Ariel - Dean Friedman (1977) 6/7/21

Today, I have reached a milestone: my 600th "Great Songs of the '70s" blog post! Thank you all for sticking with me the past 20 months. And thanks to Kobi Shaw and Steve Russell for inspiring the idea.

I hope you all have enjoyed at least SOME of my choices. There are more to come--starting tomorrow!

Today, however, to mark the occasion, I decided to repost one of my favorite entries from the early days of my blog. Just for fun.

Here's what I wrote on November 12, 2019:

Today's "Great Song of the '70s" comes under the category: "Songs You May Have Never Heard."

First of all, it's about as quirky as they come. Second, it spent 22 weeks on Billboard's Hot 100, but never made it higher than #29.

The reason for this was in the lyrics.

When the record company released it, they edited out the section about the girl being Jewish, but when the Jewish Defense League heard about the edit, they filed a lawsuit demanding it be reinstated.

At that point, some radio stations started playing the unedited album version...while others just stopped playing the song altogether. That certainly affected its chart position.

In any event, I thought it was cool and fun back then, and I still do. From 1977, the unedited version of "Ariel" by Dan Friedman: