At Home With The Radio: 1981

I’ve noted here on occasion that during the times when I was a reporter in Monticello – November 1977 into August 1983 – there were numerous Saturday evenings when the Other Half and I turned off the TV and let KSTP-FM keep us company from the Twin Cities.

Here’s some of what we would have heard had we spent an evening like that forty years ago this week. Courtesy of the Airheads Radio Survey Archive, this is the Top Ten from KSTP-FM released January 13, 1981, forty years ago today:

“(Just Like) Starting Over” by John Lennon
“The Tide Is High” by Blondie
“Every Woman In The World” by Air Supply
“Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan
“Love On The Rocks” by Neil Diamond
“I Love A Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbitt
“Never Be The Same” by Christopher Cross
“I Made It Through The Rain” by Barry Manilow
“It’s My Turn” by Diana Ross
“Suddenly” by Olivia Newton-John & Cliff Richard

That likely would have been one of those evenings when – thirty minutes in – one of us would have turned to the other and said, “Some good music tonight,” and the other would have murmured “Yeah, there is,” while involved in a Stephen King novel (me) or a crafting project (her).

But how does that set play forty years later? I admit I had to duck out to YouTube to refresh my memories of two of those – the Newton-John/Richard record and the Cross single. The first is okay, carrying reminders of the indigestible movie Xanadu, and the second is decent, but even after listening to it this morning, it remains unmemorable, even though the entire Christopher Cross album is in the digital stacks.

But there are a couple of gems in that Top Ten: The John Lennon record would still have been making us a little sad, as it had been just more than a month since he was murdered, but it remains a good record; and “Hey Nineteen” is one of Steely Dan’s less opaque offerings, at least.

The others there that can still evince a smile from me forty years later are the records by Eddie Rabbitt, Blondie and Barry Manilow. That last – “I Made It Through The Rain” – is the kind of bittersweet schmaltz aimed directly at romantic fools such as I. And for all its flaws – and there are several – it’s a good memory.

I can, however, do without the records from Diamond, Ross and Air Supply.

About half of those ten are among the 81,000 sorted tracks on the digital shelves. Have any of them made it into the iPod and thus my day-to-day listening?

Well, just the records by Eddie Rabbitt and Blondie. “Hey Nineteen” should be in there (and likely will by the end of the day), and I’m thinking about the John Lennon record. And the Manilow.

So what do we feature today? Well, why not something from Xanadu? That’s a rhetorical question; there may in fact be many reasons why not. And why? Just because it showed up here today.

So, here’s “Suddenly” by Olivia Newton-John and Cliff Richard. As well as making the Top Ten at KSTP-FM (and peaking at No. 9 there), the record went to No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 4 on the magazine’s Adult Contemporary chart.

Tags: Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John