AM Radio In The Mid-70's (Spotify Playlist)

One thing I always tell people when I mention how much love I have for 70's AM Radio is, "guess you had to be there."  When you grow up with a certain kind of music, one tends to get defensive about any sort of slight.  While many older folks were flocking to FM radio expanding AOR stations, College radio Rock or anything else that was not Top 40, I was still tuned in to AM radio. The first time I became aware that an FM station was playing Top 40 music was in early 1976.  But there were no DJ's.  It was the first automated station I heard. I soon started to like the clarity of FM better than AM.  But the AM stations still zipped by faster than the FM ones.  Which still appealed to my teenage self.  Yet by the end of the decade, even I had to admit that things sounded better on the FM dial.  By the beginning of 1980, that's where most Top 40 stations ended up.  I've tried to figure out when this occurred.  From my own personal recollections, it was sometime in 1979 that my local Top 40 stations ditched AM completely for FM.  I think I bailed on AM Top 40 by 1977.  The Country stations did the same thing, but went with a dual AM/FM broadcast.  If you weren't into Top 40, AM still had advantages.  In the early 80's, I found Classic Country and Pop oldies channels were still better suited for AM than FM.  This still held true into the 90's. 

For my new Spotify playlist I decided to salute AM Top 40's final years, and called it You Had To Be There: AM Top 40 Radio 1974-78.  

The songs I picked all needed to do one thing: bring back memories of hearing them on an AM Radio channel from 74-78.  If I heard them in that time period, they qualified. Only new songs from that time period qualified. It's a long playlist, but then again I listened to a lot of radio back in the 70's.  So, if you like Barry Manilow, Olivia Newton-John, KC & The Sunshine Band, "Play That Funky Music", "Sad Sweet Dreamer",  and many other like I do, then give the playlist a listen.