The “Lost Factor” Top 100, 1975-79

If it’s hard to decide which hits of the mid-‘70s should stay lost, it’s because it was hard to decide in the mid-‘70s which songs of a previous generation should stay lost as well.

Even among the nostalgia and remake boom of the American Graffiti era, there was something willful about the MOR-flavored remake choices made for Donny Osmond (“Puppy Love,” “Go Away Little Girl”), Marie Osmond (“Paper Roses”), and particularly for Donny & Marie together.

After their short-lived R&B/bubblegum faceoff with the Jackson 5, the Osmonds made a string of good-to-really-good power-pop records (“Down by the Lazy River,” “He’s the Light of the World,” “Crazy Horses,” “Goin’ Home”). I never use the word “bubblegum” as a pejorative, but if you do, those songs are bubblegum mostly by dint of being by the Osmonds. Their streak ran its course about the time that Donny & Marie began to have hits together, taking their cues on material from their previous solo hits.

You can make a case for the Dale & Grace hit version of “I’m Leaving It Up to You” as swamp pop and not part of the vapor trail of Paul & Paula, but the Donny & Marie remake is No. 20 among the hits of the year when we calculate 1974’s “Lost Factor” — our ongoing look at which songs have the widest gap between hit status then and a lack of airplay today.

It’s harder to find any cool factor in another hit from roughly the same time as Dale & Grace, the Nino Tempo & April Stevens version of 1939’s “Deep Purple.” The Donny & Marie 1976 remake is the song with the highest “Lost Factor” for the years 1975-79. “Deep Purple” has a “Lost Factor” of 59 — it was the No. 42 song of the year (netting it 59 points out of a possible 100) and it received no airplay for the seven previous days from the U.S. and Canadian stations monitored by BDS Radio. By comparison, the “Lost Factor” for the Nino & April version is less than 2.0, a low number for a pre-1964 song of its type.

Donny & Marie also manage the No. 12 song on our 1975-79 tally with another remake, “Morning Side of the Mountain.” That song was a throwback in 1959 when Tommy Edwards charted with a remake of a song that had originally been a hit for him in the pre-rock-era days of 1951. In other words, that song’s own “Lost Factor” would have likely been pretty high when Donny & Marie remade it in early 1975.

Thus far, we’ve published some Lost Factor tallies from 1960 to 1994, including the years 1974, 1977, 1978, and 1979. In the next installment, we’ll look at the Lost Factor of the hits of 1970-74. Also on the way: the Lost 100 of the 1970s, and finally the highest Lost Factor songs covering the entire 35-year span we’ve measured so far.

There were 17 songs among the top 100 that got no spins in their measurement week. There were also a few in the bottom reaches that got more than 20 spins but still sported high lost factors because they’d placed so high on the year-end chart.

As usual, our Lost Factor calculations have various footnotes, many of them being a function of the way this project was calculated, a year’s worth of songs at a time, done in batches between April and now. You can read about that here.

These are the hundred songs from 1975-79 with the highest Lost Factor:

Songs with high Lost Factors, especially from the ‘70s, have fit a number of patterns. This time I quantified them. Among the top 100 songs, there were:

• 35 songs that would now be thought of as MOR — older and softer than even the Soft AC recently brought back by a number of stations in recent years. The list includes five titles from Barbra Streisand (including two duets), three from Paul Anka (not including 1974’s champion, “[You’re] Having My Baby”), as well as Helen Reddy, Melissa Manchester, the Captain & Tennille, and two of the most derided hits of all-time, “Feelings” and “You Light Up My Life.”
• 20 songs that could be classified as disco, although that ranges from the pop/MOR of Cher, Meco, and Leif Garrett to up-tempo funk from B.T. Express and Johnnie Taylor that just happened to be danceable.
• 16 songs from teen idols, including all three Shaun Cassidy songs that made the year-end Hot 100. As with any of the other benchmarks here, some songs ticked multiple boxes.
• 15 songs that had retro/nostalgic elements, even when they were new. Most of these were remakes, but Toby Beau’s doowop homage “My Angel Baby” counts too. So does Electric Light Orchestra’s “Telephone Line,” although you can certainly hear echoes of that song in Dan + Shay’s current “I Should Probably Go to Bed.”

Streisand is represented here with the most songs. Her five are followed by Alice Cooper (his four ballads, each of them charting between 1975 and 1978), Donna Summer (also including her duet with Barbra Streisand) with three, and Shaun Cassidy’s three.

As has particularly been the case as we delve into the ‘60s and ‘70s, there are songs that deserve to be lost but a handful of songs I don’t find to be goofy or have aged poorly in any way. Some I’ve already gone to bat for (“Love Is Like Oxygen”); many are R&B (“Heaven Must Have Sent You,” “Disco Lady,” “Misty Blue”). I couldn’t argue Joe Simon’s “Get Down, Get Down (Get on the Floor)” with you, given its exhortations to dance the kung-fu bump. But I still enjoy hearing it. Look for an article soon on the “Most Undeservedly Lost Songs.”

And here are the songs, all but one of them Classic Rock, that receive airplay disproportionate to their year-end finishes of the time. In the past I’ve called them the “Turboed Ten.” But I’ve come up with a better name for them—even those that were hits on some level at the time, “Lucky Stiffs.”