Let me introduce you all to a hobby that I have had off and on for over 20 years. I have a rich history with pop music dating back to 1981. I used to enjoy Casey Kasem's countdown, and then Scott Shannon's countdown in the early 1990's. I decided to start making my own countdowns in 1991.
The Beginning
I started listening to Top 40 radio when I was 7 years old. It was sometime during the winter of 1981-82. I decided to buy a blank cassette tape to record some of my favorite songs off of the radio. I remember it well. The tape was a 60-minute Concertape, which looked like this:
The first song I recorded was "Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply. I am not sure what was on the rest of the tape, as it was recorded over many times until spring 1983, when it started with "Mr. Roboto" by Styx.
There were no more tapes from the radio until June 30, 1984. I did not put a date on that tape's label, other than writing "SUMMER 1984" in a red marker. The reason I know the date that tape was recorded is because it starts with "Obscene Phone Caller" by Rockwell, followed by Casey Kasem saying something like, "Rockwell at number 35 on the American Top 40, second week on the countdown...". I had one of Joel Whitburn's Top 40 Hits books in 1991 and looked up that song, and was pleased to discover that it spent 2 weeks on the countdown starting on June 23, 1984. This tape has the distinction of being the first tape where I recorded selected songs from the American Top 40 countdown.
There were a couple of other music tapes between 1984 and 1987, but those went missing. I did start to make tapes every 2 to 3 months starting in January 1988.
In July 1989, I recorded the top 15 songs of the countdown on a 90-minute tape with some filler songs from that time at the end. It was terrible! I didn't like a single song on that tape. In fact, my opinion of the first 9 months of 1989 went something like this: "That time period signified the death of the 80s. It also was the gaping hole between the 80s and 90s. Skipping that time would have been good for the music industry." This is when Milli Vanilli had several hit songs, which I thoroughly enjoyed because almost none of the other music was worth beans at that time. But yep, I was one of the victims of pop music's biggest practical joke. But I digress.
I did end up recording several more countdown tapes, most of which were 90-minute tapes with the top 24 songs. From late 1989 to January 1991 I continued recording countdowns every 2 months. Then I stopped listening to Top 40 music for a while. Why? Because "Justify My Love" by Madonna had reached number one. I had resolved a couple of weeks before that to stop listening to Top 40 radio if that song became number one, because that meant that society had completely went off the deep end.
By March 1991, I got extremely bored with silence, so I decided to do something about it. In my junior year 5-subject notebook, I devoted section 4 to countdowns. I started with the Top 10 for the week ending March 23, 1991. The first number one song was "Sailing" by Christopher Cross from 1980. Two weeks later, I expanded it to 30 songs. The countdown was on!
I will note that I started listening to Top 40 radio again at the end of March 1991, and continued until summer 1993.
The First Edition
I took great care to make the countdown charts look similar to the ones in Billboard, except I did it with a pencil and a ruler. I measured off the columns, and drew heavy lines for the borders between each 10 songs. I also had labels for number one and the hot shot debut of the week.
I made a critical difference between my charts and the ones published by Billboard. I assigned points each week to each song on the chart, and kept a cumulative total of points that each song earned during its stay on the chart. The point system had 3 layers. The first layer assigned points to each song in the range of 1 to 100. The number of points a song received for the week was higher the further up the chart it was. A song at number one could receive up to 100 points from this layer. The number two song could have an equal number of points or less, but not higher. This would continue until number 30, which could have as low as 1 point.
The second layer is first place points. There were 30 of these available for each chart. The number one song always had the most first place points. This layer, then, was a tie-breaker, in case more than one song had the most first-layer points.
The third layer assigned 25 more points to number one, 10 more points for each song from 2 through 5, and 5 points for each song from 6 through 10.
The idea for the first and second layers came from the AP Top 25 votes and first-place votes for sports teams.
The first edition lasted through October 1993, and had some enhancements and rules. Feel free to skip this section, as it gets pretty monotonous.
- A circled number in the current week's position column indicated that the song moved up the countdown. This style was modified occasionally.
- A filled circle to the right of the song title indicated that the song had earned "gold" status, kind of like the RIAA gold certification, except not for sales. It was a song that had notoriously high demand by me. Examples included "Fortress Around Your Heart" by Sting and "Jack and Diane" by John Cougar.
- A filled triangle pointing upward to the right of the song title indicated that the song had earned "platinum" status. See explanation above. These songs had incredibly high demand; much more demand than "gold" songs. These songs had a tendency to never leave my head while on the chart, or so it seemed. Examples included "I'm Not in Love" by Will To Power and "We're Ready" by Boston.
- An up arrow beside the song title indicates that the song moved up more positions than the other songs on the chart (sometimes there were ties). Conversely, a down arrow beside the song title indicates that the song moved down the chart more than the others; the "boat anchor of the week", as Scott Shannon called it in his weekly top 30.
- No song can debut in the top 10.
- If a song re-charts, then it is given a new set of statistics and, in addition to the title, "version 2" will be added for special countdowns (e.g., greatest hits).
- In special countdowns, the more popular version of a re-charting song will cancel the less popular version, preventing the song from being listed twice.
How did I play the countdown? I had four cassette players and a CD player. I would cue up the songs as I went along, and play them from number 30 to number 1.
At any rate, I will now include some singles covers of some of the more popular songs in this edition below.
The Number One song of the first edition: "It Can Happen" by Yes. It stayed at number one for 8 weeks and received 1,918 points.
Number one on February 29, 1992 (Leap Day!):
Even this little gem made it on the chart:
The Second Edition
The first edition ended on October 23, 1993. At that time, I was preparing for my church mission, so I thought that was a good time to quit. However, I got sick on my mission and came home in March 1994. So, I started the second edition.
The style was the same as the first: hand-drawn on lined paper. I played the countdowns in the same manner as before.
The second edition lasted through the end of 1997. The Saturday before spring break in 1997, I debuted my 500th song of the second edition, so I ranked all of the songs of that edition from 1 to 500, and played them all during spring break.
This also was the only edition where I did a "wrap-around", where the last chart in December 1997 had the same songs as the first chart in March 1994, except what would have been their positions a week earlier. I did this to give a fair chance to the songs that were on the first chart, since most of those songs would have been on earlier charts. I accomplished this by introducing those initial songs over the course of 3 months at the end of 1997.
I do not have the second edition charts any more, but I do remember a lot of the big hits.
I think this was the number one song of the second edition (six weeks at number 1):
This came close (five weeks at number 1, or maybe 6):
This was a number two song, but was in the top five greatest hits of the second edition:
The Third Edition
From May 1998 through December 1999, this was the shortest-lived of the editions. This edition was the first one done in a spreadsheet. The songs in this edition came from the years 1975 to 1995, whereas previous editions were almost entirely 1980s with a few 1990s songs. I do not have any charts from this edition anymore, but the number one song of this edition was "Good Times" by Chic with 8 weeks at number 1.
The Fourth Edition
The most professional edition of them all made its debut 3 years ago this week, on September 12, 2009. The previous editions focused on what made the top 40 in the past, but this one pulls in hits from other charts, and rare finds as well. This is the first all-digitally-produced, all-digitally-played edition of the countdown, and the first to be called the Top 30 Retro Countdown. Featured genres include pop, rock, disco, funk, R&B, dance, adult contemporary, new wave, and even a couple of reggae songs.
This edition of the countdown uses the same point system as previous editions, except top ten hits do not get the 5 to 25 bonus points added to their totals. I thought that the bonus points (referred to as the "third layer" above) gave an unfair advantage to the top ten songs. I also got rid of those special awards from the first edition.
As of now, the number one song of the fourth edition is "Hey DJ" by The World's Famous Supreme Team. This was not a top 40 song, or even a top 100 song, but it was redone by A Lighter Shade of Brown, and that version was used in Mariah Carey's "Honey". On my countdown it was number one for 11 weeks, and got a total of 2,217 points.
I now generate new charts with the aid of macros, but only minimally, because most of the fun is figuring out things by myself. I have included the current week's chart below to show how it looks, except I have left out the point tallies. As you can see, there is quite a mix of songs that were top 40 hits and songs that were lost to the ages. Some of them were not released as singles.
| TOP 30 RETRO COUNTDOWN | |||||
| Now | Last | 2Wks | Wks | Title | Artist |
| 1 | 1 | 3 | 7 | Feelin' Lucky Lately | High Fashion |
| 2 | 2 | 2 | 13 | Pop Song 89 | R.E.M. |
| 3 | 6 | 9 | 6 | '65 Love Affair | Paul Davis |
| 4 | 5 | 7 | 5 | Change of Heart | Cyndi Lauper |
| 5 | 3 | 1 | 15 | Searching to Find the One | Unlimited Touch |
| 6 | 10 | 15 | 4 | Dynamite | Jermaine Jackson |
| 7 | 4 | 6 | 6 | Jammin' Me | Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers |
| 8 | 12 | 16 | 5 | (What) In the Name of Love | Naked Eyes |
| 9 | 9 | 12 | 5 | Déjà Vu | Dionne Warwick |
| 10 | 7 | 4 | 9 | Just a Touch of Love | Slave |
| 11 | 15 | 25 | 3 | Go Insane | Lindsey Buckingham |
| 12 | 8 | 5 | 9 | Shake Your Love | Debbie Gibson |
| 13 | 11 | 8 | 12 | Why Me? | Irene Cara |
| 14 | 20 | 27 | 3 | Miss Gradenko | The Police |
| 15 | 13 | 10 | 12 | Don't Walk Away | Rick Springfield |
| 16 | 27 | - | 2 | Cover Me | Bruce Springsteen |
| 17 | 14 | 11 | 10 | Sunglasses At Night | Corey Hart |
| 18 | 21 | 26 | 3 | Right By Your Side | Eurythmics |
| 19 | 17 | 18 | 6 | State of the Nation | Industry |
| 20 | 19 | 23 | 5 | I Just Can't Stop Loving You | Michael Jackson |
| 21 | 29 | - | 2 | Queen of Hearts | Juice Newton |
| 22 | 16 | 13 | 9 | Stuck on You | Lionel Richie |
| 23 | NEW „ | 1 | Every Day Is Halloween | Ministry | |
| 24 | 18 | 14 | 8 | Round and Round | Ratt |
| 25 | 30 | - | 2 | Baby Hold On | Eddie Money |
| 26 | NEW „ | 1 | Don't Wanna Lose You | Gloria Estefan | |
| 27 | 22 | 21 | 7 | Be Good Johnny | Men at Work |
| 28 | NEW „ | 1 | Lucky Star | Madonna | |
| 29 | NEW „ | 1 | I Just Called to Say I Love You | Stevie Wonder | |
| 30 | 24 | 19 | 13 | Doctor! Doctor! | Thompson Twins |
