THE FAVE SONGS BY YEAR CHALLENGE

1976 Was the Best Year Ever, and These Are the Songs That Made It

My top ten songs of 1976

Photo montage by author. All images from Wikimedia Commons are in the Creative Commons, except for my own picture of Frampton Comes Alive, published by A&M Records.

The Country

I don’t necessarily think 1976 was the best year ever in music. I can’t pinpoint the year, but for me, it falls somewhere between 1980 and 1984. Or 1993 and 1996. I also quite liked 2022–2024. Not bad for an old geezer!

But 1976 was perhaps the most important year in my life, and many watershed songs and albums hit the record stores that year.

It was the year of the nation’s bicentennial (which rolls off the tongue much easier than this year’s sesquicentennial). And it was a much happier time in our history. The “Tall Ships” sailed the Hudson River with a fireworks show on July 4 that only New York can produce.

It was a presidential election year between the relatively benign candidates, incumbent Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the latter of whom narrowly won. I’d sure take either of those candidates these days. Ford was President for the entirety of ’76, with Carter taking the helm in January of 1977.

The Olympic Games were held in Montreal, and the decathlete, formerly known as Bruce Jenner and now Caitlyn Jenner, won the gold medal. The other star of the games was Romania’s Nadia Comăneci, who achieved seven perfect scores in women’s gymnastics. She was the first person ever to score a perfect 10.0 in gymnastics at the Olympic Games, and she did it five times, with two more in 1980!

My Story

Now let’s talk about me! In January, I graduated from high school after taking two years of summer school and earning the necessary credits. By March, I skeedaddled from Ventura, California, to Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places. Why? My sister and her then-boyfriend had moved there in 1975 so he could finish up college in his home state. And I just wanted to be where my sister was, my only sibling.

I boarded that United Airlines Boeing 747 from LAX to Denver, then on to a Boeing 727 to Lincoln. That’s not even germane to the story, but I’m an airline nerd, so there you have it. What is pertinent is that I had two suitcases and a bicycle, and I didn’t have to pay any luggage fees! Plus, I was served beer onboard because I looked like I could be 21 — or they just didn’t care!

I worked a couple of seriously bad jobs, but they were enough to buy my first car in July, a 1971 Super Beetle. The main difference from the regular Beetle was its use of a MacPherson strut front suspension, which was intended to provide a smoother ride. All I know is that they were expensive as hell to replace, and I went through them like oil!

In August, I began my freshman year at the University of Nebraska, declaring journalism as my major. Originally, I had planned to attend Chico State University in California to major in forestry. I still kinda wish I had. But it’s OK.

The Music

By 1976, I had transitioned from buying a mix of albums and singles to all albums, and album-oriented rock ruled the FM airwaves. They wouldn’t play just the hit songs from an album, but they’d play other cuts as well. Sometimes they’d play entire albums. The following songs may or may not have been released as a single. All references to chart positions are from Billboard Magazine.

Now on to the countdown!

#10 Afternoon Delight-Starland Vocal Band I’m not including this song because I like it. I’m including it because it was so pervasive during the summer of ’76 that you couldn’t escape it! It has evolved into one of those songs that spans generations, because it’s been so widely used in television shows and in advertising. It is one of the greatest one-hit wonders of all time. I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics because I prefer songs for their melodies rather than their lyrics. Thus, I was in the dark about the whole meaning of the song and all its innuendos!

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#9 Mamma Mia-ABBA If I admitted back then that I liked ABBA, I’d be called a faggot or some other derogatory word. After all, I was a Led Zeppelin guy! So I chose to claim that I didn’t like them — but the faggot in me did! My brother-in-law bought the album, so I would listen to it when no one was around. “SOS” was actually my favorite song on the album, but that was released in 1975. This is another song that spans the generations due to the Broadway show and the movies that followed.

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#8 Golden Years-David Bowie Now we take a big turnabout to a truly great rock song. This is my favorite Bowie song, blending elements of funk, disco, and doo-wop. As such, it was first televised on “Soul Train,” and he was only the second white musical act to appear on the show. Critics called it one of his best songs, while he was in the middle of a severe cocaine addiction. Released late in 1975, it peaked at #10 on the charts in January of 1976, which is why it’s included on this list.

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#7 Love and Affection-Joan Armatrading I didn’t really know who she was until the release of The Key in 1983, which was one of her more commercially successful albums. What I heard was compelling enough for me to buy a ticket to her show in Santa Fe in the summer of ’83. I went back through her catalog, found this song, immediately fell in love with it, and learned that it was released in 1976. I didn’t have a clue. Armatrading does not talk publicly about being gay, and her songs represent a universal human longing for intimacy and emotional connection with another person. The song reached number 10 on the UK singles chart. The first line kills me: “I am not in love, but I’m open to persuasion”~Joan Armatrading

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#6 Livin’ Thing-Electric Light Orchestra This band was very influential in my musical likes in the 70s. I bought every one of their albums. They weren’t so popular with my high school crowd, but by the time I got to college in 1976, I found many fans. The thing with ELO is that much of their music was too “poppy” for AOR stations, but didn’t have enough commercial appeal to pop radio (other than their hits). I like Jeff Lynne’s rich production, the fullness of the sound, and, of course, the melodies! I think he’s a genius. Who else thought of having violins and cellos and other classical musical instruments in a rock band?

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#5 More Than a Feeling-Boston There were several “soundtracks of 1976,” and Boston’s debut album, released in 1976, was one of them. “More Than a Feeling” became an anthem of the year. Beginning on an introspective note with just one guitar, the song then explodes into an all-out plea for lost loves and the things you remember about them. The album has sold more than 17 million copies, even though it never reached #1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. “More Than A Feeling” made it to #5 on the Hot 100 chart.

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#4 I’ll Give You Money-Peter Frampton This is probably an unlikely pick from his groundbreaking live double album, released in 1976. It was never released as a single. Frampton Comes Alive! itself is a signature of 1976, and it held at the #1 position for ten weeks. Double albums were always what you used to clean your pot of seeds and stems, so this was a heavily used album! I think what I like most about this song is the seven-chord riff that ends the song, and the audience explodes! I later saw him live in San Diego in the summer of 1977 after the release of his next album, which was not as good!

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#3 Heart-Crazy on You Not since Janis Joplin had we ever heard a voice like Ann Wilson’s! Ann and her sister Nancy formed Heart in Vancouver, BC, eventually moving to Seattle, which, who knows, may have been part of the beginning of the Seattle grunge sound! Ann has one of the most recognizable voices in rock, and the album Dreamboat Annie charted at #7 on the Billboard 200 list. “Crazy on You” was a staple on AOR FM stations that summer, and the album was a must-buy for any record collector.

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#2 Rhiannon-Fleetwood Mac With the addition of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, this UK/US-based band released their self-titled album in 1975 to huge success, though it took 58 weeks for the album to reach the #1 spot on the Billboard 200! That may be attributable to the release of “Rhiannon” as a single in 1976. “Landslide” was never released as a single until The Dance in 1998, a live album. I saw Fleetwood Mac in Omaha in 1975, after the release of Fleetwood Mac; in Lincoln during the Rumors tour; and in Chicago on The Dance tour. I’m a lucky guy!

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#1 Love Hangover-Diana Ross I know that I am going to get a lot of flak for this! Here’s why it’s so important to me. First, I’ve always been among her top fans and have seen her live seven times, more than anyone else. It was the #1 song on the Hot 100 the week my class graduated high school, in May of ’76. But it was a kind of “Groundhog Day” song for me. When I got my first loser job in Lincoln, I remember it playing every morning when my alarm went off on the station I listened to most often, WOW from Omaha. Besides that, it’s sexy, it’s sultry, and what starts as a ballad ends as an uptempo disco song, the era of which was in its infancy. She earned a Grammy nomination for the song and, at the time, broke the record for the most number-one hits by a female vocalist. So it’s important, dammit!

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