Or the year that I discovered in my 20s.
On May 13th, 1972, the #1 song in America was The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack. Not bad, and thankfully I missed A Horse with No Name, so there’s that. One of my 1971 songs, American Pie, actually topped the chart early in this year. Other notable events included the last Apollo mission to the moon, Nixon signing Title IX into law, and HBO starting to offer cable subscription services. [2024: Which David Zaslav is doing his level best to end.]
My first song for this year is Superstition by Stevie Wonder. It was time to get some R&B up in this mix, and Stevie’s the best. Turns out this song was offered to Jeff Beck, who turned it down but did play guitar on the album version. (And then later covered it anyway.) Anyway, I was vaguely aware of Stevie growing up, but I didn’t really get into his work until relatively recently, say 20 years ago. Before that, the only Stevie songs I really knew were Part Time Lover and That’s What Friends are For. Ok, there were others, but these . . . less than stellar offerings from the mid-80’s cloud anything else that he did during my formative years. Distance has granted me the wisdom to see the genius of Stevie.
Second on the docket is from yet another band that I didn’t really get until I was much older. Big Star’s In the Street‘s biggest exposure came from Cheap Trick’s cover that they used for the theme song for That 70’s Show. It’s a great party song by a band that not enough people have heard of. To be honest, this isn’t my favorite song on #1 Record; that honor would go to Thirteen. But Thirteen‘s not what you would call a party song. If you haven’t listened to any of Big Star’s stuff, do yourself a favor and check it out.
Nathan chose Snowblind by Black Sabbath, and Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie. The first is not on my list of favorite Black Sabbath songs, but you can’t argue with Bowie. I might have held out for a different one of his, too, though.
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