Well, we’re going to take one more stab this week at The Least of the Best, this time for 1972, a year that kind of just sits there in my memory, highlighted only by a trip with my pals Rick and Gary to check out the highlights of Winnipeg, Manitoba, about five hundred miles north of us. We saw part of a blues festival downtown, went to the zoo, wandered around the Provincial Capitol building, and – during a camping stopover on the way home – met two girls about our ages from Okemos, Michigan.
So, let’s look at the records at the top of the chart for the year and then take a look at the No. 40 record for the year. Our source is Joel Whitburn’s A Century Of Pop Music, a collation of data from Billboard magazine. The top five records of 1972 were:
“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack
“Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan
“American Pie – Parts I and II” by Don McLean
“Without You” by Nilsson
“I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash
If I had bothered to guess before opening the Whitburn book, I would have said McLean’s single or O’Sullivan’s would have been at the top of the list. I recall both of those seemingly playing everywhere all the time, “American Pie” during the first portions of the year and “Alone Again (Naturally)” during the summer.
Flack’s record filled the space between the two, being released in February, a fact which kind of startled me as I looked things up this morning. Why? Because I tend to think of “The First Time . . .” as a 1971 record due to its use in the Clint Eastwood movie Play Misty For Me, which I saw while on a date in late 1971. And I’m not sure I’ve ever liked the record that much.
As to the others, I loved and still love both “American Pie” and “Without You.” I liked the O’Sullivan record when it first came out but then I tired of it during that summer. And the Johnny Nash record is one of those that I know inside and out without ever having paid much conscious attention to it. It’s always just kind of been there.
So, what do I think of those five now? As always, we’ll use the presence or the absence of the tracks in my iPod to determine their value fifty years later. And four of the five are in there, with the only absence being that of “Alone Again (Naturally).” I’ve still got some room, so I’ll likely add the track later today. (That also means that I must have some affection for the Flack single after all.)
So, what record sits at the bottom of 1972’s Top 40? Well, it’s a record by Chicago that kind of made me wince when it came along in early August of 1972 and climbed into the Top Ten in September, a week or two before St. Cloud State’s academic year began. I wasn’t hanging around the snack bar at the student union until sometime in early 1973, so I never heard it on the jukebox there, but I heard it often enough in other places to think it wasn’t nearly as good as the group’s earlier work had been.
I once wrote here that Chicago had seemed to soften up as the 1970s went along, and I guess that’s not surprising. We all softened up as the Seventies went by. (That is, until punk rock and a few other things came along towards the end of the decade, screaming “You’ve all gotten soft! Get your shit together!”)
And the record that wound up at No. 40 for 1972 seemed to me to encapsulate that softening, unaware as I was that softer stuff was yet to come for Chicago, especially after then 1978 death of guitarist Terry Kath. What I heard in the group’s top-ranking single of 1972 – it went to No. 3 in late September – wasn’t what I’d come to expect from the group, and I was disappointed.
So how do I feel about the record now? Well, let’s check the 2,700-some tracks in the iPod. The Chicago tracks there come mostly from the group’s three first albums with a smattering of stuff from later on in the Seventies, but the record in question is not among them, and even though I tend to hum along when it pops up on the radio, I’m not likely to add it. Anyway, here’s “Saturday In The Park,” today’s Saturday Single.