We've covered the first thirty-five discs in Time Life Music's Sounds of The Seventies series. Click HERE to get caught up. In 1994, only three volumes in the series were released as Sounds Of The Seventies wound down and ended without announcement or notification. Let's take a listen to the final three Sounds Of The Seventies discs.
More AM Nuggets is disc 36 in the Sounds Of The Seventies series. It contains twenty-one tracks, including eighteen Top 20 songs with these three Number Ones: "My Ding-A-Ling", "Love Will Keep Us Together", and "December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)". The track list includes songs from each year of the decade, with a full 67% of the songs dating from 1974 or after. If there are any faults with More AM Nuggets, we cannot see them because one of our all-time favorite songs, the aforementioned "December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night", is included. This was the first compact disc in our collection with this song, so it was a huge deal.
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AM Heavy Hits has eighteen tracks that more than likely got airplay on AM stations, though we first heard most of these songs on FM stations later in the Seventies and early Eighties. Fourteen of the songs made the Top 40, with five of those making the Top 20. Like the previous disc, there are songs on AM Heavy Hits from every year of the Seventies. Two songs from 1979 just missed out on making the Top 40, topping out at number 41: "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman" by The Kinks and "Good Times Roll" by The Cars. Five of the songs run over five minutes long, and by our count, only two songs ("Long Time" and "Driver's Seat") appear here in their abbreviated single edits rather than their full-length album versions.
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There was an extra month or two between when AM Heavy Hits arrived and when Physical showed up in our mailbox. The disc was a surprise on several levels: the artwork and matrix number seemed to indicate it was from a different series; it was manufactured by Polygram Special Markets instead of Warner Special Products; and while it has songs from the Seventies, it also has songs from the Eighties! There are no liner notes or chart positions, just songwriter and copyright information. The mastering is once again handled by Steve Carr. Half of the tracks are from 1976-1979, while the other half of the songs are from 1980-1984. Each of the eighteen tracks made the Top 10 while eight of them climbed all the way up to Number One: "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty"; "Shadow Dancing"; "Celebration"; "Call Me"; "Upside Down"; "Funkytown"; "Physical"; and "Maniac". We lovingly think of Physical as the Roller Rink disc, as we have fond memories of hearing all but one of the tracks ("I'm So Excited") at the skating rink. Until we had kids, the last time we went to a skating rink was on an awkward date in 1982 with a girl who couldn't skate, so we ended up cuddling at a table, sharing a drink and some nachos, watching others skate, making small talk, and listening to the music until the place closed.
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Whatever Physical was intended to be, it was reissued as Celebration within a few months after its initial release. Same songs, same order. Different cover art and a different title. Please note that in each case throughout Sounds Of The Seventies where a revised disc was issued, that revised disc is the more common one, produced in larger quantities than the original disc.
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And that was the end of the Sounds Of The Seventies series. After 38 discs, Time-Life Music stopped sending them out in 1994. Late in 1993, mailers were sent out advertising the company's newest series: Sounds Of The Eighties. We enthusiastically signed up and began enjoying the discs as soon as they showed up in the mailbox. With the arrival of those first few discs in the new series, the Physical made a little more sense as a transition disc between the two series, the two decades. Maybe we'll get around to featuring Sounds Of The Eighties at some point.
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