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Welcome to The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag. This week we’re turning the clock back to 1981, a pivotal year in American culture, politics and music, as the world mourned the loss of former Beatle and counterculture icon John Lennon and watched former Movie Star and California Governor Ronald Reagan take the oath as President. And then he got shot.

Lennon and Reagan, both targets of assassin’s bullets only four months apart. Reagan survived, Lennon didn’t, but both shooters were deranged fans. That was new. And Reagan’s would-be assassin didn’t even have anything against the President; he was just trying to impress the young Actress he was obsessed with, Jodie Foster!

Now all segments of Pop Culture grew by double digits in the ’70s as media flooded the zone, but none more than the music biz, which nearly doubled as Boomers continued to engage with albums and performers not just for passive entertainment, but as extensions of their own identities: one of the striking features of the Baby Boom generation. The downside, though: with all that next-level showbiz fame, wealth and adoration, the creeping awareness among fans that their idols lived in a completely different world from them. And some fans needed to be reminded that “hey, you’re a spectator, not a participant.”

The wall in between? Well, the best-selling album of 1980 grappled with that exact issue. Pink Floyd’s epic The Wall, inspired by a incident that couldn’t be more emblematic of the growing separation between audience and performer in the ’70s: Floyd’s Roger Waters luring a loud, unruly fan to the edge of the stage while trying to play a quiet song, and contemptuously spitting in his face. In his ensuing angst about actually having done that, Waters imagined a literal wall across the stage separating Band and crowd.

So changing dynamics between fans and celebs, very much on fans and celebs’ minds, especially after Lennon and Reagan were shot, but just add that to the already long list of concerns as the ’80s began: inflation, soaring prices, unemployment, urban decay, moral decline.

“There was Vietnam, then Watergate, then the hostages in Iran,” Bruce Springsteen summed up in a Rolling Stone interview. “We were beaten, hustled, then humiliated, and I just think people need to feel good about their country.”

So in politics we got Reagan. In theaters, the enduring Rocky, Star Wars, Superman and Indiana Jones franchises; on TV, ABC became the #1 network in primetime with ’50s throwbacks Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley and jiggle shows like Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company. And in music, something, anything to replace Disco after it spectacularly imploded mid-’79.

Closest thing there is to an iron-clad rule in Pop: when people’s spirits are down and anxieties up, they crave the trancelike escape and release of the ballroom, disco, rave, EDM festival, what have you, and Dance Music surges in popularity. But like Springsteen picked up on, heading into the ’80s, people just said “enough!” and even though not much improved on paper for nearly three years into Reagan’s presidency, pride, engagement, confidence and optimism were back in style.

Now how that going to translate to the charts exactly, no one really knew, and with AM Top40 radio on life support and Pop migrating to FM so Sony Walkman listeners could enjoy the hits in stereo, Billboard in 1981 was saying “no longer is there an exclusive Top 40 anything, just an ever-changing multitude of Top 40s, depending upon genre.” Once MTV launched in August of ’81, it quickly became the new center of gravity, but before that it was an unpredictable, but sometimes exciting mishmash of sounds.

#10 Dolly Parton – 9 to 5

And Country was big in the mix. Country Rock titans The Eagles, still dominant and Kenny Rogers at the top of his game. And John Travolta’s next project after personifying the Disco and ’50s Nostalgia crazes in Saturday Night Fever and Grease? 1980’s Urban Cowboy.

So first up at numbers 10 and 9 as we get things rolling here on our 1981 Chartcrush countdown, back-to-back Country crossovers. At #10, the Oscar-nominated title tune by one Country’s top Female Singer-Songwriters from her screen debut co-starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin about a trio of ladies who scheme against their sexist Male boss. It’s Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”

Dolly Parton, “9 to 5,” only the second time a Female artist topped top both the Country and Pop charts with the same single. Jeannie C. Riley was first in 1968 with “Harper Valley PTA.” It wasn’t Dolly’s first top ten hit on the Hot100; that was “Here You Come Again” in ’77. But it was her first and only #1. Very different story over on the Country chart though: 24 #1s there from 1970 to 1991.

Speaking of Kenny Rogers, his Lionel Richie penned smash “Lady” was #1 the last six weeks of 1980, and because Billboard‘s 1981 “chart year” began with their October 4, 1980 issue, they had “Lady” at #3 for ’81. At Chartcrush, though, we don’t do “chart years.” Instead we count every song’s full run in whichever calendar year it was strongest, so we have “Lady” at #2 for 1980, where it belongs, and our ’81 countdown is Rogers-free.

#9 Eddie Rabbitt – I Love a Rainy Night

But there’s another Male Country crossover act, more in line with the Urban Cowboy archetype, who beat ‘ol Kenny on the Hot100 Artists ranking for ’81 by a lot, and he’s at #9 in our lead-off Country twofer here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show with the song that replaced “9 to 5” at #1, the last consecutive Country Crossover #1s in Hot100 history to date. A staple of road songs compilation CDs for years to come, at #9 it’s Eddie Rabbit’s “I Love a Rainy Night.”

Also a staple of road songs CDs, Eddie Rabbit’s previous hit “Driving My Life Away,” #5 in October of 1980. And then “I Love a Rainy Night,” #1 for two weeks in March of ’81, and he had one more top-fiver in October, “Step by Step,” before his chart action declined in ’82, but he kept scoring top ten Country hits ’til right about the same time Dolly Parton’s chart fortunes faded, the first years of the ’90s, when Country’s neo-Trad renaissance swept away many of the ’80s smoother, more polished Pop-Country hitmakers.

#8 Christopher Cross – Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)

At #8 we have another Soundtrack hit and the Oscar winner for Best Original Song. “9 to 5” was nominated; this won, from the film about a heavy-drinking New York heir played by Dudley Moore who falls for a shoplifting waitress from Queens played by Liza Minelli. For the score, the studio tapped the Singer-Songwriter whose debut album and its first two singles were all over the radio and the charts while the film was in production.

The Director was nervous about his lack of experience, though, so instead they brought in seasoned pro Burt Bacharach. But he did get to co-write the theme song with Bacharach, and record it for the film. Good thing, because despite his 1980 hits “Ride like the Wind” and “Sailing” and his big night at the Grammys, the next two singles off his debut didn’t connect like the first two, so he needed another hit fast, and he got it. His biggest yet. At #8 it’s Texas Singer-Songwriter Christopher Cross with “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).”

Theme from Arthur, “Best That You Can Do” at #8 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1981’s top 10 hits.

By the time Christopher Cross’ second album dropped in ’83, he’d lost some weight, ditched the scruffy facial hair and upgraded his wardrobe, but his look and style still didn’t translate to MTV, and the album’s lead single only got to #12. But “Think of Laura” was a surprise hit off the album months later after ABC started using it to promote its red hot daytime Soap General Hospital and its missing-presumed-dead heroine Laura Spencer. As it turned out, the album’s only top 10 hit. General Hospital, quite the hitmaking juggernaut in those years.

#7 Kool and The Gang – Celebration

Next up at #7, the top Black act of ’81 on the Hot100 and Billboard‘s #2 Soul Singles Artist of the year. Stevie Wonder was #1 with, among other hits from his Hotter than July album, his Bob Marley homage “Master Blaster.” Marley, diagnosed with terminal cancer in the Fall of ’80.

And if you’re wondering, Michael Jackson was between albums in ’81; Thriller came out at the end of ’82.

Now, our #7 song: baseball fans were among the first to hear it on NBC TV spots plugging the 1980 World Series, but what really juiced it on the charts: news broadcasts playing it in the coverage of the end of the Iran hostage crisis in January after 444 days, right as Ronald Reagan was being sworn in as President. Two weeks later, after a ticker-tape parade for the hostages in New York January 30, it hit #1. It’s Kool & The Gang, “Celebration.”

“Celebration,” since ’81 a staple of weddings, parties, and Democrat Walter Mondale’s campaign in 1984, but he didn’t have much to celebrate, losing to Reagan in a 49-state landslide.

Kool & The Gang notched their first top ten hits “Jungle Boogie” and “Hollywood Swinging” in ’73 and ’74, but then came Disco and for three years their “loose and greasy approach to Dance music” as Rolling Stone‘s Geoff Hines put it, was a dud on dancefloors. Not even having a track on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack helped, and adding strings and Female vocals to the mix just alienated their existing fans.

But as soon as Disco hit the skids in late ’79, they were back with J.T. Taylor as Lead Singer, and “Ladies Night” was their first top ten in over five years. Then “Too Hot” in ’80, and “Celebration” in ’81, their first #1 and #7 on our 1981 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown.

Despite MTV not playing any R&B ’til CBS forced their hand with Michael Jackson in ’83, Kool & The Gang still managed to score another top 10 in ’82, “Get Down on It,” and then later, with MTV support, “Joanna,” “Fresh” and “Cherish” in ’84 and ’85.

#6 Foreigner – Waiting for a Girl like You

So Billboard launched its Mainstream Rock chart in March of ’81: their weekly ranking of Airplay on FM Rock stations. Could’ve used that during the glory days of Album Rock in the ’70s, right? But better late than never!

Well our Rock Band at #6 had been scoring Hot100 hits since their debut album in 1977 with “Feels like the First Time” and “Cold as Ice,” then “Hot Blooded” and “Double Vision” off their second in ’78, all top 10s that virtually defined mainstream Rock in the late ’70s.

Well, their third album Head Games in ’79 wasn’t quite as successful, but after two members left the band, they hit the ’80s as a foursome, so the title of their fourth album in ’81, just the number 4, had a double meaning.

Its lead single was the Rocker “Urgent,” and got them back into the top ten in September, but around Thanksgiving this Ballad hit #2, and stayed there for the next ten weeks, #2! It never got to #1 but it’s #6 here on our 1981 edition of Chartcrush: Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl like You.”

Missy Elliott’s “Work It” got stuck at #2 behind Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” for ten weeks in 2002 into ’03, but until then, Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl like You” had that record all to itself: weeks at #2 without ever getting to #1.

Later here our 1981 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show we’ll be hearing the song that was #1 for nine of those ten weeks from late November ’81 to late January ’82.

All those weeks, by the way? In Billboard‘s 1982 chart year, which began October 31, 1981, so you’ll find them both on Billboard‘s 1982 year-end Hot100, not ’81. Now here at Chartcrush, since we don’t have to get a year-end issue printed and mailed by New Years, we can count every song’s full chart run, even if it goes from one year into the next, and rank it in whichever calendar year it earned the most ranking points. Just think of it as correcting the record.

Foreigner stayed hot for the rest of the ’80s, and if you’re wondering, yes, they finally did get to #1, in 1984 with another Power Ballad, “I Want to Know What Love Is.”

#5 Rick Springfield – Jessie’s Girl

So before General Hospital was rescuing songs like Christopher Cross’ “Think of Laura” and Patti Austin & James Ingram’s “Baby, Come to Me” from the depths of obscurity and making them hits in ’83 and ’84, our next act at #5 got some of his chart mojo playing a character on the show. From ’81 to ’83 he was Rock Singing Surgeon Dr. Noah Drake. Before that he’d been an early ’70s Teen Idol along with David Cassidy and Donny Osmond, spent the Disco years doing one-off acting roles, and right before he landed the part on General Hospital, he’d cut his first album in four years. Its lead single is #5: Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl.”

“Jessie’s Girl,” Rick Springfield, #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1981’s biggest hits. It took its sweet time moving up the chart: 18 weeks to #1 August 1st, the same week MTV launched. He never got to #1 again, but scored another four top 10s over the next few years, and got another look in 2013 when Nirvana Drummer and Foo Fighters founder Dave Grohl featured him in his documentary Sound City about L.A.’s Sound City Studios, where Nirvana recorded Nevermind and Springfield had recorded his album, Working Class Dog, ten years before.

#4 John Lennon – (Just Like) Starting Over

At #4 another veteran making a comeback after five years, but in this case his absence wasn’t because Teen Beat and 16 stopped putting him on their covers, or he couldn’t score hits, or because he was sidelined by Disco or anything like that. No, in ’75, his second son was born so he decided to step off the merry-go-round (as he put it in another song), and be a full-time Dad.

But in 1980 he was back with a new album, shorter hair, clean shaven, slicker clothes and a new bounce in his stride. He even disavowed his early ’70s radicalism and liked Reagan! “What the hell was I doing fighting the American Government,” he wondered in a 1980 Newsweek interview, “just because Jerry Rubin couldn’t get…a nice cushy job?” Jerry Rubin, Yippie founder and Chicago Seven radical-turned-Yuppie multimillionaire in the ’80s.

The album Double Fantasy, seven songs each by him and wife Yoko Ono, dropped in November of ’80, and its lead single out at the same time was the appropriately titled “(Just Like) Starting Over.” At #4, John Lennon.

“(Just Like) Starting Over,” only the fourth song to hit #1 after the artist’s death. Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay,” the first in 1968, then hits by Janis Joplin and Jim Croce in the ’70s.

Would it and Double Fantasy‘s next two hits “Woman” and “Watching the Wheels” have been as big as they were if John Lennon had lived? Well, critics for the most part hated the album, but it was selling, and John had plans to tour North America and Europe in ’81, which would have reintroduced him to a whole new generation of late Boomers and first-wave Gen X-ers in their late teens and 20s.

That generational cohort sometimes informally called Generation Jones, since they don’t neatly fit into either the Baby Boom or Gen X. Lennon’s story arc had mirrored youth culture more than any other icon of his era. Would that have continued for Jonesers in the ’80s?

Double Fantasy went on to win Album of the Year at the 24th Grammys in ’82, which Yoko was there to accept.

#3 Diana Ross and Lionel Richie – Endless Love

Next at #3, the breakout Singer from Motown’s biggest ’60s Group The Supremes who went solo at the beginning of the ’70s, duetting with the breakout Singer-Songwriter of one of Motown’s biggest ’70s Groups, The Commodores, whose last two hits before his solo career began in the ’80s overlapped the duet on the charts.

For six weeks in late Summer, both the duet and The Commodores’ “Lady (You Bring Me Up)” with him singing lead were in the top 10. Then his last big ballad with the group, “Oh No,” was on its way to its peak of #4 as the duet slipped to #2 after holding down the top spot for nine weeks, August into October. At #3, it’s Diana Ross, coming off her big Post-Disco year in 1980 with “Upside Down,” “I’m Coming Out” and “It’s My Turn,” together with Lionel Richie, “Endless Love.”

Lionel Richie like Diana Ross also had a big year in 1980, just not as a solo act yet, or even as part of the Commodores, but as the Songwriter and Producer of Kenny Rogers’ “Lady,” which was #1 for six weeks. Richie also wrote and co-produced “Endless Love” we just heard at #3 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1981: the top charting Duet of all time according to Billboard.

It was the last of Diana Ross’ six solo #1s, and the first of Richie’s five from ’81 to ’85, and it was from a soundtrack. Endless Love the movie, also memorable for being Tom Cruise’s movie debut: a short scene where he brags to friends about trying to burn down a house when he was eight.

In 1994, Luther Vandross and Mariah Carey’s cover of “Endless Love” made it all the way to #2.

#2 Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes

Now to most folks after, say, 1991, “alternative” is not the first word that comes to mind when our #2 song comes on, but Billboard in ’81, trying to identify the next big thing, trumpeted the fact for the third year in a row, a “New Music”-adjacent Rock record was their #1 hit of the year.

Now our Chartcrush #1 for ’81 is a different song, this is #2, but the larger point, of course, was right, and once MTV started catapulting New Wave tracks by previously unknown Brits and Aussies into the top ten in ’82, the question was settled. At #2 it’s Kim Carnes, “Bette Davis Eyes.”

Village Voice critic Robert Christgau snarked that ”Bette Davis Eyes” is Rod Stewart’s best work since ”Maggie May.” Of course, not Rod Stewart; it was L.A. Singer-Songwriter Kim Carnes’ synthy, New Wavey cover of a Bluesy deep album cut in 1975 by the woman who co-wrote it, Jackie DeShannon: #1 for nine weeks and the #2 song on our 1981 edition of Chartcrush. It would’ve been ten weeks, but Stars on 45’s Discofied medley of (mostly) Beatles hits moved up from #2 for one week in the middle of its run on top.

In the late ’60s Kenny Rogers (there’s that name again) had been in a latter-day lineup of the Folk ensemble New Christy Minstrels with Carnes and her hubby, so in 1979, he tapped them to write songs for his concept album Gideon about a fictional Texas Cowboy, and “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer” from that was a #4 hit: a Rogers/Carnes duet. Then her own fifth album in 1980 got her back in the top ten with her cover of Smokey Robinson’s “More Love.”

But “Bette Davis Eyes” was by far her biggest hit. It was everywhere in the Spring and Summer of ’81 and won Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys. Bette Davis herself (the movie legend; aged 73 in 1981) thanked her for making her cool in the eyes of her teenaged grandson and “a part of modern times.” And as I mentioned, it was Billboard‘s #1 song of the year.

#1 Olivia Newton-John – Physical

But we have a different #1, the song that kept Foreigner’s “I’ve Been Waiting for a Girl like You” at #2 for nine weeks at the end of ’81 spilling over into ’82, but recall from when we heard that back at #6, Billboard ranked both on its 1982 year-end Hot100 chart, not ’81, since their ’82 “chart year” began with their first issue in November ’81.

Again, at Chartcrush we go by calendar years, not arbitrary “chart years,” and for songs whose runs go from one year to the next, we rank their full chart runs in the year they racked up the most points. So Billboard‘s #1 song of 1982 becomes our Chartcrush #1 for 1981.

And actually, that’s awesome because it lets us say a little more about the biggest disruptor in music for a very brief window in ’81 before MTV shook everything up. The clunky first model in 1979 sold moderately well but the lighter, smaller Walkman II that appeared in February ’81 was the real game changer. They weren’t cheap, about what a decent smartphone cost in the 2020’s inflation-adjusted, but tens of thousands of them sold, and the centerpiece of Sony’s marketing? Fitness!

For the first time ever, you could bring your own tunes with you out for a run or skate or workout at the gym. By November, Time magazine was heralding “The Fitness Craze” on its cover with a group of spandex and headband-wearing folks and the tagline “America Shapes Up,” and this song was topping the Hot100. Yeah, the Walkman did that! At #1, Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical.”

With the Fitness Craze only just breaking, not at all clear at the time whether “Physical” was about working out or sex. Looking at the lyrics, clearly sex; but watch the video, working out… and sex, which got it banned here and there, and even MTV scrubbed the ending where a group of toned, oiled-up dudes in the gym ignore Olivia taking a shower in silhouette, and instead start eyeing each other!

“Physical” was the culmination of Olivia Newton-John’s real-life image transformation from sweet girl-next-door on her mid-’70s hits to naughty sexpot: the exact transformation that happens with Sandy, the character she played in the Grease movie opposite John Travolta in ’78. Written with Rod Stewart in mind, rejected by Tina Turner for being too sexual, but snapped up by, of all people, Olivia Newton-John after a moment’s hesitation, and it was her biggest hit, tying the then-Hot100 record with ten weeks at #10, which stood until Boyz II Men got 13 with “End of the Road” in 1992. Olivia made the top 10 three more times in ’82 and ’83, but “Physical” was the last of her five career chart-toppers.

Bonus

So that’s our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1981, but we’re not quite done yet. With “Physical” and “Waiting for a Girl like You” coming in to our top ten from Billboard’s 1982 ranking, plus “Arthur’s Theme” when you factor its full chart run and not just the weeks within their ’81 chart year, that displaces three hits from Billboard‘s official published year-end top ten, so to be thorough despite the flaws in Billboard‘s methodology, let’s look at those three. I mentioned earlier that Kenny Rogers’ “Lady,” #3 on the year in Billboard, was really a 1980 hit, so that one’s in our 1980 countdown.

#12 REO Speedwagon – Keep On Loving You

But the song Billboard had at #10 on the year was a legit 1981 hit: a Rock Group that’d been around ten years touring relentlessly, but only denting the charts. But their perseverance finally paid off when they hit the jackpot with their 1981 album Hi Infidelity and its biggest hit, REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You.”

REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You,” #10 on the year in Billboard; bumped down to #12 by the three hits coming in to our Chartcrush top ten for 1981 we just counted down.

#11 Daryl Hall and John Oates – Kiss on My List

And finally, in our bonus segment of songs that made Billboard‘s top ten for ’81 but not ours, the hit they had at #7 which just misses our top ten at #11, by a Philadelphia Duo who scored three top tens in ’76 and ’77 but then slumped badly peak Disco and came back bigger than ever in ’81 with this hit: Daryl Hall & John Oates’ “Kiss on My List.”

Pop fans and MTV couldn’t get enough of Hall & Oates’ patented brand of Pop/R&B fusion. “Kiss on My List,” the first of their five #1’s in the first half of the ’80s, and besides those they notched seven top tens to become Billboard‘s top-charting Duo of all time, ahead of such luminaries as the Everly Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel and Carpenters.

Well that’s all we’ve got for you here on our 1981 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host Christopher Verdesi and I want to thank you for listening. Hey, if you want more, you’re gonna want to check out our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll find links to stream all our Chartcrush episodes online, plus written transcripts, chart run line graphs, our full top 100 charts and other awesome extras. Again, that website: chartcrush.com. We count down a different year every week on this show, 1940s to now, so tune again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 songs of the year according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts that were published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade mag, Billboard. This week on Chartcrush we’re counting down 1994, one of the last years before the internet transformed how we shop, get our information, and, eventually, how we mostly communicate with each other.

Only 13% of Americans were online in 1994, almost all on OSP’s: “online service providers” (CompuServe, Prodigy, DELPHI, America Online), and accessing those via (at best) 28.8 kilobit per second dial-up modems over regular phone landlines.

Websites and browsers existed, but didn’t take off ’til the free version of Netscape Navigator came out in ’95, then Microsoft’s Internet Explorer later in the year. The Web usually gets the blame for ending the American monoculture: that core set of Pop hits, movies, TV shows, opinion leaders et cetera that almost everyone knows. But in reality, the Pop culture menu was already getting pretty unwieldy by the start of the ’90s.

In music, the Sony Walkman had killed AM Top40 in the early ’80s as Pop migrated to FM, which has better sound, but just a fraction of the reach of AM, geographically. MTV held things together for a while, but by the late ’80s, Rap and Modern Rock from America’s inner cities and college campuses, respectively, were selling so many albums that Billboard had to give them their own separate charts: the first new genre charts since Mainstream Rock in ’81. And MTV created Yo! MTV Raps and, for alternative, 120 Minutes.

But the final nail in the coffin of the monoculture was in ’91 when Billboard ditched its 50 year old system of weekly retail and radio surveys and revamped the charts to reflect actual retail barcode scans and independently monitored radio spins. Turns out their survey panels had been more than a little biased in favor of Boomer artists and sounds, which had kept the illusion of a monoculture alive, but at the expense of emerging GenX sounds, Alt Rock and Hip Hop, and in Country, Neo-Trad.

All kinds of wacky leftfield stuff started making the charts after Billboard flipped that switch, but by ’94, the year we’re counting down here on this week’s Chartcrush, another chart problem was eroding the Hot100’s credibility; namely, it was still a singles chart, not a songs chart, and with the demise of the 7-inch vinyl 45 after 1988, well, who wants a cassette or CD with just two songs on it like a 45 has? Same effort as an album to get it in and out of the player, right?

I mean, labels still made them, and some folks did buy them, but by far the ones that sold best were in genres that already had a tradition of putting extended Dance or alternate mixes of tracks out on 12-inch vinyl. There the new formats were a solution, not a problem, and so-called “maxi-singles” were hot items at retail, with mixes not out anywhere else. So once the 45 went bye-bye, Hip-Hop, Dance and R&B had a huge advantage on the Hot100 over song-is-the-song genres like Rock and Country with Billboard keeping its singles-only rule.

In ’95, that really came into focus when a song hit #1 on the Pop Airplay chart for eight weeks, but was ineligible for the Hot100. The Rembrandts’ theme song from NBC’s hit TV show Friends, “I’ll Be There for You:” not out as a single. You had to buy that album. After that, people started saying the Hot100 was broken, and lots more examples over the next few years, so for ’95 ’til Billboard finally rescinded its singles-only rule at the end of ’98, our Chartcrush shows use the Airplay charts to compile our rankings.

Now ’94 did have one top 5 Airplay hit that wasn’t eligible for the Hot100, Counting Crows’ “Mrs. Jones.” That would be our #10 song if we were going by the Airplay chart, but other than that, Airplay and Hot100 were still mostly in sync in ’94.

#10 Ace of Base – Don’t Turn Around

Both year-end rankings, for example (Hot100 and Airplay), have three songs in the top 10 by the same act: needless to say a very rare occurrence! Elvis Presley in 1956, The Beatles in ’64, Bee Gees in ’78 and these guys with our #10 song in ’94. That’s it ’til Usher notched three in 2004.

But the group was a flash in the pan: everywhere one minute; where-are-they-now file before they even knew what was happening! Color Me Badd, Kris Kross, Vanilla Ice and Sinéad O’Connor: others with similar story arcs in the first half of the ’90s. At #10, here’s the first of the three hits we’ll be hearing this hour by Swedish Reggae Pop Quartet Ace of Base: “Don’t Turn Around.”

Ace of Base had a song in the top 10 on the weekly chart from October 16, 1993 to September 10, ’94, 48 weeks. That’s a record for the ’90s that not even the decade’s top Hot100 act Mariah Carey could match! “Don’t Turn Around,” their third hit on the calendar, peaking at #4 for four weeks in the Summer and the #10 song of 1994. We’ll be hearing their two even bigger smashes from earlier in the year straight ahead here on our 1994 edition of the Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown Show.

#9 John Mellencamp and Me’shell Ndegeocello – Wild Night

But first we have a bit of ’70s and ’80s throwback for you at #9: ’70s because the song was first a hit in ’71 for the guy who wrote it, Van Morrison (off his album Tupelo Honey); ’80s because it’s that decade’s top-charting Heartland Rocker, the #6 artist of the ’80s adding up all his Hot100 chart points.

The song missed the top 10 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 at #15, but only because the tail end of its chart run (15 weeks) was after their November 26 cut-off for the ’94 chart year, not counted. At Chartcrush with the benefit of hindsight and not having to get an issue done before New Years, we get to factor songs’ full chart runs, and then we rank them in whichever calendar year they racked up the most points.

He seems almost out of place on a ’94 playlist, let alone a top 10 countdown, but numbers don’t lie! In the top 10 for 13 weeks, peaking at #3 for two in September, it’s John Mellencamp, formerly John Cougar, teaming up with Neo-Soul Bassist Me’shell Ndegeocello on “Wild Night.”

There’s a harder rocking version of “Wild Night” on John Mellencamp’s ’94 album Dance Naked, also with Me’shell Ndegeocello on bass, but it was the toned down semi-acoustic version we just heard at #9 on our Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown for 1994 that was the promo single sent to radio. Mellencamp’s first top 10 since “Cherry Bomb” in ’87, and as it turned out, his last.

#8 Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories – Stay (I Missed You)

Our #8 hit also had an acoustic version on the single, dubbed the “Living Room Mix:” Rock, Pop and Country acts doing what they could in the mid-’90s to catch up in the singles market with Hip-Hop, Dance and R&B where 12-inch singles had been a thing for years. In this case, though, radio played the main version from the album, which was a soundtrack: that’s the only soundtrack cut in the countdown, and the first song by an unsigned artist ever up ’til then to hit #1. From Ben Stiller’s GenX-defining movie Reality Bites, at #8 it’s Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories, “Stay (I Missed You).”

Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories, “Stay (I Missed You)” from Reality Bites. Loeb had written the song a few years earlier, about being in love with someone who lacks the maturity to reciprocate, perfect for the movie. So when star Ethan Hawke who lived across the street from Loeb in New York, heard it and gave the demo to Ben Stiller, that was that. By the way, Hawke also shot the video for “Stay,” right in Loeb’s apartment.

#7 Mariah Carey – Hero

At #7, the Diva who was the #1 Hot100 act of the entire ’90s decade with the biggest of her three charting hits in ’94: the second hit off her 1993 blockbuster album Music Box. The first, “Dreamlover,” our #3 song of 1993. It’s her eighth #1 hit since she exploded onto the charts in 1990 with “Vision of Love,” of course, Mariah Carey, still with hubby, mentor and label CEO Tommy Mottola in ’94 doing the down-the-middle Adult Contemporary Diva thing on “Hero.”

I mentioned Ace of Base’s streak with one or more hits in the top 10 for 48 straight weeks in ’93 and ’94. Well at the same time, Mariah Carey was racking up 39 straight weeks with her string of three hits off Music Box making her second on that ranking. “Hero,” the second of those, #1 for four weeks December ’93 and January ’94 and #7 on our Chartcrush Countdown of ’94’s biggest hits.

She did even better in ’95 and ’96: 42 weeks in the top 10 with the three hits from her next album Daydream.

“Hero,” written by Mariah and collaborator Walter Afanasieff for Gloria Estefan to do for the 1992 movie Hero starring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis. Tommy Mottola vetoed that though, insisting Mariah to do herself, which of course she did. Luther Vandross’ “Heart of a Hero” was what wound up in the film, but that didn’t chart.

#6 Ace of Base – All That She Wants

Next, the hit that started it all for the year’s top chart act, not just in the U.S., but their first big European smash too, and the one legendary A&R man and Arista Records Founder/Honcho Clive Davis heard vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean in ’92. Even though it was peak Grunge back home, he knew he had to break this synthy Euro-Ragga-lite act from Sweden stateside. Hey, that’s why he was Clive Davis, right? At #6, Ace of Base again, with “All That She Wants.”

Well we’re counting down the top 10 hits of 1994 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush and that was the second of the three Ace of Base hits in our countdown, “All That She Wants,” #6. No, she doesn’t want another literal baby; she’s just looking to move on to the next guy: common misconception with that song; they’re Swedish, English isn’t their first language!

Group founder Jonas Berggren, his singing sisters Jenny and Linn, and Ulf Ekberg all hailed from blue-collar Gothenburg on the West coast of Sweden, a Heavy Metal town, and although he wasn’t a Rocker at all, Jonas got the group’s moniker tweaking the title of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades.”

Things got rolling for them after they sent their demo tape to Stockholm-based Producer/DJ Denniz PoP, who’d produced the record they built their whole sound around, Nigerian-Swedish Singer Kayo’s Reggae-lite “Another Mother.”

So Denniz pops the tape into his Nissan’s cassette deck for the drive home and it’s a big yawn for him. But then he can’t get the tape to eject! So two weeks of repeated listening gets him thinking about how he can mold their track “Mr. Ace” into a hit. The result? We just heard it, “All That She Wants,” their breakthrough, #1 on all the European charts. From there, Clive Davis reissues their 1992 album Happy Nation in the U.S. with two new songs as The Sign, and it goes 9-times Platinum and is Billboard‘s #1 album of ’94.

#5 Toni Braxton – Breathe Again

And speaking of Arista Records, in 1990 they put out a single by a Baltimore-area Sister Act that only barely scraped the R&B chart, but the guy who ended up running Arista in the ’00s, Producer Antonio “L.A.” Reid heard it. He and his partner Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds had just signed TLC to the Arista subsidiary they were building, a mashup of their names, LaFace Records, so they didn’t need another Girl Group, but they were in the market for a Diva to compete with Whitney and Mariah, and the oldest of the five sisters fit the bill, so it was bye bye Braxtons, the Girl Group, and hello Toni Braxton, solo act.

Her 1993 debut sold 10 million, topped the album chart and got her and LaFace three Grammy Awards including Best New Artist. At #5 it’s the second hit off the album: “Breathe Again.”

“Breathe Again,” #5 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1994’s top 10 hits. Toni Braxton’s second top 10 peaking at #3 for three weeks in early ’94 right after “Another Sad Love Song” made it to #7 in the Fall of ’93. Both those hits, written by Babyface and produced by L.A. Reid, Babyface and Daryl Simmons. Toni’s sophomore album Secrets in ’96 did even better than her debut and gave her a pair of #1s, “You’re Makin’ Me High” and “Un-Break My Heart:” one of the top Pop Divas in a decade of Pop Divas.

#4 Celine Dion – The Power of Love

And at #4 we have another, dubbed by Billboard among others the “Queen of Adult Contemporary” because no Female has scored more #1s on the AC chart all the way back to 1961, 11, and our #4 song is her third. But it’s also the first of her three #1s on the Hot100, all mid- to late-’90s.

The song had already hit #1 in the U.K. in 1985 for the Singer-Songwriter who wrote it, Jennifer Rush, and it was a top 20 AC hit for Air Supply in the U.S. that same year. Then Laura Branigan charted a version on the Hot100 in ’87 making it a bona fide modern-day standard! But it was this Singer who got to drop the mic on it when her version went to #1 for four weeks in February and March. At #4, Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love.”

The lead single from her album The Colour of My Love, Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love,” produced by David Foster fresh from doing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” which was 1993’s biggest hit. Foster went way back with Celine to the ’80s when she was cutting albums in French and little known outside her native Quebec, and he produced half the songs on her first English album in 1990. But “Power of Love” was her first Foster-produced hit. In ’96, they did it again with “Because You Loved Me.”

#3 Ace of Base – The Sign

OK, at #3 on our 1994 edition of The Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown Show, the best-selling single of the year and the song Billboard named #1 on its year-end Hot100.

Why isn’t it #1 on our Chartcrush ranking? Well, starting with the switch to actual retail barcode scans and monitored airplay for compiling the charts in ’91, Billboard also changed its ranking method for most of its year-end charts to summing the raw sales and airplay counts that had accumulated through the year instead of a formula based on weekly chart positions. And why wouldn’t they? It’s more accurate.

That raw data, though? Locked away in Neilsen and Billboard‘s vaults so we couldn’t refer to it even if we wanted to. Actually, though, we don’t want to because one of our main value propositions here at Chartcrush is ranking every year, ’40s to the present, using the exact same ranking method that’s based on Billboard‘s published weekly charts. And since that proprietary underlying data doesn’t even exist before Billboard‘s switch to Soundscan for barcodes and Broadcast Data Systems for radio spins in ’91, ranking based on chart positions is the only way to stay consistent.

So we’re sorry Ace of Base, but there were two songs in ’94 with stronger chart runs than your biggest hit, so it’s #3, not #1. But hey, you still get an historic three songs in the top 10 on the year, same as in Billboard. It’s the new original they were working on when Clive Davis brought them to New York to brainstorm about repackaging their album for U.S. release, and they used the title for the album as well. At #3, “The Sign.”

Ace of Base’s second and biggest U.S. hit, #1 for four weeks March into April, pushed to #2 for the four weeks that R. Kelly’s “Bump ‘n Grind” was on top, and then it reclaimed the top spot for two more weeks in May, “The Sign.”

1993 was Reggae’s big year on the U.S. charts: Inner Circle’s “Bad Boys” (the them of Fox’s hit show Cops), Snow’s massive hit “Informer,” UB40’s even more massive “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Billboard unveiled a dedicated Reggae chart in ’93, and Alternative radio was on board too. So Clive Davis interrupting his Mediterranean vacation to sign Ace of Base in ’92, not as leftfield a move as it might appear at first blush.

And it sure as heck paid off. “The Sign” was everywhere in ’94. Stephanie Tanner’s Band Girl Talk even did it on ABC’s sitcom Full House, and later when Trey Parker and Matt Stone needed a song to epitomize the mid-’90s for an episode of t heir Comedy Central hit cartoon South Park, “The Sign” was a no-brainer. But Ace of Base faded fast, only making the top 10 one more time after 1994: their cover of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” in ’98. And that was it.

For his part, though, Producer Denniz PoP got backing from Arista’s parent company BMG, built Cheiron  Studios, brought in wannabe Glam Rocker Max Martin, and together they made Cheiron the epicenter of the late ’90s Teen Pop explosion. Backstreet Boys, one of their first projects. Sadly, Denniz died of cancer in 1998 at just 35, but Max Martin, one of the top Producers of the ’00s and ’10s after crafting Britney Spears’ breakthrough “..Baby One More Time” in ’98.

#2 All-4-One – I Swear

At #2 in our Chartcrush Countdown of 1994’s top 10 hits, another David Foster production. Recall that he also helmed Celine Dion’s “Power of Love” we heard at #4 and Billboard named him the year’s top Singles Producer.

Here he is pulling a Mitch Miller (the early ’50s Producer who got Tony Bennett to do Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart”) remaking a recent Country hit into a #1 Pop hit with a version of John Michael Montgomery’s “I Swear” by a Black L.A. Vocal Quartet. Atlantic Records President Doug Morris had the idea and set it all up, but Foster did produce it. At #2 it’s All-4-One’s “I Swear.”

Kentucky Singer John Michael Montgomery’s original of “I Swear” was #1 on the Country chart for four weeks and even got to #42 on the Hot100 in 1993, but All-4-One conquered the Hot100 with their version six months later, stayed at #1 all of June and July, 11 weeks, and took home the Grammy for Group Pop Vocal Performance. #2 here on our Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown for 1994.

Their next big hit was also a Montgomery cover that peaked on the Hot100 six months after the original on the Country chart: “I Can Love You Like That” in ’95. For a while it seemed like All-4-One might be the next Boyz II Men, but nope. Their last Hot100 entry stalled at #30 in ’96 while Boyz’ continued scoring massive hits…

#1 Boyz II Men – I’ll Make Love to You

…including our #1 song, their biggest hit yet, which is saying something! “End of the Road,” #1 for 13 weeks and the #1 song of 1992.

But then in ’94, after Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” replaced All-4-One on top for three weeks, their next chart topper tied Whitney Houston’s then-record of 14 weeks at #1, and it’s the #1 song of 1994 using our Chartcrush ranking method that goes by weekly chart positions.

Over at Billboard, it was #1 the last week of the ’94 chart year, November 26, with 17 weeks still to go in its run. Not counted, so it’s #3 on the year but had they been, the song likely would’ve beaten Ace of Base’s “The Sign” for the #1 spot on their year-end Hot100 as well. Again, at Chartcrush, for our rankings we factor every record’s full chart run, and at #1 for 1994? It’s Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You.”

Philadelphia’s Boyz II Men on good ‘ol Motown with the #1 song of 1994, “I’ll Make Love to You.” Billboard described their sound in ’94 as “guys next door” and a counterbalance to “the aggressive nature of this year’s music,” alluding there to the tension between R&B and Hip-Hop, which boiled over in early ’94 when a Black Women’s group barricaded a Nobody Beats the Wiz store in DC that was selling Gangsta Rap records, got big headlines, and helped initiate House and Senate hearings into Hip-Hop lyrics.

Despite all that (or maybe in part because of it), Gangsta Rap albums by Snoop Dog, Ice Cube, Easy-E and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony all made Billboard‘s top 100 albums of 1994, still with almost no airplay outside big cities, and in ’95, a Hip-Hop watershed when Billboard named Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” the #1 Hot100 single of the year.

So that’s our top 10 countdown here on our 1994 edition of Chartcrush. Again, our ranking based purely on chart positions on Billboard‘s weekly Hot100, while Billboard, starting in 1992 was adding up actual sales and radio spin units from behind-the-scenes to get their year-end rankings.

So, some differences in ranking positions within the top 10 comparing our ranking to Billboard‘s, most notably, the shakeup at #1 where we have Boyz II Men; Billboard had Ace of Base’s “The Sign.” But the songs in our top 10 vs. Billboard‘s sync up pretty well: nine in common: all except the one we have at #9. John Mellencamp’s “Wild Night,” which missed Billboard‘s top 10 at #15 on the year because they didn’t count the tail end of its run, which spilled over into their 1995 chart year.

#16 Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting – All for Love

Instead, at #8, Billboard had a second soundtrack cut besides Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” that’s in both ours and Billboard’s top 10s. From The Three Musketeers, it’s Bryan Adams, teaming with fellow Boomers Rod Stewart and Sting on “All for Love.”

Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting’s “All for Love,” Billboard‘s #8 song of 1994, that title riffing on the Three Musketeers’ motto “All for one, one for all.” We’ve got that one at #16 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1994.

Adams, something of a Soundtrack god in the ’90s. “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, #1 in 1991, “All for Love” in ’94, and then, “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” from the offbeat Johnny Depp rom-com Don Juan de Marco in ’95. All #1 hits.

And that’s gonna have to wrap things up for our 1994 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. If you like what you heard and you want more, check out our website, chartcrush.com, for a written transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version online, plus killer extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs. We do that for every year, ’40s to the present, and it’s all on the website. Again, that’s chartcrush.com.

I’m Christopher Verdesi, your host. Thanks for listening, and be sure and tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1966, a great, transformative year in Rock, Soul and R&B and Pop.

Just check out some of these songs that hit #1. Simon & Garfunkel’s breakthrough “The Sound of Silence” was #1 the last week of 1965 and the first week of ’66, and then reclaimed the top spot from The Beatles for a week in late January. Lou Christie’s ultra-catchy Four Seasons-riffing “Lightning Strikes” for a week in February followed by Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

Then the Spring brought The Young Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” Percy Sledge’s Soul heartbreaker “When a Man Loves a Woman” and The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” immediately followed in June by The Beatles, back at #1 with “Paperback Writer.” It’s run on top interrupted for a week by Nancy’s dad Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night.” And we’re only half-way through the year!

Summer kicked off with a pair of Garage Rock nuggets: Tommy James & The Shondells’ “Hanky Panky” and the three-chord stomper “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, avatars of England’s Troglodyte movement: kids forsaking civilization and reverting back to cave dwelling. New York’s Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” appropriately topped the chart for three weeks in the dog days of August, and then it was back to school with Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” The Supremes’ also soundtracked Thanksgiving ’66 with “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” and The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” was #1 while folks did their Holiday shopping in mid-December.

Wow, what a year, huh? But even more astonishing: none of those #1’s I just ran down were among the year’s top 10 hits we’ll be counting down this hour. Wait, what?! Yep, you heard me right. 1966 was such an explosive year in Pop, with literally dozens of era-defining hits that when you look at the charts, didn’t rank nearly as high as you’d think, and/or had surprisingly brief chart runs when they came out, yet they impacted pop culture for decades and still rack up tens of millions of plays on streaming platforms to this day.

Statistically, when you look at just songs that’ve cracked the top 10 and how long they stayed on the Hot100, top 10s in 1966 had an average total chart life of less than 12 weeks. That’s lower than any other year in chart history. As soon as records got traction, something else hit, and it was on to that: boom, bang zoom!

For comparison, in 2015, 12 weeks was the average for how long top 10 songs stayed… in the top 10! Average weeks on chart for top 10s in 2015: 35 weeks. Hard to imagine hits coming and going as fast as they came and went in 1966.

So if all those iconic #1s I just ran down aren’t in our countdown of 1966’s top 10 hits, what songs are? Surely they must be even better and more iconic, right? Well, after decades of nostalgia, recontextualization and reprioritization, our countdown (again, based solely on what was topping the charts at the time) might have a few surprises in store. But you can be the judge of that!

#10 The Mamas & The Papas – Monday Monday

At #10, one of the top acts in the second wave of Folk Rock, right on the heels of the first in ’65 when The Byrds’ jangly version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” hit #1 in April prompting Bob Dylan himself to plug in and “go electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in July. And a series of big hits in the new genre in Summer and Fall: Sonny & Cher, The Turtles, Barry McGuire, and Dylan’s own “Like a Rolling Stone,” clocking in at an unheard-of-on-AM Top40-radio six-plus minutes.

But for ’66 there was a whole new crop, and one of the biggest was The Mamas & The Papas. Their biggest hit in ’66 kicking off the countdown at #10: “Monday Monday.”

Mamas & Papas: John Phillips, his wife Michelle, Lead Singer Denny Doherty and “Mama” Cass Elliott. “Monday, Monday,” at #10 as we count ’em down here on our 1966 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Not their first hit but their biggest, #1 for three weeks in May after their debut “California Dreamin’” had stalled out at #4 in March.

Phillips had already been a successful Folkie with his group The New Journeymen, and Denny and Cass had both been in The Mugwumps, but once The Byrds hit and Dylan shocked the Folk world by plugging in at Newport, they formed The Mamas & The Papas and moved out to L.A. You can hear their origin story in their own words in their #5 hit in 1967, “Creeque Alley.”

After “Monday Monday,” they hit the top 10 again at the end of June with “I Saw Her Again” and had a total six hits on the charts in ’66. Adding it all up makes them the #5 Hot100 act of ’66.

But Denny and Cass’s fellow ex-Mugwumps John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky stayed in New York and the group they started, The Lovin’ Spoonful, did even better: five top 10’s in ’66: “Daydream,” “Summer in the City,” “Do You Believe in Magic” and two others, and they shake out as the #2 Hot100 artist of ’66, behind only The Beatles. Simon & Garfunkel also made the top 10 on that ranking at #7, with their string of five charting singles in ’66 starting with “The Sound of Silence.”

#9 The Four Tops – Reach Out I’ll Be There

Switching to Motown for our #9 hit. After five years of explosive growth, Berry Gordy, Jr.’s Detroit-based empire roared into ’66 with more top 10s than ever in a single year: 13. But no #1s ’til Fall when they scored three, all the work of star Songwriting/Production team Holland-Dozier-Holland, Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, best known for writing and producing The Supremes’ hits, and two of those three Motown chart toppers in the Fall of ’66 were The Supremes: “You Can’t Hurry Love” in September and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” in November.

Sandwiched between in October though? H-D-H’s top Male act, #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1966’s biggest hits, The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There.”

Coming off their first #1 in ’65, “I Can’t Help Myself,” the Four Tops struck again with “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” #9 on our 1966 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Their next two singles were also big hits, “Standing in the Shadows of Love” and “Bernadette,” and they eclipsed The Temptations as Motown’s top-charting Male group in ’67. But Holland-Dozier-Holland split with Gordy and Motown in ’67, and the Temps surged back with a bold new sound their longtime Songwriter/Producer Norman Whitfield pioneered, Psychedelic Soul.

The Tops soldiered on with their new Producer, Frank Wilson who also took the reins with The Supremes, but they didn’t score any more big hits until they too split from Motown to sign with ABC/Dunhill and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got)” produced by Steve Barri became a pre-Disco Top40 staple and peaked at #4 in 1973.

#8 Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels – Devil with a Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly

Now Motown wasn’t Detroit’s only musical export. The original “Twist” group, Hank Ballard & The Midniters were from the Motor City, as was Del Shannon, whose “Runaway” was one of the top hits of 1961. And after The Beatles hit, Detroit’s Garage Rock scene was unique for its Soul/R&B influences. Bob Seger, Ted Nugent and high-energy Proto-Punk bands The MC5 and Iggy & The Stooges, all products of that in the ’60s. And harder-edge Rolling Stone alternative Creem magazine started out in Detroit in ’69.

But the first Detroit Rockers to conquer the Hot100 post-Beatles were this next act at #8. Four Seasons mastermind Bob Crewe heard their demo, went to Detroit to see them open for the Dave Clark Five and signed them to his new label in ’65 hoping to cash in on the popularity of Wilson Pickett’s Soul Shouting R&B same as he had with Doo Wop in ’62 with the Four Seasons.

Crewe was the Arranger and Producer of their records and they made the top 10 in late ’65 with “Jenny Take a Ride,” but that was just the warm-up. The Young Rascals’ “Good Lovin’” and Pickett’s “Land of 1,000 Dances” hit in the Spring and Summer, and then this late in the year. #4 for four straight weeks November and December, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, their medley, “Devil with a Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly.”

Bruce Springsteen used “Devil with a Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly” as a concert finale, but Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels made it the #8 record of the year in 1966 by our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Now there are two versions of Billboard’s year-end Hot100 chart for 1966, the one published at the end of ’66, and a revision for a research packet they did circa 1970 that uses a slightly more modern ranking methodology. They’re quite different, but don’t look for “Devil with a Blue Dress” near the top of either of those because it was a hit so late in the year, extending into early ’67, and Billboard only factors weeks within its “chart year,” which splits ranking points between years.

At Chartcrush though, we count every song’s entire chart run regardless of when it was a hit during the year, and rank it in whatever year it had the most of its chart action. No point splitting!

#7 The Monkees – Last Train to Clarksville

OK, on to #7. The Beatles turned a corner in 1966. After over two years of nearly constant touring and recording, two movies, endless publicity events, John Lennon’s observation to a London Evening Standard reporter in March of ’66 that The Fab Four were “more popular than Jesus,” when it was publicized Stateside in late July, sparked protests, record burnings, radio boycotts and even death threats.

Their 18-date North American stadium tour was in August at the height of that backlash. And there were other controversies too: statements critical of America and Americans, a thumbs up for Vietnam draft dodgers and the gruesome original “butcher cover” of Yesterday and Today, their U.S.-only album cobbled together with singles and songs omitted from American versions of other albums. So after the tour wrapped, the Fab Four retreated from public view and hunkered down for months in the studio to make their classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

So in late Summer when NBC teased its new sitcom about a Rock group, modeled after the Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, the kiddos ate it up. And as John, Paul, George and Ringo exited the limelight, Peter, Mike, Davy and Micky and their made-for-TV “Prefab Four” group stepped right in. The half-hour show debuted September 12: Monday nights at 7:30 Eastern right before I Dream of Jeannie, now in “living color,” like the rest of NBC’s primetime lineup for the first time ever, and just nine episodes in on November 5, their debut single hit #1. At #7? The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville.”

TV group The Monkees’ first hit, “Last Train to Clarksville,” #1 for a week in November and #7 here on our 1966 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Their second was even bigger, “I’m a Believer:” seven weeks on top at the start of ’67.

The Monkees sang on their records (Micky Dolenz there on “Last Train to Clarksville”). Everything else, though? Legendary L.A. studio session group The Wrecking Crew, who played on hundreds of records in the ’60s, and not just ones by made-for-TV groups. The week after “Clarksville” topped the Hot100, The Monkees’ debut LP topped the album chart for the first of 13 weeks, which was just one shy of the record for Rock Bands atop the album chart set by The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night in ’64. By the way, their next set More of the Monkees shattered that record with 18 weeks in ’67.

#6 The Association – Cherish

So fun fact: between The Mamas & Papas “Monday Monday” in late May and this next hit at #6 in late September, none of the songs that hit #1 are in our top 10 countdown. The entire Summer!

Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” #1 for two weeks May into June: that shakes out at #25 on our ranking. The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” two weeks on top June into July, #28. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” also two weeks in July: #20. The Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” two weeks July into August: #19. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City,” three weeks at #1 in August: that one just misses our top 10 at #11; The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” two weeks in early September: #13 on our ’66 ranking. And three others.

So what’s going on there? Well it’s like I laid out in the intro: with so many great records coming out, songs just weren’t staying on the chart very long. Now we’d love to factor that in to our rankings, but to do that we’d need the underlying sales and airplay data the weekly charts were based on so we could weight the weeks throughout the year. Maybe then we’d have a couple Summer #1s in our countdown, or maybe not, but alas, all we can go by is the weekly chart positions, so a #1 in a hot sales week gets the same points as one in a less-hot week. No way to differentiate.

Having said all that, though, finally in the last week in September, a #1 that’s in our top 10! It’s another Southern California group, like the Mamas & Papas and Monkees, that coalesced out of a loose 13-member Folk collective called The Men at Hollywood’s Troubadour Club.

Along with other L.A. acts, they pioneered the new Soft Folk “Sunshine Pop” sound, but they got off to a shaky start when despite their clean-cut look, their first hit, “Along Comes Mary” earlier in ’66, landed on The Gavin Report‘s tip sheet of songs with drug references. “Mary,” slang for pot. Which all but killed its airplay along with The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” This one’s clean as a whistle, though. At #6 it’s The Association, “Cherish.”

“Cherish,” #1 for three weeks in late Summer and #6 on our countdown of the top 10 hits of 1966 here on this week’s Chartcrush. The Association scored an even bigger hit in ’67: the more upbeat “Windy,” which hit #1 for three weeks despite its numerous thinly-veiled drug references. That hit right after they were one of the top-billed acts at Monterrey Pop, the three-day festival that kicked off the Summer of Love in the Bay Area: first to take the stage Day 1.

#5 The Beatles – We Can Work It Out

Now despite the Beatles’ tumultuous second half of ’66 after John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” scandal, the first half of the year Beatlemania was still fully intact coming off Help!, their second movie and its album and singles. Rubber Soul dropped at the end of ’65 and as was their custom, a new single at the same time with songs not on the album. Well, both sides of that single made the top10, but the one that’s #5 on our countdown was the favorite on radio: #1 its fourth week on the Hot100 in early January, whereupon it battled Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” for the top spot all month. “We Can Work It Out.”

Beatles “We Can Work It Out” at #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1966’s biggest hits. “Day Tripper,” the flip-side. That peaked at #5. Both songs feature both Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s vocals: typical on The Beatles’ first hits, but it was getting rare as they increasingly wrote independently. Want to know who really wrote a Lennon-McCartney song? Just listen to who’s singing it!

#4 ? & The Mysterians – 96 Tears

Now The Beatles and the British Invasion didn’t just inspire copycat made-for TV groups like The Monkees. American Teens in the tens of thousands in the mid-60s were picking up instruments, practicing with their buddies in their parents’ garages and having a go at stardom. Start-up labels looking to make a quick buck with the next “Louie Louie” snapped up these groups and put out their records, and they often got played on local radio right alongside the latest chart hits, so a young Band could be as big as The Beatles or Stones in their hometown even if they didn’t break through nationally.

But some did break through nationally. “Wooly Bully” by Texas’ Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs, the #7 song on our 1965 Chartcrush ranking (Billboard had it at #1 on the year!). But no left-field American Garage Rock combo was ever able to top the weekly Hot100 until Tommy James & The Shondells’ “Hanky Panky” in July, yet another Summer ’66 #1 not in our countdown! Then The Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” although they were British.

But then, right before The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville,” this nugget by a Latino group out of Michigan, sung by their enigmatic dark-sunglass-wearing Frontman and propelled by an ultra-catchy Vox Continental organ riff. At #4, #1 for just one week but in the top 10 for nine, same as The Monkees, it’s Question Mark & The Mysterians’ “96 Tears.”

Why 96 tears? Well, Songwriter/Frontman Rudy Martinez, a.k.a. “Question Mark,” says that number, 96, has a deep philosophical meaning for him, but to date he hasn’t elaborated. Mysterians indeed! 1966, the pinnacle of American Garage Rock on the charts. The Outsiders’ “Time Won’t Let Me,” #5 in April; Paul Revere & Raiders’ “Kicks,” #4 in May; The Cyrkle’s “Red Rubber Ball” and Tommy James’ “Hanky Panky” in July; Sam the Sham again with their next hit “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” in August; The Count Five out of San Jose, California with their Yardbirds-inspired “Psychotic Reaction,” #5 in October, and beyond the top 10 and national charts, hundreds more.

#3 The Righteous Brothers – Soul and Inspiration

Heading back to Southern California for #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1966: the Duo who got to headline Producer Phil Spector’s crowning achievement with his “wall of sound,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” in ’65: heavy reverb, orchestration, backup choirs, et cetera. Spector spent tens of thousands of precious 1964 dollars getting that record just right, only to see the Duo bolt from him and his label first chance they got. And their new deal prohibited them from working with Spector, for which he sued and eventually won a massive settlement.

But in the meantime, they had to produce their follow-up themselves. Fortunately, they were paying attention, and they even had a soundalike song by the same writers who’d penned “Lovin’ Feelin'” for them, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. And the Spector-free result not only nails the wall of sound, it topped the chart a week longer than “Lovin’ Feelin’!” At #3, The Righteous Brothers, “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.”

Righteous Brothers: Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield: “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” #3. As big a triumph as it was to replicate Phil Spector’s sound, the era’s most acclaimed Producer, “Soul and Inspiration” was The Brothers’ last top 10 hit before fading from the charts and splitting in ’68. But in 1974 they regrouped to put an exclamation point on the whole early ’70s Early Rock Nostalgia boom with their #3 hit, “Rock and Roll Heaven.” And in ’87, Bill Medley, this time without Bobby Hatfield, was back at #1 with his Duet with Jennifer Warnes on “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing.

#2 The New Vaudeville Band – Winchester Cathedral

Well we’re down to the small numbers here on our 1966 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and with all the enduring classics that charted in ’66, kinda shocking that the top two are songs that were all but forgotten by the end of the ’60s.

At #2, a throwback to the golden age of British Music Hall, the U.K.’s Vaudeville, 30-40 years in the rear-view by ’66. It’s a studio band hired by the Songwriter, Geoff Stephens, and Singer John Carter cupped his hands in front of the mic to make his vocal sound like late ’20s Crooner Rudy Vallée, famous for singing through a megaphone.

Like Mitch Ryder’s “Devil with a Blue Dress” we heard back at #8, its chart run spilled over into ’67, so its last several weeks were not factored and it doesn’t appear on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 at all, but counting its full chart run reveals it as the #2 song of 1966. It’s The New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral.”

New Vaudeville Band, “Winchester Cathedral,” the #2 song of 1966 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown; believe it or not, the 1967 Grammy winner for Best Rock Record, and Rock fans for years used that as a reason to ignore the Grammy Awards. But maybe they were on to something. Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” and British Duo Peter & Gordon’s Music Hall throwback “Lady Godiva” were also in the top10 along with “Winchester Cathedral” in December. And further down on the charts in those weeks, even sillier stuff like “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago” by Dr. West’s Medicine Show & Junk Band.

And Paul McCartney for one was never the same after those hits; like his permission slip to open the nostalgia floodgates. “When I’m 64,” “Your Mother Should Know,” “Honey Pie,” just a few of the Beatle songs his bandmate John Lennon allegedly liked to dismiss as “Paul’s Granny music.” So maybe the Grammys got it right; “Winchester Cathedral” had legs.

#1 SSgt Barry Sadler – The Ballad of the Green Berets

The #1 song of ’66 though, not so much. U.S. troops in Vietnam more than doubled in ’66: nearly 400,000 by the end of the year, and polls showed that most Americans supported the war. But with protest escalating and most Folk and Pop acts who chimed in voicing antiwar sentiments, a record by a wounded Green Beret extolling the virtues of the cause and the bravery of the troops in combat was bound to be a hit.

But no one, hawk or dove, could’ve predicted how big a hit: #1 for five straight weeks in March while tens of thousands picketed at the White House as part of an International Day of Protest organized by The National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, precursor to MOBE. The #1 song of 1966 is Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.”

Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, “Ballad of the Green Berets.” The #1 song of 1966 and the top selling single of the year. Sadler wrote it recovering from his wounds as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam, and his pro-military, pro-Vietnam message: much different from what came later in the ’60s as protest escalated and public opinion turned. But it was also different from the military and patriotic music of the past; the muscular Male-chorus bravado of Mitch Miller’s 1955 “Yellow Rose of Texas,” say. His Folky clipped, understated vocal and acoustic guitar set a new template that endured for years, just not on the charts.

Bonus

Well there ya have ’em, the top 10 songs of 1966 according to our Chartcrush ranking. In ’67, for the first time, Billboard started adding bonus points to songs’ point totals in its year-end tabulations for weeks at #1 to better reflect the hockey stick effect with sales and airplay as you approach #1, and they continued to refine that formula over the next 25 years, but in ’66 it was still just a simple inverse-rank point system.

And of course, Billboard was only counting weeks within its chart year, not songs’ full chart runs as I’ve been pointing out. So five of the songs we just heard this hour in our countdown are not in Billboard’s top 10 for the year.

To review, New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral” and Mitch Ryder’s “Devil with a Blue Dress” were hits too late in the year to have their chart runs fully counted. Similarly, The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out:” the first two weeks of its run in calendar 1965, not counted. And The Righteous Brothers’ “Soul and Inspiration” and The Mamas & Papas’ “Monday Monday,” each with three weeks at #1, get boosted into our top 10 adding in those bonus points that are a key part of our Chartcrush ranking method we use consistently for every year. But those five coming in to our top 10 displaces five from Billboard’s, so, just to be thorough, we’ll do a mini-countdown of those.

#69 Paul Revere & The Raiders – Kicks

Billboard’s #9 song was by a Band originally from Idaho, relocated to L.A., and by ’66, ensconced as regulars on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand TV spinoff Where the Action Is and fixtures of the Sunset Strip youth scene in Hollywood with their colonial era costumes in response to the British Invasion. It’s Paul Revere & The Raiders, with “Kicks.”

Nah, they’re not talking about a sneaker shortage; “Kicks” was mid-’60s Teen slang for getting high, and the song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (same team who wrote The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” and it’s ’66 follow-up “Soul and Inspiration” we heard at #3) was an anti-drug song, first offered to The Animals, but snapped up by Paul Revere & The Raiders. It only peaked at #4, but 12 of its 14 weeks on the chart were in the top 40 so on the strength of that it made Billboard’s year-end top 10, which, again, was based on a simple inverse-rank point system. On our Chartcrush ranking, “Kicks” comes out #69.

#21 Frank Sinatra – Strangers in the Night

Billboard’s #8 song of ’66 as we continue our mini-countdown of Billboard‘s year-end top 10 songs missing from our Chartcrush Top Ten we counted down earlier: the final solo #1 by none other than Frank Sinatra, 26 years after his first chart hits singing with Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra before World War 2, “Strangers in the Night.”

Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” Billboard’s #8 song of 1966, #21 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top 10 from earlier in the show. He hadn’t had a #1 single since “Learnin’ the Blues” in 1955 but with over 30 best-selling albums since then, Grammy and Oscar winner, host of the Oscars in 1962, he was still going strong at 50.

One night in ’68, CBS-TV exec Fred Silverman couldn’t shake that “doo-be-doobie-doo” scat thing Sinatra does at the end, and the next day in a development meeting for a new cartoon about a Teenage singing group that solves spooky mysteries, he changed the name of the dog in the show from “Too Much” to “Scooby-Doobie-Doo.”

#14 Nancy Sinatra – These Boots Are Made for Walkin’

Now Frank wasn’t the only Sinatra who was red hot in ’66. Daughter Nancy Sinatra scored Billboard’s #6 hit of the year, #1 for a week in late February, seven in the top 10 and #14 on our Chartcrush 1966 ranking, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'”

Before “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Nancy Sinatra’s singing career was going nowhere despite her famous name, so Dad intervened and got Country Singer-Songwriter-Producer Lee Hazelwood to recast her as the Mod, platinum blonde, go-go booted Biker chick in “Boots.” Soldiers in Vietnam adopted it as their theme for their endless foot patrols after her “Boots tour” with the U.S.O. Then, later in ’66 she starred with Peter Fonda in Roger Corman’s outlaw biker flick, Wild Angels, and her makeover was complete.

#30 Jimmy Ruffin – What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Next up in our mini-countdown of songs from Billboard‘s year-end top 10 nudged out of our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown for 1966 we heard earlier, the older brother of Temptations Lead Singer David Ruffin, who outsold everything that the Temps had out in ’66 with his very first charting single. #3 on the year in Billboard, it’s Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.”

Jimmy Ruffin, “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” Billboard had it at #3 even though it only got to #7 on the weekly chart. But it racked up 17 total weeks in a year when the average for top 10’s was less than 12, and that simple inverse point ranking method: very generous to songs with long chart runs. It shakes out at #30 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1966.

#18 The Mamas & The Papas – California Dreamin’

And finally on our 1966 edition of Chartcrush, another 17 weeker that never hit #1, but Billboard has it as their #1 song of ’66! I mentioned it when we heard their second hit “Monday Monday” at #10. Here again, The Mamas & The Papas, their breakthrough, “California Dreamin’.”

Mamas & Papas, “California Dreamin’, Billboard’s #1 song of 1966 thanks to its 17 weeks on the chart. Again, longevity, much less decisive in our Chartcrush rankings so we have it at #18, but that’s not too bad for a song that peaked at #4!

And on that note, it’s gonna have to be a wrap for our action-packed 1966 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Hey, if you like what you heard and you want more, I hope you’ll visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version online, plus hip extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs. Which we do for every year, ’40s to the present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi and I want to thank you for listening, and be sure and tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 records according to our recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag.

This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1944, the year America and its Allies turned the tide in World War II as the Soviets took back most of their own territory lost to the Nazis in ’41 and ’42, and the massive D-Day invasion of occupied France, June 6, opened up a second European front. And in the Pacific, by Fall, bombers were within range of Japan itself after the U.S. retook Guam and the Mariana and Palau Islands, and General MacArthur kept his promise to return to the Philippines.

No, the War wasn’t over yet, but by the end of 1944, victory was in sight. In New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team were busy cracking the code on the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Monumental times, but did you know that for most of World War II, ’42 to ’44, record labels couldn’t record musicians? Yeah, the musicians’ union was on strike! Crazy, right? American Federation of Musicians boss James C. Petrillo thought records and jukeboxes were gonna replace live entertainment and put musicians out of work.

Of course, that zero-sum-type reasoning, faulty on almost every level in a market economy; in music, records, radio and concerts reinforce each other so all the channels benefit. But the U.S. didn’t really have a market economy during the War with Feds controlling prices and wages and rationing almost everything.

Even after the National War Labor Board ruled against the AFM and President Roosevelt personally reached out asking Petrillo to cut it out because, c’mon, people gotta have their tunes in a War!, the strike continued for two years, until labels, one by one, agreed to cut musicians in on profits and pay performance royalties.

Petrillo did make one concession a year in to the strike: union members could record V-Discs for overseas troops, “V” for “victory. Strictly export-only, though; labels had to destroy the masters. So with the strike, live on the radio was the only way to hear the latest tunes. That, or going out. But after Pearl Harbor, Bands were losing players to enlistments and the draft, and once those Wartime shortages and rationing kicked in on things like gas, rubber for tires and other touring essentials, taking a 15- or 20-piece Band out on the road became a logistical nightmare.

And besides, cities had blackout restrictions so enemy bombers, ships and submarines couldn’t see targets at night. So it was literally lights out on the most vibrant Dance Club scene ’til Disco in the late ’70s.

The biggest of the Big Bandleaders, Glenn Miller, was clearing nearly $400 grand a week inflation adjusted, but just before the recording ban, he lobbied for a Captain’s commission to lead the Army Air Forces Band, and did that until his plane crashed over the English channel in late ’44.

Other Bands soldiered on best they could, but in L.A. Stan Kenton’s Orchestra was pushing the boundaries of what Swing Jazz even was, with a musically ambitious approach meant more for listening than for dancing. And once his label, the L.A.-based startup Capitol, settled up with Petrillo in October of ’43, Kenton’s records were national hits and inspired other Jazz players to branch out and get creative, which led to Be-Bop, Progressive Jazz and the end of Swing as America’s dominant Pop music by the end of the War.

Congress’ hefty Cabaret Tax on dancing establishments in ’44 was another nail in the coffin, and it stayed in effect all the way ’til 1965, long after America’s ballrooms had been converted to warehouses and bowling alleys.

#10 Bing Crosby – San Fernando Valley

Now Capitol wasn’t the first or biggest label to settle with the union and resume recording in ’43; Decca was, in September, so 59 of 1944’s top100 hits are on just that one label, Decca. They didn’t have as many Bands as other labels but they had the top Crooner going back to the early ’30s, and ’44 was his biggest year yet, with 11 of those 59 records. Kicking off our Chartcrush countdown of 1944’s biggest hits at #10 it’s Bing Crosby with “San Fernando Valley.”

Ah, the San Fernando Valley, Southern California’s sprawling suburb north of L.A. Folks had already started moving there in the ’30s but it was still pretty idyllic with its apricot and walnut orchards and citrus groves: an Earthly paradise to fire hopes and aspirations amid shortages, rationing and deprivation.

Unfortunately, after the War a few too many people took Bing Crosby’s advice and made the San Fernando Valley their home; the population quintupled from ’45 to ’60. We’ll be hearing from Crosby again here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1944.

#9 Martha Tilton – I’ll Walk Alone

But at #9, we have Capitol’s biggest hit of the year, the West Coast startup label that came to terms with Petrillo and the AFM in October of ’43, a month after Decca. The song by Jule Styne and Lyricist Sammy Cahn was in Universal’s all-star morale boost musical Follow the Boys and two different versions of it are among the top 10 records of ’44. That wasn’t uncommon in the ’40s when acts rarely wrote their own songs. Instead pro Songwriters wrote them, Publishers published them, and multiple labels scrambled to record versions with their artists under contract. Broadway and movies, the top source for hit songs.

It’s one of the many hits from the War years in which a gal reassures her lover fighting overseas that she’ll stay true to him. The version by the Singer who does it in the movie was the bigger hit even though this one hit the charts first and has musicians playing on it! More on that when we hear that other one later, but at #9, Martha Tilton’s version of “I’ll Walk Alone.”

“Liltin'” Martha Tilton first got known singing with Benny Goodman’s Band in the late ’30: the first Big Band to play Carnegie Hall. That was in ’38, and then she was the Singer on Goodman’s big 1939 hit, “And the Angels Sing.” That song, co-written by lyricist Johnny Mercer, and it was Mercer who signed Tilton as a solo act to the new label he was starting, Capitol Records.

Capitol’s very first recording session in the Spring of ’42 just a few months before the strike, was Tilton’s “Moon Dreams,” which wasn’t a hit, but “I’ll Walk Alone” sure was, especially on Armed Forces Radio’s 400 stations around the globe: estimated audience, 50 million-plus soldiers and civilians. Too bad Billboard wasn’t charting that.

Their Airplay charts have never included stations outside the United States, but before 1945, we can’t factor Airplay into our record rankings at all because the Airplay chart was only an alphabetical listing of song titles, not broken out by the different versions out on records.

Publishers needed to see “Radio Plugs” which included live on-air performances bundled together by title for royalty purposes. If Martha Tilton’s “I’ll Walk Alone” was bigger on Radio than the version still to come in our Chartcrush 1944 countdown that sold better and got more Jukebox plays, we’ll never know.

Tilton toured throughout the War in Comedian Jack Benny’s USO package, but unlike other Female Singers who became Pop icons in those years like Doris Day, Dinah Shore and Kitty Kallen, she didn’t score any big hits after the War.

#8 Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five – G.I. Jive

Sticking with Capitol for our #8 hit here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1944, we have another song from Follow the Boys, the movie “I’ll Walk Alone” was in, but here it’s the same artist who does it in the film, a Vocalist/Saxman/Bandleader who with this record became the first big R&B/Pop crossover act in chart history. “Father of R&B,” just one of the many titles he’s earned over the years.

Billboard started charting what it later renamed “Rhythm & Blues” in 1942 on its weekly “Harlem Hit Parade” top 10 record sales ranking, and he’d already notched five hits on that by ’44, but then in August of ’44, this one topped the Pop Jukebox chart for two weeks as well, and cracked the top 5 on Pop Best Sellers.

“King of the Jukebox,” another name he earned. At #8, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, doing a Johnny Mercer song (there’s that name again), “G.I. Jive.”

Louis Jordan’s “G.I. Jive,” #8 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1944’s top 10 Pop hits. Johnny Mercer’s own version of his clever light-hearted send-up of military life was also out backed by Capitol’s long-time House Orchestra led by Paul Weston, and it also scraped the charts, but Jordan’s blew it away, especially as I mentioned on the Jukebox chart, which was brand new in ’44: Billboard‘s ranking of records from a national weekly survey of jukebox operators.

It cost a nickel to play a song on a jukebox in the ’40s, roughly 90 cents in today’s money, and when operators went to collect the coins and switch out the records, they saw what tunes were being played and how often from the mechanical tallies on the machines.

Nearly a half million jukeboxes in America in 1944, so the chart was a key milestone, and rather than just fall back on Best Sellers like nearly every other source that ranks pre-Hot100 hits, our Chartcrush rankings are based on a combined weekly chart derived from all the available weekly Pop charts: Sales, Jukeboxes and (starting in ’45), radio DJ spins, with equal weight for each. And from that we can use the exact same algorithm to rank the year as we do for years after Billboard did its own chart consolidation in 1958 with the Hot100.

By the way, the flip-side of Louis Jordan’s “G.I. Jive” was also a massive Jukebox hit, #2 for three weeks in September: “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby).” Jordan scored over three times as many R&B #1’s in the ’40s as his closest competitors on that chart, 17, and another nine Pop crossover hits. “Father of R&B” indeed!

#7 Bing Crosby – I’ll Be Seeing You

OK, at #7 is another wistful ballad that found huge resonance during the War, its message of love and connection transcending separation, loss, time and distance, applicable not just to lovers, but to mothers, sons and daughters and of course the soldiers themselves overseas. But the song was written before the war, for a 1938 Broadway flop called Right This Way, which the song’s Lyricist Irving Kahal joked was the answer to the only question on people’s minds in the theater: “Where’s the exit?” Right this Way! Here again, Bing Crosby, the biggest, but not the only hit version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

Bing Crosby, “I’ll Be Seeing You” at #7 on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Tragically, Irving Kahal didn’t live to see what he considered his best song become a hit. He died of a heart attack the year before in ’43 at just 38. But he did get to hear a 1940 version that was also a hit when Victor reissued it in ’44. The Tommy Dorsey Band’s with Frank Sinatra singing was on the charts 17 of the 24 weeks that Bing’s new version on Decca was.

Again, Bing’s label Decca could record at the end of ’43, but Victor and Columbia’s staring contest with Mr. Petrillo continued all the way to the end of ’44. They were able to hold out a little longer not just because they were the biggest record labels, but both also had deep-pocketed parent companies whose main business was radio: RCA with its NBC network was Victor’s; CBS was Columbia’s.

#6 Glen Gray and His Casa Loma Orchestra (vocal Eugenie Baird) – My Heart Tells Me (Should I Believe My Heart?)

At #6, a Band that’d had been around since the late ’20s and named themselves after a converted castle in Toronto where they played for eight months, and kept on using the name even after the place was seized by tax authorities and shut down at the start of the Depression.

By the Summer of ’33 they’d landed at the Glen Island Casino Resort north of New York City where they carved out a sweet spot between the swanky Dance music that was the default at such places, and the new Swing Jazz erupting out of Harlem. And CBS was beaming those performances out to a national network audience on their Camel Caravan broadcast a year before anyone had even heard of Benny Goodman, so the band gets a lot of the credit for taking Swing music mainstream. But the Bands that came to define the sound eclipsed them once it exploded later in the ’30s.

Still, they kept going and in ’44, this was the closest approximation on a record to Pinup and box office Queen Betty Grable’s performance of the song in the Technicolor musical Sweet Rosie O’Grady (Grable didn’t make records). At #6 it’s Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra featuring their new Girl Singer Eugenie Baird, “My Heart Tells Me.”

Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra with Eugenie Baird, “My Heart Tells Me” at #6, another Decca release that had a clear shot at the charts after the label was the first to come to terms with the musicians’ union and could record again.

For years, the Casa Lomans were a collective of talented players with no official leader, but Glen Gray took the conductor’s baton by acclamation in 1937 and by ’44 he’d trademarked the name, and Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra continued performing and releasing singles and albums on and off until Gray died in 1963.

#5 Dinah Shore – I’ll Walk Alone

At #5 we have the bigger of the two versions of the song we heard at #9 by Martha Tilton, and the only record on Victor in our countdown. Victor and Columbia, again, the longest holdouts in the two-year-plus Petrillo musicians’ strike. Labels had to get creative once their vaults ran dry. I mentioned Victor’s re-issue of their 1940 Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra version of “I’ll Be Seeing You” after Bing Crosby’s new one on Decca was a hit. That worked out well, but another loophole, since Singers weren’t even in the union, labels could record a capella records.

Well once Bing Crosby’s “Sunday, Monday or Always” with the Ken Darby Singers and no Band hit #1 in the Fall of ’43, Vocal Groups were suddenly in high demand, both as standalone recording acts, and to back name Singers on records instead of Bands. And our #5 song was the last one of those that was a big hit, ironically right as Victor and Columbia were agreeing to Petrillo’s demands and getting Bands back in their studios.

Now movie studios weren’t affected by the strike, just record labels, so the version of the song in the film Follow the Boys by the same Singer has Orchestra backing, but for the record, she’s backed by an unnamed Mixed Chorus, and it handily beat Martha Tilton’s version of the song on Capitol even though that one as we heard back at #9, had an Orchestra! At #5, Dinah Shore’s version of “I’ll Walk Alone.”

Dinah Shore’s voice was too delicate for Big Bands, but she scored her first top 10 as a solo act in 1941, over two years before Frank Sinatra split from Tommy Dorsey and scored his first solo hits in ’43. By the way, those were also a capella records backed by Vocal Groups, just like Dinah’s version of “I’ll Walk Alone” we just heard at #5 here on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Her only hit in ’44, but things picked up again and when you add it all up, she was the ’40s decade’s top charting Solo Female.

“I’ll Walk Alone,” the song, had another big burst on the charts in 1952 after it was in the biopic With a Song in My Heart about Singer Jane Froman, who was crippled in a plane crash in Europe during the War. Froman’s own ’40s-sounding version charted, but ’52 was peak Crooner, so belter Don Cornell’s was the bigger hit.

#4 Jimmy Dorsey & His Orchestra (vocal Kitty Kallen) – Besame Mucho

At #4, yet another song introduced by Follow the Boys, the movie that also had Louis Jordan’s “G.I. Jive,” and Dinah Shore doing “I’ll Walk Alone.” It’s a Mexican bolero written in the early ’30s and in the movie it’s an instrumental done by Charlie Spivak and His Band, but three vocal versions made the charts in the Spring of ’44 and this one was #1 for seven weeks.

Most of the top Big Bands were on Victor or Columbia and couldn’t record due to the strike, but these guys were on Decca and could: the label’s only A-list Big Band before the strike, so of course no other Band came close on the charts in ’44: five top 10s during the year. It’s Jimmy Dorsey & Orchestra with a vocal duet—they were known for those—with longtime Male Singer Bob Eberly and newcomer Kitty Kallen, the first hit version of “Besame Mucho.”

“Besame Mucho,” Spanish for “Kiss Me a Lot.” The Beatles did it in their early sets in ’62 with Paul McCartney singing but the original hit was the one we just heard at #4 here on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: Jimmy Dorsey & Orchestra with Kitty Kallen, who’d just replaced newlywed Helen O’Connell as Bob Eberly’s duet partner.

Although two of Dorsey’s hits in ’44 had just Kallen on vocals, after Eberly got drafted, Kallen jumped ship for Trumpeter Harry James’ Band and had a big, big year in ’45 with seven chart hits including two that no Second World War Victory playlist would be complete without: “I’m Beginning to See the Light” and “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.”

#3 Harry James & His Orchestra (vocal Dick Haymes) – I’ll Get By (As Long as I Have You)

Harry James’ Band had been on a hot streak before the strike too, and in ’43 James got hitched to the Pinup movie star I mentioned earlier, Betty Grable, which made him even more famous, and two sides he and his Band recorded not just before the strike, but before the War were #1 hits in ’43 and ’44. In ’43 it was a reissue of “All or Nothing at All” sung by Frank Sinatra in 1939, which first came out in 1940 before either were superstars, but on the reissue, Columbia swapped the credits to make Sinatra the headliner since they’d just signed him up as a solo act.

And in ’44 Columbia scored big with a previously unreleased side with the Argentinian immigrant Singer who’d replaced Sinatra in the Harry James Band. He’d gone solo too during the strike and landed four a capella smashes in a row, all between July and November ’43, but for Decca, not Columbia, so Harry James got to keep his headliner status on that record. And those four a capella hits in ’43 were as big as the five of those that Sinatra did for Columbia at the same time. At #3 it’s Harry James & Orchestra featuring Dick Haymes, recorded in 1941, “I’ll Get by (As Long as I Have You).”

#1 the week the Allies’ turned the tide against the Nazis in Europe with the massive D-Day Invasion of occupied France, June 6, Harry James with Singer Dick Haymes “I’ll Get By,” #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1944’s top 10 hits. Yet another song featured in that all-star musical Follow the Boys, sung in the movie by Dinah Shore.

Harry James was classified 4-F ineligible for military service due to an old back injury, but still went for a second Army physical in ’44 and even dissolved his Band thinking he was about to go fight, but the draft board reaffirmed his 4-F status. Dick Haymes on the other hand was accused in print of dodging the draft by claiming nonbelligerent status as a citizen of neutral Argentina, but the draft board too classified him 4-F for hypertension.

By the way, Frank Sinatra didn’t serve either: 4-F for a perforated eardrum, but Army files that later came to light said it was because of emotional instability!

#2 Mills Brothers – You Always Hurt the One You Love

Now besides a capella, another way for labels to get around the musicians strike was to record a Singer accompanying him or herself on a simple instrument like a guitar or piano. Now post-1965 or so, that’d be a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, right? But in the ’40s that was unheard of in Pop, even rarer than Singers who wrote their own material.

Blues and Country, different story, but those primitive musical ghettoes were worlds apart from the glitz, glamor and sophistication of the society resorts and swanky hotel ballrooms where “real” musicians and Singers entertained genteel audiences. Blues and Country records sounded raw and crude, down ‘n dirty, like the folks who made ’em and the folks who bought ’em, and no one was trying to change that.

But our Black Vocal Group at #2 had perfected a smooth, sensitive style heading into the ’40s after spending the ’30s scatting and beat-boxing on Novelty records. Very successfully, I might add, but the musicians’ strike gave them their shot at mainstream Pop glory, and they hit the bullseye, first with “Paper Doll,” the #1 song of 1943, and then nearly repeating at #1 on the year in ’44 with another record that was just vocals and guitar nearly a year after Decca could record full Bands again.

14 weeks in the top 5 on both the Best-Sellers and Jukebox charts, August to December and the #2 hit of 1944, it’s The Mills Brothers’ “You Always Hurt the One You Love.”

Another Black Vocal Group, The Ink Spots, had hit big in ’39, and inspired The Mills Brothers to hone the ultra-smooth Vocal harmony sound they unleashed on “Paper Doll” in ’43, then “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” #2 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1944.

Incidentally, the Ink Spots? Also still going strong in ’44 with their two top 5’s during the year, “I’ll Get by (As Long as I Have You)” and “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” with Ella Fitzgerald.

#1 Bing Crosby – Swinging on a Star

Now I just got done telling you a minute ago how rare it was for Singers to write their own Pop songs in the ’40s, and it’s true: songwriting was for Songwriters; Singing was for Singers, and instruments, as Petrillo was constantly reminding everyone, were for musicians in the American Federation of Musicians. But the idea for our #1 song came from something the Singer said to his cranky 10-year-old son at a brainstorming dinner at his home with one of the Songwriters: “If you don’t go to school, you might grow up to be a mule.”

Well, Songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen liked that line so much that he took it to his partner Johnny Burke, and the resulting song, sung by the Singer who’d inspired it, was #1 on both Sales and Jukeboxes seven weeks mid-August to the end of September. We’ve already heard from him twice this hour; at #1, from his 1944 movie Going My Way, Bing Crosby with the year’s Oscar-winning Original Song, “Swinging on a Star.”

Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star,” the #1 song here on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Close harmony backing courtesy of The Williams Brothers, one of whom was 17-year old Andy Williams, who went on to notch seven top 10s from 1956 to ’63 and sings the streaming-era holiday perennial, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

Also worth noting: even though Decca was no longer subject to the Recording Ban, they had a Vocal Group backing Bing on that record anyway, in addition to the Band, and that close-harmony Vocal sound that got popular during the strike persisted on Pop hits for years.

Bonus

So there you have them: the top ten records of 1944 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking we derived by combining Billboard‘s published weekly Sales and Jukebox charts into a single weekly chart, then ranking the year same as we do for every year including after the Hot100 debuted in 1958.

But in years like 1944, when multiple versions of songs charted, if you’re only looking at records you’re gonna miss songs that when you add up all the versions that charted, were among the year’s top 10 hits even if no one version was dominant enough to be in the top 10 records. Six of the top 10 songs of ’44 did have versions in the top 10 records and “I’ll Walk Alone” had two, but that leaves four that we didn’t hear a version of in our countdown, so in the time we have left we’re gonna go through those.

#13 Guy Lombardo – It’s Love-Love-Love

The #10 song of 1944 combining both of its versions that made the charts was a light-hearted romp from a movie called Stars on Parade that hit in the Spring of ’44 offering a definition of “love” for a generation about to celebrate its World War 2 victory and get on with the business of settling down and raising families.

The Four King Sisters had a strike-compliant a capella version out on Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary. That’s #46 on our ranking for 1944. But Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians’ version shakes out at #13. On Decca, featuring former Glenn Miller Band Singer Skip Nelson, “It’s Love-Love-Love.”

“The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven,” as the Chicago Tribune described Guy Lombardo & The Royal Canadians in 1928. Had there been charts before 1940, “It’s Love-Love-Love” would’ve been something like their 22nd #1.

By ’44 they were five years in to their 33-year residency at The Grill Room in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, where their New Years Eve performances became iconic. The party moved to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the early ’60s and continued until 1976, the year before Guy Lombardo passed away and Dick Clark became the new showbiz face of New Years. The Lombardo Band’s version of “Auld Lang Syne,” though, still to this day the first thing you hear after the ball drops in Times Square.

#20 Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five – Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby)

The #8 hit of 1944 if our Chartcrush Top Ten ranked songs instead of records also had two charting versions: one by the guy who wrote it (remember, that was exceedingly rare on the Pop charts in the ’40s), and the other, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, two of the decade’s top acts teaming up on the same record.

Well it was super close but thanks to its dominance on the Jukebox chart, the original won! #20 on our records ranking vs. #28 for Bing and the gals. I mentioned the song when we heard Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five’s “G.I. Jive” back at #8. It’s the flip-side of that record, “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby).”

“Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby),” #8 on the year if we ranked songs instead of records; two versions on different labels out simultaneously battling it out on the charts, Louis Jordan’s on Capitol narrowly beating Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters on Decca.

#12 Andrews Sisters – Shoo-Shoo Baby

But it was the other way around with the two biggest versions of the song that’s #7 on the year when you combine all versions. Capitol had its hot new Female solo Singer Ella Mae Morse fresh from her string of hits with Freddie Slack’s Big Band. Hers is #18 on our 1944 records ranking. But Decca had, yep, The Andrews Sisters, whose version just misses our top ten records of the year at #12: “Shoo-Shoo Baby.”

Interestingly, The Andrews Sisters never put out an a capella record during the musicians’ strike. That was their first hit post-strike, “Shoo-Shoo Baby,” from the 1943 film they sang it in, Three Cheers for the Boys. The song was so popular that troops named a B-17 Flying Fortress after it, a plane that flew two dozen combat missions over Europe in ’44 and ’45.

#16 Dick Haymes & Helen Forrest – Long Ago (And Far Away)

And finally, when you add up the not two or three but five different charting records of this next song, it comes out the #5 song of the year even though the biggest version is only #16 on our 1944 records ranking. It’s Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes’ version of the Oscar-nominated song from the Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly film Cover Girl, “Long Ago (And Far Away).”

The first of seven hit Dick Haymes/Helen Forrest Duets for Decca Records over the next couple years, the biggest of the five charting versions of “Long Ago (And Far Away)” in 1944.

The song, also notable for being the first solo records by two of the mid-century’s top recording stars. Jo Stafford’s was on Capitol backed by her future hubby Paul Weston’s band, and Perry Como‘s was a capella with Mixed Chorus on Victor. And that, folks, is gonna have to be a wrap for our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and a link to stream our podcast version online, plus snazzy extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs. We do that for every year, ’40s to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year, and 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 do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1970, which of course was the first year of “the 70s” on the calendar.

But the sounds and styles that most defined the decade like Glam Rock, Disco and Punk: not even a figment of anyone’s imagination yet. And until James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” hit #1 in October of ’70, then Carole King’s Tapestry album a few months later, no one without a crystal ball could’ve predicted how humongous the whole Singer-Songwriter thing was gonna get.

Ditto Country-Rock, despite signals from Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Linda Ronstadt and even the Stones and Beatles, and crossover novelties like Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” and Jeanne C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” The Eagles’ first hit “Take It Easy” wasn’t ’til ’72.

But other styles that defined the ’70s were already pretty well-established: Funk with James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone and The Isley Brothers; definitely Album-Oriented Hard Rock with Cream, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer, Vanilla Fudge, Led Zeppelin; Progressive Rock (“Prog” for short): The Moody Blues, Donovan and Procol Harum. All those acts I named made the Hot100 with hits in those ’70s-defining styles before the end of the ’60s.

AM Top40, another very well-established genre thanks to the shunning of Teen-targeted Pop by the emergent counterculture press in the late ’60s. By ’68 and definitely by ’69, anyone still making records that didn’t cater to evolving Hippie sensibilities as first wave Boomers hit their mid-20s: dismissed as “Bubblegum” by the likes of Rolling Stone.

Not that the makers of such records minded; “Sugar Sugar” by TV cartoon band The Archies, for example, was one of 1969’s biggest hits, #1 for four weeks. Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 debuted in 1970 and helped define Top 40 as a distinct genre, but it also gave Billboard a boost beyond just industry insiders as the general public got interested in charts for the first time.

And it’s good that they had their tunes because 1970 was an unmitigated bummer in the news. Literally the only positive national news story all year: the first Earth Day in April and a Look magazine feature unveiling the soon-to-be ubiquitous Ecology flag. But even that, it was easy to see and sarcastically mutter “oh great, just what we need, another angry protest movement telling me how to live and think!” with bombings by the far left Weather Underground just about every week, Black Panthers at peak membership ambushing cops in Oakland with grenades, and leaders visiting communist North Korea and China. And now Women, Gays, Chicanos, American Indians and even conservative hardhats getting their protest on.

’69 had had the successful Apollo 11 and 12 moon shots; ’70 had Apollo 13, the one where an oxygen fire two days in took out electrical and life-support and the crew had to loop around the moon and return to Earth without ever landing, subject of the Best Picture-nominated film starring Tom Hanks in ’95.

Other lowlights: a massive two week Postal strike in the Spring; an X-Rated film winning Best Picture at the Oscars (Midnight Cowboy), and Vietnam, of course, still raging with nearly 350,000 U.S. troops despite President Nixon’s promise to shift combat to the South Vietnamese.

And just as the shocking details of the 1968 My Lai massacre of villagers by U.S. troops were coming out, Nixon announces that the U.S. is gonna attack Viet Cong and NVA sanctuaries in neutral Cambodia just over the border with South Vietnam, which sent antiwar protesters into a frenzy. At Kent State in Ohio, the National Guard opened fire and killed four protesters, which inspired Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio,” a top 20 hit.

#10 The Guess Who – American Woman

And that wasn’t the only or even the biggest protest hit on the year. At #10 as we kick off the countdown, one of the hardest rocking singles ever to hit #1, by a Canadian group up ’til then known for light Jazzy Pop (their ’69 hits “These Eyes,” “Laughing” and “Undun“). But in ’70 they took things in a more straightforward Rock direction, first on “No Time,” which got to #5, then this.

Writer Burton Cummings insists that it’s just a comment about the complicated, not-so-innocent girls he was meeting South of the Border (the Canadian border, that is). But with lyrics about “war machines” and “ghetto scenes,” people saw it as an indictment of America herself, and it hit #1 the week after Kent State and stayed on top three weeks. At #10 it’s The Guess Who’s “American Woman.”

The Guess Who, “American Woman,” #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1970’s top hits. Billboard had it at #3 on the year. It originated when Guess Who guitarist Randy Bachman started playing a riff tuning up at a gig. One by one the other guys joined in and Singer Burton Cummings spat out the first words that came into his head. Then after, they got wind that a kid taping the show for a bootleg had caught the whole thing, so they got him to hand over the tape and from that, they did the studio version we just heard, and it was the title track of their new album.

The Guess Who wasn’t the only late ’60s borderline MOR Pop group to achieve instant counterculture street-cred with a hit Rock single in 1970. Three Dog Night’s version of Randy Newman’s Novelty about a square at a stoner party, “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” also got to #1, for two weeks in the Summer. That one notches in at #14 on our Chartcrush 1970 ranking.

That those were bigger Hot100 hits than, say, Led Zeppelin’s #4 “Whole Lotta Love” (their biggest ever) highlights an issue with the charts in the early ’70s: acts that were selling tons of albums didn’t do very well on the Hot100, which charts singles. Billboard didn’t launch its Mainstream Rock Airplay-based chart ’til 1981, so before that, there’s no definitive ranking of Rock songs: quite the blind spot!

#9 Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – The Tears of a Clown

Motown had an amazing year in 1970. That’s mostly thanks to a spectacular debut that we’ll get into later in the show, but at #9, a surprise hit by a group that was on hold because Motown boss Berry Gordy, Jr. had promoted its leader to be an executive. The U.K. distributor wanted to release a new single though, so he asked the group’s U.K. fan club President to pick an old album cut, and the one she chose became their first U.K. #1, so naturally it got a U.S. release as well and the same thing happened here: their first U.S. #1.

Now an awful lot had changed in music between ’67 and ’70, but there were early signs of the massive Nostalgia wave that crested in the early-’70s. Campy ’50s cover band Sha Na Na killing it at Woodstock: that was one, and a long-buried Motown gem hitting #1 was another, albeit more subtle.

With not a whiff of the Norman Whitfield Psychedelic Soul sound Motown led with in the late-’60s, it’s a throwback to the label’s already fading mid-’60s vibe before the ’67 Detroit Riots got Gordy thinking about moving out to L.A. At #9 it’s Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “The Tears of a Clown.”

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown” at #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1970s biggest hits. It wasn’t the only song with that classic mid-’60s Motown sound to top the charts in ’70. The legendary Songwriting and Production team Holland-Dozier-Holland largely responsible for that sound had split from Motown to start their own label, Invictus, and their #3 hit with Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” in the Summer also had that throwback sound. That one was #10 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for 1970.

But don’t go looking for “Tears of a Clown” on there because it hit too late in the year to be counted. #1 for two weeks in mid-December, past Billboard‘s November 28 cutoff for its 1970 ranking.

That made two years in a row that a major Motown hit got stiffed in Billboard‘s year-end rankings. In ’69, Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” #1 for seven straight weeks over the holidays ’68 to ’69: #86 on the ’69 year-end chart. But factor its full chart run in the calendar year it scored most of its chart action, which is our Chartcrush ranking method, “Grapevine” comes out the #1 song of ’69. And “Tears of a Clown” is #9 for 1970. Safe to assume that Motown was a little frosted at Billboard ’69 to ’70.

#8 Edwin Starr – War

At #8, a more modern-sounding Motown hit written and produced by the aforementioned Norman Whitfield; co-written by Barrett Strong, first recorded by The Temptations for their Psychedelic Shack album, which also came out in 1970. But Motown balked at putting out their version as a single despite antiwar activists begging them to, fearing a backlash of Temptations’ fans, Motown’s most popular Male group.

Enter the Singer with a tough style and James Brown-influenced Soul shout who’d gotten to #6 in early ’69 with “Twenty Five Miles,” but was starting to look like a one-hit wonder after almost a year and a half without a hit. “Hey, I’ll record that song,” he said, and with nothing to lose and everything to gain, Motown said “OK” and here’s the result. At #8 it’s Edwin Starr’s “War (What Is It Good For?).”

Speaking of James Brown, he had quite a year in ’70: six Hot100 hits including his top 20s “Sex Machine” and “Super Bad,” but it was Edwin Starr with his Funky, straight-to-the-point shouter “War” that wound up being the funkiest thing to top the Hot100 during the year, with the possible exception of Sly & The Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” #1 for two weeks in February. “War” held down the top spot for three weeks in August.

Edwin Starr followed up with the even blunter “Stop the War Now” at the end of the year, which got to #26, but Starr never cracked the top 40 again. His last Hot100 entry? A Disco record, “H.A.P.P.Y. Radio” in ’79.

#7 The Beatles – Let It Be

So as Winter turned to Spring in 1970 America was in a somber mood looking ahead to the new decade, and in case the headlines aren’t enough, just look at the top of the Hot100. For six weeks from the end of February to the beginning of April, a hymn-like song we’re gonna hear later was #1, immediately followed for the next two weeks by another hymn-like record that we’re gonna hear right now at #9: the lead single (and title single), from the last album by, to this day, the best-selling and top charting act in Hot100 history.

Just the day before it hit #1 in April, Paul McCartney had some more bad news for the world: The Beatles were breaking up. At #9 it’s “Let It Be.”

“Let It Be,” The Beatles at #9 as we count down the top 10 hits of 1970 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Really a Paul McCartney solo effort: his Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who wasn’t very enthusiastic about much of anything Paul was doing in those years, introduces it on the Let It Be album with a snarky comment in falsetto that gently mocks the song’s hymnlike religious overtones.

Fans at the time assumed the Mary in “Let It Be” was the mother of Jesus, but actually, Paul had had a dream in ’69 as The Beatles were struggling to continue working together, in which his late mother whose name was Mary, had reassured him that everything is going to be OK, and to just let it be.

There was one more Beatles single after “Let It Be.” “The Long and Winding Road” got to #1 for two weeks in June: another somber McCartney song. And that was it for The Beatles’ run on the Hot100 from 1964 to 1970.

But as 1970 came to an end, the last #1 song of the year was… not the first solo single by a former Beatle, but the first #1 solo single by a former Beatle: George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” And the same week it hit #1 on the Hot100, McCartney took The Beatles off life support when his lawyers filed suit to officially dissolve the group. McCartney had announced his split in April, just as “Let It Be” was hitting #1.

#6 The Jackson 5 – I Want You Back

OK, we’re down to #6, and remember that spectacular Motown chart debut I mentioned earlier? Well this was the one that started it all, first entering the charts November 15 of 1969, then working its way up to #1 January 31: their very first single. It only had one week on top, but that’s all it took to be the first of four consecutive #1s by the group. No other act had more consecutive #1s out of the gate like that until Mariah Carey’s fifth single, “Emotions,” topped the chart in 1991. At #6 it’s the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.”

Now The Beatles weren’t the only top-charting ’60s group that broke up in 1970, The Supremes also did. But Lead Singer Diana Ross’ solo career, still on Motown, was off to a shaky start. Her first solo single “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand” only got to #20 in June. DJs threw her a lifeline when they turned “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” off her album into a massive hit and Motown’s single edit went to #1 in September.

But it also didn’t hurt that Motown had titled the Jackson 5’s first album Diana Ross Presents… And they had her introduce them on several big TV appearances, so everyone thought that Diana Ross had personally discovered 1970’s hottest new group. “I Want You Back,” #6 here on our 1970 edition of Chartcrush: the first of two of the Jackson 5’s record-setting four consecutive #1s in our top10 countdown. The other, still to come.

#5 Carpenters – (They Long to Be) Close to You

But now, another first of two, this time a powerhouse Pop Songwriting Duo with two hits among the top 10 on the year, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. In ’68, Herb Alpert had taken their song “This Guy’s in Love with You” to #1 for four weeks even though he couldn’t really sing. The record just worked, and Alpert was a big enough name to pull it off, with dozens of instrumental hits and best-selling albums with his outfit The Tijuana Brass in the ’60s.

Well, Bacharach and David thought Alpert might be able to repeat that with a song they’d written in the early ’60s. He gave it a shot and wasn’t crazy about it, but he thought the song was perfect for a brother-sister Duo he’d just signed to his A&M label. Their first album and single had flopped so this was make or break, and obviously it was “make” because the record shot to #1 in just its seventh week and is our #5 song of 1970. Billboard has it at #2 on the year: siblings Richard and Karen, The Carpenters, “Close to You.”

Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” the first of twelve top 10s for Karen and Richard Carpenter over the next five years, but interestingly, no more Bacharach/David compositions.

The Carpenters’ success helped bridge an already narrowing gap between the rapidly-changing Easy Listening and Pop radio formats about to be inundated by Singer-Songwriters.

Karen’s reedy, intimate 3-octave contralto was a fresh new sound on all formats though in 1970, and was a major influence for, among many others, Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA and Madonna, whose debut album came out in 1983 which is the same year Karen died at just 32 of anorexia, which put a needed spotlight for really the first time on eating disorders.

#4 The Partridge Family – I Think I Love You

At #4 we have the early ’70s’ top charting made-for-TV act, with their first hit which, like The Monkees’, was a hit with Teens from the moment the TV show premiered as part of ABC’s Fall lineup. The single sold five million in record time and it was #1 in just seven weeks, same as “Close to You” and even faster than the nine weeks it took The Monkees debut “Last Train to Clarksville” in the Fall of ’66.

The half-hour sitcom on Friday nights was about a family act trying to make it in the music biz, inspired by actual family act The Cowsills from Rhode Island, who’d scored three top 10s in the ’60s. But they couldn’t act, so instead, producers assembled a cast centered around stage and screen veteran since the ’50s Shirley Jones and her real-life stepson David Cassidy, who sings lead on the show and on the record. At #4 it’s The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.”

The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1970, another one like “Tears of a Clown” that missed Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 altogether because only the first eight of its 19 weeks on the chart were counted. The rest, including one at #1 and seven in the top 10: after that November 28 cutoff date for the chart year.

The song first appeared in episode eight of the sitcom, in which a skunk stows away on the family’s colorful Piet Mondrian-inspired tour bus and leaves their stage clothes smelling, well, skunky.

David Cassidy, the biggest Teen heartthrob in an era of Male heartthrobs, his 16 and Tiger Beat pullout posters on countless Teen girls’ bedroom walls and school locker doors. He was never really down with that, though, so for Hippie cred he posed nude from the waist up for a cover of Rolling Stone in ’72 just as season two of The Partridge Family was about to start Summer reruns.

#3 Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water

So back at #7 when we heard “Let It Be,” I mentioned that it replaced another somber, reflective hymn-like song that’d been #1 the previous six weeks, and that one is up next at #3.

The world had been looking pretty scary since Woodstock and the moon landing. Nothing but bad headlines, escalating war and social tensions and apocalyptic songs like Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising” and Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525” providing the soundtrack.

Things definitely hadn’t calmed down, but it was a new decade, so time to reflect and pray for words of wisdom from Mother Mary as in The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and, our #4 song, a “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” Billboard had it as the #1 song of 1970 but two records beat it in our Chartcrush ranking, Simon & Garfunkel.

“Bridge over Troubled Water,” #3 as we count down the top ten songs of 1970 here on this week’s Chartcrush, one of Simon & Garfunkel’s last hits before they too split up in 1970, maybe the best-realized example ever of producer Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” even though Spector himself had nothing to do with making the record.

It was the title track of their 1970 album, never intended as a single, but the label, Columbia, disagreed and Pop radio played it despite its mood and five minute length.

Simon had insisted that Garfunkel sing what turned out to be his most successful song, but later regretted that. “Now I’m going to reclaim my lost child,” he’d say before doing it on his 2018 farewell tour.

They both had successful solo careers, Simon and Garfunkel did, especially Simon, and they did several one-off reunions over the years, notably their free concert in New York’s Central Park in 1981, which drew half a million and became a double-Platinum album, an HBO special and a bestselling home video.

#2 The Jackson 5 – I’ll Be There

OK, our #2 song is the second of the two hits in our countdown by 1970’s top chart debut, the group from Gary, Indiana with the 11-year-old kid singing lead, whose first four singles on Motown all hit #1. “I Want You Back,” which we heard at #6: that was first on the calendar, their breakout hit in January; then “ABC” in the Spring, “The Love You Save” in mid-Summer and our #2 song in the Fall, the biggest hit of their career.

Here again, brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and 11-year-old Michael Jackson: the Jackson 5, a record produced by one guy, Hal Davis, Motown’s West coast boss out in L.A. and the group’s mentor since they signed with Motown, not the four guys including Berry Gordy, Jr. that comprised “The Corporation,” credited with writing and producing their other 1970 hits. At #2 it’s the Jackson 5, “I’ll Be There.”

The Jackson 5 were a brothers act under the tutelage of their strict, demanding father, Joe Jackson. Sisters Rebbie, LaToya and Janet, who turned 9 in 1970, had to wait ’til the mid-’70s to make their debuts on their TV variety show The Jacksons.

Ten Jackson siblings in all, and too many chart hits to count between all of them. But Michael, the most successful, and Janet a surprisingly close second on total chart points through the years. “I’ll Be There,” #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1970. It was #3 on Billboard‘s last chart for their 1970 chart year, with five weeks left to go in its run, and adding those back in makes it the #2 song of the year, not #7 where Billboard had it.

#1 B.J. Thomas – Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head

Well, we’re down to #1, and it’s yet another hit whose ranking on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 suffered from part of its chart run being outside their 1970 chart year. Its first nine weeks were in late 1969, which in later years would’ve counted, but not in 1970. Billboard has it at #4, but adding those weeks back in and factoring its full chart run makes it 1970’s #1 hit.

It’s the second of the two Bacharach/David songs in the countdown. The Carpenters’ “Close to You” at #5, the other. And I’m highlighting that because Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David defined a unique style of breezy, jazzy melodic Pop that was everywhere at the turn of the decade: TV, radio, movies, clubs, lounges, parties, even restaurants: like the default music.

Producers in ’68 tapped them to score the neo-Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, which ended up being a pop culture phenomenon, and the song they wrote for a playful, romantic interlude panned by critics as totally out of place in the movie was memorable for that exact reason.

At first they had Ray Stevens in mind to sing it, but he was about to unleash his Summer replacement variety show on NBC and its theme song, “Everything Is Beautiful,” so at longtime hitmaking collaborator Dionne Warwick’s suggestion, they went with the Singer whose “Hooked on a Feeling” had just hit. At #1 it’s B.J. Thomas doing Bacharach and David’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” B.J. Thomas, Chartcrush’s #1 song on our countdown of 1970’s top hits. Dozens of cover versions from a who’s who of Pop Singers new and old appeared once Butch Cassidy blew up in theaters and it was a hit, but only B.J. Thomas’ charted.

An innocent, happy song but also “an exhortation to keep going in the face of tragedy,” as Financial Times Arts writer Peter Aspden put it, summing up its appeal to harried, paranoid Americans at the start of the ’70s.

Bonus

And that’s our top ten for 1970 according to our Chartcrush Countdown Show ranking. To review, three songs that didn’t make Billboard‘s year-end top ten make ours when counting full chart runs instead of just weeks within a discrete “chart year.” Those again are Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown” at #10, The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” at #6 and The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” at #4. But those coming in to our top ten bumps three out from Billboard‘s, so to be thorough, let’s look at those.

#18 Freda Payne – Band of Gold

At #10, Billboard had the Holland-Dozier-Holland production for their new Invictus label after splitting from Motown, the trio’s most successful post-Motown song about a woman sleeping alone on her wedding night: Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold.”

“Band of Gold” peaked at #3 and shakes out as our #18 song of 1970. Freda Payne went way back with Lamont Dozier to childhood in Detroit. She was a successful Jazz singer in New York with two albums out and getting work on Broadway, but Dozier persuaded her to come to Invictus and try R&B.

#21 Rare Earth – Get Ready

And speaking of the Motor City, it also had a thriving Rock scene in the ’60s, and the hometown R&B label, Motown, even signed one band and scored a hit. Billboard‘s #8 song of 1970, #21 on our Chartcrush ranking, was Rare Earth’s “Get Ready.”

Rare Earth’s album version of “Get Ready” is 22 minutes, but editing out the extended solos gets it down to a Pop-friendly three minutes. The Temptations had done “Get Ready” in 1966, but it only got to #29.

#11 Diana Ross – Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

And finally, at #6 Billboard had the record I mentioned earlier that calmed nerves about Diana Ross making it as a solo act after her first post-Supremes record stalled on the charts. It’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”

Another song previously charted by a Motown act, “Ain’t No Mountain” had gotten to #19 as a Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell duet in ’67, but the totally re-imagined version on Diana Ross’ first solo album in 1970, once radio got a hold of it, unexpectedly became her first #1 after leaving The Supremes. It just misses our Chartcrush Top Ten at #11.

And with that, we’re gonna have to wrap up our 1970 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. If you like what you heard and want more, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and link to stream the podcast version on Spotify, plus outta sight extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs. We do that for every year, ’40s to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and 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 do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture, and count down the top 10 songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade mag.

This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 2001, technically the first year of the 21st century, since there was no year zero, which actually seems more fitting given events, especially 9/11/2001 when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four domestic flights and flew them into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in DC, and a fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers thwarted the hijackers.

The consensus is that 9/11 marked the end of the “cultural ’90s” and the start of the ’00s, but boundaries between cultural decades are never black and white, and many of the ’00s defining features were already in play. The Battle of the Boy Bands heating up in ’98; then Britney Spears at the end of that year. Total Request Live on MTV. And HBO’s Sex in the City premiering that Summer. One blogger pinpoints that as “the precise moment the ’90s were summarily impaled on a fur-covered Manolo Blahnik stiletto.”

Extreme political partisanship, another feature of the ’00s coming out of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, also in ’98, and heading in to ’01, the aftermath of the 2000 election when the Supreme Court had to stop recount officials with magnifying glasses in Democrat counties looking for enough dimpled or hanging or pregnant punch card chads to swing razor-thin Florida and the election from George W. Bush to Al Gore.

’01, also the year a court pulled the plug on Napster, the original filesharing app, and its 60 million users downloading mp3 songs ripped by other users from their CDs and shared on the platform. At one school, students in dorms were using 61% of the university’s internet bandwidth downloading free music on their 56K dialup modems, as much the hard drives on their Dell and Gateway Power PCs could hold. And all of that, completely under Billboard‘s radar.

In his Year in Charts feature at the end of the year, Billboard‘s resident chart guru at the time, Fred Bronson noticed that what was being played on Pop and R&B radio and in Dance Clubs had never been more out of sync with the singles people were buying. Airplay and Club Play Top tens, many of them, barely registering on Sales charts if at all.

At the end of ’98 that same issue had forced Billboard to dump its 41-year-old Hot100 rule that disqualified Airplay-only hits not out as singles. But in ’01 single sales were down 40% in just one year, and less than a quarter what they were in 1997. And labels were releasing fewer and fewer of them to get fans to spring for full albums, but that only made legally-dubious filesharing more attractive to fans.

The industry’s Secure Digital Music Initiative went down in flames in May of ’01 after a team of hackers cracked their proposed watermark in a high-profile tech challenge. But it was already pretty clear that labels were never gonna be able to compensate gadget-makers and internet providers enough for what they stood to lose hitting the brakes on the free music gravy train. Napster’s demise, it turned out, just a bump in the road, as other peer-to-peer sharing platforms kept cropping up like whack-a-moles throughout the ’00s.

In October of ’01, Apple debuted the iPod. Tagline: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” All free, of course; the iTunes Store with its 99 cent legal mp3 downloads didn’t debut ’til 2003, and didn’t impact the charts ’til 2005. Apple sold 125,000 first gen iPods during the ’01 holiday season, MSRP $399.

Now, again, since downloads didn’t register on Billboard’s charts, we’ll never know how the ten songs in our Countdown line up with what was on music fans’ Winamp playlists and Diamond Rio mp3 players. Airplay, by far the biggest factor on the Hot100 in ’01. But with that caveat, let’s dive in.

#10 Joe feat. Mystikal – Stutter

At #10 we have the R&B Singer who scored the #7 song of 2000 with his slow-burning “I Wanna Know” from the coming-of-age flick The Wood. He brought in New Jack Swing producer Teddy Riley to produce the standout slow-burner on his third album, but it was this remix of that song, also for a movie (the buddy action flick Double Take) that became his first #1, for four weeks in late Winter. Featuring growly New Orleans Rapper Mystikal, it’s Joe with “Stutter.”

Joe featuring Mystikal, the remix version of “Stutter,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2001’s biggest hits. Billboard ranked it #14 on the year, possibly because the weeks it was #1 in February and March were below average for sales and/or radio listenership. Just a guess; we don’t have access to the underlying data, so we can only go by chart positions.

Anyway, Joe cooled off on the Hot100 after ’01, his only top20 entry after “Stutter,” his feature singing the hook on G-Unit’s #15 hit in ’03, “Wanna Get to Know You.” Mystikal returned to the top ten in ’02 though, Rapping on Ludacris’ #15 hit “Move,” but in ’03 he pled guilty to sexually assaulting and extorting his hairstylist and got six years. That’s interesting because Mystikal was bald!

#9 matchbox twenty – If You’re Gone

At #9 is another repeat top 10 entry from the Rock band that scored 2000’s #9 hit, “Bent,” the lead single from their Y2K album Mad Season. But their biggest coup in 2000 was Frontman Rob Thomas singing the year’s #1 hit as the featured Singer on Rock god Santana’s “Smooth,” one of the biggest chart hits of all time, #1 for 12 straight weeks, which catapulted the band to the top of the Post-Grunge heap heading into the ’00s. At #9, the second straight hit off Mad Season, it’s matchbox twenty with “If You’re Gone.”

Unlike “Bent,” matchbox twenty’s “If You’re Gone” never got to #1; it topped out at #5 in late January. But again, chart longevity, often the factor that gets songs ranking high on yearly rankings, and “If You’re Gone” was on the chart 42 weeks.

There were a lot of those in ’01: five of the songs in our Chartcrush 2001 countdown never hit #1. The next two singles from matchbox twenty’s quadruple Platinum Mad Season album failed to crack the top40, and the lead from their next set, More Than You Think You Are only got to #29. Uh oh. But the second, “Unwell” got them back into the top 10 in the Summer of ’03.

#8 Eve feat. Gwen Stefani – Let Me Blow Ya Mind

Next at #8, a Philly MC who was Dr. Dre’s top prospect on his Aftermath label until he decided to focus his attention on Eminem instead. She landed on her feet though as the sole Female in original growly Rapper DMX’s Hip-Hop collective The Ruff Ryders. In ’99 she became only the third Female Rapper to score a #1 album, after Lauryn Hill and Foxy Brown, and then this was her Hot100 breakthrough in ’01, produced by Dr. Dre. No hard feelings there!

She had to fight her fellow Ruff Ryders for it, but she got her way inviting No Doubt Frontwoman Gwen Stefani in to sing the chorus: only her second chart appearance as a solo act. And the record peaked at #2 the week Alicia Keys’ “Fallin'” hit #1. It’s Eve with Gwen Stefani, “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.”

Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” at #8 on our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. In ’02 she brought in the Singer who’d kept that song from getting to #1, Alicia Keys, for the advance lead single from her next album, Eve-Olution, and that one, “Gangsta Lovin’,” also got to #2, kept from #1 by Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma.”

Well, she returned Gwen Stefani’s favor in ’04 with the Rap verse on “Rich Girl,” and then, wouldn’t ya know it, she shows up on Kelly Rowland’s #7 R&B hit “Like This” in ’07: Eve’s final top10 on any chart. But she was already ubiquitous on screens: the Barbershop movie, reality show guest spots, hosting documentaries, recurring roles on scripted shows, you name it. And starting in the mid-’10s, daytime talk: The Real on Fox, and then The Talk on CBS.

#7 StainD – It’s Been Awhile

Now there were a lot of Rock bands scoring big Hot100 hits from ’99 to ’01: Creed, Limp Bizkit, Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, Kid Rock, 3 Doors Down, Nine Days, Papa Roach, Crazy Town, Linkin Park, Incubus. And those are just the ones from the Heavier side of things.

And then these guys at #7 out of Springfield, Massachusetts whose Frontman made the Hot100 as a solo act before his band did. Just a couple months before, but still. Aaron Lewis and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst’s “Outside” made the chart in January ’01; then Lewis’s “Country Boy” with Country legends George Jones & Charlie Daniels hit in March, and then this song by the band. They’re the only act in the countdown whose album was also among Billboard‘s top 10 albums of the year, Break the Cycle. At #7, StainD, “It’s Been Awhile.”

Aaron Lewis and StainD connected with an audience craving a new level of vulnerability and emotional transparency in Pop lyrics, and with “It’s Been a While” it’s easy to see why. But in the Summer of ’02, that got its own genre as Jimmy Eat World and Avril Lavigne scored their first hits, Weezer ditched their Grungy sound on their ’01 Green Album, and the confessional Pop-Punk called Emo outlasted Lewis and StainD’s Post-Grunge by several years.

Now “It’s Been a While” only notches in at #14 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for ’01. That’s because their cutoff date for the ’01 chart year to give themselves time make their press deadline for the year-end issue was the last week in November, and “It’s Been a While” stayed on the chart 14 weeks after that. But adding those weeks back in and counting its full chart run as we do for every song on Chartcrush, it comes out #7.

#6 Janet – All for You

At #6, a chart veteran: her 23rd top ten hit since 1986, and her tenth #1. Critics in the ’90s had been comparing her singing unfavorably to the likes of Whitney, Mariah, Celine and others who’d raised the bar for Pop vocal chops, even though that’d never really been her thing. But since her previous album in ’97, soaring Pop Power Ballads had been sidelined by Teen Pop, Celine Dion on hiatus, and Whitney and Mariah taking things down a notch and chasing Hip-Hop street cred with a more urban sound.

So now in her mid-30s with the Pop ecosystem looking better for her than it had in years, she was poised to surge again, and surge she did, with the longest-running #1 of the year: seven weeks in the Spring. At #6 it’s Janet Jackson (officially going just by “Janet” since ’97), “All for You.”

Janet, “All for You,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001. Miss Jackson was newly single and ready to mingle in ’01. The split from hubby, Mexican Dancer, Songwriter and Video Director Rene Elizondo, Jr. after nine years of marriage had come as quite a shock to fans; but not because they were breaking up, but because no one had known they were even married until he filed for divorce in 2000; it was a secret! But ’01 was party time, and it comes across on “All for You.”

If you heard Chic’s “Good Times” listening to that, good ear, and reviewers at the time heard it too. But not quite! The sample courtesy of Janet’s longtime Producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis is from a Dance hit from 1980 that rips off Chic’s “Good Times:” “Glow of Love” by anonymous Italian Disco producers Change. Janet had never heard of it, but Jam and Lewis had the right idea.

Janet followed up with the “Ventura Highway“-sampling “Someone to Call My Lover,” which got to #3 in late Summer. And never made the top10 again! Just before her next album Damita Jo dropped in ’04, her Superbowl halftime “Nipplegate” wardrobe fiasco with Justin Timberlake, and CBS Chairman Les Moonves banned her from Viacom-owned MTV, VH1, a ton of radio stations and even the Grammy Awards which were on CBS a week later. That oddly obsessive vendetta continued until Moonves himself was ousted from CBS, peak #metoo, in 2018.

#5 Train – Drops of Jupiter

Now I mentioned at the top of the show Billboard‘s Fred Bronson noticing at the end of ’01 how the Airplay and Sales charts were diverging. Well another thing he noticed: the opposite was happening with the Mainstream and Modern Rock charts: more and more artists and songs in common between the two.

Translation? Alternative now was Mainstream. Our #5 song had almost identical placements on those two year-end charts, but it had its best showing on the Hot100 which also factored Pop radio and Sales. It took its sweet time climbing to its peak at #5 for two weeks at the end of June, but once there it stayed in the top 10 for 14 weeks, and came up just one week shy of having the longest chart run of the year. Their top 20 chart debut “Meet Virginia” in ’98 had gotten their name out there, but this made them superstars; it’s Bay Area Rockers Train with “Drops of Jupiter.”

Train’s big breakthrough hit “Drops of Jupiter,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001, mistaken by some at the time for a long-lost Elton John song, and that was no accident! Elton’s Arranger since his first hits in 1970, Paul Buckmaster, did the strings. And how about that piano!

Train Frontman Tom Monahan wrote the song about his mom’s long losing battle with lung cancer, and it won Best Rock Song at the Grammys. Train mostly retreated to the Adult Pop Airplay charts through the rest of the ’00s, but surprised everyone in 2010, peak Electro-Dance, when their rootsy ukulele jam “Hey, Soul Sister” got all the way to #3.

#4 Jennifer Lopez feat. Ja Rule – I’m Real

At #4 we have the first of two back-to-back #1s by the same artist that got Billboard to change its rules about what qualifies as a “remix” on the Hot100. As head of Def Jam Records in the ’90s Sean “Puffy” Combs (later P. Diddy) had pioneered the strategy of releasing Hip-Hop remixes of R&B songs. With both versions out there, a song could get played on Mainstream Pop and R&B radio and edgier stations in urban markets, but Billboard would treat it as the same song, so the airplay for all the versions combined into a single entry on the Hot100.

OK, that makes sense. But what if you released two completely different songs with the same title and just called one of them a “remix?” Would Billboard still combine them on the Hot100? Well as it turns out, yes. And as it also turns out, the same artist, label and remix collaborators can get away with that twice, and both times score #1 hits, before Billboard finally says (as their reviewer did say, in print, about the second of those back-to-back #1s): “you gotta be kidding me,”

At #4, ’01’s “it” New York rapper Ja Rule with his “Murder remix” (in fact a completely different song from the Dance Pop number on the album) of Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real.”

Not too many pop culture personalities in ’01 bigger than Jennifer Lopez. In ’97 she’d scored as an Actress starring in the biopic Selena, and then rode the 1999 Latin Invasion wave to Pop stardom with her debut album and its #1 hit “If You Had My Love.” Her green Versace dress at the 2000 Grammys was Google’s top search and the reason they created Google Images.

Then at the beginning of ’01 she became the first woman to have both the #1 movie and the #1 album at the same time when The Wedding Planner co-starring Matt McConaughey hit theaters the same week her second album dropped.

The album debuted at #1 but reviews were mixed, its lead single failed to hit #1, the second barely cracked the top 20, and the album was dropping like a rock. What to do? Hip-hop remix! So they brought in New York’s hottest new Rapper. But instead of remixing anything, Ja Rule and his label, Irv and Chris Gotti’s Murder, Inc. Records, wrote and produced two completely new tracks, with J. Lo contributing vocals.

But check it out: then J. Lo’s label, Sony/Epic, released them, one after the other, with the same titles as two of the songs on the album, just tacking on “Murder Remix.” “I’m Real,” which we just heard at #4, was first; then “Ain’t It Funny,” which was the #9 song of 2002. After that Billboard changed its rule to only allow remixes with the same melody to combine for chart positions.

By the way the “I’m Real” Murder Remix was the #1 song the week of 9/11, and when they reissued J. Lo’s album with the Murder remixes included, it shot back into the top ten after bottoming out at #107. Crazy!

#3 Alicia Keys – Fallin’

Now as I said talking about Janet Jackson, Pop and R&B Divas like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey were incorporating more of Hip-Hop’s attitude and sound into their work in the late ’90s. But labels also wanted new blank slates who could embody that hot new hybrid, and the one at #3 was a perfect candidate: experienced Writer/Producer, classically-trained Pianist, great voice, sexy look, and a born-and-raised New Yorker, so she’d lived and breathed Hip-Hop since she her toddler years.

Of course Clive Davis snapped her up, the A&R legend who discovered Whitney in the ’80s. And since she wasn’t yet a star, Clive was able to sneak her out the door with him after his longtime company Arista Records threw him overboard in 2000 to bring in L.A. Reid as CEO. That despite Davis spending a bunch of Arista’s cash in ’98 to buy her out of her previous contract with Columbia, including all the songs she was working on there.

This was one of them, and in his new start-up label, J, Davis uncharacteristically gave her full freedom to develop her songs and make her records as she saw fit, unlike Columbia, who wanted her doing Teen Dance Pop. At #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001, Alicia Keys’ debut, “Fallin’.”

Not only was Alicia Keys’ debut single “Fallin'” #1 on the Hot100 for six weeks; it won the Record and Song of the Year Grammys, and Alicia was Best New Artist. Her follow-up single “A Woman’s Worth” got to #7, then her feature I mentioned earlier on Eve’s “Gangsta Lovin’,” a #2 later in 2002. But her sophomore album released in late ’03, Diary of Alicia Keys, made her one of the ’00s top stars with its three top ten hits in ’03 and ’04, and also in ’04, her #1 duet with Usher on his Confessions album, “My Boo.”

#2 Lifehouse – Hanging by a Moment

Now recall that Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” only got to #5, but it still makes our Top Ten Countdown thanks to its 53 weeks on the chart. Well our #2 song didn’t get to #1 either, but it had 54 weeks and peaked at #2, kept out of the top spot for three weeks by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mýa, and P!nk’s update of “Lady Marmalade” for the Baz Luhrmann big screen Jukebox Musical phenomenon Moulin Rouge, that starred Nicole Kidman and Ewen McGregor.

That 54 week chart run made it Billboard‘s #1 song of ’01, but one song beats it on our Chartcrush ranking, and I’ll explain in a minute, but first, at #2 it’s Lifehouse’s “Hanging by a Moment.”

Lifehouse from L.A., their Hot100 debut “Hanging by a Moment,” the #2 song here on our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. That melodic Post-Grunge sound, certainly not limited to Lifehouse and StainD, whose “It’s Been a While” we heard at #7. It was ubiquitous on Rock radio in the early ’00s and it drew a lot of fire from fans and critics alike for its sameiness across artists and songs.

Lifehouse opened for red hot matchbox twenty on a 14-date tour in March, and by the end of that, “Hanging by a Moment” was in the top 20. Their follow-up singles went nowhere but in the Fall the WB network used Lifehouse’s song “Everything” in the pilot of their new Teen-targeted Superman prequel series Smallville, which went on to be a huge hit on TV, and by the fourth season after repeated uses, Lifehouse appeared as themselves playing their song “You and Me” in a poignant prom night scene, which helped keep it on the charts even longer than “Hanging by a Moment” and make it the #8 song of 2005.

#1 Mary J. Blige – Family Affair

And that gets us down to our #1 song on our Chartcrush ranking for 2001. Again, Billboard had “Hanging by a Moment” atop its year-end Hot100, but as happens way more often than you’d think, huge hits get buried in their rankings, and only because of when during the year they were hits.

Our #1 song debuted at the end of July, hit #1 in November and was still #1 on November 24, which was the last week Billboard counted in its 2001 ranking. And it stayed #1 for two more weeks in December and on the chart ’til May of ’02. All that, factored into Billboard‘s 2002 chart year, so they have the song at #31 for ’01 and #17 for ’02.

At Chartcrush though, again, with the luxury of hindsight, not having to get a magazine issue printed and mailed before New Years, we count every song’s full chart run, and rank it in whichever of the calendar years it had the majority of its chart action, and doing that reveals this to have been the biggest hit of 2001. At #1, Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair.”

“Family Affair,” Mary J. Blige’s first #1 and first top ten since “Not Gon’ Cry” in early ’96, produced by Dr. Dre, his first #1 as a Producer after getting so close just months earlier with Eve and Gwen Stefani’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” which we heard back at #8.

Mary was coming off two more mainstream-targeted albums in the late ’90s as the Pop Diva tide was yielding to more Hip-Hop influenced R&B sounds. They sold well, those albums, but didn’t produce any big hits, and like Janet Jackson, Blige in 2001 was newly single, having just ended her abusive six year relationship with Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey. The title of her ’01 album said it all: No More Drama, and “Family Affair” was its lead single, a brighter, more upbeat sound than the tortured confessionals that’d made her famous in the early ’90s.

Bonus

Well there you have ’em: our Chartcrush top ten songs of 2001 factoring every song’s full run. But the year-straddling hits “Family Affair” and StainD’s “It’s Been a While” coming in to our top ten along with Joe and Mystikal’s “Stutter” displaces three songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten. Of those, Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women, Part 1,” their #10 song, was a 2000 to ’01 year-straddler that comes out 2000’s #2 song doing things the Chartcrush way, so it’s in our 2000 episode. But the other two were legit 2001 hits bumped from our top ten, so to be thorough, let’s run through those.

#12 Lenny Kravitz – Again

Billboard‘s #9 song comes out #12 on our ranking: yet another Rocker that didn’t get to #1. It peaked at #4, for six straight weeks. But it hung out in the top 10 for 14 weeks. Lenny Kravitz’s “Again.”

Lenny Kravitz’s first top 10 on the Hot100 since “It Ain’t Over til It’s Over” in ’91, but he scored four on the Mainstream Rock chart in that time, and his Greatest Hits set released in 2000 sold boatloads. “Again” was the new song on that.

#14 Dido – Thank You

So after the Chumbawamba and Spice Girls in ’97, Brits got pretty scarce on the U.S. charts: only eight top tens by British acts between then and when James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” hit #1 and broke the logjam in ’06. But Billboard‘s #8 song of 2001 was an exception thanks to Eminem sampling its first verse in his critically acclaimed late 2000 hit “Stan.” We have the song at #14 on the year, Dido’s “Thank You.”

Dido, one of the bestselling artists of all time in her native U.K., and one of the few British acts to impact the Hot100 in the early ’00. “Thank You” peaked at #3 for three weeks in the Spring while Janet’s “All for You” was #1. It did top the Adult Contemporary chart though, for four weeks, and she was back in ’04 with another top 20 hit, “White Flag.”

Well that’s a wrap for our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening and hey, if you like what you heard, you’re gonna want to check out our website, chartcrush.com, for a written transcript and link to the podcast version of the show, plus our full Top 100 chart, interactive chart run line graph and other kickin’ extras. We do that for every year we count down, ’40s up to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. It’s a different year every week, so be sure and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and 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 Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag and chart authority. This week on Chartcrush we’re counting down 2018, the year Billboard threw the full weight of the Hot100 behind on-demand streaming on platforms like Spotify, Apple and Amazon.

2017 was the real pivot year though: the first double-digit percent year-over-year revenue increase for the music biz in 20 years after the mp3 filesharing apocalypse in the ’00s, and when Hip-Hop/R&B officially became music’s top genre, according to Nielsen, the ratings people in charge of collecting the data for Billboard‘s charts since 1991. But Billboard‘s update of its Hot100 calculus in ’18 sealed the deal. Seven of the songs in our top 10 songs, by or featuring Rappers, up from three in ’17.

Hip-Hop, already the biggest streaming genre thanks to its outsized popularity among Millennials, aged 22 to 37 in 2018 comprising the vast majority of streaming’s user base. So as streaming eclipsed other formats, Hip-Hop eclipsed other genres.

But for the first time, with streaming, Hip-Hop’s mixtape scene was getting counted: the proving ground where new and established artists put out remixes, mashups and other non-album material for the street. In 2006, the RIAA had estimated 30 to 50 million mixtape CDs a year changing hands, just before the feds started raiding shops and CD mills to shut it down and the whole thing migrated to blogs on the Web. Those also got busted eventually, but it all flew completely under Nielsen and Billboard‘s radar, along with the tens of billions (with a “b”) of mp3s in all genres downloaded with peer-to-peer filesharing apps, until the streaming era.

But events were also driving Hip-Hop’s resurgence. The shooting of Michael Brown by a White cop in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 ignited a debate about racial profiling that’d been smoldering since President Obama’s White House beer summit in ’09 with a White cop who’d arrested a Black Harvard Professor trying to break in to his own home. Then in ’13, Black Teen Trayvon Martin, shot during a struggle with a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida who was later found to have been acting appropriately in self-defense, as was the cop in the Brown shooting.

But those and other stories combined to form one of the most pervasive media narratives of the ’10s: racial tensions and profiling, and a supposed epidemic of unarmed Black men being shot by police. Which the numbers and circumstances don’t bear out: 18 a year on average 2016 to ’19, most in struggles for the cop’s gun. But the narrative pushed by, as Elon Musk called mainstream news in 2023, the “five editors-in-chief of major publications,” still wielding their power pre-Covid-19 pandemic to manage and shape public perceptions “at scale,” with “attitudes, interpretations and conclusions already built in,” as one Media Literacy Resource Guide described narrative-driven coverage.

That definitely boosted Hip-Hop in pop culture and gave Rappers plenty of new things to say. Nearly one in four Hip-Hop #1s in ’17 and ’18 were political according to one study, the most since the ’90s, and thanks to streaming, many of those also topped the Hot100.

And race wasn’t the only issue, especially after Donald Trump took office as the 45th president. That was also in 2017, but by ’18, Trump’s first full year in office, the overwhelmingly anti-Trump media was busily stitching together similarly elaborate and potent narratives about feminism, guns, climate change, illegal immigration and of course Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia to tamper with the 2016 election.

#10 Camila Cabello featuring Young Thug – Havana

On immigration, the issue was Trump’s proposed wall along the Southern border, so what better to drum up sympathy for illegal immigrants from south of the border than a #1 hit for a record 16 weeks sung entirely in español? That was Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” in 2017 which actually didn’t hit #1 until a remix version dropped by Justin Bieber from north of the border in Canada, with most of the lyrics sung in English.

But the top beneficiary of the Latin explosion in 2018, the year we’re counting down on this week’s Chartcrush, was the solo breakthrough from Cuban-American Singer Camila Cabello, teaming up with American Rapper Young Thug on our #10 hit, “Havana.”

The first-ever Diamond-certified single by a Latin Female, the Salsa-inspired “Havana,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018: Camila Cabello’s solo breakthrough after a pair of hits in ’15 and ’16 as the standout member of the Teen Girl Group Fifth Harmony, then teaming up with Rapper/Alt Rocker Machine Gun Kelly to sing the chorus on the #4 hit “Bad Things” in 2017.

She scored another #1 in 2019, her duet with Shawn Mendes on “Señorita,” but didn’t make the top 20 again despite her 2022 album Familia getting to #10 on the album chart.

#9 Drake – In My Feelings

At #9, the first of three Rappers each with two songs in our 2018 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. 43 of the 52 weeks in 2018 had a Rap song or a song with a Rap at #1. This Rapper snagged record-setting 21 of those weeks with his two #1’s, the second of which on the calendar was #1 from late July to late September and inspired a guy on Instagram called Shiggy to post a video of himself dancing to it in the street, which New York Giants Wide Receiver Odell Beckham, Jr. copied and the viral “Kiki Challenge” was off and running.

At some point it evolved into hopping out of your moving vehicle to dance, filming yourself through the open door, and the National Transportation Safety Board had to issue an official statement about that: cut it out! It’s Drake at #9,”In My Feelings.”

Drake and Kendrick Lamar gave music its the five biggest streaming weeks ever up to that point in 2017: Lamar’s album Damn, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music, and Drake’s More Life, a mixtape, broke the record for the most streams its debut week: 384.8 million. So Drake was red hot coming into 2018, and the week his album Scorpion hit platforms, July 14, all 25 of its songs made the Hot100 and there was a noticeable dip, with every other song on the charts dropping five to ten positions to make room.

“Nice for What” was #1 that week, but then “In My Feelings,” which we just heard at #9, debuted at #1 the following week and stayed on top for the next ten, and Billboard named it “Song of the Summer.”

#8 Juice WRLD – Lucid Dreams (Forget Me)

Drake wasn’t the only Rapper who was in his feelings, though. 2018 was the year Emo Rap broke through into the top 10 from its Soundcloud origins mid-decade: a merger of Hip-Hop and the introspective, confessional lyrics and attitudes of ’00s Emo Rock.

Lil Uzi Vert, not exclusively an Emo Rapper, but he followed up his feature on The Migos’ #1 “Bad and Boujee” in ’17 with the genre’s first major hit, “XO Tour Llif3,” which opened up the charts for Emo Rap’s first two big stars, Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, but by the middle of ’18, Peep was dead from an OD in ’17 and X, shot by armed robbers, so the Emo Rapper at #8 was the last man standing in 2018’s fastest growing genre on Spotify, and the song was Emo Rap’s biggest hit, in the top 10 for 25 weeks. It’s Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams.”

Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams” at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018. Juice got to enjoy his fame a little longer than Lil Peep and XXXTentacion but at the end of 2019 at age 21, he OD’d swallowing a handful of opiate pills so cops wouldn’t find them on his airplane.

Emo Rap, the most depressing genre ever to top the Pop charts, so “Emo Rapper,” it turned out, was a highly lethal profession. Loneliness, anxiety, drugs and alcohol, nihilism, suicide, heartbreak, self-medication: just a partial list of core themes.

OD deaths among 15-24 year-olds in America were up a breathtaking 48% 2019 to ’20 according to government figures: by far the largest one-year increase ever.

Kiddos with no perspective, marinating in a media matrix pushing apocalyptic narratives about school shootings, income inequality, racism, Donald Trump and Russia conspiring to steal the election… climate change. Especially climate change! Young Congresswoman and Instagram personality Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” in early 2019. And then in ’20, the Covid-19 pandemic.

Emo Rap was many kids’ soundtrack to all that, its rise and appeal as much a symptom of exaggerated media narratives as the alarming OD and suicide stats, but in giving voice to the feelings and validating the self-destructive responses and behaviors, the music fueled a vicious cycle.

“Lucid Dreams” re-entered the Hot100 for two weeks when the news of Juice WRLD’s death hit, but labels had already signed the second wave of Emo Rap stars, 24kGoldn and The Kid Laroi, both of whom scored even bigger hits in the genre in the early ’20s.

#7 Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line – Meant to Be

Well at #7 is a change of pace: the biggest hit of all time on the Country charts, #1 there for an incredible 50 weeks: almost the entire year, but the lead artist wasn’t even a Country Singer!

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Staten Island, she was a second-gen Albanian-American whose first coup was writing the hook of Rapper Eminem’s 2013 hit “The Monster.” She didn’t get to sing it on the record, Rihanna did, but less than two years later the world heard her on another of her co-writes, White Rapper G-Eazy’s “Me, Myself & I,” and in ’17 she accepted an invite to write a song with the Duo who Billboard ranked the #4 top Country act of the ’10s decade, and this was the result. No wonder Rolling Stone called her a “Pop chameleon.” At #7 it’s Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line, “Meant to Be.”

“Meant to Be,” Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line, #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2018’s biggest Pop hits.

“Bro-Country,” the genre that crossed over from the Country charts in the ’10s and Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” and its #4 Pop remix in ’12 and ’13 set the template, with approaches borrowed from Rock, Hip-Hop and even EDM. Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” the biggest recent Bro-County hit heading into ’18.

Bebe Rexha struggled on the charts for a few years after “Meant to Be,” but was back in the top 10 in 2023 as the Singer and Co-Writer on veteran French EDM Producer David Guetta’s hit “I’m Good (Blue).” “Pop chameleon” indeed!

#6 Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin – I Like It

So at the end of 2017 Billboard kinda made a big deal over their year-end top ten not having any songs with Female lead artists, but that was only because “Bodak Yellow,” the breakout hit by the Rapper with the #6 hit on our 2018 countdown was only in the middle of its chart run November 25, the end of Billboard‘s 2017 chart year to make that press deadline for their year-end issue. But with 15 weeks yet to go, counting the song’s full chart run in the year it saw most of its chart action, “Bodak” was really 2017’s #6 song, not #24 where Billboard had it.

But still, they had a point: 2017 was pretty Male-dominated. ’18, less so, and that had a lot to do with our Female Rapper having an even bigger second year. And she was pregnant through much of it, which was another thing to keep fans engaged on socials all Spring and Summer as the songs from her debut album Invasion of Privacy, all twelve of them besides “Bodak,” bounced around the Hot100. This was the biggest. At #6 it’s Cardi B, teamed with Puerto Rican Rapper Bad Bunny and Colombian Singer J Balvin, “I Like It.”

“I Like It,” Cardi B, another song in Spanish in the top ten on the year after “Despacito” was the #2 song of 2017, legacy media pounding their border wall and illegal immigration narratives hard, so songs in Spanish were super-relevant.

The feminist #metoo narrative, also ubiquitous as Cardi B emerged to break the near monopoly of Males at the top of the charts. Donald Trump’s vulgar comments about women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape from 2005; 87 women accusing Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2017; then Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in ’18. In the Senate confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford claiming he assaulted her in college.

So a new take-no-crap, in-your-face Female Rapper against that backdrop? Perfect! Cardi B, the first Female Rapper to hit #1 since White Australian Iggy Azalea in ’14, who was quickly canceled for her culture vulturing “blaccent” and history of questionable Tweets. And after Cardi B, here came Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat in the top 10 in ’20 and ’21.

#5 Post Malone – Better Now

OK, so now we’ve heard a song apiece from two of the three Rappers with two hits in our 2018 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, Drake and Cardi B. At numbers 5 and 4 we have a two-fer from the third: both songs back-to-back in our ranking.

At the beginning of 2016, “White Iverson” off his first album Stoney had gotten to #14 and caused a bit of a stir, but nothing else connected for over a year, until the fifth single from Stoney, “Congratulations” started its slow, seven month climb up the charts to #8. By then, his second album Beerbongs and Bentleys was nearly done, and with pent up demand on streaming platforms, its lead single debuted at #2. We’re gonna hear that one which was on the charts from late ’17 into ’18 next, but first at #5, the last hit off Beerbongs and Bentleys from nearly year later. It’s Post Malone’s “Better Now.”

“Better Now” had the highest debut, #7, of all the 15 Post Malone tracks that charted the week Beerbongs and Bentleys hit streaming services, Billboard‘s issue dated May 12. The three other tracks on that album had already charted as advance singles, and Billboard has one of those, “Psycho,” as its #6 year-end song of 2018.

We have “Better Now” instead, with “Psycho” at #12, for the same reason that Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” is our #6 song of 2017 despite missing the year-end top ten in Billboard: they didn’t count its full chart run, and here at Chartcrush, we count every song’s full chart run. “Better Now” stayed on the Hot100 all the way ’til May of 2019: tied for the second most total weeks on the chart of all 2018 hits with 52, and all but one of those was in the Top40.

#4 Post Malone – rockstar

But Malone’s biggest hit of the year was our song at #4 on our 2018 Chartcrush countdown, the lead advance single from Beerbongs and Bentleys that debuted at #2 in October of ’17, months before the album’s release. And someone at the label, or maybe Malone himself, came up with a brilliant way to juice it on the charts: a looped video on YouTube with only the chorus, but in the description, links to hear the full song on streaming platforms, and here’s the jig: both views and streams were factored for the charts, so it’s double the clicks! Clever, huh? At #4, the whole song, not a loop: Post Malone with Rapper 21 Savage, “rockstar.”

Post Malone’s “rockstar” at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018, featuring Rapper 21 Savage, whose own chart breakthrough “Bank Account” peaked at #12 two months before “rockstar.”

Now, critics didn’t much like Postie. Spin called him “a doofy longhaired White guy” in a “Worst Songs of the Year” feature that included “rockstar,” and a 2022 New Yorker assessment had the headline “Post Malone’s Languid Songs of Self-Loathing.” In a year when Emo Rap killed on streaming platforms, though, maybe that’s a ringing endorsement, right? But Post Malone didn’t need critics to like him; he was back with even bigger hits in ’19 and ’20 off his next album Hollywood’s Bleeding.

#3 Ed Sheeran – Perfect

Next up at #3, the big 2018 hit by the highest grossing concert act of the year: 99 shows, a cool $429 million. Not bad. He also had the #1 song of 2017, so here he is coming pretty close to repeating. No artist in our Chartcrush rankings has done that since Bing Crosby in 1944 and ’45!

It’s the fourth single off his 2017 album Divide, just the mathematical symbol on the cover, but an appropriate title given the media posture in the late ’10s that I’ve been talking about, and all the toxic narratives. At #3, Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect.”

“Perfect,” English Singer-Songwriter Ed Sheeran, the #3 song of 2018 a year after scoring the biggest hit of 2017 with “Shape of You.” There were two Duet remix versions of “Perfect,” one with Beyonce and the other with Italian Tenor Andrea Bocelli helping propel it to #1 for five weeks, then six more at #2 behind Camila Cabello’s “Havana.”

As big as he was in the U.S., Ed Sheeran was arguably even bigger than The Beatles in his native U.K. After his album Divide dropped, he broke a record set in 1953 by occupying all five of the top chart positions on the U.K. chart. The Beatles did that in the U.S. in 1964, but not in the U.K.

#2 Drake – God’s Plan

At #2, the second song in our Chartcrush 2018 Top Ten Countdown by the Rapper whose “In My Feelings” we heard back at #9 sparked the year’s big social media meme in late Summer, the Kiki Challenge. This one was earlier, the lead single from his first proper studio album in two years, Scorpion, but first released on a two-song EP a month before he even announced that he was working on a new album, and five months before the album actually dropped.

The label budgeted a million bucks to make a video, and he gave nearly all of it to the needy and charities in Miami in cash and oversized checks and filmed himself doing so. And that was the video. It nevertheless won Video of the Year at the BET Awards.

One parody had late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s sidekick Guillermo spreading around $100 in singles in a Dollar Store. Here again, Drake with “God’s Plan.”

Drake, contemplating his fame and fate on “God’s Plan,” #2 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 2018 edition. The first of three #1s from his Scorpion album. “Nice for What” was next when it debuted at #1 in late April and replaced “God’s Plan” at the top; then “In My Feelings” replaced that in July and combined, the three songs gave Drake 29 weeks at #1 in 2018, breaking Usher’s record of 28 in ’04. He also had the #2 song four of those weeks.

Billboard has him as the year’s top Hot100 artist, which surprised no one, but on simple chart points, not counting featured appearances, only lead artist billings, Post Malone actually comes out #1.

#1 Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B – Girls like You

Billboard also had “God’s Plan” as their #1 Hot100 song of the year. But again, Billboard‘s year-end rankings can’t factor full chart runs, only weeks within their “chart years” imposed by the press deadlines for the year-end issues with their chart recaps.

Our #1 is the song that replaced “God’s Plan” atop the weekly Hot100, and stayed there for the next seven weeks through most of the Fall. But then it stayed on the chart all the way ’til June of 2019, seven months past Billboard‘s cut-off for the 2018 chart year, so Billboard ranked it #10 for 2018 and #22 for 2019. But when you factor all the weeks together, it beats “God’s Plan” by a pretty comfortable margin despite having four fewer weeks at #1.

No 2018 song had more weeks in the top10: 33 of its total 52 weeks on the chart, making it 2018’s #1 song: Maroon 5 and Cardi B’s “Girls like You.”

Cardi B’s simmering beef with Nicki Minaj coming to blows in September may’ve helped juice “Girls like You” to #1. She’d become the first Black Female Rapper since Lauryn Hill in the ’90 to score a #1 solo hit and did it with her debut single. The closest Nicki had gotten, “Anaconda,” #2 in 2014 behind Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”

Now Maroon 5: 15-year chart veterans still going strong in 2018. “Girls like You,” their fourth career #1 and #1 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2018’s biggest hits.

Front man Adam Levine, the star judge/coach on NBC’s top-rated singing competition reality show The Voice since 2011, and in the ’10s, many of Maroon 5’s biggest hits, including “Girls like You,” collaborations with “it” Rappers: Wiz Khalifa in 2012 (“Payphone”), Nicki Minaj in ’15 (the remix of “Sugar”), Kendrick Lamar in ’16 (“Don’t Wanna Know”) and Future in ’17 with “Cold.”

Bonus

And that’s our top 10. Again, we factor songs’ full runs, which gets the year-straddling hits “Lucid Dreams” and “Better Now” that missed Billboard‘s year-end top 10 because of their necessary year-splitting into our Chartcrush top 10. But those coming in bumps two out from Billboard‘s top ten, so to be thorough, let’s have a look at those.

#13 Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey – The Middle

At #8 Billboard had the hit by Russian-born German EDM Producer Zedd teamed with Country Singer Maren Morris and American EDM Duo Grey, “The Middle.”

“The Middle” was also Billboard‘s #1 year-end Hot Dance/Electronic song having set a new record with 33 weeks at #1 on that chart. It notches in at #13 on our Chartcrush Hot100 ranking.

#12 Post Malone – Psycho

And the other song from Billboard‘s year-end top 10 that got shuffled out of our Chartcrush top 10 by those year-straddlers coming in: their #5 song of the year: the third single from Post Malone’s Beerbongs and Bentleys, “Psycho.”

Post Malone’s “Psycho” is #12 on our Chartcrush 2018 ranking; I mentioned it earlier in our Postie twofer at numbers 5 and 4 in the countdown when we heard “Better Now” and “rockstar.”

Well it’s been fun but we’re gonna have to wrap up our 2018 edition of Chartcrush! I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and if you like what you heard and want more, please please please, head over to our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll a full transcript and a link to the podcast version on Spotify, plus badass extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, ’40s to the present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

Thanks for listening and be sure and tune in again this time next week, same station, for another year, and 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 culture, and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority.

This week on Chartcrush, it’s 1954, the year Todd Storz invented Top40 radio, and Silent Generation Teens launched a crudely-recorded R&B disc by a Black Vocal Group, The Chords’ “Sh-Boom,” into the Top 10. The next Summer, Bill Haley & The Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” was the first #1 Rock ‘n Roll record. Then Top 10s by Pat Boone, Chuck Berry and The Platters, a #1 by The Platters, and in May of ’56, Elvis’s debut with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

TV, the nation’s new communications medium in the early ’50s. Sets in U.S. households went from just 1% in 1948 to 75% in 1955, and at the same time, the FCC was feverishly granting radio broadcast licenses, so with all the new options on the dial vying for a shrinking audience, radio got to be a very tough business. Most stations, still chugging along with the same TV-style hodgepodge of network and local talk, music, news, serials and variety as had been on radio since the ’20s.

But in ’51, Todd Storz, the GM of KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska, noticed that the only time anyone was listening was when his station was spinning records, so in ’51 he did for radio what MTV did for TV in the ’80s: music all day. And by the end of the year, KOWH was #1 in Omaha and Storz was copying the formula at stations throughout the Midwest.

And then in ’54, legend has it, on a long lunch, Storz noticed a waitress plunk a quarter in the jukebox to play a record they’d been hearing all afternoon played by patrons three more times, and it was an “aha” moment for him: don’t just play music; play the same 30 or 40 records over and over again all day. Well, once KOWH started doing that, ratings soared even higher, thanks to the throngs of Teens that started tuning in to hear the latest hits.

With mom and dad in charge of the one TV in the house, music on the radio became their go-to media, and by the end of the ’50s, Top40 stations were #1 in almost every market playing Rock ‘n Roll, R&B, Country and Traditional Pop hits, a racially integrated mix.

DJs Alan Freed and Hunter Hancock may’ve pioneered playing Black R&B and Doo Wop on the radio for a few hours a day (or, more accurately, night) in Akron, Ohio and Los Angeles. But it took Top 40 to magnify that impact once, as Billboard noted in September, “youngsters, [who were] the backbone of the Pop record business, [sought out those R&B records] in stores and on juke boxes.”

“Gee” was first: an upbeat record by a Harlem Doo Wop group called The Crows that made the national top 20 in the Spring. But then in the Summer, another group, The Chords out of The Bronx, made the top 10 with “Sh-Boom,” immediately covered by a White Canadian Vocal Group with a Pop arrangement on a major label, and that was one of the year’s biggest hits, #1 for eight weeks, launching the R&B gold rush that led to Rock ‘n Roll.

White Silents were seeking out R&B records as a harmless form of personal rebellion and release amid the conformity of the ’50s, but it was also against the backdrop of the Cold War battle for hearts and minds against Communists out there promising full equality. As Civil Rights lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall cautioned during the Korean War, “America’s dereliction on race issues would put the U.S. in a vulnerable position” globally. In ’54, Marshall successfully argued for school desegregation in the Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case.

#10 Dean Martin – That’s Amore

So once White kids’ interest in Black R&B started showing up on the charts, that was the headline, but foreign sounds were another aspect of America’s postwar cultural voyeurism. Les Baxter’s 1951 album Ritual of the Savage launched the Exotica genre of lushly orchestrated tropical ersatz, but War vets and Italian immigrants of all ages had joined Silents in helping the whole Italian Crooner thing go supernova in the early ’50s with the Operatic belting of Mario Lanza and Al Martino.

Things calmed down after that, but into a very crowded Crooner field in ’54 emerged our Italian-American Singer at #10 as we kick off our Countdown, from the unlikeliest of places: a comedy duo. Well, at least he was the straight man! Jerry Lewis was the “banana,” and the song was from their 1953 musical comedy The Caddy, in which Lewis joins in. But on the record it’s all Dean Martin. Not his first chart entry, but his breakthrough, and it would’ve been #1 in February if not for another ethnic hit by Eddie Fisher that we’ll be hearing here in a few minutes. At #10, it’s “That’s Amore.”

“That’s Amore,” #10 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954, Dean Martin’s first top ten, still teamed with comic Jerry Lewis until their epic split in 1956. “Amore,” of course, Italian for love. Not in the top ten on any of Billboard‘s 1954 year-end rankings because it first hit the charts in November of ’53 and Billboard only counted weeks in calendar ’54. But it comes out at #10 when you count its full chart run like we do for every song here at Chartcrush.

Over the years, dozens of major hits have fallen through the cracks like that on Billboard‘s year-end rankings thanks to that chart run splitting between years, which Billboard has tried to address in various ways since the ’70s, but really can’t as long as they have to get those year-end charts out before New Years.

#9 The Four Knights – I Get So Lonely (Oh Baby Mine)

At #9, a Black Vocal Group that hit the charts three and a half months before The Crows’ “Gee,” that first R&B crossover hit I mentioned. But these guys had been together since the mid-’40s, on the charts since ’51, and regulars on TV variety shows like Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan. Plus, it’s a song by a White Songwriter, so they had more in common with The Mills Brothers or Ink Spots than The Crows or Chords. Yet this was their first top ten, and it hit just as Black R&B was about to break through. It’s The Four Knights’ “I Get So Lonely (When I Dream About You),” also known as “Oh Baby Mine.”

Also known as “Oh Baby Mine” because that was the title on the record when it first came out. It’s the hook repeatedly sung by Four Knights’ Bass Singer Oscar Broadway. But subsequent pressings retitled the song to “I Get So Lonely,” and Billboard changed it on the charts several weeks into its run. Fortunately, the confusion didn’t hurt though; it continued climbing and stayed in the top ten for 17 weeks.

The Four Knights’ next three charting singles, ’55 to ’57 were collabs with none other than Nat King Cole, their label-mate on Capitol Records.

#8 Rosemary Clooney – This Ole House

At #8 as we continue our Chartcrush Countdown of 1954’s top ten hits, the first of two we’re gonna hear this hour by ’54’s top-charting Female Singer, narrowly beating “The Singing Rage Miss Patti Page” for that title after being outranked by her three years in a row.

Bandleader Tony Pastor discovered her and her sister Betty in 1945 singing on radio in Cincinnati and she was the Singer on the Pastor band’s last four charting singles in ’48 and ’49. She cut her first solo discs in ’49, but didn’t break through ’til ’51 when Columbia Records’ new A&R Chief Mitch Miller gave her the ethnic Novelty “Come On-a My House.” Which she hated, but it was a huge hit and in ’52 she followed up with a Pop version of Hank Williams’ “Half as Much” and another Miller-decreed ethnic Novelty, “Botch-a Me.”

Both of those got to #2 and by ’53 she was making Technicolor big screen musicals for Paramount and getting hitched to Oscar-winning Puerto Rican Actor Jose Ferrer. #8 for ’54, it’s Rosemary Clooney’s “This Ole House.”

“This Ole House,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954, one of the many hits that Mitch Miller snatched off the Country charts and handed to Columbia’s Arrangers and Singers to class up into Pop hits in the early ’50s. Tony Bennett doing Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart,” the first of those in ’51, and ’54 was when other enterprising diskmen started mining the R&B charts the same way: the R&B gold rush I mentioned earlier.

Cowboy Singer-Songwriter Stuart Hamblen wrote “This Ole House” after a hunting trip with Western Actor John Wayne in the High Sierras and finding an old miner dead in his dilapidated cabin with his dog still standing guard.

Hamblen’s own version was in the top ten on the Country charts at the same time as Clooney’s was on the Pop charts, and both versions have those deep bass vocals sung by the same guy, Thurl Ravenscroft, later the voice of the Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger (“they’re great!”), and also the Singer of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” which became Ravenscroft’s first entry on the Hot100 under his own name when streaming clicks first put it on the Hot100 over the holidays in 2020.

#7 Eddie Fisher – I Need You Now

So Rosemary Clooney, again, ’54’s top Female act; next up at numbers 7 and 6 we have a two-fer: two songs in a row by the year’s top Male act, and the top charting act overall by a slim margin thanks to landing eight records on the charts during the year: the most of any act in ’54. Clooney had three. The two in our countdown, of course, the biggest of the eight, and both recorded live at New York’s Webster Hall backed by his label RCA-Victor’s top Arranger-Conductor Hugo Winterhalter & Orchestra. At #7, the later of the two on the calendar: #1 for five weeks in November and December. It’s Eddie Fisher’s “I Need You Now.”

Eddie Fisher’s “I Need You Now” at #7 here on our 1954 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The song, written for 1953’s top-charting Female Singer, Joni James, but RCA rushed out Fisher’s version and it shot into the top 10 in just its second week before James’ label MGM could even get a single out, so James’ remained an album-only cut.

By the way, if you think Fisher’s eight chart hits in ’54 is impressive? In 1953 he had ten and in ’52, 13!

#6 Eddie Fisher – Oh! My Papa (O Mein Papa)

’51 and ’52 during the Korean War was when Fisher was all over the TV variety shows singing in uniform as “PFC Eddie Fisher.” Then, as soon as he was out of the Army, he got his own show on NBC, Coke Time with Eddie Fisher, and by ’54, he was dating his future wife, Actress-Singer Debbie Reynolds. Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia in Star Wars was their daughter.

Things got super-messy after he started cheating on Reynolds with Elizabeth Taylor, and the scandal raged for a few years, but NBC canceled his TV show due to the bad publicity in ’59, RCA Victor dropped him in ’60, and by the time late-Boomers came of age in the ’80s, Eddie Fisher was mostly forgotten. But back to 1954, Fisher at his peak: the first of his two #1’s in the year from January, at #6 in our 1954 Chartcrush Countdown, “Oh! My Pa-Pa.”

The Silent Generation already manifesting its global reach on the eve of the Jet Age and propelling “Oh! Mein Pa-Pa” to #1, Anglicized to “Oh! My Pa-Pa” on the record, a song from a Swiss-German stage musical that became a German movie musical in 1954. Eddie Fisher wasn’t involved in either, but his vocal version of the song soundly beat an instrumental by another Eddie, Trumpeter Eddie Calvert, that was in the top ten at the same time. In Calvert’s native U.K. it was the other way around: the instrumental was #1 and Fisher’s peaked at #9.

“Oh! My Pa-Pa,” recorded dozens of times since ’54 including by Siouxsie & The Banshees in 1979 and Bjork in 1990. It even showed up in an episode of The Simpsons, sung by Krusty the Clown! But doubtful that many of those listeners had ever heard the Eddie Fisher version or even of Eddie Fisher!

 #5 Rosemary Clooney – Hey There

At #5, the other Singer with two hits in our 1954 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. We heard the first of them at #8, right before our Eddie Fisher two-fer, and get this: the two songs were on the same single. “This Ole House” on the flip, and both sides were in the top ten for 16 straight weeks in the late Summer and Fall: the biggest double-A sided single of the ’50s until Elvis’ “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” in ’56.

And this side, our #5 song: pretty ambitious for 1954: a Singer having a conversation with herself. In the hit Broadway musical the song is from, The Pajama Game, the character Sid confides his feelings singing into a Dictaphone tape machine and duets with himself in the playback, but how do you pull that off non-visually, i.e. on a record? Well here’s how. Again, Rosemary Clooney with “Hey There.”

Rosemary Clooney’s “Hey There” at #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1954’s biggest hits. Did I mention that Rosemary’s little brother Nicholas was Actor George Clooney’s dad? That makes Rosemary Clooney George Clooney’s Aunt, and she guest-starred as an Alzheimer’s patient in an Emmy nominated recurring role on his ’90s TV show E.R.

“Hey There” was her last top ten hit, but she was on TV regularly into the ’60s, and her ubiquitous paper towel commercials in the ’80s (“Extra value is what you get, when you buy Coronet”).

Unlike most Singers from her era, Clooney cut a ton of albums in her later years: one, often two a year almost every year from 1976 until her death in 2002.

#4 Jo Stafford – Make Love to Me!

At #4 we have another Female Singer: “The Singer’s Singer,” with impeccable phrasing and pitch, who by ’54 was a 15-year industry veteran with over 60 chart hits, updating for the mid-’50s on a brash, brassy, sexy record with a Doo-Woppy vocal hook that turned out to be her last top ten. Her follow-ups including a cover of Cuban-American Girl Group the DiCastro Sisters’ hit in 1954, “Teach Me Tonight,” only scraped the top 20. But “Make Love to Me!” was the #1 Jukebox hit in the land for seven straight weeks in early Spring. It’s Jo Stafford.

[note: song is not in Spotify’s library; here’s a link to it in Apple Music]

Jo Stafford’s “Make Love to Me!,” #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1954’s top ten hits, backed by her longtime Bandleader-Arranger Paul Weston, first at Capitol, then moving with her to Columbia, and along the way they got married.

In ’59 Stafford turned down an extended gig in Vegas to focus on her family and mostly retired from music, but in retirement, her and Weston honed their bad music party act into a Grammy-winning Comedy album under the pseudonyms Darlene and Jonathan Edwards, and music biz titan Mitch Miller blamed their third album in ’62 for fatally torpedoing his brand by spoofing his Sing Along with Mitch franchise.

Darlene and Jonathan went dormant in the late ’60s but resurfaced in ’79 with a one-off single butchering The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” right as Disco was crashing. According to Stafford in a 2003 interview, Barry Gibb was not amused.

#3 The Crew-Cuts – Sh-Boom

At #3, the record that started the 1954 R&B gold rush I’ve been talking about that made Rock ‘n Roll inevitable. It’s the first cover by a White act made deliberately to cash in on Teens’ newfound obsession with Black R&B, stoked by Alan Freed, Hunter Hancock and other trailblazing DJs on the radio, and then magnified by Top40 once enough kids bought the records and got them on the charts. That was the perfect storm that lifted this record to #1 on all three of Billboard‘s Pop charts (Best Sellers, Airplay and Jukeboxes), and kept it there for five straight weeks in late Summer.

Now, a quick note before we hear it about how we compile our Chartcrush rankings for pre-Hot100 years with those three separate charts. It can get confusing, so to streamline things, we just do the same thing that Billboard did when it created the Hot100: weigh the rankings on the Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts equally and combine them into a single weekly chart. And from there we just rank the songs exactly how we do for Hot100 years, post-1958. Neat, huh?

OK, so without further ado, the hit that transformed the music biz in ’54: The Crew-Cuts cover of The Chords’ “Sh-Boom.”

After the success of “Gee” by The Crows just two months earlier, the minute executives at Mercury Records got wind of another R&B record selling like crazy, they paired their house Arranger-Bandleader and Musical Director David Carroll with the fresh-faced Canadian group they’d just signed, whose debut “Crazy ‘Bout Ya Baby” had just hit the charts, to class it up for the Pop charts. And 72 hours later, the Crew-Cuts version of “Sh-Boom” was recorded, pressed and on its way to radio stations and stores.

The Chords only had the Billboard charts to themselves with their original for a single week. It kept rising though, peaking at #5 on the Jukebox chart the week The Crew-Cuts version hit #2 on the Sales and DJ charts: the first R&B single to make the top 10 on any Pop chart. But it lost momentum once the Crew-Cuts hit #1.

“Boom,” according to Chords tenor Jimmy Keyes, was the slang word on the streets of New York: a word you’d hear 15 times in five minutes: “Hey, man, boom, how ya doin’.” They added the “shh” to make it sound like an incoming bomb. “Sh-Boom.” And “ding dong, alanga langa lang?” Well that’s church bells, of course!

The Crew-Cuts, of course, totally oblivious to all that, but would The Chords original have gotten the same traction in 1954 if Mercury hadn’t sprung into action with The Crew-Cuts version? Hard to say, but after “Sh-Boom” hit, the pillaging of the R&B charts for Pop hits reached a frenzy.

Gradually, more and more kids started seeking out the originals, but notwithstanding the massive Songwriting royalties generated by big Pop hits, the case could be made—was made—that all this Pop “whitewashing” was coming at the expense of Black artists. But once labels just started signing the Black R&B artists themselves to make bigger-budget records that could cross over, it was a moot point, and flush with cash, R&B labels new and old did the same. Motown, anyone?

#2 Perry Como – Wanted

Well we’re down to #2 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954, and it’s another chart veteran. By ’54 he wasn’t just on TV, he’d been on TV as long as there’d been TV, and he had not one but two shows: his weekly Sunday night Chesterfield Supper Club, and a 15-minute musical variety show on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays immediately following the Nightly News. And both those shows, simulcast on the radio.

He hadn’t done any movies since the ’40s but still, with that TV and radio footprint, when he put out a new record, it was a big deal, and this one was a bigger deal than most. At #2, Perry Como’s “Wanted.”

The #1 DJ and Jukebox hit of the year in Billboard; #2 Sales; his biggest hit since “If” in 1951, Perry Como’s “Wanted” at #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954. Same Arranger and backing band we heard on Eddie Fisher’s hits at numbers 7 and 6, RCA’s Hugo Winterhalter & Orchestra.

Como also scored in ’54 with not the first, but one of the biggest and best remembered hits of the first year of the ’50s Mambo dance craze sweeping the country two years before Elvis, “Papa Loves Mambo,” heard in many an Arthur Murray Dance studio as people answered ads and signed up for lessons in the tens of thousands.

By the way, another milestone in ’54: the first year vinyl 45s outsold shellac 78 RPM records: better sound with vinyl as consumer hi-fi caught on, and jukebox operators upgraded to newer models. A third of the 200 million records made in ’54, destined for America’s 450,000 jukeboxes, according to Billboard.

#1 Kitty Kallen – Little Things Mean a Lot

And at #1, the song that replaced “Wanted” at #1 on our weekly charts derived from Billboard‘s published Sales, DJ and Jukebox charts, and it was #1 for ten weeks, three longer than “Wanted.”

She was the Singer on two of the most iconic hits of 1945, as the Allies cruised to victory in World War 2: “I’m Beginning to See the Light” and “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” featured under Trumpeter Harry James and his Orchestra. After that, though, she couldn’t score another hit, even reuniting with Harry James for two singles on Columbia in ’52. But then this one appeared in March of ’54 and just left everyone breathless: one of those records that says exactly what folks need to hear, how and when they need to hear it. It’s Kitty Kallen’s “Little Things Mean a Lot.”

Kitty Kallen happened to be in her new label Decca Records’ A&R office looking for material to record the day “Little Things Mean a Lot” came in. She loved it, but Decca, not so much. “That’s a ‘women’s song;’ it could never be a hit,” they said. Which might’ve been the end of it had Kallen not believed so strongly in the song that she offered to be on the hook for the recording session until the record sold 50,000 units. Well Decca liked that idea, and “Little Things” topped the Best Sellers chart for nine straight weeks.

Kitty Kallen followed up with another top 10 in ’54, “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” but in ’55 she lost her voice in the middle of a gig in London and wouldn’t perform again for four years. She was back on the charts in ’59 though with a new deal on Columbia. Then in ’62 on RCA.

Bonus

Well that’s the top 10 according to our exclusive Chartcrush recap of Billboard‘s weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. Again, our ranking derived by combining those three into a Hot100-style chart, then using the same method we use for Hot100 years to calculate the points. But some records were among the top 10 on one, two, or even all three of Billboard‘s published year-end charts (again Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes), but yet didn’t make the top 10 on our Chartcrush ranking, so, just so we don’t leave anything out, let’s have a look at those.

#11 Patti Page – Cross Over the Bridge

The song Billboard ranked #8 on its year-end DJ chart and #6 on Jukeboxes just misses our Chartcrush Top ten at #11: the biggest hit in ’54 by the Singer Rosemary Clooney finally beat out for Top Charting Female in ’54: Patti Page with “Cross Over the Bridge.”

Patti Page had seven charting records in ’54, more than any other Female Singer, and “Cross Over the Bridge” was the biggest, but another was a cover of “The Queen of R&B” Ruth Brown’s “Oh, What a Dream,” around the same time as Mercury labelmates The Crew-Cuts were out there with their version of “Sh-Boom.” It only got to #15, so not all White R&B covers were big hits!

Oh, and here’s a fun fact: the Chords original version of “Sh-Boom” was not the intended hit. The A-side of that record was a cover of the song we just heard, Patti Page’s “Cross Over the Bridge!”

#12 Doris Day – Secret Love

Next as we look at the songs that made Billboard‘s year-end Sales, Airplay and Jukebox top 10s for ’54 but missed the top ten on our combined Chartcrush ranking, our #12 song which was Billboard‘s #9 Best Seller and #8 DJ hit of ’54. From the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, Doris Day, who also stars in the film, “Secret Love.”

Doris Day with the Best Original Song at the 26th Oscars, “Secret Love,” from Calamity Jane.

#13 Frank Sinatra – Young-at-Heart

Now Frank Sinatra in ’54 was fresh from his Supporting Actor Oscar win for his role in From Here to Eternity, which also lifted him out of his chart slump with his first top 5 hit since 1946. It was Billboard‘s #6 year-end Airplay hit, and it shakes out at #13 on our Chartcrush combined ranking we counted down the top 10 from earlier: “Young-at-Heart.”

“Young-at-Heart,” Frank Sinatra’s first major hit for Capitol Records after parting ways with Mitch Miller and Columbia; the title song from the movie that paired Sinatra with Doris Day. There’s that name again! And in the film Young at Heart, Day’s character’s father gets a hi-fi for his birthday. Billboard predicted that that was going to help drive hi-fi sales nationwide.

#15 The Gaylords – The Little Shoemaker

Billboard‘s #10 year-end Jukebox hit of ’54 notched in at #15 on our Chartcrush combined ranking: another imported song, this time from France, and Rosemary Clooney appropriately sang some of it in French on her version, but that didn’t chart. Chicago Vocal Trio The Gaylords’ version with verses sung in Italian did though. Go figure! But that was The Gaylords’ gimmick on almost all their hits, so… In the top 5 on all three Billboard charts for eight weeks: “The Little Shoemaker.”

Gaylords, “The Little Shoemaker.” Petula Clark scored the U.K. hit with her all-English version of that song. Petula, still a decade away from her first U.S. hit in ’64, “Downtown.”

#17 Tony Bennett – Stranger in Paradise

Now as you’ve been hearing throughout our Chartcrush Countdown Show for 1954, songs often had multiple versions on the charts simultaneously. That was dying down a little since its peak in the late ’40s, but it still happened, so Billboard‘s Honor Roll of Hits was a weekly chart that ranked songs instead of records, combining all the versions into a single ranking position.

Well at #8 on Billboard‘s year-end Honor Roll recap for ’54 was a song that had three competing top ten versions on the records charts, none strong enough to make the year-end top ten records, but when you combine all three of them, one of the year’s top hits. And the biggest with 12 weeks in the top 10 on all three weekly records charts: Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes was Crooner Tony Bennett’s version. “Stranger in Paradise”

Tony Bennett sang that song in concert for the next 57 years, and in 2011 even re-did it for his album Duets II with Opera Singer Andrea Bocelli, “Stranger in Paradise.” Our Chartcrush ranking has Bennett’s version at #17 for 1954, up against Singer Tony Martin’s and Vocal Group The Four Aces’ versions at numbers 57 and 26, respectively.

#18 Four Aces featuring Al Alberts – Three Coins in the Fountain

And speaking of the Four Aces, their biggest hit of ’54 was #8 on both Billboard‘s year-end Sales and Jukebox charts and #10 Airplay. So how on Earth is it only #18 on our Chartcrush ranking? Well, because it got stuck at #2 for six weeks in the Summer behind “Little Things Mean a Lot,” so songs that did get to #1 outrank it in our Chartcrush point system.

As Billboard started doing in 1967, our ranking method awards bonus points for weeks at #1, which better reflects the hockey-stick curve with sales and airplay as the song rankings approach #1. Still a massive hit, though: featuring Lead Singer Al Alberts, The Four Aces’ “Three Coins in the Fountain.”

The Four Aces’ grandiose, cinematic “Three Coins in the Fountain.” It was the title song of a movie and even won the Best Original Song Oscar the year after “Secret Love,” but the Four Aces version isn’t the one in the film; Frank Sinatra’s is, and his more low-key version even charted, but was “Aced” on the charts by the version we just heard. No Four Aces recording ever appeared in a movie in the ’50s, but Robert Zemekis used their version of “Mr. Sandman” in 1985’s Back to the Future…

#19 Archie Bleyer & Maria Alba – Hernando’s Hideaway

…instead of the better-known Chordettes version produced by, the Artist who scored 1954’s #10 Best Seller according to Billboard; that’s #19 on our Chartcrush ranking. I mentioned the movie The Pajama Game back when we heard Rosemary Clooney’s “Hey There” back at #5. This was another big hit from the film, capitalizing on that Mambo craze I talked about: Cadence Records Founder-Owner-Producer Archie Bleyer with Spanish Actress Maria Alba on castanets, “Hernando’s Hideaway.”

Johnnie Ray and Guy Lombardo, both out with versions of “Hernando’s Hideaway” in ’54, but Archie Bleyer’s with the sound effects and castanets, the clear winner on the charts.

That meme of secret, mysterious after-hours clubs where only a select few are welcome and you need a password: it surfaced again in ’56 on Jim Lowe’s “The Green Door.” What goes on in there, hmmm? Well in ’50’s America there was a long, wide-ranging list of taboo and illicit behaviors that listeners could draw from to flesh out their imaginations.

And on that titillating note, it’s time to wrap up our 1954 edition of Chartcrush! I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard and you want more, head over to our website, chartcrush.com for a full transcript of the show and a link to the podcast version on Spotify, plus boss extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, ’40s to present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening and be sure and tune in again this time next week, same station, for another year, and 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 culture, and count down the top ten hits according to our recap of the weekly Hot100 charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week it’s 1983, the year of Michael Jackson, and the year of MTV.

But at the beginning of 1983? Hard to believe, but MTV wasn’t even playing Michael Jackson. More on that and Michael Jackson later in the show when we play his— not one, but multiple hits in our top ten countdown.

But first to set the stage, MTV. It debuted in August of 1981 with 2.1 million households on just a handful of cable systems with a straightforward concept: AOR radio on TV; AOR short for Album Oriented Rock, the main FM Rock radio format charted on Billboard‘s just-launched Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. Topping that chart in ’81, acts like The Who, Tom Petty, Moody Blues, Foreigner, Blue Oyster Cult and The Rolling Stones.

So OK. But one big problem with that right off the bat: MTV was TV, not radio. If a video was boring or low-budget, just the Band or Singer performing live like most vids by AOR acts in those days, it wasn’t going to play the same on TV. And of course if there was no video, MTV couldn’t play it at all. Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry,” Rush’s “New World Man,” Eric Clapton’s “I Can’t Stand It,” all #1 Mainstream Rock songs in MTV’s first couple years with no video.

MTV co-founder Les Garland told Jet magazine in 2006 that in the early days he was spending 50% of his time trying to convince artists to make videos, and labels to bankroll them.

Now the other problem was the AOR format itself. It was in trouble. The Sony Walkman was killing Top40 on AM as Pop fans craved better sound, so the FM band obliged, and many stations ditched AOR for CHR: Contemporary Hits.

As Billboard Rock editor Roman Kozak wrote in his radio recap at the end of ’83: “the son of once-despised top 40 was actually playing hipper and more exciting music than that being dredged up from the AOR dinosaurs, even with a few New Wave acts grudgingly thrown in.”

And by “New Wave,” he’s not just talking post-Punk New Wave like The Human League, Clash, Eurythmics and Talking Heads. Glam Metal fell under the “New Wave” banner too, groups like Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard, at least until Rock stations chose a path and veered into Modern or so-called “Active Rock” formats, or just stuck with AOR to become Classic Rock.

MTV though was all-of-the-above: stretching AOR to its limits in search of videos, which strongly favored sub-genres like Post-Punk and New Wave with a tradition of theatrics and wild art house visuals that went way beyond the guitar neck closeups and hands-on-keys shots in AOR vids.

One thing MTV wouldn’t do in ’81 and ’82? Branch off into pure Pop or R&B. That, they reasoned, would be a bridge too far for their target AOR demo, still on their Death of Disco victory lap.

But whatever MTV’s calculus was in its first two years, by golly it worked! It wasn’t just that people who already had cable were watching. People got cable just so they could get MTV. “I want my MTV” was what you were supposed to call your cable company and tell them so they’d add it. Only then would you sign up and subscribe. This was millions of people coast-to-coast and by ’83 almost every cable system was carrying MTV. It was cable’s killer app: MTV households up from 2.1 million at launch to 17 million by ’83.

#10 Patti Austin with James Ingram – Baby, Come to Me

But still not as big as broadcast! In 1981 for example, 30 million viewers tuned in to watch an episode of General Hospital, the daytime soap opera on ABC, a show that had almost as big an impact on the charts in the early ’80s as MTV. Exhibit A: our #10 song as we kick off our 1983 Chartcrush Countdown.

The episode was the one where Luke and Laura Spencer tie the knot two years after he professes his love, then rapes her on the floor of the Mafia-owned Disco he manages, thinking he’s going to be killed the next day attempting to assassinate a Senate candidate on orders from his mob boss. Talk about compelling video, right?

And at #10, the song that began a slow five-month climb on the Hot100 once it started showing up as Luke’s romantic theme music on the show. It’d only gotten to #73 upon its initial release in the Spring of ’82, but made it all the way to #1 for two weeks in February, thanks to, no, not MTV—they weren’t playing it—but General Hospital. It’s Patti Austin and James Ingram’s “Baby, Come to Me.”

Adult Contemporary, also evolving in ’83, from a Country-Pop dominated format in the first years of the ’80s to Slow R&B, like Patti Austin and James Ingram’s “Baby, Come to Me” at #10 as we count down the top hits 1983 on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Separately, both Austin and Ingram continued charting R&B and AC hits through the ’80s, but Ingram got another turn at #1 on the Hot100: his 1990 Power Ballad, “I Don’t Have the Heart,” and before that, his duet with Linda Ronstadt on “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail got to #2 in ’87 and won Best Song at the Oscars.

And speaking of General Hospital‘s impact on the charts, “Baby, Come to Me” wasn’t the show’s only export. The Afternoon Delights’ plot summary novelty, “General Hospi-Tale” had already made the Top40 in 1981, and also, former early ’70s Teen Idol Rick Springfield was Dr. Noah Drake on the show. “Jesse’s Girl” from his first album since the mid-’70s was #1 the same the week MTV launched in August of ’81.

#9 Kenny Rogers duet with Dolly Parton – Islands in the Stream

Now contrary to common perception, The Bee Gees did not disappear after Disco imploded, even if their brand was all but unmarketable after their last #1, “Love You Inside and Out,” in the Summer of ’79. Their 1981 album Living Eyes only got to #41 on the album chart, and its lead single barely scraped the Top40 on the Hot100.

But despite that, the appetite for their distinctive songs and production sheen was undiminished, provided it was someone else’s name on the record. Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” “Guilty” and “What Kind of Fool” in ’80 and ’81: Bee Gees songs in every conceivable way except Streisand’s vocals. All top ten hits. Ditto Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” in ’82: her first top ten in over three years.

Well, for ’83, the Bee Gees teamed with our Singer at #9: Country crossover’s biggest star, looking for his next #1 after his collab with Lionel Richie on “Lady” in ’80. And he got it. And the brothers Gibb, who co-wrote and produced his entire 1983 album Eyes That See in the Dark? Well, after Streisand and Warwick, the Bee Gees were three-for-three in the post-Disco ’80s!

It started out as a solo record, but didn’t gel until they brought in Dolly Parton from down the hall in the same studio and made it a duet. At #9 it’s Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, “Islands in the Stream.”

A duet by two of Country’s biggest stars, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, on a Bee Gees song, “Islands in the Stream,” #9 as we count down the top hits of 1983 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Younger GenXers will recall Mýa interpolating the song on Pras Michel’s “Ghetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)” from 1998.

Now don’t look for “Islands in the Stream” in the top ten on Billboard‘s 1983 year-end charts because it was too late in the year, its chart run split between their ’83 and ’84 chart years. They have it at #56 for ’84. But counting its full chart run in the calendar year it was biggest as we do for every song at Chartcrush reveals it as one of 1983’s top hits: one of the many hits throughout chart history that’ve fallen through the cracks on Billboard‘s year-end charts because their runs, arbitrarily split between adjacent “chart years.”

#8 Michael Jackson – Beat It

So AC hits notwithstanding, as I talked about in the intro, ’83’s big music headlines? MTV and Michael Jackson. Jackson’s Thriller came out in November of ’82, initially with two videos planned. But MTV was still positioning itself as Rock, with almost no Black artists in rotation, and no Disco artists, so it was gonna be tough to get them aired. Michael Jackson, of course, both Black and a Disco artist.

But with MTV already stretching the AOR format playing obscure British and Australian stuff that no American AOR radio station would’ve sought out on their own, and Black R&B star Rick James (“Slick Rick”) out there accusing MTV of racism for not playing “Superfreak,” it was pretty weak for MTV CEO Robert Pittman to exclude those Jackson vids. So in a bold move, CBS president Walter Yetnikov threatened to yank all vids by CBS and subsidiaries if they wouldn’t play Michael Jackson, and MTV relented.

Thriller, already on its way to becoming the best selling album of all time after Michael debuted the moonwalk on NBC’s Motown 25th Anniversary special for 40 million U.S. viewers, many of whom didn’t have cable yet. And of course, once MTV did start playing Michael Jackson, not only didn’t the expected anti-Disco backlash happen, but MTV became the first profitable cable channel, and a legit cultural force.

Now the song we’re gonna hear right now at #8 on our countdown wasn’t the first Michael Jackson vid on MTV, but it was his first to crack the top 20 on the Mainstream Rock chart: the same chart MTV used initially. It’s the third single issued from Thriller featuring a scorching solo by Rock guitar god Eddie Van Halen, “Beat It.”

“Beat It.” Michael Jackson, #8 as we count down the top ten songs of 1983 here on this week’s Chartcrush. That scorching Eddie Van Halen guitar solo: even conservative AOR stations had to play that, and it broke the logjam of Black artists on MTV. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” both debuted on the Mainstream Rock chart the same week as “Beat It.” And both eventually made the top 20 too.

As for Eddie: partly thanks to “Beat It,” the next year, his band Van Halen crossed over to the Hot100. “Jump” was not only their first top ten Pop hit, it went all the way to #1 for five weeks!

#7 Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart

So at #9 we heard a Bee Gees song that got to #1 sung by other artists, “Islands in the Stream.” At #7 we have a Meat Loaf song that got to #1 sung by another artist.

Jim Steinman was the composer of Meat Loaf’s multi-platinum Bat out of Hell album in 1978, but its ’80s follow-ups Bad for Good and Dead Ringer, also by Steinman, tanked even worse than The Bee Gees even though there wasn’t anything remotely “Disco” about Steinman or Meat Loaf. Dead Ringer‘s only charting single peaked at #81.

So Steinman did exactly what The Bee Gees did: retreated behind the studio glass and scored with another artist out front, in this case, the husky-voiced Welsh Singer whose “It’s a Heartache” was five or ten Hot100 positions ahead of Meat Loaf’s biggest hit, “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad,” through most of its chart run in the Summer of ’78. But she didn’t chart again ’til this. At #7 it’s Bonnie Tyler doing Jim Steinman’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Bonnie Tyler teaming up with Bat out of Hell mastermind Jim Steinman for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1983. Steinman and Tyler teamed up again for her next hit, “Holding Out for a Hero” from the Footloose soundtrack in ’84. That one got to #2 in her native U.K., but only #34 on the Hot100, and Bonnie Tyler faded after that, but Steinman and Meat Loaf finally got their act together and scored again in ’93 with the Bat Out of Hell sequel, Back into Hell and its hit “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).”

#6 Men at Work – Down Under

Now if you look at 1983’s big albums, three loom the largest. Thriller first hit #1 at the end of February and then the album with the #1 song in our countdown dominated the charts in most of the second half of the year. But our #6 song is from the album that was #1 for 15 weeks over the holidays at the end of 1982 until Thriller reached #1 in February. And this was its second #1 single after the group’s MTV-fueled breakthrough with “Who Can It Be Now?” Originally the B-side of their first Australian single in 1980, they re-recorded it in ’81 for their debut album Business as Usual. It’s Men at Work’s “Down Under.”

Well thanks to that song’s celebration of all things peculiarly Australian, like Kombi’s, Vegemite and chundering (that’s Aussie slang for vomiting), not to mention the term “Down Under” itself, Men at Work had folks talking up an “Aussie invasion” in ’83 to rival the mid-’60s British invasion, with other Aussies like INXS, Midnight Oil and Split Enz lending credence.

But actually, Australians had been charting top ten hits in the U.S. for years: Helen Reddy, The Little River Band, Olivia Newton-John, and more recently Air Supply. They were the top-charting AC act of the early ’80s, and the second top-charting Hot100 act.

But what was new in ’83 thanks to MTV was the absolute dominance of non-North American acts on the Hot100. Five or more of the top ten in 27 of the year’s 52 weeks, by artists from abroad. No other year in chart history even comes close.

Australia and the U.K. had a head start making and airing clever videos. Australia’s Countdown and Sounds; Britain’s Top of the Pops, big pre-MTV music video shows. So when MTV needed videos to fill all that airtime their first couple of years before Americans ramped up, that’s where they came from.

#5 Lionel Richie – All Night Long (All Night)

At #5 as we continue our Chartcrush countdown of 1983’s top ten hits, a Danceable upbeat song from the early ’80s’ top-charting Balladeer, and exclusively a Balladeer for years: “Three Times a Lady” and “Still” in the ’70s with his group The Commodores; “Lady,” written for Kenny Rogers in 1980; “Endless Love,” his duet with Diana Ross in ’81, and “Truly,” his chart debut as a solo act in ’82: all #1s, but all Ballads.

His only charted non-Ballad up to ’83? “You Are” from his ’82 solo debut, which got to #4. But he still had something to prove, and prove it he did when the song he wrote for folks to dance to on vacation topped the chart for four weeks November into December—like “Islands in the Stream,” too late in the year for its full chart run to be factored into ’83, but Billboard has it their #12 Hot100 hit for ’84, counting just its weeks from November 5 on. That full run, though, makes it the #5 song of ’83 by our Chartcrush reckoning. It’s Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long (All Night).”

By the end of ’85, Lionel Richie’s 1983 album Can’t Slow Down was RIAA-certified Diamond for sales of ten million. “All Night Long” was its lead single, #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1983.

Lionel with a Jamaican lilt to his voice on that, did you notice? And an African chant inspired by the fourth single from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” Accent and chant, both fake, but no one in ’83 cared.

Richie’s next two hits off Can’t Slow Down were “Hello” and “Stuck on You,” two more Ballads, but he was back in ’86 with another upbeat hit, “Dancing on the Ceiling.”

#4 Michael Jackson – Billie Jean

And speaking of Thriller, at #4, the second single from the album. The first: Michael Jackson’s schmaltzy duet with former Beatle Paul McCartney, “The Girl Is Mine,” which might’ve impacted early sales as fans wondered if the rest of the album is less Thriller, and more filler.

But of course it wasn’t, and that became abundantly clear when this one hit the airwaves in January, and then the famous light-up sidewalk moonwalking video premiered the first week in March, after CBS Records honcho Walter Yetnikov forced MTV’s hand. One of the most iconic videos of all time, here’s Michael Jackson again: “Billie Jean.”

“Billie Jean,” the best-selling single of Michael Jackson’s entire solo career, #1 on the Hot100 for seven weeks, #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1983’s biggest hits, and the song that opened MTV up to sounds besides Rock, including the many other Black artists who followed. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” added the same week as “Billie Jean.”

The Walkman may’ve doomed AM Top 40, not to mention vinyl LP’s (cassettes outsold vinyl for the first time in ’83), but the notion of a gravitational center in Pop lived on for another decade thanks to Walter Yetnikov’s ultimatum and MTV putting “Billie Jean” on the air.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t the top R&B single of the year; that honor went to Marvin Gaye with “Sexual Healing.” “Billie Jean” was #2.

Quincy Jones, the Producer of Thriller and it’s six top ten singles, including “Billie Jean.” And he also produced Patti Austin & James Ingram’s “Baby, Come to Me” our #10 song.

#3 Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson – Say Say Say

But back to Michael Jackson. At #3 is the second MJ/Paul McCartney duet in less than a year. “The Girl Is Mine” off Thriller peaked at #2 in January; this one off McCartney’s ’83 album Pipes of Peace got to #1 in December, making it the third song in our 1983 countdown that peaked in calendar ’83, but after Billboard‘s October 29 cut-off for the chart year. Billboard has it as the #3 song of 1984.

On “Girl Is Mine” at the beginning of the Thriller juggernaut, Michael got the cachet of having a Beatle on his record, but on this, the Beatle got an even bigger boost from having Michael Jackson on his. It hit the charts one week after Thriller‘s sixth single, “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” and went on to become McCartney’s biggest single ever, #1 for six weeks mid-December to mid-January. At #3, “Say Say Say.”

Now “Say Say Say” may’ve hit the charts at the end of ’83, but it was recorded in London in the Spring of ’81, a year before Michael Jackson even started working on Thriller. Beatles producer George Martin helmed the session.

McCartney and Jackson, two of Pop’s biggest stars of all-time, both accused at various points in their careers of over-indulging sappy, mawkish tendencies: McCartney on “Another Day” and “Silly Love Songs,” and Jackson on “Ben” and “She’s Out of My Life.”

Put ’em together and what do you get? Well, on “Girl Is Mine” you get a supremely sappy and mawkish record, exactly what you’d expect. Less so on “Say Say Say,” but in both cases you get massive hits. “Say Say Say” was McCartney’s last #1 but he continued charting on the Hot100 as a lead artist all the way to 2007.

#2 Irene Cara – Flashdance…What a Feeling

Well we’re down to #2 on our Chartcrush Countdown for 1983: the lone Soundtrack single in the top ten. It won Best Original Song at the Oscars for the Singer, who wrote the lyrics in the back of a taxicab on her way to record it. Three years earlier in 1980, she’d been the Singer on another top ten hit that won Best Original Song, “Fame.” But she hadn’t been among the Songwriters, so she didn’t get a gold statue.

This one’s also the title song of the movie, and also like Fame, the movie was a surprise box-office smash that grossed many many times the modest amount it cost to make. From ’83’s cinematic pop culture phenom, at #2 it’s Irene Cara’s “Flashdance…What a Feeling.”

Irene Cara, “Flashdance…What a Feeling,” the title song from the movie and the #2 song of 1983 here on our ’83 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The video was all movie footage, as was the video for Flashdance‘s other #1 hit, Michael Sembello’s “Maniac,” and heavy rotation on MTV helped propel the movie’s massive success at the box office: a pattern that repeated many times through the ’80s as soundtrack hits proliferated. It wasn’t just the music biz looking to MTV to create hits, so was Hollywood!

#1 The Police – Every Breath You Take

And that gets us to #1, about which the most astonishing thing I can tell you is: in the year of Thriller, it’s not Michael Jackson. It’s actually the band’s only career #1, but eight weeks on top in the Summer, and since that chart run is all in Billboard‘s ’83 chart year, every week of it counted, and it’s #1 on their official published year-end Hot100 too. And the album it’s on was #1 for 17 weeks. That album? Synchronicity: the band’s fifth and final LP. Here are The Police with the #1 song of 1983, “Every Breath You Take.”

The Police, “Every Breath You Take,” the #1 song of 1983, beating out five singles from Michael Jackson’s Thriller that were on the Hot100 during the year. The Police nearly broke up in the middle of recording their Synchronicity album, with Singer-Bassist-Frontman Sting and Drummer Stewart Copeland actually coming to blows. But fortunately they were able to complete the album and a world tour that went through the Spring of ’84 and was one of the two top grossing tours of the year (David Bowie the other).

Critics at the time were calling The Police the biggest Rock band in the world. They reunited in ’85 to headline a stadium benefit for the human rights group Amnesty International and tried to record a new album, but it didn’t work out and Sting, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers went their separate ways ’til their lucrative 30th Anniversary reunion tour in 2007. But they never made another album!

Bonus

And there you have ’em: the top ten songs of 1983 according to our Chartcrush ranking that factors every song’s full run. But the year-straddling hits “Islands in the Stream,” “All Night Long” and “Say Say Say” coming in to our top ten displaces three songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten, so to be thorough, let’s have a look at those.

#11 Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

At #10, Billboard had a real MTV New Wave hit, and by that I mean: a song that wouldn’t have done nearly as well in the U.S. if not for the wide exposure its edgy, high-concept video got on MTV. The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” was ’82’s top example, our #7 song of 1982; this one though? Pushed to #11 on our 1983 ranking: Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”

Eurythmics: Singer Annie Lennox and Songwriter-Producer Dave Stewart: “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Their first and biggest of more than a dozen hits before they split in 1990: Lennox to a successful solo career, and Stewart, a top producer in the ’90s and beyond.

#9 Michael Sembello – Maniac

And at #9, Billboard had the second #1 from Flashdance, which topped the Hot100 for two weeks two months after Irene Cara’s six week reign at #1 in early Summer with the title song. We have it at #12 on the year: Michael Sembello’s “Maniac.”

Fun fact: “Maniac” was originally about a deranged killer, not a dancer, inspired by a slasher movie, but the Flashdance Producers wanted it so Writers Dennis Matkosky and Sembello rewrote the lyrics to be about a dancing maniac. Sembello was unable to follow up the success of “Maniac,” so he went back to songwriting and producing behind the scenes.

And finally, Billboard‘s #7 song of 1983 was Daryl Hall & John Oates’ “Maneater,” an ’82 to ’83 year-straddler that we have as 1982’s #8 song, so we won’t be spinning that one here on our 1983 edition of Chartcrush.

But you can hear it on our 1982 episode: the podcast version of which is streaming now on Spotify, along with all our other Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Shows, ’40s up to now. For links to those, head on over to our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll also find full written episode transcripts with copious source links, and other radical extras like our full top 100 charts and interactive line graphs of the actual chart runs of the songs in each episode.

For now, though, we gotta wrap up our 1983 edition of Chartcrush. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi, and as always I want to thank you for listening. That website again: chartcrush.com, and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year in 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 culture, and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush we’re turning back the clock to 1962, which began with an extraordinary event: “The Twist” hitting #1 for a second time in January after already having hit #1 in 1960 and falling completely off the Hot100 for almost a whole year. The only time that’s ever happened: same record hitting #1 in two different chart runs.

But it wasn’t just a curiosity for chart geeks; it was a legit turning point for Rock ‘n Roll because it was the first Rock record to cross over to an adult audience. That’s how it hit #1 that second time: different audience digging it and buying it: grownups, once high society gossip columns started reporting sightings of mucky-mucks and celebs from Judy Garland to JFK’s sister Jean to the Duke of Bedford doing the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge, a mob-owned dive bar on the West side of Midtown Manhattan that literally overnight became the hottest ticket in town.

Rock needed that win. In the six years since “Rock Around the Clock” and Elvis shaking his pelvis doing “Hound Dog,” many OG Rockers, sidelined for various reasons. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, radioactive from scandals involving young girls. Elvis, drafted. Little Richard, now a Preacher. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper dead in the horrible “Day the Music Died” plane crash in Iowa in ’59.

’59, also the year the Payola scandal broke: DJ’s taking bribes from record labels. With Congress turning up the heat and DJs and radio stations facing fines and jail time, no one was taking any chances with crude-sounding records that could be red flags for enforcers, so Top40 got very middle-of-the-road.

Billboard even debuted a chart in 1961 called “Middle Road.” It later became Easy Listening and then in 1979, Adult Contemporary. Stations needed that chart! Percy Faith’s Musak-y “Theme from a Summer Place” was #1 for nine straight weeks, peak Payola hysteria: 1960’s top hit.

But even before the Payola scandal, Rock records were sounding more polished and professional as hit after hit raked in Teens’ disposable income and labels spent more on production. In ’58, ABC-Paramount A&R head, also a Bandleader, Don Costa signed down ‘n dirty OG New Orleans R&B Singer Lloyd Price and gave him the full Sinatra orchestra treatment in a top studio, and “Stagger Lee” and “Personality” made Price 1959’s top singles artist. And Teen Idol Rocker Bobby Darin scored the biggest hit of 1959 with “Mack the Knife,” not even a Rock song! He went straight at Sinatra on his own turf with that one!

Of course, the notion of cleaning up Rock ‘n Roll went all the way back to the beginning, Dot Records and Pat Boone in 1955, and even before that, Mitch Miller as head of A&R at Columbia getting Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney to record Hank Williams Country songs, but post-Payola, the difference was that only those kinds of records were safe for the airwaves.

So Rock was assimilating, but the Rock ‘n Roll generation, Silents, were aging: aged 17 to 37 in ’62, so most of the adults who “discovered” “The Twist” in ’62: technically in the same generation as the Teens who first got it to #1 after watching Chubby Checker on American Bandstand in 1960. That’s what we call a generational peak, the few years that come around every 15 to 20, when almost everyone in the coveted 18 to 34 target audience for ads and media is in the same generation. The oldest Boomers, just 17 in ’62: still too young to imprint themselves on the culture, which would change in ’64 with Beatlemania.

But the late ’50s and early ’60s were all about the Silents. And one of their defining features was their internationalism at the dawn of the Jet Age. Until 1958 only a couple records by non-U.S. artists had ever topped the charts, but that year Italian Domenico Modugno’s “Volare,” sung in Italian, was the Summer’s biggest hit and many other international hits followed. By ’62 Billboard was devoting a ton of space to musical happenings abroad.

#10 The Tornadoes – Telstar

Like the two British records in our ’62 countdown. Yup, that’s right: two years before The Beatles!

Joe Meek was a trailblazing Sound Engineer and Producer in London, a Silent, fascinated by space and electronic music, so after AT&T put the first comms satellite in orbit in the Summer of ’62, he wrote a song about it. His in-house studio band The Tornados cut it, and within weeks it was climbing the U.K. and U.S. charts. #1 on the Hot100 the last two weeks of ’62 and the first week of ’63 and #10 as we kick off our Chartcrush countdown of 1962’s biggest hits. It’s an instrumental: “Telstar.”

One of the biggest hits of 1961, Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” whet the public’s appetite for weird new keyboard sounds, and “Telstar,” delivered for ’62: #10 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 1962 edition.

Joe Meek, the Brit behind the Tornadoes was an acknowledged genius, but a tortured genius, likely schizophrenic. His studio was above a shop in London run by the landlady, who’d bang on the ceiling with a broomstick to complain about the noise, which would drive anyone trying to run a studio nuts, but for Meek, it was too much, and in 1967 after years of feuding, he murdered her, then himself with a borrowed shotgun.

By the way, British Rockers Muse: Frontman Matt Bellamy is Tornados guitarist George Bellamy’s son. Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” in 2006, a tribute to “Telstar.”

#9 The Shirelles – Soldier Boy

Next up at #9, what would a 1962 countdown be without a Girl Group? Girl Groups, a cornerstone of the more sophisticated, polished Brill Building sound that filled the airwaves post-Payola.

Notwithstanding countless pulp fiction paperbacks and B-movies, the “Bad girl” Pop star wasn’t a thing ’til Nancy Sinatra later in the ’60s, then Donna Summer in the mid-’70s and of course Madonna in the ’80s. And early Rock ‘n Roll was Male dominated, as was the Greaser hoodlumism critics said it incited. So records by Female Singers: automatically in the safe zone for nervous radio Program Directors, and June 27, 1960, peak Payola hysteria, there were more than three in the top ten for the first time in nearly four years.

Well, April 21, 1962 was another milestone: the first week in chart history with three songs by Black Females in the top ten. Our #9 song was #6 that week, on its way to #1 for three weeks in May. Their second #1 after “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” in ’61, written by Brill Building Songwriting power couple Carole King and Gerry Goffin, it’s The Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy.”

“Soldier Boy,” reportedly written on the spot by Luther Dixon and Scepter’s Owner-Producer Florence Greenberg and recorded in one take with five minutes left in the session, #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1962. A song that became closely associated with Vietnam once hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were in combat there, but in ’62 when it was a hit, Vietnam was just one of many countries around the world where Americans were deployed.

JFK’s administration had two big Cold War setbacks its first year: the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, then the Berlin Wall, and Kennedy was determined to not add Vietnam to that list. Now The Shirelles weren’t a Motown group, but Berry Gordy, Jr.’s first Motortown “Sound of Young America” package tour hit the road in ’62: Marvelettes and Mary Wells, Motown’s two big Female acts, pre-Supremes.

#8 Mr. Acker Bilk – Stranger on the Shore

Next here on our 1962 edition of Chartcrush, the second of the two British records in our top ten countdown, also an instrumental, but unlike “Telstar’s” aggressive futurism, this is a sweet little piece from a BBC show about a French au pair in England that some assume was a hit because people needed something to calm them down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet another Cold War powderkeg as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev put America’s new, young, idealistic President through the ringer. But Kennedy didn’t spot Khruschev’s nukes in Cuba ’til October and this was #1 in May and June, so nope.

But, again, that Payola chill on the airwaves gave records like this a boost, not to mention all-in-one home stereo cabinets now showing up in department stores and the Sears catalog and bringing hi-fi within reach for millions. I mentioned Percy Faith’s 1960 smash “Theme from ‘A Summer Place'” in the intro; in ’62 it was bowler-hatted, goateed, striped-waistcoated English clarinetist Mr. Acker Bilk, “Stranger on the Shore.”

Mr. Acker Bilk vanished from the charts almost as quickly as he arrived, and he was back on the cabaret circuit by the time The Beatles hit in ’64, but his one big hit, “Stranger on the Shore,” secured his legacy. In the top ten for 11 weeks, and #1 for just one, yet Billboard named it the year’s top hit based on the simple inverse-rank point system they were using at the time. That’s one point for a week at #100, 100 points for a week at #1, and so on.

As Billboard started doing in 1967 and refined in the years since, our Chartcrush ranking awards bonus points for weeks at #1 and in the top ten to better reflect the hockey-stick reality of sales and airplay volume as you approach #1.

And by the way, we apply that consistently to every year: same ranking method, so our Chartcrush rankings are truly apples-to-apples.

#7 Chubby Checker – Limbo Rock

So with grownups now doing the Twist, the kiddos needed new dances, and 1962 was a parade of them, one after the other: Loco-Motion, Candied Yam, Slop, Martian Hop, Mess Around, Mashed Potato, Surfer’s Stomp, Bristol Stomp, Swim, Frug, Jerk, Monkey, Hitchhike, Watusi.

And at the end of year, Mr. Twist himself, Chubby Checker, unveiled one. Not his first since “The Twist,” mind you; he was a busy man in ’61 and ’62: “Pony Time” in early ’61, “Let’s Twist Again” and “The Fly” in the Summer and Fall of ’61, and “Slow Twistin‘” with Mashed Potato Diva Dee Dee Sharp in the Spring of ’62, all top tens. But people did this one at parties for decades to come. At #7, “How low can you go?” Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock.”

An Island feel on that song, Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock” at #8. An instrumental version was out first in the Summer by The Champs (the “Tequila” guys).

Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song” unleashed Calypso on the charts in ’57 and it surged again in ’62. Soul shouter Gary U.S. Bonds’ big Summer hit was a mashup of Calypso and Twisting: “Twist Twist Senora.” I mentioned in the intro the Silent generation’s internationalism.

“Limbo Rock” at first was the B-side: the flip of “Popeye the Hitchhiker.” That was two dances in one song, The Popeye and the Hitch Hike. But it was the Limbo that caught fire, and the record peaked at #2, kept out of the top spot by “Telstar.”

But like “Telstar” and other hits in our Chartcrush 1962 top ten we’re counting down this hour, don’t look for it on Billboard‘s year-end ranking because their cutoff week for the ’62 chart year was October 27. Everything after that? Ignored in their ranking. At Chartcrush with the benefit of hindsight and not having to get an issue out by New Years, we get to count every song’s entire chart run and rank it just one year, and that year is the calendar year it scored the most points. Songs never fall through the cracks here on Chartcrush!

#6 The 4 Seasons – Sherry

And neither do whole groups, like the year’s top chart debut, who broke through in the Fall and scored two back-to-back #1’s before the end of the year. But neither of those hits is in the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100: the second because it was after the October 27 chart year cutoff, but the first, which is our #6 song, because despite its five weeks at #1, lesser hits with more weeks on the chart outranked it.

Remember, Billboard wasn’t awarding those #1 bonus points yet in 1962, so under their simple inverse point method, for example, ten weeks at #50 got the same number of points as five at #1. Incredible that it took Billboard until 1967 to address that!

Anyway, they were one of two Vocal Harmony Groups from opposite coasts that burst onto the scene simultaneously in the Fall. California’s Beach Boys, and the “Jersey Boys” (the title of their Tony-winning jukebox musical that ran on Broadway for 12 years in the ’00s and ’10s). That’s right, The 4 Seasons! Their breakthrough, “Sherry.”

Frankie Valli there with his trademark powerhouse falsetto on The 4 Seasons’ “Sherry,” the #6 song of 1962 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. #1 in just its fourth week on the Hot100; only a handful of non-American Idol winners in chart history can say that about their debut singles!

Initially called “Jackie” for First Lady Jackie Kennedy, the song inspired by Bruce Channel’s #1 “Hey! Baby” from earlier in ’62 evolved first into “Terri,” then “Sherry” after the daughter of big-time New York DJ Jack Spector, Songwriter Bob Gaudio’s best bud.

Despite being dwarfed on the charts in 1962, The Beach Boys eventually caught up and surpassed The 4 Seasons in later years to become ’62’s biggest debut looking at career chart points, but The 4 Seasons scored two #1s right out of the gate in ’62, and a third in early ’63, “Walk like a Man.” We’ll be hearing that second 1962 hit here in a few minutes.

#5 Joey Dee & The Starliters – Peppermint Twist, Part 1

But first, another group of Jersey boys that just happened to be playing at the Peppermint Lounge the weekend in October of ’61 that New York society columnists spotted British actress Merle Oberon and Russian expat Prince Serge Oblinski there Twistin’ the night away.

The sighting hit the papers the next day, and that night at the Peppermint Lounge, the NYPD needed barricades and mounted police for crowd control. Which remained the situation on West 45th Street between Sixth and Broadway throughout all of ’62 as 30 other “Twist” records came and went from the charts. Even Frank Sinatra jumped on the bandwagon with “Ev’rybody’s Twistin’.”

But besides Chubby Checker’s original, the only other that topped the chart was the one that replaced it at #1 for three weeks in January and February, by our lucky combo from Jersey, who were immediately promoted to house band at the Peppermint. Obviously!

They wrote and cut the song as a tribute to the Peppermint and the Twist craze, along with a whole album titled, what else? Doin’ the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge, which got all the way to #2 on the album chart at a time when albums by Rockers almost never cracked the top ten. At #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1962 it’s Joey Dee & The Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist.”

Joey Dee & The Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist,” the #5 song of 1962 by our reckoning here at the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Billboard had it all the way down at #25, not counting the first six weeks of its chart run in 1961 and not awarding those bonus points for its three weeks at #1.

The group’s namesake Joey Dee co-wrote “The Peppermint Twist,” but the Lead Singer is not Dee; it’s bandmate Dave Brigati, whose kid brother Eddie went on to co-found The Young Rascals with Felix Cavaliere in 1965. Small world!

As for Dee & The Starlighters, they made the top ten one more time with a frantic, live cover of “Shout” that even got The Isley Brothers’ 1958 original back on the charts in mid-’62 and inspired their new top 20 hit “Twist and Shout.” That, of course, became a centerpiece of The Beatles’ early repertoire.

#4 Bobby Vinton – Roses Are Red (My Love)

Well we’re gonna slow things down considerably for our #4 hit, which is a last-ditch “hail Mary” by a guy from the same Pittsburgh suburb that produced Perry Como, whose dream of hosting a Teen version of the Lawrence Welk Show on TV seemed doomed after his 1961 Young Man with a Big Band album and its singles failed to connect.

But at the meeting where his label was about to drop him he noticed two more singles on his contract, so in desperation he grabbed one of the demos there on the table, cut a version in a Teen Idol style jettisoning the whole Bandleader thing, and promoted the hell out of it. He even bought a thousand copies himself for distribution to DJs with, get this, a red rose! Apparently, that wasn’t considered Payola!

And it worked. The record was #1 for four weeks in the Summer and the #4 song of 1962 both on Billboard and our Chartcrush rankings, one of just two songs in our top ten that line up with Billboard‘s ranking. It’s Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red (My Love).”

Teen Idols weren’t invented in the Early ’60s. Emotive Crooner Johnnie Ray pioneered the look and style in the early ’50s. But after the Payola scandal froze out edgier sounds on the radio, labels were on the lookout for Male avatars of style who had just enough James Dean swagger to get the Teen girls a-crushin’ and a-swoonin’, but who in real life were the opposite of Rockers out riding fast cars and motorcycles, doing scandalous dance moves on TV and generating shocking headlines. Teen Idols like Ricky Nelson, Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Fabian and the Bobbies: Rydell, Vee, Darin, and, reluctantly, Vinton, whose first hit “Roses Are Red (My Love)” we just heard at #4.

Bobby Vinton was all the way to the zero-swagger end of the Teen Idol spectrum, but he made up for it with business smarts, professionalism and sheer force of will. After charting nearly 40 more hits over the next decade-plus, he finally realized that dream of hosting his own TV show. The Bobby Vinton Show aired on TV from ’75 to ’78.

#3 The 4 Seasons – Big Girls Don’t Cry

Del Shannon’s “Runaway” not only whet the public’s appetite for weird electronic keyboards like on “Telstar;” it also paved the way for powerhouse falsetto leads, along with Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs’ #1 hit from 1960, “Stay.” And Dion & The Belmonts with their snappy Pop arrangements and harmonies: next level Doo-Wop!

Well, the group at #3 who we’ve already heard in our countdown didn’t have any strange keyboards, but they did have snappy arrangements and intricate harmonies, and they sure took that falsetto to the bank! We heard their breakthrough “Sherry” back at #6; here again, The 4 Seasons: their second #1, also for five weeks and the #3 song of 1962 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

“Big Girls Don’t Cry,” Frankie Valli’s piercing falsetto along with that cleverly contrasting doofus voice by Bass Singer Nick Massi, another Four Seasons trademark also on their first #1 “Sherry” we heard back at #6.

“Big Girls,” the bigger hit, #3 on our Chartcrush ’62 Countdown, but it didn’t make Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 at all because all but its first two weeks on the chart were after their October 27 chart year cutoff. If Billboard had been factoring weeks after the cutoff into the following year like it started doing in 1972, “Big Girls” would’ve been one of 1963’s top hits.

As depicted in their jukebox musical Jersey Boys, The 4 Seasons’ road to stardom was a long one. Three of the guys had been in a ’50s group called The 4 Lovers, who were on RCA and even played Ed Sullivan, but nothing charted so RCA cut them loose and the hitmaking lineup didn’t come together until 1960, when none other than future Actor Joe Pesci, their friend, introduced them to Bob Gaudio, whose ’50s group The Royal Teens had scored a hit. “Short Shorts,” #4 in 1958, then resurrected in the ’80s for a ubiquitous Clio-winning ad for Nair, the hair removal lotion.

Gaudio wrote most of The 4 Seasons hits including “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” along with Producer Bob Crewe.

#2 Ray Charles – I Can’t Stop Loving You

So in the Summer of ’62 there were two million-selling singles after three years of tanking sales due to Payola fallout, but also the LP surge from stereo and hi-fi. Summer, typically the doldrums for single sales, so the industry took notice.

One of the million-sellers was Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red,” which was only available on a single ’til after it hit #1, but the other, our #2 song, was on an album, and that album was #1 all Summer, 14 weeks, in addition to the single selling a million.

He’s the acknowledged inventor of Soul music, but also a big Country-Western fan, and in 1962 he went all-in on Country. That album was Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and the single was his reinterpretation of a 1958 hit by Country legend Don Gibson. It’s Ray Charles with “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”

Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” #1 for five weeks and the #2 song of the year as we count down the top ten from 1962 here on this week’s Chartcrush. It was also Billboard‘s #2 Hot100 hit of the year, and despite being a Country song, #1 on the R&B chart for ten weeks.

Connie Francis also dove head-first into Country earlier in ’62 and scored what turned out to be her last #1: “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.”

#1 Chubby Checker – The Twist

Well we’re down to our #1 song, and I’m not really sure what else to say since I’ve been talking about it since the top of the show: the centerpiece of 1962 Pop and the only record in history to get to #1 in two separate runs on the Hot100. That after it caught on with adults in late 1961 once gossip writers started catching celebrities slumming at New York’s Peppermint Lounge doing the dance.

It was a Teen sensation in 1960 after he did it on American Bandstand; then again for two weeks in January 1962 after dropping off the chart for almost all of ’61: Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.”

So Billboard has “The Twist” at #9 on its year-end ranking for 1962 because they didn’t count the first seven weeks of its historic second chart run in late 1961. Again, at Chartcrush, we count every song’s full chart run and rank it in the year it earned the most points, so “The Twist” takes its no-brainer place as 1962’s top hit.

If you’re wondering, we consider chart runs “separate” if they have at least six months off the chart in between. And besides Christmas hits, and in the streaming era, songs that chart again after an artist’s death like Whitney Houston, Prince and Juice WRLD, only three records besides “The Twist” have made the top ten in separate runs:

Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” #4 in 1961 when it first came out, and then #9 in 1987 when it was the title song of the movie Stand by Me.

Bobby (Boris) Pickett’s 1962 Halloween #1 “Monster Mash” peaked again at #10 when it was reissued in the Summer of 1973.

And Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” #9 in 1976 and then #2 in 1992 when it was in the Wayne’s World soundtrack shortly after Freddie Mercury’s death.

And that’s it!

Bonus

Well there you have ’em, the real top ten songs of 1962. But in deference to Billboard despite their flawed ranking methodology in ’62, before we sign off we want to take a look at the songs that they had in their top ten for ’62,  but weren’t in our countdown. There were five of ’em.

#43 The Sensations – Let Me In

At #8 they had a one-hit Doo Wop group out of Philly, The Sensations.

Sensations Singer Yvonne Mills Baker also wrote that song, “Let Me In,” Billboard‘s #8 song of 1962; #43 on our Chartcrush ranking: one of the first all-Male groups to add a Female Lead Singer.

#22 Little Eva – The Loco-Motion

We heard three dance craze records in our countdown, Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and “Limbo Rock” and Joey Dee & The Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist.” Of those, Billboard‘s year-end top ten only had “The Twist” at #9. But they had two different ones, including their #7 song, #22 on our Chartcrush ranking, Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

Husband-and-wife Brill Building Songsmiths Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote “The Loco-Motion” as the follow-up to another Singer’s dance craze record, but she passed so they gave it to their 16-year-old babysitter, and Little Eva Boyd went from making $35 a week to earning a cool $30 grand as a Pop star. She scored three more charting singles in ’62 and ’63, all written by Goffin and King.

#11 Shelley Fabares – Johnny Angel

At #6 as we continue our look at the songs that made Billboard‘s year-end top ten but not our Chartcrush top ten we counted down this hour, Billboard had the record by the Teen daughter in TV’s Donna Reed Show, actress Shelly Fabares. It shot to #1 after she sang it in an episode, about a girl’s hopeless crush on a boy who doesn’t know she exists, “Johnny Angel.”

Shelly Fabares’ “Johnny Angel” just misses our Chartcrush Top Ten at #11. Fabares remained a big star on TV and movies into the ’90s but her Singing career began and ended with “Johnny Angel” and its sequel “Johnny Loves Me” a couple months later.

#17 David Rose & His Orchestra – The Stripper

Billboard‘s 1962 year-end top ten also had two instrumentals: their #1 song, Acker Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore” (#8 on our ranking), but instead of “Telstar” which was too late in the year to factor, at #5, they had… “The Stripper.”

Legend has it that a young, Male office assistant was sent down to the tape vault to grab an unreleased recording by David Rose & His Orchestra to slap on the B-side of their new Easy Listening version of the standard “Ebb Tide,” and he returned with “The Stripper,” recorded in 1958. And it was delighted young, Male Top40 DJs who completely ignored “Ebb Tide” and instead played the B-side to death in the Summer of ’62, making “The Stripper” Billboard‘s #5 hit of the year. Our Chartcrush ranking puts it at #17.

#14 Dee Dee Sharp – Mashed Potato Time

And finally, Billboard‘s #3 song of 1962 didn’t make our top ten. It had lots of weeks in the Top 40 so it got a longevity boost in Billboard. But it never got to #1, so it lands at #14 when songs that did get their bonus points. It’s the hit that Goffin and King wrote “The Loco-Motion” as a follow up for: Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time.”

The Mashed Potato, the biggest Teen dance obsession of ’62 while mom and dad were out discovering the two-year-old Twist. But, wait, The Mashed Potato dance move was older than the Twist. James Brown came up with it in ’59!

Oh, and fun fact: “The Monster Mash” is the same dance as the Mashed Potato. Just add Frankenstein-style zombie gestures with your arms and hands!

So 1962, an interesting year in chart history! I hope you enjoyed our look back here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and if you did and want more, go check out our website, chartcrush.com where you can listen again to the podcast version on Spotify,  follow along with a written transcript and check out spiffy extras like our full Top100 chart and interactive line graph of the top ten songs. We do that for every year we count down, and we count down a different one every week on this show, ’40s to the present, so check it out, again chartcrush.com, and be sure and tune in next week, same station and time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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