The following is a Ross On Radio guest article from Rich Appel, Host of the syndicated “That Thing with Rich Appel“.

If it weren’t for a certain radio show’s anniversary being celebrated this week, the summer of 1970 wouldn’t be as momentous a time for pop music and radio as others.

It wasn’t 1967, when the Doors lit a fire under Top 40 in the “summer of love.”

It wasn’t 1968, when harder and more urgent rock emerged that spoke to the “summer of hate,” as a friend termed it, practically in real time.

It wasn’t 1971, with Top 40’s long-due acceptance of Rock album tracks.

But it was the summer of “O-o-h Child,” “War,” “Band of Gold,” “Spill The Wine,” “Make It With You,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” and Mungo Jerry’s “In The Summertime”—the Song of the Summer’s personal song-of-the-summer.

It was a summer when Top 40’s mission remained all things to all listeners: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” and Chicago “25 Or 6 To 4” for album rock fans; Vanity Fare’s “Hitchin’ A Ride” and Bobby Sherman’s “Julie Do Ya Love Me” for the younger end of the demo; Anne Murray’s “Snowbird” and Elvis Presley’s “The Wonder Of You” for the older crowd; and a greater-than-usual showing for R&B (then “soul”), especially Motown, with the Temptations’ “Ball Of Confusion” and “The Love You Save,” the Jackson 5’s third consecutive number one single out of the gate. 

And it was the summer when American Top 40 – which would change the direction of weekly radio countdowns – went on the air.

For me, the summer of 1970 began with my bar mitzvah, and first kiss (the same day). The radio memories were waking up with WRKO’s manic Dale Dorman hitting the post on Kenny Rogers & the First Edition’s “Tell It All Brother,” and delivering the Evening Globe while listening to WMEX’s “John H.” Garabedian talk up Ernie’s Sesame Street smash “Rubber Duckie” (both No. 1 singles at their respective stations).

WRKO’s “Big 30” countdown was appointment listening on Thursday afternoons for most of us kids. Whether Alive And Kicking’s “Tighter, Tighter” would knock the Carpenters’ “(They Long To Be) Close To You” out of the number one spot was a hot topic of conversation between wiffle ball at-bats. For top 40 radio and chart fanatics like me who couldn’t wait until Thursday, there were local countdowns on Monday (WPRO Providence, R.I.) and Wednesday (WMEX), along with RKO’s rollout of weekly adds on Tuesday nights.

The focus had always been on what songs were popular on each station, which differed, often significantly, from station to station. WRKO, for example, never played “Rubber Duckie.” And there were no countdowns on Saturday or Sunday, presumably to clear the way for “Solid Gold Weekends.”

So when American Top 40 debuted (and “debut” is a word I first heard from Casey Kasem) on Sunday morning July 5 on WMEX (one of the syndicated countdown’s first seven affiliates), there was little to no excitement among the wiffle ball crowd. Who needed another countdown, especially one of the hits across the U.S., when all that had ever mattered was what the top songs were in the Boston area?

Well…I did, and I became fascinated with the difference between local and national rankings. For a lot of AT40 fans, the show’s revelation was how many “hits” there were beyond one’s market. For me, it was also that “here in Boston, hits just happen faster,” as a WMEX promo for the show put it. AT40’s first No. 1, Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me (Not To Come)” had already peaked two weeks earlier on WRKO. Ten songs on AT40 had already fallen off WRKO’s “Big 30.” WRKO was faster than Billboard on 26 of the 40 songs in that first countdown.

“Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me” by Robin McNamara was already top 10 on WRKO and hadn’t cracked the national countdown yet. Then again, AT40 beat WRKO on “I Just Can’t Help Believing” by B.J. Thomas and a couple of others. “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was one of four AT40 songs that WRKO never played (although WMEX did).

While American Top 40 never matched the excitement of the local countdowns, it was Casey’s stories and “from Hollywood” aura that grabbed me. Not to mention the occasional national hit that never made it to Boston, the biggest of which that summer was James Brown’s “Get Up I Feel Like Being A Sex Machine (Part I & Part II).” But there was also Bob Dylan’s “Wigwam,” a #9 Boston hit that just missed AT40, peaking at #41 in Billboard.

“Go Back” by Crabby Appleton was another song that made AT40 but not Boston radio. Whether listeners remember it as exactly the kind of song that you listened to AT40 for, or as a real hit locally that they can’t believe other people didn’t hear, it’s just one of the songs that listeners to That Thing with Rich Appel vote for every year on our “WOW! 100.”  In fact, these are the summer 1970 hits that they voted for in 2019 and/or 2020.

• “Out In The Country,” Three Dog Night (#12, 2019 and #28, 2020)
• “It’s A Shame,” The Spinners (#15, 2019 and #18, 2020)
• “Tighter, Tighter,” Alive & Kicking (#22, 2020)
• “Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me,” Robin McNamara (#33, 2019)
• “Ball Of Confusion,” The Temptations (#46, 2019)
• “Yellow River,” Christie (#49, 2019)
• “Go Back.” Crabby Appleton  (#55, 2019)
• “Patches,” Clarence Carter (#59, 2020)
• “Question,” The Moody Blues (#81, 2019)
• “Westbound #9,” Flaming Ember (#100, 2020)

In some markets, the local countdown hung on through the late ‘70s. In Boston, they began to disappear in 1971, even though local hits flourished in the market for another 30 years. Certainly this was good news for American Top 40, which eventually became the only countdown in town.

As a measure of how popular AT40 had become, in the summer of ‘73 (which we’ll devote a special hour to on next weekend’s That Thing) I was sending every week’s countdown numbers, with my own commentary in place of Casey’s, to a girlfriend at sleepaway camp.

By the late ‘70s, syndicated competitors to American Top 40 started to pop up: Drake-Chenault’s Weekly Top 40, Mutual’s Dick Clark National Music Survey, RKO Radio Network’s Countdown America. Each followed the AT40 formula to a T: stories behind the songs, focus on each song’s chart activity and “extras” from affiliate stations’ gold libraries. Those and later national countdowns were a testament to the house Casey built, as is Ryan Seacrest’s AT40 today.

But fifty summers ago, who could have imagined Top 40 without local countdowns, or for that matter, stations where most of the hits were the same from one to the other end of the country? And where American Top 40 wasn’t just one countdown, but the countdown?

In the summer of 1970, us kids didn’t know how good we had it.