News and notes from the first two hours of a show first played 49 years ago…
--The first seven songs Casey spins are debut tunes. While It's not that unusual for the new songs to all come at the very beginning of a show, having that occur with seven debuts feels pretty unlikely (though it happened again at least one other time, on 4/17/76). Maybe the most notable thing about this set of newcomers is that it includes three future #1's: "Theme from 'Mahogany'," "I Write the Songs,", and "Love Rollercoaster." Off the top of my head, I know of just two other times that happened during the classic Casey era: 4/15/72 and 8/24/85.
--In the middle of the onslaught of debuts, Casey fields a question about the highest debuting hit of 1975. Shockingly, the answer for the Hot 100 in 1975 is a strong contender for worst song of the year: "Last Game of the Season (Blind Man in the Bleachers)," by David Geddes. It had come aboard at #44 the previous week and shuffles in at #36 on this show.
--Between #33 and #16, there are six covers of notable tunes. Even though I note the artist performing the song in this show, hyperlinks under the titles go to earlier versions.
#33: "Brazil" (Ritchie Family) was written in 1939 and became a big hit for Xavier Cugat (who I'll always think of as Mr. Charo) and his orchestra a few years later.
#28: "Secret Love" (Freddy Fender) was a #1 hit for Doris Day in 1953, featured in her movie Calamity Jane.
#25: "Our Day Will Come" (Frankie Valli) also had hit #1, in late March of 1963 (Ruby & the Romantics boxed out "End of the World," by my father's HS classmate Skeeter Davis). The trend of disco-fying oldies perhaps didn't start with "Our Day Will Come" and "Brazil," but it didn't end there, either—we're mere months away from danceable resurrections of "Baby Face" and "Tangerine." (Additionally, one of the seven songs that fell off the show this week was Esther Phillips's disco take on Dinah Washington's "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes.")
#21: "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (Willie Nelson) was born in the '40s and recorded by many a country legend over the years. This is the only one of these six remakes to legit become the standard version.
#19: "I Only Have Eyes for You" (Art Garfunkel) also sprung from the 30s, also was first featured in a film (Dames). But Art uses the incredibly awesome arrangement from the Flamingos' 1959 version as the basis for his take.
#16: "Heat Wave" (Linda Ronstadt) is another 60s R&B classic, a #4 hit by Martha & the Vandellas. Ronstadt is the only one of these six to reach the Top 10 with her cover, though the Ritchie Family and Valli both came as close as you could without making it.
--This countdown is perhaps best-known in AT40-phile circles as the week that Pete Wingfield's "Eighteen With a Bullet" stood at #18 with, well, a 'bullet' indicating increased sales and airplay (and yes, Casey notes the momentous occasion on the intro). From Billboard's 11/22/75 Hot 100, courtesy of worldradiohistory.com:
Even though this was the period I was starting to listen to the radio in increasing amounts, I don't remember hearing "Eighteen With a Bullet" on WSAI that fall—it must not have been on their playlist. When I finally did hear it, maybe only a dozen years or so ago, I was surprised by its retro sound, Wingfield's falsetto, and, to be honest, the song's conceit—no, I hadn't twigged from the title that it was a love song littered with music industry references such as "picked to click," "national breakout," "A-side," and "high on the chart." Mea culpa. As nice a story it might be had it stalled out in this spot, the song would reach its peak position of #15 the following week. It's a really fun piece of work.
Friend of the blog Jim Bartlett has written about "Eighteen With a Bullet" at his place more than once—you can find his most recent piece about it here.
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