Maria Muldaur -
Midnight at the Oasis: One of those intimate hits which were sort of a precursor to what we would hear from the likes of Rickie Lee Jones later in the decade, and Norah Jones decades later.
Michael Martin Murphey -
Wildfire: A gorgeously arranged song about a girl and horse who freeze to death. The line when the singer says their respective ghosts are coming for him is nicely intense.
Walter Murphy -
A Fifth of Beethoven: A disco version of a well-known classical piece that, in theory, should have been offensive, but is actually irresistible.
Anne Murray -
George McCrae-
Gwen McCrae-
Maureen McGovern-
The Morning After: Most famous for being performed in the disaster movie
The Poseidon Adventure. The hit version is a little overdramatic, but the instrumentation stands out. The version in the movie was not performed by McGovern.
Don McLean-
American Pie: It s fun to decode the lyrics in terms of its references to the Beatles, the Stones and others (kind of like Rick Nelson s
Garden Party, soon to come in this series), but I ve just heard this lengthy song too many times. It makes people who were young adults in the 1970s swoon, though.
We now continue our look at the U.S. top-10 hits of the 1970s, with this installment being totally dedicated to the many, many hits of Paul McCartney and, for most of the decade, his group Wings.
Overall, when the Beatles split up, McCartney started off in a somewhat non-commercial direction, at least for his earliest LPs. His first solo album,
McCartney, was a one-man band affair â the only really commercial track,
Maybe I m Amazed, inexplicably wasn t released as a single. I m certain the impassioned ballad/rocker would have made the top 10, or even hit #1.
The experimentation continued with
Ram, a much more elaborately produced album, although the pastiche song Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey did hit #1 in the U.S., and wasn t even a single in McCartney s native U.K.
Manfred Mann s Earth Band-
Blinded By the Light: A lengthy classic rock transformation of a streetwise rock Bruce Springsteen song, with lots of great musical transitions, an instrumental intro possibly inspired by the instrumental intro of The Who s
Baba O Riley, and a sense of humour â the little bit of
Chopsticks played during one musical transition.
Chuck Mangione-
The Manhattans-
Kiss and Say Goodbye: A song I loved in the day (1976), with its Barry White-like smouldering spoken intro and its soaring musical vocals. For those so inclined, there s an X-rated (more like PG-13) version with an alternate, rather nasty intro that can be heard on YouTube.