One person’s view: “In short, vast overplay completely eliminated anything positive the song had to offer.” – DonKarnage @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 1.76 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1977 and many years thereafter
The summer of 1978 was my great awakening. This was when I discovered that the songs I heard on the airwaves weren’t just an alternating series of joy and pain, delivered in three-and-a-half-minute bursts. The relative popularity of these songs was intended to be measured, analyzed, and debated endlessly, just as sports enthusiasts did with the performance of their favorite athletes. The fountain of all music data was a magazine called Billboard and its feature known as the Hot 100. And a man named Casey Kasem – an infallible hero on par with Abraham Lincoln – fought his way through the radio static each week to play the 40 records that were atop the Hot 100 chart.
In those pre-Wikipedia days, information wasn’t always straightforward to obtain. If a sports fan wanted to know how many RBIs Joe Morgan produced last season, he might have to buy dozens of packs of random baseball cards. He’d get six Biff Pocorobas before his first Joe Morgan. Music fans didn’t have it much better, because Billboard was prohibitively expensive and it didn’t even come with bubble gum. I listened to Casey’s American Top 40 program when I could, but it was impossible to make a consistent commitment to it. I was eight years old, you know, so I had other responsibilities.
One day, a record store manager noticed my intense fascination with the copy of the Hot 100 that was displayed above the bin of 45 RPM singles. Probably assuming that I had autism, she offered me a stack of old Billboard issues that were set to be thrown out. I absorbed many important facts from these magazines, including the legend of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life”. That song had recently occupied the #1 spot on the Hot 100 for an astounding ten weeks, becoming the most successful record in history. I knew that its achievement would likely never be equaled in my lifetime, because even the great Andy Gibb could only manage seven weeks on top with “Shadow Dancing”.
As the holidays approached, Casey Kasem announced that he was going to count down the top 100 songs of 1978! The spectacle was set to start on New Year’s Eve at 9 AM and continue for the next eight hours. This was one of the most exciting things that had happened in my life up to that point, and I had no intention of skipping it. Unfortunately, New Year’s Eve fell on a Sunday. Shortly after the show began I heard the three most dreaded words in the English language: “Time for church!” I protested mightily, but was forced to put on my most uncomfortable clothes and miss the next hour and a half of Casey. My brother was deemed too disruptive to attend church, so he got to stay home with my mom. They assured me that they would write down the songs in my absence.
Church dragged even more slowly than usual that week. How could this man blather for so long about things that happened two thousand years ago while such a major cultural event was taking place? When I got home, I looked at the list of songs I had missed. “Flash Light” by Parliament? “Get Off” by Foxy? “Native New Yorker” by Odyssey? What the hell? I accused my brother of pranking me, but my mother insisted that these were real songs that Casey had played. The records must have sold lots of copies, as evidenced by their placement on the year-end countdown, but they had never aired on any of the local radio stations. It would be many years before I got to hear any of them for the first time.
“You Light Up My Life” ranked at #3 on the 1978 countdown as a hold-over from 1977, but it already seemed like an artifact of the Pleistocene Epoch. I had stopped hearing it on the radio months ago. Player’s “Baby Come Back”, the song at #7, was barely any newer yet it was still glued to the turntable at every station. Boy, was I sick of “Baby Come Back”. The only good thing about going to church was that they never once used “Baby Come Back” as the communion hymn.
In the space of a year, Debby Boone’s record-setting hit had gone from ubiquity to pariah. And it wasn’t just the gatekeepers at radio – the people who had arbitrarily deprived us of Foxy and Parliament – who were to blame. Nobody wanted to admit having bought one of those two million copies of “You Light Up My Life”, and it has never had a comeback. Today its Rate Your Music score is hardly any better than “Disco Duck” and Donny Osmond’s “Go Away Little Girl”, and is well below that of “Torn Between Two Lovers”. What’s going on here? I mean, it really isn’t that bad of a song.
I think “You Light Up My Life” tried to be too many things to too many people. It could be a love song. It could be a religious song. It could be an ode to the Sun. And Debby Boone’s voice was adequate, but not particularly memorable. It didn’t help that she was ordered to exactly imitate another woman’s vocals after that other singer had a disagreement with the composer and was dropped from the project. (Apparently, the guy who wrote “You Light Up My Life” wasn’t the most pleasant individual to work with.) As a jack of all trades and master of none, ten weeks at #1 was enough to burn the song out so badly that few people ever wanted to hear it again.
I’d rank “You Light Up My Life” in the middle of the pack of 1970s ballads – or even slightly ahead. It’s not a great pack to be in, but at least Debby Boone had her one big moment in the spotlight. And, unlike the guy who sang “Baby Come Back”, she didn’t emit an eardrum-exploding high-pitched yelp near the end of her song. That dude from Player must have gotten his underwear painfully twisted. I know how it is, buddy. I’ve had to wear church pants too.
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