The week of June 9, 1984, saw Cyndi Lauper atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Time After Time,’ a song I have already featured on the blog.
Falling to #2 after owning the top spot the week before was Deniece Williams’ ‘Let’s Hear it for the Boy’ from the Footloose soundtrack. This was the fourth single from that soundtrack and the second to reach #1, following Kenny Loggins’ title track.
Throwing back to the week of June 8, 1974, we find Paul McCartney atop the Billboard Hot 100 just as he was a decade earlier. Of course, this time it’s with Wings rather than The Beatles.
‘Band on the Run’ is the title track from Wings’ third studio album, and it’s certainly one of the best songs the band ever released. It finds McCartney imagining a band breaking out of jail, an image he says was inspired by increasing police crackdowns on musicians’ marijuana possession.
The week of May 30, 1964, saw the continued dominance of The Beatles on the Billboard Hot 100. Beatlemania was in full swing — this was the fourth #1 of an eventual six in a one-year period, still a record.
Before it topped the charts in the U.S., ‘Love Me Do’ was the band’s first single and first hit in England the previous November, peaking at #17.
Throwing back to the week of May 29, 1954, we find Kitty Kallen atop the Billboard charts with ‘Little Things Mean a Lot,’ a song written by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz. Kallen’s version was the most popular of several recordings of this song.
It was so popular, in fact, that it claimed the title as the #1 song for all of 1954. This week was the first of nine straight it would spend atop the chart.
The week of May 22, 2004, found Usher in a familiar place on top of the Billboard Hot 100.
When Usher was named the headliner of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, I was underwhelmed. But I guess that’s because I wasn’t paying much attention in the early 2000s when he was churning out hits faster than the charts could process them.
Consider that ‘Burn’ replaced Usher’s own ‘Yeah!’ at #1 and was later dislodged from the top spot by ‘Confessions Part II,’ another Usher track.
Meet Me In Montauk 