Comments on: CHART ATTACK!: 8/11/73

By: thoughtclaw

thoughtclaw — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:34:30 +0000

I agree with most of what you've said here, but no way is “Live and Let Die” not the best Bond theme. I had totally forgotten about Guns N' Roses' version of it until you reminded me. I like the other songs you compared to it (well, most of them), but I love “Live and Let Die.”

By: thoughtclaw

thoughtclaw — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:34:30 +0000

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:38:55 +0000

Ahhhh the summer of '73; I remember all of these songs quite well. One song that was in the Top 10 on both Chicago charts at this time (WLS and WCFL) that couldn't quite make the Billboard Top 40 was ELO's “Roll Over Beethoven”. One thing I also remember about “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” is we went to the lake for a picnic that summer and I distinctly remember one little girl singing this song who actually made an effort to sing “the baddest man in the whole GODDAMN town”.

(note: this is Ray. I'm leaving this comment as “unclaimed” because my email address is already on file but my original user name was only three letters, so as far as this site is concerned I'm stuck in a vacuum somewhere)

By: BobCashill

BobCashill — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:55:18 +0000

“Licence to Kill” is the only Bond theme I've exiled from my iPod. A s-l–o-w and boring five and a half minutes of aural water torture…(but the film is in my Top Five Bonds.)

k.d. lang's closing theme from Tomorrow Never Dies is a sleeper, better than Sheryl Crow's opener, though that's grown on me. For campy fun, Lulu's “The Man with the Golden Gun” can't be beat. But “Goldfinger” is on top, with “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Live and Let Die” near the summit. (The whole “Goldfinger” soundtrack, John Barry in his prime, is tremendous get-up-and-go music.)

I'll write more on this, maybe in conjuction with “Quantum of Solace”–three words which I doubt Jack White and Alicia Keys will warble once in their forthcoming duet.

Lightning didn't strike twice for McGovern and the songwriting team on “The Towering Inferno,” though “We May Never Love Like This Again” also won the Oscar. (For every “Theme from Shaft” Oscar gets right, there's one or two more of these miscues–but I like “The Morning After” just fine.) Fergie was a poor substitute for McGovern/Carol Lynley in the “Poseidon” remake.

By: Eddie W

Eddie W — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:52:35 +0000

I spent some time last year in a part of Malaysia which is majority-Chinese, and sure enough, the Filipino cover band in the hotel bar (three singing girls and a guy with a laptop) belted out “Yesterday Once More”, along with about half a dozen other Carpenters classics. The Chinese businessmen in the audience ate that up – I'm convinced they requested each and every one.

By: Marvin Gaye’ so good …. - Canuckflack

Marvin Gaye’ so good …. - Canuckflack — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:11:27 +0000

[...] a comment from the always entertaining PopDose, this time in response to a post critiquing the music found in the Billboard Chart of August 11, 1973: “… “Let’s Get It On” was [...]

By: DwDunphy

DwDunphy — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:58:38 +0000

Tip to getting through “Touch Me In The Morning” – pretend Diana Ross has leprosy.

Tip to getting through “The Morning After”: – either remember that Maureen McGovern has been stuck on the Jerry Lewis Telethon ever since OR getting to the morning after a major disaster like the sinking of the Poseidon means using Ernest Borgnine as a human shield or Shelley Winters as a flotation device. Both good.

I love “Live And Let Die” but admit a weakness for a-Ha's “The Living Daylights.”

By: Jeff Gee

Jeff Gee — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:27:25 +0000

You're rating James Bond theme songs and you don't mention GOLDFINGER??? The most over-the-top movie title song ever (except, of course, for Gene Pitney's immortal “Town without Pity”).

btw, 35 or so years back I bought a copy of Stories' second album because it had a sticker on the wrapper that said “Contains the hit song 'Brother Louie.' This turned out to be technically true, as they'd stuck a copy of the single in the album jacket. The songs on the LP itself (some of them really fine) were mostly written by Michael Brown, who wrote “Walk Away Renee” for the Left Banke when he was about 16 and as far as I can tell never caught a break again.

By: MichaelFortes

MichaelFortes — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:56:42 +0000

I too have always heard the lyric as “in this ever changing world in which we're living”, which is totally grammatically correct. Or “livin'” which is lazy, but still correct.

Another point — no matter what the business reasons for the songwriting credit, Paul has gone on record stating that Linda conceived the reggae breakdown in the middle. She was always big into reggae. Her reggae version of “Mr. Sandman” actually isn't half bad.

By: MatthewF

MatthewF — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:24:01 +0000

I can testify that Yesterday Once More is indeed absurdly well known in China. I worked there for six months and heard the damn thing about a hundred times (never having heard it once before in my life), you would hear it at kareoke, in the supermarket, I even had it beamed from a speak directly over my head for the entire overnight train journey from beijing to shanghai. Man I hate that song.