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Welcome! I’m Christopher Verdesi and this is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a different year in pop music history, and count down the top ten records  according to our recap of the weekly pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week we’re counting down the biggest hits of 1964, which kicked off with one of the most significant events in pop history: Beatlemania, February 7, when four mop-topped guys from Liverpool, England touched down at New York’s international airport, which had just been renamed for President John F. Kennedy—assassinated just a few short weeks before.

The Fab Four’s first major label U.S. single was already the #1 song in the land when they got off that plane, and to highlight the contrast to what came before on the charts, much has been made over the years about records that preceded The Beatles at #1. “Dominique” by The Singing Nun: #1 for four weeks in December ‘63 (a song sung entirely in French, by the way) and then teen idol Bobby Vinton’s cover of Vaughn Monroe’s hit from 1945, “There! I’ve Said It Again”—#1 for the four weeks of January 1964: very tame, MOR Easy Listening stuff—which tends to happen in all eras after major national traumas: folks looking to music for calm and reassurance. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, there were The Beatles: their mop-top haircuts, their goofball Merseyside charisma and humor, and throngs of screaming kids mobbing them everywhere they went. Jarring to say the least.

But an important detail that gets lost in that narrative is: for six of the weeks that The Singing Nun and Bobby Vinton were at #1 right before Beatlemania, the #2 song on the Hot100 was the gloriously sloppy “Louie Louie:” recorded in just one take in a primitive studio by an Oregon garage band, The Kingsmen, and propelled up the charts to become the first “underground” hit thanks to rumors about swear words and sex in lyrics that were so indecipherable that even the FBI couldn’t suss them out. Kinda takes the air out of the whole Beatle-centric narrative of what happened in those months, doesn’t it?

Well nothing against The Beatles, but Beatlemania, like “Louie Louie” at #2 for six weeks, was a symptom, not a cause, is my point. A new generation was coming of age: The Baby Boom: by far the largest generational cohort in American history, before or since, and the most culturally consequential. The oldest Boomers born in 1946 just after World War 2 were seventeen at the start of 1964, and the generation before, called the “Silent Generation,” had left their big teen culture upheaval, rock ‘n roll, in the rear-view as they graduated to adulthood, a lot like Gen-X did after making their mark in the early ’90s with grunge and hip-hop, and then jumping aboard the technology train and leaving the pop culture to Millennials.

Now “Louie Louie’s” chart run was split between 1963 and 1964, so it didn’t rank very high on either the ’63 or ’64 Billboard year-end rankings, and it just misses our Chartcrush top ten for 1964 at #12 despite our policy of factoring every song’s full chart run in whichever year it earned the most points.

#10 The Supremes – Where Did Our Love Go

But our #10 song did get in under the wire, of course, and it’s a great way to kick off our countdown: the first of five consecutive #1 singles by the other group that took the charts by storm in 1964 and, like The Beatles, kept it going through the rest of the decade. They were the only other act in the ’60s besides The Beatles (and Elvis Presley) who logged over 100 weeks in the top ten on the Billboard Hot100. And they did it with just over half the charting records of The Beatles. Here are The Supremes with lead singer Diana Ross, again, the first of their five consecutive #1’s in ’64 and ’65, “Where Did Our Love Go.”

Berry Gordy Jr’s Motown label, including its subsidiaries Tamla and Gordy, had notched about a dozen top ten Hot100 hits before The Supremes, whose first #1 song we just heard, “Where Did Our Love Go,” #10 on our 1964 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Another girl group, The Marvelettes, scored Motown’s first #1 in 1961, “Please Mr. Postman.” But it was The Supremes that took things to a whole ‘nother level and cemented Berry Gordy, Jr’s empire. Of Motown’s 14 #1 hits in the second half of the ’60s, only five were not Supremes records.

#9 Mary Wells – My Guy

At #9 we  have another Motown record and our third female vocal in a row. She was Motown’s first female star going back to early ’61, but her earlier stuff is in a rougher, bawdier R&B style than the polished classic Motown-y sound of this song we’re gonna hear. She left Motown at the peak of her fame, still just 21, to sign with 20th Century Records hoping to expand into movies. But she never cracked the top 20 again, and this was her last, but biggest hit. Here’s Mary Wells: “My Guy.”

Written and produced by Smokey Robinson, who wrote a lot of songs for Motown acts, not just for his own group The Miracles: Mary Wells’s “My Guy,” #9 as we count down the top ten songs of 1964 here on The Chartcrush Countdown Show.

Whether Smokey knew that the studio session group that did “My Guy” was ripping off the riff from pianist Eddie Heywood’s “Canadian Sunset” for the intro and break? Unknown. But the culprits, trombonist George Bohanon and session boss Earl Van Dyke, did. Exhausted at the end of a day, they noticed that it worked perfectly with what they’d already come up with, so they mashed it together with some bass-notes from another Heywood recording: his version of the Jazz standard “Begin the Beguine,” and voila!

Van Dyke later told Mary Wells’ biographer: “We were doing anything to get the hell out of that studio. We knew that the producers didn’t know nothing ’bout no ‘Canadian Sunset’ or ‘Begin the Beguine’ and we figured the song would wind up in the trash can anyway.” But “My Guy” became one of Motown’s biggest hits ever, and the second #1 on the chart after the first tsunami of Beatlemania receded.

#8 The Beatles – Can’t Buy Me Love

Which occurred when our next song dropped to #5 the week of May 9, ending The Beatles’ lock on the top spot, which they’d held with three different singles since February 1st—14 consecutive weeks. The third of them is our first Beatles song, recorded while the Fab Four were in Paris for a string of shows just a week before they got on that Pan-Am 707 and came to America. And it rocketed to the top spot in just its second week on the chart: “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

Beatles, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the #8 song on our ranking of the top ten hits of 1964 here on the Chartcrush Countdown Show. Paul McCartney singing lead on a single, without harmony vocals from his bandmates—a first for The Beatles. Instead he double-tracked his vocal. That’s a studio trick where two unison takes are layered one atop the other for a fuller sound. Buddy Holly and his producer Norman Petty pioneered it for Rock ‘n Roll records, and The Beatles did it on almost all their earlier stuff.

#7 The Beach Boys – I Get Around

Again, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the third of the three singles that kept The Beatles at #1 for 14 weeks in that first Beatlemania wave, which broke in May. They were back on top in August with “A Hard Day’s Night” (the movie and the song), but another record that got to #1 in that early summer Beatlemania lull at the top of the charts is by a group that’s all about summertime. They first cracked the top ten with “Surfin’ U.S.A.” just as the weather was getting nice in May of ’63—months before Americans had even heard of The Beatles. But of course, the weather’s always nice in their native Southern California, and our #8 song was their first #1. It’s The Beach Boys, “I Get Around.”

“I Get Around,” the #8 song on our 1964 Chartcrush Top Ten countdown. Like The Beatles, The Beach Boys were a band. Hard to imagine, but bands were a new thing on the charts in 1964: groups of young musicians working together under a single brand, not just singing on their records, but playing the instruments and writing songs, crafting a unique sound and identity. From the late ’40s to early ’60s, nearly all big hits, even Rock ‘n Roll hits, were written by professional songwriters and credited to solo acts, duos or, if a group, a vocal group with separate instrumental backing by an orchestra leader who worked for the label.

Starting with Instrumental Surf music in the early ’60s (Ventures, Surfaris, Chantay’s), then The Beach Boys, The Kingsmen (with “Louie Louie”) and culminating with the The Beatles and the British Invasion, the band became one of the main configurations for Pop records for the rest of the ’60s and beyond.

The Beatles and Beach Boys were both on the same label, Capitol, and beginning an incredibly productive back-and-forth competition that continued for years to push the creative limits of what this new musical configuration, the modern band, could accomplish, especially in the studio.

#6 Bobby Vinton – There! I’ve Said It Again

At #6 is a song I mentioned at the top of the show talking about the #1s that immediately preceded Beatlemania on the Hot100 and kept “Louie Louie” out of the top spot. There was “Dominique” by The Singing Nun, #1 for four weeks in December ’63, with “Louie Louie” at #2 for two of those weeks. Well this is the song that was #1 all four of the weeks in January ’64 that “Louie Louie” was #2, and it also happens to be the very song The Beatles replaced at #1 with their first American smash. It’s Teen Idol Bobby Vinton’s remake of the 1945 hit by Crooner-Bandleader Vaughn Monroe, “There! I’ve Said It Again.”

Teen Idol Bobby Vinton’s #1 cover version of the 1945 hit “There! I’ve Said It Again,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1964, an even bigger hit than Vinton’s previous single which was also a cover, of crooner Tony Bennett’s 1951 top 20 hit “Blue Velvet”. That one was our #4 song of 1963.

Vaughn Monroe first took “There I’ve Said It Again” to #1 in 1945, 19 years before 1964: the year World War Two ended. Most folks in their mid-’30s or older in ’64 already knew the song. A little perspective: Lenny Kravitz’s 1999 cover of The Guess Who’s “American Woman”—29 years removed from the 1970 original. And 23 years had elapsed between 1987’s Dirty Dancing soundtrack and The Black-Eyed Peas rejiggering of “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” on their 2010 hit “The Time (Dirty Bit).” Greatest Generation 40- and 50-somethings in 1964 would’ve appreciated Vinton dusting off wholesome good-timey classics from their youths and repackaging them for their kids.

#5 The Supremes – Baby Love

Well, we’re down to #5, and it’s the second of this Motown girl group’s five consecutive singles to reach #1, a record for a female artist that stood until Whitney Houston in the late ’80s. We heard the first, “Where Did Our Love Go” at #10. That topped the chart in August, and then this one peaked around Halloween. Here again: Detroit natives Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, and Diana Ross: The Supremes: “Baby Love.”

The Supremes, “Baby Love,” the #5 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown for 1964. Written and produced like most of their other hits by Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland: Holland-Dozier-Holland, Motown’s main songwriting and production team.

Now, timing, of course, is key when releasing singles for the charts, especially at the height of Beatlemania. Both “Where Did Our Love Go” and the song we just heard (“Baby Love”) peaked between Beatles chart-toppers: “Where Did Our Love Go” after “Can’t Buy Me Love” faded, and then “Baby Love” right as “A Hard Days Night” dropped off in August. But then at the end of the year they went head-to-head when new singles by The Supremes and Beatles entered the top ten within a week of each other. The Supremes’ “Come See About Me” (our #4 song of 1965) kept The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” at #2 the week before Christmas, then dislodged it from the top spot in January after its three weeks at #1. Eh, we’ll call it a draw.

#4 Roy Orbison – Oh, Pretty Woman

At #4, the second #1 hit by an artist who in the mid ’50s, dented the charts with a Rockabilly record on the same label that launched Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis: Sam Phillips’ Sun Records out of Memphis. But that was it for him on the charts as a Sun artist, and by 1958, he was in Nashville, writing Country songs for the publisher Acuff-Rose behind the scenes. Now this was right at the time when Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley were pioneering the so-called “Nashville Sound,” or “Countrypolitan:” Country music with strings, background singers, polished production. No twangy Honky Tonk. Country that could make the pop charts was the point, very much like what Berry Gordy, Jr. was doing with R&B at Motown. Well, as it turned out, that was just what our failed Rockabilly singer needed to find his voice, and in 1960 he scored two top ten hits in an intense, vulnerable, complex style that Bob Dylan and others compared to Opera. By ’64 though, after a steady stream of those hits, he was ready to return to his roots. Credited on the record to Roy Orbison and The Candy Men, it’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” the #4 song of 1964 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. The line “Pretty woman, yeah yeah yeah,” lifted straight from The Beatles’ “She Loves You,” of course. Things happened fast in those days!

Van Halen had a hit with their cover of “Pretty Woman” in 1982, and then it became the title and the theme song of the smash movie with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in 1990.

Despite other big hit covers of his songs over the years by big name artists, Roy Orbison lost his chart mojo after “Pretty Woman.” And he didn’t get it back ’til the mid-’80s when he teamed up with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty in The Traveling Wilburys. Sadly, Orbison died of a heart attack at just 52 in 1988, but “You Got It” posthumously became his first chart hit in 22 years.

By the way, common misconception about Orbison: despite always wearing those dark sunglasses, he was not blind! In 1963, he left his glasses on a plane and was forced to wear his clunky prescription shades for a show, and the look stuck.

#3 The Beatles – She Loves You

At #3 is the song that broke Beatlemania wide open in the U.K. in 1963, and was the third of three Beatles singles released in the U.S. on small indie labels before Capitol saw them as even marketable stateside. (By agreement with the Beatles’ U.K. label, Parolophone, Capitol had first option). So even though it was recorded and released on that indie label three months before The Fab Four’s first Capitol single, it wound up being their second U.S. #1. Here they are again: John, Paul, George and Ringo, The Beatles: “She Loves You.”

Beatles, “She Loves You,” #7 on our countdown for 1964 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. That ending vocal chord, a sixth chord, made Beatles producer George Martin cringe at first. He thought it corny and dated: a throwback to the Big Band Era. And when EMI engineer Norman “Hurricane” Smith saw “yeah yeah yeah” on the lyric sheet setting up the mics in the studio, he shook his head. But that’s the thing about The Beatles. So much of what they did wasn’t supposed to work. It just did. Spectacularly!

Now how and why Beatlemania developed in Britain: that’s a question for social psychologists, but when crowds of screaming fans at airports and hotels and everywhere else the Beatles went started getting in the way of the important work of business and government? Well that was news—and not entertainment news either, but news news. And dry TV correspondents like NBC’s Edwin Newman were at a loss to explain it, describing The Beatles as throwbacks, not to the Big Band era (Newman might’ve liked that), but to something else that in his mind had come and gone more recently: Rock ‘n Roll. “One reason for the Beatles’ popularity,” Newman snarked against a backdrop of girls screaming at a Beatles concert, “may be that it’s almost impossible to hear them.”

As I mentioned before we heard the song, “She Loves You” first came out in the U.S. in September ’63 on an indie label, Swan Records out of Philadelphia, because Capitol, who had first option, had passed on it. And it was reviewed in Billboard and featured on American Bandstand‘s “rate-a-record” thanks to Swan’s relationship with the show, also based in Philly. But “She Loves You” didn’t cause even a ripple on the charts, on radio, anywhere—until those news stories just weeks later.

#2 Louis Armstrong – Hello, Dolly!

And we’ll pick up that thread again after our #2 song. Which was #1 for just one week, but on the chart and in the top ten longer than any other record in 1964. It’s a Show Tune performed by one of America’s most beloved music figures since the 1920s. At almost 63, he became, and remains, the oldest artist ever to score a #1 hit after his manager persuaded him to come out of semi-retirement and cut a demo of the song to promote the musical, which was about to debut on Broadway. Kapp Records put out this supposed “demo” in January right at the start of Beatlemania, whereupon it inched up the charts and replaced “Can’t Buy Me Love” at #1 for the week of May 19, ending The Beatles’ 14-week stranglehold on the #1 spot. The original cast version is by star Carol Channing, but here is Louis Armstrong. The biggest chart hit of his storied five-decade career, “Hello, Dolly!”

That instantly recognizable gravelly voice of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. And of course his trademark muted Dixieland trumpet, on the #2 song of 1964. “Hello, Dolly!” was Armstrong’s return to studio recording after suffering a heart-attack in 1959. He hadn’t set foot in a studio in two years, and it ended up being the biggest hit of his career. Welcome back, Satch!

#1 The Beatles – I Want to Hold Your Hand

So at #3, we heard The Beatles’ “She Loves You” which Capitol Records had passed on, so it came out on an indie label in September of ’63—to a deafening silence. But over in the U.K., Beatlemania was disrupting airports and overwhelming police, and that got the attention of the U.S. news media, prompting Ed Sullivan to invite The Beatles to appear on his top-rated Sunday night CBS variety show. Now once word got out about that, Capitol relented and rushed The Moptops’ next single into production. And it shot to #1 in just three weeks, stayed for seven weeks, and is the #1 song of 1964. Here again, The Beatles: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Seven weeks at #1 starting February 1st, and the #1 song in our 1964 edition of the Chartcrush Countdown Show: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Star: The Beatles.

34% of America’s 192 million people watched them on Ed Sullivan. They notched 19 top 40 hits in 1964. And the week of April 4, all of the top five records on the Hot100 were Beatles records. Now that’s just a few of the stats, but here’s something you may not have heard before that really underscores how massive and deep The Beatles phenomenon was. In December of ’64, a Country single about an old West outlaw was the #1 song on the Hot100. No Country record had topped the Hot100 in nearly four years, and there was nothing at all exceptional about this one by Bonanza star Lorne Greene, except that the outlaw’s name, which was also the title of the song, was “Ringo.” With stuff like that happening, it’s no wonder that labels scrambled to sign any British act they could in the wake of Beatlemania: The Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, The Kinks, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas, Gerry & The Pacemakers (also from Liverpool): all made the charts in 1964. The British Invasion.

So Billboard of course publishes a year-end Hot100 each year based on its weekly charts. But its ranking algorithm varies year-to-year. And so does the cutoff date for the weeks they count, thanks to press deadlines. Here at Chartcrush, our countdowns factor all 52 weeks using the same point system for every year, so there are differences from Billboard’s official year-end top ten, and in the time we have left, we’re gonna spin some of the songs that made Billboard’s year-end top ten, but not ours.

#13 Dean Martin – Everybody Loves Somebody

Starting with the song that Billboard had it at #6 (#13 on our Chartcrush ranking). It’s an important entry though because it’s one of the last big hits in the Pop Singer or Crooner Era that preceded Rock ‘n Roll. The very last: Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” in ’66. But in the year of Beatlemania, Dean Martin scored with “Everybody Loves Somebody.”

Dean Martin’s  “Everybody Loves Somebody:” #13 on our ranking of the top hits of 1964, on the Chartcrush Countdown Show, but it was #6 on Billboard’s recap. Fresh from recording that song, Deano told his 14 year-old Beatles-obsessed son, “I’m gonna knock your pallies off the charts.” And he did. Dean Martin’s first top ten hit since 1958, and his first #1, since 1956.

#22 Gale Garnett – We’ll Sing in the Sunshine

In the seventh Grammy Awards, the nominees for Best Folk Recording included Peter, Paul & Mary, The New Christy Minstrels, Woody Guthrie, Harry Belafonte and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” But the winner was our next cut that was #8 on Billboard’s 1964 ranking and #22 on ours. It’s the first and biggest hit by New Zealand born Canadian singer Gale Garnett, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.”

“We’ll Sing in the Sunshine,” Gale Garnett: the Grammy winning Best Folk Song for 1964. Kind of an early free love anthem with its no-strings attitude about relationships. It was #4 for two weeks in October and the #8 song of 1964 according to Billboard’s recap. Our ranking puts it at #22.

#19 J. Frank Wilson & The Cavaliers – Last Kiss

Next up in our bonus segment here on the Chartcrush Countdown Show for 1964, a tragedy record. Also called “tear-jerkers” or “death discs”, these are songs that tell a story with a melodramatic, tragic ending, and several of them charted in ’64. Our ranking doesn’t have any of them in the top ten, but Billboard ranked this one #9 on the year. Pearl Jam did a version of it in the ’90s. It’s J. Frank Wilson & The Cavaliers: “Last Kiss.”

J. Frank Wilson, Cavaliers, “Last Kiss,” Billboard’s #9 song of 1964, #19 on our Chartcrush ranking. A song about a fatal car wreck. People forget, roads were dangerous in the mid-’60s: hair-pin turns, bad or nonexistent markings and signage. And car safety? What’s that? Cars weren’t even required to have seatbelts until 1966. So not surprisingly, traffic fatalities saw their sharpest increase ever in the years between 1961 when the original version of “Last Kiss” came out by the Rockabilly singer who wrote it, Wayne Cochran, and 1964 when the J. Frank Wilson version we just heard was a hit. Fortunately, those numbers have been declining steadily; they’re less than half what they were in the mid-’60s.

#13 Barbra Streisand – People

Now besides The Beatles and Supremes, another artist who made her chart debut in 1964 became an Adult Contemporary mainstay, with major Pop crossover—especially when she was in a movie and sang the theme song, or teaming up with the likes of Donna Summer, Neil Diamond or Barry Gibb. She’d already been on Broadway and TV variety shows for a couple years, and her first album won a Grammy, all before making the pop charts with this song that peaked at #5 and was Billboard’s #11 year-end song. On our recap it came in at #33. It’s Barbra Streisand, “People.”

From Broadway’s Funny Face, which she starred in, Barbra Streisand’s first hit, “People.”

And that’s gonna have to wrap things up for our 1964 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thank you for listening, and be sure and visit the chartcrush.com website, where you’ll find written transcripts and streamable Spotify versions of this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other ace extras. We count down a different year every week 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 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, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1973, a year in which a lot of things unraveled and came undone in America, but as in other eras, music was a refuge: a sanctuary.

Plug your clunky Pickering or Koss headphones into the quarter-inch headphone jack on your amp, drop the needle on a vinyl album and the news of the world just melts away for a while. In your car? No problem! It probably had an aftermarket or built-in eight-track tape player. No rewinding or song selection, but at least you didn’t have to listen to the latest Tiger Beat hearthrob’s new single sandwiched between Clearasil, Tang and McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” commercials on the staticky AM station.

Thanks to better sound, and these killer new ways to listen, music had become a truly immersive experience, more effective as a refuge from reality than ever before. And as I mentioned, a lot to take refuge from in 1973.

The year started out with something positive: the Vietnam draft ended, and the same month, January, the Paris Peace Accords brought the U.S. combat role in Southeast Asia to a close. Opposing Vietnam and the draft, the two issues that had galvanized the ’60s counterculture. But it wasn’t good news for everyone, especially Cold War hawks, who saw it as a humiliating surrender.

Our Cold War nemesis the Soviet Union saw it as a surrender too, and the other shoe dropped in the Fall: a surprise attack against Israeli-occupied territory by a coalition of Soviet-aligned and equipped Arab countries on the Jewish holy day, Yom Kippur. Israel a close ally of the U.S. And as the so-called Yom Kippur War played out, the Soviets aggressively resupplied the Arabs and even considered sending troops and occupying some of the disputed territory themselves.

All this at the height of President Nixon’s woes in the Watergate scandal. Well, Secretary of State Kissinger was having none of it and got U.S. forces bumped up to Defcon III for the first time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Soviets backed off. But in retaliation for our support of Israel though, the Arab oil cartel OPEC turned off the spigot, quadrupling the price of crude and making Americans suddenly and shockingly aware for the first time of our addiction to imported oil, as they queued up to buy Winter sweaters and fill up their guzzling Furys, LTDs and Monte Carlos with pricey, rationed gas.

And the backdrop to all this throughout 1973, of course: I already mentioned it in passing: the constant drip-drip-drip of the unfolding Watergate scandal. Richard Nixon, the President of the United States, Republican, feared and loathed by the counterculture and the media, but just re-elected in a 49-state landslide in the ’72 election: under fire in wall-to-wall televised hearings in Congress to investigate his role in covering up a break-in, by overzealous campaign operatives, to Democratic National Committee headquarters in DC’s Watergate office building. Nixon resigned the Presidency in 1974 over that, but it all played out in ’73.

Ugh. You want to listen to some music? Hmph. Now you know how folks in ’73 felt!

#10 Charlie Rich – The Most Beautiful Girl

So we’re gonna kick off our 1973 edition of Chartcrush with what emerged as a big trend that year, but one that’s been overshadowed by Glam Rock, Punk, Funk and especially Disco in our collective 70’s music memory. The trend? Country.

In the summer of ’72, the movie Deliverance starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight and Ned Beatty came out and was a sleeper hit at the box office. “Dueling Banjos” from the film was a massive jukebox hit, and got all the way to #2 on the Hot100 for four weeks in February and March: an instrumental Bluegrass number.

Was it a fluke? Well one of the records that answered that question and proved that Country crossover was a thing when it topped the Hot100 in December was our #10 song. It’s Charlie Rich, “The Most Beautiful Girl.”

Charlie Rich, “The Most Beautiful Girl.” #10 as we count down the top 10 from 1973 here on the Chartcrush Countdown Show. A straight-up Countrypolitan song of the type that Nashville had been cranking out for years. It was even produced by Billy Sherril, Tammy Wynette and George Jones’ Producer, and came complete with pedal steel in the arrangement and a sad, cryin’-in-my-beer lost love story. Nothing about it engineered for the Pop charts in 1973, yet it was a #1 hit on the Hot100 for two weeks in December.

Charlie Rich never duplicated that success, but plenty of other Country artists sure did: Jim Stafford, Freddy Fender, Glen Campbell, Crystal Gayle, Jimmy Buffett, Kenny Rogers, not to mention The Eagles, Neil Young, John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, Charlie Daniels, Pure Prairie League and you could even say some of Fleetwood Mac’s mid-’70s hits!

#9 Jim Croce – Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

So the platinum Comedy album was a brand new thing in 1973 with Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambu and George Carlin’s Class Clown both passing the million unit mark. Class Clown contained Carlin’s bit about broadcast censorship, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and interesting to note, all seven of Carlin’s words are still verboten on America’s airwaves, even though they’ve shown up on literally hundreds of post-2000 radio hits. Radio of course plays special radio edits.

Now “damn” is a four-letter word that wasn’t on Carlin’s list, but our #8 song was only the second hit of any magnitude that used the word. The first: Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” in ’71. And it’s also the first of three story songs in our countdown (more on that later). It’s Jim Croce: “Bad Bad Leroy Brown.”

One of the biggest hits of the Singer-Songwriter genre: Jim Croce’s “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1973. All of Jim Croce’s songs sprang from his working-class background, attitudes and sense of humor, at a time when the public’s appetite for common-man perspectives was growing. “Leroy Brown” is based on a real guy Croce knew in the Army.

Unlike the fellow who cornered that market later in the ’70s, Bruce Springsteen, starting with his 1975 album Born to Run, Jim Croce was massively successful on the singles chart, not just with “Leroy Brown” but his other 1973 hits, “Time in a Bottle” and “I Got a Name,” and his 1972 breakthrough, “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim.”

Notwithstanding Bob Seger and Tom Petty, no one else with that kind of out-front common-man orientation even approached Jim Croce’s success on the singles charts until John Cougar in the early ’80s.  We can only speculate what might’ve been had Croce’s career and life not been tragically cut short when the plane he was on ran into a tree on takeoff in September of 1973. He was only 30.

Perhaps in tribute, perhaps just because he could relate to the song (likely both), none other than Frank Sinatra covered “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” on his 1974 album Some Nice Things I’ve Missed. And it even charted!

#8 Gladys Knight and The Pips – Midnight Train to Georgia

At #8, the first #1 hit by an Atlanta Soul-R&B group that’d been at it since before Elvis, 1952, when the Group’s Lead Singer won first prize on a TV talent show. She was just eight. By ’57 they had a label, and by ’61, their first top 20 hit. And despite not scoring another for almost six years, they did very well purely on the strength of their exceptionally polished, well-choreographed live show.

Motown signed them ’66, and label boss Berry Gordy, Jr. put them on Motown’s Soul subsidiary label for acts not meant for the Pop charts. Which is incredibly ironic because in late ’67, the group’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was a #2 hit on the Hot100 and became Motown’s best-selling single ever. Marvin Gaye’s version eclipsed it a year later, but by ’73 they’d racked up another dozen hits on Soul.

Switching over to Buddah Records in ’73, a label that was branching out from its roots in late ’60s Bubblegum Pop, they scored their biggest hit late in the year in ’73. Too late unfortunately for the second half of its chart run to impact Billboard’s year-end ranking for ’73, so it winds up #49 on Billboard’s published year-end Hot100. But counting its chart action from mid-November until it exited the chart in January ’74 puts the song at #8 on the year. It’s Gladys Knight & The Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

Gladys Knight & The Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia.” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1973. Gladys & The Pips stayed hot through ’74 and into ’75, but struggled on the charts in the Disco years later in the ’70s.

After moving to Columbia Records in 1980, and then to MCA later in the ’80s, they notched their last hit in 1988 before amicably splitting after 37 years with the same core lineup and Gladys moving on to a solo career that kicked off with a James Bond theme (“License to Kill”) that was a top ten hit in Britain.

In 2019, she defied the Colin Kaepernick NFL kneeling protest fad by singing the national anthem at Superbowl LIII in her hometown of Atlanta. That caused a huge controversy, but at 75 she looked and sounded great and the performance even drew comparisons to Whitney Houston, whose Superbowl anthem in 1991 was a top 20 hit!

#7 Elton John – Crocodile Rock

Now when The Beatles split in 1970, it left a huge smoking crater right at the center of the Pop music landscape. They’d been music’s undisputed, go-to yardstick of cool for so long, replacing Elvis in that role, that psychologically, fans and especially critics didn’t quite know how to adapt to this new leaderless pop culture mise en scene.

Well, as the saying goes, “nature abhors a vacuum,” and in The Beatles’ native U.K., David Bowie (in his Ziggy Stardust phase) emerged. But Bowie? Eh, a little too over-the-top for the American middle, even in 1973. Our act at #7 though somehow conjured the sheer audacity to merge British op-art Glam flamboyance with folksy Singer-Songwriter earthiness, and then sell it at L.A.’s most famous Folk club, The Troubadour.

Well, if anyone filled the Beatles void in America, it was this guy who notched six U.S. #1’s in just three-and-a-half years. And here’s the first of them. #7 on our Chartcrush 1973 countdown: Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock.”

Elton John and his longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin’s paean to early Rock ‘n Roll, “Crocodile Rock,” Elton’s first career #1 hit, riding the top of the charts tapping into ’50s nostalgia while George Lucas prepared his pre-Star Wars ’50s pastiche American Graffiti for release in the Summer.

“Crocodile,” the lead single from Elton’s sixth studio album in just over three years, Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player. And by the way, also the first single released on the MCA label.

In a gutsy move in ’73, parent company MCA dissolved all its record labels and merged them together as MCA, which didn’t even exist as a label before that. Huge, established brands in the record biz: Uni, Kapp, Coral and, the biggest of them all, Decca. Just like that, poof!

#6 Eddie Kendricks – Keep On Truckin’, Part 1

Now part of the reason for Country’s expanding appeal, of course, was that it was one of the few things in American life that wasn’t becoming completely unhinged from its past in 1973, like Soul music was! Gone were Motown’s bouncy R&B Pop confections and the Gospel-derived Memphis Soul sound of the Stax and Volt labels.

A Billboard article in ’73 observed this, noting that only one top 10 single during the year even kind of fits the old definition of Soul, and that was Fred Wesley & The J.B.’s funky “Doing It to  Death.” So Soul/R&B was changing, but a lot of the names were the same, just going in different directions, free from suffocatingly strict label-imposed formulas.

Now of course Rock was changing radically too, but not too many Rock artists who were big before, say 1967 or 8 were thriving in the sprawling new ’70s free-form FM album paradigm. The top Album Rock acts like Led Zeppelin, Yes, Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper: all relatively new to the charts.

But in R&B, albums like Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book and Innervisions and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Even Diana Ross’ prolific early ’70s output: radical creative departures by the top established artists: not only brilliant, innovative and praised by critics, but hugely successful.

Our #6 song, another example. It’s one the main Singers in Motown’s biggest Male Group in the ’60s, The Temptations, and his distinctive falsetto on “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “Get Ready,” “Just My Imagination” and other hits made him one of the most instantly recognizable voices of the era. Here’s Eddie Kendricks, like Stevie, Marvin and Diana, still on Motown but now blazing his own trail. “Keep On Truckin’.”

Eddie Kendricks, #6 on our 1973 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. “Keep On Truckin'”, the only solo #1 ever by a member of The Temptations. It took its sweet time truckin’ up the charts to #1 too: eight weeks from when it broke into the top 20.

The full version of “Keep On Truckin'” clocks in at nearly eight minutes on Kendricks’ self-titled third album. Long songs, often split into two parts on singles in those days. What we just heard was Part One, the A-side.

For their part, The Temptations, minus Kendricks, had just topped the charts in late ’72 with their 12-minute masterpiece, edited to seven for the single, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

#5 Carly Simon – You’re So Vain

At #5, the first and only career #1 song by one of the top Female Singer-Songwriters of the ’70s: a Grammy favorite and daughter of one of the founders of Simon & Schuster, the Book Publisher. Once the song was a hit, a speculative frenzy ensued thanks to its pointed and clue-filled but still cryptic lyrics.

“Who’s it about?” you can’t help wonder. And the Singer was no help. Not just because she wouldn’t say anything, but because looking at her bio, is there a good-looking man in music, movies and beyond from the mid-’60s up to ’73 that she didn’t date? The title of the album it’s on is No Secrets. Eh, nothing ironic about that! At #5 it’s Carly Simon’s, “You’re So Vain.”

Carly Simon at #5 on our Chartcrush Countdown Show for 1973, “You’re So Vain,” the year’s first #1 song on the calendar, where it stayed for three weeks, then got bumped down to #2 behind “Crocodile Rock” for most of February.

OK, so who is this narcissist who did our girl Carly dirty? The details she gives are so specific, right? You can’t help trying to connect the dots. Well, it can’t be fellow Singer-Songwriter James Taylor, who she just married in 1972, right? So who? Rolling Stones Frontman Mick Jagger? He does sing backup on that record, and, well, Mick Jagger is pretty vain.

For years Simon brushed off the question with “Oh, it’s not any one guy, it’s just a composite.” But then in 2003, she revealed that there was in fact a specific Mr. “You’re So Vain” by offering to spill the deets to the highest bidder in a charity auction. NBC executive Dick Ebersol won with a bid of $50 grand, so I guess he knows, but sworn to secrecy under the terms of the auction.

Finally in 2015, plugging her memoir, she told People magazine that each of the song’s three verses is about a different man. And she even named one. Verse two, the guy who said they made such a pretty pair and that he’d never leave: actor Warren Beatty. As for the guy in verse one who walked into the party like he was walking onto a yacht, and verse three the guy with the horse at Saratoga who jetted off for the eclipse in Nova Scotia? The mystery continues.

#4 Paul McCartney and Wings – My Love

Now to the extent that The Beatles were a functioning band after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, their 1967 magnum opus, Paul McCartney was the glue that was holding things together. Their manager since the beginning, Brian Epstein, died at just 32 from an accidental barbiturate overdose right after the album came out, and no one besides McCartney seemed to even care enough to try and fill his shoes, which was a tall order, and he was of course unsuccessful. So after the split in 1970, McCartney was rudderless. His first solo album was a collection of home demos of what would’ve become Beatles songs.

By 1973 though, McCartney and his wife Linda had released their brilliant Ram album, which included the #1 hit “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and formed a new Band, Wings, which, after a lukewarm start, hit its stride in 1973, cranking out two albums and a James Bond theme, “Live and Let Die.”

Our song at #4 was from the first of those albums, Red Rose Speedway. The second, Band on the Run, came out at the end of the year. #1 for four weeks in June ’73, Paul McCartney’s first post-Beatles year-end top ten hit: “My Love.”

“My Love,” the #4 hit of 1973 according to our Chartcrush ranking. ’73, a big year for The Beatles past and present. Capitol released its two double-album Beatles greatest hits collections; Ringo and George both scored #1 hits with “Photograph,” and “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” respectively; and John Lennon’s Mind Games album dropped in November.

Besides “My Love,” Paul’s Bond theme, “Live and Let Die,” was #2 for three weeks, kept out of the top spot by three different songs. McCartney, of course, wrote “My Love,” to his wife Linda, and in the promo video they did with other members of Wings, both Paul and Linda got their hair on fleek, sporting a matching pair of possibly the illest first-gen mullets in Rock history.

#3 Roberta Flack – Killing Me Softly with His Song

Next up at #3 in our Chartcrush Countdown Show for 1973: the Singer who had the #1 song of the year in 1972, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” coming pretty close to repeating at the top-spot. Elvis had back-to-back year-end chart toppers on Billboard‘s Best Sellers chart in 1956 and ’57 with “Heartbreak Hotel” and “All Shook Up,” but that was pre-Hot100. Since 1958 when the Hot100 began, this is as close as anyone’s ever gotten: Roberta Flack, “Killing Me Softly.”

“Killing Me Softly with His Song,” Roberta Flack with the #3 song of 1973, nearly repeating at the top spot after “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was the #1 song of 1972. Not bad for a DC piano bar singer whose first album barely dented the charts.

She got what turned out to be her big break when Clint Eastwood needed a song for a poignant love scene in his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me and chose “First Time Ever.” “Killing Me Softly” was her solo follow-up.

She hit #1 again in 1974 with a more down-the-middle pop R&B sound on “Feel like Makin’ Love,” but none of her later stuff comes close to the deep, intelligent intensity of “First Time” or “Killing Me Softly.”

Hip-Hop Group The Fugees had a massive hit with their cover of “Killing Me Softly,” Lauryn Hill singing lead. That was Billboard’s #10 year-end Airplay hit of 1996.

#2 Marvin Gaye – Let’s Get It On

And next up at #2 as we close in on the #1 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1973, another top Male Soul/R&B singer: Motown’s most successful, going all the way back to his first chart hit for the label in 1962, breaking from the template that had made him a star. But this Singer had already been going his own way for a couple years by 1973, having thrown down the gauntlet with Motown founder and mogul Berry Gordy, Jr. over his musical direction in 1970.

His first effort with creative control, “What’s Going On,” which Gordy didn’t want to release because it was too political, became Motown’s bestselling single ever up to that point, and in ’73 he did outdid himself, selling two million in the first six weeks and scoring Billboard’s #1 year-end Soul/R&B single with this. As steamy sexual as “What’s Going On” was political, it’s Marvin Gaye at #6, “Let’s Get It On.”

Speaking of songs that would’ve been banned just a few years earlier… Hey, if you want more “Let’s Get It On,” just pull up the album. There’s a Part Two on it, titled (what else?) “Keep Gettin’ It On.”

Marvin Gaye made Motown a boatload of money in ’69 with his version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which I mentioned earlier replaced Gladys Knight’s version as Motown’s biggest seller. Well, that gave him the clout to demand and get creative control over his music going forward from a very reluctant Berry Gordy, Jr., head of Motown.

“Grapevine” was #1 for seven weeks, late ’68 into ’69, and the #1 song of ’69 if you count its full chart run, which of course we do here at Chartcrush. And then in ’71 “What’s Going On” did even better sales-wise than “Grapevine,” so Gordy loosened the reins with other big Motown acts and a Soul/R&B renaissance ensued and continued with “Let’s Get It On,” the #2 song on our Chartcrush countdown for 1973.

Lyrically of course, the song is a plea for sexual liberation, which gives it a broader cultural context in the middle of the sexual revolution. The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision declaring abortion a Constitutional right had just come down in January. But Marvin Gaye had a more immediate inspiration: his future live-in lover and, in ’77, second wife, Janis Hunter, a friend’s daughter just half his age, and Marvin was already married since 1963, to Berry Gordy, Jr.’s sister Anna. Oh boy.

#1 Dawn featuring Tony Orlando – Tie a Yellow Ribbon (Round the Old Oak Tree)

OK, we’re down to the #1 song on our 1973 Chartcrush Countdown. We’ve already heard two so-called “story songs” in our countdown: “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” at #9 and “You’re So Vain” at #5. Now, there’ve been big story song hits in all eras, but the early ’70s: kind of a golden age.

Our #1 song, also #1 on Billboard’s year-end ranking for 1973, is about a guy who’s just gotten out of jail for stealing and isn’t sure if his sweetheart still wants him in her life. He doesn’t want to just show up and knock on the door if he’s not wanted. That’d be awkward. So he devises a way she can signal “yes, I still want you,” and he’ll be able to see it from the bus. In his final letter from jail he tells her to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon (Round the Old Oak Tree).” Here’s Tony Orlando and Dawn with the #1 song of 1973.

Tony Orlando & Dawn with the #1 song of 1973, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon (Round the Old Oak Tree).” Orlando and Dawn had the #4 song of 1971 with another story song about signaling affections (or lack thereof) without all that difficult and unpleasant eye contact, hemming, hawing and stammering. “Knock Three Times.” In that song we never find out how the story ends, but “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” has a very happy ending: not just one, but a hundred yellow ribbons ’round the old oak tree.

Bonus

And there you have ’em: the top 10 songs of 1973, according to our Chartcrush ranking based on 52 Billboard magazine weekly Hot100 charts from January to December. To review, three songs we heard this hour that made our Chartcrush Top Ten were not in the top ten on Billboard‘s published year-end Hot100 chart because the chart runs spilled over into Billboard‘s 1974 chart year and weren’t counted towards their 1973 ranking.

Those were Eddie Kendricks’ “Keep On Truckin’,” our #9 song, #35 on the year in Billboard; Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia,” #8 on our Chartcrush ranking, #49 Billboard. And Charlie Rich’s “Most Beautiful Girl,” our #10 song: that one was so late in the year that Billboard has it at #24 for 1974.

But those three coming in to our Chartcrush top ten bumps three songs out from Billboard‘s top ten for ’73. To be thorough, let’s take a look at those.

#45 Kris Kristofferson – Why Me

Billboard‘s #6 song of the year was on the Hot100 from the beginning of April to the end of December, 38 weeks, which shattered the Hot100 record of 27 weeks set by Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” in 1960, and stood until Paul Davis’ “I Go Crazy” notched 40 weeks in 1978. It only topped out at #16 though, so it misses out on the bonus points our Chartcrush ranking method awards for weeks at #1 and in the top 10 to model the hockey stick effect in sales and airplay as you approach #1. We have it at #45 for 1973. It’s Singer-Songwriter Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me.”

Well if, as some have said, the early ’70s were a cultural hangover from the ’60s, “Why Me” definitely rates a slot on that playlist. Country music historian Bill Malone called “Why Me” “a personal religious rephrasing” of Kris Kristofferson’s earlier song, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” in which Kristofferson is “coming down” not from drugs or alcohol, but from the whole hedonistic euphoria of the ’60s. His gruff vocals? Perfect for a song about “a man who has lived a lot but is now humbling himself before God,” Malone said.

#15 Billy Preston – Will It Go Round in Circles

Billboard‘s #8 song of ’73 fared quite a bit better than “Why Me” on our Chartcrush ranking thanks to its two weeks at #1 and eight in the top 10. One of the ’60’s top session keyboardists and the only artist ever to get a feature credit on a Beatles record, “Get Back” and its flip, “Don’t Let Me Down.” He’d been putting out solo records for ten years, but no hits until his instrumental “Outta-Space” in ’72, then this one with vocals, his first #1 in ’73: Billy Preston’s “Will It Go Round in Circles.”

Billy Preston’s “Will It Go Round in Circles” notches in at #15 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top 10 from earlier. He was back at #1 in ’74 with “Nothing from Nothing.”

#12 Diana Ross – Touch Me in the Morning

And Billboard‘s #10 song on its published year-end Hot100 for ’73 just misses our Chartcrush Top Ten at #12: one of the most successful women in Pop for eight years, pushed to the limits of her vocal abilities on this song by her label, Motown. So much so that according to Songwriter/Producer Michael Masser, she suffered near-breakdowns during the sessions. But it was her second #1 after splitting from The Supremes and going solo in 1970. It’s Diana Ross’ “Touch Me in the Morning.”

Diana Ross, a busy gal in the early ’70s: first daughter born in ’71; second in ’72; Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues; and four solo albums. “Touch Me in the Morning,” the second of her six solo #1s, 1970 to ’81.

And that’s it for our 1973 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening. For more, go check out our website, chartcrush.com. There you’ll find a written transcript and link to stream the podcast version of the show, plus our full top 100 chart, chart run line graph and other groovy extras. We do that for every year we count down, ’40s to now and it’s all on the website, again chartcrush.com. It’s a different year every week on this show, 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 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 Billboard magazine, the music industry’s top trade publication. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 2005, the year the youngest Gen-Xers turned 25, and the next generation, Millennials, born 1981 to 1996, were definitely in charge on the Pop charts.

Some would say it was earlier, when 50 Cent’s heavily-censored “In da Club” topped the ’03 year-end Hot100 and Airplay charts and Crunk king Lil Jon scored his first hit, or ’02 when Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” surfaced Emo and Skater Punk (both of those year-end top 20 hits in 2002). Or even as early as 1999, when Teen Millennials sent their Boy Bands ‘NSYNC and Backstreet Boys to battle it out with their Girl Idols Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

Whatever, as a generation, like Baby Boomers in the mid-’60s, Millennials exploded onto the Pop charts before the oldest were even out of high school, cutting short Gen-X’s brief reign after Xers had spent their Teens in the ’80s thinking their Gangsta Rap, Grunge, Alt-Metal and Neo-Trad Country would never be mainstream.

That changed in ’91 with the first Lollapalooza festival tour and then Billboard dumping its ancient survey system and switching to monitored sales and airplay data for the charts, which revealed that Gen-X sounds were already mainstream and probably had been for quite some time. But by decade’s end, here came the Millennials.

Not that Gen-X minded too much, busy forming a wave of entrepreneurs and ladder climbers in the burgeoning tech industry, which had a far more profound impact on music than anything any artist, label or DJ did in the 2000’s.

By 2005, digital storage was affordable, and high-speed internet was slashing mp3 download times from minutes to just seconds for millions of music fans. 2005 was the year broadband internet overtook dialup, and the computer company Apple on its way to becoming the largest music retailer, since 2001 selling what quickly became the default gadget for playing mp3s, the iPod, and since 2003 the mp3s themselves for 99 cents apiece on its virtual iTunes store.

But for every music fan paying 99 cents a song, 50? 100? 200? A thousand? were filling up their iPods for nothing with mp3s downloaded off legally ambiguous peer-to-peer platforms like Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, just to name a few, that’d cropped up after courts shut down the original mp3 sharing site, Napster, in ’01.

No one really knows the extent of illegal music downloading in the early 2000s, but it was an epic disaster for the music industry and a huge blind spot on the charts, only partially-addressed by Billboard launching its Hot Digital Songs chart in late 2004 tracking paid downloads, then incorporating digital sales into the Hot100 for the 2005 chart year: the first new consumer sales component added to the Hot100, ever. Up until then only physical sales (records, tapes or CDs) counted. And boy did the chart need it! Hot100 and Airplay charts: practically indistinguishable in the first half of the 2000s.

#10 Kelly Clarkson – Breakaway

Now another enormously consequential music discovery platform in the 2000s is where our artist at #10 got her break, and with her album that was on the charts in 2005, she decisively proved the doubters wrong and firmly established said platform as a springboard for bona fide Pop stars.

Just one year-end top ten hit would’ve done the trick, but she scored two in ’05. And here’s the first of them at #10. It’s American Idol Season One winner Kelly Clarkson, the title song from her six-times platinum sophomore album, “Breakaway.”

Kelly Clarkson, “Breakaway” at #10: the first of two Kelly Clarkson hits we’ll be hearing this hour as we count down the biggest hits of 2005 on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Clarkson, the winner of Fox TV’s surprise 2002 smash American Idol, as determined by 58% of the 15½ million votes phoned-in after the season one finale, in which Clarkson squared off against runner-up Justin Guarini. And then her coronation single, “A Moment like This,” shot to #1 in just three weeks. “Miss Independent” from her first album was also a top10 hit in ’03.

But despite all that, critics had a hard time accepting that a TV talent show winner could be more than just a flash in the pan. Her second album Breakaway settled the question with its five Hot100 hits and cemented American Idol’s status as a legit star-maker.

Unfortunately though, Idol’s clout didn’t translate to movies. The 2003 romantic comedy From Justin to Kelly starring Clarkson and Guarini, not only bombed at the box office; it won a special Golden Raspberry Award as the Worst (airquotes) “Musical” of the First 25 Years of the Golden Raspberries.

#9 Snoop Dogg featuring Pharrell Williams – Drop It like It’s Hot

At #9, the first of three Hip-Hop songs in our countdown and chronologically the earliest: #1 for three weeks in December 2004, whereupon it had a very gradual descent from the top spot that kept it in the top ten for another eight weeks, in calendar 2005. Because its run on the charts straddled ’04 and ’05, it made Billboard’s Year-End Hot100 in both years, but counting its full chart run, as we do with every song here on Chartcrush, gets it into our top ten for ’05, which is only fitting since it wound up being Billboard’s #1 Rap song of the 2000’s decade.

Besides the vocals, the track has a drum machine, a keyboard riff and, perhaps its most novel and unforgettable feature, tongue clicks. One of the most sparsely-produced hits in Hot100 history: here’s West-Coast Rapper Snoop Dogg teaming up with Pharrell Williams, who co-produced with his crew The Neptunes. Snoop’s very first #1, despite charting 10 songs since his 1993 debut, #9 “Drop It like It’s Hot.”

Snoop Dogg with Pharrell Williams, “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of the top ten hits of 2005. It was also the #2 song of the year on Billboard’s Ringtone chart, just launched at the end of 2004. Ringtones—snippets of songs for your flip-phone, downloaded, for a price, from Zingy, 9Squared, a dozen other providers that sprung up out of nowhere—that you could customize for different callers.

Having any cell phone in 2005 was still brag-worthy. But having one of the fancy ones that played different songs when people called? Well, that was just something you wanted the whole world to hear, literally! And a great conversation starter before phone etiquette evolved and rendered the custom ringtone more of an eye-roll moment than an excuse to get up and dance.

Billboard discontinued the Ringtone chart in 2014, but for a music biz fighting for its life in 2005, a previously nonexistent niche worth an estimated $4 billion was a godsend.

#8 Lifehouse – You and Me

Next at #9, the L.A. Post-Grunge group whose debut single “Hanging by a Moment” was the #1 song on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 for 2001, despite never making it to #1 on the weekly chart. Its run spanned almost the whole year and went into ’02, 54 weeks, and when you add up the points for all those weeks, there it is, #1 on the year!

Well they went four years without another top10 hit, until this, which had an even longer chart run than “Hanging by a Moment.” It debuted in February, dropped off for a week but then returned in March and stayed on the chart all the way ’til the end of April 2006. 62 weeks peaking at #5: one of the longest chart runs ever. It’s Lifehouse, “You and Me.”

“You and Me,” the #8 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2005, released as the first single off Lifehouse’s eponymously-named third album. But it was only denting the charts until Lifehouse appeared as the prom band in an episode of the WB Network’s Superman prequel series Smallville, and played “You and Me” during a poignant slow dance scene, whereupon it took a sharp upward turn and climbed steadily over the next four months to its peak at #5. It was a must-play at proms and weddings starting in 2005, and topped a special Billboard ranking of Adult Pop Songs from the last 15 years that was published in 2011.

#7 Gwen Stefani – Hollaback Girl

So touring was bigger than ever in the Wild West days of rampant music piracy on the internet, but Baby Boom acts continued to dominate America’s arenas and stadiums: Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bon Jovi, Eagles, Elton John. In fact, only one artist in our Chartcrush countdown of 2005’s top ten songs was among Billboard’s top 35 concert grosses of the year, and it’s our artist at #7.

She was everywhere, both as a fashion icon and Pop star: Billboard’s #1 New Artist in 2005 even though she’d been on the radio and the charts for years with the band she fronted since the mid ’80s, No Doubt.

The song was 2005’s big upbeat Summer hit and the first ever to pass the million mark on iTunes, which made it a lock for the top spot on the first year-end Hot Digital Songs chart. Written in response to ’90s Grunge icon Courtney Love dismissing her as a “cheerleader,” here’s Gwen Stefani, “Hollaback Girl.”

Now why use a swear word only once in a song when you can repeat it dozens of times? The word in question: the one that rhymes with “split,” and in the Radio Edit of our #7 song, Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” all 38 instances on the uncensored album version are covered up with a coach whistle or omitted altogether, and the video has Stefani playfully doing a “shh” gesture. Cussing aside, Stefani wanted a silly Dance Pop song for her first solo album, and “Hollaback Girl” was it.

Co-written and produced by ubiquitous behind-the-scenester Pharrell Williams, again, Snoop Dogg’s collaborator on “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” our #9 song. In 2014, Pharrell’s first headline single in nearly 10 years was the #1 song of the year, “Happy.”

Not everyone loved “Hollaback Girl.” The men’s magazine Maxim named it the “Most Annoying Song Ever.”

#6 Ciara featuring Missy Elliott – 1, 2 Step

At #6 as we count down the top ten hits of 2005 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, the only artist from our 2004 top ten, repeating in 2005. Her debut single “Goodies,” featuring Petey Pablo, was our #4 song of ’04.

The Hip-Hop style “Crunk” was at its peak in the mid 2000’s. Lil Jon & Usher’s “Yeah” (2004’s #1 song) the penultimate Crunk track. Well this artist embodied a Crunk/R&B hybrid that critics dubbed (what else?) Crunk ‘n B, first with “Goodies,” then with this, her follow-up featuring rapper Missy Elliott. At #5 it’s Ciara, “1, 2 Step.”

Chart newcomer Ciara, “1, 2 Step:” the follow-up to 2004’s #4 song, “Goodies,” and the #6 song of 2005 as we count down the top hits of 2005 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The Rap verse in “1, 2 Step” is by veteran Rapper Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, who stunned the music biz back in 1997 when her first album debuted at #3 on the album charts, unheard of for a Female Rapper at the time.

It was only fitting that Elliott would feature on a Ciara hit. That oscillating whistle that runs through both “1, 2 Step” and “Goodies:” a gimmick lifted straight from Missy Elliott’s 2002 hit, “Work It.” Ciara further returned the favor by guesting on a Missy Elliott track that was a #3 hit in ’05, “Lose Control.”

#5 Kelly Clarkson – Since U Been Gone

So if you listen to this show, you know that it’s not unusual for an artist to have two or more songs among the top ten on the year. In fact, going back to the ’40s, on average there are two or more songs by the same artist in the top ten for the year in over half the years.

By our reckoning here at Chartcrush, ’04 was a banner year for artists with multiple year-end top ten hits: Maroon 5 and Outkast each had two, and Usher had three! In ’05 though? Only one artist has more than one song in our top ten, and it’s the Singer whose “Breakaway” we heard at #10. Here again, American Idol Season One winner Kelly Clarkson at #4: her biggest hit of the year, “Since U Been Gone.”

Now in its ’05 year-end recap, Billboard took note of the stigma attached to talent contest winners like Kelly Clarkson, winner of American Idol’s first season. Their singles sell well, Billboard noted, but they don’t get much radio support. Kelly Clarkson changed that with her second album Breakaway, in which she crafted a sound, along with some top Collaborators and Producers lined up by legendary label boss and A&R man Clive Davis, that Billboard credited with roughing out the core up-tempo, Dance-oriented Mainstream Pop sound that carried into the 2010s.

Radio couldn’t get enough Kelly Clarkson in ’05, as she dominated the Pop, Adult-Contemporary and Adult Top 40 radio formats with multiple hits from the Breakaway album.

Incidentally, Season Four of American Idol was in early 2005 and the winner, Carrie Underwood, immediately went on to score the only #1 Hot100 hit of the 2000s decade by a female solo Country singer with “Inside Your Heaven.” That was the #83 song in our ’05 year-end ranking.

Underwood grabbed the #4 spot in our 2007 top ten with “Before He Cheats” and Clarkson was back in the yearly top ten in 2012 with “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” before switching in the mid-to-late ’10s to children’s books, The Voice and her own NBC daytime TV talk show.

#4 50 Cent featuring Olivia – Candy Shop

At #4, the return to the year-end top ten of the Rapper who, in ’03, did what Nelly couldn’t do in ’02: score the #1 hit of the year with a debauched, profanity-laced Hip-Hop party Anthem. Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” the #6 hit of ’02; this artist’s “In da Club,” #1 on the year ’03.

Together, the magnitude of those two hits in back-to-back years cemented Rap’s “bling era” and represented an historic coup in Pop history that NPR’s Frannie Kelley in 2009 compared to Hair Metal in the late ’80s. Usher and Lil Jon’s “Yeah” kept it going: the #1 song of ’04. From his second commercial album The Massacre, it’s 50 Cent featuring Olivia Longott, “The First Lady” of 50’s extended recording and mixtape crew, G-Unit,” it’s “Candy Shop.”

50 Cent featuring Olivia, “Candy Shop,” which was played on radio, of course, in a heavily censored Edit. But just as with 50’s “In da Club” in ’03, having to mute out what seems like half the song’s lyrics didn’t stop radio stations from playing the _____ out of that track. Heh, see what I did there?

How big was 50 Cent in 2005? Well, he was Billboard’s Artist of the Year. The Massacre was the #1 album: first time an act had the #1 album two different years since Michael Jackson. All told, he headlined four massive hits in ’05, including “Candy Shop,” and featured on two others by West Coast newcomer The Game before ’05’s big Hip-Hop feud erupted between them.

50 shifted his focus to movie acting in ’05, first with the semi-autobiographical Get Rich or Die Tryin’, titled after his 2003 debut album, then with other projects. But as for music, as it turned out, ’05 was 50 Cent’s high-watermark on the charts. One of the epic Hip-Hop battles of all time was brewing between 50 and an up-and-comer we’ll hear in a couple minutes.

#3 Mario – Let Me Love You

OK, we’re gonna slow things down a bit with our song at #3, which critics at the time compared to Michael Jackson’s romantic Ballads. The Singer was signed at just 14 by the aforementioned Clive Davis, who executive produced Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway. And his first single, a thoroughly reimagined cover of Biz Markie’s ’80s Hip-Hop classic “Just a Friend,” was a #4 hit in 2002.

On the strength of that, he built a large Teen following. But turning 18, he wanted a more mature sound for his follow-up, so he enlisted Crunk king Lil Jon and producer Scott Storch, who also worked with 50 Cent on “Candy Shop.” At #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown for 2005, here’s Mario, “Let Me Love You.”

“Let Me Love You,” Mario. The #3 song here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 2005. The hits dried up for Mario after “Let Me Love You,” and Chris Brown and Usher dominated the Smooth R&B space for the rest of the 2000’s, but he continued recording and releasing new music into the 2020s, despite no chart activity on the Hot100 or album charts since 2009.

#2 Kanye West featuring Jamie Foxx – Gold Digger

At #2, the artist I mentioned after we heard 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop,” who challenged “the bully of Hip-Hop’s” supremacy on the charts, not with insults, diss lines or, God forbid, bullets and posses and unsolved murders, but simply by out-selling and out-charting him, winning fans, and in so doing, blazing a new trail for Hip-Hop in the late 2000s: less blingy, arrogant and ghetto; more common-touch, introspective and, dare I say, middle-class!

And that remained the template well into the 2010’s until the ghetto struck back at the top of the charts, with Trap. But in ’05 those battle lines were just being drawn between New Yorker 50 Cent and the self-described (on the title of his first album) College Dropout, a former ghost producer from Chicago, his sophomore album Late Registration in ’05 continuing the collegiate theme of College Dropout, it’s Kanye West at #2, “Gold Digger.”

Kanye West “Gold Digger,” from his second album Late Registration, the #2 song of 2005, beating 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop” at #4 and cuing up a title bout on the charts between the two Rappers in ’07 when both of their albums dropped on the same day, and 50 Cent famously said he’d quit music if Kanye outsold him, a bet he spectacularly lost.

The riff on Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” at the beginning and throughout “Gold Digger” is Actor-Comedian-Singer Jamie Foxx, fresh from playing Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray, for which he swept all the major Best Actor awards.

“Gold Digger” was the #1 record in America in late August when flooding from Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans’ largely African-American Ninth Ward, and in a telethon for the relief effort, Kanye, standing next to Wayne’s World and Austin Powers Star, Comedian Mike Meyers, went off-script to say that President George W. Bush didn’t care about Black people, which reverberated way beyond the music world. Some say it was the turning point in Bush’s presidency. Time for one, named Kanye one of 2005’s most influential people.

#1 Mariah Carey – We Belong Together

And that brings us to the #1 song in our Chartcrush countdown of the top hits of 2005. It’s the Singer’s 16th #1 hit on the Hot100, at least one every year for 11 consecutive years starting in 1990, and her eighth career appearance in the year-end top ten according to our Chartcrush rankings. That puts her at #2 on that all-time list in the Hot100 era behind only The Beatles, who had 10.

She was Billboard’s Artist of the 1990s Decade, but didn’t score big like her ’90s heyday in the 2000s until her autobiographical album The Emancipation of Mimi and this monster hit that was #1 for 14 weeks. Despite her amazing run in the ’90s, this was her first year-end chart topper; it’s Mariah Carey, “We Belong Together.”

Mariah Carey’s spectacular comeback to the top of the charts in 2005, “We Belong Together,” the #1 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2005. And it wound up topping Billboard’s decade-end Hot100 chart for the 2000’s. Mariah scored a second #1 from her Emancipation of Mimi album in ’05, “Don’t Forget About Us.” And then “Touch My Body” was her 18th and final new song to hit #1 in 2008.

I say “new song” because her 1994 recording of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has made the charts every holiday season since online streams started factoring into the Hot100 in the early 2010s, even making it to #1 for multiple weeks every year since 2019.

Bonus

So there you have them, the top ten songs of 2005 according to our Chartcrush recap of Billboard’s published weekly Hot100 charts. Billboard, of course, does its own recaps at the end of every year, and those are considered the “official” year-end rankings. But there are problems with those, and correcting them is one of the main reasons we do this show.

For example, at Chartcrush, the chart year is what you’d expect: first week in January to last week of December. Billboard, though, has to set a cutoff week for its chart year in the Fall to leave time to produce the year-end issue, and it’s not the same for every year. Ranking points up to the cutoff get counted in the current year; after the cutoff, kicked into next year or sometimes not counted at all!

Now in the digital age, Billboard still has its cutoff week, but its year-end charts now use cumulative data from the original sources of its weekly charts: Soundscan unit sales, Broadcast Data Systems airplay stats, download and streaming data and what have you. Readers don’t have access to that, but in theory, it can produce a more accurate ranking than going purely by weekly chart positions.

So with all that in mind, there are some differences between Billboard’s year-end top ten for 2005 and ours.

#17 Kelly Clarkson – Behind These Hazel Eyes

We had Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway” at #10. Billboard didn’t count all of the song’s chart action in 2004 so it was #27, but a different Clarkson hit was their #10 song, “Behind These Hazel Eyes.”

“Hazel Eyes” was our #17 song of 2005.

#12 The Pussycat Dolls – Don’t Cha

Next as we look at the songs that made the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 but not our Chartcrush top ten we counted down this hour, their #9 song: ’05’s big Girl Group who filled the vacuum on the charts left by Destiny’s Child, Spice Girls and TLC, all on hiatus.

They’d been selling out the Roxy in L.A. for years as a neo-burlesque act, so Interscope label boss Jimmy Iovine adapted them into a Pop group with a new Lead Singer: Nicole Scherzinger’s former group Eden’s Crush, formed for the WB network’s Pop Stars USA, a precursor to American Idol. Their first and only single before their label folded, a top10 hit in 2001: “Get Over Yourself.” But in ’05, Billboard‘s #9 song of the year (#12 on ours) was The Pussycat Dolls, “Don’t Cha.”

Pussycat Dolls charted nine more hits over the next four years after “Don’t Cha,” including three more top10s.

Robin Antin, the choreographer who started the neo-burlesque act in the ’90s, kept the cabaret franchise going with The Pussycat Dolls Burlesque Saloon at Planet Hollywood in Vegas, The Pussycat Dollhouse in San Diego, and other ventures.

#13 Green Day – Boulevard of Broken Dreams

And finally, Billboard‘s #7 song of 2005, which our Chartcrush ranking puts at #13 on the year. The group had been at it for nearly 20 years and by ’04 were thinking of throwing in the towel, but decided to do a concept album instead, and that album American Idiot yielded one of the biggest Hot100 hits ever by a Punk band. It’s Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” #7 on Billboard‘s Year-End Hot100, #13 on our 2005 Chartcrush ranking. Kept out of the #1 spot all five of the weeks it was at #2 in March of ’05 by the song we heard at #4 song, 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop.”

Well, I hope you enjoyed our 2005 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other poppin’ extras. We count down a different year every week from the very beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in again next week, same station and 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, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1987, the year Hard Rock broke through on the Pop singles charts on its own terms for the first time in almost 15 years.

Glam Rock, a.k.a. “Hair Metal,” gradually built a following among Rock fans in the early ’80 who’d come to see Mainstream Rock as a disappointing, directionless muddle after its dominant mode in the ’70s, Progressive Rock or “Prog,” petered out around 1978. But Rock radio continued playing the favorites from what’s since been called Rock’s “denim and leather” era, and anything new that those aging artists put out. And fans would breathlessly anticipate these releases hoping to hear something worthy of existing in the same universe as the older classic stuff. It rarely was. Usually it sounded more like a lame attempt to stay relevant (or chase a buck) by jumping aboard the latest non-rock-adjacent bandwagon lighting up the charts. Disco, New Wave, Synthpop.

After years of disappointments, the burgeoning Glam Metal scene was Rock fans’ vote of no confidence. Musically and lyrically, it was ’70s Hard Rock stripped down to its basics, jettisoning all of Prog’s mysticism, sprawl and compositional ambition and zeroing in on catchy riffs, straightforward song structures, guitar pyrotechnics, and lusty, uncomplicated (some would say “shallow”) lyrics. And the aesthetic: showy, flashy, colorful spandex, headbands, hairspray and even makeup, ready-made for MTV, with image and attitude like a comic book version of the wildest sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll fantasies of adolescent boys.

Glam Metal: the big headline, but not the only one in ’87. ’87, also the first full year of MTV’s Sunday late-night nod to the left of the dial set, 120 Minutes, that took viewers “two hours into the future of music.” Wait, did that mean you were going forward in time two hours? Or were you visiting some unspecified future time for two hours? I think it’s the latter, but either way, they had no trouble filling the time in the dead of night with videos by what were then called “College Rock” artists because the only place you could hear them on the radio was on college stations. 120 Minutes: a huge milestone on the road to Alternative Rock’s breakthrough in the early ’90s.

By the way, MTV also had a show for Metalheads since ’85, which was renamed Headbanger’s Ball in ’87. And also in ’87, Yo! MTV Raps launched, but only in Europe. It was ported over to MTV America in ’88. The Beastie Boys’ License to Ill may’ve been the first #1 rap album ever, in ’87, with its big hit “Fight for Your Right to Party,” but like College Rock, Hip-Hop was still mostly underground. In ’87 Billboard critic Nelson George observed a generation gap in Black music. Older audiences including industry insiders and radio programmers were shunning it, but Rap albums were still selling like crazy and making the charts. Billboard finally acknowledged Alt Rock in ’88 when it launched its Modern Rock Tracks chart, later renamed Alternative Songs. The Hot Rap Tracks chart followed in ’89.

#10 Robbie Nevil – C’est la Vie

So Glam Metal, College Rock and Hip-Hop: three emerging genres that were in play in ’87, but a new default Pop-R&B sound had emerged in the mid-80’s, which had lots of flavors. But the core of it was a syncopated, Electro synth-beat-driven sound rooted in the New York and Miami Post-Disco dance scenes. In ’87, Billboard was just calling it “Urban Crossover.”

Our #10 song is a great reflection of that new Pop sound in that here was a songwriter, a white dude from L.A., who’d built a resume writing songs for mainstream R&B acts like The Pointer Sisters, El DeBarge and Earth, Wind & Fire, making his move and stepping in front of the mic. Not looking to break new ground; just looking (along with his producers) to hit the Pop bullseye and score a hit. And he did. Kicking off our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1987, it’s Robbie Nevil’s “C’est la Vie.”

Robbie Nevil (no relation to The Neville Brothers or Aaron Neville), “C’est la Vie,” #10 as we count down the top ten songs of 1987 here on the Chartcrush Countdown Show. The song stayed in the top 40 for 16 weeks in early 1987 peaking at #2 for two of them, and was a #1 Dance hit too. Nevil’s follow-up in ’87 was also a top 20 hit, but his fortunes quickly waned and he went back to songwriting and producing.

#9 Whitesnake – Here I Go Again

At #9, our first Glam Metal song. In 1973, rocker David Coverdale came out of nowhere to replace Ian Gillian as the lead singer of the British Hard Rock band Deep Purple, right when they were at their peak (Gillian had quit over internal quibbles and exhaustion from constant touring). The Coverdale-fronted version of Deep Purple was pretty successful, but not very stable, so they split in ’76, and in ’77, Coverdale released his first solo album, entitled Whitesnake.

OK, now fast-forward ten years. Now it’s 1987 and Whitesnake is no longer an album title by a solo artist, it’s the name of a band. Wait. No. it is an album title because Whitesnake’s 1987 album was titled Whitesnake, but now it’s a self-titled album by a band, not a solo artist. Wait. No. That’s not right either. Coverdale fired everyone in the band Whitesnake right after the album Whitesnake was done, and he’s the only guy who gets any facetime in the videos. So is it a solo album? Well, I don’t know. But at #9 it’s Whitesnake: “Here I Go Again.”

“Here I Go Again,” Whitesnake, the #9 song of 1987 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Now as if the whole Whitesnake saga isn’t confusing enough, there are actually three different versions of “Here I Go Again,” recorded by different Whitesnake lineups. The first from 1982, then they re-did it for their 1987 self-titled album. But the version we just heard isn’t either of those. It’s a special “radio-mix” version that was only released as a single, but was recorded after the album, and after David Coverdale fired his entire band.

A huge factor in Whitesnake’s success in ’87: their music videos, “Here I Go Again” and their other hits “Still of the Night” and “Is This Love.” All three starred Coverdale’s girlfriend and future wife (for a couple years), actress Tawny Kitaen. But Kitaen was already the poster girl of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip Metal scene as Ratt guitarist Robbin Crosby’s girlfriend since high school. This is the Metal scene that produced Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot, and W.A.S.P. as well as Ratt. Metal fans knew Kitaen from the video for one of Ratt’s biggest hits, “Back for More,” and from the covers of both of Ratt’s first two records, all before she hooked up with David Coverdale.

#8 U2 – With or Without You

So as I mentioned, so-called “College Rock” in the late ’80s was gradually building momentum to burst out into the mainstream as “Alt Rock” in the early ’90s. MTV launched 120 Minutes in ’86 and Billboard was gearing up to launch its “Modern Rock” chart in ’88. At the end of ’87, the Indie Rock band R.E.M. scored their first top ten crossover Hot100 hit with “The One I Love,” and got their first Rolling Stone cover with the headline “Rock’s Most Influential College Band Graduates.” But another band that was just as big on college radio also had their big breakthrough year on the Pop charts in ’87 and got their second cover earlier in the year when Rolling Stone proclaimed them “Band of the ’80s”. At #8, the debut single from their fifth studio album The Joshua Tree, it’s U2, “With or Without You.”

Before “With or Without You,” the #8 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1987, U2’s highest charting hit on the Hot100? “Pride (In the Name of Love),” which peaked at #33 in 1984 and was only their third Hot100 entry since 1980. Pretty disappointing considering the massive airplay they got on MTV with several videos. But ’87 was their year.

Despite its three weeks at #1, “With or Without You” missed Billboard’s year-end top ten at #15, but U2 was still Billboard’s #2 Pop singles artist of the year, behind only Madonna. Two other singles from their Joshua Tree album were big hits: “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (#1 for two weeks in August), and “Where the Streets Have No Name,” which stalled at #13 but stayed on chart almost as long as the other two.

They never had another #1 hit, but U2 remained one of the top Rock bands for the next three decades. Their 30th Anniversary tour for The Joshua Tree was the highest-grossing concert tour of 2017.

#7 Gregory Abbott – Shake You Down

Now back at #10 we heard Robbie Nevil’s “C’est la Vie.” At #7, another one-hit exemplar of the default late ’80s Electro-R&B-inflected Pop sound that Billboard was calling “Urban Crossover” in 1987. Not to be confused with Bob Seger’s “Shakedown” from the Beverly Hills Cop II Soundtrack, which was the #9 song of 1987 according to Billboard’s year-end Hot100 (#14 on our Chartcrush ranking), here is R&B singer Gregory Abbott at #7, “Shake You Down.”

Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1987’s biggest hits. Abbott described the song at the time as a “groove ballad,” which critics picked up on and have been using to describe songs ever since. It topped the Hot100 for a week in January in the middle of season three of Friday night’s can’t-miss TV show on NBC, the crime drama Miami Vice. Which I only mention only because Abbott bore more than a passing resemblance to Philip Michael Thomas, who played detective Ricardo Tubbs on the show opposite Don Johnson as Sonny Crockett. In the era of video music, lots of people in ’87 thought “Shake You Down” was Philip Michael Thomas.

#6 Starship – Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now

Have you ever seen the ’80s romantic comedy Mannequin? Andrew McCarthy, Kim Cattrall pre-Sex in the City? Guy who does department store windows falls in love with a mannequin, and she comes to life? Well, its main title song was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar and was the #6 song of 1987. It’s also the first of nine #1 songs, all by different artists, and 11 Best Original Song Oscar nominations for songwriter Diane Warren, whose future credits included some of the biggest hits of the ’90s. #6 on our countdown, it’s Starship: “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” Starship. Previously Jefferson Starship, and previous to that, Jefferson Airplane. And yup, the female singer is none other than Grace Slick, who played both the Monterrey Pop and Woodstock festivals and sang “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” way back in the psychedelic ’60s.

Airplane had splintered several times since the ’60s. Slick was the only original member on “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us” and even she’d been in and out of the group over the years. They had to drop the “Jefferson” from their moniker and go by just Starship after Slick’s fellow founding member and baby daddy Paul Kantner quit in 1984 and sued. In ’89, the original Airplane reunited for a new album, which, like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us,” sounds nothing like their ’60s stuff.

#5 Los Lobos – La Bamba

On the U.S. Pop charts up to 1987, there’d been #1 singles sung in Italian, French, German, even Japanese. But never one in Spanish. Tejano singer Freddy Fender’s 1975 hit “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” has a verse in Spanish, but the #5 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1987 is the very first U.S. #1 that’s entirely in Espanol.

It’s by a hard-working Chicano band from L.A. who’d been playing bars, weddings, and what have you for 14 years by ’87, and never aspired to Pop stardom. But Pop stardom found them when the family of teen ’50s rocker Ritchie Valens nominated them to do the cover versions for the 1987 Valens biopic starring Lou Diamond Phillips. Ritchie Valens, killed in the same 1959 plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper. His original version in ’58 and ’59 only got to #22 as the B-side of his #2 hit, the ballad “Donna,” but Los Lobos took it all the way to #1 nearly 30 years later in 1987 and it was the #5 song of the year: “La Bamba.”

Los Lobos’s version of “La Bamba,” from the soundtrack of the Ritchie Valens biopic “La Bamba,” #5 as we count down the top ten from 1987 on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It just missed Billboard’s 1987 year-end ranking at #11. Los Lobos also appears in the movie. They’re the band playing “La Bamba” in the Tijuana brothel where Valens first hears the song. After “La Bamba,” Los Lobos continued putting out albums all the way into the 2020s, with a loyal following among Roots Rock fans, but no more entries on the Hot100 since 1987.

#4 Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)

Narada Michael Walden was Billboard’s top charting producer for the second year in a row in 1987. Our #6 song, Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” That was his. But it wasn’t his biggest hit of the year. His biggest was our next cut at #4, by a singer whose debut album in ’85 generated four top ten hits, and whose follow-up album, released right at the beginning of ’87, yielded five. And of those nine top ten hit singles from her first two albums, seven in a row were #1s, a record that still stands. And speaking of that second album, it debuted at #1 on the album chart, the first album ever by a female artist to do that. Its debut single was the upbeat summer hit 1987. It’s Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”

Whitney Houston, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” the fourth of her record seven consecutive #1 singles, the #4 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1987, coming off a red hot debut year in ’86 with two songs among the top ten hits of the year: “How Will I Know” and “Greatest Love of All.”

Whitney’s incredible success began a frenzy of virtuoso female singers on the Pop charts over the next ten-plus years: Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Vanessa Williams, Toni Braxton and others, comparable to what happened in the early ’50s when the public couldn’t get enough of virutoso male singers and a tsunami of belters and crooners hit the charts.

Whitney, the original Pop diva of the Pop Diva era, out diva’d everyone on the #1 song of 1993, “I Will Always Love You.” Her live Superbowl version of “The Star Spangled Banner” was even a hit, first after she did it in 1991 when it peaked at #20, and then again after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 2001, when it got all the way to #6.

#3 Heart – Alone

Power ballads. Slow songs performed with a Hard Arena Rock or Heavy Metal arrangement—complete with distorted guitars, loud drums, the rock vocal style, but a ballad that starts slow and builds. Arguably no band in rock history was more successful with power ballads than the band with the #3 song in our countdown: veteran Arena Rockers, Heart, featuring the sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson. “Alone.”

The biggest hit of Heart’s long career, “Alone.” Big in the ’70s; huge comeback in the mid ’80s. The momentum shifted for Heart when Ann Wilson, who we just heard singing “Alone,” teamed up with Mike Reno from the group Loverboy on the top 10 hit “Almost Paradise” for the movie Footloose. Heart’s “Never” and another power ballad, “These Dreams” followed in ’85 and ’86. And then “Alone” in ’87, the #3 song of the year on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1987.

#2 Bon Jovi – Livin’ on a Prayer

In its “Year in Music” article in the December 26, 1987 Billboard, longtime writer-editor Paul Grein went so far as to compare the impact of the third album by our next act at #2 to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, pointing out that in the months after its seven weeks at #1 on the album chart in January and February ’87, five similar bands cracked the top five albums for the first time. Those bands were: Cinderella, Poison, Whitesnake, Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard: Glam Metal bands. In June of 1987, four out of the top five albums were by Metal bands.

So who was this Michael Jackson caliber phenomenon that Paul Grein says opened the hair metal floodgates? Well they’d been at it since ’83. They were from New Jersey, and the album that started the flood, aptly named for the purposes of that metaphor, Slippery When Wet. It was the first Metal album to produce three top ten singles, and the biggest of them was 1987’s #2 song. It’s Bon Jovi “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

Four weeks at #1, February into March, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” the biggest single off their Slippery When Wet album. But not the first, and not even the first #1 from the album, which dropped in August of ’86. “You Give Love a Bad Name” hit #1 for a week around Thanksgiving, before “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

Bon Jovi put a unique blue collar New Jersey spin on Glam Metal, different from the L.A. swagger of Mötley Crüe or Ratt, or the colder metallic edge of British or German Metal bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, The Scorpions or even Def Leppard. And boy did the girls go crazy for smilin’ front man Jon Bon Jovi. But you have to give their fellow New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen some credit for establishing a beach-head for the band, injecting the whole working class North Jersey ethos into ’80s Pop with the stadium-sized anthems on his ’85 album, Born in the U.S.A.

#1 George Michael – Faith

OK, well we’re down to #1, here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1987, and it was also the #1 song on Billboard’s year-end chart for 198…8. Hmm? What’s going on there? Well, Billboard’s year-end rankings are not based on the calendar year. They can’t be. They have to get an issue out with their official year-end charts before New Years. So, every year they set a cutoff for the chart year, which varies, but for 1987, it was December 5th. This song hit #1 on the weekly chart a week after the cutoff, December 12th, which was, yes, the first week of Billboard’s 1988 chart year. So, most of the song’s chart run was counted by Billboard towards 1988.

Here at Chartcrush, our rankings are based on the calendar year, and we count every song’s entire chart run in whatever year it scored the most ranking points, which for our song at #1, was 1987.

Now here’s another twist. For the same reason Billboard’s #1 song of 1988 is in our 1987 countdown? Their #1 song of 1987, The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” is in our 1986 countdown! Anyway, our artist at #1 wasn’t new to the yearly top ten; his Pop duo Wham! notched Chartcrush’s #2 song of 1985, “Careless Whisper.” Here’s George Michael at #1 with his year-straddling solo smash, “Faith.”

“Faith” hit #1 on December 12, 1987, stayed for four weeks and was on the chart until March ’88: our Chartcrush #1 song of 1987. George Michael never made the top ten on a year-end Hot100 chart again, but he had six more top tens on the weekly Hot100 in the ’90s.

A series of arrests for lewd acts and drug use though (a lot of them in, of all places, public restrooms) caused a lot of head shaking and face-palming, and tarnished his reputation in the late ’90s and 2000s. But he had dedicated fans, who paid him a heartfelt tribute after he passed away prematurely from heart problems on Christmas Day 2016 at the age of 53.

Bonus

So that’s our 1Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1987, but we’re not done yet! We have some more housekeeping to do to square our top ten with the top ten on Billboard’s official published year-end Hot100 chart thanks to all these songs that spilled over from ’86 into ’87, or from ’87 into ’88. I already pointed out The Bangles’ “Walk like an Egyptian” and George Michael’s “Faith,” Billboard‘s #1 songs of ’87 and ’88, respectively, both of which shift into prior years when you do things our Chartcrush way by January-to-December calendar years instead of Billboard‘s November-to-November “chart years.”

Another one of Billboard‘s ’87 year-end top tens that shifts into ’86, Bruce Hornsby & The Range’s “The Way It Is.” Billboard has that one at #8 for ’87; we have it at the same position, #8, for ’86. And two songs besides “Faith” from Billboard‘s ’88 year-end top ten shift into ’87. Unlike “Faith,” though, we didn’t hear them in our countdown. Why? Because when you rank them in ’87 instead of ’88, they’re not in the top ten!

#12 Belinda Carlisle – Heaven is a Place on Earth

Billboard‘s #7 song of ’88 first entered the top ten in mid-November ’87 and had its one week at #1 in early December, by the former frontwoman of the first all-female band ever to score a #1 album writing all their own songs and playing their own instruments. It’s Belinda Carlisle of The Go Go’s, who’d split in ’85, her second top ten solo hit after “Mad About You” in ’86, “Heaven is a Place on Earth.”

Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” Billboard‘s #7 song of 1988; #12 on our Chartcrush ranking for ’87 combining its full chart run, and ranking it in the calendar year it was strongest on the charts.

#13 Whitney Houston – So Emotional

Billboard‘s #6 song of ’88, same situation: first hit the top ten in early December ’87 which is Billboard‘s 1988 chart year, but actually a 1987 hit. Just not among the top ten for ’87. We have it at #13. It’s the sixth of Whitney Houston’s record seven consecutive #1’s from ’85 to ’88, “So Emotional.”

Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional,” the third single from her second album Whitney, Billboard‘s #6 song of 1988; #13 on our Chartcrush 1987 ranking.

#14 Bob Seger – Shakedown

And finally in our Chartcrush 1987 bonus segment, the one hit that was in Billboard‘s top ten for ’87, bumped out of the top ten on our ranking: a Singer-Songwriter who charted 30 hits all the way back to 1968, including six top tens, but this was his only career #1, for one week in August. It’s a soundtrack hit, from Beverly Hills Cop 2. Bob Seger’s “Shakedown.”

A whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on on the Pop charts in 1987, Bob Seger’s “Shakedown,” which I shouted out earlier when we heard Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down” back at #7. “Shakedown” was Billboard‘s #9 song of ’87; #14 on our Chartcrush ranking.

Fun fact: the movie that song was in, Beverly Hills Cop 2: Detective Axel Foley played by Eddie Murphy, a cop from Detroit. Bob Seger also from Detroit, but so was the guy who’d scored the big hit from the first Beverly Hills Cop in ’85, former Eagle Glenn Frey, a lifelong friend of Seger’s. Not sure if the producers intended that, or just a coincidence.

And that’s gonna have to wrap things up for our 1987 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard, go check out our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and a link to the podcast version, plus our full top100 chart, an interactive line graph of the chart runs for our top ten hits, and other choice extras. We do that for every year we count down, ’40s all the way to now, and it’s all on the website, again that’s chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening, and tune in again next week, same station and 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 Chartcrush, we dive deep 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 leading trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re setting our sights on 1969: an empowering year for Americans of all backgrounds.

The transcendent event, of course, Apollo 11, which fulfilled late President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 promise to go to the moon “and other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” 53 million American households and 650 million viewers worldwide sat glued to their TVs on July 20, 1969 as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface and planted the stars and stripes.

A few weeks later was the Woodstock festival: three days of peace and music at Yasgur’s Dairy Farm in Bethel, New York. 50,000 attendees was what promoters had told local authorities to sidestep objections and get the necessary permits (really they were expecting 200,000). But nearly 500,000 showed up to hear—really a who’s who of Rock music. It rained, it poured. It was muddy. It was overcrowded. There were plenty of hallucinogenic drugs, but food, clean water, medical facilities and Porta-Potties, not so much. And ugh, the traffic! People abandoned their cars and walked, leaving the roads in and out jammed for miles.

Like the moon shot, Woodstock was hard and had all the makings of an epic disaster. But somehow a half million young Baby Boomers who’d grown up listening to stories about the Depression and War beat the odds and not only got through it, but galvanized the hippie counterculture and had a once-in-a-lifetime blast.

And the big protest movements of the ’60s, Civil Rights and opposing the war in Vietnam, were making real progress: the Voting Rights act in 1965, the Fair Housing Act in 1968, and the new Nixon administration’s policy of Vietnamization starting to shift the combat role in Vietnam to the Vietnamese, with the first withdrawals of U.S. troops. All those, huge tangible victories that validated America’s “can do” grassroots spirit. Americans in 1969 had more reasons than ever to believe that anything, even really hard things, were within reach, even the New York Mets winning the World Series, which they did in 1969: the Miracle Mets.

Of course, there were proverbial “other shoes” dropping all over the place, many on the front-page like assassinations, riots, hijackings; in Vietnam, the Tet offensive and Mỹ Lai Massacre; the Manson family and Zodiac murders in California; Cleveland, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching fire because of industrial pollution. All of which contributed to a gathering sense of unease. But 1969 was a year of triumphs and validations: maybe the last year Americans could be unabashedly optimistic before the accumulated reality of all the “other shoes” burst the bubble in the ’70s.

#10 Tommy Roe – Dizzy

And speaking of attempting the impossible as we kick off our countdown: how about a Bubblegum Pop song with 11 key changes between four different keys in under three minutes? That won’t mean much to you unless you know a little music theory, but trust me: it’s pretty ambitious, to the point of ridiculousness. But hey, in the year Bubblegum Pop became its own distinct genre, ridiculousness was kind of the whole point! And if you think such a song could never be a hit, think again. Hey, if you’re driving, pull over because our #10 song by Buddy Holly-inspired early ’60s rocker-turned-pop-singer Tommy Roe (who also co-wrote it) gonna make you—the title of the song—”Dizzy.”

Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” at #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1969. Roe opened The Beatles’ very first U.S. concert in Washington, D.C. in 1964 and was one of the few American early ’60s teen idol-type acts to score #1 hits both before and after the British Invasion: “Sheila” in ’63 and “Dizzy” for four weeks in March ’69. In between he scored a pair of top tens in ’66 with “Hooray for Hazel” and “Sweet Pea.” Notice, though: Tommy Roe was not invited to play at Woodstock.

#9 Tommy James and The Shondells – Crimson and Clover

No Bubblegum acts were. And that chasm in Pop music, between Bubblegum and serious music, was getting wider. Up to the late ‘60s, there wasn’t even really a distinction. All the mainstream dailies, glossies and TV considered Pop and Rock silly kids’ music. Of course they did. Top 40 radio and after-school shows like American Bandstand were targeted at kids. No more pretense to high art than a cartoon or a toy commercial.

But as a generation, Baby Boomers were different from previous generations in that they weren’t growing into some version of their parent’s music. No! They were taking their teen music obsessions with them into adulthood, especially those who’d uprooted themselves from their families, friends, churches, and communities to be part of the counterculture. For them, music, and the emotional bond they felt with their favorite artists, wasn’t just some take-it-or-leave-it type diversion; they needed their favorite artists, authors, filmmakers, what have you, to reflect and to share their experiences as they lived and matured, to help fill the role of everything they’d uprooted themselves from.

All this was only beginning to come into focus in ’69, the year the oldest Boomers turned 23 and the startup Hippie mag Rolling Stone created a new Reviews Editor position in ’69 and one Greil Marcus got the job—a guy who (as rock critic Robert Cristgau put it) “wanted fans who expected records to change their lives, and got mad when they didn’t.” So with the largest wave of young people in U.S. history out there putting music at the center of their very existence, and underground publications like Rolling Stone critically reviewing new releases through that prism, dozens of successful chart acts found themselves scrambling to stay relevant.

One such act: our artist at #9, with a history of chart hits like “Hanky Panky,” “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Mony Mony” in a style that was now being dismissed as “Bubblegum.” In ’68, though, he demanded and got total artistic freedom from his label: a pretty bold move since his label, Roulette Records, was controlled by the New York mafia. Remember Hesh Rabkin from HBO’s mob series The Sopranos? Modeled on Morris Levy, the head of Roulette!

So at the end of 1968, he unleashed the record he hoped would win over the counterculture and underground press. Chart success, of course, irrelevant to that question, but it turned out being their second #1 hit. It’s Tommy James & The Shondells, “Crimson and Clover.”

“Crimson & Clover,” Tommy James & The Shondells, #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1969. So did James succeed in remaking his group from teen pop idols to psychedelic counterculture icons? Well, you could argue it both ways. They scored two more counterculture-oriented top tens in ’69, “Sweet Cherry Wine” and “Crystal Blue Persuasion” but maybe the biggest check in the yes column, their invitation to play Woodstock. “We were in Hawaii,” James later recalled, “and my secretary called and said, ‘Yeah, listen, there’s this pig farmer in upstate New York that wants you to play in his field.’ That’s how it was put to me. So we passed.”

#8 The Beatles – Come Together

So in 1967, Billboard came up with a way to improve its system of ranking the songs for its year-end charts. Up to ’67, all it was, was an inverse point system based on the weekly charts. I know, that’s a mouthful but it’s pretty simple: the song at #100 gets one point and the song at #1 gets 100 points, and so on. Add up all the points by song for all the weekly charts, and there’s your ranking.

OK, sounds fair. But here’s the problem: in any given week on the Pop charts, is the #1 song really only 10% more popular than the #10 song? Usually, no. Turns out, once you get into the top ten, this intangible thing we’re trying to gauge, “popularity,” rises on more of an exponential or “hockey stick” type curve. So the improvement in ’67 was: a hundred bonus points for the #1 song. So now, #1s are worth 200 points, with a better chance of ranking higher, as people would expect.

Now for some reason, after doing bonus points for the 1967 and 1968 year-end charts, the folks at Billboard decided to ditch them for ’69, and because of that, Billboard‘s top ten for 1969 doesn’t include any Beatles songs.

Well here at Chartcrush, we do use a bonus point system to address the hockey stick in the top ten, so we have two hits by the Fab Four  the year after they scored the #1 hit of the year with “Hey Jude.” The first of them is at #8. Released a couple weeks after the album it’s on, Abbey Road, came out, it’s a John Lennon opus, “Come Together.”

Beatles, “Come Together” #8 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1969. Now the flip-side of that single was George Harrison’s “Something,” also from the Abbey Road album and a big hit.

We had to do a little head-scratching to decide which song we should play at #8 because while both songs were still on the charts in November ’69, Billboard changed its policy about so-called “double-A side” singles. These are records with hits on both sides. Instead of letting them chart individually, they started combining them into a single chart position. Fortunately, Billboard‘s biggest competitor, Cashbox magazine, with a completely separate chart operation, continued ranking sides separately. They had “Something” peaking at #2 and “Come Together” with three weeks at #1, so we think we got it right.

#7 The Beatles – Get Back

At #7, the other Beatles song (that’s right, it’s a Beatles twofer), which hit the charts six months earlier, in May, while the band was recording Abbey Road. It was a non-album single, until their last LP, Let It Be, appeared in the Spring of 1970, nearly a year later. One of the highlights from their impromptu rooftop concert in London in January ’69, which turned out to be their last live performance, at #7, “Get Back.”

7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1969: “Get Back:” The Beatles 17th #1 U.S. hit, tying Elvis, and the only Beatles single to credit a featured musician, American keyboard player Billy Preston. Preston had first met The Beatles all the way back in 1962 in Germany on tour with Little Richard’s band, so when he was in London, he paid a visit to his old pals in the studio. They wheeled in a Fender-Rhodes piano and he hung out for eight days.

Lyrically, “Get Back,” a McCartney song, started as a parody of anti-immigrant politics, but evolved into the cryptic stories of Jojo and Loretta, which free-flying hippies, known for paying close attention to Beatles lyrics, saw as an admonition to go home, mend fences, and “get back to where you once belonged.”

#6 Sly and The Family Stone – Everyday People

At #6, the first big American chart act with a racially integrated, male and female lineup, and also the only act in our countdown who played at Woodstock. They were one of the hottest groups on the charts when they did, and their set was in the overnight hours Saturday into Sunday between Janis Joplin and The Who. This song was the only #1 hit played by any act at the festival: an appeal for peace and equality among races and social groups that coined the phrase “different strokes for different folks,” it’s Sly & The Family Stone’s “Everyday People.”

Produced and written by Sly Stone, Sly & The Family Stone’s first #1, “Everyday People:” the #6 song of 1969 here on our 1969 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Sly Stone had been a radio DJ, producer and session keyboard player in the Bay Area for years before Sly & The Family Stone came together in ’67. And he used that diverse experience to update James Brown’s mid-’60s Funk sound with rock hooks, and melody, and the fusion made songs like “Everyday People” and their other big hit in ’69, “Hot Fun in the Summertime” irresistible to the pop mainstream.

After ’69 and Woodstock, Sly moved from San Francisco to a mansion in L.A., where he entered, as Guardian writer Sean O’Hagan put it in 2007, a “terminal zone of drugs, guns, chaos and paranoia.” From there, his music got shriller and weirder. But so did the times. And Sly & The Family Stone scored two more #1 hits in ’70 and ’71. From there, though, it was sadly all downhill.

Stone is often mentioned in conversations about lost ’60s geniuses along with Beach Boy Brian Wilson and Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett.

#5 Zager and Evans – In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)

Now sometimes it takes a bit of head scratching to connect what was happening on the Pop charts to events and currents in the larger world. Our record at #5 is not one of those times. It’s a weird, anxious sci-fi meets book of Revelation end-times prophesy that homes in on mankind’s growing dependency on pharma and tech, and the moon landing was right in the middle of its six-week run atop the chart after a year of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes in theaters.

Recorded in a single take in ’68 at a studio in rural Texas and self-released, it started catching on in the Midwest. So RCA remastered it with some overdubs and put it out nationally. It’s Nebraskan duo Denny Zager and Rick Evans, their only hit: “In the Year 2525.”

“In the Year 2525” subtitled “Exordium & Terminus,” Zager and Evans, the #5 song of 1969 according to our Chartcrush ranking. Despite its six weeks at #1 (July into August), it was only #26 on Billboard‘s official year-end chart, for the same reason The Beatles missed their top ten: no bonus points for #1 songs. It must’ve been a shock to music fans to see “2525,” which was everywhere in the summer of ’69, at a middling #26 on the year. In 1970, Billboard restored #1 bonus points.

Zager and Evans disappeared completely from both the U.S. and U.K. charts after “2025” was #1 on both: a one-hit wonder in the truest sense. Why was that? Well, their follow-up single was a first-person lament about an accused rapist who crucifies himself in his jail cell. Hmm, yeah, hard pass, even in 1969.

#4 The Rolling Stones – Honky Tonk Women

At #4, the song that hit #1 the week after Woodstock, dislodging “In the Year 2525” from the top spot. The group, second only to The Beatles among British Invasion acts, and the single was the capstone on their triumphal return to blues rock after a disastrous foray into psychedelia in ’67 that consisted of a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ripoff album roundly panned by critics. The aforementioned critic Greil Marcus, however, gave the song an enthusiastic thumbs up as “likely the strongest three minutes of Rock ‘n Roll yet released in 1969.” It’s The Rolling Stones, “Honky Tonk Women.”

The Rolling Stones’ fifth #1, “Honky Tonk Women,” #4 on our 1969 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Now the Stones’ lead guitarist, Brian Jones, had just drowned in his swimming pool in July, but that wasn’t why they didn’t play Woodstock. Front man Mick Jagger was in Australia shooting a movie.

At the end of the year though, with their new guitarist Mick Taylor on board, they did play a one-day free concert that was hyped as “Woodstock West,” and, accordingly, drew a Woodstock-sized crowd to the Altamont Speedway west of San Francisco. The vibes at Altamont, though, by all accounts, not very peacy or lovey. Sensing this, The Grateful Dead, who’d helped create the event, bailed just hours before their scheduled set.

Stage security was provided by the notorious Hells Angels biker gang, who were paid in beer, and while The Stones played, an 18-year-old fan high on meth pulled a gun while rushing the stage and was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel, which sparked months of handwringing about the death of Woodstock Nation as the ’70s began.

The Stones kept a pretty low profile stateside for a year, but they were back in ’71 with their Sticky Fingers album and yet another #1 hit, “Brown Sugar.”

#3 The Archies – Sugar, Sugar

So as I’ve been mentioning, Bubblegum Pop was a consequence of the new strident, opinionated underground music journalism of Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus and others elevating the Rock album and reserving praise for a select few “serious” artists making “important” records. Well in Pop, of course, not all records are capital “I” Important, not all artists are capital “S” serious, and some of the biggest chart acts found themselves running out of road, standing at a bridge having to answer a proverbial gatekeeper’s riddle, on penalty of being deemed insufficiently weighty and tossed into the gorge with the other wannabes.

Any act without at least one foot in country, R&B or adult contemporary was affected. Of course, the out-of-the-box response to that: just refuse to play the game and tell the gatekeeper where he can stick his riddle. And that was Bubblegum, a complete (you might even say defiant) lack of pretention: pure pop fluff. And our #3 song was like an exclamation point to that. It wasn’t even a real group!

The Archie Show was a Saturday morning cartoon that debuted in the Fall of 1968. 17-year-old Archie and his Riverdale High School friends Jughead, Reggie, Veronica and Betty. On the show they had a band, and this record by their cartoon band, The Archies, wound up Billboard’s #1 song of 1969 thanks to having the longest chart run of the year at 22 weeks. By our reckoning though, it’s #3, “Sugar, Sugar.”

The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar.” The #3 song of 1969 according to our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Now, when TV group The Monkees demanded more creative control over their music, much like Tommy James had done before recording “Crimson and Clover,” music mogul Don Kirshner, tired of dealing with pesky human beings, conceived The Archies and recruited songwriters Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, vocalists Ron Dante and Toni Wine and a bunch of studio musicians. Copycat cartoon bands The Banana Splits and Josie & The Pussycats followed in the early ’70s, but no cartoon band ever approached the success of “Sugar, Sugar” again.

#2 The Fifth Dimension – Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)

Now our next song at #2 as we close in on the #1 hit of 1969 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show captured the essence of the counterculture and effectively packaged it to cross over to the mainstream. Sly Stone’s “Everyday People” may’ve been the only #1 hit performed at Woodstock, but the crowd spontaneously broke out singing this song even though the group wasn’t there.

#1 for six weeks in the Spring, it’s a mashup medley of two selections from the controversial musical Hair, about a tribe of politically active, long-haired hippies in New York who live a Bohemian life and protest the Vietnam draft. Not an original cast recording, mind you; it’s by a soft-soul vocal group that had been putting songs on the charts for a couple years before 1969. At #2, it’s The Fifth Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.”

When Fifth Dimension lead singer Billy Davis Jr. saw Hair on Broadway, he called his producer Bones Howe wanting to do the “Aquarius” part. Howe told him “This isn’t a song, it’s only an introduction.” But after seeing the musical himself, Howe got the idea of doing it as a medley with a snippet from a whole other part of the show, saying “we’re gonna just jam them together like two trains.” Another vocal group, The Cowsills, who inspired The Partridge Family, got their version of Hair’s title song to #2 in May, the last two weeks “Aquarius” was #1.

#1 Marvin Gaye – I Heard It Through the Grapevine

And that gets us to #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1969: a record that was #1 for seven weeks, but only ranked #86 on Billboard’s year-end ranking. Now after my whole spiel about #1 bonus points earlier, you might be thinking that’s why, and you’d be partially right. But the main reason for the song’s dismal finish is: Billboard only counted nine of the 15 weeks it was on the chart, because its chart run began in late November of 1968, and Billboard’s 1969 chart year for its year-end ranking started on January 4. Omitting its first weeks on the chart plus not awarding #1 bonus points gave this song the rawest deal in year-end chart history.

But one of the main reasons we do the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show is to correct the record by counting every song’s full chart run and properly acknowledging the importance of top tens and #1s. When you do that, Billboard’s #86 song becomes Chartcrush’s #1 song of 1969. It’s Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

Marvin Gaye recorded his version of “Grapevine” in the Spring of ’67, and it sat on a shelf for over a year while Gladys Knight & The Pips’ version was a massive hit and became Motown’s top selling single ever up to that point. When Gaye’s version finally came out in ’68 it was an album cut, but a DJ on Chicago’s biggest Black music station, WVON, started playing it, and Motown boss Berry Gordy, Jr. finally relented and put it out as a single.

He’d been reluctant because the song’s paranoid intensity didn’t comport with the silky smooth image he was trying to cultivate for Marvin Gaye, but once it dropped it shot to #1 and stayed at the top spot for seven weeks: our #1 song of 1969, here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Bonus

Now given all the issues I’ve raised with how Billboard compiled its 1969 year-end chart, you won’t be surprised to know that there are a few songs that were Billboard year-end top ten hits, but didn’t make our top ten countdown. For our bonus segment, let’s run through those.

#17 The Foundations – Build Me Up Buttercup

At #9, Billboard had another multi-ethnic group, like a British Sly and The Family Stone who recorded in a Motown-meets-The Monkees style with horns, The Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup.”

Billboard‘s #9 song of ’69, “Build Me Up Buttercup” The Foundations, #17 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#33 Tom Jones – I’ll Never Fall In Love Again

Billboard‘s #8 song first dented the Hot100 in 1967, and then returned in ’69 and got to #6 with 16 weeks on the chart, Tom Jones’  “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again.”

Welsh Singer Tom Jones’ “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” comes out just #33 on our Chartcrush ranking, but was Billboard‘s #8 song of 1969 as we run through the hits that made Billboard‘s official, published year-end top ten but not our our Chartcrush re-ranking.

Croonerdom, making its last stand on the Hot100 in the final years of the ’60s as even the MOR Easy Listening format was yielding to younger “now” sounds and artists. Frank Sinatra’s last notable Hot100 hit, “My Way,” was in ’69, as were Frankie Laine, and Peggy Lee and Dean Martin’s. Jones, one of just a handful of Singers who didn’t fall flat trying to update classic Crooning and bridge the generation gap, along with Gary Puckett, Neil Diamond and even Jim Morrison on The Doors’ “Touch Me” in ’69.

#25 Sly and The Family Stone – Hot Fun in the Summertime

At #6, Billboard had a second Sly & The Family Stone record in its year-end top ten, “Hot Fun in the Summertime.”

The second of Sly & The Family Stone’s two big hits in ’69, “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” Billboard‘s #6 song of the year, #25 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top ten from in the first part of the show. “Hot Fun” was #2 for two weeks in October…

#11 The Temptations – I Can’t Get Next to You

…and at #1 both those weeks, Billboard‘s #3 song of the year that also didn’t make the cut for our ’69 countdown. It just misses our Chartcrush top ten at #11: The Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You.”

Motown’s Temptations and their Producer Norman Whitfield roared into ’69 with their new “Psychedelic Soul” sound inspired by Sly & The Family Stone, and scored their first #1 since “My Girl” in ’65, “I Can’t Get Next to You,” the fourth of the four hits in Billboard‘s year-end top ten that didn’t make the top ten in our Chartcrush ranking we counted down earlier that factors songs’ full chart runs into the calendar years they were hottest on the chart, and awards bonus points for #1s as Billboard started doing in ’67, but again, for some unknown reason didn’t do in ’69. Our Chartcrush ranking method, by the way, is the same for every year.

#26 Creedence Clearwater Revival – Proud Mary

Now as if all these differences in year-end chart positions isn’t weird enough, check this out: 1969’s #1 singles act doesn’t have a record in the year-end top ten either in Billboard or in our Chartcrush re-rank. The band charted seven songs in ’69 and four were top five hits. The first was #2 for three weeks in March, it’s Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.”

During their four year chart career from ’68 to ’72, incredibly, Creedence Clearwater Revival never had a #1 hit, but they had five #2’s, and “Proud Mary” was the first, notching in at #26 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1969. They also released three albums in ’69, and all were top ten on the Album chart.

#39 The Youngbloods – Get Together

Now we’re gonna close out our 1969 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show with one of the most enduring anthems of the ’60s: a timeless, impassioned appeal for peace and brotherhood that frames the issue as a choice between love and its opposite, fear. Like Tom Jones’ “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” it was first released in 1967 and barely scraped the charts, but then it was picked up for a radio PSA for the National Conference of Christians and Jews, then reissued, whereupon it rose into the top ten and peaked for two weeks at #5 in September ’69, landing at #39 on our ranking. It’s New York Folk-Rock group The Youngbloods, with “Get Together.”

The Youngbloods’ lone top 40 hit, “Get Together.” After they split in 1972, group leader Jesse Colin Young went on to a successful solo career with six charting albums in the ’70s.

Well I hope you enjoyed our 1969 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard, go check out our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and a link to the podcast version, plus our full top100 chart, an interactive line graph of the chart runs for our top ten hits, and other far out extras. We do that for every year we count down, ’40s all the way to now, and it’s all on the website, again chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening, and tune in again next week, same station and time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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