Welcome back to the second installment of The Number Nines:
A glimpse of great music that never quite got the buzz it deserved.
Here are my next four picks, representing some of the most exciting new sounds of the high ‘70s.
Popcorn
Hot Butter
1972
At first, it’s only an unearthly whistle and a toe-tapping sleigh bell rhythm. Then we hear the galloping, floridly electronic bassline.
And then, just as the fourth measure ends, the corn begins to pop.
For two and a half glorious minutes, the shadowy Hot Butter sinks its teeth into the “Popcorn” hook, symphonically layering unearthly Moog melodies and adding in percussive touches every so often:
A shaker, a triangle, offbeat drum hits. The end result is every bit as exciting as standing on a stool for the first time to watch popcorn kernels pop in the pot.
By novelty-instrumental standards, the journey of “Popcorn” is surprisingly long, but so is its cultural shadow.
The song was originally written in 1968 by the experimental German-American composer Gershon Kingsley. A man who loved his Moog so much, he recorded the song for a truly strange half-cover album called Music to Moog By.
He set up the “First Moog Quartet.”
And later wrote the PBS synth fanfare:
Kingsley rearranged “Popcorn” for a Quartet album in 1972.
But bandmate Stan Free covered it that same year with his own short-lived band, and that version unexpectedly took off worldwide.
As the first primarily electronic song to make the top 10, “Popcorn” must have sounded completely alien on pop radio.
But it granted Moogs the visibility needed for synthesizers to colonize the charts, unexpectedly providing the building blocks for several generations of electronic dance music.
Also: it rules:
Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
Marvin Gaye
1972
The album What’s Going On is a shameful omission in the history of Hot 100 number-ones. It sent three singles into the top-ten – more than any album by a male solo artist until then – but its artistic achievements are even more undeniable.
A product of Gaye’s dismay at the social conditions in America and his brother’s letters from Vietnam, I think What’s Going On works as impossibly well as it does because it uses the free-form language of psychedelic soul to capture his wide-ranging personal ruminations on society and make them universal.
The first two singles are gorgeous, perfectly bittersweet accounts of injustice and environmental ruin.
But both are grounded in hope for a better future.
“Inner City Blues” has none of that.
It’s dark, bluesy, and brimming with frustration at the status quo.
In his unearthly falsetto, Marvin unveils the bleakness of life in the inner city one devastating line at a time – from the lack of government spending, to police brutality, to an autobiographical line about tax struggles – adding in the “make me wanna holler” to highlight how untenable and frightening the situation is.
The music underneath is a rich, driving swirl underpinned by a beautifully murmuring bongo line from Bobbye Hall.
A pioneering female percussionist with an utterly astonishing resume of session credits.
Nowadays, the Vietnam War is over, civil rights heroes of the ‘60s are universally-acknowledged legends, and most Americans are at least aware of ecological issues.
But I think “Inner City Blues” remains undimmed to this day because it lays bare issues in urban communities that still make us wanna holler.
I never met the man, but I’m not sure if Marvin Gaye would be too proud of just how much his song still matters.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Queen
1976
Whatever your thoughts on a song I might have heard in a hundred contexts before I graduated high school: there’s no way to deny its staying power.
My favourite story is that of my friend, who was inspired to take up opera after discovering this song at age five.
That’s part of the power of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Everybody has some kind of history with it.
Nobody’s history with the song was longer than Freddie Mercury’s: having spent seven years writing it and never bothering to reveal what inspired him. But the most striking thing about the whole song is that it makes sense as one.
The a capella intro, the ballad, the operatic number, the hard rock section, and the reflective coda are produced so cleanly that each section flows beautifully into the next.
The song sounds like the three weeks it took to fully record. (Freddie, Brian and Roger would devote 10 to 12 hours a day to recording their mind-blowing vocals.)
But “Bohemian Rhapsody” might be just as impactful as a pop product. One that established the modern standard of releasing a music video for a big single release. Their video was appropriately overblown and unforgettable, and probably helped the song stand out commercially in the vast realm of British prog-rock.
Favourable comparisons to “Good Vibrations”, not least from Brian Wilson himself, probably helped.
Even America finally let Queen into its top-10 heart – but only barely.
At least until the song climbed back up to #2 in 1992 through a Wayne’s World boost – that I chose to ignore so that I could write about this song. It was the song that inspired this list.
And it’s probably the most monumental of them all.
Magic Man
Heart
1976
After growing up in Seattle dreaming of becoming a rocker, Ann Wilson answered an ad from a local band seeking a singer.
And her life became as dramatic as the music she’d later create. Lead guitarist Roger Fisher offered her the job immediately, only for his brother Mike – the band’s manager – to dodge the draft to Vancouver, forcing Heart to follow him.
But she was following her heart, too – by then, Ann Wilson had fallen dizzily, passionately in love with Mike Fisher.
Her mother wasn’t pleased with these changes, although the record does not reveal whether she tried to understand, triiiied to understand, tried, tried, tried to understaaand her daughter’s decision.
Anyway, Heart eventually picked up steam, and eventually had an album deal with an indie label. Thinking back on her whirlwind romance with Mike Fisher, she and Nancy wrote a funky, chugging, awesomely horny wailer that the label loved, complete with cool solos on both lead guitar and Minimoog.
The marketing strategy for “Magic Man” was ridiculous. After hilariously sending it to Canadian radio stations because it qualified as Can-Con, it earned further airplay after the band opened for “Tonight’s The Night”-era Rod Stewart.
The Wilsons have said that their radio publicist bribed DJs with drugs and prostitutes’ phone numbers for airplay. Then, of course, there was the label’s tabloidy, wildly misogynistic Rolling Stone ad.
Ann and Nancy were rightly furious, and promptly declared war on their label.
But the song stuck. Heart kicked off a much-loved run as the first high-profile female-fronted classic-rock band.
And none of it would have happened without the chart success of “Magic Man”.
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That’s a great foursome there, NoB. Thanks for the spotlights!
I agree with your decision to treat the second coming of BR as an asterisk. It really was a fluke (let alone its third go-around).
Wow. All of these songs are great picks and all-timers, though they are very very different from each other. One story- A couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I rode our bikes to the store, and we passed by an outdoor concert our town has 4 times a summer, where they bring in some big names from the past. Lo and behold, it was Ann Wilson of Heart. I had forgotten she was one of the acts booked. My daughter went into Walgreens to look for some tortilla chips, and I waited outside, listening to Ann belt out “Magic Man”. It would be totally unreasonable to expect her to sing like she did in ’76 after decades of going full throttle with her voice, and just human biology. Her voice had definitely aged, but I was impressed that she was still able to belt out such a difficult song. It was just amazing to hear her. One of the greatest rock vocalists, period.
Heart’s 70s output is inconsistent, but the good is SO good. And I agree, no woman had a better voice for rock. Amazing.
I’m a strong partisan for the original “Popcorn” by Gershon Kingsley. I love novelty songs, often silly ones, but I think “Popcorn” loses something with Hot Butter’s more openly cartoony rendering. Kingsley’s original is bubbly and catchy, but there’s a dreaminess to it. It’s like an early version of trance.
I might get in trouble for saying this, but I remain underwhelmed by the What’s Going On album. The production is fantastic, but the music itself sounds like four or so strong-but-similar songs connected by pleasant filler. I completely agree that “Inner City Blues” is a gem. It’s always been my favorite song on the album, though of course “What’s Going On” is a masterpiece as well.
I can’t say for sure, but Wayne’s World may have been the first time I heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a kid. It’s possible I heard it on the radio earlier, but it’s also possible that I heard it on the radio after Wayne’s World inspired DJs to spin it some more. In any event, that scene was really striking, and its dedication to singing along to most of the song went a long way to immortalizing it among later generations. If course, that scene doesn’t capture the sadness that’s in the song, but that’s for subsequent listens to reveal.
Great list!
When I was a kid and first heard “Inner City Blues,” I felt like it was an assignment, something that I needed to listen to, and figure out what it meant. I lived in a city, but most certainly was not living the experience of the narrator.
I think I see your point about the album as a whole. Perhaps it’s a case of the sum being greater than the individual parts.
As an aside, the song itself, “What’s Going On” is an example of what I call an “ uncoveable.” Over the years in various bands, and, God bless her, Cyndi Lauper taking a stab at it, I’ve neither participated in or heard anyone come remotely close to doing it justice.
Dissenting opinions welcome if anybody has a good example.
The problem is that I often ignore the whole in favor of the four or so best parts. But, maybe that says more about me than the album?
I think that’s human nature.
And I also think everyone around here would agree that no one is more fair minded and objective than you.
One of the great things about connecting here and over at the mothership is discovering a whole new world of music that didn’t make it over here and I’d missed out on.
As far as I knew Heart were the 80s/90s female branch of hair metal, that was the period they had their UK hits. Not my kind of thing was my dismissive opinion. Finding out about their harder 70s output while over at Toms blew me away. Barracuda is a perfect 10 for me with Magic Man not too far behind.
Bohemian Rhapsody’s achievements are impressive given that its length doesn’t seem too radio friendly – unless the DJ needs ‘a comfort break’. Did it get played in its entirety on radio or was there an edit?
“Comfort break” = prostitutes from Heart’s radio publicists?
Not quite what I had in mind but it works as well!
I don’t think there was a radio edit of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” I only remember hearing the entire thing. And anyway, what could you possibly take out?
Radio edits began to go away in the late 70s, as the “cool” FM stations began to horn in on the former AM domination. Our crowd certainly noticed it when the “short versions” were played.
I don’t recall anyone daring to try and chop-shop “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
I remember being surprised when I finally heard the uncut version of “Frankenstein.” They’d only play the shorter on my local station and AT40. Then I tuned into WBLM-FM broadcasting from Lewiston, ME and, like you say, I heard the album versions of songs. I never went back to AM.
Common sense says that you couldn’t cut it down but nothing would surprise me. Haven’t had a chance to listen to these yet but there’s a few lousy radio edits proposed here:
https://www.culturesonar.com/radio-edit-songs/
They’re from the U.K.
The imports section at any record store cast a spell on me. I was the possessor of secret knowledge.
Orange Juice’s Texas Fever was a great E.P. import, and to this day, my favorite E.P.
Whaat? You’ve never heard of David Sylvian? You should check out Brilliant Trees. I’ll tape it for you.
Great blog here. To me, the cherry on top was the PBS synth fanfare. Man, did that bring back memories of hearing that in the 1970s and 1980s, as does this one seen often on commercial television during the period. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDRr6M_yPng
AHHHHHHHH!! Yes! Learning of the origin of that PBS logo music was the best part! I have that 7 second “song” in my iTunes. It has 5 stars.
And thanks for the Screen Gems reminder, Ozmoe!
Glad I’m not the only one with the PBS music in my music library… Among several other TV tunes are the ABC and CBS movie themes from the late ’70s/early ’80s (both of which, I recently learned, were compared by the same guy):
https://youtu.be/P5J7MeOu8ls?si=eNq0Oe2hmdbAVWQo
https://youtu.be/ZuzTfQM4nYE?si=0j21Ebncf9I7O1Ix
That should be “composed”, not “compared” (feel free to compare them though!).
Gah, too late to edit… I should clarify that those weren’t written by PBS/”Popcorn” guy, but by Ferdinand Smith, who also composed this classic theme:
https://youtu.be/GjYDBLnHE1Y?si=5YAPImf0o8k-ESEx
I never had HBO, but I remember hearing this at other people’s houses. Good stuff!
It’s funny, I don’t remember that CBS theme, but the ABC theme pops in my head all the time over the years!
Folks, I’ve not been in hiding. I’ve truly loved your contributions but with with back to school and back to coaching, I haven’t had a chance to chime in but Napoleons” article hit a spot I’ve always been aware of.
Marvin Gaye is the soul of Mowtown as much as Smokey Robinson was the poet, Marvin got the whole dynamic.
Much has been made of the 50th anniversary of Rap and the shaming of Mowtown that they didn’t speak to the “Black Experience”is short sighted.
The Temptations “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” and Gaye’s “What’s Going On” were ahead of the curve and gave white America an insight to what was happening in the Black community ( I should add Curtis Mayfield’s output at this time should also be included re: “Superfly”).
As I’ve talked about in this site and the mothership, we had many Black students at our college in the early “70’s and they were constantly at my door to borrow both albums and Rolling Stone has consistently had Gaye’s album
in the top Ten of all time albums. As a matter of fact, in 1990, they named it the top album of all time.
“Inner City Blues” doesn”t just talk to the Black experience but to all of us
who wonder “What’s Going On”.
Remember, Tom Breihan rated “Popcorn” a 10. (I agree…9 or 10)