Trying Out a New Series: 1970s AM-Radio Music

Over the last few weeks I’ve been feeling evermore creatively restless. I’m still posting daily new photos to Instagram (the five most recent always display here, down at the bottom of the right-hand side); and I contribute what I hope are thoughtful comments to various Substack and similar sites — mid-21st-century blogs, really. But here at Running After My Hat, what should be a fruitful tool for writing creatively (and not incidentally, for stimulating actual creative writing), I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for a few years now….

Back in what I think of as Ye Olde Blogging Days of the early 2000s, one reliable source of inspiration for posts came from music. It turns out that I’ve written roughly 500 posts about music, counting the annual — and recently stalled — Christmas playlist. And so I’ve been thinking maybe I should get back into that…

Yesterday I accompanied The Missus for a dental appointment (hers). I’d brought along reading material, of course, but — also of course — had my phone handy, too. And here’s what happened:

Suddenly, I found myself thinking about a song popular when I was in my 20s, that is, in the 1970s. I couldn’t remember the name of the guy who sang it, and I couldn’t remember the song’s title. I had a vague sense of the song’s “mood,” which was a love song in the plain-old-vanilla pop genre, and I sorta-kinda recalled that the singer’s voice was sort of a histrionic baritone… It was driving me crazy. All I could remember for sure was that the song was played incessantly on New York AM radio stations in… 1979. Yes. It was definitely ’79—

Well, you can probably guess the rabbit hole that led me into. Indeed, I ended up scrolling through “top 100” pop-music lists for the years from 1970 through 1979 (working backwards, chronologically). And I was flabbergasted how much of it I remembered, despite often never hearing another song from the specific performer. So many of those songs did nothing to shift the course of musical history, but they were driven into my head just by virtue of all the time I spent in cars, with no recorded music available: at the mercy of AM-station DJs and program managers.

One of those songs in particular put me over the edge, so to speak. I am pretty sure that you’ve never heard it, or if you did, I’m pretty sure it made almost no impression on you. (The Missus, for one, said she’d never heard of it — and her pop-music tastes from the ’60s-’70s are if anything even more lowercase-c catholic than mine.) So powerfully were my emotions yesterday stirred up by this song that I thought, okay, I’ll start here: a new RAMH blog series, on music from the 1970s which AM radio introduced me to.

(Oh, I’m under no illusions that this will make me any more of a “music critic” than I’ve ever been. I’m doing this for myself, really — both to get me writing again, and to get me listening to music again. Happy to have you — whoever you are — along for the ride, so to speak, and I’ll be delighted if the project stirs up something in you… But this is entirely a selfish project.)

Anyway, below is the song which unlocked the floodgates yesterday. I may or may not write more, here or anywhere, about things going on in my life when it was popular; just know that the cascade continues. And I hope to come up with a set of 10 full playlists over the next N weeks, all using the Spotify WordPress plugin (a first for me).

Here’s Randy VanWarmer, with “Just When I Need You the Most.”

Looking forward to returning soon(ish) — a week? more or less? — with the first of ten full playlists!