When I was growing up, in the
pre-Internet/Wii/Netflix/iPhone/satellite radio era, the main source of entertainment for a small
town kid, besides television (only one channel if you had “rabbit ears” like we did, three with a rooftop antenna), was Top 40 radio. It was an airplay format based
on the popularity of songs recently released on 45 rpm records, the more
popular ones being played more frequently per hour or two than those further
down the list. Every major U.S. city had its own Top 40 station, usually on the
AM dial, and each city had its own top forty most popular songs,
though they weren’t necessarily limited to forty. WLS, the 50,000-watt
powerhouse station located in Chicago, for instance, migrated from forty, to
thirty, to sometimes twenty-five songs on its weekly survey over the years, and
every New Year’s Eve would count down the top 89 hits of the year, to coincide
with its number on the dial.
Billboard
magazine, just as it does now, maintained a nationwide weekly ranking based on
sales, airplay, and surveys. Unlike now, its charts were fewer and less fragmented, with Country and
Western, Rhythm and Blues (R&B), and Popular (Pop) being the primary genres tabulated. The Pop charts were considered the barometer of the nation’s tastes, and the goal of most artists,
regardless of their musical style, was to top that chart, “with a bullet” if
possible. With the advent of FM radio and album oriented rock (AOR) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the previously unchallenged institution of Top 40 became a target of derision for everyone from musical elitists and audiophiles to various proponents of the ‘60s counterculture, and it was often held up as a symbol of everything that was wrong with mainstream society. My main beef was the maddening amount of repetition inherent in such a limited playlist, and when I was thirteen I started listening almost exclusively to what was then an oldies station, WDZ in Decatur, before discovering, and succumbing to, FM.
For all the grief leveled at
the phenomenon that was Top 40 radio in its heyday, by the late ‘60s-early
‘70s it nevertheless reflected popular tastes that were capable of
simultaneously embracing the likes of Al Green, Johnny Cash, The Temptations,
Engelbert Humperdink, Bob Dylan, Glenn Campbell, Bobby Goldsboro, Louis
Armstrong, The Rolling Stones, The Jackson Five, Aretha Franklin, Ferrante and
Teicher, Isaac Hayes, The Carpenters, Edwin Starr, Tammy Wynette, Neil Diamond,
Carole King, Harry Nilsson, Tom Jones, Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra, Santana,
Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, John Denver, the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, The Partridge Family, Marvin Gaye, Joan Baez, Perry
Como, The Doors, The Osmond Brothers, Led Zeppelin, The Bee Gees, Barbra
Streisand, James Taylor, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Cat Stevens, Diana
Ross, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles. Ponder for a moment what all those names
could possibly have in common, other than the fact that they all performed some
type of music, and you get the point.
WLS music survey flyer listing the "Top 89" hits of 1970.
It’s safe now to admit that the
musical pulse of the American public was being taken from a more culturally
diverse sampling under that much-maligned system 40 years ago than any of the myriad
current genre-based measuring sticks—bastions of isolationism that they are—manage
to do today. In retrospect, the Top 40 of four decades ago could be described
not as the whirlpool of homogeneity that AOR hipsters would have us believe at
the time, but rather as a fountain of tolerance and heterogeneity. For all of our
current penchant for self-congratulatory back patting based on the canard of
“how far we’ve come,” what do we have today that compares to the original
concept of Top 40 as a celebration of, and showcase for, diversity—both musical and cultural? If you
think American Top 40 with Ryan Seacrest
fits the bill, then you may as well stop reading this right now.
No stranger to Top 40 radio in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s was
Sly and the Family Stone, itself a model of diversity—not only in the music which
that aggregation created, but also in the physical makeup of the group.
It was one of the first racially integrated rock groups (only the Del-Vikings
and Booker T. & the MG’s come to mind as precursors), as well as being
multi-gender. This thanks to the band’s founder and front man, Sylvester
Stewart, a.k.a. Sly Stone, who cut his musical teeth with multi-racial groups
as a gospel- and doo-wop-singing youth, later going against the grain by
occasionally spinning discs by white artists as a disc jockey for the San
Francisco R&B radio station KSOL.
Everyday People. Left to Right: Greg Errico, Rose Stone, Sly Stone, Cynthia
Robinson, Freddie Stone, Jerry Martini, and Larry Graham.
The name itself suggests
brotherhood/sisterhood. In addition to the fact that the group was comprised
of, in part, Sly’s actual siblings, the implication was that even
non-relations, including the two white members, Greg Errico and Jerry Martini
(despite Black Panther demands that they be replaced with black musicians) were
brothers and sisters as well, part of a utopian family of man. And the music
lived up to the name. Hits like “Dance to the Music,” “Stand!,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Everyday People”
(which popularized the phrase “different strokes for different folks”), “Hot Fun in
the Summertime,” and “Everybody Is a Star” perforated racial barriers at a time
when race riots were a not infrequent fact of life.
By late 1971, though, after having
taken up residence in the LP and singles charts for a solid couple of years, and
after sealing their place in the pantheon of rock’s superstars with a knockout
performance at Woodstock, Sly and company had not produced an album of new
material in nearly two and a half years. This was pop music suicide at the
time, hit singles notwithstanding—Sgt.
Pepper and FM radio had recently made the LP the standard currency in the
business—and their record label, Epic, resorted to the stopgap measures of
repackaging their first album and releasing a greatest hits collection.
