My Top 1000 Songs #350: The Ballroom Blitz

July 26, 2023

My Top 1000 Songs #350: The Ballroom Blitz

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

It's early 1976. You're 9 years old, barely a few months since discovering pop music on the local Top 40 station but already well down the rabbit hole of a deep, lifelong obsession with music. Every afternoon, you head up to your room after school, grab your handheld AM transistor radio, and soak up every song they spin, mentally tracking the ascent & descent of every new song on the local station's weekly music survey.

Sweet's "Fox On The Run," released the prior year, is your first favorite song, still getting some airplay but on the downswing; their new one, "Action," is racing up the charts, and every time you turn on the radio you're hoping you'll catch it before it, too, disappears, to be replaced by the next chartbusters populating those K-Tel collections they advertise on tv.

Finally, you've got a few dollars of allowance saved up... time to splurge on your very first LP!

So you head over to the Sears at the nearby mall with your dad (it's a new mall, with Sears as the anchor, and your dad is always eager to check out the store). They've got a big Sweet display in the music section, a cardboard cut-out of the band and stacks of their newly-released LP Give Us A Wink, the one with "Action." But after agonizing over it, you decide to plunk down your handful of crumpled singles for their prior record, Desolation Boulevard, because it's got "Fox On The Run."

You take it home, eagerly peel off the wrapper, and gently place the vinyl on your dad's living room turntable. (You're still a few years off from getting your first stereo as a Bar Mitzvah gift.) You gently drop the needle onto side one, track one, and spin the volume dial well past where your dad keeps it set.

The locomotive drumbeat crashes in, and the singer checks in with the rest of the guys. "Are you ready, Steve?" "Uh-huh." "Andy?" "Yeah." "Mick?" "Ok." "Alright, fellas. Let's GOOOOOOO!"

Mom & Dad are fleeing upstairs in terror. But you are totally ready!

[For any confused UK/Europe readers: the US version of Desolation was an amalgam of a couple Sweet albums as well as a few random tracks, including this 1973 single--which, in contrast to Facebook, includes a "the" in the proper title.]