Which classic rock song held the number one spot for the longest in the 1970s?
The Beatles had disbanded, Elvis Presley was beleaguered, and Jimi Hendrix was dearly departed. After its stark rise from nowhere, rock ‘n’ roll was experiencing something of a down turn in the 1970s.
But so was everything else. At the dawn of the decade, New York was in worse shape than a Jack-o’-lantern in November. Between 1969 and 1974, half a million manufacturing jobs had been lost. A million homes depended on welfare. Rapes and burglaries tripled. Drugs dug their claws into the sagging psyche of the sleepless city.
The murder rate in the city of lights hit a startling high of nearly 33 slayings every week. Things looked bleak, and the Big Apple seemed rotten to its core. The rest of the world, as is often the case with New York, was following suit. Amid this knee slide of the most decrepit variety, folks were understandably searching for something different.
So, it was mutations of rock ‘n’ roll rather than the age-old genre itself that soared through the charts in a stunning decade for music. Punk and disco simultaneously offered a ‘sound of the people’ to subvert the economic woe. Meanwhile, David Bowie got experimental, heavy metal roared to the fore, and Gil-Scott Heron even offered a hint of what would later become rap.
But what rock ‘n’ roll song held the number one spot for the longest in the 1970s?
While The Beatles might have edged away from their rather more bluesy roots by the close of the 1960s, incorporating rather more avant-garde flourishes, Paul McCartney began to revert back to that staple sound when he settled back into the groove of a group with Wings.
He might have helped to set up the building blocks for indie music with Ram in 1971, but by the time 1976 had arrived, he was gooing back to his roots with singles like ‘Silly Love Songs’, and it worked. The song held the top spot for five weeks, and it looked like that would be the most any rock ‘n’ roll song mustered in the entire decade for a long while.
Debby Boone might have towered over it with ‘You Light Up My Life’ that sat at number one for ten weeks, but the simple, good, old guitar appeal of ‘Silly Love Songs’ still looked to be a crowning achievement for an apparently ailing genre in ‘76. But then, with only a few months of the ‘70s to spare, ‘My Sharona’ would kickstart the rock ‘n’ roll once more.
The Knack eclipsed McCartney, managing one week more in its six week run at the top of the charts from August 1979. Pairing the punchy spirit of punk with the chugging melody of the blues and a truly poppy chorus proved to be a masterstroke by the Californian band who had only formed a year earlier.
Youth culture was a firm fixture in the ‘70s, dictating plenty of trends, and perhaps this is also why it proved to be the best-selling single of the year in the US. As the frontman Doug Feiger would explain, “I was 25 when I wrote the song. But the song was written from the perspective of a 14-year-old boy. It’s just an honest song about a 14-year-old boy.”
