These are the 1981 #1 Top Rock Tracks. I purchased the book Joel Whitburn Presents Rock Tracks last year. It is “compiled from Billboard’s alternative Rock and Mainstream Rock charts.” The mainstream rock chart was first published on March 21, 1981.
Not unlike Spotify today, it would compile the most-played tracks based on their popularity, “regardless of its mechanical configuration, meaning, regardless of whether it is a 45 RPM single, LP cut, or whatever.”
Start Me Up – the Rolling Stones, 13 weeks at #1, #2 pop for three weeks. I remember this song extraordinarily well. I went to my high school reunion, ten years later, at Binghamton Central High School in upstate New York. The reunion itself was so-so, but several of my friends and I ended up going over to my friend Cee’s house. One of my oldest friends, Karen, who was in the music industry, played “Start Me Up,” which had just come out, at least hourly, so about a half dozen times. (We were there for a very long time.) Ultimately, it became a song for Windows 95, by which point I had grown sick of it. But I liked it initially.
The Waiting – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 6 weeks at #1, #19 pop. The line, “the waiting is the hardest part,” is forever stuck in my vernacular.
Wagering?
You Better You Bet – the Who, 5 weeks at #1, #18 pop. This is the last Who song I really remember.
The Voice – the Moody Blues, 4 weeks at #1, #15 pop. Oh, THAT song; I’d heard it, but I didn’t recognize it from the title.
Urgent – Foreigner, 4 weeks at #1, #4 pop. I was a sucker for the saxophone.
Harden My Heart – Quarterflash, 3 weeks at #1, #3 pop for two weeks
I Can’t Stand It– Eric Clapton and his band, 2 weeks at#1, #10 pop. It feels pretty generic.
Burnin’ For You – Blue Oyster Cult, 2 weeks at #1, #40 pop. I’ve never seen this video; I like it.
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic – The Police, 2 weeks at #1, #3 pop for two weeks. Ghost In The Machine may have been my first Police album.
A Life Of Illusion – Joe Walsh, 1 week at #1, #34 pop
Waiting For A Girl Like You – Foreigner, 1 week at #1, #2 pop for ten weeks. For nine of those weeks, which rolled into 1982, Physical by Olivia Newton-John was #1 pop; the final week, I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do) by Daryl Hall & John Oates was #1 pop
Often, there have been #1 songs, even in my lifetime, that I have never even heard of. Then there’s 1981 when I was in my late twenties, and I’ve heard every single track that reached the top of the Billboard pop charts.