Gold records

Youtube is a great channel for listening to music.  I have a coffee-table book titled THE BOOK OF GOLDEN DISCS, listing records year by year that sold a million copies or more up to about 1977.  Lately I've been going through the book backward from the last pages, listening to gold-record singles I don't recognize from the mid-'70s. (Some stuff I did recognize, of course.  I was happy to listen to Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" again.)

A lot of this music was mediocre, of course, but there were quite a few "keepers," like Sweet's "Little Willy" and the Elton John-Neil Sedaka duet "Bad Blood." There was also stuff like Raydio's "Jack and Jill," which I remembered hearing before without knowing anything about it.  I also re-discovered Parliament's early rap album CLONES OF DR. FUNKENSTEIN, which I'd heard at a campus radio station. (One Youtube contributor managed to upload the whole album in a single post!)

And then there's the ear-worms, as the Germans call them.  Stuff that gets into your head and won't leave, Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun" being a notorious example.  I discovered a perfectly ineffable Eurovision song by Brotherhood of Man(?) called "Save Your Kisses for Me." (Listen to it if you dare.) Another is "Get up and Boogie" by the German disco trio Silver Convention.  Less famous than their "Fly, Robin, Fly," its lyric consists of the title line repeated over and over, with an occasional "That's right" thrown in for variety.  Catch their costumes in the Youtube video--does any clothing item scream "70s" louder than the sleeveless pantsuit?

I've wearied of '70s music and now I'm going to start working forward from the front page and listen to the early hits.  I'm especially interested in the '30s song "Peanuts," because I remember Cary Grant singing the opening line ("Peanuuuuts!") in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.