The Sounds Of The Seventies 1977 disc continues to mine the vein of our favorite decade of music, 1973-1982. With seven Number Ones and nineteen Top 10 hits, the fifth disc in the series packs a punch. The disc begins with the cool soul of "Got To Give It Up" and high energy of "Dancing Queen" before slowing things down with the softest rock of "Blue Bayou" and plush romance of "How Deep Is Your Love". And that's just the first half of the disc. Foreigner, Linda Ronstadt, and the Bee Gees all make encore appearances on the second half of Sounds Of The Seventies 1977, though it would have been cool had other top artists of the year like Debby Boone, Andy Gibb, and Shaun Cassidy appeared instead of second songs from each artist previously mentioned. It is a fairly accurate snapshot of the music I was listening to on WLS back in 1977.
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Due to an issue with Abba's "Dancing Queen", the original disc was quickly replaced with a revised disc with "Serpentine Fire" in place of the Abba track, as pictured above. With all due respect to this classic Earth, Wind & Fire song, we'd have to dock our previous rating of Sounds Of The Seventies 1977 from 💿💿💿💿💿 with "Dancing Queen" to one less disc without it.
In 1973, I was seven years old, the same age as my youngest grandkids are at the moment, and this blows my mind in so many ways. Of the precious few memories I have of 1973, nearly all of them revolve around music; therefore, it was a lot of fun listening to Sounds Of The Seventies 1973 upon its arrival in 1990. The disc features eighteen Top 10 tracks with five of them going to Number One. The only track we tend to skip when playing this disc is track 16, an edit of a live version of Deep Purple's classic "Smoke on the Water". It's a great song, a great performance, but it just feels out of place with the rest of the tracks.💿💿💿💿
With nineteen Top 10 songs, including eight Number Ones, Sounds Of The Seventies 1974 keeps the hits coming. We were surprised to revisit this disc and find our Number One favorite song from 1974 on it. Joni Mitchell's "Help Me" took that honor back in May 2024 after slowly gaining our interest over the previous fifty years, particularly the last five years or so, when it sounded better each time we heard it. Even more surprising is finding our Number One favorite song from 1973 on this same disc. "Show And Tell" was released in 1973 along with five other tracks on Sounds Of The Seventies 1974, but it peaked on the charts in January 1974, so that somehow makes it a 1974 song. Cash Box even declared it their Number One Song of 1974, while we made it our Number One Song of 1974 in February 2016. This whole chart and provenance thing is very confusing and contradictory, but it doesn't make this disc any less enjoyable.💿💿💿💿💿
A colorful illustration of Joni Mitchell was the original cover art for Sounds Of The Seventies 1974. It was replaced early on with the more common cover: a cryptic illustration of an eye and eyebrow, as seen above.
Sounds of The Seventies 1975 features more of the same great-sounding music as the discs before. With nineteen Top 20 songs and ten Number Ones, the disc's big surprise is the charting B-Side from Linda Ronstadt about halfway through. "Love Is A Rose" is a Neil Young composition given a banjo-led country makeover courtesy of Ronstadt & Company over a rock foundation. In a 1994 infomercial for Sounds Of The '70s (sic), Rex Smith said 1975 was "a year of new directions" and "an avalanche of talent". I know it's all hyperbole, but there is a nice blend of single edits and album cuts on this collection. And then there's "Free Bird", presented here in an edit that cuts off the gospel organ intro and fades out about three minutes too early on the four-minute epic guitar duel that closes the album version. We'd rather skip the track entirely.
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Seems Linda Ronstadt had an issue with the original stylized cover art for Sounds Of The Seventies 1975, so it was removed and replaced with the generic stylized portrait by David Willardson, who had also done the Ronstadt art.
As much as we had enjoyed the previous discs in the Sounds Of The Seventies series, the 1979 disc was a milestone for us, striking the perfect blend of favorite tracks and songs finally available on compact disc for this listener and collector. All eighteen tracks landed in the Top 20, with eleven of them going on to Number One. We finished sixth grade and entered seventh grade in 1979, so all of these tunes are near the top of the pile, memory-wise. The songs "Too Much Heaven" and "Reunited" were slow jam favorites at school dances and couples skates at the roller rink. We count seven bona fide disco dancefloor smashes that still shake our bodies down to the ground, as well as a few rockers that got spins on WLS, WLRW, and my Soundesign turntable. Sounds Of The Seventies 1979 only has eighteen tracks, clocking in at just seventy minutes, well under the series' average. Half the tracks are single edits, with half of those preferred around these parts as full-length album cuts.💿💿💿💿💿
Ten discs in, we finally finish up the decade with Sounds Of The Seventies 1978. There are twenty tracks on the disc, and all but one of them made the Top 20. That outlier – "Werewolves of London" – is a great album opener, setting the stage for the tracks that follow. There are only four Number Ones here (Gilder, Exile, Chic, and the Bee Gees), but they are all great tunes, so it's quality over quantity. The one song that seems out of place is "Short People". We didn't even let the whole track play for this review, skipping forward to "Dust In The Wind". We still think it should be required that "We Will Rock You" always precede "We Are The Champions" unless you're playing the latter immediately following a victory of some sort. We loved the two songs that close out Sounds of The Seventies 1978.💿💿💿💿💿
Given the number of changes they've had to make thus far, Time-Life or Warner Special Products should have had someone on the project staff reach out to artists and their management to get everyone's approval before featuring them on the covers of these discs. Looks like the Brothers Gibb took issue with the illustrated art on the original cover and had it replaced by the generic art above on most copies of Sounds Of The Seventies 1978.
The question what are they gonna do now that they issued a disc for each year of the decade? was answered when Sounds Of The Seventies 1970: Take Two arrived. Rounding up twenty-one more hits from 1970, including sixteen Top 20 hits and two Number Ones, the disc kicks off with a trio of Motown classics from The Jackson 5, The Temptations, and Rare Earth. While I cannot speak to the airplay any of the songs on this disc may have had back in 1970, I can say with confidence that many of these songs would be considered classic rock today, which is not necessarily a bad thing. A trio of tracks close out Sounds Of The Seventies 1970: Take Two on a soulful note.
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Depending on your sensibilities, Sounds Of The Seventies 1971: Take Two opens with a nice soulful run of two, seven, or nine tracks. We're in the latter camp ourselves with this second bunch of songs from 1971. Of the twenty-one tracks here, seventeen made the Top 20, with two of those rising all the way up to the top of the chart. In addition to that wonderful opening soul run, we're fans of the stretch of tracks 10-16, which scream the early 1970s in the best way possible.
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The original pressings of Sounds Of The Seventies 1971: Take Two have twenty-one tracks. Repressings of the album feature twenty tracks. At some point, Richie Havens or his label or his management decided they did not want his take on the Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" on the album, and it was removed.
We'll return with the third batch of Sounds Of The Seventies discs soon.
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