Ambiorix Top 40 – 1976-05

Glory Hallelujah!! 

One of the absolute masterpieces of 1976 finally sees the light of day in May: Warren Zevon’s self-titled album. For me, it effortlessly earns desert island disc status! Drop me on a deserted island and allow me to take 20 albums with me, and this record is guaranteed to occupy a prominent place among them. Throughout the rest of the year, I’ll be picking one of its many unfading flowers every month. Opening track “Frank & Jesse James” (#1) gets the honour of kicking things off. It simply couldn’t have been more magnificent! Pure class!

The American funk band Supercharge generally falls well outside my musical comfort zone. “She Moved The Dishes First” (#2) is the exception that proves the rule, if the rest of the accompanying album Local Lads Make Good is anything to go by. This is one of the funniest little oddities of all time. Riding along on a loosely improvised parody of “Under the Boardwalk,” the song chugs, skips and doo-wops its way cheerfully forward. “Now look a-here, now look-a-here, now look-a here!” Listen to this wonderfully crazy track on YouTube or Spotify and you’ll immediately understand what I mean.

The entire Top 3 of May 1976 almost consisted exclusively of album tracks, were it not for the fact that “Hand Of Fate”(#3) from the Stones’ Black & Blue also appeared on a French single release that year, with “Hot Stuff” on the flip side.

For the first time in four months, since the debut album Ramones appeared in February, a track from that record narrowly misses the Top 3. “Havana Affair” (#4), however, still keeps its finger firmly on the 1-2-3-4 pulse!

Only a handful of songs — still very few at this stage — point in the new punk/new wave direction. Besides The Ramones, there are The Nerves (#8), Graham Parker (#11), The Modern Lovers (#24) and Chris Spedding (#33). “Hanging On The Telephone” (#8) by power-pop pioneers The Nerves would, as you probably know, achieve worldwide fame a few years later through Blondie. This supergroup, featuring Paul Collins, Peter Case and Jack Lee, stood at the cradle of much of the slick and powerful American guitar music of the 1980s, including Paul Collins’ Beatand The Plimsouls.

Three indestructible reggae strokes colour this month’s chart: Bob Marley & The Wailers with “Johnny Was” (#31), Max Romeo & The Upsetters with “One Step Forward” (#34), and the less celebrated Gene Rondo (#40 – “Ramblin’ Man”) raise a yellow-green-black Jamaican flag smokescreen across the lower reaches of the ranking.

I cannot resist mentioning three more songs. At #22, another feather is added to the many-coloured squaw hat of Buffy Sainte-Marie! The blood-curdling vocal cries that this Native American artist unleashes in “Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan” quite literally grab me by the throat.

I suspect that most people are hearing the name Robert Macleod for the first time. This Australian singer-songwriter released exactly two singles and one album, Between The Poppies and the Snow, produced by John Peel. I had completely forgotten that the man even existed! Yet while digging through the archives I stumbled upon one of his two 7-inch releases: “Sing Bird Sing” (#15). Instant goosebumps! How can a completely forgotten song, one that hadn’t passed through my well-trained Eustachian tubes in nearly half a century, still generate such emotion? It is difficult to comprehend, and it is far from being a world-class classic. Nevertheless, it awakened an immense flood of memories and effortlessly transported me back to those spring days of the mid-seventies.

And, as always, we finish in style! My better half has meanwhile raised the red flag and is shamelessly chanting along with the red comrades of Bots, who in 1976 also caused quite a stir in our part of the world, filling and conquering countless dance halls and youth clubs with the forceful slogans of “De Lange Weg” (#12), taken from the album Voor God en Vaderland.

Come on then, everybody together:

“Come socialists, march into battle,
Come socialists, be prepared.
Our struggle can no longer be avoided,
As long as you know what it is really about!”

If we still don’t know by now, we never will!

(Jan VH)

Playlist

1. Warren Zevon – Frank & Jessie James
2. Supercharge – She Moved the Dishes First
3. Rolling Stones – Hand of Fate
4. Ramones – Havana Affair
5. Neil Young – Danger Bird
6. Bryan Ferry – Let’s Stick Together
7. Bad Company – Fade Away
8. The Nerves – Hanging on the Telephone
9. Van der Graaf Generator – Still Life
10. Queen – You’re My Best Friend
11. Graham Parker – Gypsy Blood
12. Bots – De Lange Weg
13. Uriah Heep – Weep in Silence
14. Ian Hunter – Irene Wilde
15. Robert MacLeod – Sing Bird Sing
16. Bob Dylan – Romance in Durango
17. Steve Miller Band – Serenade
18. Sherbet – Howzat
19. UFO – Belladonna
20. Ian Matthews – Brown Eyed Girl
21. Billy Joel – Say Goodbye to Hollywood
22. Buffy Sainte-Marie – Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan
23. Blue Öyster Cult – This Ain’t the Summer of Love
24. Modern Lovers – Astral Plane
25. Gallagher & Lyle – Heart on My Sleeve
26. Kevin Coyne – Walk on By
27. Rod Stewart – Tonight’s the Night
28. Johan Verminnen – Kom Jeanine
29. Joe Walsh – Walk Away
30. Golden Earring – To the Hilt
31. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Johnny Was
32. James Brown – Get Up Offa That Thing
33. Chris Spedding – Guitar Jamboree
34. Max Romeo & The Upsetters – One Step Forward
35. Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Three – One Piece at a Time
36. Alan Parsons Project – A Dream Within a Dream
37. Wim De Craene – Marcellino
38. David Bowie – We Are the Dead
39. Angel – On and On
40. Gene Rondo – Ramblin’ Man

NOV: Eve Brenner – Le Matin sur la Rivière

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