Posted on 09/20/2008 4:30:40 PM PDT by stand_your_ground
Somehow, thirty years have slipped by and it's time for my high school reunion. One of the coordinators sent me a list of the top 100 songs from 1978. Here's what I wrote back:
Can we just pretend 1978 was not our year? Those really are lame. I had managed to block the lyric "three times a lady" from my mind, until it jumped out at me and stirred up the old motion sickness. I vote for the whole Patsy Cline to Pretenders continuum, with emphasis on classics.
This must be why I'm on a farm, enjoying old music and old ways and old, open skies.
I mean, really, listen to some of these titles:
Night Fever, Bee Gees: Can't you just see the blow dryers and the bad white suits? No teenager should be forced to share a generation with this music, and no parent should ever have to explain a photo taken during this era.
You Light Up My Life, Debby Boone: I like the Boone family, but they played this song so many times you could almost feel the vinyl grooves widening out in the record. (I keep seeing a paramilitary interrogator with a khaki uniform and pencil-mustache, armed with a turntable and a Debby Boone album. The single light in the cell clicks off and the music starts. "No! Anything! Please!" Yooooooo Liiiiiiiight up my Liiiiiiiiiife.)
Stayin' Alive, Bee Gees: More Saturday Night Fever Disco temporary insanity. Who was responsible for disco? I want names.
Three Times A Lady, Commodores: someone skipped English Lit. How do you mix a love song with auction lingo? Is he proposing to her, or selling her? ("When we are together, the moments I cherish with every beat of my heart.") That barely works as a greeting card. They didn't have red pens in the 70s?
Can't Smile Without You, Barry Manilow: Post Mandy. I like Barry Manilow, but he should have taken a break from song writing in 1978. As you can tell, the song-writing muse was in a medically induced coma this year.
Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad, Meat Loaf: "I want you; I need you; there aint' no way I'm ever gonna love you."
Don't these Meat Loaf lyrics make you feel special, ladies? Even during the alley-cat, shag-wagon Seventies, this song seems like a testimony to public school syphilis instruction. Can you see a couple anywhere, saying, "honey--two out of three; they're playing our song!"Hot Blooded, Foreigner: Check it and see? Check it and see? Did I hear that right?
Dust In The Wind, Kansas: the guys who wrote this song were fighting off a severe depression brought on by listening to too much 1978 music.
They say old soldiers have a comradery born of a common experience of suffering. I'm anxious to see my old friends, and I'm pretty sure I know the source of our common misery. We survived that Seventies Music.
Thunder Island.
And who can forget those “best of” by Kay-Tel records... all the stuff you couldn’t escape on the radio, in one album!
I come from class of ‘75 ... put in DJ’s CONTRACT... Any music played from 1975, Class would have no way of Guaranteeing DJ’s Health.
Luckily between Alcohol and the Pharmaceuticals available at the time... most of the musical(/sarc) names mentioned are either Blurs with a couple of them being minor nightmares.
Ebony Eyes - Bob Welch
Don't Look Back - Boston
Me too! '75 had some good and bad music, but mostly good. But the music of the Late 70's absolutely sucked. LOL
LOL! That was my year too. There was some good music but most of it didn’t make the top 40. I was listening to The Runaways and AC/DC from a friend who had just came back from serving in Germany.
I graduated in 1979 and threatened a walk out if the administration didn't let us have Freebird as our class song instead of some lame song..either John Denver or Barry Manilow, I forget.
Bob Seger - Mainstreet
Dust in the Wind is one my all-time faves.
That’s why I graduated in ‘76. It was a much better year musically. And it was the Bicentennial. :^)
Sorry about those ‘78 songs, bud. IMHO the music scene definitely started downhill from about ‘75.
Did a google on the top ten songs of my graduation year, ‘72...
Superstition Stevie Wonder
2. Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone The Temptations
3. Smoke on the Water Deep Purple
4. Lean on Me Bill Withers
5. Heart of Gold Neil Young
6. Walk on the Wild Side Lou Reed
7. You Are the Sunshine of My Life Stevie Wonder
8. If You Don’t Know Me by Now Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes
9. I’ll Take You There The Staple Singers
10. Tumbling Dice The Rolling Stones
BPE
I swear she's ston3d outta her gourd the entire show.
I have NEVER been to any of my class reunion events. I graduated in 1970; was Student Body Pres.; Senior Class Pres. and etc. When I graduated I essentially said goodbye and moved-on. I don’t regret it. There were new horizons east of the Sierra Nevada. Oye como va. Santana. Thumping on the stereo while we cruised the main in Pittsburg gettin’ drunk and stupid.
“Southern Rock ruled 1978....”
Don’t forget Molly Hatchett.
LOL my husband would agree with you (and he’s class of ‘79 too)
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