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Let's talk about American Top 40. In my day, AT40 was hosted by Casey Kasem and later by Shadoe Stevens - both of whom were legends. From its 1970 debut until 1991, this radio program counted down the top 40 of Billboard's weekly Hot 100 singles chart, which was compiled from record sales and radio station playlists. AT40 and the Hot 100 were also special because of the way they were woven into each other.
For much of my youth, I moved all the heavens to listen to American Top 40 every Sunday. And my parents absolutely hated it. Hated, hated, hated it! Or at least that was the impression I got. I'm not sure if they hated the show itself that much, but they hated the fact that I devoted so much interest to it. One time in the mid-1980s, when I was about 11, my mom warned me that I couldn't let my life "revolve around" AT40.
There was a period of a couple years around that time when I had several running gags that involved a significant chunk of the music industry. That timeframe was also one of the high water marks of pop radio.
Fast-forward to 1988. I was still an AT40 fan. But the tables were turned! For weeks on end, my parents decided they weren't going to let me listen to AT40. But by then, I was absolutely fed up, so I devised a way to catch this great program and not miss any of it.
How did I accomplish this?
I made sure to clear my bottom drawer so a boom box would fit snugly therein. I had stockpiled a few blank cassettes. I turned the volume all the way down on the boom box as it was tuned to AT40 - so nobody would know it was on - and recorded the show onto tape. Each cassette held 30 minutes per side, so every half-hour, I'd sneak into my room and change the tape. At night, after I had supposedly gone to bed, I listened to AT40 off of cassette - with the volume down very low so I wouldn't get caught.
It was like the RC Cola commercials where people had to smuggle RC into prison or hide it from the KGB.
The lost hit profiled in this entry was by 12-year-old Tracie Spencer from Waterloo, Iowa. It scraped into the top 40 during some of the weeks in which I carried out the above plan. In fact, I think AT40 was the only place I ever heard this song. There were getting to be more and more top 40 hits that I didn't hear anywhere except the countdown, thanks to the narrowing of radio playlists and the minds that compiled them.
I don't think my folks banned me from listening to AT40 again after that timeframe. I guess they got it out of their system. I think somehow they eventually discovered that I had taped the program when I wasn't allowed to - but that wasn't until years later, after the statute of limitations had run out.
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