The AT40 Blog/October 29, 1983: When the Bee Gees docked on an 'Island'

One of the greatest country music songs of all-time was written by none other than disco's favorite songs, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb.

No, seriously. It was written by the Bee Gees, who made a mint gettin' down and funky to songs such as "You Should Be Dancing," "Stayin' Alive," "Night Fever" and "Jive Talkin'."

In 1983, the Bee Gees were still trying to walk away from that part of their lives. Disco had died out and a new era of 1980s music was starting up. In 1983, it was about spry, peppy pop that would one day be the staple of pop adult contemporary, new wave music and a second wave of British artists who were ruling the roost that year.

The Bee Gees were still relevant as songwriters. In 1982, they wrote Dionne Warwick's "Heartbreaker," a No. 10 hit. And that success allowed them to branch out further. So they composed "Islands In The Stream," a song they were targeting for a man who was enjoying a major comeback on the charts -- Marvin Gaye, who was scoring kudos everywhere for the song "Sexual Healing" and the album "Midnight Love."

The problem, though, was Gaye was not recording anything immediately. So the Brothers Gibb had a composition that had a lot of soul to it with no takers. It was suggested to them, though, by his manager, Ken Kragen, that country star Kenny Rogers was looking for new material for an album that would ultimately called "Eyes That See Through The Dark."

They handed "Islands In The Stream" to Kragen and immediately, Rogers loved it. Then came the idea to make the song into a duet, something the Brothers Gibb never intended on the song being. But Rogers knew the perfect partner -- fellow country star and the ever-so-sassy Dolly Parton. Both were familiar with pop-crossover success, each scoring solo No. 1 hits in the early '80s on the Billboard Hot 100, he with "Lady" in 1980 and she in 1981 with "9 To 5."

The song proved to be a magical collaboration. It debuted in the Top 40 in September of 1983 and a month later, it had gotten to No. 1 on the chart on October 29, 1983, spending two weeks there, while simultaneously spending two weeks at the top of the country chart.

The song, everyone found out, had a lot of staying power over the years. In 1998, the tune was the premise behind the Top 15 pop rap hit for Pras, Mya and the late Ol' Dirty Bastard as "Ghetto Superstar" from the Warren Beatty-directed and starred Bulworth. And in 2005, Country Music Television (CMT) did a countdown of the 100 greatest collaborations of all time. Guess what song was No. 1?

Yup. And Kenny and Dolly were more than happy to perform their amazing duet for a live audience when the Top 10 of that countdown was revealed.

The pair would record quite a bit more in the subsequent years, including a Christmas album and the song "Real Love."

As for Barry, Robin and Maurice, the success of the songs "Heartbreaker" and "Islands In The Stream" would continue to grow their confidence as songwriters and in 1989, six years after their previous Top 40 hit "The Woman In You," they would hit the Top 10 with "One," their first Top 10 hit in 10 years.

So the Brothers Gibb never worried about starving or living out on the streets in the 1980s. They did quite well after the disco era died out. All they did was co-write one of the greatest country music songs ever, showing they can transition from dancing shoes to cowboy hats and boots.

The AT40 Blog/October 20, 1973: Celebrating Jim Croce's short career

When it came to the king of the countdown, Casey Kasem was pretty straight-forward, counting down the hits, while reading listeners' mail when it came to a question or maybe an occasion comment about the show.

But rarely did he do what he did in this countdown. He spent a six-minute segment in this particular week talking about the life and short career of Jim Croce, who scored the biggest mover within the Top 40 that week with "I Got A Name," which leaped 18 places from No. 40 to No. 22 and eventually peaked at No. 10.

It was a tribute he did to Croce. The Philadelphia native had come off a No. 1 hit in the summer of 1973 with "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and was only continuing to get bigger in his career. However, on September 20, 1973, Croce and his entire band were leaving Northwestern State University's Prather Gymnasium after playing a sellout concert. He, the band and comedian George Stevens and booking agent Kenneth D. Cortose were leaving from Natchitoches Airport in Louisiana.

The Beechcraft E18S plane had issues taking off from the runway and just gotten off the ground when, in the dark, the pilot, a 57-year-old veteran of over 14,000 hours in the air, did not see a pecan tree at the end of the runway. The plane clipped the runway and crashed to the ground, killing everyone on board.

Croce was only 30 years old. He left behind his wife, Ingrid, and their nearly 2-year-old son, A.J.

The music business was in complete shock. It just didn't seem fair that Croce, who had only earned his big break just one year earlier working with producer-performers Tommy West and Terry Cashman, was now gone way too soon. His death was reminiscent of the death of Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson aka The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens on February 2, 1959 and of talented stars such as Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves and Otis Redding.

Right before playing Croce's fast-climbing single, Casey spent the time talking about how Croce, the son of Italian-Americans, got into the music business in an unusual way -- while working as a teacher in his native Philadelphia, he got into an argument with a rather large and troubled African-American girl, one of many troubled youths who were in this school Croce was a teacher at. She got angry and the two ensued in an argument. In the end, she pushed him so far across the room and into a blackboard that it made it easy for Croce to push ahead into the music business, something he had dabbled in for some time.

Casey told the story of Croce and AT40 played snippets of Croce's first four Top 40 hits he had out while he was alive -- "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," a No. 8 hit in 1982, " the No. 17 hit about a phone conversation between the singer and a phone operator called "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)," "One Less Set Of Footsteps," a small No. 37 hit in 1973 and finally, "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," which sauntered to the top in July 1973, spending two weeks at the top.

Croce tirelessly toured with his band and was in the middle of his "Life And Times" tour when the fatal crash took place. After talking about his career, Casey played the No. 21 hit of the week in "I Got A Name," which came from the motion picture "The Last American Hero."

"I Got A Name" would fall of the charts, but Croce had a catalog of songs still left to be released. And so came the follow-up, introspective "Time In A Bottle," the beautifully emotional song that hit No. 1 in December 1973 and helped Croce join Redding and Janis Joplin as the only artists to ever have a posthumous No. 1 hit. In 1974, Croce's "I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song" went to No. 9, his last Top 40 hit.

Interestingly, Croce would write a lot of songs off of his own personal experiences, like "Operator." And story songs like "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "You Don't Mess Around With Jim" painted a great picture for the listener. But ironically, "I Got A Name" was not a song written by Croce. It was written by the team of Charles Fox and  Norman Gimble.

No one will ever know how great Croce's career could have been. He was still growing as an artist when the fatal crash took place.

But while he was here, he left us with a great amount of music most of us will never forget.

As for the top spot in the countdown that week, the Rolling Stones' beautiful ballad, "Angie," leaped into the No. 1 spot from No. 5 the week before, to become the band's seventh No. 1 hit of their career, dropping Cher's "Half-Breed" down to No. 2.

The AT40 Blog/October 9, 1976: Rockin' Out to Ol' Ludwig

Only one human being can link Ludwig von Beethoven and Peter Griffin together.

His name is Walter Murphy, who these days is best known for the music he composes on Family Guy, The Cleveland Show and American Dad!, television shows created by Murphy's good friend, Seth MacFarlane.

But for all the fame Murphy has for his musical work on those shows, he's known best for one song.

And it's a disco classic to say the least. It was on this week, October 9, 1976, that Murphy took the classical composer to a place he never was before -- No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 as "A Fifth Of Beethoven," based solely on Beethoven's "Symphony No. 5 In C Minor," which finished being composed in 1808, finished off the slowest climb on the Hot 100 to No. 1 at that time, 20 weeks. It had debuted on the Hot 100 at No. 80 and reached the top spot by knocking Wild Cherry's disco classic, "Play That Funky Music" from the top.

The story behind "A Fifth Of Beethoven" began in 1974 when Murphy (born December 19, 1952) was composing songs for commercials he had been contracted for. It was a producer who suggested to this multi-instrumentalist that he should update classical music. So in his spare time, Murphy, who had major keyboard and piano training from his work as a child with the legendary New York City-based silent screen keyboardist Rosa Rio, composed a demo tape of "the classics" put together in a disco groove.

The response to those "re-workings" was lukewarm at best. But it was his disco interpretation of Beethoven's famous "Symphony No. 5" that got the attention of Larry Uttal, the head of Private Stock Records, in 1975. Uttal signed Murphy and in early 1976, he went into the record studio to once again create that magic that he originally put on that demo for "A Fifth Of Beethoven," once again playing every instrument on the track, a long, arduous task and undertaking.

When the single was done, backed by another disco instrumental called "California Strut," Murphy was excited. But he was brought back to reality when Uttal told him that it'd be best if there was a bigger "name" behind his work than just "Walter Murphy." So Murphy became infuriated when he found out that his song was being released as Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band ... even though there was no other players on that record! The song got released in the spring of 1976. But imagine Uttal and Private Stock's shock when they found out that there already was a Big Apple Band. Ultimately on subsequent releases, the song would be dubbed under The Walter Murphy Band and later, just Walter Murphy.

And wouldn't you know it -- people ate up "A Fifth Of Beethoven." It became a club music favorite and discos everywhere played it on a nightly basis. So, too, did radio, and the people went out and bought the 45. And as soon as the song spent this one week at No. 1, Murphy was asked to an entire album based on the classics put to disco. One such song, "Flight '76," which was based on Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight Of The Bumble Bee," hit the Hot 100, but missed out on the Top 40, peaking at No. 44 in early 1977.

After doing another album of disco classics, this one featuring George Gershwin's classic, "Rhapsody In Blue," Murphy would miss out on the Top 40 again in 1982 when his "Themes From E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial)" hit No. 47. That movie work ultimately led to Murphy being contracted to do television music from shows like Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and Channel Umptee-3. before he connected with MacFarlane to do work on his television cartoon shows as well as the motion picture "Ted," which MacFarlane starred as Mark Wahlberg's talking teddy bear.

And in 1977, "A Fifth Of Beethoven" was contracted to be used in a movie that would make disco music a staple forever -- Saturday Night Fever. Then in 2002, a long-haired new artist named Robin Thicke used "A Fifth Of Beethoven" as the backdrop to his debut single "When I Get You Alone." And that opening musical refrain -- "Dum-dum-dum-duuuuuuuuum" -- has been used at sporting events, especially when the opponent has done something bad, like walk a batter or make an error in baseball or committed a foul in basketball or a penalty in hockey.

Finally, one other footnote -- that real Big Apple Band eventually changed its name because of Murphy's smash. They changed it to Chic and became a legendary dance-disco band that had hits with "Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah)," "Le Freak" and "Good Times and was once again nominated for induction into the Rock 'N Roll Hall of Fame.

But it all started with a suggestion to "update the classics." And though the record label screwed up the name of the act because it would "appeal" more, Walter Murphy will forever be linked to Ludwig von Beethoven.

The AT40 blog/October 3, 1981: The long road for "Hollywood"

When Billy Joel wrote "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" in 1976, he was writing the song with a great 1960s song in his mind.

That song was the Ronettes' classic "Be My Baby." Joel has gone as far as tell college students at lectures of its birth as he was writing songs for what would be his album "Turnstiles," his fourth studio album. It's the same album that brought us classics such as "Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)," "Summer, Highland Falls" and one of the most recognizable songs he does in all his concerts, "New York State Of Mind."

Joel claimed to have written the song after he moved back from being on the West Coast for three years. Though some have interpreted the song as him not liking the bright lights of L.A., Joel said he was writing it from the point of living the experience, enjoying the success he began to have, but knowing it was time to go back to his native New York. And as for Spector's influence on the song, Joel said he was a huge fan of the Ronettes and most girl groups growing up in Long Island, New York as a teenager. If you play the recordings of "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" and "Be My Baby" side by side, you can hear the similarities, the only thing missing is the legendary Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" he helped make famous on "Be My Baby."

"Say Goodbye To Hollywood" may have been just stuck on the "Turnstiles" albums forever if not for Joel and his backing band playing this song and many others he recorded before his breakthrough "The Stranger" album in 1977 on tour in 1980. It was those recordings that would wind up on the 1981 album, "Songs In The Attic," his first live album. Many of those songs have become Joel staples on FM radio like "Captain Jack," "The Ballad Of Billy The Kid" and "You're My Home."

And to give Joel fans who only caught on with the superstar because of "The Stranger," the first release was the live performance of "Say Goodbye To Hollywood," that sentimental ode to the "growing up" part of his career of the 1970s. The song debuted on the Top 40 on September 26, 1981, at No. 40, and it was on this week, October 3, 1981, that it made the biggest leap within the Top 40, jumping 10 places from No. 40 to No. 30. It would eventually peak at No. 17 and be Joel's 14th Top 40 hit since "Piano Man" debuted in 1974. Another live track from that album, "She's Got A Way," would hit the Top 25 in early 1982.

As a side story to "Say Goodbye To Hollywood," a year after Joel recorded his original, guess which artist also recorded the song?

Uh-huh ... Ronnie Spector. She took it to heart, saying, "In a way it's my life story 'cause I was married in Hollywood, I lived in Hollywood, my life fell apart in Hollywood and now I am saying goodbye to Hollywood." Her version of the song was produced by Steven Van Zandt, who had plenty of time to work with Spector as he and the rest of the E Street Band were waiting to record again as his "Boss," Bruce Springsteen, was dealing with legal wranglings with his management and productions teams. Spector also had done backing vocals for Springsteen and the E Street Band.

As for the top of the chart on October 3, 1981, Diana Ross and Lionel Richie were riding at No. 1 for the eighth straight week with the theme from the movie Endless Love, but leaping up five places to No. 2 was Christopher Cross' hit from the movie Arthur, "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)."