1970 is often considered a watershed for rock & roll. The years on either side - 1969 and 1971 - can make a stronger claim to being the "best," but none was more important than 1970. If it had only been the year the Beatles broke up, that would have placed it pretty high on any such list. But there was so much more.
Simon & Garfunkel also broke up. Both the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel went out with singles that hit the top of the charts during the year. And that got me thinking. What other songs climbed all the way to number one in this most intriguing of years?
Only a couple of the 21 songs that achieved that honor were genuine rock songs. There was a lot of funk and soft pop -- songs that were no doubt influenced by the way rock & roll had come to be such a dominant cultural force, but wouldn't really be considered rock & roll these days.
So I decided I'd take a look back at those 21 songs with 55 years' worth of hindsight and rank them anew. These were the songs the American public loved the most back in 1970. As with most lookbacks, we'll find some great tunes, along with several "what were they smoking?" songs that seem to defy any sense of logic or taste.
The number one hits of 1970, ranked worst to first
For context, I will note where the song finished the entire year according to Billboard. A song can make it all the way to the top for one week but then vanish rather quickly. Such a song might not figure prominently in the year-end chart despite its brief race to the summit. Or a very popular song may have been released at the end of the year, and thus not been around long enough to rank very high on that year-end chart.
Still, as you might expect, most of these songs did in fact make their way into the top-20 for the year. But the Billboard rankings and the Jonathan Eig rankings rarely agree. So I'll note where Billboard had them so you can see where we differ.
One word of caution. These are my opinions. I will try to explain my rationale, but I promise you, you will disagree – sometimes to the point of name-calling – with what follows.
And if you don’t – if you agree with every single one of these rankings – please drop me a line. I always suspected I had a long-lost brother or sister out there somewhere.
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