A Bear-ican Top 40:

March 14, 1972 – Part 2

It’s still my party, and you can still read if you want to, but…

…well, read anyway.

It’s still my birthday week, and if we’re not doing naked keg stands for it, at least remember what the Top 25 of March 22, 1972 kept in store for us.

Now, let’s get back to the countdown…

Sly Stone was a man under pressure in the early-1970s.

CBS wanted a contractually-obligated album. The Black Panthers urged him to be more strident and socially conscious. And he started using cocaine and PCP to cope, while becoming more paranoid and reclusive. In 1971, the release of There’s A Riot Goin’ On calmed a lot of nerves but harshly divided critics, but the #1 single Family Affair got people groovin’ again.

Runnin’ Away, though, isn’t one of those instant hits you can decipher immediately. In a 2010 SPIN interview, Sly said it referred to people always running away, like the hippies cutting their hair in the 1970s and returning from a more normal existence. It has a Prince-like approach to the music, but it still feels a bit underdeveloped, as determined by a bunch of variations on “Hee-hee, hee-hee” replacing actual thought. This one is a 5.

Smokey Robinson had his first songwriting Top 40 hit for The Supremes since The Composer/I’ll Try Something New double-sided single in 1969.

And he got it by diving into the past and reviving their classic sound from the mid-‘60s. The vocals are actually very nice, a shared lead between Jean Terrell and Mary Wells, and the sound is absolutely nailed in the production. The words, though…if you’re gonna write about a man whose power over women is so strong they don’t care what his actual name is, at least make it make more sense. It’s a 6.

One of those things that makes for better ideas than good songs, it’s a mix of pop and country and Russian folk influences (your mileage will vary) that can’t meet all three needs.

It uses the “cowboys & Indians” gambit as a romantic metaphor, and even though there’s a sense of TV-show theatrics going on, the whole thing just kinda goes on until it stops. The music is actually very interesting, but there’s a limit to whimsy, and, well, this is it. Stick ‘em up. A 4.

An Al Green obituary might require an extra page when we get to it, because he’s lived a varied, and not always noble, life.

But for all the complexity of the man, the simple Memphis-soul style was mastered by him, and Al knew how to deliver many different shades of sensuality and heartache as needed. If I gave anything less than a top score, I’d be lying to myself, because Let’s Stay Together is pure carnal magic, even when he’s only begging her to stay. A 10.

A luxurious hardcore soul love song between a veteran and a newcomer, it’s one of those lush ballads that promotes the mood at the expense of the specifics, and that’s…OK.

Brenda Lee can sing, and as a footnote, she holds a distinction not many people have: she co-wrote a song with Prince (Somebody’s Somebody, 1997). She’s also known for writing songs for Aretha and Gladys and even Cliff Richard. But she sings very well here, giving off steam with Jerry Butler (in his last pop Top 40 appearance). 7.

Any song that requires a Crazy Wall to explain itself isn’t usually a good sign.

American Pie struck a chord about “the day the music died”, February 3, 1959, though, so it subverts the notion a little. Still, for something that at its heart is nothing more than an epic poem, you need a roadmap to fully understand what a mercurial guy like McLean was getting it. Me, I have never seen the American Pie movies and can only bear this song once maybe every 18 months, so I use my GPS to find routes around the problematic traffic of Don and his song. 6.

A grand, sweeping Easy Listening ballad, by a woman best known by then for appearing on Broadway in Hair, and deliberately fashioned to be a 1960’s-styled ballad for a girl-group.

It’s pretty broad, but she sings well and emotes how she needs to in order to get by. BTW, she is not a one-hit wonder: she had a follow-up single pink at #40 in We’re Free, a song about “free love” that found itself banned at its peak. What can I say? Sex is a sin, and we’ve never recovered from it. 6.

The Blossoms and Duane Eddy help out B.J. on this…um, rock and roll lullaby. Soft-focus production was A Thing in the early-‘70s, where you could shroud singers in a fog of music and hoped it would serve to relax them. In this case, it did. It relaxed one all the way to the point of pharmaceutical effect.

Not that it’s a bad thing, as it was in B.J.’s wheelhouse, and his past experiences with The Number Ones before he passed showed he could have used relaxing things often. Still, for all the effort put into it, it glides off into space and never really returns. 6.

Songs about rain usually are sad, or downcast, but very few of them back around this time played with the theme as stylistically as this one.

Complete with both rain sounds, and a sort of avant-garde soul production featuring unique guitar sounds (by Dennis Coffey using an Echoplex effect), the song is a stone classic, embracing the disoriented guitar and the rain FX as an expression of devastation over love. It was their last hit, but what a way to go. I love rain songs. 9.

Decidedly mixed feelings about this song: Carole’s voice is in fine form, and the lyrics about resolving one’s life on her own terms are fine. But Paul Simon had a quote about his colleague: “Toast – when I hear Carole King I think of toast.”

That 1973 Rolling Stone quote kinda explains some of the non-Tapestry feeling I sometimes get about some of her singles. Sweet Seasons is at least buttered with some good music, but it didn’t seem to be as nimble as anything on Tapestry. 5.

From 1972 to 1982, classical music influenced pop music, in ways both new and old.

Eric Carmen and Barry Manilow had hits with songs based on classical compositions, and a variety of acts had hits with instrumental songs which either co-opted or updated a classical track. From Eumir Deodato’s jazz-funk take on Also Sprach Zarathustra to Miguel Ríos‘s version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 as A Song of Joy, symphonic pop was never higher.

The highest, and happiest, might be this harpsichord-happy version of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (or is it organ? I can’t tell, it might be organ), which really has a way of filling the heart with joy, and not the lemony dishwasher liquid kind. 9.

At The Number Ones, the TNOCS contingent was split on the song between being menacing and creepy, silly, or funky.

I’m not sure we got a majority vote on the merits. The lyrics read a bit problematic, but the music is funky, and even if you don’t dig Joe Tex as a singer the whole thing remains pretty catchy. HOWEVER:

Is a song really that problematic if you can stand to watch Liza Minnelli go all Lola Heatherton on it unironically? Spoiler: it’s actually not bad most of the way. 6.

Elton John mimed the keyboard parts when T. Rex visited Top Of The Pops in 1971, but he doesn’t do the keyboard stuff here: Rick Wakeman does…at least, some of them. Seems Rick, pre-Yes, was in need of rent money, so he contributed some piano glissandos, and maybe more. But no one recalls if he did more, as Blue Weaver is rumored to have played on the record, too.

Weaver did, however, play a massive role on the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love, so…how rabbit hole-ish do you want me to go? Bang a Gong (Get It On), so named in the US because Chase’s funky single Get It On was riding the charts at the same time, is a banger no matter who got involved. 9.

You would think, being something of an Easy Listening aficionado, that I’d be digging a Carpenters single of any stripe.

And you’d be right, yet this one, a cover of a Jimmy Clanton single in 1965 (later covered by Chad Allan & the Expressions—an early version of The Guess Who—and Ruby & The Romantics, from whom Richard Carpenter got the arrangement) goes about and beyond the Carpenters origin story. This is the first Carpenters single featuring bitter recriminations instead of longing or hazy romance.

And it works, because it picks up on two self-destructing people set on mutual pain. That, frankly, just sounds better because it isn’t perfect love, but imperfect humans. 8

I am down with the occasional blast of overly-ripe sexy in my favorite songs.

I find Liz Phair’s H.W.C. to be hilarious, and I adore the grungy industrial nose that is Lords Of Acid’s I Sit On Acid.

And for both of those songs: I expressly warn @LinkCrawford and my pals with uneasy constitutions to steer clear from, as I like them too much to drag them down with me.

But this is just crap. It’s a repetitive, percussive instrumental with guitar, and it features a woman alternately talking in a foreign language, and then very loudly experiencing certain waves of pleasure, ifyaknowwhatimean. And that’s it, for four damn minutes. It might be the first abstinence-only pop song to ever chart here. And that’s saying something. 1.

Now, if you take a look at the main YouTube clip for this song, you see the Osmond Brothers going all Jesus Jones on their instruments. I honestly don’t know if it’s a put-on, since I never knew them to be rock-band adjacent, but if you forget Donny trying to fake fake-playing the electric piano, they seem to have a flair for the dramatic.

And the rock sound (and not the rather squeaky-clean lyrics) is convincing enough to make you forget there are not a lot of Utah rock bands out there. It’s an unexpected rouser from the boys who thought the constipated One Bad Apple was Jackson 5-lite. Who knew? 7

Oh, the things I do for you people. I listened to this one again, a couple of years after first calling it out in TNOCS at Stereogum. I don’t recall the specifics of just what I said, but I believe the word “atrocious” may have come up. Along with my dinner.

Whatever I said, I meant it. Donny sings it like a school talent show contestant, right down to acting out the words as he’s singing. Whatever the opposite of “career achievement” is, this is. 1

In 1972, you couldn’t slip any kind of gay reference anywhere unless it was, say, a “fruit” joke or an episode of Marcus Welby, MD where being gay was unmanly and leaned into the worst stereotypes. Cher, however, with the help of producer Snuff Garrett, took this cover of a French chanson and drove it through barricades.

The song is addressed to an ex, but it’s not clear if the singer is a straight woman addressing a gay ex-lover, or a lesbian addressing a bi woman, either of whom have left her for another guy. I know that the mystery doesn’t matter, it’s the feeling, and to that end, it’s magnificently camp feeling, a torch song that could, um, go either way. Cher, however, is best in her class at this. 9

Remember when late-night TV aired commercials, and not infomercials? They’d offer up many things, like adjustable beds and life insurance and magazine subscriptions and knives and all that, but they would also spend two minutes offering compilation albums on LP or cassettes. This song was literally made for a commercial like that, offering up “secret love” for your 2 AM viewing of Three Coins In The Fountain.

It’s all gauzy soft-focus music, sung with questionable ability and arranged like a Dinah! Performance, but you could make out to it, if you tried hard enough. 4.

Recorded in Jamaica, its title inspired from a Chinese dish called “oyakodon” (which was on a restaurant’s menu as “Mother And Child Reunion”), and its lyrics a study of death based on his dog that died about a year prior and filtered through his view of his then-wife Peggy, this one is…hard to pin down.

But it’s a pop-reggae track contrasting a reconnection against a backdrop of sorrow. And I learned a lot of this from a Rolling Stone interview from 1972. (Most fascinating bit there: Bridge Over Troubled Water was almost called Like A Pitcher Of Water. Why, God? 7.

Are we ready for a Bread reassessment yet? I admit running hot and cold on them, and I don’t think it’d be easy giving reappraisal to something like Baby, I’m-A Want You. Still, when you learn things about something like Everything I Own, you tend to want to think they deserved better.

David Gates wrote it about his father, who passed in 1963 but had been long proud of his career before David hit it big. Well-earned sentiment goes a long way past any resistance to soft-rock music, and things such as this and It Don’t Matter To Me deserve respect for the little ways soft-rock songs transcend their bounds to warm the colder hearts among us. 8.

Big, torchy power ballads were in vogue in the 1990s more than they were in 1972. It didn’t matter to Pete Ham and Tom Evans at the time when the Badfinger duo wrote this, and it didn’t matter to Harry Nilsson, who just sings his heart out here.

It might have mattered to Mariah Carey, who had a #3 cover in 1994 and whose version was best described in print long ago as “the national anthem of a nation under siege”, and it was something of an epidemic for many pop fans back then – I recall @tleo at the SG TNOCS mentioning that Whitney Houston’s version of The Star Spangled Banner was called “Whitney über alles” in a CNN article he wrote years ago about songs people hate.

Nilsson, though, is sincere, and sincerely controlled in his vocal, as power is something he never had to rely upon. 8.

Arranged like someone lost a bet, sung with falsetto that could grind your teeth for you, complete with a tuba solo, what’s not to like? “The Lion Sleeps Tonight by the Tokens could move you, but this one is a slug someone used to jump a turnstile. 3

I’m sorry, I still think of The Muppet Show when I hear this. The sketch with cows and horses and monsters and pigs and stuff writes itself in my mind when they hit the “na-na-na”’s on the chorus. 5.

My birthday song, and my life’s quest.

Something that has come to the fore in the last couple of months for me.

Neil was recovering from a back injury, so he recorded this one lying down—not coincidentally, Sly Stone did the same thing for There’s A Riot Goin’ On—and recruited Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor to sing backup.

It’s a rock-solid tune, one with meaning and ruminations about the quest for love at a certain age… and the trouble with it.

Now, does Neil Young like it? He had that famous quote from the album liner notes for Decade:

“This song put me in the middle of the road.

Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.”

Regardless of that quote, I’m still unclear on how he feels about it in spite of dragging him into MOR radio territory. Maybe he’s mellowed.

But certainly: Heart Of Gold contains poignant magic, capturing the feeling of the quest some people never seem to resolve, about true love. 9.

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