From 1970 to 1988, Casey Kasem (aka Shaggy on Scooby-Doo) hosted a weekly radio countdown program featuring the week’s top 40 songs. It came on Sunday mornings. I was attending a Catholic high school away from home (Portsmouth Abbey in RI; I was from Chicago), and after mass Sunday mornings, we’d have to clean up our dorm, and invariably we’d do it to the sound of Kasem’s top 40 songs.
This is entirely an exercise in nostalgia. The immediate prompt for me listing all these songs on this blog (the lists can be found elsewhere on the internet, though perhaps not as conveniently as on the links here to the Web Archive) is watching the Marvel movies with my college-age kids during this time of pandemic, and finding fun songs from the 70s showing up at unexpected places in these films. So, without further ado, here goes the trip down memory lane:
[Read more…] about Casey Kasem’s Classic American Top 40 Countdown — 1970 to 1988