78: Steely Dan, "Peg"

By Wm. on January 10, 2026

As the calendar turned to 1978, I was ready to get back to a formal chart-keeping routine. My AT40 lists throughout the last two months of '77 had been slapdash efforts, initially due to suffering a broken wrist on the first Saturday of November (even if my non-dominant arm was the one affected). I'll claim inertia, rather than laziness, was responsible for taking it easy for the rest of Debby Boone's reign at the top.

I'd started toying with getting all forty songs on one side of a sheet just a few weeks before my injury; the design for '78 modified how I handled the Top 10, which gave space for not only AT40 Extras but plenty of trivia, as you see above. (All the add-on stuff went AWOL after just a couple of weeks, as it was–and maybe still is–my wont to be bad at follow-through on grand plans.) One notable change, though, occurs at the top of the page: this is the first chart in my collection with only a Saturday date on it. Up to this point, covering nineteen months, I'd used Sunday or "weekend of Saturday-Sunday" dates, owing to the show being aired on Sundays in Cincinnati when I discovered it.

Anyway, a new year was exciting enough, and since I was still over two years away from being able to drive, I was reliant much more often than not on getting the latest dope straight from Casey rather than the Billboard chart posted in Recordland at the Florence Mall. One of the true pleasures of charting in real time was learning what songs were new to the show–this week, I didn't have to wait long at all. I'm not 100% certain now, but the night of 1/7/78 might just have been the first time I heard all four of the debut tunes. Let's poke around a bit with them.

40. Steely Dan, "Peg." While I'm sure I knew some of their older stuff by this point, this is the first appearance by Fagen and Becker on one of my charts. Maybe someday I'll do some research into this, but I don't recall another song that started off its Top 40 run by going 40-36-32-28 (it hit the gas the next two weeks, though, moving 20-15 on its way to a #11 peak).

39. Donny and Marie, "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration." This was the fifth of D&M's six hits that made the Top 40. All five to this point had been covers (as was generally the Osmond way), four of which had charted previously as duets. They'd already taken on songs from Dale & Grace, Nino & April, and Marvin & Tammi; here it's a sample from the library of Bill & Bobby. I hadn't realized until today that Medley, and not Phil Spector, had produced the Righteous Brothers' version of "Soul and Inspiration"–I feel like I'm hearing a bit of an effort to re-create the Wall of Sound from producer Mike Curb on the remake.

38. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "What's Your Name?" Casey had talked about the September '77 plane crash that took the lives of Ronnie Van Zant and others on the 11/5/77 show and mentions it here as well on the intro. That doesn't mean I was paying close attention, as it feels like the news of the crash didn't register with me until later that year.

Two quick things: 1) This was the second consecutive year that Skynyrd occupied the #38 slot on the year's first show (note the debut of the live version of "Free Bird" on my chart); 2) Yes, "What's Your Name?" was at the time the latest iteration of the "rambling man" genre. I get that Van Zant is telling a story here, but I find the line "What was your name, little girl?" (emphasis added) in the final chorus particularly grating, even galling.

37. Samantha Sang, "Emotion." This weekend is the first time that Premiere has made 1/7/78 its principal offering since 2011, before I began tuning in. Thus, it's been 48 years since I heard the story about Barry Gibb calling Sang very late one night to offer to write something for her. In Casey's telling, that was "five years ago," likely meaning sometime in the second half of 1972, but if Wikipedia is to be trusted, this first encounter would have been in 1969. The song, which Maurice co-wrote, is "The Love of a Woman," which, contrary to what we're told, was not a big chart success in Australia and Europe. (Casey was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story.) The song is what you might expect from the pen of a Gibb in that time frame, and showcases Sang's voice much more than "Emotion" does.

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The winter of '78 wasn't quite as brutal or snowy in the Cincinnati area as the previous one had been, but we still missed a good deal of school due to the weather. I associate quite a few of the songs that were on the 1/7/78 show with those snow days–those were among my first weeks listening to Q102, the FM Top 40 station in Cincy. But for me this has always been the "Peg" show, when the lead single from Aja kicked off what turned out to be a pretty good year for pop music.