Originally published at: Casey Kasem's American Top 40 as a time machine | Boing Boing
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We got his show in Canada too. I listened every week! Music discovery was a lot more difficult in those days. If you didn’t have a lot of friends into music, or you didn’t have the money to buy a zillion records and tapes, it was Casey Kasem who told you about new stuff to listen to.
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I’ve been listening on 70s on 7 on SiriusXM for years.
It’s weird to hear songs being introduced for the first time that I’ve listened to my entire life.
It’s also weird to hear things like “Here’s 4 young men that call themselves The Queen fist time on the list with Killer Queen”.
It’s also why I like old TV shows from the 70s like The Rockford Files. It is a time machine when they film in the streets, old cars, gas stations, stores, etc… just like I remember.
Seeing or hearing stuff like that in context is really cool to me.
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I just turned it on this moment, listening to Quiet Riot - Metal Health (Bang Your Head), and suddenly I’m 17, driving around small town Pennsylvania with my friends trying to figure out where we can get some weed and beer for the weekend.
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I’m not surprised these shows are still around - from what I remember, being up in Canada - our radio stations got tape copies about a week after the show originally aired.
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My brother used to work in a radio station that aired AT40 back in the 70s. Every week, they’d get the new show on vinyl LPs. You can still buy old copies on eBay.
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Of course most people know the swearing Snuggles outtakes from the Negativland single that was eventually recalled. Of course I have a CD copy: Negativland – U2 (1991, CD) - Discogs. I think the bootlegs circulating the Internet in the early 1990s came from my CD, in fact.
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I was working in college radio in the late 70s and remember those vinyl issuances coming in the mail each week. Damn if I wasn’t smart enough to keep them…
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Kasem was prety good. I personally was a bigger fan of K-billy’s super sounds of of 70’s
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We made mix tapes from the show, taping from the radio. I remember being so annoyed how he’d talk over the end of the songs!
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We had him on in New Zealand too.
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A friend’s stepdad worked in radio in the 70s and there were a couple of random weeks of these at her childhood home.
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Along a similar vein I shower to these YouTube videos about top British singles.
I’d love to give them an 80. They have a great beat and they’re easy to shower to, but that’s a different DJ.
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I recently played the Negativland “U2” song with Kasem blowing his top (“these guys are from England and who gives a shit!”) for someone a lot younger, and I think a lot of the humor was lost because Casey Kasem was an unknown to him-- he didn’t get all the cultural baggage that came with the voice, to him it was just some radio announcer.
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My mom was a DJ at an AM pop station around '79-81, and brought home the LP set from a week in November 1980. I STILL have songs (dedications, other ephemera from the show) emblazoned in my mind over 40 years later.
Also that week of AT40 is why I am still a fan of Devo and Boz Scaggs to this day.
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I’m gonna go a step further and posit that Casey Kasem’s backdrops as Shaggy in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? were some form of Tardis. 
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I often sat with a rudimentary Sony portable tape recorder next to the speaker of a clock radio and taped songs I liked off AT40. I can go back and match the order and some of the announced rankings to say that on a certain date I was in a certain place doing a certain thing and hear cute things like my mother calling me for dinner over “Getaway” (thanks for ruining my recording, mom!).
There used to be some full shows for the 70s on YouTube but those seem to have been taken down, now it’s some shorter clips, end-of-year top 100s, and number one montages. There are some full shows from later but I stopped listening around 81 or so.
ETA: found it, this little guy gave me so much happiness 74-80 (after which I started sneaking into dads study to use his nice TEAC, which he was not happy about)
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The opening theme was a standard cliche of its time but tucked away in the middle was this great bit of synthpop before synthpop was a thing. The sound reminds me of Mort Garson’s Plantasia. I loved how melancholy it sounds.
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