Reaching for the Stars, Vol. 4
Chart Week: March 5, 1983 Song: “Allentown” – Billy Joel Chart Position: #17, 15th week on the chart. Peaked at #17 for six straight weeks from February through March. This week’s edition is the first that draws from SiriusXM’s VJ Big 40 show on its Eighties on 8 channel. For those not familiar, Eighties on 8 features three of the…
Reaching For The Stars, Vol. 3
Chart Week: February 18, 1984 Song: “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” – Elton John Chart Position: #18, 17th week on the chart. Peaked at #4 the week of January 28, 1984. A countdown from 1984, my favorite musical year! So many fantastic songs to pick from. “Thriller” had just hit the top 10 in its second…
Reaching For the Stars, Vol. 2
Chart Week: Feb. 7, 1981 Songs/Chart Positions: “Killin’ Time” – Fred Knoblock and Susan Anton, #28 “Smoky Mountain Rain” – Ronnie Millsap, #27 “I Made It Through the Rain” – Barry Manilow, #26 My normal Sunday routine is to get up sometime between 8:00 and 8:30, watch the local news long enough to check the weather, and then move into…
Reaching For the Stars, Vol. 1
I’ve been kicking around an idea for awhile about using the 1980s American Top 40s[1] I listen to most weekends as a jumping off point for writing about old songs. Every weekend, whether I listen to an entire countdown or just catch a few minutes here and there, I’m bombarded with memories from 30+ years ago when all those songs…
RIP Casey Kasem
We knew this was coming, based on recent, terrible, news reports. But it still hurts. Casey Kasem, 1932-2014. It is not hyperbole to say no pop culture figure influenced my life more than Casey. I began listening to “American Top 40” way back in its earliest days. My parents listened to “AT40”. Their friends listened to “AT40”. My uncles listened…
My Musical Youth
On occasion a memory from the past will trigger something in my brain and I’ll fall into a deeper hole of nostalgia. That’s been the case recently concerning summer music from the 1980s. The trigger, this time, was two separate American Top 40s I listened to on recent Sundays.1 One was from 1984, and was loaded with Prince, Bruce, Tina,…
Casey Hangs Up His Mic
Even a long-time Casey Kasem fan like me was surprised by this news. Not the fact that he was retiring his countdown show(s), but that he was still even doing a countdown. Casey Kasem ending his run on radio this weekend – “Hosting various versions of my countdown program has kept me extremely busy, and I loved every minute of…
This Week With Casey
A brief American Top 40 The 80s update.* (Don’t worry, an extensive basketball post is coming.) This week’s show was from 1981, making it the first repeat year countdown since I began listening in January. It was fun to track where songs I heard six weeks ago were in the latest chart. At least for this amateur music historian. Two…
Kickin’ It With Casey
I owe my fellow music geeks some AT40 updates. So a couple items from the last two weeks are below. Last week’s show was from 1986. I only caught the last 15 songs or so, and it was a rather unremarkable collection of music. Sure, I loved a lot of the songs at the time, but with the exception of…
AT40 Trivia
A little trivia from this week’s American Top 40: The 80s* rebroadcast. (Apparently this is the official name for these programs.) Until 1980, no artist had ever had two top ten hits at the same time as both a member of a group and as a solo artist. Diana Ross did it first in late 1980. Another artist accomplished the…