Super Hits of The 70s: Have A Nice Day, Vol. 1

whatever the man is here:

https://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0002/090/0002090345.jpg

I love all of these but between Venus and Baby It’s You. Probably Venus today.

I love all of these but between Venus and Baby It’s You. Probably Venus today.

I love how Lindsay decided to step away from the Paul Revere image and go full sleaze. Appropriate for a song that pure WTF lyrically:

She must belong to San Francisco
She must have lost her way
Postin' a poster of Poncho and Cisco
One California day
She said she believes in Robin Hood and brotherhood
And colours of green and grey
And all you can do is laugh at her
Doesn't anybody know how to pray?

Arizona, take off your rainbow shades
Arizona, have another look at the world
My myyy
Arizona, cut off your Indian braids
Arizona, hey won'tcha go my way

Mmmm strip off your pride you're acting like a teeny-bopper run away child
And scrape off the paint from the face of a little town saint
Arizona, take off your hobo shoes
Arizona, hey won'tcha go my way

Follow me up to San Francisco
I will be guide your way
I'll be the Count of Monte Cristo
You'll be the Countess May
And you can believe in Robin Hood and brotherhood and rolling the ball in the hay
And I will be reading you an Aesop's fable
Anything to make you stay-ay-ay

More Today Than Yesterday

Runners-up: Cherry Hill Park, Early in the Morning, Arizona

The Rapper - Fun but stupid
Na Na Hey Hey - At least a minute too long
Mississippi Queen - Feels out of place
Tracy - Generic example of smooth bubblegum, outclassed by at least 2 songs on Super Hits Vol. 2 (My Baby Loves Lovin', Hitchin' a Ride)
Come Saturday Morning - It would win if this were a compilation of the "Beautiful Music" easy listening radio format of the '60s/'70s

xpost "Oh hippie child, please stop looking like trash so I can take you to the Bay Area anyway and fuck you."

i mean it doesn't make a lick of sense on ANY level!

“doesnt anybody know how to pray” is *the* good uber 70’s line though, feels very post-war idk

Yeah especially the way he sings it. Somewhere between actually outraged and randomly nettled.

it's strange to contemplate how different these songs must sound to people who heard them in 1970 vs. people who heard them later

the best track here is "Mississippi Queen," but it's a ringer, not really in the spirit of the compilation ... I voted for "The Rapper" as least played out to my old ears

Seeing those "Arizona" lyrics written out makes it come off a little like a Father John Misty song.

That...makes sense.

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/9c/f5/9c/9cf59c10da4abcd2c1ef4986d59dfba6--paul-revere-raiders.jpg

"I Love You, Honey bear Arizona"

AIR
IZOWN
AH

Where's the brass section in the pop hits of today, is what I wanna know, dagnabbit.

I'm damn glad that I already have a dedicated AM gold playlist parked on my iPod.

also kinda partial to Early in the Morning
I love Vanity Fare’s “Hitchin a Ride”, one of the few songs featuring a recorder that doesnt make me want to kill

Gotta go with Venus. No idea when I first heard it & didn’t recognize it until I played it. Came back to me immediately though. Weirdly those first strummed chords sounds a bit like Pinball Wizard

I love how Lindsay decided to step away from the Paul Revere image and go full sleaze.

He was even sleazing it up with the Raiders by then! Check "Just Seventeen", their Zep/Grand Funk move that hit #82 around the time "Arizona" was sliding off the charts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnk2R5FLMVM

The lyric finds our hero succumbing to the charms of an underage girl ("Just 17...but she looked fine!) in Missoula, MT, and getting busted by the cops a few hours later.

Think I could vote for almost any of these except of course The Jaggerz, “The Rapper.” Really going to have a tough time with later volumes.

"'Mississippi Queen' and the Smith tune are solid jams but feel a little out of sync of what I think of as the AM gold sound.

I was a radio-obsessed kid in this era, and the "whiplash programming" (as noted above) of going from, like, Helen Reddy to Grand Funk WAS the sound of the times.

I love all these songs to greater and lesser extents, but I'm going for the only one I bought the 45 of when it was new: "Mississippi Queen."

Oh for sure, re: the vast diversity of '70s pop hits. I love that so many varied things coexisted alongside one another on the radio at the time. It just feels to me like the HAND comps are largely concerned with the soft focus warm n' fuzzy MOR tunes without much edge, so songs that actually rock feel a little misplaced in this particular context.

The now-defunct oldies station here used to play More Today Than Yesterday at least once a day. While not a favorite, the fact that it never made me scramble for the dial a la other good-but-overplayed oldies (looking at you, Looking Glass), is some kind of testament. Never bothered to check if Spiral Starecase was actually a real group or just session musicians a la Steam.

Smile a Little Smile for Me - I always liked this song, but I remember reading Rosemary's Baby as a kid, and being freaked out at the end when there's a Japanese (of course) tourist taking pictures of the hellspawn, and Rosemary's all like "Smile for the camera! One little smile!" I think those are in fact the final lines. Coincidence? The book came out 2 years before.

I'm not ashamed to admit that "Doesn't anyone know how to pray" always chokes me up a bit.

I guess my vote is most likely to go to Cherry Hill Park. Love the sleaze of the lyrics, and the music always sounded menacing. I also love this YouTube comment "Was Mary Hill the only woman in town? Cherry Hill Park kinda closed down when she left".

"whiplash programming"

this child of the 70's agrees-super otm.

I knew this was going to happen ... yesterday I woke up with a couple of lines of "Smile a Little Smile" in my head, where they lingered for hours; today it was "Early in the Morning"

maybe I'm just prone to earworms, but I think these particular hooks were set deep in my tender brain by the ultra-repetitive style of Top 40 programming and the limited range of music then available to kiddie consumers ... these days I can appreciate how well most of these tunes were written, arranged, performed, and recorded, but the certainty that some of them will trigger savagely persistent mental loops makes the prospect of listening to 24 more compilations an Imp of the Perverse situation

Voted « Arizona » before reading the thread, happy to see « appreciation » of its charms. It was a mystery song for me before the internet ; I heard it once in college but didn’t catch the artist, and then it stuck with me, taking on its own lyrics in my mind (something about dancing shoes). As ever I like my version more than the actual one I eventually found online, but it’s still catchy camp.

I always lump it together in my head with a handful of other Super Hits which address a lady by name ('Amie', 'My Maria') and which collectively would make for a solid, loosely-themed comp.

Super Seventies Chicks: Have A Nice Dame

I always lump it together in my head with a handful of other Super Hits which address a lady by name ('Amie', 'My Maria') and which collectively would make for a solid, loosely-themed comp.

(Dammit, I was just about to go to bed...)

Amie
Arial
Big City Miss Ruth Ann
Black Betty
Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)
Clair
Emma
Hey Deanie
I'm Not Lisa
Jackie Blue
Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne
Judy Mae
Julie, Do Ya Love Me?
Living Next Door to Alice
Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)
Ma Belle Amie
My Maria
My Sharona
Shannon
Sweet Mary
Sylvia's Mother
Tracy

(First person who says "But Shannon is about a dog!" gets a reminder of what Clair is really about.)

omg I fucking hate Shannon.
I hate it almost as much as I hate Honey.

Shannon by Henry Gross? but that's a wonderful song?

Fuckin' 'Honey'! So glad that creepfest isn't on any of these comps.

Well done, Lump. You saved me from some inevitable obsessive listmaking of my own.

Henry Gross's "Shannon" is about a dog!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/73/Shannon_-_Henry_Gross.jpg
:O

You know the whole thing about “Shannon” and Casey Kasem, right? And about the fact that it was about Carl Wilson’s dog, I think.

Used to hate it but eventually grew on me. “Honey” is pretty bad, as noted above.

And yes, thanks to Hideous Lump for preemptively creating that list so the rest of us don’t feel we have to.

my old boss knew how much I hated Shannon - every once in a while he’d wander by my desk singing the chorus in a high-pitched voice. the worst! RAGH

My friend and I were recently discussing this and started riffing on Steve Coogan and the other guy in The Trip imitating Michael Caine talking about this song “And when he sings high, he sings very high.”

You know the whole thing about “Shannon” and Casey Kasem, right?

Do tell...

Well, you see, Casey was alone with Shannon one day when he starts eying this jar of peanut butter...

Actually has nothing to do with “Shannon,” sorry.

Thanks to C.G/McC for starting this thread/series and to cryptosicko for the Spotify playlist.

This stuff is def. *my* music, although this particular Volume is variable in quality and full of things that made no impression whatsoever in the UK. Steam and Shocking Blue are the most familiar and deservedly so. "Tracy" too, from numerous bubblegum pop comps, but it doesn't quite fit in that company - or here either for that matter. The Flying Machine and Vanity Fare were actually Brits, so I know these too, but... meh (the latter have better songs as mentioned upthread).

Didn't know this Sandpipers tune but it's reliable easy listening. Of the unfamiliar acts, Spiral Staircase and The Jaggerz were the nicest surprises. Think I'll vote for the latter.

these comps do occasionally yield great non-US hits that I remember as a kid growing up in Australia, like Smokie, Brotherhood of Man, and my favorite: Sister Janet Mead’s version of The Lord’s Prayer :D

Eurovision content scattered throughout which is always good

How could it be anything else but "The Rapper"?

Eurovision content scattered throughout which is always good

Ignorant American here--which songs were from Eurovision?

Save Your Kisses for Me was one
I’ll have to look up the others as memory is failing me but there are a few in the compilation

Been obsessed with this series for the last few years. I've even replaced some of my cassette copies with CDs just to get some of the bonus tracks. "Come Saturday Morning" was also used to great creepy effect in the movie Clara's Ghost.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Get yer last votes in folks.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

(...I kinda think 'Venus' is just okay. Sorry.)

Moves Like Jaggerz

so bummed i missed this, especially the extensive discussion of "Arizona." wasn't so long ago it felt like we "Arizona" lovers were a nearly extinct breed on this board.

Indeed. Probably haven’t thought about that song since it first came out and was a hit and don’t think I ever knew who the artist was.

Really digging the drums on “Tracy,” wondering which studio pro played them.

"Arizona" feels like the theme song for a reactionary grindhouse film where Charles Bronson travels from his small town to San Francisco to get revenge on the hippies that got his daughter addicted.

The narrator of "Cherry Hill Park" def a minor baddie who gets killed fifteen minutes into this film.

lol, yes to both.

Now do 'The Rapper'.

!