract with Columbia, who paired him with English Bandleader Ray Noble for this record that stayed in the top10 on all three Billboard Pop charts–Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes–throughout the Spring, and is #6 on our 1947 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It’s Ray Noble’s Orchestra and (double-billed, not featuring) Singer Buddy Clark, “Linda.”

Ray Noble and Buddy Clark, “Linda,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1947’s biggest hits.

So who’s this beguiling “Linda” Clark is singing about? Well, Songwriter Jack Lawrence wrote the song as a favor to his Attorney, who wanted a song for his baby daughter. The Attorney was Lee Eastman, and the daughter was Linda Eastman, who if you know your Beatles history in 1969 became Linda McCartney, wife of Paul McCartney, who never played that song. Wonder why?

Clark continued scoring hits, including four duets with Columbia label-mate Doris Day. But sadly, right at the peak of his fame, he suffered a fatal head injury when the chartered plane he was on ran out of fuel and attempted to land on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. The other four passengers and the Pilot, also injured, but Clark was the only fatality.

After his death, his record “A Dreamer’s Holiday” became the first posthumous top 20 hit. Even Big Band icon Glenn Miller didn’t rate that after his plane went down over the English Channel in late 1944. Major Miller, en route to newly liberated Paris to set up his Army Air Forces Band. Maybe it didn’t occur to RCA to release a tribute, or considered poor taste. Both Miller and Clark, though, huge news stories when they happened, as you can imagine.

#5 Tex Williams and His Western Caravan – Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)

OK, back to the fun! At #5 we have a Western Talking Blues Novelty hit written, no, not in the ’30s like “Peg o’ My Heart” and “That’s My Desire,” but actually in 1947, after the Singer got fired for wanting equal billing with Bandleader Spade Cooley, later convicted for murdering his wife. Several players exited the Band with him, and the Singer formed his own 12-piece “Western Caravan.”

Capitol Records snapped him up, but not satisfied with the Polkas they were having him record, the Singer turned to his friend, Country star Merle Travis, for help writing a hit more suited to his style. And what they came up with topped the Country chart for 16 weeks and was the first big Country-Western/Pop crossover hit. #1 on the Best Sellers chart for six weeks in late Summer, at #5 it’s Tex Williams and His Western Caravan:  “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).”

Tex Williams, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the biggest hits of 1947. Williams kept charting records on the Country charts all the way to the ’70s, but never dented the Pop charts again. Western Swing Revivalists Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen scored a big FM counterculture hit with their cover of “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!” in 1973. It even made the Hot100.

#4 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Billy Williams & Choir) – The Old Lamp-Lighter

You know, the further removed you get from an era, the harder it is to spot a nostalgia wave, but when a sentimental song about pre-War street lighting charts three versions in the top10, and one of them is the #4 record of the year, well, that’s a pretty good sign that one was underway.

Actually, the signs were everywhere, not just the Pop charts, but also many of 1947’s top movies: Life with Father set in the 1880s, Green Dolphin Street, the 1840s, Mother Wore Tights, turn of the century Vaudeville; The Perils of Pauline, 1920s Silent Film Era. MGM even re-released Gone with the Wind in ’47.

But back to street lighting. During the War, the spike in natural gas prices got many cities to switch to electric outdoor lighting. But to a certain generation, nothing said “simpler, happier time” like gas streetlights. And throughout the ’50s and ’60s, so many businesses, neighborhoods and communities, mostly upscale ones, reverted back, that during the ’70s energy crisis, the Carter Administration had to specifically ban gas outdoor lighting.

At #4 is the song that, as far as we can tell, first gave voice to that particular slice of nostalgic yearning, the biggest hit version was by the Band whose version of “That’s My Desire” we heard back at #9, Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, but it’s not Don Cornell singing this time; it’s the Country Singer who as I mentioned had been the Male Vocalist on almost all Kaye’s hits with Male vocals since their version of “Don’t Fence Me In” in 1945, Billy Williams. The song isn’t about gas streetlights per se; it’s about the man whose job was to come around at dusk and dawn to turn them on and off, “The Old Lamp-Lighter.”

Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye featuring Billy Williams, “The Old Lamp-Lighter,” #4 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1947’s top hits.

By the way, our top10 is based on our exclusive ranking that combines action on Billboard’s published Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. From those, we derive a single unified Hot100-style weekly ranking that lets us tabulate the year using the same exact same method we do for Hot100 years post-1958.

RCA’s only competition on the charts with “The Old Lamp-Lighter” was Columbia’s top late-’40s Bandleader Kay Kyser, who had future afternoon TV talk show host Mike Douglas singing. That one comes out at #31 on our 1947 ranking.

#3 The Harmonicats – Peg o’ My Heart

At #3, it’s the original version of the instrumental oddity we heard RCA-Victor’s copycat version of by The Three Suns. I mentioned when we heard that back at #10 that reverb was the brand new secret sauce studio gimmick that got folks’ attention when they heard it, and RCA did a very good job with the effect on the Three Suns record.

But the original we’re about to hear was where it was first unleashed, by pioneering studio genius Bill Putnam: the debut release on the Vitacoustic label he co-founded in Chicago. Recording in his building’s tile bathroom was how he got the reverb effect, but it’s the mixing with non-reverberated parts that creates the illusion of space and depth that Putnam was after.

It had the charts all to itself for its first nine weeks, late April to late June until RCA’s Three Suns version hit, and then four more traditionally-recorded versions of the song with vocals on other labels. Yes, “Peg o’ My Heart” has words!

Now, a massive hit by a trio of Harmonica Players wasn’t on anyone’s Pop bingo card in 1947, but here it is: the #3 song of the year, The Harmonicats’ original version of “Peg o’ My Heart.”

Released in early Spring on Vitacoustic Records, their first release, by August, The Harmonicats’ “Peg o’ My Heart” had racked up eight weeks atop the Jukebox chart and passed the million mark for Sales: pretty incredible.

On a different record in 1947, Bill Putnam, the studio ace who produced “Peg” also invented overdubbing, so Patti Page could do her own backing vocals on her debut record on Mercury. No money in the budget to hire a second Singer. Patti Page harmonizing with herself became her signature sound.

The Vitacoustic label foundered after things soured between Putnam and his business partners, and the Harmonicats’ subsequent hits were on Putnam’s own Universal label, then on Mercury into the ’50s.

#2 Francis Craig and His Orchestra (piano, Francis Craig; vocal, Bob Lamm) – Near You

Well, halfway through the year, while the instrumental versions of “Peg o’ My Heart” were still battling it out on the charts, another odd record appeared, and on another indie label no one had ever heard of, Nashville’s Bullet Records. By the end of August it was #1 on the DJ chart, then Best-Sellers in September, finally winning Billboard’s Pop “Triple Crown” by topping the Jukebox chart October 4 and staying #1 on all three for the next 10 weeks.

Of course, major label covers by established stars followed, but Bullet Records kept up with demand, and the original version by a recently unemployed Nashville Bandleader and his blind Vocalist-Trumpeter, slapped on the record as a B-side, sold two-and-a-half million and became one of the biggest chart hits of all time, and the first-ever Pop hit recorded in Nashville. At #2,  it’s Francis Craig, who wrote the song, and what was left of His Orchestra, “Near You.”

Francis Craig had been leading a Band since the early ’20s and was pushing 50 when, in 1947, he lost his gig at Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel after 21 years, and his Sunday night NBC network radio show after 12 years, and was thinking about retiring. He was an institution in Nashville, though, so the two local guys starting up Bullet Records asked him to record one of the signature songs from his ballroom set, and for the B-side he did “Near You.”

The way it goes for a full minute with just Craig’s piano, and then the vocal comes in when you least expect it with a full Brass Band accompaniment. Riveting! And easy to see how it caught people’s attention and became a big hit once radio got a hold of it.

Craig rode the momentum for one more hit, “Beg Your Pardon” in ’48 and started up Nashville’s first pressing plant with the profits. When Comedian Milton Berle (“Mr. Television”) became the permanent host of NBC’s Texaco Star Theater, “Near You” was his theme song.

#1 Ted Weems and His Orchestra (whistling, Elmo Tanner) – Heartaches

But despite its miraculous success and being Billboard #1 Best Seller of 1947, our Chartcrush rankings factor the DJ and Jukebox charts as well, and it loses out for the #1 spot by the slimmest of margins, to an even more unlikely hit (is that possible?) that was #1 for 16 weeks, three longer than “Near You.”

But there’s an asterisk on our #1 song of 1947: two different versions on different labels, but by the same artist, and Billboard didn’t chart them separately, so the two versions combined for chart positions. Come to think of it, that’s actually how Billboard handles remix versions today, so maybe no asterisk necessary for that.

But how about an asterisk for both versions being from the 1930s? Hey, in a year of peak nostalgia with indie labels scoring hits recording old songs, why not an old record? Well, when overnight D.J. Kurt Webster on Charlotte, North Carolina’s WBT pulled a 1938 record out of a box and gave it a spin on the air, the phones lit up from up and down the East coast. WBT was 50,000 watts. And soon, everyone was playing it, so Decca re-issued it. And RCA, who had the original faster-tempo one from 1933, re-issued that.

The ’38 Decca version folks heard on WBT that night is a slightly slower-tempo Rhumba Fox Trot, and with no way to unravel which version did better from Billboard’s combined chart placements, we’re gonna go with the faster, original Samba version on RCA. It’s Ted Weems and His Orchestra, a record from 1933, the #1 song of 1947: “Heartaches.”

A-list Crooner Perry Como started out singing with Ted Weems’ Band in the ’30s and Decca owned all those records, so after “Heartaches” hit, Decca figured, why not reissue one of these old Weems-Como discs? And “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” from 1939, made the top10 on all three Billboard charts in the Fall. RCA, of course, rushed Como into the studio to cut a 1947 version of that song, and again, Billboard combined them on the charts.

By the way, Como called “Heartaches” Ted Weems’s “intermission number,” the song he’d play when there was nothing else, a filler, and couldn’t believe it was such a big hit. Elmo Tanner’s whistling on both “Heartaches” versions, Como said, was because Weems preferred it to the song’s lyrics!

Bonus

Well there you have them, the top10 records of 1947 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Now as you’ve been hearing this hour, songs had multiple versions on the charts at the same time in the ’40s, all competing for chart slots. Given that, what if we ranked songs instead of specific records?

Well actually, Billboard’s flagship chart in the ’40s did just that. The Honor Roll of Hits was a weekly ranking that combined sales, airplay, jukebox plays and sheet music sales for all versions of songs. That’s the chart Tin Pan Alley Publishers checked every week. Well as it turns out, a few of 1947’s top songs didn’t have a dominant version that rose to the top of any of the record charts, so in the time we have left, let’s take a look at those, shall we?

#63 Count Basie and His Orchestra (vocal, Harry “Sweets” Edison & Bill Johnson) – Open the Door, Richard!

So that week I mentioned in March ’47 when five of the top10 hits were by Black artists for the first time ever. Our #7 song, the King Cole Trio’s “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” was #6 that week. At numbers 2, 3, 4 and tied at #6 were four different versions of what by our reckoning was the 12th biggest song of 1947, all versions combined, “Open the Door, Richard!”

That was the Count Basie Orchestra’s version of “Open the Door, Richard!” [see note] sung by the Basie Band’s trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison and trombonist Bill Johnson on RCA-Victor, #63 on our ranking of the year’s top records we just got done counting down the top10 from here on our 1947 edition of Chartcrush.

[Note: Count Basie Orchestra version not available on Spotify, so podcast substitutes the earlier version by Jack McVea]

It topped both the Best Sellers and DJ charts in April ’47 and was the biggest hit, beating out versions by singing comedians The Three Flames on Columbia, and Jump Blues icon Louis Jordan on Decca. Versions also charted by the Comedian who came up with the routine on the Vaudeville circuit, Dusty Fletcher, and the Saxophonist who first turned it into a song, Jack McVea. Both of those, though, on indie labels that didn’t get much traction.

#21 Freddy Martin and His Orchestra (vocal, Stewart Wade & Ensemble) – Managua, Nicaragua

Now, before Managua, Nicaragua in Central America became a flashpoint in the Cold War in the ’80s, Contras vs. Sandinistas, it was pretty idyllic from the sound of what was 1947’s tenth biggest song, combining all versions’ chart action, not to mention fun to say, or sing.

Three versions of “Managua, Nicaragua” on the charts in ’47. Freddy Martin’s on RCA-Victor with a Band vocal and Clyde Rogers singing lead was first and the biggest, #21 on our Chartcrush record ranking, beating Decca’s Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians with Don Rodney, which did best on the Jukebox chart, and Kay Kyser on Columbia with Female vocals by Gloria Wood backed by The Campus Kids.

#20 Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra (vocal, Vaughn Monroe & The Moon Maids) – I Wish I Didn’t Love You So

Singing Bandleader Vaughn Monroe was one of the most successful acts in the late ’40s and his biggest chart hit of 1947 was his version of “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So.”

Radio preferred the two Female-sung versions of “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So:” Dinah Shore’s on Columbia and Betty Hutton’s on Capitol. But singing Bandleader Vaughn Monroe with his deep baritone on RCA-Victor was the choice for record buyers and on jukeboxes: the #20 record our Chartcrush ranking but combining all those versions’ chart action together, the #8 song of the year.

#25 Art Lund – Mam’selle

Like Buddy Clark, 6-foot-4 Baseball Player-turned-singer Art Lund served in the War and got a record deal straight away after he got out. Also like Clark, his first release, “Mam’selle,” was a massive hit.

The MGM movie studio started up MGM Records in 1946 supposedly to release soundtracks of MGM’s films, but the movie “Mam’selle” first appeared in, The Razor’s Edge, was a 20th Century Fox property, and Art Lund doesn’t sing it the film anyway. Lund’s version was first on the charts though, and the biggest hit: the #25 record on our 1947 Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top10 from this hour, and when you combine the points from all the many charting versions, 1947’s #7 song.

#29 Al Jolson – Anniversary Song

And finally, no 1947 recap would be complete without talking about Pop’s most dramatic comeback that side of Tony Bennett in the ’90s and ’00s, by one of America’s most famous and best-paid entertainers of the 1920s and star of the first movie with sound, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson. In Columbia Pictures’ multi-Oscar-winning biopic of him, The Jolson Story which hit theaters in 1946, he dubbed his own vocals for the actor portraying him, and “Anniversary Song” was the biggest hit from the movie.

Maybe not too surprising with such a strong nostalgia current running in the late ’40s, but in 1948, Al Jolson at age 62, was voted America’s Top Male Singer in a Variety poll up against all the top Crooners: Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra.

Jolson’s own version of “The Anniversary Song” was by far the Best-Seller, #1 on that chart for six weeks. But radio by a big margin preferred Dinah Shore’s Woman’s touch, and Jukebox patrons liked the Band versions by Guy Lombardo and Tex Beneke leading Glenn Miller’s Orchestra.

Well, 1947 sure was a wild year in American Pop, huh? But that’s gonna have to do it for this edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other top-notch extras. And check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year on this show, from the beginning of the charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune in again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1992, a presidential election year, and in February, George H.W. Bush, running for a second term, did a photo op at a grocer’s convention and was on video expressing what appeared to be marvel and amazement at the computerized scanning of items at the checkout. Wow!

Well, by 1992, retail barcode scanners were already common, so in a front-page story headlined “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed,” the New York Times opinion page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, wrote that Bush “emerged from 11 years in Washington’s choicest executive mansions to confront the modern supermarket.”

Well, putting aside whether President Bush was out of touch with technology, no question that the music biz was. But ’92 was the year that  Billboard caught up by revamping its charts to reflect actual point-of-sale units captured by retail barcode scans for sales, and independently-monitored airplay data for radio spins. Up ’til ’92, the charts had been based on weekly phone surveys of record sellers and radio programmers, but now, cutting out the middleman, suddenly Heavy Metal, Hardcore Rap and Country albums were in the top ten, Alternative Rock was, well, Mainstream Rock, and Nirvana, NWA, Metallica and Garth Brooks were household names.

Soundscan, a startup under the auspices of Nielsen, the TV ratings people, pioneered barcode data collection in the music biz. They negotiated exclusives with several important retail chains that prohibited them from reporting their sales data to anyone else, including Billboard’s survey system. Which forced Billboard’s hand, and Billboard and Soundscan have been joined at the hip ever since. The album chart changed first; for the Hot100, Billboard waited ’til the last week of November ’91, the beginning of its 1992 chart year.

A decade earlier, the Sony Walkman had sped up Top40’s migration from staticky, mono AM radio to hi-fi stereo FM. But switching to FM, Top40 radio went from being music’s center of gravity on 50,000 watt blowtorch stations whose coverage areas spanned multiple states, to just another music genre on FM.

MTV came along just in the nick of time to became music’s new center of gravity through the ’80s, but by the early ’90s even that wasn’t holding, and now, without Billboard’s survey panelists manning the barricades, genres flooded the charts and so-called “crossover” became the rule, not the exception. But to the extent that there was a musical center in 1992, you’re gonna hear it this hour. An act’s gotta have reach and mass appeal to score one of the top ten songs of the year, right?

#10 Color Me Badd – All 4 Love

Well the ’90s had its share of Pop superstars, but it had more than its share of one-hit wonders, especially early in the decade. Or, as is the case with our act at #10, three-hit wonders, with the hits all happening in under a year. Here is the multicultural contemporary R&B group from Oklahoma City, Color Me Badd. Their third and final top ten hit, “All 4 Love.”

The Superbowl halftime show evolved rapidly in the early ’90s, from marching bands and Up with People, to the must-watch Pop Culture showcase it later became. The first time a top Pop act headlined was New Kids on the Block in ’91, but that got pre-empted by an ABC News Special Report about the Gulf War. For ’92 it was Gloria Estefan, Olympic skaters and a marching band in a production titled “Winter Magic.”

But the upstart Fox network, only on the air for a few years in ’92, counterprogrammed a football-themed live episode of its edgy sketch comedy show In Living Color at halftime, and tens of millions of Superbowl viewers changed the channel. The act we just heard at #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1992, Color Me Badd, was the musical guest. On the show they did their better-known breakthrough hit from ’91, “I Wanna Sex You Up,” but “All 4 Love” was their new single and it had just hit #1. Color Me Badd faded after their last top 20 hit in the Fall of ’92.

#9 Jon Secada – Just Another Day

But speaking of Gloria Estefan, next up we have a Cuban-American Singer-Songwriter she discovered in Miami. Gloria sings backup on it and her husband Emilio produced. The Spanish version was #1 on the Hot Latin chart, so despite its pretty middle-of-the-road late ’80s Pop sound, it’s actually a significant Latin Pop crossover hit at a time when those were kinda rare. It only peaked at #5 on the Hot100, but stayed in the top 40 for 30 weeks. At #9 it’s Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day.”

Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day,” the #9 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1992’s top hits. Gloria and Emilio Estefan were returning the favor after Secada co-wrote and sang backup on several of their solo and Miami Sound Machine tracks in the ’80s. He came pretty close with “If You Go” in ’94, but never repeated the success of “Just Another Day.” Mostly he became a darling of Adult Contemporary radio, and after that, the Broadway stage and Latin charts.

#8 Michael Jackson – Black or White

Now, our #8 song was #1 for seven weeks through the 1991 holiday season, Thanksgiving to New Years, all the way to the middle of January: the third longest stay at #1 of the year, yet it’s only the #14 song on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100. Wait, How’s that?

Well, with the switch to Soundscan’s point-of-sale barcode data and monitored airplay for ranking the songs for the weekly charts, Billboard also changed how it ranks the year. From ’92 on, Billboard’s year-end rankings have nothing to do with how the songs performed on the weekly charts through the year. Instead, they just sum the underlying sales and airplay points, which could be different, say, for the #1 song in a strong, ultra-competitive week vs. a slow week. All weeks in reality: not created equal! Just one problem: no one else could see that underlying data.

Now here at Chartcrush, whether it’s 1950 or 2010, every year is ranked exactly the same way using the published positions on Billboard’s weekly charts. We can’t match the accuracy of summing underlying sales and spins, but what we can and do offer is a consistent ranking methodology across all the years there’ve been charts. So for ’92, the song that was #1 for seven consecutive weeks in the beginning of the year is in our top ten, and without further ado, here it is: the lead single from his eighth studio album, Dangerous, it’s Michael Jackson’s biggest chart hit since “Beat It” in ’83, “Black or White.”

Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1992. The deadly L.A. Riots hadn’t happened yet when it was a hit, but the video of Black parolee Rodney King’s beating by White and Hispanic cops after a high-speed chase had been on what seemed like continuous loop in the media for months, and the officers were on trial, so the song’s racial harmony message was right on point.

And it wasn’t just the words. Michael seemed determined to find or define a new “consensus Pop sound,” not an easy task in ’92. But the fusion of Pop Rock, Dance, New Jack Swing and Hip-Hop was the fastest chart topper since The Beatles’ “Get Back” in 1969: just three weeks. No song had yet debuted at #1: that milestone was in ’95. The song? “You Are Not Alone,” by… Michael Jackson! Incidentally, the short Rap in the middle? A mystery Rapper. “LTB,” who’s not on anything else, before or since. Well a writer at Vice decided to get to the bottom of that so he did some digging, and turns out it was the producer, Bill Botrell.

#7 P.M. Dawn – I’d Die Without You

At #7 we have the song that was #51 on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 for 1992, but this time the discrepancy has nothing to do with Soundscan or the weighting of weeks. It’s a different issue that’s always been baked into Billboard’s year-end charts: songs’ chart runs getting split when they straddle two adjacent “chart years.” The song is #51 for ’92 in Billboard, and also #43 for 1993. Obviously, neither of those scream “massive hit.” And the same thing had happened with their breakthrough hit, #1 at the end of Billboard’s 1991 chart year and it wound up at a middling #44 because the ranking couldn’t factor the second half of its chart run.

Now Billboard can’t fix this problem and continue to publish their year-end rankings before New Years, but they could go back later, once all the songs have completed their chart runs, and issue revised rankings. Just sayin’. They don’t, though, so countless “year-straddling” hits over the years have fallen through the cracks. Well, here at Chartcrush, with the benefit of hindsight we can factor every song’s entire chart run and rank it in whichever year it was strongest. So not only does that breakthough hit, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” get rescued from oblivion (it’s our #6 song of 1991), this one is #7 for 1992. It’s R&B/Hip-Hop duo PM Dawn, with “I’d Die Without You.”

“I’d Die Without You,” PM Dawn repeating in the top ten on the year in back-to-back years here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Early in ’92, a diss war between PM Dawn and Bronx Rapper KRS-One ended with KRS and his Boogie Down Productions posse rushing the stage, violently ejecting PM Dawn and taking over the gig. The incident generated some headlines, but didn’t affect PM Dawn’s chart mojo. “I’d Die Without You,” #3 for four weeks in the Fall and our #7 song of the year.

#6 TLC – Baby-Baby-Baby

Now, the ’90s biggest Girl Group debuted in 1992! The concept was a trio with a quirky, fun, tomboyish, Hip-Hop style to contrast against what the established Girl Groups had going on. Producers and managers put them together, but their chemistry is what made them instant stars. That, plus being on R&B’s hottest label, LaFace, and label honchos L.A. Reid and Babyface producing and co-writing several of their songs, including their big breakthrough that’s our #6 hit. The second single off their first album Ooooooohhh… On the TLC Tip, it’s TLC’s “Baby-Baby-Baby.”

TLC’s “Baby-Baby-Baby” at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1992’s biggest hits: the only song on their debut album that doesn’t have a verse by their resident Rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez. “Baby-Baby-Baby” had the misfortune of peaking at for #2 for six straight weeks behind the #1 song in our Countdown that we’re gonna hear in a few minutes, so they had to wait ’til their second album in ’95 to score their first #1, “Creep.”

#5 Snap! – Rhythm Is a Dancer

Electronic Dance Music (“EDM”) has had an interesting history on the U.S. Pop charts. For a while in the early ’90s, the Rave scene in Europe and the U.K. seemed on the verge of becoming the next big thing Stateside, with House and Techno-derived dancefloor fillers like Madonna’s “Vogue,” C + C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat;” Londonbeat’s “I’ve Been Thinking About You;” EMF’s “Unbelievable” and Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations” all hitting #1 on both the Dance Club Play chart and the Hot100 in ’90 and ’91.

Now a lot’s been made of Billboard’s switch to Soundscan unleashing genres that’d previously been underperforming on the charts. With EDM, the opposite happened. After the switch there wasn’t another #1 EDM hit on the Hot100 ’til “The Macarena” in 1996! Well our #5 song never got to #1, but it was on the chart 39 weeks, and 14 in the top ten. That’s longer than any of the pre-Soundscan EDM #1s I just mentioned.

Formed in ’89 by two German producers with an ever-changing lineup of American Singers and Rappers, they scored one of the first big Eurodance/EDM hits with “The Power” in the Summer of 1990, but this one was the early ’90s’ biggest Dance crossover hit and the #1 hit of the year in Europe. It’s Snap! featuring American singer Thea Austin, “Rhythm Is a Dancer.”

Snap!’s “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” our #5 song of 1992 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It got a lot easier and a lot more affordable to create Electronic Dance Music with the proliferation of synths, MIDI and sequencers. And pagers made it possible to organize impromptu Rave parties in random places. What American EDM was missing in the early ’90s was a big, culturally galvanizing event like Lollapalooza, the touring festival that put Alternative Rock and a distinct Gen-X lifestyle front and center. Or a movie like Cameron Crowe’s Singles, set in Seattle just as Grunge was breaking through.

After “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” EDM crossover hits got pretty sporadic, and Raves, Eurodisco and even Dance Clubs slipped below the mainstream radar in the U.S., with the possible exception of Saturday Night Live‘s Roxbury Guys: Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan and Jim Carrey sometimes when he was available, bobbing their heads to Haddaway’s “What Is Love” in the car, in the bar. It took ’til the late ’00s, when American EDM festivals started drawing Woodstock-sized crowds for electronic music to return to the top of the Hot100.

#4 Vanessa Williams – Save the Best for Last

Next, a vindication and comeback for the first Black Miss America: Miss America 1984, who had to give up her crown after nude photos from a few years before showed up in the men’s magazine Penthouse. Instead of spending years fighting about it in court, though, she dropped her lawsuit and turned to music. Soon she had a #1 Dance hit with the title cut from her 1988 debut album The Right Stuff.

And “Dreamin’,” the downtempo hit from the album, made the top ten on both the Hot100 and the Adult Contemporary charts. Her Outstanding New Artist win at the 1989 NAACP Image Awards set the stage for our #4 hit. #1 for five weeks March into April, it’s Vanessa Williams, “Save the Best for Last.”

Vanessa Williams, “Save the Best for Last,” #4 on our 1992 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and Billboard’s #1 Adult Contemporary song of ’92, from Williams’ second album The Comfort Zone. Her next Hot100 top ten was “Love Is” from the first Beverly Hills 90210 soundtrack album, a duet with Brian McKnight. And that was Billboard’s #1 Adult Contemporary song of 1993: two years in a row with the #1 AC song.

She scored again in ’95 with “Colors of the Wind” from Disney’s Pocahontas and stayed hot on both the Dance and AC charts into the ’00 while also winning multiple awards for her acting roles on TV: the bitchy boss on Ugly Betty in the late ’00s and Desperate Housewives in the early ’10s. And in 2016 she was appointed head judge of Miss America, complete with a public apology.

#3 Sir Mix-a-Lot – Baby Got Back

I mentioned that thanks to Soundscan, Hip-Hop songs started regularly topping the Hot100. Well our #3 hit is “exhibit A.” As far as Pop radio was concerned, it was hobbled by, number one, being a Hip-Hop song at all, but number two, it was way too raunchy for broadcast, at least during the day, so it barely even registered on the Airplay chart. But it still topped the Hot100 for the entire month of July (five weeks), and that was thanks to all the giggling Teen Gen-X-ers who went and bought the single.

Was it a Novelty hit? Or a serious comment on female body image and racial stereotyping? Well whichever side of that ongoing debate you come down on, it certainly was iconic. In a 2002 Friends episode, Ross gets his baby daughter to laugh for the first time when he sings it to her. In ’09, it was in an ad for Burger King’s SpongeBob Kids’ Meal toys. In 2014 Nicki Minaj based her entire song “Anaconda” on a line and sample from it and scored a #2 hit. And in 2020, none other than former Alaska Governor and Veep candidate Sarah Palin sang it on The Masked Singer. Our #3 song of 1992? Seattle’s Sir Mix-a-Lot: “Baby Got Back.”

Sir Mix-a-Lot (real name Anthony Ray) was against putting out “Baby Got Back” as a single, but after the track he picked instead about police harassment went nowhere, his producer, legendary Def Jam Records founder Rick Rubin, got his pick, and that was “Baby Got Back.” It moved up the Hot100 quickly but stalled at #5 and took six weeks to inch up to #1. Once on top, though, it stayed for five weeks and racked up the most weeks in the top ten since Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” in ’82.

After “Baby Got Back” faded, Mix-a-Lot put out a similar song, but this time instead of butts, the focus was on the other female attribute that young straight men have been known to obsess over. That song, “Put ‘Em on the Glass,” didn’t chart anywhere, and Sir Mix-a-Lot, despite “Baby Got Back’s” enduring legacy, was a one-hit wonder.

#2 Kris Kross – Jump

OK, we’re down to #2 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1992’s biggest hits, and it’s the fastest that a previously unknown act’s debut single has risen to #1 since Nebraskan Folk-Rock duo Zager & Evans’ Boomer doomsday anthem “In the Year 2525” in 1969: just four weeks! Also a duo, these two kids from Atlanta, Chris Kelly and Chris Smith, a.k.a. Mac Daddy and Daddy Mac, friends since first grade and barely into their Teens, discovered in a mall by Producer Jermaine Dupri, who first put Atlanta on the map for Hip-Hop in the ’90s.

But in ’92 Dupri, at 19, was just a few years older than the two kids. Dupri later said he’d never seen anyone so focused on being cool. So he taught them some Hip-Hop chops, produced their record in a few months, and its debut single also set a new record for weeks at #1 for a Hip-Hop track, eight. At #2 it’s Kris Kross’s “Jump.”

Anyone who had a pulse in the early ’90s remembers the two kids wearing their clothes backwards who gonna make you “jump! jump!” Unlike Zager & Evans, Kris Kross did make the charts again after their big debut hit, six more times. But “Jump” was their only top ten. Its eight-week run at #1, late April to June, spanned the destructive Rodney King riots in L.A.

#1 Boyz II Men – End of the Road

Now back at #6 we heard TLC’s big hit “Baby-Baby-Baby,” which I mentioned never hit #1 because for six weeks it was stuck behind what became the #1 song of the year 1992. Well, we’re down to #1 here on our 1992 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and after TLC dropped down to #3, this song still had another seven weeks to go on top, which broke the Hot100 record with 13 weeks at #1.

Produced and written by Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Antonio “L.A.” Reid, who also wrote and produced TLC, it’s on the same soundtrack (the Eddie Murphy romantic comedy Boomerang) that also had our #7 song, PM Dawn’s “I’d Die Without You.” Here’s the #1 song of 1992, Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.”

“End of the Road,” Boyz II Men: their first #1 after coming close in ’91 with their debut, “Motownphilly,” and their a capella smash “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.” “End of the Road,” #1 for 13 weeks, August to November and the #1 song of the year no matter how you slice or dice it. Later in the ’90s, Boyz II Men broke their own record for weeks at #1 twice, first with “I’ll Make Love to You,” 14 weeks in 1994, and then their duet with Mariah Carey, “One Sweet Day,” 16 weeks in ’95 and ’96. That record stood ’til Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” racked up 19 weeks on top in 2019.

Bonus

And that’s our top ten here on our 1992 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. In the little bit of time we have left, let’s shout out the three songs that made the top ten in Billboard’s year-end Hot100, but got nudged out of our top ten.

#12 Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under the Bridge

First up, our #12 song was Billboard’s #8 song of the year: an important entry because it highlighted Alt Rock’s crossover appeal after the switchover to Soundscan.

“Under the Bridge” by Lollapalooza headliners Red Hot Chili Peppers: 12 weeks in the top ten, May to July, just before the tour got underway: the biggest Alt Rock hit on the Hot100 the year Grunge arrived with Nirvana’s breakout hit “Smells like Teen Spirit” all over MTV. “Teen Spirit” only got to #6 on the Hot100 though because the fans that made Nirvana’s Nevermind, the #3 album of the year didn’t have much use for the single.

#13 En Vogue – My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)

At #7, Billboard had the second hit by the ’90s first R&B Girl Group, En Vogue’s “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It).”

“My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It),” En Vogue’s second top ten after arriving in 1990 with “Hold On:” the first of the modern R&B Girl Groups. TLC, SWV, Xscape, 702, Allure and Destiny’s Child… they all came after. Billboard has “My Lovin'” at #7 on the year; our ranking puts it at #13.

#11 Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven

Billboard’s #6 song had almost the exact same chart run as Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last.” The two songs debuted a week apart, and for 20 of the next 26 weeks that they were both on the chart before exiting the same week, they were just one or two positions apart, it’s Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.”.

“Tears in Heaven” was Eric Clapton’s song for his four-year-old son Conor, killed after falling out a 53rd story window in New York. It was the most successful single of his career.

Well, I hate to end the show on such a sad note, but that’s the hour. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening! Be sure to visit our website at chartcrush.com, where you’ll find written transcripts and streamable Spotify versions of this and other Chartcrush Countdown Shows, plus chart run line graphs and other legit extras. Also, check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week on this show we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1975.

Let’s just say it: a pretty crappy year. Nixon had just resigned over Watergate. Bad recession since ’73 due to the energy crisis, but in ’75, unemployment hit 9%. The dominoes fell in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and here at home, far-left terror groups were bombing government buildings and other targets in D.C., New York and elsewhere. In the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil until 9/11 (still unsolved, but probably Yugoslavians), the bombers took out a baggage area at New York’s LaGuardia airport, killing 11. Airplane hijackings were averaging 41 a year, ’68 to ’77.

And there were not one but two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford, both in Northern California in September, and both by women, a year after newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst had helped her kidnappers rob a bank. Manson-cultist-turned-radical-environmentalist Squeaky Fromm and wannabe revolutionary Sarah Jane Moore both spent over 30 years in prison. Moore’s attempt, just four days after Hearst was found and arrested in San Francisco.

America’s largest city was a shambles. New York hit rock bottom in 1975 when the urban decline that Soft-Rock duo Cashman & West mourned in their “American City Suite” in 1972 put the city on the edge of a fiscal cliff. In June, Police and Firefighter unions facing layoffs printed up a million “Fear City Survival Guides” (with a hooded skull on the cover!) to hand out to arriving visitors. In the Fall, the famous New York Daily News’ headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” after officials asked for a federal bailout.

Now you’d think movies would’ve been a refuge from all of this, right? But it was just the opposite! Some of the biggest blockbusters of the early ’70s were disaster movies that made modern life seem even more terrifying! Andromeda Strain, Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Earthquake!, Airport and its sequel Airport ’75.

But if seeing how much worse things could be wasn’t your idea of sanctuary, well, you can always take a hike in the woods, right? Back to nature! Maybe a canoe trip? Eh, not if you saw Deliverance! And forget about the beach! ’75’s top-grossing movie: Jaws! Ads for the sequel in ’78 had the tagline “Just when you though it was safe to go back in the water.” Even things you couldn’t see were out to get you, as 109 million North Americans who went to see The Exorcist learned.

Now Sports delivered the goods in ’75: Steelers, Flyers, Golden State Warriors and an epic World Series between the Reds and Red Sox. All the hype over Ali-Frazier III, the “Thrilla in Manilla,” propelled the song “Black Superman” into the Top 40 over the Summer, and the fight itself helped launch HBO and cable TV. That was only way to watch the fight live in your home. Broadcast TV didn’t get it ’til January!

But what about music? Well, ’75, like ’74, was quite a grab bag. Since the start of the Hot100 in 1958, an average of about 18 songs hit #1 per year. In ’74 there were 36, the all-time record, but ’75 had 35. All Billboard writers could say at the time to sum up the year was that “the polished smooth-yet-complex production sound” they’d noticed in ’74 was still in force.

Now some have called 1975 one of the worst years in Pop music, and the yardstick in such assessments seems to be how much “schlock” there was filling the airwaves. Schmaltzy, sappy, mawkish ballads anchored to the time they were on the radio like filled fish tanks in sixth-floor walkups.

#10 Morris Albert – Feelings

Well, ’75 had its share of those for sure, and our song at #10 as we kick off our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1975 was one of them: maybe the epitome of ’70s schlock. An entire episode of TV’s spoof talent competition The Gong Show was devoted to contestants singing just this one song. The whole show, just this one song!

Comedian Carol Burnett even did a skit where her Mama’s Family character Eunice Harper Higgins goes on The Gong Show and sings the song. And it’s been the brunt of jokes in countless movies, commercials and TV shows since. But it was a million seller on the chart five more weeks than any other song in ’75, 32. Here we go: Brazilian Morris Albert: “Feelings.”

Morris Albert’s “Feelings,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s biggest hits. In 1986, Albert was sued by French songwriter Louis Gasté for infringing his song “Pour Toi,” so on streaming services you’ll find the song as “Feelings (Pour Toi).”

#9 Neil Sedaka – Laughter in the Rain

Now the early ’70s were very good to several early ’60s Pop stars whose careers nosedived after the Beatles hit in ’64. Chuck Berry, Ray Stevens, Paul Anka, Brook Benton, Rick Nelson, Wayne Newton and Sammy Davis Jr. all scored major hits. And newer acts doing covers of early ’60s hits: lots of those. Even 1962’s “The Monster Mash” (not a remake) had another run on the charts in ’73 and got all the way to #10. Well one latecomer to that party was our Singer-Songwriter at #9, and it took the intervention of 1975’s hottest Pop star. Details after the song. At #9 it’s Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain.”

Behind Neil Sedaka’s ’70s comeback? None other than Elton John. Sedaka needed a new label in the U.S., and as it happened, Elton, a big fan, was starting one. So after they hit it off at a party in London, Elton’s new Rocket label put out a compilation of Sedaka’s recent U.K. releases that’d never been released stateside, and on that album, our #9 song, “Laughter in the Rain.” It took three and a half months to get to #1, but year-end rankings do favor slow-burners like that, so it’s among the top ten on the year.

Sedaka’s follow-up was also a hit: the upbeat, funky “Bad Blood,” which rocketed to #1 in just a few weeks with its prominent backing vocals by none other than Elton John. By the way, Sedaka also wrote… didn’t perform but wrote… the #1 song in our countdown, straight ahead on our 1975 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#8 Elton John – Island Girl

How hot was Elton John in ’75? Well, Billboard wasn’t doing an Artist ranking that factored albums and singles yet, but Elton would’ve won it hands down. His first of two albums released in ’75, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, was the first album ever to debut at #1. And then his second of the year did it too: Rock of the Westies. Oh, and his Greatest Hits set released at the end of ’74? That was ’75’s #1 album. So given all that, hardly a surprise that he has two songs in our top ten. At #8 is the lead single from that second album, Rock of the Westies, it’s “Island Girl.”

Dodger Stadium in L.A. hadn’t hosted a concert in a decade, but at the end of the year, Elton John played to over 100,000 two nights in a row there wearing his blue and white sequined Dodger uniform with ELTON over the number “1” on the back. Elton’s sound had been called “unclassifiable” because it drew from so many currents. But his fashion, attitude and showmanship, pure British Glam, tied it all together and gave him the space to switch up musical styles like he changed wardrobe and crazy sunglasses.

No one was confused. “Island Girl” hit #1 the week after Elton’s sold-out Dodger Stadium shows. Now since a good chunk of its chart run extended into Billboard’s 1976 “chart year,” don’t look for it on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 for ’75.

#7 Silver Convention – Fly, Robin, Fly

Ditto our next cut at #7. See, in order to get its year-end issue out before New Years, Billboard has to call an end to what it calls its “chart year,” usually in November. That doesn’t affect songs whose chart runs are all within the chart year, but for songs that are still on the charts, weeks after the cut-off get kicked into the following year.

Well for our Chartcrush rankings, we factor every song’s entire chart run into whichever calendar year it earned most of its points. So “Island Girl” takes its proper place at #8, and what Billboard has as its #14 song of 1976 gets rescued from its year-staddling oblivion and lands at #7 on our 1975 ranking.

Which is awesome, because it’s a key puzzle piece in how Disco evolved. Producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff laid down the template for Disco with their “Philly Soul” sound on hits like MFSB’s “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” and The Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again,” both of those top five hits in 1974.

But when Munich, Germany-based producers Sylvester (“Silver”) Levay and Michael Kunze decided to try their hand at the hot new Philly Soul sound, they filtered it through their minimalist German sensibilities, and what came out was something very different: a simplified version of Philly Soul with just a beat, a bass, a piano and some string flourishes.

But instead of being regarded as an inferior imitation, it turned out to be closer to the mark of what clubgoers wanted: the blissful hypnosis and sweaty, euphoric escape that can only come from losing yourself on the dancefloor. And for that, as it turned out, when it comes to music, less is more. Around Thanksgiving, Kunz and Lamay’s record hit #1 for three weeks. Here it is: #7, The Silver Convention, “Fly, Robin, Fly.”

The Silver Convention’s “Fly, Robin, Fly” at #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s top hits. The simple, mantra-like lyrics, only six words repeated ad nauseum, suited the non-English-speaking singers the producers lined up just fine, and it became a Disco trope. At the same time, another Munich-based producer, Italian-born synthpop and EDM pioneer Giorgio Moroder, was working with soon-to-be American Disco superstar Donna Summer on her debut. “Love to Love You Baby” hit the charts in December destined for #2 despite its scandalous 23 orgasms (the BBC counted). And Silver Convention were back in the top five in the Spring of ’76 with “Get Up and Boogie.”

#6 KC and The Sunshine Band – That’s the Way (I Like It)

Now a week before “Fly, Robin, Fly” hit #1, another early Disco record beat them to the top, despite having debuted two weeks later. Its chart run also spanned ’75 into ’76, so again, don’t look for it in Billboard’s year-end top ten, but factoring its full chart run in the year it earned the majority of its ranking points, as we do with all songs here on Chartcrush, it comes out the #6 song of 1975. From Miami, not Germany, they’d already scored with their debut “Get Down Tonight,” in August but were back late in the year with an even bigger hit. It’s KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (I Like It).”

KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way (I Like It)” beat “Fly, Robin, Fly” to #1, but then it rose to #1 for another week immediately after Silver Convention dropped out of the top spot. And with Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” scaling up the charts at the same time, the media didn’t quite know what to make of what Time called in print, “sex rock.” The word “disco,” not yet widely used to describe a style of music; still just a shortened form of “discotheque,” a public place where records are played.

By the way, the Bee Gees’ first Disco hit, “Jive Talkin’,” also one of 1975’s 35 #1 hits, for two weeks in August. That just misses our countdown at #12.

#5 Eagles – One of These Nights

But they were in the studio recording “Jive Talkin'” in early ’75 when our next act was making our #5 record right there in the same studio, North Miami’s Criteria Studios. On “Jive Talkin'” The Bee Gees followed the advice of their producer Arif Mardin and took things in the more funky, R&B-based direction that made them Disco superstars.

But it rubbed off a little on our act at #5, who were also in transition, looking to shake off Country and embrace Rock. That despite their very Countryish song “Best of My Love” having just become their first top five on its way to becoming their first #1 in March. Well mission accomplished shaking off Country, but there’s a little bit of Soul in our #5 hit too. And it was even bigger than “Best of My Love:” top ten from July to September and #1 for a week in August. It’s The Eagles’ “One of These Nights.”

“One of These Nights,” #5 on our 1975 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: the title track and lead single from The Eagles fourth album, and the stepping stone between the Country of “Best of My Love” in ’74 and “Hotel California” in ’77.  Their new guitarist Don Felder with that solo. And they were about to add yet another Rock guitarist to the lineup, Joe Walsh from The James Gang, after the Country purist in the band, co-founder, banjo and pedal steel player Bernie Leadon, reportedly poured a beer on bandmate Glen Frey before quitting over the group’s new direction.

#4 Freddy Fender – Before the Next Teardrop Falls

Our Singer at #4 was trying to avoid doing Country too, toiling away on a Tejano Rock/Swamp Pop album and playing clubs in Corpus Christi, Texas in ’74 after cutting records for 13 years without a hit, when New Orleans producer Huey Meaux approached him about singing over a backing track he’d produced of a song written in 1967 and already recorded and released (with little success) by over 30 artists including Charley Pride and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Meaux was an important guy in the music biz in the South, so he did it, but with a twist, and the record came out on Meaux’s Crazy Cajun Records and was a hit in Houston, so ABC-Dot picked it up nationally, and it topped first the Country chart in March, and then the Hot100 at the end of May. The twist? A verse in Spanish. The singer is Tejano. Born Baldemar Huerta, he changed his name circa 1959 to the hot new brand of guitars and amps all the cool cats in Rock ‘n Roll were playing at the time, it’s Freddy Fender at #4: “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”

Freddy Fender at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s top Pop hits, “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” He followed it up with an update of a song he’d written and first released when he was in his early twenties doing Rockabilly, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.” That got to #8 in September. He faded from the Hot100 after that, but charted nearly 20 more hits on the Country charts into the ’80s. Not bad for a guy who didn’t want to do Country!

#3 Elton John – Philadelphia Freedom

Now of course 1976 was America’s bicentennial, but the celebration (such as it was) was already underway in ’75. I say “such as it was” because with so little to celebrate about America in the here and now in the mid-’70s, kinda hard to get those patriotic juices flowing.

Still, there were bicentennial quarters, The Freedom Train, tall ships, the movie Rocky, a big parade with Johnny Cash, a new Liberty Bell donated by Queen Elizabeth II for the occasion, lots of fireworks, and for Pop fans, a big #1 single by the hottest name in music, who strenuously denies that it had anything whatsoever to do with American patriotism or the bicentennial. But fans didn’t get that memo, or didn’t care. It’s the closest thing there was to a bicentennial anthem on the U.S. Pop charts: Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom.”

“Philadelphia Freedom,” Elton John. Lyrics by John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin. A single-only release that besides K-Tel’s Music Express hits compilation, didn’t appear on any album until Elton’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2 set in 1977. Again, not intended as a bicentennial record, and to dispel the notion, the 45 label says “with Love to B.J.K. and the sound of Philadelphia.” Which made as much sense to fans as most of Taupin’s lyrics in the song. That’s not Bernie’s fault though. His only instruction? “Please write a song called ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ for me? Thank you, Elton.”

Well, the Philadelphia Freedoms was feminist icon Billie Jean King’s tennis team, but Taupin had no idea about that, so the lyrics have nothing to do with tennis, Billie Jean King or for that matter “The Sound of Philadelphia.” Music fans would’ve had more of a clue had Elton chosen to abbreviate that on the label instead of “B.J.K.” The Philly Soul instrumental “T.S.O.P.” had been a #1 hit for Gamble and Huff’s M.F.S.B. studio aggregation in ’74 and was the theme of Soul Train. Gosh, what a mess! But it was the bicentennial and Elton John’s new single was “Philadelphia Freedom,” so fans drew their own conclusions. “God Bless America!”

Footnote: Gamble and Huff’s M.F.S.B. aggregation was out with an album titled “Philadelphia Freedom” that had an American flag on the cover and an instrumental version of “Philadelphia Freedom,” and cracked the top 40 on the album chart heading into ’76.

#2 Glen Campbell – Rhinestone Cowboy

Well we’re down to #2 here on our 1975 edition of Chartcrush, the first record since Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” in 1961 to top the Country and Pop charts at the same time. Not surprising that ’75 would be the year that drought was be broken: Country crossover was big in the mid-’70s. And not only that, Trucker culture and CB radios were all the rage, with C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” also among 1975’s 35 #1 hits (also a #1 Country Hit, but not at the same time). And the movie “White Line Fever” starring Jan-Michael Vincent as an independent long-haul trucker becoming a surprise box office hit. Smokey & The Bandit came out just a couple years later.

At #2, not a trucker song, but a surprise comeback by a guy who got hot on the charts after teaming up with songwriter Jimmy Webb in the late ’60s, who had his own TV variety show for three years and even played opposite John Wayne in True Grit. His phone hadn’t been ringing for a few years by ’75 though, so he had an idea how the protagonist in the song felt. At #2, it’s Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

No one really saw “Rhinestone Cowboy” coming. Glen Campbell recorded it for the album he was working on, but then a programmer with L.A.’s biggest top 40 radio station, KHJ, saw him play it live on a TV charity telethon and called Capitol Records to get a copy. Until it took off on radio, no one was even planning to release it as a single!

Joining Glen Campbell in the studio to record the song was a loose group of professional L.A. session players that is today known as The Wrecking Crew. They played on thousands of records in the ’60s and early ’70s, but as studio musicians hired basically by the hour, they were never credited on any of them. Campbell himself had paid his bills as a Wrecking Crew guitarist before becoming a star in his own right. “Rhinestone Cowboy” had the most weeks in the Top 40 of any 1975 hit (18) with two weeks at #1 in September: the #2 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s top hits.

#1 Captain and Tennille – Love Will Keep Us Together

Now our #1 song, also recorded with Wrecking Crew musicians, but one of the last. As studios went from four to 16 tracks in the ’70s, producers no longer needed an entire ensemble playing live, so time and money-saving pre-mic’d setups like The Wrecking Crew became obsolete. But what a way to go out, huh? The #2 and #1 hits of the year!

And at #1, the debut single and the first of eight top 20 hits ’75 to ’80 by a husband-and-wife duo who scored their own prime-time network TV variety show after this song was a smash. The #1 record of 1975, both in our Chartcrush ranking and according to Billboard, it’s The Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

Didja hear that callout just now? Toni Tennille subbing “Sedaka’s back” for one of the “da da da’s” in the fadeout? How Hip-Hop of her! Sedaka, of course, Neil Sedaka, who wrote the song, and who’d just scored his own big comeback hit early in ’75 with his song we heard back at #9, “Laughter in the Rain.”

Notwithstanding the composition or The Wrecking Crew’s involvement though, it was Darryl Dragon (a.k.a. “The Captain’s”) pioneering synthesizer work that really made the song leap out of the speakers and get noticed in early ’75. The synth bass sound that opens the song and plays throughout: no one had ever heard anything quite like that before, especially on a Top 40 record, and the solo was pretty cutting-edge too. Stations in Alabama, Kentucky and Ohio were playing it for a few weeks before the big California stations added it, but once that happened it was everywhere.

Darryl Dragon and Toni Tennille met as keyboard virtuosos in The Beach Boys touring band before teaming up as a duo for gigs at a restaurant in Encino, California. That and a self-released record got them signed to A&M Records, the Carpenters’ label. Another superstar, Roberta Flack, had gotten her start as a Lounge act in a pub in D.C. earlier in the ’70s. Apparently, people actually paid attention to live music in restaurants in those days! When “Por Amor Viviremos,” the Spanish version of “Love Will Keep Us Together” charted, it was the first time that two versions of the same song by the same artist were on the Hot100 simultaneously.

Bonus

Well that’s our top ten countdown. Now due to the two Disco “year-straddlers” coming into our top ten, plus “Island Girl” and some differences in ranking methodology, four songs that made the top ten in Billboard’s 1975 year-end Hot100 got bumped out of ours, so let’s shout those out.

#23 John Denver – Thank God I’m a Country Boy

At #10, Billboard had a rollicking live version of a song by one of the early ’70s’ top Singer-Songwriters, #23 on our Chartcrush ranking: John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”

John Denver also had a double-A-sided single on the charts late Summer into the Fall: a 45 where both sides are hits. In ’75, Billboard’s policy was to chart the side was getting more airplay. So a week after “I’m Sorry” dropped down to #2, the other side, “Calypso,” took over on the Hot100. Now if they’d been combining sides of records like that for chart positions as was their policy in other eras, one of those two songs would’ve definitely been in the top ten on the year. Oh well! Without access to Billboard’s underlying Airplay data though, nothing we can do to separate them out.

#11 David Bowie – Fame

Billboard’s #7 song of 1975 just misses our Chartcrush top ten at #11, something completely different on your radio: David Bowie’s “Fame.”

Former Beatle John Lennon was hanging with Bowie in the studio and supplied those falsetto “Fame’s” heard throughout. Bowie described “Fame” as “plastic funk … the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak Rock, written and sung by a white Limey.”

#14 Earth, Wind & Fire – Shining Star

Well, as if to balance out Bowie’s “Plastic Funk” at #7, Billboard‘s #6 song of the year is some legit Funk, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star.”

According to Rolling Stone, Earth, Wind & Fire redefined the sound of African-American Pop in the mid ’70s, and “Shining Star” was their biggest Hot100 hit of the ’70s, #14 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#17 Frankie Valli – My Eyes Adored You

And finally, Billboard’s #5 song (#17 on our ranking) was another major comeback by an early ’60s legend, Four Season Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You.”

Now unlike Neil Sedaka, whose last top 40 hit before “Laughter in the Rain” was all the way back in 1963, Frankie Valli didn’t hit his commercial slump ’til 1968, but a slump is a slump, and Motown wouldn’t release the record. So he bought the master and put it out on a start-up label. Well it took four months to get to #1, but after that, not only was Frankie Valli back; so was his group The Four Seasons. Their “Who Loves You,” our #40 song of 1975.

And that’s gonna have to be a wrap for our 1975 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can find written transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other dyn-o-mite extras. Also, check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning ofthe charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1956.

Do ya like Elvis? Well, ’56 was Elvis Presley’s breakthrough year on the charts, and he has four songs in our Top Ten Countdown.

Now here at Chartcrush, we’ve ranked every year since Billboard started doing weekly Pop charts in 1940 using the same ranking method for every year. For pre-Hot100 years, we combine Billboard’s weekly Best Sellers, Jukebox and DJ charts into a unified Hot100-style ranking, just like Billboard did in 1958 when it created the Hot100, and then do the ranking just like Hot100 years after 1958. Besides Jimmy Dorsey and his Big Band in 1941, Elvis is the only act in chart history with four records in the top ten on a year. The Beatles in ’64, Bee Gees in ’78, Ace of Base in ’94, Usher in 2004, they all had three.

Now Elvis, or Rock ‘n Roll for that matter, couldn’t have dominated the Pop charts the way it did without cheap, unbreakable vinyl 45 singles. 45s brought record collecting within budget for teenagers for the first time. They cost about 65 cents apiece in the ’50s, which was a little over $7 adjusting for inflation. And the portable record players teens got to play them on ran between $20-50. They made great gifts for Christmas, birthdays, graduations. By ’56, 45s had been around a little over six years, and teens were buying boatloads of them.

But not only that: the Seeburg Company in 1955 introduced the first 200-selection jukebox. With two songs per record, side A and side B, that’s 100 45s, and with three quarters of a million jukeboxes out there in the wild, that’s a lot of records. And more slots to fill in jukeboxes meant more variety, so Billboard kept having to increase the number of positions on its Pop charts in the ’50s.

45 changers and 45s selling like crazy, but jukeboxes, a huge part of the record biz. “Put another dime in the jukebox,” as Joan Jett once said. Or you could “turn up the radio” as glam rockers Autograph sang around the same time, and tune in to your local Top 40 station.

Top 40, a format pioneered in the Midwest just after 45s debuted, by Todd Storz, who, legend has it, noticed customers in a bar across the street from his radio station in Omaha, Nebraska playing the same record over and over again on the jukebox.

Now the oldest Baby Boomers in 1956 were only turning ten, so the generation buying all these Rock ‘n Roll records and putting all those dimes in jukeboxes was the one that came before Boomers, the Silent Generation aged 11-31 in ’56, so-called because they tended to keep their heads down and work within the system to build comfortable lives and nest eggs. But as teens, music, Rock ‘n Roll, especially, was their outlet.

Comprising the adult 30- and 40-something demographic in the mid ’50s, of course, was the “Greatest” or “G.I.” generation that’d fought and won World War 2, raised in the era of Victrolas and scratchy-sounding shellac 78s. But in the ’50s vinyl records and electronics revolutionized the quality of sound for home audio. If you could afford it, you geared up your swanky mid-century living room with a hi-fi system. Albums of course became the preferred format for audiophiles, especially once stereo hit, which made singles even more the domain of young people, but in the mid ’50s, grownups were buying lots of 45s too, preferring ones that made their expensive new hi-fi’s sound like the money they cost.

#10 Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra – Lisbon Antigua

And one of those is our #10 song: the first of two instrumentals we’re gonna hear this hour. He became Frank Sinatra’s top arranger and bandleader with Capitol Records in the ’50s, but even before that, he’d worked under Les Baxter on Nat King Cole’s early ’50s smashes “Mona Lisa” and “Too Young,” and some say he was the arranger on those records even though Baxter got the conductor credit. But like Baxter, plus Columbia’s Percy Faith, RCA’s Hugo Winterhalter, Decca’s Frank Chacksfield and others, he also got to put out his own records, and this one was huge: piano, string section, brass, and a wordless male chorus. It’s Nelson Riddle’s version of an old Portuguese children’s song, “Lisbon Antigua.”

Nelson Riddle’s “Lisbon Antigua,” the #1 Best Seller for four weeks, March into April, but it didn’t fare quite as well on the Jukebox or DJ charts. Which was the pattern for so-called “hi-fi hits.” In the Summer, after it was a chart hit, it showed up theaters, in Ray Milland’s film noir Lisbon.

#9 Elvis Presley – Hound Dog

So Elvis! Four songs in our 1956 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, and at #9 is what some say is his signature song, not just because it was a huge hit, but because his performance of it on TV in June caused such an uproar across the media and instantly transformed Elvis from just the latest in a string of fleeting and essentially harmless Teen fads to the personification of the whole Rock ‘n Roll movement and a cultural phenomenon. At #9, “Hound Dog.”

Performing “Hound Dog” for 40 million viewers on comedian Milton Berle’s very mainstream prime-time TV variety show on June 5, 1956, Elvis abruptly stopped, waved his arm and commenced a slow, grinding version that he accented with some, ahem, very suggestive body movements. Ben Gross of the New York Daily News wrote that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley. … Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.” And that’s just one sample. You should see what the Times said!

“Hound Dog” was Black slang for a ladies man who tries to schmooze his way into a woman’s life so she’ll take care of him and he doesn’t have to work. A male gold digger! Which made total sense sung by female singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, for whom songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote it in 1953 and scored a #1 R&B hit.

Lieber and Stoller, a pair of East Coast Jewish guys who bonded over their obsession with Black culture and R&B as students in Los Angeles in 1950, and started writing songs together. They wrote over 70 chart hits early in the Rock Era including #1’s for The Coasters, Drifters and Elvis.

Lieber and Stoller knew what a “hound dog” was. Did Elvis? Did Freddie Bell & The Bellboys, the White vocal group whose version he copied after seeing them at the Sands in Vegas? And how about all the DJs and teens who turned it into an iconic early Rock ‘n Roll hit? Probably not! And for all the day-after outrage in the press over Elvis’s gyrating on Milton Berle, no one really bothered to explore the lyrics!

Elvis recorded his version in New York a month after that Milton Berle appearance, and it was originally the “B” side of the 45! But that record with not one but two hits on it simultaneously topped the Pop, Country and R&B Best Sellers charts from mid-August to the end of October. We’ll hear the A-side a little later in our 1956 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#8 Kay Starr – Rock and Roll Waltz

Now Rock ‘n Roll was 1955’s big headline on the Pop charts, with Bill Haley & The Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” first to hit #1 in August, then Pat Boone’s version of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” a #1 Jukebox hit in September while Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” was also in the top ten. When the weather cooled off in the Fall of ’55 though, so did Rock on the charts. As it turned out, it was the calm before the storm.

While America’s biggest record label RCA was busy poaching Elvis from Sam Phillips’ indie Sun Rockabilly label outta Memphis, they scored the first hit with “Rock ‘n Roll” in the title by a veteran Pop Singer who’d been at it since the ’30s and was one of the top Pop acts of the early ’50s, with nine top10s to her name including the #1 “Wheel of Fortune,” which was the #2 hit in our 1952 countdown.

It’s a Novelty number about oldsters trying to dance to their teenage kids’ Rock ‘n Roll records, and it replaced The Platters’ “The Great Pretender” at #1 in March, right as Elvis was debuting on the charts. At #8 it’s Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz.”

Pop singer Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz,” Billboard’s #10 Best Seller, but #1 on their year-end ranking of 1956’s Jukebox hits. Combining those, plus the DJ chart, it lands at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking we’re counting down this hour.

Before Rock ‘n Roll, the last dance craze to sweep the nation: Mambo, but mostly with adults. Cuban bandleader Perez Prado’s “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” the #1 song of 1955, beating “Rock Around the Clock” at #2, and veteran Crooners Perry Como and Vaughn Monroe both scoring in ’54 with “Papa Loves Mambo” and “They Were Doin’ the Mambo,” respectively, both on RCA by the way. So it made a lot of sense to repeat that trick with Rock ‘n Roll and Kay Starr.

#7 Elvis Presley – Love Me Tender

And speaking of Crooners and Crooning: still mandatory for male Pop Singers even after Rock ‘n Roll broke through, to reach that next level of popularity, just like Female vocal chops were in the ’90s. Well, Elvis of course was a natural. Three of his chart hits in ’56 were Croons, and the biggest of those was Civil War-era song updated with new lyrics by the guy whose “Singers” backed up Bing Crosby on “White Christmas,” Ken Darby.

It was written for Elvis’s first movie, a Musical Western, working title The Reno Brothers. But it was released ahead of the film, and when record sales hit a million, producers decided to release the film with the same title as the song.  #1 Best Sellers and Airplay for all of November, then Jukeboxes for a week after that, our #7 song of 1956 is Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”

They easily could’ve fleshed out that arrangement with lush strings and a chorus typical of Pop Ballads at the time. And an instrumental version by Orchestra Leader Henri Rene issued by the same label (RCA) while the Love Me Tender movie was in theaters in the Fall, did just that. But in an era before producers dominated recording sessions, Elvis was in control in the studio, so the sound of his records? It’s all Elvis.

And not just that. Early on, manager Col. Tom Parker required Songwriters to put Presley down as a co-writer if they wanted him to cut their songs so Elvis would half the publishing royalties. He was a shrewd operator, that Col. Tom! But in many cases Elvis earned that co-credit by changing up lyrics on the fly in addition to being the de facto producer and arranger at his sessions.

#6 Dean Martin – Memories Are Made of This

Well, we’re gonna stick with Crooners for the #6 hit on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1956: the first #1 for an Italian-American Rat Packer who’d nearly topped the charts in ’54 with his breakthrough, “That’s Amore.” He’d been on the charts since 1949, though, so the #1 in ’56 was a long time coming. #6, it’s Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.”

The top song on the charts for five weeks January into February of 1956, before Elvis, and #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1956, Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.”

And Deano was far from done: “Return to Me” and his version of “Volare” were massive hits in 1958, both with verses sung in Italian. And in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania, he actually made good on his wild boast that his latest record was gonna knock his Fab Four-obsessed son’s “pallies” off the top of the charts.

“Everybody Loves Somebody” bumped “A Hard Day’s Night” from the #1 spot in August! One of the last oldskool Crooner hits on the Hot100, but Martin was dominant on the Easy Listening chart for the rest of the ’60s while he hosted his top-rated prime-time variety show on NBC all the way into the mid-’70s, and then his series of celebrity roasts into the mid-’80s.

#5 Jim Lowe – The Green Door

But back to 1956. Dot Records was the Gallatin, Tennessee label that’d unleashed Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame” in ’55, the second big Rock ‘n Roll hit after “Rock Around the Clock.” And Boone followed it up with four more top10s, all on Dot, including a #1 with his “whitewashed” cover of Bluesman Ivory Joe Hunter’s “I Almost Lost My Mind.” That’s #19 on our 1956 Chartcrush ranking.

But Elvis, Carl Perkins, Sun Records and Rockabilly had changed the game, so Dot scrambled for Elvis-style material and found Sanford Clark’s “The Fool,” which got to #8 in September, then an even bigger hit that was by a New York DJ! After Archie Bleyer’s “Hernando’s Hideaway” in ’54, it’s the second #1 hit in the mid-’50s about the mysterious goings-on at secret members-only after-hour clubs. At #5, Jim Lowe’s “The Green Door.”

33-year-old Missourian Jim Lowe had just started his long career in New York radio when Dot put out “The Green Door” and it dislodged Elvis’ biggest hit of ’56 from #1 in November, and then Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” replaced it two weeks later. Some have called it a Novelty. Most records by radio guys are, including Lowe’s first Dot Record in 1955, “Close the Door (They’re Comin’ in the Windows).” But Novelty hits rarely spark as much speculation about what inspired them.

Theories about “The Green Door” abound, ranging from a Chicago speakeasy, to a lesbian club in London featured in the 1968 Robert Aldrich movie The Killing of Sister George, to “The Shack” in Columbia, Missouri where Lowe went to college. Covers over the years include Country singer Crystal Gayle in the ’70s, Welsh singer Shakin’ Stevens, fresh from playing Elvis in a West End musical. His was a #1 hit in the U.K. in 1981. And a surprisingly faithful rendition by New York Horror Rockers The Cramps.

Incidentally, don’t look for “The Green Door” on Billboard’s Top Ten lists for ’56 because its chart run goes seven weeks into 1957: just one of dozens of songs throughout the history of Billboard’s year-end charts whose runs straddled two different years, so they fell through the cracks. At Chartcrush, though, we rank every song’s full chart run in whichever year it earned the majority of its ranking points.

#4 Les Baxter, His Chorus and Orchestra – The Poor People of Paris

OK, so we heard Nelson Riddle’s “Lisbon Antigua” at #10; at #4, the record that 1956’s newly-minted hi-fi enthusiasts made the year’s biggest instrumental hit, by the conductor/arranger I mentioned who mentored Nelson Riddle at Capitol.

He scored his first top10 under his own name in ’51 with a chorus-and-strings rendition of “Because of You,” the Tony Bennett hit. “April in Portugal” and the first hit version of “Unchained Melody” followed, both among the top ten Best Selling singles of 1953 and ’55, respectively, and he kept the streak going into ’56 with the record that Elvis’ first hit replaced at #1. It’s Les Baxter: “The Poor People of Paris.”

Les Baxter’s last chart hit, the million-seller “The Poor People of Paris,” #4 as we count down the biggest hits of 1956 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show. Capitol continued putting out Les Baxter singles, but he shunned Rock ‘n Roll, and after “Poor People of Paris,” he disappeared from the charts completely, even the album charts, despite averaging over three LP’s of new material a year on Capitol from ’56 to ’62, mostly in a subgenre of Easy Listening lounge music called Exotica that was especially popular with hi-fi-equipped 30- and 40- something War vets, many of whom had visited or served in “exotic” locales like the Caribbean and South Pacific.

A resurgence of interest in Exotica in the ’90s, after Baxter’s albums had been languishing in thrift shop bins for 25 years, got Capitol to release its two-disc Exotic Moods of Les Baxter anthology in ’96, as it turned out, just before he died at 73. And Silicon Valley’s culture gazette, Wired magazine eulogized him. Writer David Toop snarked that Baxter “offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home stereo comforts in the white bread suburbs.” Not unlike more recent hipster coffee-shop fare like the Putumayo World Music series for example.

#3 Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel

Well we’re down to #3, which Billboard named the #1 Best Seller of the year in its recap, since it was #1 on the weekly Best Sellers chart for eight straight weeks. But radio wasn’t quite as enthusiastic, so when you factor in the DJ chart, other songs outrank it. It’s Elvis’s first #1 record and his first single for RCA after leaving Memphis’s legendary rockabilly label, Sun, a few months prior. With lyrics inspired by a newspaper story about a lonely man who jumped to his death out a hotel window, it’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Like nothing heard in Pop music up ’til then or since: Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” It gets your attention from the first syllable with its sparse and bleak intensity, and doesn’t let you go until the bitter end. Imagine how that must have sounded up against the other songs you’ve been hearing in our 1956 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown so far! Even in Elvis’s own repertoire it stands alone in its desperation. It reached the top five on the Country, Pop and R&B charts from April to July.

Carl Perkins was still on Sun Records, and his “Blue Suede Shoes” hit the charts the same week as “Heartbreak Hotel,” and they were neck-and-neck all of March into April with Perkins even leading two of those five weeks, until “Heartbreak Hotel” shot to #1. “Blue Suede Shoes” shakes out at #26 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#2 Gogi Grant – The Wayward Wind

At #2 we have a song that veteran Western singer Tex Ritter took into the top ten in the U.K. in 1956. But the version that was a hit in the U.S. was the first one that was recorded, by the singer who beat out Doris Day for most popular female vocalist in Billboard’s DJ poll: the only year Day didn’t win from 1949 all the way to ’58. And it’s the song that knocked “Heartbreak Hotel” out of the #1 spot in June: Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind.”

#1 on the nation’s airwaves in 1956 according to Billboard’s year-end DJ chart, Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind, which came out on the indie Era label out of Hollywood, who signed Grant after her first two singles in 1952 had failed to chart for RCA. But her first record on Era was a top 20 hit in 1955, “Suddenly There’s a Valley,” and then “The Wayward Wind” caught fire, just a few months after the mania over Disney’s Davy Crockett miniseries had died down a bit.

By the way, ’56 was the last year any record sung by a female made the top ten on Billboard’s year-end chart ’til Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” in 1960. Our Chartcrush rankings have Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy” at #4 for 1957, but no females in ’58 or ’59 on our rankings either.

#1 Elvis Presley – Don’t Be Cruel

And we’re down to #1 here on our 1956 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It’s the A-side of the B-side that was our #9 song of the year, “Hound Dog.” For the fourth time in our countdown, here again, Elvis Presley: his biggest hit the year he notched four of the top ten records. At #1, it’s “Don’t Be Cruel.”

It took 28 takes to get “Don’t Be Cruel” how Elvis wanted it. He perfected the arrangement on a piano right there in the studio. “Hound Dog” took 31 takes the same day. Despite all that, RCA’s Stephen H. Sholes got the production credit on the record. Elvis did “Don’t Be Cruel” all three times he appeared on CBS’s top-rated Ed Sullivan Show in ’56 into ’57.

Well, there you have ’em: the top ten songs of 1956 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Now there are several songs that made the published year-end top ten on one of Billboard’s three chart categories (Sales, Jukebox Plays and Airplay), yet missed the top ten on our combined ranking. In the time we have left, let’s give some of those a listen, shall we?

#12 The Platters – The Great Pretender

Billboard’s #4 Jukebox and DJ Airplay song of the year narrowly missed the year-end Best Sellers ranking at #12, which is where it lands in our Chartcrush ranking: #12 on the year. It’s the Black vocal group that bridged the gap for Teens between Rock ‘n Roll’s first hits in the Summer of ’55, and Elvis in early ’56, prominently featured in the first B-movie Rock exploitation film, Bill Sears’s Rock Around the Clock. Here’s The Platters’ biggest hit, “The Great Pretender.”

Platters, “The Great Pretender,” #1 for two weeks in February between Dean Martin and Kay Starr. Their “My Prayer,” also hit #1 for two weeks later in the year, in August, and that one was Billboard’s #4 Best Seller of 1956.

#15 Doris Day – Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Será, Será)

But instead of a Platters twofer, we’re gonna move on to Billboard’s #8 Best Seller, which was #13 and 12 on the year-end Jukebox and DJ rankings, respectively, and our Chartcrush #15 song of the year, from the Alfred Hitchcock picture The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring Jimmy Stewart and the singer, also an A-list leading lady, who made it her signature song for the rest of her career. It’s Doris Day’s “Que Será, Será (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).”

Doris Day’s hitmaking career goes all the way back to 1945 when she was the singer on two of the iconic homecoming anthems for troops returning from World War 2, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time” and “Sentimental Journey,” both with the Les Brown Big Band, with whom she continued to perform and record ’til her first movie and solo records in 1948.

#16 Morris Stoloff Conducting The Columbia Pictures Orchestra – Moonglow and Theme from ‘Picnic’

#5 on Billboard’s year-end DJ chart was only #27 on Jukeboxes. Maybe because it was always on the radio! It’s an instrumental medley from the blockbuster movie Picnic starring William Holden and Kim Novak and our #16 hit of 1956: Morris Stoloff with the Columbia Pictures Orchestra, “Moonglow and Theme from ‘Picnic.'”

Composer George Duning wrote the Theme from Picnic as a musical counterpoint to the 1933 tune “Moonglow,” so musically it made sense to mash ’em up as a medley. In 2004, director Martin Scorsese used the same recording to score a key romantic scene in The Aviator where Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes and Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn fly over Los Angeles at night in one of Hughes’ private planes.

#21 Perry Como – Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)

Next we return to Croonerdom and a record that hit #1 on the DJ chart for a week and was Billboard’s #9 DJ song of the year. But it stalled at #2 Sales and Jukeboxes behind “Heartbreak Hotel” and shakes out at #21 on our combined yearly ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show. The Singer was the first to get his own TV show in 1948, and now, at 44, he was back on NBC doing his live one-hour variety show on Saturday nights that, in the Fall of ’56, became the first to be broadcast in color! Of his four top10 hits in 1956, this was the biggest. It’s Perry Como’s “Hot Diggity.”

“Hot Diggity, subtitled “Dog Ziggity Boom,” Perry Como here on our 1956 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Singer Al Jolson coined that phrase in 1928 and anyone who watched TV in the late ’70s no doubt remembers the Oscar-Meyer hot dog commercial that repurposed the song.

#24 Four Lads – No Not Much

Finally Billboard’s #3 DJ Airplay song of the year, which was #20 and 10 on the year-end Best Sellers and Jukebox charts respectively, and #24 on our combined Chartcrush ranking.

Fresh-faced Canadian Vocal Quartet, The Four Lads, coming off their massive 1955 hit “Moments to Remember,” “No, Not Much,” wrapping up Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show look back at 1956.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and I want to thank you for listening this hour. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can get a written transcript and streamable Spotify versions of this and other Chartcrush Countdown Shows, plus chart run line graphs and other jazzed extras. Also, check us out on TikTok, @chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Hot100 charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week, we’re turning the clock back to the year 2000, the first year of the new century and the new millennium.

But actually, fun fact: 2001, not 2000, was the turn of the Millennium, since there was never a “year zero.” (People liked to point that out). But 2000 was the first year that started with two. And that alone could’ve been catastrophic had $100 billion with a “b” not been spent in the last years of the ’90s to upgrade computers that stored years with just the last two digits of the year, and avert the Y2K computer disaster.

But having dodged that bullet, the first 21 months of the new decade seemed a lot like the 1990s! Until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks marked the start of the ’00s as a distinct cultural “decade.”

One thing though already coming into focus: music! Unlike Gen-X, Millennials didn’t waste any time imprinting themselves on pop culture. The late ’90s Pop explosion (Britney, Christina, Boy Bands and MTV’s Total Request Live afterschool show, TRL for short): going strong. Boy Band N’Sync (featuring Britney Spears’ then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake), had the #1 album of Y2K, No Strings Attached. Media-dubbed “Bad Girl” Christina Aguilera, who didn’t perform at the Grammys, won Best New Artist over “Good Girl” Britney Spears, who did.

Britney beat Christina on the album chart for a second straight year, but Aguilera flipped the script on the Hot100, 2000 vs. ’99, in addition to that Grammy win. The rivalry, still front and center in Y2K. Backstreet Boys (another Boy Band), also in the top ten on Billboard’s year-end album chart.

The music mogul behind both Backstreet Boys and N’Sync though? Lou Pearlman? Losing control and soon to be sued for fraud and abusive management by both. All those cases settled out of court, but Pearlman, eventually convicted for conspiracy and money laundering.

Divadom was in transition in 2000, as the last of mainstream R&B’s long resistance to Hip-Hop dissolved. Top ’90s Divas Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton took big steps in the direction things were going on “Heartbreak Hotel” and “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” respectively, but Singers like Celine Dion and Mariah Carey had nowhere to go but the Adult Contemporary charts. And the full-on merger of R&B and Hip-Hop became unstoppable in the ’00s.

But there was a lot more happening on the charts in Y2K. And lots of surprises! No one from 1999’s top ten repeated in 2000.

#10 Vertical Horizon – Everything You Want

Now as we kick things off at #10, did you know, there’s a whole subreddit (an entire category within the Reddit discussion website) devoted to #niceguys? Think relationships: these are guys who present as gentle, compassionate, sensitive, vulnerable.

Well within that subreddit is a thread about how our #10 song is the theme song of nice guys. It was the commercial breakthrough for a ’90s Indie-Rock band that formed at D.C.’s Georgetown University and relocated to Boston, and although these nice guys are finishing last on our countdown, #10 on the year (#5 going by Billboard), on the strength of 19 weeks in the top ten? That’s not bad! Here’s Vertical Horizon. “Everything You Want.”

Vertical Horizon, “Everything You Want,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2000’s biggest hits. At the end of the video, a message appears: “Everything you want is not everything you need.” Songwriter and group leader Matt Scannell explains: “I was in love with this girl, and she was just a broken person. She kept turning to everyone except me for love and acceptance, and I wanted so much to help her, but I couldn’t.”

Aw. Theme song for nice guys. Not technically a one-hit wonder. Vertical Horizon’s follow-up, “You’re a God” got to #28 and is in the Jim Carrey flick, Bruce Almighty.

#9 Matchbox Twenty – Bent

So as we just heard, a new sweet spot for Rock on the Pop charts came into focus after big hits in the late ’90s by Hootie & The Blowfish, Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind and others that blended Grunge’s sound and aesthetic with melody and Emo first-person songwriting that would’ve made Kurt Cobain cringe, to create “Post-Grunge.”

Y2K saw the most Rock acts hit #1 on the Hot100 since the height of Hair Metal in the ’80s. But another thing that made that possible: Billboard dropping its requirement for the Hot100 at the start of the 1999 chart year that songs had to be in stores as physical singles to chart.

Since the demise of 45s and vinyl in the early ’90s, there hadn’t been viable format for Rock singles. CD singles, great for genres like Dance, R&B and Hip-Hop that’d been putting out multiple mixes and extended 12-inch club versions for years, but in Rock, the song’s the song; who needs a CD with just two tracks?

But starting in 1999 songs could make the Hot100 on just Airplay. No single release required. And sure enough, the three biggest Rock acts on Hot100 in ’99, Goo Goo Dolls, Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray, all bands that’d had major Airplay hits earlier in the ’90s that couldn’t chart on the Hot100.

Well in 2000, another band in that category scored their first #1 hit. Their melodramatic, guitar-driven “3AM” had been the #4 Airplay hit of 1998, but no single release, so it didn’t chart on the Hot100. Their 2000 sophomore album Mad Season, three years in the making, disappointed hardcore Rock fans with its horns, keyboards, sophisticated melodies and toned-down vocals, but it hit the Pop-Rock bullseye and produced a #1 hit. The first of two songs in our countdown sung by matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas, here’s “Bent.”

matchbox 20’s “Bent” only peaked at #16 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart. Even Vertical Horizon beat that. But it was in the top ten on the Hot100 for 14 weeks, #1 for a week in July, and the #9 song of the year 2000 according to our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. And the follow-up, “If You’re Gone,” also from Mad Season, was also a top five hit.

#8 Savage Garden – I Knew I Loved You

Now for all the hype about Boy Bands ‘NSYNC and Backstreet Boys I mentioned at the top of the show, ‘NSYNC’s biggest 2000 hit, “Bye Bye Bye,” and Backstreet Boys’ “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely” only shake out at numbers 27 and 43 on our 2000 Chartcrush ranking, respectively. Their albums No Strings Attached and Millennium, respectively, more than picked up that slack.

But an Australian, call them a “Boy Duo”, did make our top ten Hot100 songs of 2000 at #8. They first came to Pop fans’ attention in 1996 with a big Dance-Pop hit called “I Want You” off their debut album, and followed it up with the love song ballad on the album, “Truly Madly Deeply,” and that shot all the way to #1.

So in ’99, they’re finishing up their second album, and the suits at Columbia Records are like: “Where’s the next ‘Truly Madly Deeply?'” because the album didn’t have a love-song ballad. Now, label-coerced follow-ups aren’t always hits, but this one sure was was! #1 for four weeks in January and February and #8 on our countdown, it’s Savage Garden’s “I Knew I Loved You.”

Savage Garden, “I Knew I Loved You,” #8 on our 2000 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: the last song by an Australian artist to top the Hot100 until Gotye’s left-field hit, “Somebody That I Used to Know,” in 2012.

Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones (the Duo comprising Savage Garden) went their separate ways in ’01 at the peak of their fame, with Hayes going on to a pretty successful solo career. Asked in ’07 if he and Jones would ever consider reuniting, Hayes said “only if it cured cancer.” OK then.

#7 Joe – I Wanna Know

The year 2000 wasn’t a big year for soundtrack albums, but it was a big year for songs from soundtracks. Two in our countdown of the year’s biggest hits, the first at #7 from The Wood, the coming-of-age movie about three guys growing up in the L.A. suburb of Inglewood in the ’80s.

It had the most weeks in the top 40 of any 2000 song: 38, largely thanks to its ubiquitous airplay on R&B radio. It was Billboard’s #1 R&B Airplay song of the year. But it was especially big on “Adult R&B:” a format that got its own Billboard chart in 1993 as the home of Neo-Soul and smooth Contemporary R&B, but boomed as older listeners sought a refuge from harder Hip-Hop inflected sounds that were becoming the default at the turn of the millennium.

Adult formats in every genre thrived in the ’00s. Savage Garden was Billboard’s #1 Adult Contemporary artist of 2000, but on the Adult side of R&B, it was all Joe, and “I Wanna Know.”

After it was already in the top 20 as a soundtrack cut, “I Wanna Know” was included on Joe’s 2000 album, My Name Is Joe, which included the follow-up hit, “Stutter” (featuring Rapper Mystikal). That became his only #1 hit in 2001. “I Wanna Know” peaked at #4 in July.

#6 Lonestar – Amazed

Now even though there were two Country acts in the top ten of Billboard’s 1998 Hot100 recap (Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One” at #3 and LeeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live” at #5), in his “Year in Charts” feature, Billboard writer and chart guru Fred Bronson expressed surprise that there were two Country songs in the year-end top ten for 2000.

Well, here at Chartcrush, for what we like to call “the broken Hot100 years” (’95 to ’98), we go by the Airplay chart, not the Hot100, so in our rankings there’s no Shania or LeeAnn in 1998 so you have to go all the way back to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s “Islands in the Stream” in 1983 to find a Country song among the top ten hits of any year.

So yeah, Bronson was more right than he could say in print in a Billboard feature, without repudiating four years of Hot100 charts! Two Country songs, and here’s the first at #6: also the first Country song to get to #1 on the Hot100 since “Islands in the Stream.” It’s Lonestar’s “Amazed.”

Well after a whole decade of Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Toby Keith, The Dixie Chicks and others incorporating Rock and Pop, Country in Y2K had its strongest showing on the Pop charts since before Disco. Lonestar’s “Amazed,” the #6 song of 2000 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, with one more Country hit to go.

Now if that version of “Amazed” sounded different than what you remember, you were probably listening to Country radio in the ’90s, where it was the #1 song of 1999. But even the original with its pedal steel intro was in the top 40 on the Hot100 for 15 weeks, prompting the Pop remix, complete with a new key change at the end that transformed it into a Power Ballad and gave it a whole new life as a #1 Pop hit for two weeks in March 2000.

#5 3 Doors Down – Kryptonite

Now back at #9 (Matchbox Twenty), I mentioned that unlike their previous hit “3 AM,” “Bent” barely scraped the Modern Rock chart. Well our next song isn’t just the #5 Pop hit of 2000 according to our Chartcrush ranking; it was also Billboard’s #1 Modern Rock song of year: a true, massive Alternative crossover. And also one of the longest chart runs on the Hot100 in 2000, 53 weeks, which took it well past the end of Billboard’s 2000 “chart year” all the way into the Spring of 2001.

Now, a baked-in flaw with Billboard’s year-end charts is that for songs like that, whose chart runs straddle two different chart years, the points get split and the song’s true popularity isn’t reflected in either year’s year-end ranking. So at Chartcrush, we correct that by counting every song’s full chart run in whichever calendar year it earned the most ranking points.

So while our next song was only #15 on Billboard’s 2000 ranking (because the last 19 weeks of its chart run were kicked into Billboard’s 2001 chart year), with our method it comes out #5. It topped out at #3 for three weeks in November, but spent 18 weeks in the top ten. It’s the debut single by a band from Escatawpa, Mississippi: 3 Doors Down, “Kryptonite.”

“Kryptonite,” 3 Doors Down. It took off after their local FM Rock station in Mississippi started playing it in ’99 and the requests poured in. By November, other Gulf Coast stations had gotten a hold of it and in the beginning of February, it cracked the Mainstream Rock chart. Then in March the Modern Rock chart. They were back in the top ten in ’03 with “When I’m Gone,” the lead single from their second album. And then “Here Without You” in ’04 was a #5 hit that stayed on the Hot100 for 51 weeks, just shy of “Kryptonite’s” 53.

Ranking early ’00s Hot100 Artists, Nelly, Usher and J-Lo are the top three, and 3 Doors Down comes out seventh (ahead of even Matchbox Twenty) as the top Rock Band on the Hot100 the first half of the decade. Creed, Nickelback, Linkin Park and Train, also in the top 40 on that list.

#4 Faith Hill – Breathe

You’re listening to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and we’re counting down the top ten hits of the year 2000 this week. At #4 we have the second of the two Country songs in our countdown! We heard Lonestar’s “Amazed” back at #6. Billboard with its chart-run splitting between different “chart years” named it the #1 song of 2000 because all but the first four weeks of its 56-week chart run were in its 2000 chart year. Same can’t be said for two of the three songs that beat it in our Chartcrush ranking.

By the way, 56 weeks? That’s even more than “Kryptonite.” The most weeks of any 2000 song. But like “Kryptonite,” our #4 song never got to #1. For four of the five nonconsecutive weeks it was #2, it was kept out of the top spot by the juggernaut that was our #3 song we’ll hear in a few minutes.

But even after said “juggernaut” suddenly dropped down to #8 in June, Aaliyah’s “Try Again,” from the action movie Romeo Must Die moved up to become the first #1 in history not out as a commercial single; that a full 18 months after Billboard’s rule change allowing Airplay-only hits on the Hot100. But all those weeks at #2 and 19 in the top ten made it Billboard’s #1 song of the year and our #4. OK, enough suspense: here’s Faith Hill’s “Breathe.”

“Breathe,” Faith Hill, #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the year 2000’s biggest hits, and the first Female vocal we’ve heard so far. Which is odd since 1999’s top ten was so skewed towards the ladies: nine of the ten songs! Still one more Female act to go as we close in on #1.

Faith Hill, of course, one of a whole crop of Female Country- or Country-influenced Singers in the mid-to-late ’90s that crossed over to the Pop charts. Shania Twain, LeeAnn Rimes, Jewel, Sheryl Crow, and 2000’s top-performing act on the Billboard 200 Album chart (all albums combined), The Dixie Chicks.

“Breathe” was Faith Hill’s second Hot100 top10. The upbeat “This Kiss,” her first in 1998, and then she followed up “Breathe” with another upbeat song, “The Way You Love Me,” a #6 hit later in 2000, and “There You’ll Be” from the Pearl Harbor soundtrack in ’01.

#3 Santana featuring The Product G&B – Maria, Maria

At #3 the aforementioned “juggernaut” that kept “Breathe” from reaching #1, and the first of two hits in our countdown by the act who took the “Latin Invasion” torch into the 2000 yearly top ten from 1999’s torch bearers Ricky Martin and J-Lo.

That’s not to say that other “Latin Invasion” stars faded. Far from it. Marc Anthony’s “I Need to Know” is our #13 hit of the year, and Enrique Iglesias’s “Be with You” was #1 for three weeks in June. Shakira was on tour and her MTV Unplugged set was on the album chart. J-Lo was between albums, but dating Bad Boy Records mogul Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and forcing Google to develop Image Search thanks to the plunging green Versace dress she wore to the Grammys.

No, the Latin invasion? Still going strong: 68 straight weeks with at least one song by a Latin artist in the top ten, Spring ’99 to well into 2000, thanks largely to the most spectacular comeback on the Pop charts by a veteran Artist in history. And the song at #3 was the follow-up: #1 for 10 weeks April to June. It’s Santana featuring R&B duo The Product G&B, “Maria, Maria.”

Santana with The Product G&B, “Maria, Maria.” Santana, of course, guitarist Carlos Santana’s namesake group, around since the late ’60s: played at Woodstock, and a staple of early ’70s FM Rock radio with Latin-influenced hits like “Evil Ways,” “Black Magic Woman,” “No One to Depend On” and “Oye Como Va.” They got back into the top ten in the early ’80s with Soft Rock hits “Winning” and “Hold On,” but by the mid-’90s, they didn’t even have a label.

In ’97, Santana pitched Arista CEO Clive Davis, probably the greatest talent and trend spotter in Rock history who’d first signed them in 1969, the idea of updating the vintage Santana sound with contemporary influences and squeezing it all into concise, radio-friendly songs. And they recruited collaborators from across the musical spectrum for Supernatural, Santana’s 18th album.

On “Maria, Maria”, the Product G&B duo (G&B short for ghetto & blues) came in via Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean, part of his extended musical family centered around his trailblazing New Jersey alt-Hip-Hop group The Fugees, who co-produced the song and convinced Davis to plug it to radio as a single.

#2 Destiny’s Child – Independent Women, Part 1

Our #2 song notches in at #97 on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 chart for 2000, and #10 on its ranking for 2001. Yep, it’s another Billboard chart year straddler! Again, how we do it at Chartcrush: we look at every song’s full chart run, and rank it in whichever calendar year it earned the most points.

Well this one entered the chart in late September and peaked at #1 in November, just a week before the cutoff issue for Billboard’s 2000 chart year, and stayed on top all the way to the end of January 2001: the second #1 hit of the year for a R&B Girl Group right on the cusp of superstardom.

Billboard had that first Y2K #1, “Say My Name,” at #6 on the year. That slips to #16 on our ranking, but one this moves into the #2 spot. From Charlie’s Angels, the second soundtrack hit in our countdown, it’s Destiny’s Child, “Independent Women.”

Destiny’s Child re-grouped at the start of 2000, letting go LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson and bringing in Michelle Williams. “Independent Women” was their first hit as a trio: Beyonce Knowles, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams, and it was later included on their blockbuster 4X platinum album Survivor, along with three others that became top10 hits. “Bootylicious,” their next #1.

In ’02, Kelly Rowland teamed up with Rapper Nelly on “Dilemma” and that was #1 for 10 weeks. And Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” with future hubby, Rapper Jay-Z, in ’03 was the first of her six career #1’s as a solo artist.

#1 Santana featuring Rob Thomas – Smooth

And that, folks, gets us to #1: the song that launched Santana back to superstardom and secured Carlos Santana’s legacy. But not only that, it catapulted Santana’s collaborator on the track, who co-wrote and sang it, to new heights: Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas.

Remember, we heard Matchbox Twenty’s “Bent” at #9, so that’s two of the year’s biggest hits, including the biggest by a mile that we’re about to hear, sung by the same dude. It entered the chart at the end of July 1999 and hit #1 in October ’99. But it stayed #1 for 12 weeks into January 2000, and then on the chart all the way to September of 2000: a 58 week chart run. This song was everywhere! The #1 song of 2000, Santana with Rob Thomas on vocals, “Smooth.”

“Smooth,” Santana with Rob Thomas, the #1 song here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2000. Before Supernatural, Santana’s last #1 album was in 1971. 29 years. That’s the longest time between #1 albums ever.

Bonus

Well that’s our countdown. Two songs from Billboard’s year-end top ten that got bumped from our ranking, so let’s shout those out.

#17 Toni Braxton – He Wasn’t Man Enough

At #10, Billboard had a ’90s Diva updating her sound for the ’00s with an upbeat Dance Hit.

Toni Braxton’s “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” her last top 20 hit before Vegas, lots of lawsuits, and Braxton Family Values on WeTV, notches in at #17 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#16 Destiny’s Child – Say My Name

And as I mentioned, Billboard had Destiny Child’s other 2000 #1 hit at #6.

“Say My Name” shakes out at #16 on our Chartcrush ranking.

Well, thanks for listening to our 2000 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can find a written transcript and a link to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other bumpin’ extras. Also, check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning ofthe charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome! I’m Christopher Verdesi, and this is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Every week, we take a look back at a different year in Pop music history and count down the top ten hits according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time by the music industry’s leading trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1982.

So, Sony sold 20 million of its Walkman portable cassette players in 1981: MSRP $179: about what a good smartphone cost in the early 2020s, adjusting for inflation. They would’ve sold even more if the U.S. hadn’t been in a bad recession weathering President Reagan’s drastic inflation-fighting, money-tightening policies, but they did once the economy started booming in ’83.

A major theme of Sony’s advertising for the Walkman? Exercise! With the Walkman you could take your tunes with you, for the first time, out for a jog, roller skating, aerobics, even the gym. What a game-changer!

Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” hit the charts in October of ’81 and by the end of November it was the #1 song in the land, where it stayed for ten solid weeks: one of the biggest hits of the ’80s. Coincidence? Both “Physical” and the Sony Walkman have been linked to the early ’80s fitness craze, but would “Physical” have been such a big hit without the Walkman?

Well, we can’t say for certain, but ’82 was the last year that vinyl LPs were a majority of music industry revenue. Cassettes took the lead in ’83 and were the dominant format for music until 1990! So it stands to reason that such a big development in the way people consumed music–right up there with the 45 rpm single in the ’50s or affordable stereo headphones in the late ’60s–would also have a pretty sweeping effect on the kinds of songs and albums people bought and propelled up the charts.

Of course, people listened to their Walkmans riding buses and subways, sitting at home or in hotels, or, yes, just walking. So to just consider workout type songs when thinking about its impact would be oversimplifying things. But Billboard Chart Beat columnist Paul Grein noticed that “Pop music got tougher in 1982.” There was still plenty of room for ballads, he conceded, but “Most of the year’s biggest hits were hard-driving, rock-inflected records that might have had trouble garnering as much airplay even a year or two ago.”

Was that because of the Walkman? MTV launched in ’81 with a Rock format, and the first MTV-fueled chart-toppers were in 1982. MTV played the heck out of most of the songs in our countdown. So again, hard to say. Just a couple things to keep in mind as we count down the hits here on our 1982 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Now just to let you know, over on Billboard, they had “Physical” as the #1 song of 1982 because of how they shift their “chart year” back several weeks into the previous year so they can get the issue with their year-end charts printed and mailed well before New Years. That’s so networks, DJs and other magazines and newspapers have time to get their countdowns ready. “Physical,” however, hit #1 and saw most of its chart action in 1981, not ’82, so for ’82, we have a different #1 hit.

With that, let’s start counting down some songs, shall we? Starting with #10.

#10 Laura Branigan – Gloria

It’s the second single (after a lukewarm debut) by a former Leonard Cohen backup singer who got a record deal after auditioning for legendary Atlantic Records co-founder and A&R legend Ahmet Eturgun. The song had been a big hit in Europe in ’79, and her producer had played on that record, and wanted her to cover it. But with lyrics about a guy obsessed with the woman whose name is the song’s title, she needed some convincing. So they tweaked it to be about a woman counseling her friend (whose name is the song’s title) about her obsession with a guy.

Once out, the record debuted at #84 and took over four months (July to November) to reach its peak of #2, where it stayed for three weeks, it’s Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”

“Gloria,” Laura Branigan, #10 on our Chartcrush ranking of 1982’s top hits. “Gloria’s” chart run started in the middle of ’82, but went all the way to March of ’83, so on Billboard’s year-end rankings it wound up in the lower half of both the ’82 and ’83 year-end Hot100 charts. But combining its chart run and ranking it in the year it was strongest (what we do for every song), it gets its due.

In 2019, the St. Louis Blues NHL hockey team started playing it at games. Then they started winning, and they took it all the way to their Stanley Cup victory over the Boston Bruins. Laura Branigan continued scoring hits through the ’80s, notably “Solitaire” and “Self Control” in ’83 and ’84. Things cooled off in the ’90s though, and sadly, she died of a brain aneurism in 2004 at just 52.

#9 John Cougar – Jack & Diane

When we think of Roots Rock or Heartland Rock in the ’70s and ’80s, we think of, who? Well, a few names come to mind, but if this were Family Feud, Bruce Springsteen would probably be the #1 answer, right? Get this, though: in his entire career, Springsteen never had a #1 Pop hit. Closest he got was #2 in ’84 with “Dancing in the Dark.”

Different story on the album chart: Born in the U.S.A. was the #1 album of 1985. But in 1982 on the singles chart? This next act from small-town Indiana, who’d already had a handful of minor hits starting in 1979 with “I Need a Lover,” broke out and became a superstar with two top ten hits off his fifth studio album, American Fool. Here’s the second of those on the calendar: #1 for four weeks in October ’82: It’s John Cougar, “Jack and Diane.”

In ’81, The Rolling Stones had broken all kinds of records with their North American Tour, and their album Tattoo You was #1 on the album chart for nine weeks. Well, John Cougar, after his first big hit in ’82, was close to being dismissed as a Stones wannabe, but “Jack and Diane” showcased his depth, authenticity, and distinctly American voice. Not cynically putting down or criticizing small-town American life, but celebrating its simple pleasures right at the dawn of the Reagan era.

He scored seven more top ten hits in the ’80s, but that was his most successful single, about two American kids growing up in the heartland. The song was unfinished and not going anywhere ’til producer Mick Ronson suggested the choir part, “let it rock, let it roll.” Well, that was the missing ingredient, and the rest is history

#8 Hall & Oates – Maneater

At #9 is a record that was one of the top ten hits on Billboard’s 1983 year-end Hot100, but it hit #1 in mid-December ’82, so when you do things the Chartcrush way (by the calendar), it’s a 1982 hit: the fifth #1 by a duo from Philly that first hit the charts in 1976 with a pair of soft Blue-Eyed-Soul top tens. They slumped in the Disco years, but came back strong with a more upbeat sound epitomized by the first of their three #1 hits in 1981, “Kiss on My List.”

They were on a roll before there even was such a thing as “Yacht Rock.” Daryl Hall and John Oates, more commonly known during their heyday as just Hall & Oates, from their album H₂O, “Maneater.”

“Maneater,” the biggest hit of Hall & Oates’s career and the #8 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1982. And they were just getting started. Their next six charting singles in ’83 and ’84? All top ten hits. And Billboard proclaimed them the most successful duo of the Rock era, beating out Simon & Garfunkel and even The Everly Brothers.

#7 The Human League – Don’t You Want Me

In 1982, Time Magazine, still a relevant source in news and culture in those years, would feature a person, group, idea, or object that “for better or for worse… has done the most to influence the events of the year.”

In 1982, after tapping Reagan and Polish Solidarity trade union leader Lech Walesa in ’80 and ’81, respectively, Time’s editors named The Computer as person of the year. Not surprising then that the first synthpop track to top the Hot100 was this next one at #7. It was the fourth single from the group’s third album. Rolling Stone later flagged it as the “breakthrough song” of what became a Second British Invasion in the early ’80s, and it was one of the first hints of MTV’s growing power in the music biz. It’s the Human League, “Don’t You Want Me?”

The Human League, #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1982’s biggest hits, virtually unknown in America until MTV started playing that video just as cable systems coast-to-coast were adding MTV to their channel lineups.

Now, if you listened Phillip Oakey’s lyrics in that song, it’s not a love story; it’s a song about sexual power politics, and the group’s original demo version was sparse and dark and kinda creepy. But Synthpop producer Martin Rushent transformed it into an upbeat Pop song, which Oakey hated and didn’t even want included on the album, let alone released as a single. Rushent though, was working for the label, not Phillip Oakey, so he got the final say and the version we just heard was not only The Human League’s breakthrough American hit, it was their first UK #1 too. Today, even Oakey begrudgingly acknowledges that his initial problems with the track may’ve been a little misguided.

#6 Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra

Here’s a fun fact: the entire month of August of 1982, four weeks, the top five songs on the Hot100 were the same. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5: no changes. First time ever!

Our song at #6 was #3 those four weeks, and broke the logjam when it moved up to #1 the first week in September. It was by one of many big ’70s Rock acts who re-tooled their sound in the early ’80s, not just to stay up-to-date, but to stay on the air at all. Top40 radio, the so-called CHR (or Contemporary Hits) format that traces its lineage all the way back to Todd Storz in the mid-’50s, switched bands in the early ’80s. Radio bands, that is, to FM.

Staticky, mono AM radio, OK for the car when that’s all there is to listen to, but just not cutting it anymore sound-wise once the Walkman came along. Most Walkman models after ’81 were radios too. And many of the FM stations that switched to Top40 had been Rock stations before.

AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in his review of the album our #6 song is on, refers to a subgenre of early ’80s Rock he calls “faux new wave AOR:” AOR (album-oriented rock) updated with a veneer of synthesizers, gimmicky effects and slick production: just enough to stay relevant on the changing FM dial. #1 for two weeks and 14 weeks in the top 10, it’s The Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra.”

“Abracadabra. I wanna reach out and grab ya:” the lyric came to Steve Miller after seeing Diana Ross skiing. Miller, the ’60s and ’70s San Fran “space cowboy” who did “The Joker,” “Fly like an Eagle,” “Rock ‘n Me,” and “Jet Airliner.” His longtime fans were surprised (that’s putting it nicely) at how “Pop” Miller sounded on his ’82 album. But he scored the hit, his biggest ever on chart points, and his first #1 since “Rock ‘n Me” in 1976. On his next album, Miller was done reacting and adapting and wanted to innovate. Bad idea. Ever hear of the 1984 album Italian X-Rays? Yeah, exactly.

#5 John Cougar – Hurts So Good

At #5 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1982, the #2 song all four of those weeks in August when the top five stayed the same, and the breakthrough hit I mentioned earlier that could’ve been John Cougar’s last had he not unveiled his own distinctive on “Jack and Diane,” the follow-up. Unlike “Jack and Diane,” this one, the first single off his American Fool album, never got to #1, but on total ranking points it was the bigger hit with 16 weeks in the top ten. That’s the most of any hit in the 1980s decade. Again, John Cougar with “Hurts So Good.”

John Cougar, later John Cougar Mellencamp. By the end of the ’80s going just by his given name John Mellencamp: by far the most successful of the Heartland Rock or Roots Rock acts on the singles chart, up against Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Los Lobos, Bob Seger, even Jim Croce going back to the early ’70s. In ’83 with his next album, he repeated the one-two punch of “Hurts So Good” and “Jack and Diane” with the rocker “Crumblin’ Down,” followed by the rootsy Americana of “Pink Houses.” Both were top ten hits. And in ’85 he co-founded Farm Aid, a festival-style benefit to help financially-strapped family farmers stay on their land.

#4 Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder – Ebony and Ivory

’82 was a pretty lean year for Black artists on the charts. It got so bad in the months before Michael Jackson’s Thriller dropped in November that for three consecutive weeks in October, not a single record by a Black artist in the Top 20 on the album or Hot 100 singles charts, as a Billboard piece celebrating the 30th anniversary of Thriller’s release noted in 2012. That hadn’t been seen since the early ’50s.

On the Hot100, the week of June 19th, Juneteenth, was the only week before Thriller with more than three Black artists in the top ten. They were Deniece Williams, The Dazz Band, Ray Parker, Jr., and at #1 that week for the fifth of its seven weeks on top, the #4 song in our 1982 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, which is a superstar duet. A Motown legend and a former Beatle, on a song that frames racial harmony in musical terms. It’s Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, recorded live in the studio as only consummate professionals can pull off: “Ebony and Ivory.”

McCartney got the idea for that song from a trope he’d heard repeated by British-Irish comedian named Spike Milligan: “Black notes, White notes, and you need to play the two to make harmony, folks!” “Ebony and Ivory,” the #4 song here on the 1982 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Once MTV added Michael Jackson’s videos to its rotation in ’83, other Black artists followed and the charts reflected that diversity. So instead of contributing to the fragmentation of music already underway with AM Top40 dying out, MTV wound up replacing AM’s role as a unifier and extending the notion of a gravitational center in Pop for another ten years.

#3 Joan Jett and The Blackhearts – I Love Rock ‘n Roll

OK, we’re down to #3. Now, straight-up Punk Rock never caught on commercially in the U.S. the way it did in the U.K. Ironic because it was a New York band, The Ramones, that invented Punk and exported it to Britain, where the Sex Pistols and The Clash and others took the ball and ran with it. That’s not to say, though, that American kids didn’t have the same spirit of anarchy and rebellion as British kids at the end of the ’70s. It just expressed itself differently.

New Wave, of course: the artsy, more accessible Pop-oriented version of Punk. But also, the new wave of Heavy Metal and Hard Rock groups gave the Rock audience a bridge from ’70s “Denim and Leather” era sounds, eliminating the mysticism and “Progginess,” and cranking up the urgency and the energy-level. Well, right in the sweet spot between New Wave and Metal in ’82 was the song at #3 by a former member of an all-girl L.A. Glam Punk band, The Runaways, that put out its first album all the way back in 1976, year-zero for Punk. It’s a cover of Alan Merrill & The Arrows 1975 UK non-hit, “I Love Rock ‘n Roll.” It’s Joan Jett & The Blackhearts.

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, “I Love Rock ‘n Roll,” #3. Critics hated it almost as much as they hated the new wave of British Metal acts: panned as crude and amateurish. But of course, like Punk, that was its appeal, and it was one of the videos (along with “Don’t You Want Me”) that people saw as soon as they got their MTV, an exclamation point on Disco Demolition, and Rock replacing Disco on the Pop charts at the start of the ’80s.

#2 J. Geils Band – Centerfold

You’re listening to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 1982 edition, and we’re down to #2.

Back at #6 we heard Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra:” a big ’70s AOR act adding New Wavey sprinkles to stay on FM radio as stations switched formats from Rock to Hits. At #5 another group that had been around for years. Not as successful as Steve Miller in the ’70s, but finally hitting pay-dirt after a decade of nearly constant touring.

On their tenth album, Freeze-Frame, they added some New Wavey touches to their R&B-derived Party-Rock sound, but tastefully (Party Rock was still the name of the game). At #2, the earliest song in our countdown on the calendar, entering in November ’81 and peaking at #1 for six weeks in February and March of ’82, the J. Geils Band’s song about a guy who can’t believe his eyes when he sees his high school crush in a men’s magazine: “Centerfold.”

“Centerfold,” from the J. Geils Band’s Freeze-Frame album: their last featuring longtime front man Peter Wolf, who exited in ’83. The band wanted to move further into New Wave and Techno sounds, and Wolf was having none of that. He had a pretty successful solo career for the rest of the ’80s, hewing pretty close to the Freeze-Frame formula, while the Geils Band barely dented the charts with their follow-up.

#1 Survivor – Eye of the Tiger

Now I led off the show talking about the impact of the Walkman, and how Sony especially targeted fitness nuts in its advertising. So it seems obvious that “workout music” would get a boost on the charts with Walkmans flying off the shelves. I mentioned that Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” was Billboard’s #1 song of 1982 since their 1982 “chart year” stretched back multiple weeks into ’81 when “Physical” was #1. Again, at Chartcrush we do things by the calendar, so “Physical” moves into 1981 on our rankings and leaves the #1 spot on our 1982 rankings open, as it turns out, for another big motivational workout song.

The third film in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky franchise was one of the most hotly-anticipated box office releases ever. The original Rocky in ’76 won Best Picture and its sequel in ’79 completed the story arc with a rematch between fictional boxers Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed after the split decision at the end of the original movie. Rocky III in 1982 pitted Rocky, now the heavyweight champ for a few years, against his first serious challenger, the ruthless Clubber Lang played by Mr. T.

Now the big training sequence in the middle of all three films, where Rocky gets serious about the big fight, soundtracked by Bill Conti’s “Theme from Rocky (Gonna Fly Now),” and culminating in the first two films with Rocky’s triumphant climb up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Gonna Fly,” a #1 hit in 1977, but to catch moviegoers up on Rocky’s career since the Apollo Creed rematch and introduce Clubber Lang, Rocky III opens with a montage.

Stallone couldn’t get his first choice, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” for that, so instead he plucked a Chicago Hard Rock group out of relative obscurity and made them superstars. Our #1 song of 1982 from Rocky III: Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”

Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky III, 1982’s #1 song according to our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and the only soundtrack hit in the top ten for ’82. “Poor Man’s Son” #33 in 1981, Survivor’s biggest hit up to then, and how they got on Sylvester Stallone’s radar. After “Eye of the Tiger’s” amazing success, Survivor struggled to get back in the top ten, but they finally succeeded in ’85 and ’86 with a string of top tens including “Burning Heart,” their biggest career hit that wasn’t “Eye of the Tiger.”

#11 Chicago – Hard to Say I’m Sorry

Now besides “Physical” getting bumped out of our 1982 ranking because it was actually a 1981 hit, only one other song from Billboard’s year-end top ten didn’t make our countdown.

Chicago, one of the biggest chart acts of the ’70s, but they hit a slump after their guitarist Terry Kath accidently shot and killed himself in 1978. They tried to carry on with Jazzy Pop Rock singles like their early ’70s stuff, Soft Rock like their later ’70s hits, and they even dabbled in Disco.

But their run seemed to be over until producer-songwriter David Foster came along. Rolling Stone in 1985 called Foster “the master of bombastic Pop kitsch,” and once he teamed up with Chicago’s Peter Cetera, together they relaunched the band as a Pop Power Ballad group that scored eight top tens in the ’80s, starting with “Hard to Say I’m Sorry,” which was Billboard’s #10 song of 1982, but just misses our top ten at #11.

And that’s gonna have to wrap things up for our 1982 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Be sure and check us out on the Web at chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush shows, plus chart run line graphs and other tubular extras. We’re also on TikTok (@chartcrush). Every week we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so be sure and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week we’re counting down 1967, the most geographically lopsided top ten in chart history. Of the ten records in our countdown, seven came out of just one place: Los Angeles, California, by six different Southern California-based acts.

L.A. in the ’60s, the epitome of a modern, forward-looking American city: drenched in sunshine, spectacular beaches, young, tanned, beautiful people everywhere, futuristic architecture, multi-lane freeways. And Cars! Cars! Cars! “Suburb as city,” sprawling by design, no building taller than the 28-story City Hall downtown by law until 1958, and none was until 1966.

And glamorous industries: aerospace, TV, motion pictures, and of course music, especially since American Bandstand moved there from Philadelphia, and L.A.’s homegrown record label, Capitol, with its cool cylindrical tower at Hollywood and Vine, embraced youth culture and started putting out records by The Beach Boys and Beatles. The title of Dick Clark’s L.A.-centric Bandstand spinoff had it right: L.A. was Where the Action Is.

But over 150 other U.S. cities saw a very different kind of action in 1967. Almost everywhere but California was a “Long, Hot Summer” of racial unrest and urban riots, the worst in Detroit and Newark, New Jersey in July: dozens killed, hundreds injured, entire neighborhoods looted and burned.

Emerging Black leaders weren’t talking about reforming the system anymore, but overthrowing it. In a CBS interview in late ’66, Martin Luther King, Jr., called riots “the language of the unheard” and admitted that the voting rights and anti-poverty measures he’d helped secure in ’64 and ’65 hadn’t made much difference. Cries of “Black power” were a reaction to White America’s reluctance to “make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality,” he said.

But he couldn’t and wouldn’t condone the violence, so he pivoted in ’67 to opposing the war in Vietnam as his core issue. Heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali had just forfeited his title and boxing license refusing his Army induction after being drafted.

The first major anti-Vietnam Peace protest was in New York in April, organized by Mobe (short for Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam): a coalition of radicals, clergy, pacifists and MLK. Dozens of men burned their draft cards in Central Park and a crowd of 300,000 rallied at the U.N. A march the same day in San Francisco was only a third as big after Folk singer Joan Baez was quoted on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner urging people not to show up because the rally was really a cover for communist support of the Viet Cong.

But the protests put the Peace movement front and center, and soon, Mobe was hunkered down planning its Fall wave of protests in 30 cities in October, culminating with the main event in D.C.: 100,000 on the National Mall, then on to the Pentagon, where poet Allen Ginsberg led chants to levitate the building and “exorcise the evil within,” as chronicled in Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer-winning The Armies of the Night.

California though, with its new Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, seemed almost exempt from all the chaos and violence, and was a magnet. In May, Folkie Scott McKenzie put out a record written and produced by John Phillips of the Mamas & Papas beckoning kids from “all across the nation” who were looking for “a new vibration” to come to “San Francisco,” and “be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” Tens of thousands did, descending on ‘Frisco’s Haight-Ashbury district to get in on what Time had already heralded two months before as “the center of a new utopianism, compounded of drugs and dreams, free love and LSD.”

Instead of a “Long, Hot Summer,” San Francisco had a “Summer of Love,” and down the coast, L.A. produced seven of the top ten hits of the year.

#10 The Turtles – Happy Together

The first of which we’re gonna hear right now at #10. No ’60s flower power compilation would be complete without it, and it’s been on over 200 of ’em. AllMusic.com’s Denise Sullivan called it “a most sublime slice of Pop heaven [that’s] bounced through decades of AM-car-radio-play unharmed.” It’s The Turtles, “Happy Together.”

“Happy Together,” The Turtles, #1 for three weeks in March into April and the #10 song of 1967. None of The Turtles’ hits until “Eleanor” in late 1968 were written by members of the group. “Happy Together,” written by two guys from a no-hit New York Folk-Rock outfit called The Magicians, whose demo was a stripped-down affair with just guitar and hand-claps, rejected by a dozen artists before The Turtles’ brand new bass player Chip Douglas came up with that brilliant Flower Pop arrangement to help set the stage for the Summer of Love.

#9 The Young Rascals – Groovin’

At #9, the first of the three songs in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1967 not from L.A. This group hailed from the New York area, and their first hits were frantic rockers. “Good Lovin’,” #1 in the Summer of 1966. But in ’67 they toned things down, first with mid-tempo Motown-y soul on “I’ve Been Lonely Too Long,” a top 20 hit in April; then with this mellow, sun-dappled stroll in the park, complete with singing birds and an arrangement featuring conga but no drums, and Caribbean rhythms.

At about the same time as Beatle George Harrison was discovering Indian music, Felix Cavaliere, was nurturing his fascination with Afro-Cuban sounds on what became The Young Rascals second #1 hit, for four weeks in May and June: “Groovin’.”

The Young Rascals, “Groovin,'” written, like all their hits after “Good Lovin’,” by bandmembers Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati. Atlantic label boss Jerry Wexler wasn’t too keen on “Groovin'” at first, but DJ Murray the K intervened, and convinced him it’d be a hit.

In mid-May as it was peaking on the Hot100, “Groovin'” also crossed over to the R&B chart, eventually getting to #3, prompting a front-page piece in Billboard about Black radio stations playing more records by non-Black artists, and Pop Rock stations playing more R&B hits.

#8 Nancy & Frank Sinatra – Somethin’ Stupid

Our #8 hit is a crossover too, but to a different genre chart. Billboard had just three of those in the ’60s for each of the top radio formats: Country, R&B and, since ’61, Easy Listening, where it was #1 for nine straight weeks, topping the Hot100 for four.

It’s the only #1 father/daughter duet ever, and both father and daughter were red hot coming into ’67. Dad, a superstar since the early ’40s, had just scored his first #1 in over ten years at age 51 with “Strangers in the Night,” just a few months after his daughter became an international Swingin’ ’60s “it” girl in ’66 with a tough, platinum blonde image on her hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and her starring role alongside Peter Fonda in Roger Corman’s outlaw biker flick The Wild Angels. Here are Nancy and Frank Sinatra straddling the generation gap: “Somethin’ Stupid.”

C. Carson Parks, older brother of songwriter/producer Van Dyke Parks, wrote “Somethin’ Stupid” and cut it earlier in ’67 with his wife Gaile Foote. It didn’t chart, but ‘Ol Blue Eyes Frank Sinatra got a hold of it and Nancy’s mentor-producer Lee Hazelwood persuaded him to record it with Nancy. Obviously not written with a father and daughter in mind, so DJs had lots of fun joking around about incest. But fans mostly saw it, as one commenter on an internet forum put it, as “the equivalent of a father and a daughter singing karaoke at a party.” Not creepy at all.

Detour: The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Now we’ll get to #7 in a minute, but first, a little detour.

For the first time in three years, The Beatles didn’t have any songs in the top ten on the year. They were busy inventing Album Rock!

In the Fall of 1967, Billboard’s music editor since the ’40s, Paul Ackerman, observed on page one that albums by “underground” acts were selling in the hundreds of thousands “without the impetus of a hit single:” albums with “unconventional” material, promoted in “scores of underground publications” and via “posters, buttons and certain radio stations which are hip to the idiom.”

And even big AM Top 40 stations were getting in on it, like New York’s WMCA, auditioning album cuts as if they were singles. This had a profound impact on the charts. While it’s always been true that people don’t usually buy singles of songs on albums they already have, even if they are out as singles, after ’67 with albums taking center stage, Billboard could no longer claim that the Hot100 was a definitive songs ranking.

Eventually they tweaked the rules to allow Album cuts on the Hot100, with Charts Director Geoff Mayfield explaining that “The goal is deceptively simple: to reveal the most popular songs in the United States. Period. End of sentence.” But that was at the end of 1998. From ’67 until then though, popular album cuts, even ones getting airplay and moving boatloads of LPs, were a total blind spot on the Hot100, which remained a singles-only chart.

And that’s why none of the songs on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album charted on the Hot100, among other glaring omissions, especially at the peak of Album Rock in the ’70s: they weren’t out as singles (as with Sgt. Peppers), and/or most people were buying the album and had no use for the singles.

Now The Beatles did release some singles in ’67: “Penny Lane” backed with “Strawberry Fields Forever” in March and “All You Need Is Love” in the Summer did well, but not “well” by Beatles standards, and that was thanks to the massive backlash against John Lennon predicting the demise of Christianity and saying The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” in the late Summer of ’66.

Practically overnight it became controversial to play Beatles records on Top 40 radio, and things got pretty tense on the road. So after wrapping up what turned out to be their final tour, they retreated to the studio, and ten months later, which is an eternity in Beatle time, they emerged with Sgt. Pepper’s, their all-in psychedelic, druggy rebuke to an increasingly hostile mainstream.

And right after it came out, Paul McCartney, who was actually the last of the four Beatles to try LSD, doubled down and became the first Pop star to admit it publicly. Lennon had been using LSD regularly for two years at that point!

#7 The Doors – Light My Fire

Back to our countdown, and #7: a new group plucked out of Hollywood’s thriving Sunset Strip club scene, and their debut album had been slowly scaling the Album chart all Spring. Just one problem: its biggest hit clocked in at over seven minutes! Well they weren’t The Beatles; they couldn’t just not release singles off their album, and Top 40 radio wasn’t playing seven-minute songs. So the label, Elektra, decided to edit out the song’s lengthy organ and guitar jam in the middle, and the result, just shy of three minutes, was the first “single edit” of an album cut on the Hot100. A song about fire, #1 for three weeks right in the middle of the “long, hot summer” of ’67, it’s The Doors, “Light My Fire.”

Another thing making headlines in the music trades in ’67: Texas radio mogul Gordon McLendon’s crusade against smutty and druggy lyrics. TV and radio, McLendon felt, was kids’ first contact with the adult world, and if that was making drugs and illicit sex attractive, “we’ve been just as guilty as those who do the pushing of drugs.” He even set up a panel of ex-prostitutes and junkies to help weed out suggestive records.

Well, a few weeks after “Light My Fire” hit #1, The Doors appeared on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show, and a producer, who also happened to be Ed Sullivan’s son-in-law, asked them to change “girl, we couldn’t get much higher” in the song to “girl, there’s nothing I require,” and The Doors agreed to do that. The Rolling Stones had changed “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” and aside from Mick Jagger flubbing one instance and rolling his eyes on another, that’d gone off without a hitch. But then, on live TV, Doors front man Jim Morrison went ahead and sang the original line, “girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” and The Doors, who’d been negotiating to do multiple episodes of Sullivan, were banned for life.

#6 The Box Tops – The Letter

At #6 is the debut single and biggest hit by a short-lived blue-eyed soul group from Memphis, Tennessee: another of the three records in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1967 not out of California. The lead singer, just 16. In ’67 though, his gruff vocals really stood out, and helped propel the song to #1 for four weeks in the Fall. And speaking of song lengths, it was the last #1 hit shorter than two minutes. No editing needed on that one! It’s The Box Tops, lead singer Alex Chilton, “The Letter.”

Box Tops, “The Letter,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1967’s biggest hits, written by songwriter Wayne Carson, who wrote a couple more top 20s for them before they split in 1970, right around the same time Joe Cocker was scoring his first top ten hit, a slowed-down version of “The Letter.”

Box Tops singer Alex Chilton’s work in Big Star and beyond in the ’70s: a huge influence on ’80s Alternative groups like The Replacements, whose song entitled “Alex Chilton” is a highlight of their 1987 album, Pleased to Meet Me.

#5 The Monkees – Daydream Believer

So if anyone indirectly benefited from the backlash against John Lennon’s comments about Jesus and religion and The Beatles’ retreat to the studio and out of the public eye, it was our group at #5. The timing was perfect. Their first hit debuted in September ’66, right after The Fab Four played their last-ever U.S. gigs. And then, their weekly TV show premiered: a half hour goofball sitcom, Monday nights at 7:30 on NBC conceived as TV’s answer to The Beatles. How could it miss?

This song peaked in December ’67, well into season two of the show, so, one of their later hits, after they’d ruled the charts all year. It’s (who else?) The Monkees, “Daydream Believer.”

Mickey Dolenz, the singer on most of The Monkees’ biggest hits, but Davy Jones got the mic on “Daydream Believer,” The Monkees fifth top ten and third #1, all in less than a year and a half. And Monkeemania wasn’t just a U.S. phenomenon; in the U.K., The Beatles’ home turf, it was their sixth top ten! Over the summer, they’d drawn 10,000 to see their U.K. debut at Wembley’s Empire Pool in London, and according to Billboard, 90% of them were teenaged girls. By the end of ’67 The Monkees were bigger as a recording act than as TV stars, and Nesmith managed to wrest creative control of their music from the New York and Hollywood suits that had brought them together and made them stars.

“Daydream Believer,” the one song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1967 not in Billboard’s official published top ten for the year, because Billboard only counted chart action up to its December 16 issue. “Daydream” still had a week to go at #1, and six more in the top ten into 1968. At Chartcrush, not having to get an issue out before New Years, we get to factor every song’s full chart run for more accurate rankings.

#4 Bobbie Gentry – Ode to Billie Joe

At #4 is an unlikely hit by an until-then unknown singer based since her teens in, where else? L.A., but originally from Mississippi. And everyone who was around in ’67 seems to remember exactly where they were and how they felt when they first heard it. Janis Joplin felt nauseous. Right from the strummed intro, Otis Redding knew it was going to be “some kind of trouble.” And Bob Dylan called that same intro “primitive and searing.”

Capitol Records released it in July as a B-side on the singer’s first single with no fanfare, but it caught on and wound up displacing The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” at #1 at the end of August. Here’s Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.”

“Ode to Billie Joe,” #4 on our 1967 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: just Bobbie Gentry, a stunning raven-haired beauty from the Mississippi Delta where the story takes place, and her acoustic guitar, with those dramatic strings overdubbed.

Gentry, who wrote the song, was quoted saying it’s a study in unconscious cruelty for the way the news of Billie Joe’s suicide doesn’t rise above the mundane details of life. But it leaves key questions unanswered, like what were the narrator and Billie Joe throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge? On that and other points, she let listeners draw their own conclusions.

It only got to #17 on the Country chart. Country radio, not playing many “primitive” and “searing” records in the late ’60s, and there was a cover version in a more polished-sounding “Countrypolitan” style by singer Margie Singleton, but enough Country fans bought Bobbie Gentry’s album to propel it #1 for three weeks on the Country Albums chart.

Get this: both song and album cracked the top ten on the R&B charts, even with a competing version by Instrumental Soul star, saxophonist King Curtis. As they say in the biz: an “all-market sweep.”

Gentry stayed in the music biz ’til the early ’80s, when she retired back to her native Mississippi, just a couple hours’ drive from the site of the Tallahatchie Bridge, which collapsed in 1972.

#3 The Association – Windy

So we’ve heard The Turtles, the Sinatras, Doors, Monkees, Bobbie Gentry so far. That’s five of the California-based acts in our 1967’s top ten. #3 is the sixth, all the way to the mellow side of the Folk-Rock spectrum: a Harmony Pop Vocal group that came out of The Troubadour, the West Hollywood Folk Club where Elton John put himself on the map a few years later.

They’d already scored a #1 hit with “Cherish.” That’s our #6 song of 1966. Here they are repeating in the top ten for ’67 with this breezy hit that was #1 for the whole violent, fiery month of July, dislodged from the top by “Light My Fire.” It’s The Association, “Windy.”

Now you’d think “Windy” would’ve been all over the Easy Listening charts in ’67, right? Nope. Not a chance with thinly-veiled drug references like “stormy eyes,” “tripping down the streets,” “flyin’ high above the clouds.” Nah ahh. They didn’t get to do it on Ed Sullivan either.

Adult America, still for the most part allergic to Hippie sounds and messaging. The Easy Listening chart in ’67 (precursor to Adult Contemporary) reads like a who’s who of pre-Elvis Crooners and Pop Singers: Sinatra, Como, Martino, Patti Page, Frankie Laine, Margaret Whiting, all in their 40s and 50s, while the counterculture was saying never to trust anyone over 30.

The Association established their Hippie credentials beyond doubt by leading off one of the defining events of the Summer of Love: the three-day Monterey Pop Festival in June. “Windy” was allowed there, and later in the festival, among many other iconic moments, Jimi Hendrix poured lighter fluid on his guitar and lit it on fire to top The Who’s guitar smashing antics.

On the planning committee for Monterrey, Brian Wilson, and his group The Beach Boys was slated to headline day two, their latest #1 single “Good Vibrations” having received a resounding thumbs up from the Hippie press. But they canceled last-minute, and according to writer Jesse Jarnow on the music site Pitchfork, “the ascendant underground effectively wrote The Beach Boys out of the ’60s Rock narrative that followed.”

Sgt. Pepper’s entered the album chart the same week as Monterrey, and The Beach Boys’ hotly-anticipated psychedelic studio masterpiece Smile was eventually shelved.

#2 Lulu – To Sir, with Love

And that gets us to #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1967. It’s the theme song of a British movie about a black Guianan immigrant played by Sidney Poitier who takes a teaching job in a school in London’s tough, working-class East End to make ends meet while he looks for a job as an engineer.

Unexpectedly, it became one of the biggest films of the year, and the song sung by a teen British singer-actress who was in the movie was #1 for five weeks in October and November. The singer-actress? Lulu. And the song’s title? Same as the movie: “To Sir, with Love.”

The “Sir” in “To Sir, with Love” is Sidney Poitier’s character in the movie: the teacher who insists on being addressed as “Sir” by his unruly students: part of teaching them respect and manners.

Poitier had previously played a student in Blackboard Jungle, the 1955 movie that launched “Rock Around the Clock” to the top of the charts. And then he became the first Black man to win Best Actor at the Oscars (for 1963’s Lilies of the Field) and was a such an icon in the Black community that Lulu’s “To Sir, with Love” was also a top ten hit on the R&B chart just because it was in a Sidney Poitier movie. That crossover success, definitely a bright spot in a year of racial strife.

Lulu, the singer-actress, remained a big star in her native U.K., but “To Sir, with Love” was her only big U.S. hit. And it was the #1 song on Billboard’s year-end Hot100.

#1 The Monkees – I’m a Believer

But again, here at Chartcrush, our rankings don’t just measure chart action in a defined “chart year;” we count every song’s full chart run in whichever calendar year it scored the most points, so songs don’t fall through the cracks like they so often have in the history of Billboard’s year-end rankings.

Our #1 song: well, it didn’t exactly fall through the cracks; it’s #5 on Billboard’s ranking. But seven weeks at #1 and 12 in the top ten, mid-December ’66 to March ’67 make it the strongest chart run of any 1967 hit.

Their very first hit, “Last Train to Clarksville,” was on its way to becoming the #7 song of 1966 even before their TV show premiered, but then their second was an even bigger hit. We heard “Daydream Believer” from late in the year at #5; here again, The Monkees, doing Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”

All across America, hundreds of teen combos formed in the wake of the British Invasion, practicing in garages, basements and warehouses, playing high school dances and “Battles of the Bands” sponsored by local radio stations, maybe even putting out a 45 on some indie or vanity label. A few of them even broke out nationally. Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs “Wooly Bully” and Question Mark & The Mysterians “96 Tears” were both among the top ten hits in ’65 and ’66, respectively. Tom Hanks’ 1996 movie That Thing You Do! chronicles the story arc of a fictional combo from playing a pizza parlor on Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania to national one-hit wonderdom.

But right when this so-called Garage Rock movement was at its frenzied peak in late ’66, The Monkees captured all the lightning in a bottle and unleashed it on TV and the Pop charts to become, not one-hit wonders, but the top recording act of 1967. Which definitely validated the movement, but since they were a TV fabrication, also marginalized it against the backdrop of Sgt. Peppers, Monterrey Pop and Album Rock.

Underground cred, the new coin of the realm in music, as dispensed by guys like Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, just one of the dozens of upstart underground ‘zines. Henceforth, by editorial decree, or so it seemed, The Monkees and any group like them: summarily dismissed as “Bubblegum.”

Bands scrambled to adapt, especially The Monkees. After NBC cancelled their TV show in ’68, they attempted to update The Beatles Help! for the acid generation, and the resulting movie, titled Head, was an epic fail, along with its soundtrack album, and The Monkees faded fast.

Jann Wenner didn’t have to do or say much to hasten that fall, but after a Monkees revival got them back on the charts in the mid-’80s and beyond, according to Monkee Peter Tork, Wenner spent the next 30-plus years making sure The Monkees never got anywhere near being inducted into his precious Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!

So there you have ’em: the top ten hits of 1967 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking, which (again) is derived from Billboard’s weekly Hot100 charts, but using a ranking formula that’s the same for all years and factors every song’s full chart run.

#13 Frankie Valli – Can’t Take My Eyes off You

Now there’s only one song from Billboard’s 1967 year-end top ten that’s not in ours. In ’67 they started tweaking their year-end rankings with bonus points for songs that made it to #1, which does produce more accurate rankings.

Our Chartcrush method though? Well it’s a little more generous with the bonus points than Billboard’s was in ’67, so their #10 song, which never got to #1, comes out #13 on our ranking: one of the earliest examples of an artist who’s still a member of a group, putting out a solo song and album. From that album entitled simply Solo, it’s Four Season Frankie Valli with a record that’s equal parts ’60s MOR Pop and Jet Age Lounge Crooner: “Can’t Take My Eyes off You.”

Frankie Valli, “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” #10 on Billboard’s year-end chart and the first of two bonus cuts here on our 1967 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The industry in ’67 was buzzing about fans preferring solo acts to groups, so Four Seasons mastermind Bob Crewe wanted to see if a Valli solo record could chart at the same time as a Four Seasons single. Yes, it could! The Four Seasons’ “C’mon Marianne” was in the top ten at the same time.

#15 Aretha Franklin – Respect

You may have noticed this hour that there were no songs by Black artists among the top ten hits of 1967. Very unusual: first year since 1957 for that. So we’re gonna close out this week’s show with the #1 song of the year from Billboard’s 1967 year-end R&B chart.

It did top the Hot100 for two weeks in June, but its shorter-than-average run of just 12 weeks on the chart only gets it to #15 on our ranking. It’s a cover of a song that written and first charted by Otis Redding in ’65, but this singer transformed it into one of the great feminist anthems of all-time. It’s Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.”

Aretha had been recording for Columbia Records since 1960, but it wasn’t until she moved over to Atlantic that she had her big chart breakthrough. R-E-S-P-E-C-T “Respect,” Aretha Franklin, closing out our action-packed 1967 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard, head on over to our website. It’s chartcrush.com, where you’ll find written transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other mondo extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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