If they lived close enough to its AM site, they may have been able to pick up the local station through their horses' bridle bits. I think the Japanese briefly had a perfectly tuned model on the market for a while called the Sony Plowman.
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Song you wondered how they they ever got played on Top 40 radio
- Thread starter secondchoice
- Start date
10/10. No notes.
Why you ... nyuk nyuk nyuk ... wise guy!
Oh Lord, "Once You Understand". Topped the list of worst songs ever in a book I read in the 1990s. I only remember it because my small town local station played. Outside a Casey Kasem rerun, the only other place I've heard it was a 1974 Y-100 Miami aircheck.
Yes, those lyrics were in French
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
As has already been pointed out, though, the English translation was rather tame, so we can stop guessing at "how" the song got airplay, I think ...
Yeah. Honest to God, guys. I’ll think about a real list of “how did they get that on the radio?” songs and post it later.
It’ll be short and if you think “Lady Marmalade” is spicy, it’ll curl your hair.
The Knack - "My Sharona": "I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind.”
Ten Years After - "I'd Love To Change The World": The opening line would probably get bleeped if I posted it here, but I'm sure you've heard it.
The Sweet - "Little Willy": Isn't a nickname for William...
Ten Years After - "I'd Love To Change The World": The opening line would probably get bleeped if I posted it here, but I'm sure you've heard it.
The Sweet - "Little Willy": Isn't a nickname for William...
Okay---so legitmately, here are the songs I think were fighting big odds to get Top 40 airplay, and like I said before, it's not a long list:
And seriously, after all that in five years, what was left?
Do we even count Major Harris' "Love Won't Let Me Wait" just because it has two sections of female orgasm?
Donna Summer wasn't doing anything with "Love to Love You Baby" that Sylvia didn't do two years earlier, she just did it over a more hypnotic track (though I thought Sylvia was more convincing).
"Bad Blood" and "Rich Girl" were now the third and fourth hit records with "bitch" in the lyrics, but neither forced the jocks to say it.
Really, the next big milestone was probably Rod Stewart's "Tonight's The Night" (1976), where "my virgin child...just let your inhibitions run wild" caused a bit of heartburn before everyone just went with it as it rolled unstoppably to number one. And another orgasm sound effect record at the end. Bonus points, though---the girl speaks French. So---culture.
Billy Joel's "Only The Good Die Young" paired seducing an innocent girl and religion ("Catholic girls start much too late") and, as mentioned above, The Knack's "My Sharona" came off as deeply predatory, being the real-life story of singer Doug Feiger's relationship with a 17-year-old. Doug was 26. Didn't keep either of them from being hits and getting tons of airplay.
And just around the corner was Prince.
I wanna be your lover
I wanna be the only one that makes you come running
I wanna be your lover
I wanna turn you on, turn you out
All night long, make you shout
Oh, lover, yeah
I wanna be the only one you come for
I wanna be your brother
I wanna be your mother and your sister, too
There ain't no other
That can do the things that I'll do to you
And not even Tipper Gore and Congressional hearings could stop him.
- 1969: Rolling Stones-Honky Tonk Women. Discussed before in this thread. The line "laid a divorcee" should have killed it on the spot. But it was the Stones. Out of the box first week adds at KHJ, KFRC, CKLW, KRLA, KQV, WMCA. It took London Records lying about the lyric, saying it was "played a divorcee", not "laid", to get it on WABC, but that was only two weeks after release.
- 1969: Beatles-Ballad of John and Yoko. You could say "Christ" as in "Jesus Christ, Superstar" or the opening two words of Neil Diamond's "Done Too Soon" (though those came later), but this ("Christ, you know it ain't easy" plus the line "they're trying to crucify me" was widely considered blasphemy---the Lord's name in vain. The Beatles lost the RKO/Drake stations and pretty much the entire South, but it's remarkable it got on the stations it did. It was ten years before another hit record used His name that way (Rickie Lee Jones, "Chuck E.'s in Love").
- 1969: Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg-Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus. First of the female orgasm sound effect records.
- 1970: The Kinks-Lola. Frankly, I think this got on because a lot of people didn't really get it. It just wasn't a common experience, especially among young Top 40 listeners. I was 14 and I thought, "okay, she's big and masculine, but he loves her." Took me a couple of years (I misheard "I'm glad I'm a man and so is Lola" as "I bet I'm a man and so does Lola",which threw me off). I think I mentioned that KHJ in Los Angeles added it and dumped it a week later after figuring it out.
- 1971: The Buoys-Timothy. Already discussed in this thread. Cannibalism is generally a disqualifier, and like "Honky Tonk Women", it took the label (Scepter) lying about it to get it on some stations.
- 1971: Rolling Stones-Brown Sugar. I've never been great at understanding what Mick's singing. I think a lot of folks weren't really clear that "how come you taste so good...like a black girl should" was the least of the worries lyrically in a song about a slaveholder who whipped and raped his female slaves. And the song wasn't exactly an exposition or condemnation ("I said yeah, yeah, yeah, woooo!"). Fact is, though, if you're a Top 40 programmer in 1971 who didn't understand or pretended not to understand the lyrics, you'd be crazy not to play this record.
- 1971: Rolling Stones-Bitch (flip side of "Brown Sugar"). I mentioned this record earlier as having broken the barrier on this word in the lyrics and said "some stations" flipped "Brown Sugar" mostly at night to play it. It was bigger than that. ARSA shows it charting separately from "Brown Sugar" on KCBQ, San Diego, KLIV, San Jose, CKFH in Toronto and WMEX in Boston.
- (A lot of excuses were made over the years for the Stones. KDAY in Los Angeles played "Sweet Virginia" from the "Exile on Main Street" album in 1972 (as did Jimmy Rabbitt on KROQ-AM). It has the line "got to scrape the shit right off your shoes." When asked about it by one of the trades, PD Bob Wilson said "It's the Stones. If it says "f@#k" I'll figure out a way to play it." The next year the Stones recorded "Star, Star", which says "starf@#ker" 64 times, and called Bob's bluff.)
- 1971: Chase-Get It On. The term "get it on' was being used for all kinds of things (sex, fighting, being on top of your game), so they could have shined it on, but the lyrics killed that.
- 1972: Chakachas-Jungle Fever. I posted the record earlier in this thread. Another orgasm record---unless you bought the record company's explanation about mosquitos and delirium...but you really didn't. Neither did I.
- 1973: Chuck Berrry-Reelin' and Rockin'. A live re-make of his 1958 hit, which was about dancing ('we was at a rock and roll dance havin' nothin' but fun"), this one definitely wasn't (especially if you played the long version--"we boogied in the kitchen, we boogied in the hall, I got some on my fingers, so I wiped it on the wall"). Yeah, we could throw "My Ding-A-Ling" in, too, but it's nowhere near as obvious as this.
- 1973: Sylvia-Pillow Talk. Posted earlier in this thread. By this point, nobody's even bothering with pretense. Didn't get played in Provo? Who cares?
- 1973: Marvin Gaye-Let's Get It On. Yeah, Chase went there first, but this was straight-up seduction in a way the Chase record wasn't.
- 1973: Bobby Goldsboro-Summer (The First Time). A seventeen year old losing their virginity to a 31-year old. If the genders had been swapped, this would have been statutory rape. Bobby was saved by a double standard.
- 1974: Elton John-The Bitch Is Back. Mentioned earlier in this thread. The Stones were first to use the word in the lyric, but a relative handful of Top 40s played it and many never announced the title. This record forced disc jockeys, who earlier that same year, had to get used to saying "hell" when back-announcing Mac Davis several times a day for several months, to accommodate "bitch".
And seriously, after all that in five years, what was left?
Do we even count Major Harris' "Love Won't Let Me Wait" just because it has two sections of female orgasm?
Donna Summer wasn't doing anything with "Love to Love You Baby" that Sylvia didn't do two years earlier, she just did it over a more hypnotic track (though I thought Sylvia was more convincing).
"Bad Blood" and "Rich Girl" were now the third and fourth hit records with "bitch" in the lyrics, but neither forced the jocks to say it.
Really, the next big milestone was probably Rod Stewart's "Tonight's The Night" (1976), where "my virgin child...just let your inhibitions run wild" caused a bit of heartburn before everyone just went with it as it rolled unstoppably to number one. And another orgasm sound effect record at the end. Bonus points, though---the girl speaks French. So---culture.
Billy Joel's "Only The Good Die Young" paired seducing an innocent girl and religion ("Catholic girls start much too late") and, as mentioned above, The Knack's "My Sharona" came off as deeply predatory, being the real-life story of singer Doug Feiger's relationship with a 17-year-old. Doug was 26. Didn't keep either of them from being hits and getting tons of airplay.
And just around the corner was Prince.
I wanna be your lover
I wanna be the only one that makes you come running
I wanna be your lover
I wanna turn you on, turn you out
All night long, make you shout
Oh, lover, yeah
I wanna be the only one you come for
I wanna be your brother
I wanna be your mother and your sister, too
There ain't no other
That can do the things that I'll do to you
And not even Tipper Gore and Congressional hearings could stop him.
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Like Woody Allen's "Manhattan", when you find out it's autobiographical, it hits different.
Today, but nobody thought twice about it then. Nor 14 years later when Dire Straits did "the little f***ot with the earring and the makeup."
Yeah, but there's also no evidence that's what Chinn and Chapman had in mind. Ambiguous at best.
The Beatles' "Penny Lane" has several references to Liverpool street slang, some of which are NSFW (...depending where you work, I guess...)
I'm just gonna take a wild shot here and say the vast majority of U.S. Top 40 listeners in 1967 weren't up on NSFW Liverpool street slang.
True, but it did get past the BBC censors of the time.
They should have bee up on disco slang, with Musique's "(Push) Push in the Bush" being a good example.
In 1979, an artist representative who was providing me with some salsa talent for a show in Puerto Rico "made me" take Musique along with them, as I guess he had promised the group some more gigs. And, actually, the all-salsa lover crowd liked the group! Go figger.
I somehow managed to not even know the unedited version existed until when I first heard it in the late 1990s. All the stations I heard up to that point played the version which omits that line, which is also the version found on Dire Straits' Greatest Hits album.
But "I'd Love To Change The World" does still get occasional airplay on Classic Hits and Classic Rock stations, with unaltered lyrics.
George Michael "I want your sex."
"There are boys you can trust, and girls that you don't. "
The Vapors "Turning Japanese. "
According to a VH1 interview, the song meant a guy who had lost his girlfriend, and was going slowly crazy. It wasn't about " pleasuring yourself. " I had heard that myself at the time.
Never realized what "Little Willy" was about, but there is that line when they say " Stay down."
"There are boys you can trust, and girls that you don't. "
The Vapors "Turning Japanese. "
According to a VH1 interview, the song meant a guy who had lost his girlfriend, and was going slowly crazy. It wasn't about " pleasuring yourself. " I had heard that myself at the time.
Never realized what "Little Willy" was about, but there is that line when they say " Stay down."
I honestly have played most of the songs listed here. The only time I ever got really screamed at by one of the (m)asses was after an airing of Jim Stafford's My Girl Bill. The caller was nuts about it, having not listened to the final line which has a comma between "my girl" and Bill. He assured me he would never listen again. I assured him that my salary would not be effected
Fun fact if you didn't already know. The real Sharona sells high-end real estate in Beverly Hills. I'll let you guess what her website address is