These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Jackie DeShannon had three Top 40 hits. Two of them made it all the way into the vaunted Top 10 and have basically became standards. Her first, “What the World Needs Now,” was written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach and first recorded by DeShannon for the 1965 album This is Jackie DeShannon. The next hit, released about four years later, was the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Love Will Find a Way”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. There are at least three waves to Rod Stewart’s solo career: the early years, when he was still an amazing belter with spotty but acceptable taste in material; the middle years, when he was desperately singing any schlocky song he (or his people) thought might become a hit; and the later years, when he lazily crooned standards, knowing that a cushy, lucrative spot … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Angel”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Thanks to K-tel comedy music collections that would probably strike me as a form of torture if I tried to sit through one of them now, I probably knew Ray Stevens before just about any other artist included in this series. His various Top 40 hits from the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies took up a lot of the vinyl on those compilations that I obsessively … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “In the Mood”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. For a brief, noteworthy cultural moment in the nineteen-seventies, Andy Gibb was about as big a music artist could get. The youngest sibling of the furry Gibb clan, Andy was so committed to following in his brothers’ footsteps that one of his first bands was named after a Bee Gees song. He was eventually signed as a solo artist to RSO Records, the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Me (Without You)”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Ray Charles is one of the few figures in the history of American popular music who deserves the descriptor “legend.” With well over one hundred singles to his credit, tallying up his total entries into the Billboard Top 40 is beyond my current mental energy, so let’s concentrate strictly on the two songs that qualify for this feature. “I’m Movin’ On” was the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “I’m Movin’ On” and “Sticks and Stones”

By my rough count, the Beach Boys notched thirty-eight Top 40 singles over the course of their multi-decade career. A significant number of those made it into the Top 10, and four of those topped the chart. That quartet of number ones includes their final Top 40 song, a single so simultaneously awful and incessantly catchy that the only word that suitably describes it is “hellish.” (Seriously, don’t click on that link. The song will be trapped in your brain for increasingly uncomfortable hours upon hours.) In 1979, the band was in a rough space commercially. It had been three years … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Good Timin’”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Get ready for some sugary, blipping R&B as only the early-nineteen-eighties could provide. Stephanie Mills first made her name in 1975, when she played Dorothy in the original Broadway production of The Wiz. She was only seventeen years old when the production opened. It got her a Drama Desk nomination, a signature song, and a recording career, although the latter was only fitfully … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Two Hearts”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. By my count, Eddy Arnold has fifteen Top 40 singles, include several that were officially charting B-sides. That’s on the pop charts. It’s a very different number when consulting a different section of Billboard. Arnold landed 147 different singles on the country charts, spanning from “Each Minute Seems a Million Years,” released in 1945, to 2008’s “To Life.” Only George Jones could claim more. Happily, … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “The Last Word in Lonesome is Me”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. In the late nineteen-sixties, a high school student named Vincent Damon Furnier, a recent transplant from Detroit to Phoenix, started a band with a few friends. They called themselves the Spiders, a name they eventually jettisoned in favor of Nazz. That was problematic because there was already a group calling themselves Nazz, with a talented guy named Todd Rundgren in the lineup. By … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Clones (We’re All)”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Okay, acknowledging that Wikipedia is a shaky source, here goes: Over the course of a music career that began with “No Place For Me,” recorded when he was working as a disk jockey, Willie Nelson has released over one hundred singles, including five last year. While the red-headed stranger has had an abundance of huge hits on country radio and is at least as … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Let It Be Me”