WLS Music Survey April 22, 1978

Shortly after WLS switched to a pop music format in May 1960, they published their first Silver Dollar Survey for the week of October 14, 1960, listing the station's Top 40 singles as well as a featured album. By the late Sixties, the Silver Dollar Survey had been rechristened the WLS Hit Parade and through the years the number of albums and singles featured fluctuated though one thing remained constant: one of the station's disc jockeys was featured on every survey. There were no surveys printed from March 1972 thru July 1973 and in 1975, the physical dimensions of the survey changed to 7" x 8 1/2" (half a legal sized sheet of paper) basically doubling in size, allowing more information and advertising to be printed. Another benefit of the new size can be seen in the pic up on the right - the sheet fit perfectly into a 45 sleeve! I picked up my first WLS Music Survey in 1976 and managed to fill a Dingo brand boot box with them before they were tossed out in our move from Rantoul, Illinois to Tucson, Arizona in August 1981. Recently, I was sailing the Seas of Nostalgia and through several eBay Buy It Now deals, found myself reliving the years 1976-1982 via a rainbow of colorful WLS Music Surveys acquired from others. Several are admittedly of the same quality my old collection was: wrinkled, folded and maybe even marked but most definitely used if not abused. I used to fold them up to fit in my pocket and more than a few did not survive the washing machine. Or I would pierce the poor surveys so I could carry them in my three ring binder or Trapper Keeper, though in hindsight I could have just kept them in folders. But I also have a source, a new friend, who has managed to preserve his collection of vintage surveys in pristine, almost museum quality condition. (I hope to tell his interesting story and showcase his immaculate collection soon.) The survey featured in today's post is not from that very special collection but it is in really good shape itself for a piece of paper dated thirty-eight years ago today. 

Are you freakin' kidding me?!?!? This is a super-fine 45 song countdown and by my count I have 15 of the forty-fives listed so you know I was all over it back in the day, the week before my 12th birthday and my final month as a sixth grader. The worst song on the list is the Elvis track debuting at number 45. A posthumous single in poor taste and poor quality as Elvis doesn't sing it as much as reads the song's lyrics while one of his back-up singers sings the words.  The song on the list I have not heard in the longest time is probably "The Theme From Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" - I have the 45 and would guess I last played it after the kids and I watched the movie for the first time maybe 18 years ago. Incredibly, Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" was in its seventh month on the WLS Forty-fives list and moving up. The Bee Gees have three of their songs in the week's Top 20. Compared to the Top 40s on Billboard and Cashbox that week, WLS was behind the times: the station's Number One song had peaked at Number One on the two trade magazine charts a month prior and though "You're The One That I Want", the first single from Grease soundtrack, was shooting up those two charts and inside the Top 20, the song was nowhere to be found on the WLS list though it would debut way down at number 41 the following week.  And that Debby Boone track? It had fallen off the Hot 100 more than two months before April 22nd, after a 25 week run, including 10 weeks at the top of the chart as 1977 faded into 1978. The chart below compares the WLS list to both the Billboard and Cashbox chart and it ain't pretty.

WLS			Billboard	Cashbox
1	Emotion	Samantha Sang	21	20
2	Stayin' Alive	Bee Gees	13	10
3	Night Fever	Bee Gees	1	1
4	Jack and Jill	Raydio	8	6
5	Can't Smile Without You	Barry Manilow	3	2
6	Flash Light	Parliament	16	15
7	(Love Is) Thicker Than Water	Andy Gibb	27	43
8	Dance Dance Dance	Chic	65
9	Dust In The Wind	Kansas	6	3
10	Lay Down Sally	Eric Clapton	4	8
11	Just The Way You Are	Billy Joel	75
12	If I Can't Have You	Yvonne Elliman	2	4
13	Our Love	Natalie Cole	10	27
14	Ebony Eyes	Bob Welch	23	12
15	Closer I Get To You	Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway	5	5
16	Thunder Island	Jay Ferguson	49	36
17	Sometimes When We Touch	Dan Hill	98	83
18	Too Much, Too Little, Too Late	Johnny Mathis & Deniece Williams	20	26
19	Lady Love	Lou Rawls	45	51
20	How Deep Is Your Love	Bee Gees	55
21	We Are The Champions/We Will Rock You	Queen	91
22	Dance With Me	Peter Brown with Betty Wright	51	42
23	Running On Empty	Jackson Browne	12	7
24	Bootzilla	Bootsy's Rubber Band
25	Baby Come Back	Player	96
26	Which Way Is Up	Stargard	62	53
27	It's You That I Need	Enchantment
28	Hot Legs	Rod Stewart	78	57
29	Do You Believe In Magic	Shaun Cassidy	40	47
30	Always And Forever	Heatwave	61	44
31	Goodbye Girl	David Gates	15	9
32	Sweet Talkin' Woman	Electric Light Orchestra	19	18
33	Miss Broadway	Belle Epoque
34	Close Encounters Of The Third Kind	John Williams
35	Short People	Randy Newman
36	Wonderful World	Art Garfunkel	99
37	Peg	Steely Dan
38	With A Little Luck	Wings	7	13
39	Ain't Gonna Hurt Nobody	Brick
40	You Light Up My Life	Debby Boone
41	Reachin' For The Sky	Peabo Bryson
42	The Way You Do The Things You Do	Rita Coolidge
43	We'll Never Have To Say Goodbye	England Dan & John Ford Coley	9	14
44	What's Your Name	Lynyrd Skynyrd		64
45	Softly As I Leave You	Elvis Presley

Did you happen to notice that only one artist has two albums listed in the Top Thirty-threes? He was my sister's favorite artist at the time and she actually tried to runaway to Chicago to see him in concert in March 1978. She was eight years old at the time.

Surprisingly, all thirty three albums on the WLS Thirty-threes list for the week of April 22nd can be listened to via Spotify and I've included them in the countdown styled playlist above, from number thirty-three to Number One! The flip side of the WLS Music Survey was usually home of some cool stuff:

1. the lyrics to one or sometimes two songs from the Forty-fives list were almost always printed each week;
2. some weeks (like this one) would feature a random Top Ten from the Past, completely and totally unrelated to the current week;
3. sometimes a sponsor or a station contest would be featured;
4. once a year, around Memorial Day, WLS would feature a Rock Hall Of Fame countdown of the 500 most popular songs of the Rock era as voted on by listeners. The countdown was broken down into ten lists, with 50 titles on each one;
5. upcoming concerts were sometimes featured in addition to the dates listed on the front;
6. The Big 89 year end countdown was usually featured on its on Survey sheet with the Top 89 forty-fives taking up both columns on the front and the Top 33 albums and other stuff featured on the back;
7. The Annual WLS MusicRadio Survey Awards were printed once a year on the back of a Survey sheet;
8. Brief artist bios sometimes appeared on the back of the WLS Music Surveys.

Probably the most important thing to notice on the Music Survey is the tiny print on the front, between the Thirty-threes list and the Concerts in the Weeks Ahead feature. It is a disclaimer of sorts that reads:

"WLS plays selected music from these lists."