Some golden oldies are forever. “Hotel California” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” we’re looking at you: How can we miss you if you won’t go away?
Barry Scott has been spinning songs from the golden age of Top 40 radio on the Boston airwaves since the early 1980s. Yet he has never played either of those songs. Instead, Scott specializes in the songs that did go away — each of them once popular, many of them inexplicably so.
This Labor Day weekend on Plymouth’s WPLM — by his count, the eighth station of his long run in radio — Scott will present the latest edition of the Top 100 Lost 45s countdown, an annual staple since his days as a student DJ at Emerson College. The program will mark the 40th anniversary of the countdown, and its last.
Oh, Scott will continue to host his weekly show. At 61, he sounds as youthfully exuberant as you remember. It’s just time to lay the annual countdown to rest, he says.
“The fact that it survived this long is really just a testament to the listeners,” Scott says. “Because virtually every program director I ever worked with eventually hated the show.” That’s because Scott is unabashed about lending airtime to some of the listening public’s most egregious lapses in judgment.
Not that every song in the Lost 45s canon is bad. Who among us can resist the unfettered joys of Cher’s “Dark Lady”?
But an alarming number of the songs Scott plays fall into the “so bad, they’re good” category. That’s the beauty of the Lost 45s, he says. They trigger memories you may have forgotten you had.
Take the two songs mentioned above, by the Eagles and Queen.
“There are a trillion memories associated with those songs, because they’ve never left the radio,” Scott says. “But there’s really only one memory of [Alan O’Day’s] ‘Undercover Angel,’ and that was when I was 14 and I thought, ‘Is this song dirty?’”
Some songs, having enjoyed a resurgence, have rendered themselves ineligible for the Lost 45s countdown. No one was playing ABBA when that group’s “Dancing Queen” topped the annual list in the mid-1990s, Scott claims. Then the “Mamma Mia!” musical and film made the Swedish group a household name all over again.
Lots of other songs — 30 or 40, Scott says — have appeared on every countdown since the beginning, simultaneously confirming their long wallow in obscurity and the extent to which the Lost 45s diehards love them. “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” for one. “The Night Chicago Died.” “Rock Me Gently.”
The idea for the countdown began when Scott was still an undergrad, hosting a radio program called “The Gold Rush” that was initially heard only in Emerson’s dorms, on the college’s AM radio station. Scott, who grew up in Connecticut dreaming of being a disc jockey, devoted each show to a pop theme of the past — girl groups, say, or ‘50s rockers.
Each show, he’d present one Lost 45, usually drawn from his childhood in the early 1970s. Eventually, after graduating to the college’s FM station, WERS, he realized that the Lost 45s were the segment of the show that the audience engaged with most.
The first Labor Day countdown took place in 1985, when Scott was a senior. The number one most requested song that year was 1973′s “Heartbeat — It’s a Lovebeat” by the DeFranco Family. Terry Jacks’s maudlin ballad “Seasons in the Sun” (1974) holds the Lost 45s record, topping the countdown five times.
Though his loyal listeners lean heavily toward a certain age (middle and up), Scott says he has picked up some younger fans in recent years, largely due to the tongue-in-cheek popularity of “yacht rock.” It’s a concept after his own heart, but Scott isn’t a big fan: Like most other radio programming, the soft-rock renaissance tends to rely too heavily on a tight rotation of standbys for his taste.
“We dig deeper, always,” he says. “We’ll play a song that peaked at number 40, or barely made the Hot 100. We started calling them ‘shuddabeens.’”
Some of those songs, he says with a touch of pride, have enjoyed renewed interest because of his support. As an example, he names “It’s a Crying Shame” by the late Gayle McCormick, formerly of the LA group Smith.
That song was a modest hit, number 44, in 1971. To Scott, however, “It’s a stone cold smash.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.