We've already featured the first twenty-one discs in the Time Life Music Sounds Of The Seventies series across three posts, including two runs through the decade for the initial twenty discs. Today, we're covering the seven discs that were mailed out in 1992.
Seventies Top 40 opens with a great seven-song R&B run featuring tracks from 1969-1974 and running the gamut from Philly Soul to Funk with a couple of ballads to pump the brakes. Then, beginning with "I'd Love To Change The World", a wonderful ten-song chunk of pop/rock, before an R&B classic by Joe Tex offers a brief time out for fun before Jim Stafford, the Outlaws, and Blackfoot finish the disc off. Seventies Top 40 features twenty-one tracks, all of which are Top 40 hits, as stated in the album's title. Fourteen of the songs made the Top 20, with "Fire" going all the way to Number One. The disc is heavily weighted towards the early 1970s, with fifteen of the tracks dating back to before 1974. We usually enjoy this disc on shuffle, but it might just be the weakest disc in the series for us.
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Someone in Sweet's camp had an issue with "Little Willy" being included, as it was soon replaced by America's "I Need You" on the more common later re-repressings.
The series plugs in and turns it up on Guitar Power, the twenty-third disc in the Sounds of The Seventies series. Of the eighteen tracks on the disc, seven songs failed to make Billboard's Hot 100. Six of the remaining eleven tracks made the Top 40, while only Foreinger's "Blue Morning, Blue Day" crashed the Top 20 at number 15. Fourteen of the tracks on Guitar Power are from before 1976; they are deep cuts from the FM Rock format, some of which are still getting airplay on Classic Rock stations. We like this disc less than the last one, as we like less than half of these tracks.💿💿💿
Guitar Power turned out to be a snafu on the licensing front, with five songs getting replaced after the initial pressing:
- "Lady Love" replaced by "Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)" at track 4;
- "Locomotive Breath" replaced by "Funk #49" at track 8;
- "Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad" replaced by "Yank Me, Crank Me" at track 10;
- "Blues Power" replaced by "Fool For The City" at track 12;
- "Juke Box Music" replaced by "Easy Rider (Let The Wind Pay The Way)" at track 15
We love three of the five replacement tunes and bump our rating up a whole disc for the repressing.
Speaking of FM Rock, the next disc is FM Rock, featuring nineteen songs from the format's heyday. Only two of the songs made the Hot 100: Traffic's "Empty Pages" came in at number 74, while "The Story In Your Eyes" from the Moody Blues was number 23. We can count our favorite songs from FM Rock on one hand.
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Seventies Generation returns to a mix of pop, rock, and R&B tracks that we prefer to mono genre discs like the previous two. The twenty-one tracks feature eleven Top 20 songs, including four Number Ones: "Want Ads", "You're So Vain", "Saturday Night", and "Love Rollercoaster". Once again, the track list leans towards the early part of the decade with thirteen tracks from before 1975. One song that definitely deserves more listens is "One Fine Morning" by Lighthouse, a Canadian entry into the horn rock race of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Seventies Generation is an accurate representation of the random shuffle jukebox way we listen to much of our music.💿💿💿💿
A second dose of early-seventies free-form rock is offered on FM Rock II, the twenty-seventh disc in the Sounds Of The Seventies series. Twelve of the eighteen tracks are from 1970-1971, with five others from 1972-1973, and the Warren Zevon outlier from 1978. Santana's rockin' groove "Everybody's Everything" is the disc's only Top 20 track, coming in at number 12. We like less than half of these songs, but that's still more than FM Rock.
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It was a pleasant surprise when Dance Fever showed up in our mailbox one day in 1992. With nineteen songs from 1973-1979 on the album, there are fourteen Top 10s and six Number Ones. Some of the songs are pure, undeniably disco tracks, while others lean more towards funk or soul. Nearly all the tracks exist elsewhere in longer, uncut versions. We counted eight songs on Dance Fever that later appeared on Rhino's The Disco Years and/or The Disco Box (1999). While we enjoy getting lost in the music of extended cuts, sometimes we just want the comfort and familiarity of the single mixes.
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The third installment of FM Rock arrives with eighteen tracks and a lone Billboard Hot 100 charting in Bloodrock's "D.O.A.", which peaked at number 36 in 1971. The rest of FM Rock III, with just five exceptions, was new to my ears at the time and really hasn't grown on me over time.💿💿
The latter, more common repressings of FM Rock III have "Nobody" by The Doobie Brothers replacing Elton John's "Take Me To The Pilot". Not an improvement for this listener. We're calling it - FM Rock III is the weakest disc in the series.
We'll return soon with a look at the Sounds Of The Seventies discs from 1993.
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