Recently I decided to listen to every song that made the Billboard Hot 100 in 1974. I got the idea from hearing the occasional rerun of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 on the local oldies station. Casey likes to build up the songs with long, meandering stories or crazy teasers like, “Next up, a man who started beating his wife two months ago.”1 But, surprisingly often, when the payoff comes along, it’s a letdown because I’ve never heard the song before. That experience made me realize that, for any given year, there is a lot of music that was once popular, but for some reason hasn’t survived in the public consciousness.
I decided I wanted to learn more about these forgotten songs and possibly unearth some treasures. I chose a year — 1974 — for no real reason other than that I’m into the ’70s right now. My goal was to put together a one-hour mixtape that highlights lost classics of that year. I envisioned it being like a bizarro version of the hits compilations I used to listen to with my parents when I was a kid. But instead of the same old songs that everyone already knows, it would be filled with songs that sound fresh and new, while still capturing the spirit of the time. You can find that mix, along with notes about each of the songs, on a separate blog post.
As a side effect of this exercise, I learned a lot about 1974 and spent a lot of time reflecting on the nature of hits and the Billboard charts. This companion article shares some observations about the boogie-filled, politically tumulus year that was 1974, as well as some big theories on what makes music endure.
Methodology
To do this project, I used Billboard’s excellent online Hot 100 charts, which let you page through each week of chart history and are visually quite well designed. I started with the week of January 5, 1974, scanned through the chart, and added every song I wasn’t already familiar with to a “new to me” playlist on Spotify (or bookmarked it on YouTube, if it wasn’t available). For the first week, 77 out of 100 songs weren’t familiar to me — quite a high percentage, and probably more than I was expecting. I listened to all the songs and copied any that I liked to a second, “would hear again” playlist. That first week, there were 12 songs that made the cut.
From there on out, things got easier. For each new week, I just had to scan the chart and look for new entries. I ended up with probably 5-10 new songs to hear for each Billboard week. I didn’t keep detailed stats on how it all broke down, but in the end, I listened to 419 songs on Spotify, and maybe another 40-50 on YouTube. Of these, 63 were good enough to hear again. I chose 16 for my final mix, all songs that had their chart peaks in 1974. 2
As an outcome of my method, the definition of “lost classic” became “song Kristen has never heard before.” Who’s to say these songs are really that obscure? I didn’t live through the 70s, and someone who did may end up knowing many of them already. All I can say is that I’ve listened to a lot of oldies and classic rock radio in my life, and I’m very alert to incidental music in my environment. I have a pretty good feel for what’s well-known and what’s not. As a check, I played this mix for my husband, and he didn’t know any of them either, so I think my instincts were sound.
One caveat: I didn’t usually listen to songs that I already knew, since I wouldn’t be considering them for my final mix. But I did notice a lot of what was on the charts, and it’s definitely informed my perception of the year. I also want to acknowledge that there are plenty of great songs from 1974 that were not hits, and many of those may be ironically more well-known now than some of my lost classics. (Big Star’s Radio City came out in ’74, for instance.) And there are probably a lot of great, lost non-hits as well. But the Hot 100 served as a convenient bucket of songs that at least a few people must have liked at some point, and it helped me put some boundaries around the project.
The sounds of ’74
There’s no question the dominant musical trend of 1974 was soul. The chart was absolutely filled with all variety of soul from slow jams to funk to early disco. Stevie was literate and melodic on “Living for the City,” Marvin smooth on “Let’s Get it On,” James Brown defiant on a track brilliantly titled “Papa Don’t Take No Mess.” Disco Tex turned out the gloriously shambolic “Get Dancin’” and First Class pioneered some powerful, female-led dance tracks. It was also a breakout year for soul artists gone solo. Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations had a big album yielding multiple hits, and as did Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier.
For all that, soul also demonstrated a pattern that held true across genres. For every great track with original melodic and lyrical ideas, there were two or three songs that were straight up dull. Not technically bad or incompetent, just lacking hooks and inspiration, content to coast along sounding mostly like a lot of other songs that were popular at the same time. These songs tended to follow trite romantic conventions like “Sexy Mama” or “Bring Back the Love of Yesterday.” Occasionally, a few artists went off the rails just enough to be noticeable, usually on the lyrical end of things. The sometimes-excellent Chi-Lites turned out two notable clunkers: “Homely Girl” and “There Will Never Be Any Peace (Until God is Seated at the Conference Table).” Oof.
From a rock perspective, 1974 is usually seen as a post-Beatles, pre-punk doldrums, and there’s certainly some validity to that. I found it difficult to represent rock music on my final mix, largely because all rock songs seemed to disqualify themselves in one of two ways. Some were awesome mega-hits that everyone still knows: “Jet,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “D’yer Maker,” “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” — you get the picture. Everything else was pretty uniformly bad, tending toward boring medium-hard rock by Grand Funk imitators or phone-ins by the already-famous, including Dylan and Ringo. One rare bright spot was “Candy’s Going Bad,” a lesser hit by Golden Earring from the same album as “Radar Love.”
A few other genres made a respectable showing in 1974. Country music was a consistent presence on the charts and demonstrated a good deal of heart and humor, without the overly slick, faux-redneck crap that would mar it in the ’90s. You had lovable simpletons like Tom T. Hall, classy guys like Glen Campbell and Hoyt Axton, and great singer-interpreters like Linda Ronstadt. Novelties were also huge, particularly those by Dickie Goodman, who interspersed fake news interviews with borderline nonsensical responses culled from popular songs. Q: “Mr. President, what really caused the energy crisis?” A: “Smokin’ in the boys room.” Hilarious? Maybe. Finally, bubblegum and light rock continued to have their day. Seals and Crofts turned out pretty, delicate harmonies on “The King of Nothing,” Blue Swede created their immortal “ooga-chaka” backing vocals on “Hooked on a Feeling,” and Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods deliver a surprisingly acidic anti-war message on “Billy Don’t be a Hero.”
On the whole, however, there was nothing on the charts that felt particularly unique or revolutionary. It was a perfectly ordinary year filled with some great songs that that distinguished themselves on craft and performance, lots of mediocre songs that coasted in their wake, and only a small handful of truly awful tracks.3
The wider world
Listening to the music of 1974 opened a window into what was happening in the world at that time, from politics to social trends. Sometime in the February charts, Dickie Goodman’s “Energy Crisis ’74” appeared, followed shortly after by NRBQ’s “Get that Gasoline Blues” and Jerry Reed’s “The Crude Oil Blues.” The degree of humor afforded to the energy crisis is hard to contextualize, because I think people really were panicked at the time, but they also seemed to be laughing about it. It’s probably more apt to compare these songs to today’s YouTube videos and late night comedy sketches than anything on the current pop charts. Parody of world events is still a constant, it’s just changed venues.
After two years of Watergate controversy, Nixon finally resigned in the summer of 1974. While Goodman released his trademark interview send-up, a lot of songs treated these events more seriously. Lamont Dozier’s “Fish Ain’t Bitin’” is eloquent and direct in its hopelessness, ending with the plea, “Tricky Dick, stop your shit.” James Brown, who I sometimes think should have just released a series of song titles and called it a day, turned his attention to Gerald Ford in “Funky President (People It’s Bad).” The song encourages a range of dubiously helpful behaviors from “Get on your good foot, change it!” to “Turn on your funk motor.” Less cogent, perhaps, but equally urgent.
Perhaps directly related to these events is a slew of songs about patriotism. Some are presumably meant to be a conservative backlash to public opinion about the president. However, 1974 conservatism seems borderline liberal by today’s standards. Case in point: Donna Fargo’s “U.S. of A.,” which delivers the unsubtle message, “And when one of/My brothers makes a mistake/Be he peasant or a President/I will try to treat him/As I would want to be treated/With compassion and understanding.” And, yet, the very next lines are “And I will continue to be proud/To pay taxes for the opportunity to live/In the greatest nation in the world.” 4 Jud Strunk’s song-poem “My Country” has a similar mix of now-incompatible views, extolling nature, the Kennedys, veterans, and Jesus, before declaring, “And I don’t stand for everything my country is about/But I am willing to stand for my country.” Despite these moderately refreshing attitudes, all of these songs are pure schmaltz musically and unlistenable except as historical curiosities.
On the lighter side, 1974 was peak streaking, with Ray Stevens’s novelty “The Streak” hitting number one and staying there for three weeks. This song is not very good, and I can’t imagine anyone enjoyed seeing a bunch of random naked people all that much either. 1974 was also the ramp-up to peak boogie, with everyone from rockers to soul singers to country balladeers working this word into their songs with a complete lack of irony. No one sums up the boogieing craze — and perhaps 1974 itself — better than Brownsville Station on the opening to their song “Kings of the Party”: “You can always count on about one hundred to five hundred people/Down at the very front row screaming one word/At the top of their lungs/BOOGIE!!”
What makes a hit endure?
When I started this project, the big question I wanted to answer was “What makes a hit endure?” Having done it, the trait I’d say most correlates with a song’s longevity is it’s memorableness. In many cases, this can be roughly equated with quality, which is a good thing. Songs that have great hooks and melodies, powerful vocal performances, or virtuosic playing tend to be memorable. “The Joker,” “Waterloo,” “Jungle Boogie,” “Rebel, Rebel,” — everyone knows these songs and they hold up. Memorableness can also be the result of more ambiguous sources, including gimmicks, weirdness (how many times do I have to reference Blue Swede?), and even badness. People love to make lists of bad songs, and one of 1974’s biggest hits, Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby,” has been a frequent contender for one of the worst songs of all time, even decades after its original release.
This theory is consistent with the 1974 lost classic mix I put together. I’ve really enjoyed listening to the tracks I selected and I think the overall quality is on par with many more famous songs of the day. But I will say that many of these songs took me several listens to really appreciate. Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” is a good example. The melody is gorgeous, but I didn’t catch on to it immediately. Contrast this with Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” which was actually less successful on the charts, but more remembered today. The instantly memorable “don’t it always seem to go” line is a big reason why. Without an immediate hook, songs seem to stand less of a chance of making it to household name status.
Another factor in the endurance equation is the commercial structures that deliver music to our ears. You can hear music from 1974 on oldies and classic rock stations, but in either case it’s only a sliver of what was actually popular at the time. Since these stations are generally covering the better part of three decades, it makes sense that they play a only few songs from each year and that they choose songs that people like best — determined by extensive market research. One perhaps unintended outcome of this structure is a pro-rock bias. It’s not surprising, since classic rock has an entire radio format of it’s own, while I’ve never encountered, say, a classic soul station.5 I’d hypothesize that this bias is a result of the demographics of U.S. listeners, and even more so the demographics of U.S. radio station owners and executives. The end result that that rock gets a lot of air time and thus is better remembered, while genres like soul, vocal pop, bubblegum, classic country, and comedy must always share their exposure with rock, at least in the mainstream.
Finally, you can’t discount the role of luck in a song becoming a hit, much less becoming an enduring classic. I recently read a novel called Shadowbahn that explores this idea by imagining that Elvis had never been born. Without Elvis, the Beatles never made it big, and rock/pop fizzled completely as a genre. So one element of luck is the existence of a genealogy of previous music all leading up to your moment, allowing your vision to succeed because the groundwork has been laid. You can see this in the chronology of The Bee Gees. Their 1974 album, Mr. Natural, while incorporating subtle soul elements, didn’t make it big, perhaps because it didn’t sound enough like the zeitgeist. Their next album, Main Course, was a stunning success, maybe because their ideas were more fully realized, but also because they struck while the disco iron was hot.
Big Star’s Radio City was another classic example of bad luck in 1974. It got good reviews, but the band’s record label ran into distribution problems, so copies of the record simply could not be sold. However, attention from music critics in later years has resulted in Radio City ultimately becoming better remembered — at least by a certain crowd — than songs that were hits at the time. You could even say that Big Star’s early obscurity has contributed to their mystique, enhancing their cult status even more. These are factors that no artist can control, yet they have great impact on their trajectory in the public memory.
It’s only natural, given all of these factors, that many deserving hits have been forgotten. But there’s a big bright spot for lost classics, and that’s the current greatness of the internet as a music platform. Even 10 years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to listen to all of these songs without spending an enormous amount of time and money. I probably would never have done it. But thanks to Spotify, YouTube, Mixcloud, and other services, anyone can go back in time, dig up hidden treasure, shine it up, and share it with the world. If nothing else, this project has been a testament to the depth of the pop era and power it still has for renewal and rediscovery.
- Beating her on the charts, that is. But yeah, really…
- That means I included some songs that were released in 1973, but peaked later. I also had to throw out some 1974 releases that didn’t peak until the next year.
- I considered including a list of worst songs of 1974, but I cut it for length and because it felt kind of mean. All I have to say is, if you want to seek out anything by Cheech and Chong, it’s your funeral.
- Interestingly, nearly every version of the song I found has the words “to pay taxes” edited out, except for the original album version on Spotify.
- At least not on terrestrial radio. I’m sure there’s one on satellite radio, but that seems to be much less part of our shared cultural experience than the FM stations of my childhood.