Member-only story
Plethora of Pop’s Rate-A-Record
Spiders, Snakes, and 1974’s Beautiful Girls
From Jim Stafford to Olivia Newton-John and Charlie Rich
How do you measure what happens to a person in those few months between graduating high school and entering college?
Maybe it’s by whether the person now willingly takes 8:00 AM classes MWF?
Or perhaps it’s whether that person decides that when he returns home, given the state of college cafeterias, he or she now loves broccoli (but still never cauliflower)?
Or, is it whether that person’s tastes in music undergo such a radical transformation that all of a sudden, he believes Neil Young looks right in Glam platforms?
Ok, while I try to unstick that image from my mind (I owned a lot of flannel shirts and some pretty glam reddish/orange suede boots, so not as easy as you might think), let me just say that if you felt all over the place in the year that we finally rid ourselves of Nixon (how quaint does that feel now?), then you’re in good company, for the year-end Hot 100 reflects such a state of schizophrenia that I wonder why we weren’t all on drugs.
Pause.
By my fast count, three artists had at least three songs in that 100 best of 1974. Two of…