American Top 40 PastBlast, 11/11/78: Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisberg, “The Power of Gold”

Our Christmas gift to each other in 2004 was an iPod, fourth generation, I think. A few months earlier, I’d begun collecting CDs that contained my “original forty,” the songs appearing on the 6/5/76 countdown; the last few were painfully obtained via our new iTunes account, over a non-broadband internet connection in our apartment in Ithaca, NY. As I’ve mentioned previously, afterward I began eyeing other shows to re-assemble. Over the course of roughly the next five years, a total of thirty-two collections, covering a ten-year span from June 76 to May 86, were loaded onto that iPod. For the remotely interested, here they are:

1976	6/5, 10/2
1977	1/29, 5/7, 7/30, 11/5
1978	1/28,4/29, 11/11
1979	4/7, 8/25, 11/10
1980	4/12, 8/30, 12/6
1981	4/18, 7/18, 10/3
1982	1/23, 6/5, 9/4, 11/13
1983	3/5, 5/7
1984	1/21, 4/21, 10/20
1985	2/2, 5/18, 8/24
1986	1/18, 5/24

There were at least five or six more 40s I assembled a little later on that don’t appear in that table–they wound up on an iPad 2.

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Not all the sets listed above have (or can) be rebroadcast by Premiere. 4/7/79 was guest-hosted, and 10/2/76 featured “The 40 Biggest Hits of the Beatles Years.” I haven’t heard all of the other thirty since I started listening to the rebroadcasts, but this is the weekend that the last of them, 11/11/78, finally gets its first turn in the spotlight.

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What were my reasons for picking the weeks I did? Sometimes it was a matter of whether all the songs were available digitally; others were chosen because of a specific subset of tunes I liked. A decade-plus out, I can only guess now the exact reasons for 11/11/78’s inclusion, but it’s very likely the combination of excellent tracks we hear in the show’s first hour: “Like a Sunday in Salem,” “Talking in Your Sleep,” “It’s a Laugh,” and perhaps best of all, “The Power of Gold.” The future #24 song, at #32 in its second week on the show, was probably my introduction to Fogelberg’s work.