::start transcript::

Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host Christopher Verdesi. Every week we set our sights on a different year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time by the music industry’s top trade mag, Billboard. This week, we’re turning the clock back to 1995, a politically-charged year after Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America to shrink the government swept Republicans to control of the House of Representatives, and the GOP also won back control of the Senate.

Republicans had won Presidential races against the backdrop of the culture wars raging since the early ’70s, but flipping the House? That was new. 1955, the last time there’d been a Republican Speaker. The Culture Wars, accelerating in the ’90 and spilling over into national politics, and music was at the center.

For its 1992 chart year, Billboard had completely transformed its data collection for ranking songs and albums, switching from its 40-year-old system of retail and radio surveys to actual barcode scans for sales through Soundscan and airplay spins reported by Broadcast Data Systems. And the change was dramatic as the charts started reflecting what Gen-X was actually consuming. Suddenly, artists and whole genres considered fringy and underground were on top: Gangsta Rap, Punk, Alt Rock, all aggressively pushing the limits of public taste.

Zooming out with the benefit of hindsight, it was the inflection point between modernism and postmodernism’s elevation of low culture and inversion of Western civ’s “meta-narratives,” in religion, morality, aesthetics, everything.

Gen-X essayist Chuck Klosterman in his book The Nineties highlights 1994’s Reality Bites as the cinematic epitome of his generation’s pathological fear and loathing of “selling out,” with “selling out” defined as embracing, rather than rejecting, virtually any aspect of those meta-narratives.

And in ’95, with the Cold War over five years and the youngest Boomers now in their 30s, when Billboard unveiled its year-end Hot100 chart and a Gangsta Rap track was the #1 song of the year, it was like an exclamation point on all that. Was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” really 1995’s most popular song though? Well, definitely an important milestone in the mainstreaming of Hip-Hop: one of the major themes of ’90s and ’00s, but no, it wasn’t. It was more like wishful thinking on the part of postmodern taste inverters and envelope pushers, not to mention Hip-Hop fans. It was only #50 on Billboard’s year-end Airplay ranking.

How it got to be #1 on the year-end Hot100, we’ll explore in more detail as the show goes on, but for now, suffice to say that the Hot100 was broken in 1995, and stayed broken all the way ’til Billboard fixed it for its 1999 chart year. So for those late ’90s years, ’95 to ’98, Billboard‘s Airplay chart, not the Hot100, is the best gauge of what was broadly popular, so that’s what we’ll be counting down here on our 1995 edition of Chartcrush: the top ten derived from Billboard‘s weekly Airplay chart that ranked the songs based on actual spins on a broad cross-section of radio stations.

#10 Sophie B. Hawkins – As I Lay Me Down

Kicking things off at #10, speaking of Reality Bites, after Lisa Loeb scored the first-ever #1 hit by an unsigned artist in ’94 (her song “Stay (I Missed You)” from the film), one of ’95’s big Indie Female sensations was our Singer at #10: her second hit after “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” in 1992 and one of the top Adult Contemporary hits of ’95 (#1 on that chart for six weeks), it’s Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down.”

What are those backing vocals saying in the chorus? If you thought “I like tacos,” you’re not alone. ’95, one of the last years that misheard lyrics could become memes, before fans could look ’em up on the Web. “Ooh La Kah Koh” is what they’re singing: just nonsense syllables.

Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down,” #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1995’s biggest hits according to our exclusive recap of Billboard‘s weekly “Radio Songs” airplay charts. It also peaked at #6 on the Hot100. It was in the Christina Ricci coming-of-age flick Now and Then and an episode of Fox’s Party of Five, the family Drama that made stars out of Matthew Fox, Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love-Hewitt. Hawkins even guest stars in the episode.

#9 Hootie & The Blowfish – Only Wanna Be with You

At #9, a band that surprised everyone by scoring the bestselling album of 1995—by a mile. 12 million in its first year. As AllMusic writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine puts it, they “defined the mid-’90s mainstream in the wake of Alt Rock” by flipping the script on the conventional notion of artsy left-of-the-dial college Rock. They sounded Alternative, but were really anything but, making Alt Rock safe for local pubs, mom’s minivan and mainstream radio.

It was #19 on the year going by the Hot100, but #9 looking at Airplay, it’s Hootie & The Blowfish, “Only Wanna Be with You.”

Hootie & The Blowfish, “Only Wanna Be with You,” #9 as we count down the top ten Airplay hits of 1995 on this week’s edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. They scored three other massive hits off their Cracked Rear View album, the breakout single, “Hold My Hand,” plus “Let Her Cry,” and “Time.” But later albums didn’t fare as well and the band went on hiatus in 2008. Singer Darius Rucker became a big Country star with eight Country #1’s from 2008 to ’18.

#8 Blues Traveler – Run-Around

While the O.J. Simpson trial was mesmerizing TV audiences in 1995, there were a couple notable deaths in the music world. Latin Pop singer Selena (dubbed the “Mexican Madonna”) / was shot and killed in a dispute over money, by a former fan club President. She was just 23 and on the verge of achieving major crossover success for Latin music, four years before Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez.

And then in August, Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack. In their long strange trip since the mid-60s, The Grateful Dead? Never bigger than when Garcia passed away. They spawned a whole movement of Jam Bands in the ’90s: Phish, Black Crowes, Spin Doctors, Dave Matthews and the group with the #8 Airplay hit of ’95, who were David Letterman’s favorite band: more appearances on that show than any other act.

It comes out #11 on the year ranking the songs according to the Hot100, but #8 Airplay, it’s Blues Traveler’s “Run Around.”

“Run Around.” In 1991, a few years before that song made Blues Traveler stars, group leader John Popper was at The Arrowhead Ranch 15 miles from the site of the original 1969 Woodstock playing with a bunch of other Jam Bands, and got the inspiration to organize the H.O.R.D.E. Festival: Jam Bands’ answer to the Alt Rock festival Lollapalooza. H.O.R.D.E. ran for seven successful years during a decade of Summer music festivals: Warped, Lilith Fair, Woodstock revivals.

#7 The Rembrandts – I’ll Be There for You

Next up at #7 is the song that made everyone realize that the Hot100 chart was broken: again, why we’re counting down the top ten Airplay hits here on our 1995 edition of the Chartcrush Countdown Show instead of the Hot100, our usual go-to. It was Billboard’s #1 Airplay song for eight straight weeks in the Summer of ’95, but disqualified from the Hot100 because it wasn’t out as a single.

All the way up to the end of 1998, Billboard stubbornly clung to its rule that songs had to be out as singles in order to chart on the Hot100, which was problematic because increasingly, hits weren’t being released as singles. Labels wanted to sell $15 albums, not $4 singles, but besides, once the 7-inch vinyl 45 faded, fans didn’t have much use for cassettes or CD’s with just a couple songs.

Now the exceptions, R&B, Dance and Hip-Hop: genres with a tradition of multiple versions and remixes of hit songs going back to the late ’70s and 12-inch vinyl. So-called “CD Maxi singles” in those genres: hot items because you couldn’t get the remixes and extended versions anywhere else. So the Hot100 skewed heavily in favor of R&B, Dance and Hip-Hop, at the expense of “song-is-the-song” genres.

But Rock and Country, still as big as ever on the Album charts and on the radio. And in the case of the #7 song on our 1995 Airplay countdown, TV, thanks to NBC’s Thursday night primetime hit Friends. It was the theme song. It’s The Rembrandts, “I’ll Be There for You.”

Friends premiered September 22, 1994, just three weeks after show producers decided it even needed a theme song, tried to get R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” but couldn’t, so recruited a Songwriter and Pop Rock Duo The Rembrandts to create one, and the result was “I’ll Be There for You.”

Friends was an immediate hit on TV but the whole first season you couldn’t buy the song in any format, until May of ’95 as Summer reruns were about to start and The Rembrandts tacked it on as the last track on their new album, L.P. But no single because the band didn’t write it and didn’t think it represented them, so the only way to get it was to buy the album. And before the end of the year, a million people did.

Finally in the Fall of ’95 with the release of the Friends soundtrack album for the premiere of Season Two of the show, “I’ll Be There for You” came out as a single and debuted at #17 on the Hot100, but that was after it’d become the first song ever to top the Airplay chart without being on the Hot100 at all over the Summer: the first of many like that over the next few years, it turned out, as Billboard continued its policy of disqualifying Airplay-only hits from the Hot100 all the way up to its 1999 chart year.

#6 Mariah Carey – Fantasy

At #6, the other extreme: a song that greatly benefitted from Billboard‘s singles-only policy. It was only the second single in history to debut at #1 on the Hot100, and by the end of ’95, that single was Double Platinum.

Billboard listed the album version on its charts, and that’s what Adult Contemporary and most Top40 stations played, but much of the song’s success was thanks to a remix (only on the single) by Bad Boy Records mogul Puff Daddy featuring Wu Tang Clan Rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard that crossed it and the artist over to the Hip-Hop audience just as that was about to become an essential career move for Pop Singers who wanted to stay relevant.

And no one was a bigger Pop Singer in the ’90s than she was. That’s not hyperbole, she literally was Billboard‘s top charting act of the ’90s decade. It’s Mariah Carey’s ninth #1 hit, the lead single from her 1995 Dream Lover album and our #6 Airplay hit of the year, “Fantasy.”

Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” #6 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1995’s top hits ranked from Billboard‘s weekly “Radio Songs” Airplay chart. It was also Billboard‘s #7 year-end Hot100 song.

That remix version I mentioned: it was a bold move and a big deal in ’95 for a star of Mariah’s caliber to embrace Rap like that, and she did it against the bluntly-expressed wishes of her mentor, label boss and hubby Tommy Mottola, a first-wave Boomer 20 years her senior who, like most Boomers, was immune, even hostile, to the pull of the Postmodern Gen-X sounds and sensibilities that transformed pop culture in the early ’90s.

Mottola couldn’t stop that remix, but he did quash her Alt-Rock band Chick, whose 1995 album Someone’s Ugly Daughter would’ve no doubt caused more than just a ripple if it’d come out with her original vocals instead of her friend Clarissa Dane’s overdubs as the band’s subbed-in frontwoman. Mariah’s involvement, a closely-guarded secret until her memoir spilled the deets in 2020.

By the way, that catchy bass line in “Fantasy?” It’s a sample from “Genius of Love,” by Tom Tom Club, the Talking Heads spinoff, that immediately caught on with Rappers upon its first appearance in 1981. No fewer than 85 Hip-Hop records using that sample before Mariah got a hold of it in ’95.

#5 Dionne Farris – I Know

Moving on, our #5 Airplay hit of ’95, also out as a single, and it just missed the year-end top ten on the Hot100 at #11, by a Singer who, despite getting her start in the epicenter of Hip-Hop (New York), got involved with the Atlanta Alternative Hip-Hop group Arrested Development and sang on their big hit in ’92, “Tennessee.” From there future American Idol judge Randy Jackson signed her to a solo album deal on Columbia, and this was her debut single from the album. It’s Dionne Farris’s “I Know.”

One-hit wonder Dionne Farris’ “I Know:” the #5 radio Airplay song of 1995 as we count down our top ten derived from that chart here on our 1995 edition of Chartcrush. She cut a follow-up album, but the label (same as Mariah Carey’s, Columbia) declined to release it, citing creative differences, and after that she quit music altogether to raise her daughter. But in 2007, she released the album herself on iTunes.

#4 Real McCoy – Another Night

At #4, another of the five songs in our Radio Songs-derived top ten countdown that were also in the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 singles chart. This one, a crossover from the Dance chart. Again, Dance, one of the genres that continued selling tons of singles in the ’90s thanks to extended Club, House and Special mixes not available anywhere else.

And the four-minute Radio version caught on, thanks to Arista Records boss Clive Davis, who’d struck gold in 1994 breaking Reggae-tinged Swedes Ace of Base in the U.S. and was looking to repeat that trick with this German Euro-Disco outfit that’d suddenly caught on in Canada. Well, Ace of Base they weren’t, but they were 1995’s Club Culture triumph: Billboard’s #1 New Pop Group of 1995, with three other Hot100 hits during the year besides our #4 song. It’s The Real McCoy with “Another Night.”

“Another Night” could easily have been the song that Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell’s Roxbury Guys on SNL bobbed their heads to in their rayon suits cruising clubs for women, but instead they chose a lesser Euro-Disco hit from ’93, Haddaway’s “What Is Love.” “Another Night” never topped the Radio Songs chart. It peaked at #2. But it was on the chart longer than any other ’95 hit: 44 weeks. And 45 on the Hot100, where it holds the record for most weeks at a chart position besides #1: 11 at #3.

#3 Madonna – Take a Bow

So, Mariah Carey, the top Pop Diva of the early ’90s, breaking out of her Adult Contemporary box in ’95 to embrace the Gen-X Postmodern taste inversion. Well, our act at #3 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1995: Billboard‘s top charting act of the ’80s, a constant provocateur and envelope pusher, to the point where multiple scholars and books have highlighted her as the central figure of Postmodernism, and she did the exact opposite from Mariah in ’95, even apologizing for putting everyone through the ringer.

“I’m going to be a good girl this year, I swear,” she said on video with a little girl in her lap. “Secret,” the lead single from her 1994 album Bedtime Stories topped out at #3 on the Hot100, but the second was #1 for seven weeks and topped the Airplay chart for nine. It’s Madonna, “Take a Bow.”

It ain’t easy being the vanguard of a cultural sea change for ten years! Feminist lightning rod Camille Paglia for one, got it, calling Madonna in a 1990 New York Times op ed “the true feminist” for exposing “the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode.”

So pushing limits worked in the ’80s and early ’90s. Why change? Well after MTV banned her video for “Justify My Love,” and after she almost got arrested for obscenity in Canada on her Blonde Ambition tour, her Girlie Show tour that made Blonde Ambition look tame by comparison, and finally, her bizarre, profanity-laced smell-my-panties appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in ’94, the eyebrow-raising had turned to serious public doubts about her sanity. So doing a 180 and cleaning it up seemed like the most shocking thing she could do for ’95, and with Bedtime Stories it paid off.

When “Take a Bow” hit #1, Madonna dethroned Carole King as the Female songwriter who had written the most #1 songs in chart history.

#2 Boyz II Men – On Bended Knee

And our act at #2 became the first act since The Beatles in 1964 to replace itself at #1 on the weekly Hot100 with a different song. Decades old chart records falling like dominoes in the ’90s.

Incidentally, The Beatles scored their first top ten Hot100 hit since the ’70s / in 1995, “Free as a Bird,” from their Anthology project. At #2 though, this group’s sixth Hot100 top ten hit since their chart debut in ’91, and their third #1, after “End of the Road” in ’92 and, more recently, “I’ll Make Love to You.” That’s our Chartcrush #1 song of 1994 and the one our #2 song of ’95 replaced to match that Beatles milestone. It’s Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee.”

So Mariah Carey, the top charting act of the ’90s on the Hot100; Boyz II Men, the top charting group of the decade, “On Bended Knee,” the #2 Airplay hit of 1995, and even bigger things were right around the corner. Their collaboration with Mariah, “One Sweet Day” hit the charts in December 1995 and stayed at #1 on the Hot100 for 16 weeks, another record broken. That one it stood until 2017.

#1 Seal – Kiss from a Rose

And that gets us to our #1 song according to the Billboard year-end Airplay chart: a sleeper hit. When the artist first wrote and recorded it all the way back in 1987, he was embarrassed by it; says he just threw the tape in the corner. Then five years later during the sessions for his second album, he dusted it off and gave it to his producer Trevor Horn to work on, and it peaked at #20 on the Hot100. Not bad for a throwaway song, right?

But then, it was selected for the hottest movie of 1995, Batman Forever and re-entered the chart, went all the way to #1, became the #1 Airplay single of 1995 with 10 weeks at #1, and won all the awards at the Grammys. It’s Seal, “Kiss from a Rose.”

“Kiss from a Rose,” Seal, the #1 song on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1995’s top Airplay songs, propelled by its appearance in the blockbuster Batman Returns. Over on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100, it was #4. Seal’s cover version of The Steve Miller Band’s “Fly like an Eagle” went to #10 in 1997, but he never came close to repeating his unexpected success with “Kiss from a Rose.”

Bonus

So that’s our top ten. As I’ve been saying, lots of differences between what was happening on radio in ’95 and the Hot100 with Billboard‘s rule about songs having to be out as commercial singles to be eligible to chart. Four of the year’s top ten Airplay hits we just heard in the countdown didn’t make Billboard‘s year-end top ten on the Hot100 despite being out as singles.

Our #10 song, Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down” was Billboard‘s #39 Hot100 hit of 1995 and #76 for ’96 since its chart run extended all the way to the end of March. Hootie & Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be with You,” which we have at #9: Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 had that one at #33. Our #8 Airplay hit, Blues Traveler’s “Run-Around” was #14 and Dionne Farris’ “I Know,” our #5 song was #11 on the year-end Hot100. And of course, The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” which we have at #7, didn’t make the year-end Hot100 at all because it wasn’t out as a single during its eight week run atop the Radio Songs chart.

But Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 had five other songs in the top ten that we didn’t hear this hour in our Airplay-derived ranking, so in the time we have left, let’s take a look at those.

#30 Montell Jordan – This Is How We Do It

At #10, Billboard had a six-foot eight R&B Singer whose first single used a ubiquitous Hip-Hop sample like Mariah Carey did with Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” on “Fantasy.” Here it was Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” one of the most sampled tracks of all-time. It’s Montell Jordan, “This Is How We Do It.”

The first non-Rap record on Def Jam after its acquisition by PolyGram, Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” Billboard‘s #10 Hot100 song of 1995. It notches in at #30 on our Airplay ranking we counted down the top ten from earlier.

#36 Monica – Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)

At #9 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 was the debut by a 14-year-old R&B Singer that was in the top ten for 14 weeks but only got to #2. If it’d gotten to #1, she would’ve dethroned Little Peggy March as the youngest Female with a #1 hit ever. Little Peggy March was 15 in 1963 when “I Will Follow Him” topped the chart. It’s Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days).”

Before Britney vs. Christina in ’99, there was Brandy vs. Monica, two Black Female Teens. Brandy hit first with “I Wanna Be Down” and “Baby” in the first half of the year, both top tens, but Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)” got all the way to #2. Neither Singer topped the chart ’til ’98, when they teamed up on “The Boy Is Mine.” “Don’t Take It Personal” was #36 on our Airplay ranking.

#19 TLC – Creep

Billboard‘s #3 and #2 Hot100 songs of 1995 were both by the ’90’s top charting Girl Group on the Hot100, but neither song was among the top ten Airplay hits we counted down this hour. Both were in the top 20 though. The one Billboard had at #3 was #19 on our Airplay ranking. Radio, generally more conservative about what goes on the air than fans about what they buy, and it’s a song about revenge cheating that topped the chart just weeks after the trio’s Rapper, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, burned down her boyfriend’s Atlanta mansion. It’s TLC’s “Creep.”

Considering how big they were in ’92 when their first album dropped, surprisingly, “Creep” was TLC’s first #1 hit on the Hot100. It only got to #3 on the Airplay chart though.

#17 TLC – Waterfalls

The third single off their 1994 CrazySexyCool album got to #2 though, and was #17 on our ’95 Airplay ranking, #2 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100. The song that kept Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal” from hitting #1 and breaking Little Peggy March’s record for youngest Female chart topper, it’s “Waterfalls.”

Tionne, Lisa & Chilli, TLC with “Waterfalls,” a song about AIDS and drug violence, and best video at the MTV Video Music Awards, a first for a Black artist.

#43 Coolio – Gangsta’s Paradise

As I said at the top of the show explaining why we were going with the Airplay chart for our ’95 Chartcrush Top Ten countdown, the Hot100 had ceased to be an accurate ranking of the nation’s top hits with Billboard sticking to its rule that songs had to be out as commercial singles. Until they finally changed that at the end of ’98, several top hits: absent from the Hot100. The Friends theme “I’ll Be There for You,” the most glaring omission in ’95.

Well the flip-side of that: looking at the Hot100, several songs that were out as singles appear much more popular than they really were, and no hit makes that point better than the song Billboard ranked #1 for 1995. It was #50 on their year-end Airplay ranking so how can it be the year’s top hit?

Besides the Soundtrack album it was on, the tough school Drama Dangerous Minds starring Michelle Pfeiffer, the only way fans could buy the song for its first three months in release was the single. That also boosted it on the Hot100, and a Gangsta Rap track being named the year’s #1 hit was a milestone in the mainstreaming of Hip-Hop. Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” featuring Singer L.V., Billboard‘s #1 Hot100 song of 1995 but only 50th on its Airplay ranking. No profanity on any version of that song thanks to Stevie Wonder, who made it a condition of sampling his 1976 song “Pastime Paradise” for the beat. Ironically, though, it’s one of the least Pop-oriented tracks by a Rapper, Coolio, who many have criticized for leaning too hard into Pop.

And with that, we’re gonna have to close out our 1995 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, but if you like what you heard and you want more, visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show, and a link to stream the expanded podcast version on Spotify, plus bangin’ 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, 1940s up 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.

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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 different year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag.

This week on Chartcrush it’s 1979, the year Disco suddenly, and spectacularly, flamed out at its height, after surging nearly four years, swept away in a sudden, spontaneous release of pent up frustration over the whole gamut of ’70s problems: energy crisis, urban rot, stagflation, malaise, the misery index, President Carter’s smiley aw-shucks beta personality, pussy-footing around with Soviets and terrorists, hand-wringing over Watergate and Vietnam, the Welfare State, collapsing morals and social fallout, and on and on. On the eve of the ’80s, all of it had to go. Not a conscious rebellion; more like a primal scream: just let this decade be over!

The last #1 Disco hit, Chic’s “Good Times,” referenced the 1930s Depression era that spawned Big Band Swing, another bad time that went on too long, and the last time dancing had been so big, not coincidentally. Virtually every city in ’79 had a Disco. And the latest thing: Disco roller rinks, especially out in the ‘burbs, with mirror balls and lights and DJ booths and the latest Disco records pumped through state-of-the-art sound systems.

By ’79 Disco had become a hegemonic genre-devouring vortex. First Funk, Soul and R&B, then Jazz and now even Rock and Country acts taking the Disco plunge! And radio? Well, AM Top 40, which still had half the audience for music: their job was to play the Top 40, regardless of genre, so that was now half Disco. But on FM, Disco-exclusive stations cropping up in major cities, and beating everyone else, even the big AM stations.

WKTU “Disco 92” in New York and infamously, WDAI in Chicago, previously an Album Rock station. Infamously because one DJ who lost his job when WDAI switched to Disco didn’t take it lying down. Moving to another Chicago Rock station, Steve Dahl took up the “Disco Sucks” mantle on his morning show, where he’d put on a Disco record and a few seconds in, scratch the needle across it with an explosion sound.

He got so popular doing that that the struggling Chicago White Sox thought they could fill some seats with a “Disco Sucks” promotion. Bring a Disco record, throw it in a bin and get in to a White Sox-Tigers doubleheader for just 98 cents (98, Dahl’s new home on the FM dial). And between games, “Disco Demolition” where Dahl detonates the bin of Disco records behind second base.

Well, fill seats it did: the biggest crowd ever at Comiskey Park, but there for “Disco Sucks,” not baseball, and after the explosion, total mayhem as thousands rushed the field and the Sox had to forfeit game 2. July 12, 1979. Disco Demolition Night, when the simmering Disco backlash burst out into the open and became a national news story.

And the shift on the charts: sudden and dramatic. For the first eight months of ’79, almost every #1 was either Disco or a slow song by a Disco act. But less than a month after “Disco Demolition,” Chic’s “Good Times” was nudged to #2 and The Knack’s “My Sharona” topped the chart for six weeks. And for the rest of the year, the top ten was a Discoless grab bag and the music biz, already reeling from a 20% drop in LP sales since ’78, was left scrambling.

MCA fired its entire A&R staff in ’79 and those laid-off staffers no doubt rode down to the lobby with their pink slips grumbling about cassette decks, home taping and the just-launched Sony Walkman. So it wasn’t just that folks were tired of Disco. But things didn’t pick up again for the industry ’til 1983 and ’84 with MTV. But that’s for another episode.

#10 KC & The Sunshine Band – Please Don’t Go

We kick off our 1979 Chartcrush countdown, with two hits at numbers 10 and 9 that both came very late in the year, months after Disco Demolition, and the one at #10 is something different from an iconic Disco group that landed four #1’s pre-Saturday Night Fever and Bee Gees, but zero after, not even a top 20, until this. Sometimes a couple years out of the limelight can be a good thing! At #10 it’s KC & The Sunshine Band’s only Ballad, “Please Don’t Go.”

KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go” at #10, stuck at #2 the last two weeks of the year behind the song we’re gonna hear next at #9 in our 1979 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, and then it moved up, and was the first #1 of the ’80s.

Now at Billboard, their year-end charts don’t go by calendar years. They have to give themselves time to get their year-end issue out before New Years, so there’s a cutoff, and in ’79 that cutoff was early: October 20, “Please Don’t Go’s” ninth week on the chart. It’s remaining 17 weeks, including its 11 in the top ten? In Billboard’s 1980 chart year. They have it at #19 for 1980. Well at Chartcrush, we do go by the calendar year, and rank every song’s full chart run in the year it earned the majority of its ranking points. No splitting. So it’s our #10 song of 1979.

#9 Robert Holmes – Escape (The Pina Colada Song)

Same situation with our #9 song. It was neck-and-neck in the top ten with “Please Don’t Go” December into January, and was the last #1 of the ’70s decade: a story song with an unexpected twist at the end, by a Singer-Songwriter who got his start in the anonymous world of late ’60s Bubblegum, then spent most of the ’70s writing ad jingles, songs for other artists (notably Barbra Streisand) and four albums, none of which charted. His fifth, though, was the charm, and its lead single took off. At #9, Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song).”

Narrative Story Songs, huge in the first half of the ’70s, then a lull as Disco ramped up, then a resurgence. Kenny Rogers had launched his solo career with his Country crossover Story Songs “Lucille” in ’77, “The Gambler” in ’78, and his latest “Coward of the County,” which was in the top ten at the same time as Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” the one we just heard at #9.

Rogers moved on from musical storytelling in the ’80s, but not Rupert Holmes. His Broadway musical based on Charles Dickens’ unfinished last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, won five Tony Awards in 1986. Once the follow-up singles after “Escape” ran their course in 1980, though, and two from his next album failed to crack the top 40, that was it for Rupert Holmes on the Pop charts.

#8 Peaches & Herb – Reunited

Next, the third song in a row in our Chartcrush Countdown for 1979, that isn’t Disco, but unlike the first two at numbers 10 and 9, it hit in the first part of the year, so, one of the #1 Ballads by Disco acts that I mentioned at the top of the show. The Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” was another: #1 for two weeks in January.

This one came later, #1 for four weeks in May, after their dancefloor-filler “Shake Your Groove Thing” had lit up the charts in March, four straight weeks at #5. Hey, the kiddos at the roller disco needed slow songs too! #1 for four weeks in May. At #8, it’s the Duo Peaches & Herb with “Reunited.”

Peaches & Herb weren’t really “Reunited” because it wasn’t the same “Peaches” who was with Herb Fame for their string of hits in the late ’60s including the song “United.” Francine Barker was “Peaches” in their “Sweethearts of Soul” days, and she’d retired. Herb had too, in 1970, to be a DC cop.

But music beckoned again and Producer Van McCoy, who’d put the first Peaches & Herb Duo together, hooked him up with former model Linda Greene, and she’s the “Peaches” on all their late ’70s stuff. McCoy had just scored himself with one of the first Disco #1s, his instrumental “The Hustle” in the Summer of ’75, but the Peaches & Herb relaunch album he produced in ’76 didn’t chart, so they switched labels and teamed up with Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren, the team who’d just done Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

Fekaris & Perren wrote and produced all of Peaches & Cream’s 2 Hot! album, and cranked out three more Peaches & Herb albums in ’80 and ’81, but except the ’80s wedding perennial “I Pledge My Love,” which topped out at #19, nothing connected like their hits in ’79.

#7 Village People – Y.M.C.A.

At #7, finally some Disco! By a group conceived as a celebration of the Gay lifestyle and club scene in New York that gave Disco its flashy, flamboyant aesthetic. Gays had come a long way since the 1969 Stonewall Riots that ignited the Gay Rights movement, but that scene was still deep underground, and few outside of it had any clue, least of all the kiddos at suburban roller rinks skating around to our #7 song, spelling out letters with their arms.

It never got to #1, but was #2 for three weeks in February and in the top ten for 12: enough to make it one of the top ten hits of the year. It’s The Village People’s second hit after “Macho Man” in the late Summer of ’78, “Y.M.C.A.”

A song about Gay men cruising for hookups—Cruisin’, the title of their album—at a place long-known for Gay hookups—the Y.M.C.A.—by a group named after New York’s Gay neighborhood—the Village—costumed as Gay Male fantasy personas—Cop, Cowboy, Hardhat, Indian, G.I., Biker—and formed specifically to target the Gay club scene… and still, most people in 1979 had no clue what any of that meant. Or even that there was a Gay club scene.

For many, their first inkling was scratching below the surface on “Y.M.C.A.” (or talking to someone who had). By the way, fun fact: Village People frontman Victor Willis, who wrote “Y.M.C.A.” is straight, married at the peak of the Village People’s fame to the future Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, Phylicia Rashad.

#6 Gloria Gaynor – I Will Survive

Well, we’re counting down the biggest hits of 1979 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, and in 1974, our Singer at #6 had helped usher in Disco with one of the earliest Disco top tens, her cover of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

On the album, it was the middle song in a three-song, 18-plus minute Disco suite: a first-of-its-kind by remix pioneer Tom Moulton, who understood that even DJs sometimes need to eat a sandwich or take a bathroom break! Moulton, also the compiler of Billboard’s first Dance Club Songs chart in October of ’74, on which he ranked “Never Can Say Goodbye” at #1. No more hits after that, though, until she helped close out the Disco era in ’79 with this, her biggest hit. At #6 it’s Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

It was the B-side, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” tacked on at the end a session after a long day recording the discoized Righteous Brothers cover issued as the A-side in August of ’78. But the single went nowhere until “I Will Survive” caught on with DJs, making the chart in December, then a slow four-month climb to #1 on the Hot100 for two weeks in March.

Written and produced by the same guys who did Peaches & Herb’s “Reunited” a short time later, former Motown producers Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren. And with the same backing band, but with a simpler arrangement, no back-up Singers, and none of the production flourishes usually on Disco hits by Female singers like sped up vocals, for one. So Gaynor’s voice on “I Will Survive” is unfiltered, unvarnished, and honest: a record that was way ahead of its time and remained a dancefloor anthem for many years.

#5 Rod Stewart – Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?

Well you’re listening to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, our 1979 edition, and we’re down to #5.

Now, David Bowie, Elton John, Paul McCartney and The Eagles had all scored Disco-dabbling hits in ’75 and ’76 when the sound was still incubating, having not yet completely outgrown its Funk and Philly Soul roots. But by ’78 thanks to Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees, it was nearly impossible to spin the radio dial, turn on a TV, or for that matter even walk down the street or go shopping without being bombarded by spandex, mirror balls and fuschia.

Imagine that from inside the music biz bubble! Disco wasn’t just a bandwagon anymore; it was a convoy of semis rolling down the interstate: Pop itself! So after the Rolling Stones took the plunge on “Miss You” and scored their first #1 in five years, our act at #5 saw the future and asked his Drummer Carmine Appice, formerly of the proto-Metal ’60s band Vanilla Fudge, to help him make it happen by writing a song like “Miss You.” And this was the result. At #5 it’s Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

The more ubiquitous Disco got, the more Rock fans felt alienated and forgotten. It’s a straight line from Rod Stewart showing up on TV in spandex and teased hair singing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” in February to Steve Dahl and Disco Demolition mid-Summer.

Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” hit in the Spring: a downtown Punk band going Disco! Then Pop-Progsters ELO with “Shine a Little Light” and KISS with “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” in the immediate lead-up to Disco Demolition. Wings “Goodnight Tonight” and The Kinks “Superman,” two others along that timeline, but Rod Stewart and “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” bore the brunt.

Around the same time as Disco Demolition, Steve Dahl himself was out with a parody single on an indie label: “Do You Think I’m Disco?” It charted for six weeks.

#4 Donna Summer – Bad Girls

And meanwhile, Disco’s own stars were soaring to new heights on the charts, like the one with the two-fer at numbers 4 and 3 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1979’s top ten hits. Both songs were in the top 5 at the same time for six straight weeks, June to the end of July, and that made her the first Black Artist since Louis Jordan in 1944 to have two hits in the top five the same week on the Pop chart, and the first-ever Black Woman.

In the Hot100 era she would’ve been the first Woman, period, but Linda Ronstadt beat her to it in December ’77. Gloria Gaynor may’ve been the first and one of the last Disco Divas, but Donna Summer with her eight top tens including three #1s from ’76 to ’79, was the quintessential Disco Diva. At #4, the second single and title track from her 1979 double album, “Bad Girls.”

“Bad Girls” at #4, inspired by an office assistant at Donna Summer’s label, Casablanca Records, mistaken for a street prostitute by a police officer while running an errand for her on Sunset Blvd. in L.A.

Label boss Neil Bogart shelved the song as too Rock upon hearing Donna’s demo in January, even suggesting giving it to the label’s latest signing, Cher. But as the album came together, with all the Rock acts scoring Disco hits, “Disco Sucks” gaining steam out in the wild and Summer’s own instincts to incorporate more Rock into her style, what was disqualifying in January had become a strength, so they went to work on it.

The “toot toots” and “beep beeps” were a last-minute ad lib by Summer looking to spice up what struck her as empty spaces in the song. On the album version, they continue a few more bars a capella after the music fades, which top40 DJs could’ve had some fun with on the air, but, alas, it wasn’t on the single version. But it became a meme anyway: arguably what made “Bad Girls” such a monster hit, #1 for five weeks, July into August…

#3 Donna Summer – Hot Stuff

…and the second song on the album, that opens with… our #3 song. And like Tom Moulton’s Disco suite leading off Gloria Gaynor’s album in ’75, the two songs flow into each other without missing a beat.

“Bad Girls” wasn’t a Rock song by the time Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte got done with it. But the leadoff track co-written by Bellotte (and also the album’s lead single)? At least as much a Rock song as “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” is Disco, four years before Michael Jackson’s Rock crossover “Beat It.” It even won Summer the first-ever Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. And she was nominated twice more for that in ’82 and ’83, but lost both times to Pat Benatar.

#1 for three weeks up against six for “Bad Girls,” but it hung around in the top ten four weeks longer, so when you add it all up it’s the bigger hit: again Donna Summer, with “Hot Stuff.”

Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” at #3. She went way back with Songwriter-Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, to her first record deal in Germany in ’74, having moved there in the late ’60s with a part in the Munich production of Hair.

Moroder and Bellotte’s fellow Munich Producers Sylvester Levay and Michael Kunze hit first in the U.S. with “Fly, Robin, Fly,” their minimalist take on Philly Soul credited to their Silver Convention project, but the week after that hit #1 in December of ’75, Summer’s first hit “Love to Love You Baby” debuted. That got to #2, and together those hits launched Euro-Disco and completely changed the trajectory of Dance music in the U.S.

Donna Summer weathered the Disco backlash better than most: continuing to score top fives in late ’79 and into the ’80s, even after parting ways with Casablanca Records and Giorgio Moroder to expand her creative horizons. She was never far from the Dance charts; her final album Crayons in 2008 yielded four #1 Dance/Club Play hits.

#2 The Knack – My Sharona

Next as we close in on #1 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1979, the song Billboard named #1 on the year. And that was quite an exclamation point on the Disco backlash at the time because it’s the record that decisively broke Disco’s nearly continuous stranglehold on the top spot since just after Saturday Night Fever hit theaters at the end of ’77.

It hit #1 August 25 just after Disco Demolition Night, stayed on top for six straight weeks, and in his article leading off the year-end charts, Billboard writer Paul Grien called it “the clarion call of the new music.” OK, but hold on. Was it really the #1 song of the year? Well not according to our Chartcrush ranking; we have it at #2! Explanation after the song. Here’s The Knack’s “My Sharona.”

Of course, a complete break from Disco; that’s the main headline. But even within Rock circles, “My Sharona” stood apart from the Prog and Soft Rock sounds on FM radio in the ’70s.

L.A. Times Music Editor Robert Hilburn hailed it as having restored the Teenage viewpoint to Rock: same thing they’d been saying in the U.K. about Punk. But Punk never caught on like that in America. Remember, Blondie had to make a Disco record, “Heart of Glass,” to make the charts, and by the way, Blondie and The Knack had the same Producer, Aussie Mike Chapman. So “Sharona” was New Wave’s “Rock Around the Clock” Stateside, even if it took a few more years (and MTV) for it to blossom on the charts.

Here’s a bit of trivia: Sharona was a real person: Knack front man Doug Feiger’s girlfriend. She’s on the picture sleeve of the 45. When they met she was 17. He was 25.

Song parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first single was a “My Sharona” send-up, “My Bologna.”

As for The Knack? Well, they toured nonstop and their second album sounded just like their first, but they faded fast after “My Sharona” and the follow-up “Good Girls Don’t,” which peaked at #11. ’79 was still too soon for a band to not sheepishly demur when compared to The Beatles, which they were, often. No, instead they invited that comparison, and appalled Rock critics punished them by blasting their over-the-top sexist lyrics.

Doug Feiger slipped into a spiral of addiction for a few years before sobering up in the mid-80s, but sadly died of cancer at just 57 in 2010.

#1 Chic – Le Freak

OK, so here’s why “My Sharona” was Billboard’s #1 song of 1979, but it’s #2 on our Chartcrush ranking we’ve been counting down. It’s because Billboard‘s methodology in ’79 strongly favored consecutive weeks at #1. “My Sharona” and our #1 song both had six weeks on top, but “Sharona’s” were consecutive while our #1 song’s weren’t: knocked down to #2 twice, first by Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond’s “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” in December ’78, then by The Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” for its two weeks in January ’79.

Both times, though, it reclaimed the #1 spot to rack up its six weeks. And it was in the top ten three weeks longer than “Sharona,” so using our Chartcrush formula (which, by the way, is identical for every year we rank), our #1 song is Billboard’s #3 song of ’79: Chic’s “Le Freak.”

Chic was Guitarist Nile Rodgers and Bassist Bernard Edwards’ project, with hired female Singers, and “Le Freak,” the first of their two #1s before the Disco implosion and #1 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1979’s top ten hits.

Their first hit, “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” had been the #1 Dance Club song for seven weeks at the end of ’77, and then crossed over to peak at #6 on the Hot100 in early ’78, so Rodgers and Edwards were kind of a big deal New Years Eve ’78, when they showed up, dressed to the nines, at New York’s hottest Disco, Studio 54, invited by Jamaican-American Supermodel Singer Grace Jones, who was performing.

But Jones forgot to get them on the guest list and the door man wouldn’t let them in. So after a heated exchange, they hit a liquor store, went back to Rodgers’ apartment and wrote the song that would evolve into “Le Freak,” only that night, “Freak Out!” wasn’t the phrase on their minds; it was another more pointed phrase that also abbreviates to “F.O.” Chic topped the chart again later in ’79 with the aforementioned “Good Times,” Disco’s final #1 on August 18. “My Sharona” bumped it to #2 the next week.

So that’s the top ten here on our 1979 edition of Chartcrush, but between Billboard’s ranking published at the end of ’79 and ours, the shakeup at #1 isn’t the only difference. To review, our #10 song, KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go,” had only just entered the weekly top ten at the end of Billboard‘s ’79 chart year, so they ranked it #19 in 1980. Same with our #9 song, Rupert Holmes’ “Escape.” That’s their #11 song, again 1980. So with those two coming in to our Chartcrush top ten, Billboard’s #9 and #10 songs got bumped out. So, just to be thorough, let’s take a look at those.

At #10 they had the song that replaced “My Sharona” at #1 in October: Robert John’s “Sad Eyes.”

“Sad Eyes” notches in at #12 on our Chartcrush ranking, Robert John had been at it since the late ’50s, didn’t score a big hit ’til ’72 (a cover of the Tokens’ “Lion Sleeps Tonight” that got to #3), and then it was another seven years before he got to #1, with a song he wrote, “Sad Eyes.”

And at #9, Billboard had another hit from the first half of the year (the Disco half), Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell.”

“Ring My Bell” was a longshot hit, written by one of the co-founders of start-up Juana Records as a Teen Pop song about talking on the phone, and intended for 12-year-old R&B singer Stacy Lattislaw, who jumped ship to sign with a major label before she cut it. So the song fell into Anita Ward’s lap; she was working on an album right at the same time on that label. Her only top 40 hit, #1 for two weeks. It just misses the top ten on our Chartcrush ranking, at #11.

And with that, we’re gonna have to close out our 1979 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show because we are all out of time. But if you like what you heard and you want more, visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and link to stream our podcast version on Spotify, plus primo 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, 1940s up 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 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 in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority. This week on Chartcrush we’re counting down the biggest hits of 1946, the first year Billboard did year-end charts, adding up the action on their previous 52 weekly Retail Sales, Disk Jockey, Jukebox, Live Radio and Sheet Music charts, song-by-song, record-by-record, artist-by-artist, label-by-label, composer-by-composer, publisher-by-publisher: quite an undertaking on a tight deadline without computers!

But in 1946, Americans knew all about epic undertakings, having just split the atom and won a two-front World War; then reassimilating 12 million returning GIs and transitioning from wartime quotas, wage and price controls and government central planning to the boom of suburbs, cars, consumer goods and babies that drove Postwar economic expansion.

But at the same time, a new threat was gathering, and the guy that first called it out, was the same guy who’d called out Hitler in the ’30s, Britain’s recently unemployed wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Invited to speak at a college in President Truman’s home state of Missouri in March of ’46 after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had said that a war between East and West was inevitable, Churchill declared that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across Central Europe, and all the countries behind it were now in what he called “the Soviet sphere.”

Truman, by the way, President less than a year. So, new President, a new world map, new technologies, and now a new threat. That’s a lot of anxiety-inducing newness to dump in the middle of a victory party, and the weird mix of confidence and terror spawned sci-fi and film noir in the late ’40s but also a massive nostalgia wave: people craving what was comfortable and familiar from the past, but also trying to define what America was and wasn’t in an era of ideologies.

The Hays Code had been around since the 30s: before ratings, the movie business’s guidelines so studios didn’t have to worry about the patchwork of different state and local decency laws across the country. It also affected music since most hit songs were written for movies. But all through ’46, Billboard was reporting on civic leaders and “vigilante” “blue-nose” groups (their words) going after “indecent” entertainment in their communities, pushing for tighter restrictions and more aggressive enforcement.

Frank Capra’s holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life came out at the end of ’46 contrasting protagonist George Bailey’s bucolic hometown, Bedford Falls, with trashy Pottersville in the alternate reality if Bailey had never been born. In 2019, a writer in Esquire preferred Pottersville’s neon, strip clubs, pool halls and Hot Jazz to Bedford Falls, “where,” he said, “the coolest thing you can do is throw rocks at a condemned house.”

But in ’46 it wasn’t a debate. Most of the top Jazz Big Bands called it quits in ’46, up against a changing market and a hefty federal sin tax on dancing establishments passed by Congress in ’44, and that left the field to the Crooners and Pop-oriented Bands that ruled the charts for the rest of the decade.

#10 Bing Crosby with Carmen Cavallaro at the Piano – I Can’t Begin to Tell You

And at #10 as we kick things off here on our 1946 edition of Chartcrush, the original star Crooner, teaming up with “The Poet of the Piano” Carmen Cavallaro, fresh from his massive 1945 hit with his band version of “Chopin’s Polonaise.” At #10 it’s Bing Crosby and Cavallaro with “I Can’t Begin to Tell You.”

Bing Crosby and Carmen Cavallaro’s “I Can’t Begin to Tell You” at #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1946’s biggest hits. The song was from a movie, The Dolly Sisters, a biopic about identical twins who make it big on Broadway. Singer-Actress and Pinup Betty Grable sings it in the film and her version was also out on a record, but Crosby and Cavallaro’s was the bigger chart hit.

Since the first six weeks of its run were in 1945, it’s not anywhere near the top ten on any of Billboard‘s three year-end charts for ’46: Best Sellers, DJ spins and Jukebox plays. But at Chartcrush we count every song’s full chart run in the year it scored most of its points, so we have it at #10 on the year: the biggest of Crosby’s 11 charting records in ’46.

#9 Kay Kyser and His Orchestra (vocal Michael Douglas) – Ole Buttermilk Sky

And at #9, another year-straddling hit, but from the end of 1946 into 1947. Again, counting full chart runs surfaces it as one of 46’s top hits. It’s a song by Great American Songbook legend Hoagy Carmichael, written for the 1946 Technicolor Western Canyon Passage: a scene where the Male lead is getting ready to propose to his girl, hoping for a romantic, moonlit night, and Carmichael sings it himself in the film, but the biggest hit was by the Kay Kyser Orchestra, sung by future daytime TV talk show host Mike Douglas, “Ol’ Buttermilk Sky.”

Hoagy Carmichael’s own record of his song “Ol’ Buttermilk Sky” on the ARA record label also charted, well below Kyser’s on Columbia we just heard at #9 for the last 12 weeks of the year, but a new Carmichael version on Decca dropped later in the year leading up to the Oscars and surpassed Kyser’s. Not long enough to be the bigger hit overall, and he lost the Oscar to Johnny Mercer’s “Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

But fast forward five years to 1951 and it’s Carmichael and Mercer together at the podium accepting Best Original Song for “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” which they co-wrote! We’ll be hearing another tune by Hoagy Carmichael later as we continue counting down the top ten hits of 1946, here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush.

#8 Dinah Shore – The Gypsy

At #8 is the first of two versions of the same song in our top ten. Five versions were on the charts in the Summer of ’46: a common occurrence at a time when few performers were writing their own songs and Tin Pan Alley publishers were still the gravitational center of the music biz. After Mike Douglas we just heard, another ’40s Singer who went on to Daytime TV Talk Show glory in the ’70s. But she didn’t just sing on a couple hits; 21 top tens from ’41 to ’49. She was the top charting Female of the entire ’40s decade. It’s Dinah Shore’s version of “The Gypsy.”

Dinah Shore’s version of “The Gypsy,” #8 here on the 1946 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. English Bandleader Billy Reid wrote the song for Welsh Singer Dorothy Squires, and that record was a hit in the U.K., but Squires and Dinah have something else in common: serious relationships with much younger men: Squires married future James Bond Roger Moore at 38. He was 26. And Dinah in her late fifties was hot ‘n heavy with Actor Burt Reynolds for six years in the early ’70s. He was in his late thirties.

#7 Betty Hutton – Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

At #7, as promised, another Hoagy Carmichael song from a movie, but unlike his “Old Buttermilk Sky” we heard at #9, the hit version is by the Singer-Actress who does it in the film, known for her over-the-top, manic performances in movies since 1942, and by ’46, one of Paramount’s top box office draws. And even though she was a Singer before she was an Actress, none of her records cracked the top 5 on any chart until this one in ’46. At #7, from the movie The Stork Club in which she plays a Nightclub Singer, it’s Betty Hutton’s “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.”

Betty Hutton, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1946. Irving Berlin’s Annie, Get Your Gun debuted on Broadway in ’46, about Buffalo Bill’s Female sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Ethel Merman played the lead on Broadway, but Betty Hutton was Annie in the 1950 blockbuster movie, her most enduring role.

By the way, two songs from Annie, Get Your Gun were in the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Honor Roll of Hits for ’46. That was their chart that combined all versions of songs out on records and factored in Sheet Music sales. “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” was #5 and “They Say It’s Wonderful” was #10, but none of the versions of those songs cut by A-list Pop Singers and on the charts at the same time made our countdown of the top ten records of the year.

#6 Frank Sinatra – Five Minutes More

At #6, a Singer who accumulated a lot of nicknames over the years in different phases of his career, but the first? “Skinny,” his most striking physical characteristic. He kind of invited the taunt as a hotshot upstart unapologetically Crooning to maximum seduction effect for his teenaged Female fans (“Bobbysoxers”), and then brazenly challenging the status quo of headline Bandleaders and Featured Vocalists, going solo at the height of Big Bands in 1941. That was a genuinely gutsy move. Only Bing Crosby had survived the public backlash against the first wave of Pop Crooners in the early ’30s.

But also because Bandleader Tommy Dorsey owned 43% of his lifetime earnings by contract. Genovese family underboss Willie Moretti may or may not have convinced Dorsey to sell that contract for one dollar. As big as the Singer was as a solo act after that, though, he didn’t hit #1 on any chart, ’til 1946 when he did it twice, first with a Ballad that only topped the DJ chart, not Best Sellers or Jukeboxes, but then in late September, this was #1 on all three the same week, and Billboard started using a new nickname, “The Voice.” At #6, Frank Sinatra’s “Five Minutes More.”

You wanna hear some Swing, check out the Glenn Miller Band’s version of that song, “Five Minutes More,” which was on the charts at the same time as Sinatra’s we just heard at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1946. Miller, of course, the biggest of the Big Bandleaders before the war, but he enlisted to lead the Army Air Forces Band in ’42, and in ’44 the plane taking him to newly-liberated France went down over the English Channel.

Sax Player/Vocalist Tex Beneke took over, and the first records by Beneke and the Glenn Miller Orchestra hit in ’46, but #4 was as high as any of them got on the charts. By year’s end as I mentioned earlier, most of the Big Bands, even Tommy Dorsey’s, had called it quits.

#5 Perry Como – Prisoner of Love

So the Pop charts now belonged to Singers, but Crosby and Sinatra weren’t the only Crooners scoring hits, and in fact, the most successful on the charts in ’46 is the one at #5. Billboard named the record #1 on its year-end Retail Best-Sellers chart, and since most sources (even Billboard) default to Sales talking about pre-Hot100 song rankings, it’s considered the year’s biggest hit. Only problem with that, record players and records were expensive in the ’40s; the vast majority of people were listening on radios and jukeboxes. Still, on our combined ranking that factors Airplay, Jukeboxes and Retail Sales it was in the top 3 for 14 straight weeks. Here’s Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love.”

Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love,” the #5 song of 1946 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Como was making a good living on tour with the Ted Weems Orchestra in the ’30s but quit in 1940 after his son was born to go home to Pennsylvania, open a barber shop and settle down. It wasn’t long, though, before an agent wooed him back with a deal where he could stay put and didn’t have to travel: his own network radio show and a gig at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, which was held over through the entire Summer of ’43.

RCA-Victor needed a Crooner to compete with Sinatra on Columbia and Crosby on Decca, so they snapped him up, and his World War 2 victory year smash “Till the End of Time” in ’45 made him a superstar. Perry Como managed to chart at least one top ten hit every year until 1958.

#4 Frankie Carle and His Orchestra (vocal Marjorie Hughes) – Rumors Are Flying

At numbers 4 and 3 we have a two-fer for you: two records in a row by the same act, and it’s a Band, not a Singer. Well, a Band with a Singer, but the Singer isn’t the headliner. That crediting arrangement lingered a few more years before going all but extinct in the ’50s. Anyway, the Singer was the Bandleader’s daughter. His wife slipped an unmarked recording into an audition stack, and he chose his own 19-year-old daughter not knowing who she was!

Finding out didn’t change his mind, and audiences loved her, but he didn’t like the optics so it was a secret until Walter Winchell got the scoop and spilled it in his gossip column. But that was after their first big hit of ’46 and no one seemed to mind. At #4, their second big hit of ’46 (we’ll hear that first one next in our two-fer). #1’s, for eight straight weeks in the Fall it’s Frankie Carle & Orchestra, vocal by Marjorie Hughes, “Rumors Are Flying.”

“Rumors Are Flying,” #4 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1946’s top records, ’46’s top band, Frankie Carle’s Orchestra featuring Carle’s daughter Marjorie Hughes on the vocal.

#3 Frankie Carle and His Orchestra (vocal Marjorie Hughes) – Oh! What It Seemed to Be

Carle first got noticed as the Piano Player in Horace Heidt’s Musical Knights, who were big on network radio and scored a string of top tens in ’41 and ’42, but he eventually outgrew that and started his own band, which debuted live in early ’44. They first made the charts in ’45 but putting Marjorie in the spotlight was what cracked the code, and at #3, as promised, their first hit of ’46, #1 or 2 for ten weeks in the Spring, “Oh! What It Seemed to Be.”

Billboard named Dinah Shore the year’s top Female Singer even though Marjorie Hughes blew her away on chart points, but as the featured Singer on her dad’s band records. Being a headliner had its advantages! By the way, if you’re listening on Spotify, the podcast version of the show, you heard live versions of both those Frankie Carle songs from 1946 radio broadcasts. They don’t have the hit record versions.

Frank Sinatra also scored big with “Oh! What It Seemed to Be.” His version was tops on the DJ chart (radio’s love affair with ‘ol Blue Eyes: already in full blossom in ’46), but Carle had the edge in Record Stores and on Jukeboxes, so was #1 with Sinatra’s at #2 overall for five weeks in the Spring. After a few more hits with Marjorie singing ’47 to ’49, Carle took his band over to RCA-Victor and Marjorie stayed with Columbia as a solo act. They still performed live together for a while, but neither charted again and Marjorie left showbiz completely in 1950.

#2 Eddy Howard and His Orchestra (vocal Eddy Howard) – To Each His Own

OK, we’re down to #2 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1946’s top ten hits: the breakthrough by a Bandleader from L.A. who came up in the ’30s as a featured Singer with fellow Californian Dick Jurgens’ Swing Band, then started his own band in ’39: one of the first Singing Bandleaders.

That was good way to weather the shift from Big Bands to star Vocalists in the mid-40s. He was a chart newcomer and had a lot of competition with the song: five different versions in the top ten on our combined weekly ranking for three straight weeks in September. That’s a record! But he came out on top and scored the year’s #1 Airplay hit and the #2 hit overall, it’s Eddy Howard with “To Each His Own.”

Eddy Howard’s “To Each His Own” at #2 here on our 1946 edition of Chartcrush: another song written for a movie, with the same title. Multiple Oscar-nominated score writer Victor Young wrote the music for the film, but passed on taking a crack at the title song because no one at the time knew that phrase, “to each his own.” It’s from a 17th century John Donne poem. Producer Charles Brackett wouldn’t change the title though, so second-string Songwriters Jay Livingston & Ray Evans got their big break: the #2 record of the year, but also the year’s #2 song.

#1 Ink Spots – The Gypsy

Now if you’re listening to the countdown and thinking “man, the charts were skewing awfully White in the ’40s,” well, we’ve got a surprise for you at #1. And ’46 wasn’t the first year that a Black artist scored the #1 hit of the year. The Mills Brothers’ “Paper Doll,” #1 on the year 1943. And in the top ten for years in the ’40s, Louis Jordan and the Mills Brothers again in ’44 and Ella Fitzgerald, a very respectable #14 that year. And of course Nat “King” Cole in ’47 and again in ’48.

But the top charting Black act of the decade was the Group at #1 for ’46. After huge years in 1940 and ’43 they were back bigger than ever. We heard Dinah Shore doing the song back at #8, but at #1 it’s The Ink Spots version of “The Gypsy.”

Ink Spots with the #1 song of 1946 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, #1 for ten straight weeks, and their version of “To Each His Own” was also a top ten hit in ’46. They had one of the most identifiable sounds in Pop history thanks to their so-called “top & bottom” formula: lead vocal by Balladeer Bill Kenny, and a talking bass part, first by Hoppy Jones until his death in 1944, then by Bill’s brother Herb Kenny, who we just heard on “The Gypsy.” From 1940 to ’51, 19 charting records including 11 top tens.

Bonus

Well there you go: the top ten songs of 1946 according to our Chartcrush recap of Billboard‘s weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. Again, our ranking derived by combining those three charts into a Hot100-style chart, then using the same method we use for Hot100 years to calculate the points. But looking at the charts individually, there were records that made the top ten on one, but not the others, and since we have a little bit of time, let’s take a look at those.

#17 Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers – Personality

First, one that Billboard had in the top ten of both their year-end Best-Sellers and DJ charts. Our ranking algorithm wasn’t as generous, but it’s our #17 song overall: the big 1946 hit by 1945’s top charting artist, Johnny Mercer, here with the Pied Pipers Vocal Group, “Personality.”

Pretty racy for a mid-’40s Pop hit! Where was the Hays office on that one? Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers’ “Personality.”

#16 Frank Sinatra – Oh! What It Seemed to Be

Next is the #4 song on our DJ ranking, but nowhere near the top ten on for Sales or Jukeboxes. Did I mention that radio loved Frank Sinatra? Here’s his version of “Oh! What It Seemed to Be.”

We heard Frankie Carle and Marjorie Hughes’ version of “Oh! What It Seemed to Be” at #3 in the Countdown; Sinatra’s shakes out at #16.

#12 Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters – South America, Take It Away

Our #12 overall hit comes out #9 on our Best-Sellers re-crunch: two of the ’40s top acts teaming up for another #1 after their “Don’t Fence Me In” in ’45: Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, “South America, Take It Away.”

“South America, Take It Away,” Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, a song about the Latin dance craze as Pan-Americanism and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy took root in the culture.

Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra (vocal Vaughn Monroe and The Norton Sisters) – Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

And finally, just missing our top ten for 1946 at #11, a Holiday song that we have as the year’s #10 Best-Seller and #7 DJ hit. Five weeks on top January into February made it the biggest Holiday hit since Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” in ’42: Vaughn Monroe’s “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

Dean Martin’s 1959 version of “Let It Snow!” started charting every year at holiday time in 2018 as on-demand streaming took over, but Vaughn Monroe’s, the original hit, was in 1946.

And wouldn’t you know it, just when you’re feeling festive, it’s time to wrap things up for our 1946 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. 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 ducky 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 I hope you’ll tune in again this time next week, same station, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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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 count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive 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 we’re turning the clock back to 2010, the second year of the Obama presidency, the country coming out of the Great Recession, and on Christmas Eve 2009 during a blizzard in D.C., the Senate passed Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” the most sweeping expansion of federal social spending and power since the mid ’60s. And while the Tea Party ramped up to oppose final passage by the House, angrily confronting politicians at town halls waving yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, Pop amped up into a hedonistic party mode not seen since Disco. Bad economies and dancing: closely linked since at least the 1930s. And no one was more anxious about their wallet in 2010 than the music biz, in freefall from online piracy for ten years already, with five years still to go before rock bottom.

But the explosion of Dance Pop that started in the late ’00s as crowds at U.S. EDM festivals swelled to Woodstock proportions was different, so much so that Billboard declared it the start of a “new era.” For one, its scale was unprecedented. Of the 15 #1’s on the Hot100 in 2010, only six were not, as Billboard put it, “synth-driven, Auto-Tuned, four-on-the-floor-influenced” Dance Pop. Peak Disco in ’78, less than half the #1s were Disco.

But for another thing, 2010’s Dance Pop had the support and approval of critics. That was definitely new. Critics had always been at best dismissive of Dance music. That they weren’t in 2010 was thanks in large part to a kind of production philosophy articulated by Black Eyed Peas mastermind will.i.am. It went something like this: at any given moment there’s a “bubble” (Will’s word) of what people want to hear. Capturing it in the grooves and scoring a hit: obviously a commercial achievement. It’d always been that. But while Black Eyed Peas were #1 for an amazing 26 straight weeks over the Summer of ’09 with their back-to-back hits “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Got a Feeling,” will talked it up into an artistic achievement as well: the insight and ability to collect and harness sounds and feelings, and mold them into something that taps into or even becomes the “bubble,” not randomly but with intention. Kind of like Andy Warhol’s visual art philosophy applied to music, and critics ate it up. So did a music biz desperate for new models. And with the flood of view, click, like and share data now coming from the internet and social media, the “bubble” could be quantified and exploited with a scientific precision never before possible, which that made will’s new philosophy of Pop irresistible from a business standpoint.

All the data points, of course: also how success was now being measured too, on top of the old-skool metrics like sales, airplay and charts. But the downside? Well, it’s kind of like how the science of aerodynamics and government fuel efficiency standards made cars all look the same: hit records started sounding a lot alike. Critics noticed that too, but 2010’s Dance Pop was a perfect storm of converging trends, and the cover of Billboard‘s 2010 Year in Music issue summed it up: a man in a fur coat, fishnet stockings and a foil crown with arms outstretched holding a bottle of champagne with the headline “Why Pop Rules.”

#10 Usher featuring Pitbull – DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love

So with that, let’s dive in at #10 with the first of five Auto-tuned, four-on-the-floor Dance Poppers we’ll be hearing this hour. It peaked at #4, so not among the nine Clubby #1’s during the year that Billboard called out to make its point about a new era in Pop, but it hung around in the top ten for 15 weeks: a Singer-Rapper collab co-written by the Rapper, and co-produced by Swedish producer Max Martin, his first time working with either artist. It’s Usher and the Rapper who co-wrote, Pitbull, with “DJ Got Us Falling in Love.”

The perfect song to lead off our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for a year when Club music conquered the charts: “DJ Got Us Falling in Love,” from what was disc two of the deluxe reissue of Usher’s 2010 album Raymond v. Raymond, also issued in the Fall as the standalone EP Versus. Cash-strapped fans appreciated that. Club sounds, of course: dominant across the Atlantic since the ’90s, and a handful of Euro-Disco singles had scored big in the U.S. But it took a full-on merger with Hip-Hop to put it over the top Stateside. Pitbull, the Miami-based Latin Rapper on the track, originally wrote “DJ Got Us Falling” with his collaborators for Rihanna, but she turned it down.

#9 Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

The origin point of the ’10s Club Pop boom was Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” in ’06, which topped both the Hot100 and Dance charts with Rapping throughout by the Producer/mastermind behind the track, Timbaland. Rap plus vocal hooks, common in R&B but not in Euro-Clubby hits, at least since the early ’90s. Britney Spears might’ve grabbed the momentum with her Clubby ’07 album Blackout, but the baggage of her Teen Pop image and imploding personal life held her back, so it was our upstart Diva at #9 who grabbed the controls and hit the launch button. Blogger Ryan McNutt described her in 2010 as “a twisted pop mashup of sex, murder and electro-clash,” and she quickly came to personify not just Euro-Disco, but will.i.am’s entire Warholian stardom-as-pop-art ethos. After three straight #1s in ’09, she barreled into 2010 with what Billboard described as a “virtually uninterrupted flow of content…and press-worthy spectacles.” Like Usher’s Versus, her Fame Monster EP was a recession-busting standalone release of just the new songs from the deluxe reissue of her album The Fame, and this was its lead single. At #9 it’s Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”

Billboard’s #1 artist of 2010, Lady Gaga, with the #9 song of the year, “Bad Romance” here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It was also the #2 Dance/Club song of the year, and she accepted her Video of the Year award for it at the MTV VMAs wearing a dress made entirely of raw beef, which Time named the year’s top fashion statement. But maybe the most extreme thing about Gaga in 2010: the nine-and-a-half minute video for “Telephone,” her next hit after “Bad Romance.” It co-starred Beyonce, so that was huge, but it also had nine (count ’em nine) conspicuous paid product placements: Virgin Mobile, Diet Coke, Wonder Bread, Miracle Whip and the dating site Plenty of Fish. And Polaroid, who even appointed her to be their new Creative Director. She also did a lucrative deal with Armani in 2010. An ad exec had told Billboard in ’07 that Pop stars getting in bed with corporations wasn’t “selling out” anymore, it was “selling in,” and indeed, Millennials didn’t seem to care. The poison used in the “Telephone” vid, though? Well, thankfully that was generic.

#8 Usher featuring will.i.am – OMG

So, Gaga, the epitome of the whole “bubble” concept that lifted the brazen pursuit of Pop culture glory to high art status (perhaps the final triumph of the postmodern taste inversion that turned the corner in the early ’90s), but next at #8, the guy I’ve been talking about who came up with that “bubble” concept, will.i.am. He’s the featured performer on the track, but doesn’t just Rap; he produced and wrote it. And if you’re thinking the headliner must be a pretty big deal if will.i.am settled for a feature, you’d be right. It’s the Singer’s ninth #1, and it made him the first act in the 2010’s to top the chart in three decades (and only the fourth in history). #1 for four weeks in May and June, at #8, again, Usher, “OMG.”

Usher, one of the top Singers of his time, had no use for Auto-Tune, yet it’s all over his vocals on “OMG,” #8 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of the top ten hits of 2010. Auto-Tune, the digital effect that produces a futuristic, stepped pitch effect when pushed to its limits on vocal tracks, unleashed by T-Pain in ’06. And by 2010 everyone was using it, even Usher. Reluctantly, though. In 2013, three years after “OMG” and fading on the charts, his steamy, Hip-Hop-inflected R&B style already a ’00s relic, Usher cornered T-Pain on a plane and bitterly accused him of ruining music for real Singers. Usher did go out with a bang, though: eight charting singles in 2010, including the #1 “OMG” and our #10 song, “DJ Got Us Falling in Love.” His biggest year since “Yeah,” “My Boo” and Confessions in ’04.

#7 Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys – Empire State of Mind

And speaking of Auto-Tune, at #7, a song by its most famous and outspoken detractor. He even proclaimed its demise in ’09 in his song “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune).” Which was gutsy move: kind of like if Eric Clapton had announced the end of fuzztone in 1968, or Sting the end of synthesizers in ’87—wishful thinking. Drake, Future, Travis Scott kept Auto-Tune front and center through the ’10s, not to mention Kanye West, who was a protégé of our would-be prophet. But you won’t find any Auto-Tune on his ’09 album The Blueprint 3, or on what became his only career #1. At #7 it’s Jay-Z featuring Billboard’s #1 R&B/Hip-Hop Artist of the 2000s decade Alicia Keys, “Empire State of Mind.”

“Empire State of Mind,” Jay-Z and Alicia Keys at #7. Don’t look for it in the top ten of any Billboard year-end ranking though: its chart run was split between their 2009 and 2010 chart years, so it’s #62 on their ’09 tally, and #21 for 2010.. But factoring its full chart run into 2010 (the calendar year it accumulated most of its points, as we do with every song for our Chartcrush rankings), it comes out at #7. Jay-Z, a towering figure in Hip-Hop with nine straight #1 studio albums under his belt by 2010, but of his 36 Hot100 singles as a headliner since his debut in 1996, no #1s until “Empire State of Mind.” Different story as a featured Rapper though: 21 hits with three #1: Mariah Carey’s “Heartbreaker” in ’99; girlfriend, then wife, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” in ’03; and his top discovery as the head of Def Jam Records, Rihanna: “Umbrella” in ’07.

#6 Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg – California Gurls

The rivalry between New York and L.A.’s Hip-Hop scenes in the ’90s, of course, like the Wild West: the stuff of legend. The bullets had stopped flying years ago by 2010, though, as Atlanta eclipsed both in the ’00s and Midwestern scenes flourished: Eminem out of Detroit, Nelly out of St. Louis; Kanye West from Chicago. But a #1 anthem about New York by Jay-Z demanded a West Coast response, even in 2010, and it’s at #6, back-to-back with “Empire State of Mind.” The bigger hit: six weeks at #1 vs. “Empire’s” five. It’s OG West Coast Rapper Snoop Dogg featuring on the lead single off fellow California native Katy Perry’s sophomore album Teenage Dream, “California Gurls.”

Major market radio stations in droves: flipping from Rock to Pop around the turn of the decade because the ratings books were telling execs that audiences were skewing too Male. That’s part of the reason why so many new Female superstars emerged in those years. As big as Katy Perry was in 2010 though, four other Females outranked her on Billboard’s overall Female Artists ranking: a crowded field in the early ’10s. “California Gurls,” her collab with Snoop Dogg, #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2010’s biggest hits. Girls spelt with a “u,” so as not to be confused with the Beach Boys classic. Billboard named it the year’s top Summer hit, and when they updated their ranking of the top 30 Biggest Summer Hits of All Time, it came out #1. Beach Boys’ were #16.

#5 Eminem featuring Rihanna – Love the Way You Lie

At #5, another Rapper/Singer hit that replaced “California Gurls” at #1 at the end of July. Unlike Jay-Z, this Rapper did score #1 hits in the ’00s: two of ’em, the first of which was the #1 song of the year in 2002, “Lose Yourself” from his autobiographical hit movie 8 Mile. After struggling with addiction mid-decade, he came back in ’09 with his first new album in five years and got to #1 again with his all-star collab with Dr. Dre and 50 Cent, “Crack a Bottle;” then another star-studded track headlined by Drake in late ’09, “Forever,” also featuring Kanye West and Lil Wayne. By mid-2010, fans were itching for new stuff from him so bad that the advance lead single from his next album Recovery, “Not Afraid,” debuted at #1. That was still just a once-every-couple-year occurrence in 2010, debuting at #1. But it was his controversial collaboration with Rihanna released the same day as the album that really connected: a song about lovers in a codependent relationship. The video intersperses scenes of domestic violence with performance shots in front of a burning house and it notched over six -and-a-half million views in one day, breaking YouTube’s record at the time. At #5 is Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie.”

Both Eminem and Rihanna had had very public dysfunctional relationships: Eminem divorcing his wife Kimberly Scott a second time, and Rihanna ending her relationship with R&B star Chris Brown after his felony assault on her in early ’09. So “Love the Way You Lie” came out of very real struggles, #1 for seven straight weeks in the late Summer, and #5 on our 2010 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Some critics faulted it for downplaying the woman’s perspective, so Rihanna did a part two sequel on her next album, with Eminem contributing a verse. It wasn’t promoted as a single, though, so it didn’t chart.

#4 Train – Hey, Soul Sister

So with Big Radio dumping Rock to lure Female listeners, bands needed other ways to reach the masses, and the band at #4 drove their song up the charts by blitzing it out on TV. Not just the usual late night guest spots, but embedded in so many primetime dramas and commercials that two guys started a social media campaign against that that rated a feature in Entertainment Weekly. But the song (their first chart entry in nearly five years) continued moving up for 25 weeks, eventually surpassing their previous chart high in 2001 with their song “Drops of Jupiter,” and peaking at #3 for four weeks in April. It was in the top 40 all the way to the end of September: a 54 week chart run, all told. The only Rock band in our Countdown, at #4 it’s Train, with “Hey, Soul Sister.”

Train isn’t just the only Rock band in our Countdown; they’re the only one that cracked the top 10 all year on the weekly chart. “Hey Soul Sister,” #4 on our 2010 edition of Chartcrush. The Script and Neon Trees: the only other bands that got close, with “Breakeven” and “Animal,” respectively.

Fewer radio stations playing current rock, a big factor in that, but it was also political. Hip-Hop’s mobilization had been key to Obama’s victory in ’08, so culture critics at progressive outlets: determined to deny the Tea Party that advantage. It was projection, of course: conservatives hadn’t rallied around a song since Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s pro-Vietnam “Ballad of the Green Berets” in 1966. And what had that accomplished? But if they were gonna rally around a song, the critics figured, it’d be one by a group like Train, so out came the long knives. In naming “Hey, Soul Sister” the worst song of 2010, The Village Voice‘s Christopher Weingarten dissed it as “so White that Sarah Palin just named it her running mate for 2012.” Less partisan critics just pointed out that it sounded a lot like Jason Mraz’s ukelele-strumming 2009 hit “I’m Yours.” As for Train, in ’13 they canceled their appearance at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree in protest of the Scouts’ ban on openly Gay scoutmasters, so did they really need that target on their backs?

#3 Taio Cruz – Dynamite

Anyway, we’re getting down to the small numbers here on our 2010 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show, and at #3, a British act: the only one in the countdown, with a song co-written and produced by the aforementioned Max Martin and Dr. Luke, who’d helmed dozens of top hits in the ’00s by Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, P!nk and others, and burst into the ’10s with the Usher and Katy Perry tracks we heard at numbers 10 and 6. This singer’s first hit, “Break Your Heart,” shot from #53 to #1 in just its second week in March: the biggest jump to #1 for a debut single in chart history up to then. That one’s #13 on our Chartcrush ranking, but our #3 hit, the follow-up, took a little longer to top out at #2 for three weeks in August, but it was on the chart four and a half months longer, so it the bigger hit. It’s Taio Cruz, “Dynamite.”

Had Taio Cruz’s label been more impressed with his demo of “Umbrella,” which became a megahit for Rihanna, he might’ve broken through in 2007, but like Britney Spears’s people, who’d also had shot at that song, they passed. But “Break Your Heart” was his explosive debut in 2010, and then our #3 song “Dynamite.” And after that, he quickly faded almost as fast as he’d arrived. Someone leaked the songs from his follow-up album, so there was that, but Taio was never able to forge a Pop star identity and escape what Stereogum’s Tom Breihan called the “just some guy” zone, and never scored another hit, despite continuing to release new music, and even launching his own social media app, KeWe, in 2013.

#2 Lady Antebellum – Need You Now

At #2 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2010’s top hits, the act that ruled the Country charts in 2010. But they were also Billboard’s #1 top overall Duo or Group of the year, with the #4 album. And their song at #2 was the year’s #1 Radio Airplay song, #1 Adult Contemporary song, and the biggest Country crossover hit since Faith Hill’s “Breathe” in 2000. Also the longest chart run of the year: 60 weeks: longer than Train’s 54. It’s Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now.”

Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now,” #2 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 2010 edition. Also #2 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 ranking. More Hot100 hits followed, and eight more Country #1’s, throughout the ’10s, but speaking of politics, as early as 2011, one writer in Ms. Magazine was on their case for glorifying slavery in the pre-Civil War South by having the word Antebellum in their name. Fast forward nine years to the Confederate history purge and statue hysteria that followed in the wake of the George Floyd protests. In 2020 they announced that henceforth, they’d just be “Lady A,” and the Dixie Chicks followed two weeks later. The newly rechristened “Chicks” got the blessing of the Duo in New Zealand that was already using that name, but Lady A wasn’t so fortunate. The Seattle-based Black Lives Matter activist-Singer already using the “Lady A” moniker sued for millions and hounded them in the press every chance she got until settling for an undisclosed sum in 2022. Yikes!

#1 Ke$ha – TiK ToK

Well we’re down to #1, and it’s back to pure, straight-up Pop: the headline Hot100 debut by a 23-year-old daughter of a Country songwriter mom, raised in Nashville. And based on that, you’d have every right not to expect what Genius.com calls an “aural glitter bomb” about a chick who wakes up feeling like P. Diddy and brushes her teeth with Jack Daniels before hitting the party circuit ’til the sun comes up, or the cops show up. But remember the fishnet stocking dude holding the champagne on the cover of Billboard’s Year in Music issue I mentioned at the top of the show?” Right, this is 2010 we’re talking about, and the #1 song of the year is Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK.”

White-girl rapping, 30 years after Blondie, and 4 years before Iggy Azalea! One of the most explosive debuts in chart history, Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK,” #1 for all of January and February, nine weeks, and the #1 song of the year, shattering the single-week download record for a song by a Female artist. After Ke$ha (and both of Taio Cruz’s big 2010 hits) the floodgates opened for repeated words in lyrics (“Boys blowin’ up our phones, phones;” “Wearing all my favorite brands, brands,” et cetera). That became a Pop trope in the early ’10s. “TiK ToK,” co-written with and co-produced by the protégé of the aforementioned Max Martin, Dr. Luke, who’d brought Ke$ha in to sing the hook on Flo Rida’s “Right Round” in ’09, which was a #1 hit. And even though she wasn’t officially credited on the record, fans knew that voice!

Well there ya have ’em, the top ten here on our 2010 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Again, unlike Billboard, we factor every song’s full chart run, which they can’t do because they have to get their year-end issue out before New Years. So two of the songs we heard this hour are not in the top ten on Billboard’s official Hot100 chart for the year. Our #10 song, Usher & Pitbull’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” was still high on the chart at the end of the 2010 chart year so Billboard ranked it #22 just counting its weeks up to it’s 2010 cutoff. Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” our #7 hit, was also a year straddler, but ’09 into ’10. Billboard had it at #21. But those two coming in to our top ten bumps two songs out from Billboard’s, so in the little bit of time we have left, let’s take a look at those.

At #10, Billboard had Taio Cruz’s first hit I mentioned when we heard his second, “Dynamite” at #3.

Unlike “Dynamite,” which topped out at #2, Taio Cruz’s “Break Your Heart” had a week at #1: it’s second week, rocketing to the top from its debut at #53. It shakes out at #13 on our Chartcrush ranking for 2010.

And at #6 Billboard had the year’s top New R&B/Hip-Hop artist, Georgia Rapper B.o.B: yet another Rapper/Singer combo with Rock band Paramore’s Hayley Williams on the hook: “Airplanes.”

“Airplanes” just misses our Chartcrush top ten at #11. B.o.B. also notable for introducing Bruno Mars, the featured singer on his first big hit earlier in 2010, “Nothing on You.” B.o.B cracked the top ten again in ’11 teaming up with Lil Wayne on “Strange Clouds” and got to #11 with “So Good” in 2012, but his career on the Hot100 didn’t last into the latter half of the decade. And with that, we’re gonna have to call it a wrap up for our 2010 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Thanks for listening! Hey, if you like what you heard, head over to our website, chartcrush.com for a full transcript of the show and a link to stream the expanded podcast version on Spotify, plus zeke extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive graph of the actual chart runs of our top ten songs. We do that for every year, 1940s up to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. See you again back here next week, hopefully, same station, same time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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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 culture and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly charts published in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag. This week on Chartcrush, it’s 1959, a tough year for Greasers, Rock ‘n Roll’s original fan base of working class, gang-affiliated, motorcycle- and hotrod-obsessed young men portrayed by Marlon Brando and James Dean in ’50s films like The Wild Ones and Rebel Without a Cause, and then later by throwback group Sha Na Na, Henry Winkler as The Fonz in Happy Days and John Travolta as Danny Zuko in Grease once ’50s nostalgia took hold in the ’70s.

No one called them “Greasers” or thought of them as a movement ’til people started having to name all the Boomer youth subcultures in the mid-’60s (Hippies, Mods, Beats, Radicals), so it was applied retroactively, first by Surfers in California, who had their own distinct subculture. Then S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders in 1967 made it stick. In the ’50s, though, they were just Jets or Sharks or Jesters, Devils or Wanderers: their local gang. No connection with other leather-jacketed, dungareed and cigarette sleeved toughs. Usually the opposite! And to respectable folks, of course, they were just “hoodlums” and “troublemakers.” But they were the edgy, dangerous, thrill-seeking rebels in a time of unprecedented conformity, so girls were titillated, boys were jealous, and the Greaser became an enduring icon of “cool.”

Early Rock ‘n Roll was Greaser music, a marriage of Pop’s two low-brow musical ghettos, R&B and Country, but anyone could listen to it and safely have some of that “cool” rub off. But was it safe? The New York Daily News didn’t think so, calling Rock ‘n Roll “an inciter of juvenile delinquency” just as Elvis was breaking out in April of 1956. In ’58, a journal for music teachers called it “a threat to civilization” and “the most disgraceful blasphemy ever committed in the name of music.” And the most powerful man in the music biz, Columbia Records’ Mitch Miller, considered it “musical baby food.” Preachers and segregationists, of course, had been up in arms, for different reasons, right from the start.

So, quite a diverse collection of anti-Rock crusaders, but leaderless and without a coherent plan of attack, until 1959. That’s when Congress got out in front, but not for any of those reasons. Since 1950 the record biz had ballooned from a $50 million business to a $500 million business, but at the same time the five major labels’ share of top 40 hits had dwindled from 89% to just 25%, a catastrophic loss of market share. And blue-chip copyright clearers ASCAP were hemorrhaging too as rival BMI collected and paid the royalties for all the low-brow songwriters that ASCAP had been thumbing its nose at for years. So with lobbyists breathing down their necks, Congress targeted, not suggestive lyrics or onstage antics or even the link to juvenile delinquency; they found a money angle! Payola! Radio DJs accepting bribes to play certain records (ahem, indie label Rock ‘n Roll records, that is). Well that was a new one for anti-Rock ‘n Roll crusaders, but it explained everything, didn’t it? Well the moral panic and hearings over Payola cast DJs like Alan Freed (the guy who coined the term Rock ‘n Roll in the early ’50s), as shady racketeers selling out America’s youth. Freed was a combative, chain-smoking wise guy in the hearings, and it cost him his job at New York’s WABC, then his house, seized by tax authorities three months later. Dick Clark, on the other hand, was pleasant and cooperative when it was his turn in the 1960 hearings that shaped the legislation that outlawed Payola, and got to keep his network radio show and American Bandstand on TV. But going forward, radio got super-careful about what went on the air. Program directors, not DJs, picked the records, and anything too crude-sounding was a red flag, so they steered clear to stay above suspicion.

#10 Guy Mitchell – Heartaches by the Number

One record that didn’t raise any eyebrows though: our song at #10 as we get things rolling here on our 1959 edition of Chartcrush. He was a chart veteran: the first to make it purely as a recording act, with hardly any experience performing live. That was in 1950, and after 16 hits, followed by a chart slump from ’53 to ’56, he got a second act with his very first #1 and then his own variety show on ABC, which only aired for a few months, but he became one of only a handful of acts with career peaks before and during the Rock era. At #10 is his second career #1 from late ’59. It’s Guy Mitchell with “Heartaches by the Number.”

I mentioned Mitch Miller in the intro, head of A&R, first at Mercury, then Columbia Records. Well, mining the Country charts for Pop hits was one of Miller’s trademark gambits, and wildly successful. Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz,” Tony Bennett’s “Cold Cold Heart” and Rosemary Clooney’s “Half as Much” were all top five Country hits a year or less before Miller gave them to his Pop Singers to record.

And he still had the knack in ’56 when he gave Guy Mitchell what became his big comeback hit, “Singing the Blues,” his first #1 and the #1 overall song of 1957 by our reckoning, beating out Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. Marty Robbins’ version of “Singing the Blues” out at the same time was #1 on the Country charts for 13 weeks. Well after “Heartaches by the Number” was a big Country hit for Ray Price, Miller and Mitchell did it again. But Guy’s Pop version was his last #1 and last Top40. In 1967 though, he went to Nashville and reinvented himself as an actual Country singer.

#9 Ritchie Valens – Donna

So on February 3, 1959, three of Rock ‘n Roll’s biggest stars, Buddy Holly, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and our 17-year-old act at #9 had just done a gig in Iowa as part of a three-week, 24 date package tour of three Upper Midwest states organized by a talent agency in the dead of Winter. The next day’s show was in Minnesota but the heater on their bus wasn’t working, so rather than freeze, they chartered a plane. Tragically, though, the plane crashed minutes into the flight and everyone was killed. Don McLean later memorialized the crash as “the day the music died” in his 1972 hit “American Pie.”

Holly and Richardson were veterans compared to the 17-year old star, who’d only just scored his first two hits in the Fall. But his third had just hit #3 on the Hot100 that fateful night on its way to #2 for two weeks, a bigger chart hit than either of his tourmates had yet scored. At #9, it’s Ritchie Valens’ ballad, “Donna.”

Blocked from the top spot at #2 for two weeks by a song we’ll be hearing later in the countdown, but its ten weeks in the top ten make it our #9 song of 1959, Ritchie Valens’ “Donna.” The upbeat “La Bamba” on the flip was on the chart at the same time but only got to #22. It’s Valens’ signature song though: one of the first Latin Rock hits, sung in Spanish, and the title of the Valens biopic starring Lou Diamond Phillips. Los Lobos’ version of “La Bamba” from the soundtrack to that film was #1 for three weeks in the Summer of 1987.

Now “Donna” missed the top ten on Billboard’s year-end ranking for ’59 at #14 because its first six weeks of chart action in late ’58 weren’t factored. At Chartcrush we rank every song’s full chart run: key difference. By the way, Guy Mitchell’s “Heartaches by the Number,” our #10 song? Same story, but at the end of the year. Billboard has that one at #88 for ’59 and #93 for 1960.

#8 The Browns – The Three Bells

“Folkniks Оп March: Hill Sound Upsurge” was a front-page Billboard headline trumpeting the first Newport Folk Festival in ’59, an annual event that defined Folk as genre distinct from Country in the ’60s, but Country and Folk had already been resolving into separate camps.

The Kingston Trio’s 1958 smash “Tom Dooley” that started the Folk Revival had topped the Pop chart and never cracked the Country chart. And our trio from Arkansas at #8, who’d been scoring Country top tens for years and appearing on TV showcases like Louisiana Hayride and Ozark Jubilee, didn’t play at Newport. But they still managed to straddle the Country-Folk divide well into the ’60s after our next song, which was a huge Pop crossover hit: ten weeks at #1 on the Country chart and four on the Hot100. And it even got to #10 on the R&B chart!

The song was a standard by ’59, originally in French and done by numerous artists before, but the trio’s lead singer, Jim Ed Brown, had the same name as the song’s character, so it’d already been in their repertoire for years before they decided to record it. At #8, The Browns, Jim Ed and his sisters Maxine and Bonnie, “The Three Bells.”

The Browns at #8 as we count down the biggest hits of 1959 here on The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. “The Three Bells” got The Browns on Ed Sullivan and American Bandstand and they followed it up with more updated standards, including an update of the 1946 hit “The Old Lamplighter” that got to #5 in 1960.

After The Browns, Jim Ed Brown went on to a long solo career as a Country Singer through the early ’80s, including his 1967 drown-your-sorrows anthem “Pop a Top.”

#7 Lloyd Price – Stagger Lee

So as anyone who’s ever done a corporate compliance job or had to operate under any kind of scrutiny can tell you: it’s not enough to just obey the letter of the law; you’ve got to avoid even the appearance of impropriety to keep regulators off your back. And since the Payola scandal was really about the broader backlash against Rock ‘n Roll, for radio that meant being very careful about what Rock records got on the air, if any.

New York’s WINS, Alan Freed’s station until he quit in 1958, nearly lost its broadcast license for turning a blind eye to its DJs taking Payola and played Frank Sinatra for 66 hours straight to demonstrate to everyone that they were committed to “pretty music.” Well, not every station went to that extreme, of course, but going forward it was clear to labels and artists that if they wanted their records on the radio, they had to have class and polish and production values: no more raucous R&B or raw Rockabilly.

So the Brill Building sound took hold over the next few years. But even before the first Payola hearings, our act at #7 saw the stitches on that fastball, so when he set out to update an old down ‘n dirty Blues standard in late ’58, he told the bandleader/arranger Don Costa that he didn’t want it to sound like a Blues record; he wanted horns like voices and a big, mainstream sound that’d pass muster with the general public. And Costa, who was also head of A&R at the label, ABC-Paramount, was just the guy to give him that. At #7 it’s 1959’s biggest R&B star, Lloyd Price: his first Pop hit, #1 for four weeks, “Stagger Lee.”

Yet another song that narrowly missed Billboard’s 1959 year-end top ten because they didn’t count its first few weeks on the chart in ’58. Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” is #13 on their ranking. But his follow-up hit “Personality” did make their top ten at #3, despite it never reaching #1. We have that one at #15.

Price scored his first hit on the R&B chart as a Teen in the early ’50s after Art Rupe, founder of L.A.’s legendary Specialty label signed him on a scouting trip to New Orleans. His song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was 1952’s top R&B hit and one of the first to catch on with White kids digging Black R&B in the early ’50s. But he got drafted in the last months of the Korean War and when he returned in ’55, Specialty was scoring hits with Little Richard and Price’s former chauffer Larry Williams, and ‘ol Lloyd was yesterday’s news. So he bought out his contract from Rupe, co-founded his own label and his first release on that got picked up by ABC-Paramount, where he stayed until ’63.

After the hits dried up, Price started another label, Double L Records, which launched Wilson Pickett’s career in the mid-’60s, and mostly focused on the business side of things, and not just music. In 1974 he teamed up with Don King to promote the epic Rumble in the Jungle title fight, Ali vs. Forman

#6 The Fleetwoods – Mr. Blue

Next up, another example of the smooth, polished, unthreatening Folk-adjacent sound that was a safe bet for labels and radio in the thick of the Payola hysteria. And also another example of an act that, like Lloyd Price, had two massive hits in 1959. But in the case of this high school trio from the Pacific Northwest, both made Billboard’s year-end top ten at numbers 10 and 8. The latter, “Come Softly to Me,” just misses our top ten at #11, but the one Billboard had at #10, the follow-up, stayed on the chart into 1960, so again, counting that full chart run, it’s the bigger hit, #6 on the year. It’s Gretchen Christopher, Barbara Ellis and Gary Troxel, originally Two Girls and a Guy, but renamed to a Seattle record distributor’s telephone exchange as a gimmick to sell more records locally. It’s The Fleetwoods, “Mr. Blue.”

The Fleetwoods’ “Mr. Blue,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1959. Are ya sleepy? That’s the song on the radio in the scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation where the camera pans to show the whole Griswold family asleep in the car, including Chevy Chase as Clark, who’s driving! “Mr. Blue” was only #1 for one week, but in the top ten for a very impressive 11.

Their debut “Come Softly to Me” was on top four weeks in the Spring, but had fewer in the top ten. Again, we have “Come Softly” at #11. Interestingly, both songs were top five hits on the R&B chart too. Gary Troxel got called to active duty in the Navy before 1959 was out and despite meeting up to record in L.A. during his shore leaves over the next couple years, they couldn’t keep their momentum and split in ’63.

#5 Paul Anka – Lonely Boy

Now, I mentioned ABC-Paramount’s A&R head Don Costa when we heard Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” back at #7. Well, one of Costa’s first discoveries in that role was our Canadian Singer and Songwriter at #5. At 17 in 1957, he moved to New York with just $100 in his pocket, auditioned for Costa, got signed, and his first record, “Diana,” was a #2 hit. A great start, but it took him nearly two years and a dozen more singles to match it. When he did, though, with this song, it was #1 for four weeks. At #5 it’s Paul Anka’s “Lonely Boy.”

Paul Anka’s “Lonely Boy,” the #5 hit of 1959, both on Billboard’s original year-end Hot100 chart and on our Chartcrush ranking that we’re counting down the top ten from this hour. It was on the charts while the Teen exploitation movie he sings it in was in theaters (his acting debut), about a sexy delinquent played by ’50s blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren, sent to a reform school run by nuns.

Anka was only getting started: four more top tens over the next year, and fun fact, in 1960 he wrote one of TV’s most instantly-recognizable themes, the theme to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, originally titled “Toot Sweet.”

After ’63 the hits trailed off and he spent the rest of the ’60s playing Vegas, but like other Teen Idols and early Rockers, he rode the ’70s nostalgia wave back to the top of the charts: a #1 duet with Soul singer Odia Coates in ’74, “(You’re) Having My Baby,” and another three top tens after that.

#4 The Platters – Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

At #4, the fourth and final #1 hit for the ’50s top charting Doo Wop group, honed into a powerhouse stage act by veteran Songwriter/Producer/Arranger/Manager Buck Ram, and then whooshed to fame on records and the charts along with Rock’s initial burst in ’55 and ’56 doing Ram’s songs. “Only You,” “The Great Pretender,” “(You’ve Got) The Magic Touch,” all top fives. Starting with “My Prayer” in late ’56 though, they pivoted to updating old standards in their unique style with Tony Williams’ distinctive lead vocals, and our #4 song was the third of those to top the charts. It’s The Platters with “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” at #4: yet another record whose run began at the tail end of 1958, so Billboard didn’t factor all of its chart action into their ranking for ’59 and ranked it #16 on the year. With its lush, dreamy orchestration, it was a milestone in Vocal Group records heading into the ’60s. No one would suspect Payola on a record like that, right?

The song had been recorded dozens of times back to the mid-’30s by a who’s who of Big Band and Pop names, but as with their previous covers of standards, The Platters completely reinvented it and made it their own. At the end of ’59, Lead Singer Tony Williams split from The Platters to pursue a solo career but was unsuccessful, as were The Platters without him.

#3 Frankie Avalon – Venus

So if you’re flipping through Billboard to see how they covered the plane crash that killed Richie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, the “day the music died,” it’d be pretty easy to miss the four column inches clustered on page six of the February 9, 1959 issue with 11 other short news items and a boxed legal notice that’s the most prominent thing on the page. The headline? “Tragedy Fails to Halt GAC Winter Tour.”

Since GAC was a talent agency (short for “General Amusement Corporation”), they had no problem filling the vacated slots for the remaining gigs on the tour, and one of the acts they brought in was the Teen Idol at #3, and the choice was emblematic of the shift from legit Rockers steeped in Blues and Country back to the swoon-worthy Pop Crooners of yesteryear. At #3 it’s Frankie Avalon’s first #1 hit that entered the chart the same Billboard issue as that short news burst, February 9, and peaked a month later: “Venus.”

Unlike the earthy, sometimes lewdly suggestive R&B hits earlier in the ’50s, the Teen Idol records that took over the charts in the wake of Payola usually framed romance in terms of unfulfilled yearnings and longings. Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” #3 on our 1959 Chartcrush Countdown, the epitome of that: a prayer to the Roman goddess of love to be his matchmaker!

It was Avalon’s first #1 since his chart debut in the beginning of ’58, and he got to the top again later in ’59 with “Why.” And he continued charting singles for a few more years. But he was an even bigger movie star, paired with Annette Funicello in a string of seven American International Pictures beach party movies in the early ’60s. And remember what I said about that nostalgia-based comeback trend in the ’70s talking about Paul Anka? Well, add Frankie Avalon to that list with his Disco update of “Venus” that charted for 11 weeks in 1976.

#2 Johnny Horton – The Battle of New Orleans

At #2 is the second of the two Folk records in our countdown. Three if you count “Stagger Lee” but that was more of a Blues record and an R&B record. We heard The Browns’ “Three Bells” at #8. Both (or all three of those) are story songs, and over on the Country charts, the trend was even more glaring. Six of the ten songs that topped the Country chart in ’59 were story songs.

This one’s about an historical event: a decisive battle in the War of 1812, written and first recorded in 1957 by prolific Folk Songwriter and School Principal Johnny Driftwood to get his students in Arkansas interested in history. Driftwood’s own version didn’t cause much of a stir, but this one by our struggling Honky Tonk and Rockabilly Singer at #2 struck a chord with ’50s kiddos steeped in Westerns and mid-’50s Davy Crockett mania and it was #1 for six weeks in June and July. The #2 song of 1959 is Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans.”

Johnny Horton, “The Battle of New Orleans,” #2 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1959’s biggest hits, about the American victory vs. the British Navy in the War of 1812 that made General Andrew Jackson a legend, and future President who’s on the $20 bill. Horton followed “Battle” with other historically-themed songs, and two were top five hits: “Sink the Bismarck” and “North to Alaska,” which was used in the opening credits of the John Wayne movie of the same name. But tragically, while the that one was climbing the chart in late 1960, Johnny Horton was killed in a head-on collision with a truck after playing a gig in Austin, Texas at the peak of his fame.

#1 Bobby Darin – Mack the Knife

Now Billboard has “Battle of New Orleans” as 1959’s #1 song of the year, but, yet again, we have a record with a chart run that went into 1960, that’s a bigger hit when you count it’s full run, so “Battle” gets bumped to #2, and we have at #1 the first Rock Era Teen Idol type Singer who had the stones to wade into neo-Swing Jazz Crooner territory and try to out-Sinatra Sinatra. And it entered the chart just two weeks after his feather-light, yearning Teen Idol ballad “Dream Lover” exited.

It’s a song from a German opera: a Kurt Weill composition from Berthold Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” which debuted in Berlin in 1928 and with American Marc Blitzstein’s updated English lyrics was one of the longest-running off-Broadway musicals in history. Louis Armstrong charted a version of the song in 1956, and after our Singer at #1 saw the show, he added the song to his nightclub act and recorded it with a fresh Swing arrangement by Richard Wess. Atlantic Records’ honcho Ahmet Ertugun was skeptical, but once he heard it, not only did he want it on the album, but he wanted it out as a single too, and it was #1 for seven weeks, October and November. At #1, it’s Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.”

Bobby Darin had come a long way since “Splish Splash (I Was Taking a Bath),” his first hit in ’58. “Mack the Knife,” our #1 song of 1959 here on the Chartcrush Countdown Show. With Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” at #7, that makes two songs about murder in our countdown. And I’ll just leave that there except to point out that 1959 was peak Mafia, just before Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s brother and Attorney General, started really clamping down on organized crime in the first years of the ’60s.

So did Darin out-Sinatra Sinatra? Well Frank didn’t go anywhere near “Mack the Knife” until 1984 and he called Bobby’s “the definitive version.” Darin blazed the trail crossing over to Adult Pop territory in ’59, but year later, Elvis was out with his “O Sole Mio”-derived “It’s Now or Never,” and Bobby Darin followed up with more of the same on “Beyond the Sea” and charted 33 more hits before his untimely death in 1973 after heart surgery at just 37.

Bonus

So that’s our countdown. Now as I’ve been saying throughout the show, several of the hits we’ve heard this hour were not in Billboard’s year-end top ten for ’59 because their chart runs extended back into ’58 or ahead into 1960, and Billboard just didn’t factor those weeks. Again, at Chartcrush, our ranking method factors every song’s full chart run into whichever calendar year it earned the most points.

To recap, Guy Mitchell’s “Heartaches by the Number,” Ritchie Valens’ “Donna,” Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” and The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes:” none of those were among the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Hot100. But that means Billboard had four songs that weren’t in our countdown, so in the time we have left, just to be thorough, let’s take a look at those.

Wilbert Harrison – Kansas City

At #9, Billboard had one of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller’s first songs, written in 1952 and recorded a few times, including by Little Richard, but not a hit until Wilbert Harrison’s version in 1959, which was #1 for two weeks in May: “Kansas City.”

We have “Kansas City” at #20 on our Chartcrush ranking. Wilbert Harrison couldn’t release a timely follow-up to “Kansas City” because his previous label was claiming he was still under contract with them and sued. By the time that was settled, his moment had passed. But his song “Let’s Work Together” got to #32 in 1969 before Blues Rockers Canned Heat got their cover version all over FM radio in the early ’70s.

The Fleetwoods – Come Softly to Me

Next, as I mentioned when we heard “Mr. Blue” at #6, The Fleetwoods’ first hit was also in Billboard’s year-end top ten. It just misses ours at #11, “Come Softly to Me.”

Recorded a cappella with just minimal instrumentation overdubbed later, The Fleetwoods’ “Come Softly to Me,” #1 for four weeks in the Spring.

Bobby Darin – Dream Lover

Billboard also had Bobby Darin’s hit right before “Mack the Knife” in its ’59 year-end top ten at #6.

Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover” shakes out at #19 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1959. It never got to #1 but stayed in the top 10 ten weeks.

Lloyd Price – Personality

And finally in our bonus segment review of the four Billboard year-end top ten hits bumped out of our Chartcrush top ten by other hits whose chart runs weren’t entirely in Billboard’s ’59 chart year, Lloyd Price’s “Personality.”

“Personality” is our #15 song of 1959 and Billboard’s #3. That’s a discrepancy we can’t explain with what’s known about their ranking methodology that year, or any ranking methodology, but we’re sure it wasn’t Payola because they wouldn’t do that, right?

And on that shaky note, we’re going to have to wrap things up for our 1959 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show because we’re all out of time. 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 cool 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, 1940s up to now, and it’s all on the website. Again, chartcrush.com. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thank you for listening, and be sure and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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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 culture and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade publication.

This week we’re turning the clock back to 2007, “the year the music industry broke,” according to MTV, citing a series of lo-lights during the year like the Dreamgirls soundtrack debuting at #1 on the album chart with only 60,000 units sold; Sony-BMG getting smacked in court for sneaking anti-piracy rootkit malware onto people’s computers via music CDs, and the first judgment against a peer-to-peer user for sharing songs on KaZaA.

But the macro trends were even more sobering. Music biz revenues in a tailspin, down over 12% since ’06 and nearly 40% since the start of the decade. And retail Armageddon! The last of the iconic chains, Virgin Megastores, closing in ’07 after Wherehouse in ’03, HMV in ’04, and Tower and Musicland/Sam Goody in ’06. And along the way, Strawberries, Spec’s, the Wall, Camelot, Coconuts, DiscJockey, Saturday Matinee, Media Play. Trans-World Entertainment snapped all those up in addition to Wherehouse and Musicland/Sam Goody, and the ones they didn’t close, they rebranded under their F.Y.E. logo. By 2019 though, only about 200 F.Y.E.’s were still in business.

One investment banker quoted in Billboard had a creative way to get an unprofitable mall store closed fast: blast Heavy Metal and hire purple-haired employees until other tenants pressured the landlord to terminate the lease. Hey, it’s not rootkit malware, but desperate times do call for desperate measures!

Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris in ’07 compared the music biz trying to fix online piracy to a dog owner trying to operate on his sick pup to take out a kidney. Music biz types were not Techies, he said. Morris’ comments were yet another example MTV offered for why ’07 was “the year the music industry broke” because after years trying (and failing) to work out copy protection and digital rights management with Big Tech and the consumer electronics industry, and now, affordable broadband internet and high-capacity devices and storage penetrating down-market, music piracy was escalating geometrically.

So what did artists do? Well, they had to hustle. Paul McCartney ditched EMI and signed with Starbucks Coffee’s Hear Music label. Radiohead released their first album in over five years as a “pay-what-you-want” download. Veteran acts like The Police, Eagles, and Van Halen (reunited with David Lee Roth) hit the road and cashed in on the higher ticket prices that were becoming the norm as CD sales tanked. Aspiring artists put their stuff on Myspace, and Hip-Hop entered its “Blog Era” as the internet filled the void from a crackdown on bootleg mixtape CDs.

And savvy Producers focused on catchy singles since in a world where fans were in charge of how songs were bundled and sequenced on their devices, albums had become really nothing more than suggested playlists. By ’07, of course, those devices included cell phones that could store and play music, and Apple quickly cornered that market with the iPhone, launched by CEO Steve Jobs in ’07 not just as a new kind of mobile phone, but as a next-gen iPod.

Ringtones, downloadable song snippets to customize the alerts on your phone: at their peak in ’07, a $1.5 billion industry, so Billboard gave them their own chart at the end of 2006.

#10 Akon featuring Eminem – Smack That

At #10 as we kick off the countdown is the very first #1 song on that Ringtone chart, and the first of the artist’s seven top tens in ’07 that helped make him Billboard’s Artist of the Year. The song never got to #1, stuck at #2 for five weeks behind Justin Timberlake, but from its peak at the end of ’06, it stayed in the top ten through January and on the chart ’til the end of April. It’s Akon, with a rare mid-to-late ’00s appearance by Rapper Eminem, who also produced, “Smack That.”

Akon’s “Smack That” at #10 as we count down the top hits of 2007 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Akon took the #1 spot for two weeks after Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” finished its run, but not with “Smack That;” with his next hit, “I Wanna Love You” with Snoop Dogg. But “Smack That” stayed at #2 for a fifth week, so Akon joined an elite group of acts who’ve locked down both of the two top spots on the Hot100 the same week.

His versatility singing on a dizzying array of styles and collabs made his voice ubiquitous in ’07, but at the cost of a coherent identity that fans could connect with. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “Lord of the Ringtone,” and Vibe’s cover story was headlined “The Last Hitmaker,” more a comment on the sorry state of the music biz than on Akon as a personality.

He did what he could to boost his street cred telling stories of high-stakes criminal hijinks in the ’90s every chance he got, but in ’08, The Smoking Gun website investigated and found his actual rap sheet to be far less colorful than he’d been making it out to be. After that he struggled on the charts as a headliner, but was a featured performer on several charting songs throughout the ’10s.

#9 Plain White T’s – Hey There Delilah

Pivoting now from a artist and song that practically defined ’07 Pop, at #9 is one that really stood out, maybe because it was recorded over two years prior. It stood out on their album too: a lone acoustic ballad closing out a set of aggressive Emo Rock. One blogger credits the song’s success to it being the hottest thing on Myspace right when they launched a feature that let users embed a song on their profile. It hit the chart in April of ’07, took nine weeks to make the top ten and then climbed just one chart position a week, #6 to #1 mid-Summer. It’s Chicagoland’s Plain White T’s with “Hey There Delilah.”

Remote relationships were 1000% more viable once internet and cell phones replaced postage stamps and long-distance charges. Plain White T’s, “Hey There Delilah,” #9 on our Chartcrush look back at the top ten songs of 2007.

There really was a Delilah. Delilah DiCrescenzo, a nationally-ranked distance runner that frontman Tom Higgenson met in ’02. She had a boyfriend, but he promised to write a song for her anyway and they kept in touch. Once the song was a hit, she wanted to remain anonymous but a friend went behind her back set her up with an interview, and she ended up accompanying Higgenson to the Grammys, still just as friends though.

An AI-generated “cover” version of Kanye West singing “Hey There Delilah” caused quite a stir in 2023.

#8 T-Pain featuring Yung Joc – Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)

And speaking of Kanye, he doesn’t have a song in our countdown, but his Graduation album dropped in ’07, famously the same day as 50 Cent’s Curtis, which it outsold, and Kanye’s Daft Punk-sampling “Stronger” just misses our top ten at #11.

But at #8 is another trailblazing Rapper. Akon’s “Smack That” may’ve been the first #1 on the weekly Ringtone chart, but this one was #1 on Billboard’s first year-end Ringtone chart: the #1 ringtone in the year of the ringtone, and on the Hot100, his third top ten but first #1. It’s T-Pain featuring Atlanta rapper Yung Joc, who’d just scored a #3 hit with his first single “It’s Goin’ Down” in ’06. At #8, “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’).”

Snap was a lighter form of Crunk Hip-Hop with snaps anchoring the beat. DL4’s “Laffy Taffy,” the first #1 in the genre in early ’06, but T-Pain’s “Buy U a Drank” hit at the peak of ringtone mania, so detractors started dissing Snap as “Ringtone Rap.”

But T-Pain’s main legacy was being the first act to popularize Autotune’s fabled “zero setting” in Hip-Hop, as in, zero milliseconds for the effect’s pitch correction to kick in. Normal values fix off-pitch notes in a natural sounding way you don’t know is even there. With the zero setting, though, you get that stepped robotic effect, and T-Pain based his whole sound and persona on that, and it quickly became as ubiquitous in Hip-Hop as distortion pedals were in Rock after the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

T-Pain got to #1 again, but as a featured artist on Chris Brown’s “Kiss Kiss” later in ’07, and then on Flo Rida’s “Low,” the #1 song of 2008.

#7 Gwen Stefani featuring Akon – The Sweet Escape

At #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for ’07, it’s Akon again, but this time as a featured singer, on a track he co-wrote and co-produced: the third big solo hit by an act that Blender magazine described as “an ageless bottle-blond eminence, stepping from mosh pit to Paris fashion show” since “appearing as a buff pinup on the cover of [her band’s breakthrough album] in 1995.”

Her label’s CEO brainstormed the collab with Akon, and she practically had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing it, thinking the result would be just some ho-hum, by-the-numbers Hip-Hop-adjacent yawn. But it was in the top ten on the AC chart for a whopping 26 weeks and the Hot100 for 15, jumping to #2 the week after she performed it with Akon on American Idol. At #7 it’s Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape.”

“If things weren’t the way they are, and I wasn’t the way I am, wouldn’t that be sweet?” Gwen Stefani at #7 with maybe the ultimate Millennial relationship excuse anthem co-written with Akon, “The Sweet Escape.”

As I mentioned after we heard “Smack That” at #10, Akon’s star did not maintain its A-list luster much past 2007, and with the field of top-tier female Pop acts getting very crowded in the last years of the decade, neither did Stefani’s. Her band No Doubt’s long-awaited reunion album in 2012 debuted at #3, but disappeared from the album chart forever after only four weeks. Gwen stayed busy, but after “The Sweet Escape,” she was most visible as an on-again, off-again coach on seven nonconsecutive seasons of NBC’s The Voice starting in 2014.

#6 Timbaland featuring Keri Hilson – The Way I Are

At #6, the Producer who helmed two of ’06’s top three hits: Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” and Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous,” but just as those acts’ follow-up #1s were exiting the top 10 in the Spring of ’07, a record featuring both of them appeared, with the Producer, at age 35, the lead artist. That record, “Give It to Me” (the first-ever Pop diss track, as Furtado later called it), was #1 for two weeks and in the top ten for seven, but the next single off our Producer-turned-headliner’s album Shock Value had 19 weeks in the top ten, so it was by far the bigger hit when you add it all up.

Billboard could only count its run up to November 24, the cut-off for its ’07 chart year, so it came out at #18 on their year-end ranking. But factoring its full chart run, including its 14 weeks after the cut-off into ’08, it comes out #6 on our ’07 Chartcrush ranking we’re counting down this hour. And with 20 production credits in Billboard’s Year-End Hot100 including his own, he was ’07’s top charting Producer. At #6, it’s Timbaland featuring his protégé, R&B Singer Keri Hilson, her chart breakthrough, “The Way I Are.”

Kanye West’s Graduation album outselling 50 Cent’s Curtis released the same day was the turning point between Hip-Hop’s Bling and Blog Eras, but another strong signal that things had changed: two of the year’s top ten hits bucking the materialism of early ’00s Hip-Hop for a deeper, transcendent kind of love. Timbaland and Keri Hilson’s “The Way I Are,” the first of the two at #6.

He ain’t got no money or car, but it’s alright, he ain’t gotta flaunt it for her. That message paired with Timbaland’s futuristic beats rode the top ten for five solid months, right on the heels of the other love-before-money anthem that’s up next at #5 in our Chartcrush ’07 countdown, and both hits coming as Barack Obama’s campaign for President was ramping up. Movie and music celebs in general, but African-American ones like Timbaland especially, ecstatic over Obama’s candidacy and contagious “Yes We Can” message even before he won a single caucus or primary.

#5 Rihanna featuring Jay-Z – Umbrella

And as promised at #5, the other love-over-bling Hip-Hop-adjacent megahit of ’07. Despite the song’s central thrust, though, Jay-Z, who signed the Singer and was her mentor, manages to name check diamonds, the stock market and private jets in his 30 second intro. That wouldn’t’ve been in the song if the artist the Songwriters wrote it for, had gotten it, but Britney Spears’ A&R people passed on it without her even hearing the demo.

Britney had a rough year in ’07, in and out of rehab, shaving her head, custody battle with soon-to-be ex-hubby Kevin Federline and a lethargic performance at the MTV Awards panned by critics. But our Singer at #5 who got the song won Video and Single of the Year for it at those same MTV awards. From her third album in only two years, Good Girl Gone Bad, it’s Rihanna at #5, her signature song, “Umbrella.”

Another thing that wouldn’t’ve been in the song if Britney had gotten it, that whole “ella ella” thing. That was all Rihanna, and “Umbrella” propelled her from Teen Pop/R&B girl-next-door to full-fledged grownup Diva.

Her partnership with “Easy, Breezy” CoverGirl also helped. “Even if it’s raining, your lips will have lasting, fruity shine,” Rihanna said in her 30-second spot for Wetsticks Fruit Spritzers, twirling a pink umbrella with the song in the background: a watershed campaign that opened the floodgates for artist-brand partnerships and an explosion of “synchronization” licensing from deep-pocketed advertisers. Millennials, it turned out, didn’t care if their Pop stars hawked products, which was good news for brands, but even better news for a music biz flailing for revenue lifelines. By the end of the year Bob Dylan was doing an Escalade commercial.

#4 Carrie Underwood – Before He Cheats

Female empowerment anthems go way back on the Pop charts, but feminist-leaning Country songs? Far and few between until Shania Twain, Dixie Chicks and Martina McBride in the ’90s. But in the ’00s, Gretchen Wilson and Miranda Lambert went beyond sassy humor and unthreatening assertiveness into edgy, take-no-crap identity pride and just flat-out revenge, and into that new Bad Girl zone jumped our Singer at #4.

After winning Season Four of American Idol, her debut album Some Hearts dropped in the Fall of ’05 and its first three singles came and went, but one deep album cut cracked the Country chart and stayed for six months. And once it was finally issued as the album’s fourth single, it crossed over and spent a whopping 64 weeks on the Hot100. It only scraped the top ten for two of those weeks, but still, it’s #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2007. Originally written with the aforementioned Gretchen Wilson in mind, Carrie Underwood got a hold of it first. At #4, “Before He Cheats.”

Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” 2007’s #4 song here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. ’07 was a big year for American Idol alumni. Underwood, the big winner on the Hot100, but Season Five semifinalist Chris Daughtry scored the #1 album of the year; Season Three’s seventh place finisher Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar and Golden Globe for her Supporting role in Dreamgirls, and good ‘ol Kelly Clarkson, Season One winner and the first to legitimize an Idol win with an enduring Pop hit and multi-Platinum album… Kelly scored her seventh top ten, “Never Again,” which was another angry ex-boyfriend kiss-off.

#3 Fergie – Big Girls Don’t Cry (Personal)

Next we have the last and biggest of a solo act’s string of three #1 hits and a #2, all within the span of just a single year. Her Hip-Hop group had embraced a more Pop direction since adding her to the lineup in ’03, and by ’06 after two multi-Platinum albums and three group top tens, it was time for a solo album.

She’d already adopted British Royal Sarah Ferguson’s nickname since they shared the same surname, so for the album she borrowed her title too, adding a “t” to “Duchess.” The real Duchess of York wasn’t happy about either, and even wrote to tell her so. But that wasn’t all: the title of our #3 song, same as Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons’ second #1 from 1962. Totally different song; same title. “Worst Four Seasons cover ever” got a guaranteed laugh in ’07 when the song came on the radio. At #3, it’s Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas, with “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” at #3. It hung around in the top ten from the beginning of June to the end of October, #1 for just one week in September, but #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart for six weeks. AC radio in ’07, happy to have a Rap-adjacent Female after two years of John Mayer, Michael Bublé and Maroon 5.

The Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am produced The Dutchess and after Fergie wrapped up her U.S. tour in the Summer, she was back with the group for their 20-country international tour in the Fall of ’07, and then their album The E.N.D. and its #1 hits “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling” in ’09.

#2 Soulja Boy Tell’em – Crank That (Soulja Boy)

We are counting down the top ten hits of 2007 here on this week’s Chartcrush Countdown Show, and at #2, we have another first-of-its-kind smash. Not because it sparked a dance craze or because it’s a loud,  boisterous Rap song, or even because its beat uses Snap percussion, making it the second of the two Snap (or “Ringtone Rap”) tracks in our countdown. No, it was a first because it was a hit purely from grassroots buzz on the internet: the first viral chart topper.

The Blog Era meant that a kid in Batesville, Mississippi had the same access to fans as a mixtape MC in New York and he proved it, putting the song on his Myspace page and six months later it’s #1 on the Hot100. And since Billboard wasn’t factoring YouTube into the Hot100 yet, it was probably an even bigger hit than its already-impressive chart run shows, with hundreds of user dance vids that racked up millions of views on top of the artist’s own multimedia barrage, which included a step-by-step instructional video for the dance. Needless to say, it was massive on the Ringtone chart as well.

The beat consists entirely of sounds in the unregistered demo version of the FruityLoops Studio digital audio workstation. The #2 song of 2007 is Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em’s self-produced (in his bedroom) “Crank That (Soulja Boy).”

Soulja Boy had a clever way of getting his tracks out there into the wild. Get this: renaming his mp3s to titles of current hits and sharing them on filesharing platforms. That must’ve been as annoying to downloaders as “Crank That,” our #2 song of ’07, was to virtually everyone over 16 in the Fall of ’07 when the song, dance and videos were ubiquitous.

People were shocked when Billboard’s year-end Hot100 chart came out in December and “Crank That” was only #20. But, like Timbaland’s “The Way I Are,” it stayed on the chart 14 weeks into Billboard’s ’08 chart year and even jumped back into the top ten for a couple weeks in January ’08. Counting that full chart run, as we do for every song at Chartcrush, puts it at #2 on the year.

#1 Beyonce – Irreplaceable

No discrepancy like that for our #1 song though: it’s Billboard’s #1 song of ’07 as well: all but the first four of its 30 weeks in their ’07 chart year, including its ten straight at #1, mid-December ’06 to mid-February ’07.

The Singer was on the big screen that whole time too, the lead role in Dreamgirls about a fictional early ’60s Girl Group in Detroit that’s not The Supremes (wink wink). But she was upstaged in that by the aforementioned Jennifer Hudson: a riveting, Oscar-winning performance by the first-time Actress and American Idol contestant.

Destiny Fulfilled, her reunion album with Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams in Destiny’s Child didn’t match their earlier success, and the first two singles from her second solo album, B’Day (or Birthday) underperformed on the charts: the lead single featuring future hubby Jay-Z, “Déjà Vu,” reprising their collaboration on their ’03 monster hit “Crazy in Love,” only got to #4 amid rumors of a romance between Jay and Rihanna. And then the second single “Ring the Alarm” only got to #11. So up against Rihanna, plus strong mid-’00s comebacks by Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige, her hold on the ’00s R&B Diva space was somewhat tenuous. But this hit humbled the doubters. At #1 it’s Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable.”

“To the left, to the left.” Beyonce. “Irreplaceable,” the #1 song here on our 2007 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. At first, she didn’t think it was a fit for her upbeat B’Day album, but Producer Swizz Beats convinced her to include it, and from then on, all of Beyonce’s albums included ballads.

Bonus

So that’s our top ten according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking that, unlike Billboard’s, factors every song’s entire chart run, impossible for Billboard to do since they have to get their year-end issue out before New Years. So three of the songs we heard this hour, not in Billboard’s top ten on the year. To recap, Akon’s “Smack That” was #15; Timbaland and Keri Hilson’s “The Way I Are” was #18, and “Soulja Boy Tell’Em’s “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” was #20. But those three coming in to our top ten displaces three songs from Billboard’s, so in the time we have left, let’s review those.

Billboard had the second #1 from Fergie’s The Dutchess at #10, featuring Rapper Ludacris, the song about staying rooted amid all the trappings of fame and fortune.

“Glamorous” notches in at #17 on our Chartcrush ranking.

And at #9, they had the other Akon hit I mentioned back at #10 that took the #1 spot after Justin Timberlake despite “Smack That” having sat patiently at #2 behind Timberlake for three weeks.

Akon & Snoop Dogg’s “I Wanna Love You” is our #15 song of ’07.

And finally at #8, Billboard had Nelly Furtado’s next #1 after ’06’s “Promiscuous,” also produced by Timbaland.

Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right” just narrowly misses our Chartcrush top ten at #12.

And that’s all we have time for in our 2007 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. 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 today’s show and a link to stream the podcast version on Spotify, plus sizzlin’ extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual Billboard chart runs of every song we heard this hour. We do that for every year, 1940s up to now, and it’s all on the website. Again, that’s chartcrush.com.

Thanks for listening and 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 dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten 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 publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1965.

“I guess the ’50s would have ended in about ’65,” said none other than Bob Dylan. Beatlemania swept in in ’64, and after seeing the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night in the Summer, Folkie Roger McGuinn went out and got himself a 12-string Rickenbacker electric guitar like George Harrison’s in the movie, and started playing Beatle hits and Rock versions of Folk songs at L.A.’s top Folk club, the Troubadour. By the end of the year he had a band, The Byrds (with a “y”), and their debut single, a cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”  went all the way to #1 in June. A month later Dylan himself was plugging in with a full Rock band for his set at the Newport Folk Festival: sacrilege to traditional Folkies, who only approved of acoustic instruments and booed Dylan. But Dylan doubled down on his all-electric Highway 61 Revisited album in the Fall.

The advance single was his opus, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which Columbia Records didn’t want to release because of its length, over six minutes. But after Dylan’s people leaked it to New York’s hot new society discotheque, Arthur, Columbia relented under pressure, and it became Dylan’s first top ten single. And just like that, a generation of screaming Teen Beatle fans were now plumbing the depths of Dylan’s psychedelic imagery and oblique social commentary, hanging on every word and expecting the same literary IQ from all their Pop stars.

Those kids of course were Baby Boomers: America’s largest-ever generation, and the first wave born in the late ’40s were aged 15 to 19, raised in affluence, comfort and modernity by parents who’d lived through the Depression and War, didn’t take much for granted, and took their responsibilities very seriously. Thousands of new schools built in the ’50s, Disneyland, Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, and (speaking of Disney) Davy Crockett and The Mickey Mouse Club. And Hula Hoops and Slinkys and Mr. Potato Head and Barbie. And board games like the Game of Life to set them on the right path.

Get drafted and go to Vietnam though? Not a square on those board games. So when the U.S. put boots on the ground in March of ’65 and draft notices went out, it didn’t compute. No wonder Barry McGuire’s growly “Eve of Destruction” was an oddball #1 hit. “You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’,” right in the first verse! Now there was a generation gap. Just like that!

The values and norms and hard-nosed, ruthless pragmatism that’d won the War and built the so-called Affluent Society: was it all still necessary? Or was it all just relics of a harder world when their was no time to ponder nuances and deeper meanings or question authority? Either way it persisted, as deeply ingrained values and norms tend to do. Especially in advertising. “One-dimensional thought,” hostile to critical thinking and protest” was how counterculture philosopher Herbert Marcuse put it.

#10 The Beatles – Yesterday

Well, after a summer of big hits prying open the generation gap, our #10 song as we kick off our 1965 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show expressed a wistful, nostalgic yearning for simpler, less troubled times. A first for the band: just one member on the record with a string quartet added later by Producer George Martin and nearly issued as a Paul McCartney solo single. But it had the now requisite lyrical depth and intimacy to resonate with fans just turning on to Dylan, so it was a Beatle record, and it topped the chart for four weeks in October. “Yesterday.”

The Beatles’ “Yesterday” at #10 as we count down 1965’s top hits here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush.

Adult, or “Middle of the Road,” a top radio format in the mid ’60s, but unlike other eras, it didn’t have a lot in common with Top40: a bastion of pre-Rock Era artists and sounds that wanted nothing to do with The Beatles. You’d think “Yesterday” might’ve broken the ice, but not even a lush, orchestrated version by tuxedoed English Crooner Matt Monro arranged and produced by Beatles producer George Martin did. But The Beatles’ original sure soothed a lot of frayed Boomer nerves in the Fall with draft notices going out, troops in Vietnam nearing 200,000 and just weeks after the deadly Watts race riots in L.A.

#9 The Beatles – Help!

“Yesterday” of course, from The Beatles’ second feature film, Help!, but a single-only release in the U.S., not on the soundtrack album. The advance single from the movie and album though, “Ticket to Ride,” with George’s Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar had topped the chart in May, a month before The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” upped the ante on 12-string jangle, and then just before “Yesterday,” in September when the film was in theaters, its title song topped the chart for three weeks, and that’s our #9 song!

Yes, a Beatles two-fer leading off our 1965 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. “Yesterday” at #10; “Help!” at #9. John Lennon with the vocal on “Help!,” a song he dashed off after the group decided last minute to change the title of the movie from Eight Arms to Hold You. Up to then, Lennon had been the singer on 10 of The Beatles’ 13 top ten hits, but starting with “Yesterday,” Paul McCartney became more dominant, singing on over half the band’s next 17 top tens up to their split in 1970.

#8 The Byrds – Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)

Next up, the L.A. band I’ve been talking about that launched Folk Rock with their first record in the Spring of ’65, their #1 version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The follow-up was another Dylan cover, “All I Really Want to Do,” but Cher’s punchier version beat it on the charts in tandem with Sonny & Cher’s #1 hit “I Got You Babe” in the Summer, and for a minute it looked like they’d relinquished the Folk Rock torch. But they got it back with their second #1 in the Fall; not a Dylan song, but verses from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, set to music by Folk pioneer Pete Seeger. At #8 it’s The Byrds with “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

“Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1965. Roger McGuinn went way back with that song. He played on the first recorded version in ’62 by The Limeliters and did the arrangement for Singer Judy Collins’ in ’63. Neither of those charted, but his own version with The Byrds was the group’s second #1 of ’65 after “Mr. Tambourine Man” in the Spring.

Despite peaking in December, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” still wasn’t the last word in Folk-Rock in ’65. Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” made the top 10 the very last week of the year.

#7 Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs – Wooly Bully

At #7 is the song that Billboard named #1 on the year, even though it never topped the weekly chart. Not the first or last time that’s happened, but it was more likely in ’65 because Billboard‘s method for ranking the songs at the end of the year was a simple inverse point system. One point for #100, 100 points for #1 and so on. Add up the points for all the weeks and that’s the ranking. And this song logged more weeks on the chart than any other, 18.

They were a gimmicky Mexican-American Garage band that performed in robes and turbans and drove around in a 1952 Packard hearse. Front man Domingo “Sam” Samudio got his nickname for his shuffling dance while singing and playing his red Farfisa Compact electric organ. He wrote the song about his cat. At #7, Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs “Wooly Bully.”

“Wooly Bully.” Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs, the #7 song of 1965 by our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Again, Billboard‘s published year-end Hot100 has it as the #1 song of the year using their simple ranking method that tends to reward songs with long chart runs. Our more modern method, similar to Billboard’s in the 1980s, accounts for the fact that as a song approaches #1, its popularity based on sales, airplay etc. increases exponentially, more like a hockey stick graph than a straight line, so six other songs that did hit #1 beat out “Wooly Bully.”

#6 Herman’s Hermits – Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter

Now The Beatles may have introduced the whole cutesy, goofy, long-hair mop top thing, but it’s not called the British Invasion for nothing. 21 British acts in ’65 combined to score 40 of the 119 songs that cracked the top ten during the year. Six of those were Beatles records, but another six were by our act at #6, who faded from the U.K. charts after just a couple hits, but were hot on the Fab Four’s heels in the U.S. in ’65 as an export-only group, doubling down on cute with exaggerated accents and a singer who was just 17. It’s Herman’s Hermits, their first #1 hit, “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”

Herman’s Hermits, “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1965Herman’s Hermits notched nine more top tens over the next two years and were in three MGM movies (MGM, also their record label).

#5 The Four Tops – I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)

At the end of 1963, Billboard decided it didn’t need an R&B chart anymore after over 20 years of publishing one. Martin Luther King’s dream of racial integration was a reality as far as the charts were concerned. And you can see why they’d think that glancing at the R&B and Hot100 charts from ’63 side-by-side: half the top 20 on both, week-to-week, give or take: the same songs by the same artists! And it wasn’t just R&B crossing over to the Hot100. White acts like The Four Seasons, Dion, Lesley Gore, Little Peggy March and even Folk group The Rooftop Singers scored top five hits on the R&B chart too.

But all that all changed when The Beatles hit just weeks after Billboard’s last R&B chart. As obsessed with R&B and Black culture as a lot of the British bands making the Hot100 were, that love affair only went one-way. Black America was at best indifferent to Beatles and Brits. One Black woman who did like The Beatles, quoted in a book about Chicago in the ’60s, recalled being shunned and bullied and called a “White girl” in sixth grade by her Black classmates. And when Billboard asked the Program Director of a major R&B radio station at the height of Beatlemania why they weren’t playing The Beatles, she told them: “We’ve already got enough of a menagerie.”

It would’ve been nice if Billboard’s readers at the time could’ve flipped to the R&B chart to investigate that, but instead they had to flip to Billboard’s competitor, Cashbox magazine, to see that not a single Brit cracked the top 20 on an R&B chart throughout 1964. Even after Billboard about-faced and re-instated its R&B chart in early ’65, it was months before any British act appeared on it.

Of course, the “menagerie” was the Motown and Soul music that was soundtracking the Civil Rights Movement, and at #5 in our countdown, the record that spent the most weeks at #1 on the R&B chart during that time: nine in the Summer ’65. And it topped the Hot100 for two weeks as well. It’s The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself.”

The Four Tops had honed themselves into a polished, experienced Detroit supper club attraction over their decade together, but couldn’t score a hit record until they landed at Motown. The difference? Songwriter/Producers Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, Holland-Dozier-Holland. Their songs, of course; but they also pushed lead singer Levi Stubbs to strain the upper limits of his baritone range to get that urgent desperation that became The Four Tops’ trademark, first on their breakthrough, ’64’s “Baby I Need Your Lovin’;” then on their first #1, “I Can’t Help Myself,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1965.

#4 The Supremes – Come See About Me

When the dust cleared from the first wave of Beatlemania in ’64, Billboard speculated that a sudden surge for R&B radio was because R&B stations, by avoiding Beatles records, had given listeners something other than wall-to-wall British Invasion on the airwaves. Well no label benefitted more from that than Motown. Of the 27 #1s in ’65, six were on Motown, and Motown’s most successful group in ’64 repeated in the top ten on the year in ’65. It was their third consecutive #1, the #4 song of the year, also written and produced by Holland-Dozier-Holland, it’s The Supremes’ “Come See About Me.”

Supremes, “Come See About Me” at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1965’s biggest hits. By the end of ’65, after three more #1s with “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Back in My Arms Again” and “I Hear a Symphony,” The Supremes were headlining New York’s bastion of oldskool midtown respectability, The Copacabana, where they recorded a live album.

Some have criticized Motown for its detachment from Civil Rights while Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading marches from Selma to Montgomery and Congress was debating the Voting Rights Act. White Folkies, after all, were going straight at it in their protest songs. But could a literal airing of inner-city grievances have been as potent a street anthem as, say, Martha & The Vandellas’ 1965 Motown hit “Nowhere to Run” was during the Watts Riots?

As with any novel interpretation of a work of art that resonates, there was ownership and empowerment in claiming and repurposing Gospel songs and hits about love and relationships. But more broadly, Motown and R&B/Soul reflected and created a new sense of Black pride as Civil Rights dominated the news. The lyrics and subject matter were almost beside the point; it was the attitude that came across and made the difference.

#3 Petula Clark – Downtown

At #3 we have another head-scratching omission from ’65’s Adult-MOR charts. Unlike The Beatles, this Brit was a 30-something Female, and it was a record done the old-fashioned way: live in a studio with a big brassy orchestra just like Sinatra! It should’ve been sonic catnip for an over-30 set enjoying its own British Invasion with Princess Margaret’s U.S. visit, Oscar sweeps for Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady. Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Michael Caine and Peter Sellers. James Bond! Triumphs, MGs, Minis and Jaguars on the highways. Twiggy, Mary Quant and Carnaby Street in the fashion mags. And Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Julie Rogers, Marianne Faithfull and even Chad & Jeremy on the radio and showing up on the MOR chart. So what happened? Well first, let’s have a listen at #3, to Petula Clark’s “Downtown.”

Petula Clark’s “Downtown” at #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1965’s biggest hits. It shot up the Hot100 over the holiday season in ’64 and was #1 the last two weeks in January, but that was before Billboard relaunched its Easy Listening chart in June of ’65 as a full-blown survey-based ranking of songs on so-called “conservative” music stations. Before that it was just an “MOR programming guide:” hits that weren’t Rock ‘n Roll or Teen records cherry picked off the Hot100 by Billboard staff. For whatever, they reason didn’t see fit to include “Downtown” in the category. But the very week the more scientific survey-based Easy Listening chart was unveiled, Clark’s follow-up hit, “I Know a Place” was #16 and her next two singles in ’65 both cracked the top five. So who really knows with “Downtown?”

The song was written by British Songwriter Tony Hatch about New York. He’d just arrived, first time in the city, and standing on a corner in Times Square the melody and title just popped into his head, and it was the first U.S. #1 by a British female since Vera Lynn’s “Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart” in 1952.

#2 The Righteous Brothers – You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’

So back at #5, I mentioned The Four Tops’ breakthrough in ’64, “Baby I Need Your Loving.” Well that was the record that inspired our #2 song by the Southern California duo the phrase “Blue-Eyed Soul” was coined to describe. But it was also a milestone for its Producer, Phil Spector, already famous for his so-called “Wall of Sound” on Girl Group hits. Spector signed the group to his Philles label, flew A-list Brill Building Songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil out to L.A. to write the song for them, and spent countless hours and $35 grand making the record. At #2, The Righteous Brothers, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Proof that Black music fans in the ’60s didn’t care if an act had blue eyes (or white skin) as long as a record had Soul. The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” spent nine weeks in the top ten on the R&B chart peaking at #2. So whatever R&B radio’s problem with The Beatles was, it didn’t apply to Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, who weren’t really brothers. They got their name when a Black Marine shouted at one of their shows: “That was righteous, brothers!”

#1 The Rolling Stones – (I Cant Get No) Satisfaction

And as it turns out, it didn’t apply to the act at #1 in our 1965 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown either. And they were British! The only British Invasion act to crack the top 20 on the R&B chart before 1967. On the chart we’re counting down the top ten from this hour, though, the Hot100, it was the group’s first #1, and the first four-week #1 since The Supremes’ “Baby Love” in the Fall of ’64. The #1 song of 1965 is The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

The Rolling Stones had made the top ten in ’64 with “Time Is on My Side” and earlier in ’65 with “The Last Time.” They had three albums out and had toured the U.S. twice, but were still in the third-tier of British Invasion bands on the charts, behind groups like The Searchers and Gerry & The Pacemakers… until what Newsweek later called the “five notes that shook the world:” Keith Richards’ fuzzed out guitar setting up Mick Jagger’s sneering putdown of America’s relentless advertising barrage. The riff came to Richards in a dream and Jagger fleshed out the words in ten minutes poolside at a Florida motel. In his memoir, Richards credits its success to the Maestro FZ-1 fuzztone pedal he used as a placeholder for a planned horn part, but before that could happen, the single was out, as it, and racing up the charts.

Bonus

So there you have ’em, the top ten hits of 1965 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking that, as I mentioned earlier, uses a more advanced algorithm than Billboard had in 1965. We also count every song’s entire chart run, which Billboard can’t do having to get their year-end issue out before New Years. So if you look at the top ten that Billboard published at the end of ’65, some songs are missing. The Beatles’ “Yesterday” and The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” hit too late in the year, and The Supremes’ “Come See About Me” straddled ’64 into ’65, so those didn’t make Billboard’s year-end Hot100, let alone the top ten. And Herman’s Hermits “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” they had at #19 due to its short chart run, just 11 weeks.

So what are the four songs that made Billboard’s year-end top ten but not ours?

At #10, they had the song that was #1 on their R&B chart the first week they reinstated it, January 30. It was a Motown record, the group’s first top ten and first #1: The Temptations’ “My Girl.”

The Temptations’ “My Girl” notches in at #16 on our Chartcrush ranking, co-written and produced by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White, whose own group The Miracles charted four hits themselves for Motown in ’65, including “Tracks of My Tears” and “Going to a Go-Go.”

Billboard’s #9 song of ’65 was an outtake from a Gospel album recorded in 1960, dusted off and issued as an Easter Special single in ’65. Nevertheless it was Elvis Presley’s biggest hit since “Return to Sender” in ’62.

Elvis still had a massive fan base in ’65 despite being almost completely disconnected from the music scene and focusing on his movie career.

Billboard’s simple inverse point method of ranking the songs in ’65 put a different Herman’s Hermits hit in the top ten on the year at #8. They had “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” down at #19 despite its three weeks at #1. This one only got to #2, but was on the chart four weeks longer. It’s “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat.”

Herman’s Hermits’ “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” shakes out at #32 on our Chartcrush ranking.

And finally, Billboard’s #4 year-end song: another one that ranked high due to chart longevity: 15 weeks in a year when the longest chart run was 18 weeks, peaking for a week at #3. It’s #20 on our Chartcrush ranking. Again, no Byrds or Beatles on the Adult/MOR chart in ’65, but this Folk-Rocker was one of the biggest hits of the year on the radio format that evolved into Adult Contemporary, five weeks at #1 on that chart. It’s “We Five’s “You Were on My Mind.”

We Five were based in San Francisco and scored one of the earliest and biggest Folk-Rock hits of the ’60s just as the Hippie counterculture was coalescing. But being on MOR radio, doing ads for Coca-Cola and sprinkling their repertoire with show tunes and standards put them on the wrong side of the generation gap, and the ship sailed without them.

1965, what a year, huh? Unfortunately that’s all the time we have for our 1965 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. For more, go check out our website, chartcrush.com for a full transcript of today’s show, plus a link to stream the podcast version on Spotify and fab extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top ten songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, 1940s up to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening, and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for 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 exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1971, an inflection point in music and pop culture after the deaths of two of Rock’s biggest counterculture icons less than three weeks apart in the Fall of 1970, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. And fans still mourning the breakup of The Beatles earlier in the year. And then The Doors’ Jim Morrison died in July of ’71.

How would music have been different in the ’70s with The Beatles still together and those three towering figures living on? Would the spirit of the ’60s have persisted? Perhaps, but it was already on life support after major body blows like the MLK and RFK assassinations in ’68, The Manson Murders and the Altamont festival-gone-bad in ’69… Nixon being president. And the protest movements of the ’60s, Black Civil Rights and the antiwar Movement, going full radical revolutionary: far-left splinter groups like The Weather Underground and The Black Liberation Army careening off into a revolutionary crazyland of bombings, murder, kidnappings.

But not just that: with billions in new federal anti-poverty funds flooding the zone, protest escalated and expanded. In his New York magazine essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” culture-critic Tom Wolfe detailed how in San Francisco alone, there were 87 different militant niche identity groups all devising ever-more creative, colorful, frightening and newsworthy ways to confront the system (or “mau-mau,” after Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion against the British), all to secure grants, or lucrative community organizing gigs or what have you, from the mostly clueless, almost exclusively White middle-class career bureaucrats (the “flak catchers”) whose agencies and committees were in charge of deciding who got the funds. How did they decide? “When somebody rises up in the ghetto and confronts you,” Wolfe explained, “then you know he’s a leader of the people. So the poverty program not only encouraged mau-mauing, it practically demanded it.”

Wolfe was writing about San Francisco in ’68; by ’71, the explosion of aggressive, militant, even theatrical activism, courtesy of taxpayers, was everywhere. And protest fashion went mainstream. At school, letter sweaters and McGregor back-to-school slacks and skirts, out. Guerilla berets, field jackets, combat boots and proletarian Can’t Bust ‘Em jeans or Army khakis, in. Radical Chic: the title of another Tom Wolfe essay about the same time as “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.”

All in the Family premiered on CBS in January of ’71: Norman Lear’s sitcom about a high-school educated, blue-collar loudmouth, Archie Bunker, under constant ideological assault in his own house over race, feminism, poverty, the war, Nixon, et cetera, by his obnoxious, freeloading student activist son-in-law Mike Stivic (a.k.a. Meathead), and it resonated because everything in ’71 was political. Every American was either confronting or being confronted. The show was #1 five years in a row, and Lear and CBS spun off Maude, Good Times and The Jeffersons from All in the Family later in the ’70s. Archie Bunker’s chair is in the Smithsonian.

Now where would Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and a still-intact Beatles have fallen on the spectrum between activism and escapism that developed in music in response to all that?

#10 The Raiders – Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)

Who can say? But our first song as we kick things off is the most conspicuous example of activism in our countdown: a song about the plight of Native Americans written in 1959, and a #20 hit in 1968 for Don Fardon, formerly of the British Mod band The Sorrows. But that was before Indian activists claimed Alcatraz, the island in the San Francisco Bay abandoned since 1963 when the federal prison there closed. Their physical occupation of the island for over a year-and-a-half got as much attention as any action by a militant group in the era, and just as the feds were clearing out the last of the occupiers in June of ’71, this new version of the song shot into the top ten. Ironically, the band had gotten famous in the ’60s wearing colonial costumes and tricorner hats, but Singer Mark Lindsay was part Cherokee, and he sings the song like he means it. It’s The Raiders’ “Indian Reservation.”

That 19-month Alcatraz occupation put the plight of Native Americans front-and-center. A who’s who of celebs got involved: Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Jonathan Winters and many others. Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Rock band, pitched in $15 grand for a supply boat. Pre-Rock ‘n Roll Pop Singer Kay Starr, who was half-Iroquois, carried the message to the over-40 set. Keep America Beautiful’s iconic “Crying Indian” anti-littering ad was the right PSA at the right time when it hit TV screens on Earth Day in April. And The Raiders’ “Indian Reservation” was the right song at the right time when it topped the charts in the Summer, #10 here on our 1971 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

The song, subtitled “The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian.” It was really a Mark Lindsay solo record recorded in L.A. with Wrecking Crew studio aces, but the namesake of Lindsay’s ’60s band The Raiders, Paul Revere, jumped on his custom bike and rode coast-to-coast plugging it to every radio station he passed along the way, and it was the band’s first top 10 since 1967, and their only career chart-topper.

#9 Sly & The Family Stone – Family Affair

Another guy who got political in ’71, Marvin Gaye. And he scored his biggest hit since 1969’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with the title track to his concept album What’s Goin’ On. No punctuation after that title but our artist at #9 heard a question, so last minute he retitled his group’s first album in two years to his answer: There’s a Riot Going On. On the cover, a reimagined American flag with black instead of blue and bursts instead of stars, and pessimistic, disillusioned and sometimes incoherent songs: a far cry from their ultra-catchy starry-eyed utopian hits from just a couple years before. The album got mixed reviews, but it still shot to #1, and its lead single was #1 for three weeks in December. It’s Sly & The Family Stone’s “Family Affair.”

Sly & The Family Stone were at the pinnacle of fame after their 1969 hits “Dance to the Music,” “Everyday People,” “Stand” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” but the racial colorblindness the group not only celebrated but embodied, having both Black and White members, put Sly at odds with the Black Panthers, who leaned hard on him to fire the White Drummer and Sax Player and embrace Black Power and revolution. So, squeezed from both ends, Sly holed himself up in his mansion in L.A. surrounded by hangers-on, drug dealers, petty gangsters, “bodyguards” and his Pitbull “Gun,” a “terminal zone of drugs, guns, chaos and paranoia,” as Guardian writer Sean O’Hagan put it in 2007. That’s where he recorded There’s a Riot Going On.

“Family Affair” replaced Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft” at #1 in December, marking five straight weeks with a Black artist at #1. But that was just a preview for ’72, when Black artists scored a record-setting 11 of the year’s 22 #1 hits, and had a majority of the records in the top ten for 14 straight weeks. Sly coulda-shoulda been part of that, but showing up late or not at all to shows, and his rambling, incoherent interviews in print and on TV were just too weird, even for 1971, and after “Family Affair,” the Riot album yielded no further hits.

#8 Donny Osmond – Go Away Little Girl

OK, so that concludes the blatantly political segment of our 1971 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, but as Isaac Newton taught us, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, so maybe not! Because what could be more reactionary in an era of in-your-face political activism and racial consciousness than a group of five White brothers that sound just like the group of five Black brothers they’ve replaced at the top of the charts?

The Jackson 5 were 1970’s big Pop story: four consecutive #1s, lead vocals by 11-year-old Michael Jackson: “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There.” But then, on literally the first Billboard chart in 1971, January 2, out of Ogden, Utah, here came The Osmonds, with their pre-Teen, voice-hasn’t-changed-yet Donny singing lead. One thing The Osmonds thought of first, though (maybe the only thing): issuing solo singles by the squeaky-voiced little guy getting all the attention. By Spring, Donny was a full-blown Tiger Beat heartthrob and his first solo record, “Sweet and Innocent” got to #7 just after the group’s first hit got bumped out of the #1 spot. The second group single only made it to #14, so the label, MGM, issued a second Donny single, and when it hit #1, it became the first song ever to top the Hot100 twice in two different versions. More on that in a minute, but first #8, Donny Osmond’s “Go Away Little Girl.”

“Go Away Little Girl,” written in 1962 for Teen Idol Bobby Vee by Brill Building power songwriting couple Carole King and Gerry Goffin. But only an album cut, so Pop Crooner Steve Lawrence put his version out as a single and it was his first #1 hit in 1963. Vocal group The Happenings took it to #12 in ’66, but in ’71 as a ’50s and early ’60s nostalgia wave was building, 13-year-old Donny Osmond got it to #1 again: maybe the only version of “Go Away Little Girl” that’s not cringeworthy since the ’80s. That’s when the topic of pedophilia first trended.

A side note: at the tail end of Tin Pan Alley in the ’40s and early ’50s it was common for multiple versions of a song to chart, usually at the same time, and several songs had more than one version that got a turn at #1: a double jackpot for the songwriters. But “Go Away Little Girl” was the first in the Hot100 era, eight and a half years apart. Before long, two other covers of early ’60s #1s topped the chart: Grand Funk’s “The Loco-Motion” in ’74 (another Carole King song), and then The Carpenters’ “Please Mr. Postman” in ’75. The originals of those by Little Eva and The Marvelettes, respectively. I did mention escapism and that nostalgia wave about to break, right?

#7 The Osmonds – One Bad Apple

And at #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1971, the hit that started it all for our White Jackson 5 copycats from Utah, and get this: it’s a song that was written for the Jackson 5, but rejected by Motown boss Berry Gordy, Jr. in favor of The Jackson 5’s second #1 hit, “ABC.” Here again, Donny Osmond, but this time with his brothers in the Osmonds group, their first hit, “One Bad Apple.”

Osmonds, “One Bad Apple,” #7 as we count down the top ten hits of 1971 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Recorded at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, by studio owner Rick Hall, who’d also produced ’60s Soul stars like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett… and, hired the longhaired, mutton-chopped session guitarist who’d pitched a tent in the parking lot to get noticed. Sadly, that guitarist, Duane Allman, the inventor of Southern Rock and founder and leader of The Allman Brothers, was another Rocker who didn’t live to see 1972.

#6 Bee Gees – How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

Up next, we have another brother act, but this time a trio, from Britain, who’d charted their first top 20 hits in 1967 and their first top tens in ’68. But the ground shifted under their feet in ’68 and they found themselves stuck, along with dozens of other popular mid-’60s acts, in the vast limbo between Hippie-approved Album Rock on the one hand, and Bubblegum, as adjudicated by the new arbiters of cool in the counterculture press. And when their Proggy 1969 double LP concept album failed to earn the Rolling Stone seal of approval, they disintegrated, but were back before too long with a renewed focus, tighter material, and a #1 hit, their first, for four weeks in August or ’71. It’s the Brothers Gibb, that’s right, The Bee Gees. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”

Robin on the verses, Barry on the chorus and both along with the third Gibb brother Maurice on harmonies, The Bee Gees, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” #6 as we count down the top ten from 1971 here on this week’s Chartcrush.

April of 1970 was when Paul McCartney announced that The Beatles were splitting, and by Summer the Bee Gees were back together cutting a record that many mistook for a lost latter-day Fab Four masterpiece. “Lonely Days” became their first top five hit, and then “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” their first #1.

They slumped badly again after ’71, but of course came back bigger than ever in the Disco years, with seven more #1s starting with “Jive Talkin'” in ’75.

#5 George Harrison – My Sweet Lord

And speaking of The Beatles, here’s a trivia question: which Beatle was the first to get to #1 after the breakup? Well John Lennon was the first to chart a solo single: “Instant Karma.” That hit #3 behind The Beatles’ own “Let It Be” in April of ’70 as Paul McCartney was announcing the split and releasing his first solo album. “Maybe I’m Amazed” off that album might’ve topped the chart, but it was never issued as a single, and the charts were Beatle-free all Summer until Thanksgiving. That’s when our #5 song hit the airwaves, rocketed to #1 the last week of 1970 and stayed on top four weeks into ’71. His songwriting, voice and guitar on songs like “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “I Me Mine” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” had as much to do with The Fab Four’s sound in their last couple years as anything John, Paul or Ringo contributed, so for fans mourning the breakup all year, it was a delight. At #5, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.”

George Harrison, “My Sweet Lord,” #5 on our 1971 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Don’t look for it anywhere near the top of Billboard’s year-end chart for 1971 though; it’s only #36. ’71 was the last year that Billboard’s “chart year” (the timeframe they count for their year-end rankings) didn’t include the last several weeks of the previous year after the press deadline for the issue with the year-end charts. They changed that for ’72, but for “My Sweet Lord,” not counting its weeks in December 1970 makes it one of the many year-straddling hits over the years that’ve fallen through the cracks on Billboard’s “official” year-end charts. Here at Chartcrush we avoid that by factoring every song’s full chart run in the year it earned the most points, so George’s ode to Krishna takes its rightful place as the #5 song of 1971.

Overtly religious Pop hits were a thing in the early ’70s. “My Sweet Lord,” preceded in the top ten by Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” in the Spring of 1970, and two weeks after it finished its run, Ocean’s “Put Your Hand in the Hand (Of the Man from Galilee)” debuted on its way to #2. And over on the album chart, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar: at or near the top ten pretty much all year: Billboard’s #1 album of 1971.

#4 Dawn featuring Tony Orlando – Knock Three Times

Religious songs on the charts, definitely a barometer of worldly stresses and anxieties. Nostalgia is another. But you know times are really tough when songs about literally escaping are topping the charts. There were a lot of those in the early ’70s. Two examples from ’71: John Denver’s first hit “Take Me Home Country Roads” and Janis Joplin’s last, “Me and Bobby McGee.”

But what if you live in the inner-city, right in the thick of it, and can’t just escape to the country, or hit the open road with nothing left to lose? Well you can still beat a tactical retreat back to the basics of home, family and neighbors, and that’s especially tempting when there’s a cute girl downstairs who blasts her music every night, and getting to know her would make life so much sweeter. Inspired by another “how to” song about finding sanctuary amid the hustle and bustle of the city, the 1962 Drifters hit “Up on the Roof,” at #4, it’s Dawn featuring Tony Orlando, “Knock Three Times.”

The narrative story song, with a beginning, middle and end: as old as the hills in Country and Folk, but in the early ’70s, Pop records that weren’t crossovers from those genres started topping the charts, and “Knock Three Times” was one of the first.

According to co-songwriter L. Russell Brown, it sold 100,000 copies a day for 10 days straight over the holidays heading in to 1971, and that was just in New York. Once it made the charts, it’s narrative depiction of the simple joys and dramas of urban life warmed the hearts even of folks who’d never even been in an apartment building, and it caught on nationally: three weeks at #1 and the #4 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1971.

Now, we never find out whether the girl downstairs knocks three times or bangs twice, or even if she sees the note on the string, but two years later Tony Orlando & Dawn were back at #1 with another story song that does have an ending: a happy one, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the ‘Ol Oak Tree.”

#3 Carole King – It’s Too Late

At #3 we have the first hit by the woman that Billboard honored with a Trendsetter Award in ’71 for proving that Singer-Songwriters doing “personal statement songs” could sell boatloads of records. Well she had nothing to prove as a Songwriter: over 70 charted recordings of her songs on the Hot100 (including over a dozen top tens), most from the early ’60s co-written with her lyricist hubby Gerry Goffin in the Brill Building. But it wasn’t until she divorced Goffin, moved to L.A.’s Laurel Canyon and took a stripped-down, confessional approach for her ’71 album with producer Lou Adler that things gelled for her as a Singer.

The album Tapestry took a few months of word-of-mouth to crack the top ten on the album chart, but once it did, it became a big part of the soundtrack for the burgeoning Women’s movement: #1 for 15 straight weeks, and then Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. Adler picked our #3 song for the single and put another winner from the album on the flip, “I Feel the Earth Move.” And it was #1 on the Hot100 the first five weeks Tapestry was the top album, mid-June to mid-July. At #3 it’s Carole King’s “It’s Too Late”

One of the great breakup songs, Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” at #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1971’s biggest hits. A very mature song for the Pop charts; it doesn’t wallow or cry or point fingers; it just observes kind of matter-of-factly that, for whatever reasons, things aren’t like they were and it’s time to move on. Critics have highlighted the implicit feminism of that, and besides opening the door for Singer-Songwriters in general, Tapestry‘ssales alerted the biz to the purchasing power of Women as a distinct demographic.

One reason it took Carole King so long to find success as a Singer: extreme stage fright. It wasn’t ’til the summer of ’71 when Tapestry and “It’s Too Late” were already #1, that she finally pushed through the jitters, for a sell-out crowd at New York’s Carnegie Hall. You go, girl!

#2 Rod Stewart – Maggie May

Now on the Male side of so-called “personal statement songs” in the first years of the ’70s, guys like Neil Young, Cat Stevens and James Taylor come to mind. Taylor, by the way, a close friend of Carole King after she moved to L.A. His #3 hit “Fire and Rain” in late ’70 credited with kicking off the Singer-Songwriter era. But one guy who usually isn’t thought of in that category scored the biggest hit in the genre in 1971. And he didn’t even mean to. It first appeared as an album cut, and then as the B side of his debut 45 as a solo artist. But radio started playing it instead of the A-side. Recorded essentially live in the studio, at #2, Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.”

A biographical song about his first intimate relationship, with an older woman: Rod Stewart’s first solo hit, “Maggie May,” #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1971’s top hits. Stewart was also the lead singer in the band Faces in the early ’70s, along with future Rolling Stones Guitarist Ron Wood, group founder and Bassist Ronnie Lane and Drummer Kenney Jones, who later replaced Keith Moon in The Who. None of those guys wanted to be thought of as Rod Stewart’s backing band though, which caused friction as Rod’s solo career took off, and they called it quits by ’75. Even most Classic Rock fans, to this day, think Faces biggest hit is a Rod Stewart song. The Rocker “Stay with Me” hit the chart less than a month after “Maggie May” exited and while Rod’s solo follow-up, “I’m Losing You,” another Rocker, was still on it.

#1 Three Dog Night – Joy to the World

And speaking of Rockers, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath and Yes all had quintessential albums out and in the top ten on the album chart in ’71. So how did Classic Rock perennials from those albums like “Stairway to Heaven,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Aqualung,” “Iron Man” and “Roundabout” fare on the Hot100? Well, in a word: poorly.

Album Rock, a massive blind spot on the Hot100 for the simple reason that the Hot100 was a singles chart in the ’70s, and who needs a single of a song you have on an album? We can’t even guess at those songs’ popularity relative to others because Billboard didn’t start publishing Airplay charts until the ’80s.

Still, even with those dynamics in play, some Rock songs did manage to become #1 Hot100 hits. The Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” in ’68 which was only out on a single; ditto Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” in ’70. The Guess Who’s “American Woman,” also in ’70, a band previously known for more easy-on-the-ears Jazzy Pop. And the band with the #1 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten for 1971, also more Top40 than FM before this hit, but it was an FM jock in Seattle who first played it, and based on the response, the big AM Top40 station in the same building started spinning it, and the rest is history. At #1 it’s Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World.”

Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World,” another totally unexpected hit added last-minute to the end of their album just to fill out the time. The single version we just heard is a punchier mix, shorter, with some guitar overdubs in the break that aren’t on the album.

Veteran Country Singer-Songwriter Hoyt Axton had started “Joy to the World” for a kids’ cartoon that never got made, so the lyrics were still incomplete when he pitched it to the band. Jeremiah was only a bullfrog because those were the nonsense words he came up with there on the spot, planning to go back and polish things up if they wanted the song. But before he could, they recorded it and the album was out.

Three Dog Night charted 21 singles from ’69 to ’75 with 11 top tens, but ’71 was their high watermark: “Joy,” #1 for six weeks, plus two other top tens, “Liar” and “An Old-Fashioned Love Song.”

And there ya have ’em, the top ten songs of 1971 according to our Chartcrush ranking that based on Billboard’s weekly charts, but factoring songs’ full chart runs. None of that chart year stuff where things fall through the cracks, so there are some differences between our ranking and the top ten on Billboard’s published Hot100 for ’71. I mentioned that “My Sweet Lord” moves up from #36 to #5. Also absent from Billboard’s official top ten, our #9 song “Family Affair,” Sly & The Family Stone. But that one was so late in the year that Billboard has it in their 1972 chart year, but only at #79 because they didn’t factor its first weeks in ’71. So two songs coming in to our top ten means two songs from Billboard‘s that we didn’t get to hear this hour. So let’s take a look at those.

Billboard’s #9 song was Eddie Kendricks’ last lead vocal in The Temptations before going solo.

“Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” notches in at #13 on our Chartcrush ranking for ’71. The Temptations continued scoring hits without Kendricks: “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” in ’72 and “Masterpiece” in ’73. But Eddie did very well too with his top tens “Keep on Truckin'” in ’73, and “Boogie Down” in ’74.

And Billboard’s #8 year-end hit of 1971 I mentioned earlier talking about songs literally about escaping.

“Take Me Home Country Roads,” one of West Virginia’s official state anthems since 2014, and West Virginia University’s theme song since 1972, just after it was a hit: performed at every Mountaineers home football game to this day.

And that’s gonna have to wrap things up for our 1971 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard and want more, head over to our website, chartcrush.com for a full transcript of today’s show and a 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 Billboard chart runs of every song we heard this hour. We do that for every year, 1940s up to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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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 count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re setting our sights on 1997, a year when women consolidated their gains after Alanis Morrissette reset the bar for what females could do in music and still score big hits.

’97 was the first Lilith Fair tour: Singer-Songwriter Sarah McLachlan’s answer to music’s “glass ceiling” rule that you couldn’t do two females back-to-back on a concert bill or on the radio. “Lilith” was from Jewish folklore: Adam’s supposed first wife banished from the Garden of Eden, not Frasier’s girlfriend on the NBC sitcom Cheers, as some assumed. Alanis did her own tour in ’97 and wasn’t on Lilith Fair, but 16 other top female acts were, plus dozens more on two smaller stages: all-day shows in 36 cities: the year’s top festival tour according to Rolling Stone.

But as much as Lilith Fair did to put women in the spotlight, it was only a sliver of Female Pop in ’97: as the U.K. Observer put it at the time: the “sensitive side”. No R&B, Hip-Hop or Country on the roster, but on the charts, female R&B acts Monica, Mary J. Blige, TLC and En Vogue, scoring hits like crazy; ’90s Divadom at its peak (Mariah, Celine, Whitney and Toni); LeAnn Rimes and Shania Twain taking Country crossover to new heights. Female Rappers even made their own watershed moment in ’97 with a top ten remix of Lil’ Kim’s “Not Tonight” featuring Da Brat, TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Missy Elliott and Angie Martinez.

Straight-up Pop, not at Lilith Fair either, but The Spice Girls hit in January, and that had everyone talking up a comeback for Pop, borne out later in the year when Hanson, Savage Garden and Backstreet Boys made it gender-inclusive. Now it’s not just a Pop surge; it’s Millennials taking over while the youngest of ’em are still in diapers, and right in the middle of what’s supposed to be Gen-X’s pop culture prime! In ’98 MTV made the takeover official, launching its Total Request Live after-school show.

Rapper The Notorious B.I.G. was murdered in a drive-by shooting in March of ’97, and in August, Princess Diana died in a car wreck in Paris. Both of those sudden deaths shocked the public, and the tribute songs that came out as the world mourned were the two best-selling singles of the year.

But neither of those songs got much airplay, so ’97 was the third year in a row that Billboard’s #1 Hot100 song of the year wasn’t among the year’s top Radio hits. But worse, some of the year’s biggest Airplay hits never charted on the Hot100 at all: excluded because the labels had opted not to release them as singles. That was Billboard’s rule all the way to the end of 1998: no single, no chart.

In a 1997 commentary piece in Billboard, writer Terry McManus lamented the death of the vinyl single with nothing replacing it, and for “song-is-the-song” genres like Rock and Country, he was 100% right. But CD singles were actually thriving in Dance, R&B and Hip-Hop, where multiple versions, edits and remixes of hit songs had been mandatory since the ’80s.

So with that threshold eligibility rule and sales counting for 40% of the ranking, the Hot100 by the late ’90s had become pretty useless. Who needed a chart to see what songs out as retail singles were selling if half the most popular songs weren’t out as singles? The next best thing? Billboard’s weekly 50-position Radio Songs chart, which ranked songs based on how often they got played on a cross-section of hundreds of U.S. radio stations.

#10 The Cardigans – Lovefool

Our song at #10 as we kick things off: the first of four glaring examples in our countdown of why we use that Airplay chart to rank the songs for the “broken Hot100 years,” ’95 to ’98. No single, so it never charted on the Hot100, but it was a top ten radio hit for 21 weeks. Movie director Baz Luhrman gave it a big boost when he picked it up for his modern-day Romeo + Juliet reboot with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. The lead single plugged to radio from that soundtrack, The Cardigans’ “Lovefool.”

“Lovefool” peaked in March, and by Summer The Cardigans were one of the 16 acts on the Lilith Fair tour’s main stage. They continued charting hits in the U.K. and their native Sweden, but were a one-hit wonder in the States. “No-hit wonder” if you go by the Hot100. No commercial U.S. single, so “Lovefool” was ineligible. But it’s the year’s #10 song here on our 1997 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, thanks to the Airplay chart.

#9 Backstreet Boys – Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)

At #9 is one of the Boy Band hits that got people thinking that maybe the The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” wasn’t a fluke and that a Pop surge was really happening. Hanson’s “Mmmbop” hit #1 on the Airplay chart for four weeks in June and July, but meanwhile, this one was scaling up the charts. Hanson was a one-hit wonder, but these guys kept on scoring hits, and #1 albums. They were from Orlando, Florida but got big in Europe first and were calling America “no fan land” ’til this song. It’s the Backstreet Boys “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart).”

Since lip-syncing accusations derailed New Kids on the Block in the early ’90s, there’d been a stigma against White Boy Bands. And ever since, notwithstanding Motown’s squeaky clean Boyz II Men, it’d been a competition among Male R&B vocal groups like Jodeci, Silk and Blackstreet and their producers to out-raunch each other on the charts.

Given that, Jive Records wanted to launch the Backstreet Boys in the U.S. with “If You Want to Be Good Girl, Get Yourself a Bad Boy.” But the group pushed back and “Quit Playing Games” was the lead single. It’d already topped the charts in Europe so it was the safer bet, and it was their first U.S. hit, #9 on our 1997 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown.

It was also the first big chart triumph for Swedish producer Max Martin. In ’98, he unleashed Britney Spears’ “..Baby One More Time” on an unsuspecting world, then in the ’00s and beyond, career-defining Pop hits by Kelly Clarkson, P!nk, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and many others.

#8 Shawn Colvin – Sunny Came Home

At #8, another Lilith Fair act, and hey, for anyone thinking this Girl Power thing in ’97 was just music, the two big TV premieres that year? Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ally McBeal. But I digress. She’d been at it since the ’70s, first fronting a Hard Rock band, then a Western Swing outfit, but after damaging her vocal chords in ’83 she moved to New York and gradually built up a following there in the emerging “New Folk” scene. Columbia signed her in the late ’80s as Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega and The Indigo Girls were scoring hits, and her 1989 debut Steady On won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

But success on the Pop charts eluded her until this song, which first appeared on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart in February, and was #1 on all of radio for four weeks in July: the entire first half of the Lilith Fair tour. It’s Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home.”

#8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1997’s biggest radio hits, “Sunny Came Home,” the opening song on Shawn Colvin’s 1996 divorce-themed concept album, A Few Small Repairs. Since there was a commercial single, it also made the Hot100, peaking at #7. And it won her another two Grammys, the big ones: Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

At the awards, one of her acceptances was pre-empted by Rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard (ODB), who grabbed a mic to complain about his group Wu-Tang Clan not winning Best Rap Album, 11 years before Kanye West borrowed Taylor Swift’s mic at the ’09 VMAs on behalf of Beyonce. Shawn Colvin continued making music and all six of her albums up to 2016 made the album chart, but “Sunny Came Home” was her only Pop hit.

#7 Chumbawamba – Tubthumping

At #7, yet another one-hit wonder: as Variety put it, a “drinking-and-dancing anthem,” by a self-described “anarcho-communist Punk collective” that’d gone hitless, even in their native U.K., since forming in 1982. This one, however (their first on a major label) connected immediately, debuting at #2 on the U.K. charts and staying in the top ten 11 weeks.

In the U.S. it took 10 weeks to top the Airplay chart, but once it did at the end of November, it was #1 for nine weeks. And there was a single so it got to #6 on the Hot100 too: an important milestone for Punk as a genre after two decades of little to no singles chart action. It may’ve been voted the 12th most annoying song of all-time in a 2007 Rolling Stone poll, but it sure was an earworm in the Fall of ’97. At #7 it’s Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.”

So what would you do if you came up on restrooms labeled “chumba” and “wamba?” Well if you were in a band with males and females, you might think, as these guys did, to mash the words together for your band name. “Tubthumping,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1997’s biggest radio hits.

So how does an anarcho-communist Punk group deal with sudden wealth and fame? Well, for one, they go on ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and tell people to steal their CD from big box stores like HMV and Virgin. They donate their ill-gotten gains to antifa groups; lace acceptance speeches and interviews with controversial slogans; publicly refuse offers from brands, like Nike’s to use “Tubthumping” in a ’98 World Cup ad. And given the chance, they dump ice water on then-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at the Brit Awards.

All those things happened, and, hard to believe in an era when even the slightest perceived political threats elicit hysterical overreactions from some corners of law enforcement and the legal system, but Chumbawamba faced no reprisals at all for their agitprop and mischief, and carried on cranking out albums and singles until 2012.

#6 Toni Braxton – Un-Break My Heart

OK, #6 is a change of pace! Songwriter Diane Warren was busy in the late ’90. Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me, “Monica’s “For You I Will” (from the movie Space Jam) and LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live:” all Diane Warren songs. And our #6 song was another shiny framed disc for her wall.

The singer was LaFace Records’ answer to Whitney, Mariah and Celine, coming off her first #1 hit in ’96 with “You’re Makin’ Me High” after missing the top spot with three top tens from her 1993 self-titled debut. So song choice was key and she wasn’t sure about this one when label honcho L.A. Reid proposed it to her, but it became her second #1 on the Hot100, and even dislodged the #1 song in our countdown from the top of the Airplay chart right in the middle of its record-breaking 16-week run. We’re gonna hear that one a little later, of course, but at #6, it’s Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart.”

Toni Braxton, “Un-Break My Heart” at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1997’s biggest hits, one of just two songs in our Airplay-derived top ten that was also in the top ten on Billboard’s 1997 year-end Hot100 ranking: #4 on that. The CD maxi-single was the only way to get the non-album Hex Hector-Soul Solution remix that topped the Dance chart for four weeks and got played on Rhythmic stations. It sold a ton.

There was an opening in Divadom in ’97 and Toni Braxton whooshed in. Mariah Carey was making a movie (The Bachelor), separating from hubby Tommy Mottola and reinventing herself as a Hip-Hop-friendly R&B singer for her album Butterfly. Celine Dion, between her massive hits from her ’96 Falling into You album and Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On” in early ’98. And Whitney Houston, focusing mainly on her acting career (Waiting to Exhale, Preacher’s Wife, Cinderella).

#5 The Wallflowers – One Headlight

So when you’re Bob Dylan’s son and your band cuts an album, you have some big advantages, right? But you also have a lot to live up to. Our act at #5 got a fair hearing, though, in ’96 when their second album came out and they started getting traction, because after years of L.A. club gigs, a first album that didn’t sell, and opening for other acts on tour, they’d paid their dues, and Jakob Dylan hadn’t traded on his name, not once.

The opposite, in fact. He never talked about it, which made a difference for critics and fans. And when they finally broke through with this song, it was the first to top all three of Billboard’s Rock Airplay charts: Modern Rock, Mainstream Rock and Adult Alternative. Billboard has it as the #1 Adult Alternative song of all-time! It’s The Wallflowers’ “One Headlight.”

The Wallflowers, another act that never released an actual, physical single, so don’t look for them on the Hot100. But with 22 weeks in the top ten on the Radio Songs chart, “One Headlight” was the #5 hit of 1997 by our Chartcrush ranking of the year’s top airplay hits we’re counting down this hour. Their album Bringing Down the Horse went 4X Platinum, “One Headlight” won Best Rock Song at the ’98 Grammys, and Jakob Dylan was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

By the way, Jakob’s dad Bob Dylan released his first album of new songs in over six years in ’97, Time out of Mind, which topped multiple critics polls at the end of the year, including Billboard’s. Bob played a big role in another success story we’re gonna be hearing in a few minutes.

#4 Third Eye Blind – Semi-Charmed Life

But first, at #4 we have the lead single from the debut album by the first San Francisco band to make it big since Huey Lewis & The News in the early ’80s.

The song had been a work-in-progress for front man-Songwriter Stephan Jenkins since his days as half of Rap duo Puck & Natty, who got one of their songs on Beverly Hills 90210 in 1992. But once Grunge came along, Jenkins figured he’d have a better shot at making it in a Rock band, and by ’97 his band had evolved a loose, Rap/Jam Band sound that was irresistible to Alternative and Pop radio: “a bridge,” as Billboard later put it “between the grim Grunge years and the soon-to-explode pure Pop explosion.” The first in their string of hits that were ubiquitous on radio late ’90s, it’s Third Eye Blind with “Semi-Charmed Life.”

Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” at #4. 54 weeks on the Billboard Radio Songs chart, and since there was a single, it also charted on the Hot100, with four weeks at #4. While it was still on the charts “Semi-Charmed Life” was also on the big screen, in Robert Zemeckis’ sci-fi blockbuster Contact starring Jodie Foster, and it’s been used in at least eight other movies since, and counting.

#3 Sugar Ray – Fly

At #3 we have a third massive Rock debut in a row here on our 1997 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: another song that could be described as a bridge between Grunge and late ’90s Pop. Unlike “Semi-Charmed Life,” though, there wasn’t a single, so it only registered on the Airplay charts.

But boy did it! Four weeks at #1 on Radio Songs and eight on the Alternative Airplay chart. But the Reggae-tinged hit was unlike anything else on their CD of funky Nu-Metal, so when fans bought their album Floored (the only way to get the song), a lot of them were sorely disappointed, which was a familiar experience in the late ’90s. At #3 it’s Sugar Ray’s breakout hit, “Fly.”

Sugar Ray’s “Fly,” from their album Floored, #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1997’s biggest airplay hits. Smash Mouth’s Fush Yu Mang, another debut album propelled to double-Platinum by a radio hit that sounded nothing like the rest of the band’s stuff. But both bands changed course for their next albums, building them around the massive radio hits from their previous ones, and both nailed it. Sugar Ray titled theirs 14:59, as in, one second left in the 15 minutes of fame critics advised them to enjoy before going back to their day jobs, and it yielded not one but two top tens in the “Fly” mold in ’99: “Every Morning” and “Someday.”

#2 Jewel – You Were Meant for Me

Next up, the one song where the year-end Hot100 and Airplay top tens for 1997 agree. It’s #2 on both. The biggest of the Lilith Fair acts in our countdown, and the song is the second hit off her debut album recorded at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow ranch in California and live at the coffeehouse in San Diego where she played when she was living out of her car.

The album didn’t sell when it came out in ’95, but constant touring got her opening gigs for both Young and Bob Dylan (there’s that name again), and by ’97, things were happening. Her first single, “Who Will Save Your Soul,” spent the whole Summer of 1996 in the top ten, but this is the one that sealed the deal, #1 on the airwaves for nine straight weeks, mid-April to the beginning of June. It’s Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me.”

Jewel knew she’d arrived when she got to play Bill Clinton’s second inaugural in January of ’97. That was before “You Were Meant for Me” had even entered the top ten, and it went on to be the #2 song of the year. The other song on the single it was on was what turned out to be her next hit, “Foolish Games.”

Once that started getting more airplay in September, Billboard started listing it on the Hot100 as the main song of what was now a “double-A sided” single. That’s industry jargon from vinyl 45 days for a record where both sides are hits. So technically, Billboard’s #2 Hot100 single of ’97 is “You Were Meant for Me” and “Foolish Games.” Thankfully, we don’t have to bother with those technicalities counting down the top ten Radio hits: “You Were Meant for Me” earns the #2 spot all on its own.

Once Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera hit in ’99, Jewel’s sensitive, Folky style was passe and the hits stopped, so in ’03 she tried to reinvent herself as a flashy Dance Pop Diva, but her makeover song “Intuition” only got as high as #20. Maybe if she’d tried that a couple years earlier with, say, Max Martin in the producer’s chair? But by ’03 skater grrrl Avril Lavigne was Pop’s new “it” girl and even Britney was struggling, so Jewel returned to her Country-Folk roots.

#1 No Doubt – Don’t Speak

Well we’re down to #1 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1997, and it’s the hit people most often mention talking about how messed up the Hot100 was in the late ’90s. No U.S. single release, so it was ineligible, but it’s the #1 Airplay hit of the year no matter how you slice and dice it.

Like Sugar Ray’s “Fly,” it wasn’t typical of the band’s sound, but unlike Sugar Ray, they’d already notched two top tens on the Alternative chart in ’96 in the amped up New Wavey Ska-Punk style that’d been packing ’em in back in Anaheim, California, “Just a Girl” and “Spiderwebs,” so their hardcore fans could look the other way as this one made them overnight Pop superstars. By the end of the Summer, their third album, Tragic Kingdom, was certified 8X Platinum and this was its biggest hit: 1997’s #1 song, No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.”

No Doubt at #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1997’s biggest hits. Like Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Don’t Speak,” as No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont put it, “had a long incubation process.” Originally a bouncy, Jazzy love song, singer Gwen Stefani rewrote the words after her seven-year romance with bassist Tony Kanal ended, and it evolved into the more mournful breakup song we just heard. Despite the drama, Kanal remained in the band, and the “Don’t Speak” video tackles the breakup fallout head-on.

Bonus

And that’s our countdown. Just two songs in common between the top ten of our Airplay-derived ranking and Billboard’s published year-end Hot100 chart: Toni Braxton and Jewel, which were numbers 4 and 2, respectively, in Billboard. But that means that eight of Billboard’s year-end top ten Hot100 singles were not among the year’s top ten Radio Songs. In the time we have left, let’s review those.

At #10 they had the all-female British Pop sensation, Spice Girls.

Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger and Posh Spice were everywhere in ’97; except the radio, at least as much as you’d think given all the hype. Their first hit “Wannabe” is only #38 on our Airplay ranking.

This one made Billboard’s Hot100 year-end top ten in ’97 and ’98.

LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live” was on the Hot100 from June ’97 straight through to June ’98 and in the top ten nearly half of those 69 weeks, so it’s Billboard’s #9 song of ’97 and #5 on the year 1998. It’s run on the Airplay chart though? Not quite as impressive. Even factoring its full chart run into a single year, which we do for all songs in our Chartcrush rankings, it’s #15.

For its #8 song of 1997, Billboard had another British act.

Mark Morrison’s only U.S. hit, “Return of the Mack,” #21 on our Airplay ranking.

#7 in Billboard was the comeback of the original R&B Girl Group after over four years without a top ten hit.

En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go (Love),” founding member Dawn Robinson’s last record with the group, from the soundtrack of the 1996 bank robbery flick, Set It Off. That one shakes out at #14 on our Airplay ranking.

And at #6 on the year, Billboard had another soundtrack hit, from the live-action/animated sports fantasy Space Jam starring Michael Jordan… and Bugs Bunny.

R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” Michael Jordan’s theme, played at the end of the ’97 NBA Finals on NBC after five-time MVP Jordan’s Chicago Bulls defeated the Utah Jazz four games to two. And then the New York Yankees adopted it for home games in their four consecutive World Series appearances, ’98 to 2001. Our Airplay ranking for 1997 has it at #24.

#5 on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 was Bad Boy Records mogul-producer Sean “P. Diddy” Combs headlining his first record as Puff Daddy and featuring one of his label’s hottest Rappers, Mase.

“Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” shakes out at #67 on our Airplay ranking. Even in ’97, not many U.S. radio stations outside major urban areas were playing Rap, despite Hip-Hop albums and singles selling in the millions, a definite drawback of using the Airplay charts, but one Hip-Hop track that did pretty well in addition to being Billboard’s #3 Hot100 single of the year, was Diddy’s tribute to slain Rapper The Notorious B.I.G., featuring Biggie’s widow Faith Evans and Bad Boy R&B group 112.

Biggie’s murder was big news, not just in Hip-Hop circles, so “I’ll Be Missing You” is our #23 Airplay song of the year. The sample from The Police’s 1983 megahit, “Every Breath You Take” sure didn’t hurt its crossover appeal to other radio formats.

And Billboard’s #1 song was the best-selling single in Billboard history. But for a hit of that magnitude it got remarkably, shockingly, little airplay, only on the Radio Songs chart for seven weeks, peaking at #21. It comes out #77 on our Chartcrush Airplay ranking.

Elton John’s reworked “Candle in the Wind ’97” for Lady Diana’s funeral. Tribute songs at numbers 3 and 1 on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 for 1997. Folks wanted to buy those singles, obviously, but listen to them endlessly on the radio? Not as much as you’d think from the sales numbers.

And we’re gonna have to leave it there for our 1997 edition of Chartcrush, because we’re out of time! I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. For more, check out our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll find transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other suh-weet extras. Each week we count down a different year from the ’40s up to now, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host Christopher Verdesi. Every week we set our sights on a different year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time by the music industry’s top trade mag, Billboard magazine. This week, we’re turning the clock back to 1986, a transitional year when the currents that’d made the early ’80s MTV revolution fresh and exciting were fading and new sounds were coming up from the underground and streets.

Hip-Hop, for one. MTV treated it like a novelty and it didn’t even have its own Billboard chart ’til 1989, but in ’86, Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell shared the top 5 on the album chart the seven weeks after Labor Day with the likes of Madonna, Lionel Richie, Steve Winwood and the Top Gun Soundtrack, and their remake of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith was all over MTV. And right after that in the Fall of ’86, what Billboard Chart Beat editor Paul Grein called the Thriller of Glam Metal, Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, shot into the top five, and it was a whole new bag on the charts heading into ’87.

Other more gradual changes were reaching tipping points too: smooth R&B replacing Soft Rock and Country Pop as the dominant sound on Adult Contemporary radio, and so-called “College Rock” bands like U2 and R.E.M. nearing the cusp of superstardom. And as in other transitional periods, nostalgia was big. The Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame honored its first inductees in ’86; Classic Rock was now a thing on radio, and after the demise of AM Top 40 earlier in the decade, FM Oldies, never bigger. And Doo-Wop was charting again: not just Billy Joel’s obvious throwbacks “Uptown Girl” and “The Longest Time,” but modern-sounding hits by Wham!, Huey Lewis & The News, Hall & Oates and even Madonna: enough of those that the smart alecks who invented the genre “Yacht Rock” in the ’00s to retroactively classify certain ’70s and ’80s Soft Rock hits, came up with a genre for that too: “Nu Wop!” The Monkees were back in ’86: on tour with six of their albums from the ’60s back on the charts at the same time. And James Brown back in the top 10 for the first time since 1968 (“Living in America” from Rocky IV). Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” and The Beatles “Twist and Shout,” both charted again thanks to movies.

And after a decade of abstract, escapist Prog; lusty, hedonistic Disco; angsty, nihilistic Punk; and flippant, aloof New Wave, Pop had a conscience again, even if it sometimes felt more top-down and prefab than bottom-up and organic, like a nostalgia trip for Woodstock Nation 40-somethings. Live Aid and Farm Aid in ’85, and the Amnesty International shows in ’86 were massive events that did raise awareness (and money) for neglected causes: hunger in Africa, family farm foreclosures and human rights.

But while the late ’60s were the tail end of the Postwar economic Boom and Boomers had had the luxury to take up causes, the ’80s were more like the beginning of it the late ’40s and early ’50s, after years of Depression and War. ’70s stagflation, “malaise” and urban collapse weren’t quite that bad, but coming out of it, people weren’t taking their opportunities for granted. They were focused on building careers, businesses and nest eggs. Which, according to President Reagan and economist Milton Freedman, was also the best way to solve the big problems. So the ’80s, not exactly fertile soil for Progressive activists, but just try keeping people away from an all-day A-list music extravaganza!

#10 Mr. Mister – Kyrie

And with that, let’s kick off our countdown! At #10, the second of two consecutive #1’s for a group of L.A. session guys who decided to form a Rock band, and their second album connected the last year before Glam Metal exploded. The front man had turned down offers to be the lead singer in Toto and to replace Peter Cetera in Chicago. Wise choices, it turned out, once their song “Broken Wings” hit #1. And then then this topped the chart just a few months later. It’s Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie.”

The slick, synthy Arena Rock sound perfected by Mr. Mister on “Kyrie” and other 1986 Rock hits like Europe’s “Final Countdown” and Survivor’s “Burning Heart:” swamped by grittier, keyboard-averse Glam Metal once Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet album came out at the end of ’86, soon followed by Cinderella, Poison, Motley Crue and Def Leppard. “Kyrie’s” chorus was among the top misheard lyrics in ’80s Rock: “Give me a laser down the road that I must travel” was what many heard, but those who paid attention when the DJ said the title, many of them, figured it was about a girl named Kyrie, and sure enough, 164 couples gave their baby girls that name in ’86 according to the Social Security Administration. But like the band’s run on the charts, the girls name Kyrie was a blip. Mr. Mister had two #1s in four months, and by the end of the decade they didn’t even have a label. But the name made a comeback on the boy’s list in 2012, Kyrie Irving’s rookie year with the Cleveland Cavaliers. By the way, the actual lyric is “Kyrie eleison down this road that I must travel:” an ancient prayer invocation that means “Lord, have mercy.” Were churchgoers even listening to Rock in the mid-’80s, as preachers and Senators’ wives in the PMRC railed against smutty lyrics? Maybe a few.

#9 Falco – Rock Me Amadeus

So the Berlin Wall was in the news throughout the ’80s, culminating in 1987 with Reagan’s iconic “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech, and in ’89, Berliners did just that. German songs had scored big on the U.S. charts in other eras when Berlin was in the news. “Forever and Ever” was a top hit during the Berlin Airlift in 1949, adapted from the German Air Force’s theme song in World War 2. Then in 1952 when East Germany sealed its border and cut power and phone lines to West Berlin, Vera Lynn’s “Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart” was #1 for seven weeks. And in ’61, the year the wall went up, unknown singer Joe Dowell took a German Folk song, “Wooden Heart,” to #1. But in the ’80s, it wasn’t just German songs, it was German artists singing them, in German. At #9 on our 1986 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, an Austrian who’d made the top ten on the Dance chart in ’83 with his original version of “Der Kommisar” as British band After the Fire took their English one to #5 on the Hot100. But in ’86 he scored his own U.S. Pop smash, in German, inspired by Miloš Forman’s blockbuster Mozart biopic Amadeus, which won eight Oscars including Best Picture. #1 for three weeks in the Spring of ’86, it’s Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.”

Falco, “Rock Me Amadeus,” #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986 and the second big hit in German on the U.S. Pop charts in two years. Nena’s “99 Luftballons” had gotten to #2 in 1984, in German even though their English version, “99 Red Balloons,” was on the flip, so Falco didn’t bother, and Americans didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

#8 Bruce Hornsby & The Range – The Way It Is

At #8 we have the most overtly political #1, lyrically-speaking, since Folkie Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” in 1965 or Edwin Starr’s “War” in ’70, and until Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” in 2023. But while those other songs sound raw and angry, this one is polished and nonchalant, by a previously unknown Singer-Songwriter, son of an uber-rich Virginia real-estate developer who himself was a generation removed from his dad who amassed the family’s wealth in the oil business. The Steinway grand in the living room was where he honed his piano chops growing up, and the song tackles racism and the wealth gap exactly like you’d expect from a guy with that background: a detached, fly-on-the-wall perspective on two emblematic rich guy/poor person interactions and a tidbit from Social Studies class about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the ’60s to drive home the point. But his bright, shimmering piano transcended the song’s understated, ho-hum moralizing. Conservative talker Sean Hannity actually used the intro for years as bumper music on his radio show! At #8, it’s Bruce Hornsby & The Range, “The Way It Is.”

Bruce Hornsby & The Range’s “The Way It Is,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. Since it didn’t hit #1 ’til December 13th, after the cut-off for Billboard’s 1986 chart year for their year-end rankings, they have it as the #8 song of 1987. In the ’90s, Rappers Tupac Shakur and E-40 both built top 40 charting Hip-Hop tracks around Hornsby’s infectious piano riff. He later scored two apolitical top tens with “Mandolin Rain” in ’87 and “The Valley Road” in ’88, and his piano showed up on dozens of records including Don Henley’s hit “The End of the Innocence” in ’89, but in ’91 he disbanded The Range and became the Grateful Dead’s fulltime touring keyboardist: over 100 shows until Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia passed away in ’95.

#7 Huey Lewis & The News – Stuck with You

Next at #7, the closest thing to a Summer hit in our countdown. ’86 was weird that way. Of the nine #1s in the Summer, only two had more than a single week at #1. Those were Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” from The Karate Kid II and Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” each with two weeks on top. But in that weird zone after Labor Day when it’s still technically Summer but school’s back in session and everyone’s in their Fall clothes, the lead single from these guys’ first album in three years hit the airwaves, and its goofy story video (they were known for those) was all over MTV. It was the first song to hold down the #1 spot for more than two weeks since early June. Coming off their first #1 hit the previous Summer with “Power of Love” from Back to the Future, it’s Huey Lewis & The News’, “Stuck with You.”

A song for couples ratcheting down their relationship expectations, or, the ultimate pandemic quarantine track? Those are two of the dubious latter-day honors bestowed on Huey Lewis & The News’ “Stuck with You,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. Good-natured ironic understatement (“ehhh, you’re okay, I guess I’ll keep you around, wink wink”): apparently that went extinct sometime in the Emo ’00s. Maybe just a Boomer thing! In ’87, Huey & The News notched five top tens including a second #1, “Jacob’s Ladder,” but their brand of good-timey Pub Rock didn’t track much beyond the Reagan era. They kept touring and making albums into the 2020s though, with four original members including Huey.

#6 Whitney Houston – Greatest Love of All

At numbers six and five we have a two-fer. That’s two songs by the same artist back-to-back: the third and second, respectively, of her record-breaking string of seven consecutive #1s from ’85 to ’88. That record still stands. There may not’ve been a single standout Summer hit in ’86, but make no mistake: the Summer of ’86 was the Summer of Whitney Houston, and the song that got Arista honcho Clive Davis to sign her in the first place when he saw her sing it at Sweetwater’s near Lincoln Center in Manhattan in 1983 is our song at #6, “Greatest Love of All.”

Whitney Houston, “Greatest Love of All,” #6. There was no one then on the charts who could sing like that. Adult contemporary listeners got to hear her first: “Hold Me,” Whitney’s duet with Teddy Pendergrass, a #6 AC hit in the Summer of ’84. Once her album was out in the Spring of ’85, her first solo single “You Give Good Love” hit the R&B bullseye, and Arista’s next move was to target AC again with “Saving All My Love for You.” Well, when that topped not only the AC chart, but also the R&B chart and became her first #1 on the Hot100, Clive Davis was validated and Whitney was a multi-format superstar. From there, the label staggered her single releases between Adult Contemporary ballads and lively Pop songs, and they were all #1 hits.

#5 Whitney Houston – How Will I Know

“Greatest Love of All,” the second ballad after “Saving All My Love,” and between them, yep, the upbeat Pop song that won over the MTV crowd, and that’s the #5 hit here on our 1986 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. It had just come out when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in flight at the end of January, and hard to conceive of two more jarringly opposite things simultaneously on the minds of impressionable teens. But the two are closely linked in many GenX-ers’ memories. Again, it’s Whitney Houston with “How Will I Know.”

The hit that showed the MTV generation that Whitney Houston wasn’t just a ballad singer, “How Will I Know,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. Written for Janet Jackson, but her managers rejected it so Arista secured it for the unknown Whitney. And Clive Davis had to lean hard on Narada Michael Walden to get him produce, with his plate already full working on Aretha Franklin’s comeback album, Who’s Zoomin’ Who? Aretha’s “Freeway of Love” and Whitney’s “How Will I Know,” recorded in the same session! By the way, both of Whitney’s first two #1 ballads, “Saving All My Love” and “Greatest Love of All” which we just heard at #6, produced by Michael Masser and also co-written by him, but in the late ’70s for other artists. That’s right, Whitney’s were both covers! “Saving,” originally a Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. album cut in 1978, and “Greatest,” first done (and charted) by George Benson for the 1977 Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest.

#4 Patti Labelle & Michael McDonald – On My Own

Our #4 song may be the first example of a collaboration where the artists recorded their parts separately, thousands of miles apart: piece of cake with the internet, right? But not sure how they pulled it off before most folks had even heard of FedEx. And they weren’t together for the video either! It’s a split screen. In fact, the first time they were ever in the same room was the day before they sang the song together on The Tonight Show, Joan Rivers guest-hosting, just as it was about to crack the top 20 in late April. Married producer/songwriters Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager recruited the singers and put the whole thing together. It’s Patti LaBelle coming off her hit “New Attitude” from Beverly Hills Cop, and former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, “On My Own.”

Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald, #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. “On My Own,” was Patti’s first #1 since her group LaBelle’s Disco smash “Lady Marmalade” in 1975, and McDonald’s first since “What a Fool Believes” with the Doobie Brothers in ’79. His highest charting solo hit? “I Keep Forgettin’,” #4 in 1982, the year the Doobies split up. Right after “On My Own,” McDonald’s “Sweet Freedom” from the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines buddy-cop flick Running Scared made it to #7, and he continued charting on the AC charts ’til 2008. And Patti Labelle stayed hot on the R&B chart well into the ’90s. She surged again after the all-star cover of “Lady Marmalade” for Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge! hit #1 for five weeks in 2001 and L.A. Reid signed her to Def Jam. Her ’04 Def Jam album Timeless Journey was her first to crack the top 20 since ’86, and then her reunion with Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash in LaBelle debuted at #45 in ’08. Those three had first performed together all the way back in 1962!

#3 The Bangles – Walk like an Egyptian

At #3 we have the last big, goofy MTV New Wave chart topper of the ’80s, although the B-52’s “Love Shack” did make it to #3 as late as 1989. This one’s got nonsense lyrics about cops in donut shops and gold crocodiles who want your cigarette. And a suitably goofy video and dance too, that was ubiquitous ’86 into ’87. It’s The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.”

Now you’d think that ’60s revivalism would’ve been bigger in the ’80s, but while The Stray Cats and Billy Joel were mainlining pure ’50s sounds onto the charts, only one of the literally hundreds of bands worldwide in or adjacent to the 60’s-obsessed Paisley Underground scene centered in L.A. made it past college radio and ’60s-themed clubs to the top of the charts: all-Girl Group The Bangles.

Columbia signed them in ’83 to compete with The Go-Go’s, but their debut album in ’84 was a commercial dud. As luck would have it, though, The Go-Go’s cleared the lane by breaking up, and Bangle Susanna Hoffs caught Prince’s eye in the middle of his Paisley-influenced “Raspberry Beret” phase. His jangly song “Manic Monday” became The Bangles breakthrough hit in early ’86, but “Walk like an Egyptian” sealed the deal, #1 for four weeks at the end of the year. Too late to make Billboard’s 1986 year-end ranking so they have it as the #1 song of 1987, but most of its chart action was before New Years so it’s #3 in our 1986 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#2 Lionel Richie – Say You, Say Me (Title Song from White Nights)

Well we’re down to #2: the only soundtrack hit in our countdown the year after the Phil Collins/Marilyn Martin duet “Separate Lives” was the only soundtrack hit in our 1985 top ten, from the same movie, Taylor Hackford’s Cold War musical drama White Nights starring Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov. OK, technically, it’s not a soundtrack hit because the artist’s label, Motown, wouldn’t clear it for release on a rival label. But yet it was the movie’s theme song! Fresh from co-writing USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” #1 Live Aid charity single with Michael Jackson in ’85, and an unbroken string of nine top ten solo hits going back to 1980, it’s Lionel Richie with “Say You, Say Me.”

Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me,” #2 on our 1986 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Director Taylor Hackford had a real knack for picking award-winning #1 ballad hits to put in his movies: Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’ “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, #1 in ’82, Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” from the movie of the same name, #1 in ’84, both of those nominated for Best Original Song Oscars, and “Up Where We Belong” won. So did “Say You, Say Me,” beating out “Separate Lives,” from the same movie, also nominated. Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling album yielded three more top tens in ’86 into ’87, but things cooled off for him on the charts as his marital woes dominated the tabloids from ’88 ’til his divorce in ’93. He continued charting AC hits into the ’10s, though, and was the elder-statesman judge on American Idol three years running in the late ’10s.

#1 Dionne & Friends – That’s What Friends Are For

Now with all the big benefit concerts in the ’80s, surprising that there wasn’t one for the worsening AIDS crisis ’til 1992: the benefit in London after Queen front man Freddie Mercury died. But in ’86, after veteran actor Rock Hudson became the first big celebrity to die of AIDS, veteran actress Elizabeth Taylor and veteran playwright Neil Simon suggested to veteran Songwriters Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager (remember them from “On Our Own” at #4?) that the duet they were working on with two veteran Singers could be an AIDS charity single. Well, after adding two more veteran Singers, that’s what it became. And with ten weeks in the top ten and four at #1, it’s the #1 song of 1986. Billed on the record as Dionne Warwick & Friends, the “Friends” were Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John. That’s a century of combined chart action between them. And the record raised millions for AIDS research. At #1, “That’s What Friends Are For.”

#1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986, Dionne Warwick & Friends, “That’s What Friends Are For,” the Bacharach/Bayer-Sager song first recorded by Rod Stewart for the 1982 Ron Howard movie Night Shift starring Michael Keaton but not released as a single.

Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick went way back, to their amazing string of over 30 chart hits including seven top tens in the ’60s, which came to a messy end in 1972 when Bacharach’s long partnership with lyricist Hal David dissolved and Dionne found herself without Songwriters or Producers, having just signed a multi-million-dollar contract with a new label. “Friends” was the first time they’d worked together in 14 years.

Bonus

Well, there you have ’em: our Chartcrush Top Ten hits of 1986, based on their performance on Billboard’s weekly charts and ranked using our formula that we apply to every year’s songs. Up to the ’90s, that’s how Billboard got its year-end rankings too: recap the published charts. But they kept tweaking the formula every year, ostensibly to improve accuracy, and in the mid-’80s they started doing some very complex stuff. So comparing our ’86 ranking with Billboard’s, there are a few head-scratchers. Five of our top ten jive with Billboard’s ranking exactly or within one ranking position, but five don’t. Of those, two were hits late in the year (Bruce Hornsby and The Bangles), so they were in Billboard’s 1987 top ten. And Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All” just misses at #11 in Billboard. But Huey Lewis and Falco, despite three weeks each at #1 in a year where the #1 song had just four: those didn’t even make Billboard’s top 20. Very strange! Now let’s take a quick look at the five songs that made Billboard’s top ten for ’86, but not ours.

At #10 they had the first #1 by a British Rocker who’d been charting albums and singles since the mid ’70s, but just hadn’t been able to crack the top 10.

The video for Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” (off his eighth album) was all over MTV in the Spring, helping propel the song to #1 for its one week in May. We have “Addicted to Love” at #20 on the year.

Survivor’s “Burning Heart” never got to #1 but its 16 weeks in the top 40 was just one shy of Dionne & Friends’ 17.

Like Mr. Mister, Survivor did not survive into the Glam Metal era. “Is This Love,” #7 in early ’87, their last record to make the top 40.

And three other hits in Billboard’s year-end top ten for ’86 hit their chart peaks in December ’85, and, by our Chartcrush method, they’re really 1985 songs. Of those three, only Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” is in our top ten for ’85, though, at #7.

The song comedian Eddie Murphy cut, he says, to settle a bet with Richard Pryor over whether he could sing or not: that was Billboard’s #7 song of 1986.

We have Murphy’s “Party All the Time” at #19 on the year 1985.

And at #3 on their ’86 ranking they have the song that with 29 weeks, was on the chart two weeks longer than any other ’85 or ’86 song, even though it only got as high as #5.

That long chart run for Klymaxx’s “I Miss You” only gets it to #17 on our Chartcrush ranking, for ’85, not ’86.

And that’s gonna have to be it for our 1986 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show because we’re all out of time! I’m Christopher Verdesi and thanks for listening. If you like what you heard be sure and check out our website, chartcrush.com, for links to stream all our Chartcrush episodes on Spotify, plus written transcripts, chart run line graphs and other gnarly extras. 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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