Warner Special Products “Superstars of the 70’s”

This 1973 compilation boxset kind of achieved mythic proportions in my life even though it’s a fairly corny and unfocused collection of popular, canonized, and feared music of the era that they incessantly advertised on TV. I honestly can’t remember if I bought it mail-order, or you could get it in stores—nor how much it cost. In spite of seeing them one million times, I was captivated by the TV commercials with the scrolling lineup of brief song excerpts—and one short snippet in particular captured my imagination—that was the Rolling Stones “Tumbling Dice.” At that point in my record buying, I’d been too frightened to buy a Stones record—I remember the mortal fear I experienced in the Ontario store just seeing the cover of “Sticky Fingers.” It occurs to me now that my listening was somewhat limited at the age of 13, but then, I lived in Sandusky, Ohio, had no older siblings to latch onto, and my parents were not into rock’n’roll—more popular jazz than anything. A record was a big investment for little kids who didn’t have jobs, so it was an odd one here and an odd one there—based on what? I guess what you heard on the radio and saw on TV. So when I finally got this huge, eight-side, almost 50 song collection, it was one of the first exposures to a lot of stuff I’d not heard whatsoever. It came with a program that folded out into eight columns—all the colors of the rainbow—like the box cover—which listed not only the songs, artists, and song titles, but also the albums the songs came from and even the rest of the songs on that album. (Just the song titles from Exile on Main Street once again frightened me—but also intrigued me.)

It’s not a collection that makes a lot of sense, really, as far as an overview, or sequencing—but I didn’t know that at the time. Some of the bands and songs I knew, of course. It’s starts out with Alice Cooper “Schools Out,” an album I owned (on which nearly every other song is better than the title song). Some were incessantly on the AM radio, like “Anticipation” and “Where is the Love.” A few songs here I couldn’t get into at all, but I’d still play it through one side after another, on the turntable of my Show’N Tell (I was still pre-stereo, but it wasn’t long before I got a GE “Wildcat”). After a while, of course, there were certain preferred sides, and then songs I wanted to hear over and over—my favorite still being “Tumbling Dice” (and still to this day). My first time ever (I’d never heard anything like that!) hearing Jimi Hendrix—and his two songs (“Purple Haze” and “Foxey Lady”) held a particular fascination. As did The Kinks “Lola,” Grateful Dead “Truckin’,” Jefferson Airplane “White Rabbit,” and Black Sabbath “Paranoid.” My very favorite, though, was Faces “Stay with Me”—I couldn’t get over that one for years and years (yet strangely never bought a Faces album). Some, I just didn’t get, until way, way later. Upon relistening to the whole thing, the song that surprised me (because I didn’t remember it was on here) is The Bee Gees “To Love Somebody” (one of the best pop/love songs ever written) but it made no impression at all, back then—maybe because it was sandwiched in-between Hendrix and The Kinks.

10.3.25