Last night the family and I drove over to Weber’s, an old-fashioned, American Graffiti-style drive-in near us for after-dinner milkshakes and root beer floats. I recently loaded The Cars‘ first album on my iPod to please my wife during summer drives. It’s on of her high school favorites, and I figured it would be a good time to introduce our boys to the album on our short drive. A massive thunderstorm broke out, so the normally 5-minute drive took a good 20 minutes. We ended up letting the album play out as we enjoyed our desserts. The boys warmed up to the album after our oldest son’s initial “What’s this music?!?!” as “Let the Good Times Roll” kicked things off. My wife loved every minute of it, and I got to thinking about the days when commercial radio stations played more than one track from a new album – and more than one track from an artist, for that matter.
Long before I bought a used vinyl copy of the first Cars album and long after having seen them at Philadelphia’s soon-to-be-demolished Spectrum, at my first-ever rock concert (Greg Kihn Band opened, playing “Roadrunner,” which at the time I had no idea was connected to Cars’ drummer David Robinson – and yes, I can see how the fact that this connection came to me while sucking down a root beer float last night might be seen as pathetic) I knew every song on that first album. Late on a Sunday night, FM radio stations in the late-’70s occasionally featured a new release in its entirety, but that’s not how I knew every song on this new album, The Cars. Rather it was because, in those days, there were occasionally new albums, over the course of the album’s first few months on the market, radio stations would incorporate into their playlists almost in their entirety. I don’t know what kind of payola system was in place for this to happen, how much coke satin-clad DJs snorted off the nipples of hookers, or what, but older heads will recall: there was a time when a new album often resulted in three or four tracks being played on the radio. As in the case of the first Cars album, there were even albums that DJs felt confident dropping the needle down at any point. I’m not dreaming, am I? As I listened to The Cars last night it occurred to me that the album contained not a single deep cut in its time!
I was trying to remember other albums on which every song was regularly played on the radio during the first few months of the album’s release. Only counting albums that I would have heard when they were fresh (ie, classic Beatles, Stones, and Who albums from the ’60s and early ’70s, which had been featured in whole on the likes of A-Z Weekends [remember them?] do not count for me), I thought of The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, The Cars, and then two albums that probably mark the tail-end of this phenomenon – and that may have each spawned an album’s worth of songs that charted, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. I’ve never owned the last two albums and I was already too-cool-for-school when they invaded the airwaves, but there was no getting around hearing every track on those albums played to death on commercial radio.
Are there other albums like that from your experience? Again, weed out any Classic Rock albums that you’ve heard on the radio years after they were released; keep it fresh. Has there been an album since the MJ and Boss records that reached this status? Maybe Nirvana’s Nevermind was the last to come close, but what do I know about albums that have been released and played on the radio since? Could you ever imagine anything like this happening again? Are the days of DJs doing coke off a hooker’s nipples that far in the past?
