Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown--August 12, 1972

A clutch of evergreen rockers, gentle one-hit-wonders, soaring soul tunes, and an above-average number of songs with parenthetical titles in this fact-packed backtrack to August of 1972.

This week’s Top 40 Countdown originally aired against a pretty wild backdrop.

On August 4th of 1972, a massive solar flare knocked out cable lines across the U.S. and caused widespread communication disruptions for the next 6 days.

Entirely unrelated, on August 10th, a meteor came within just 36 miles of striking Earth. It came so close, in fact, that it could be seen during the day time with the naked eye. Here it is passing over the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming:

It’s probably best not to think about just how narrowly we were spared unfathomable disaster. Speaking of unfathomable disasters, incumbent Richard Nixon was renominated as the GOP’s presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention in Miami on August 21st.

Stax of Wax

Just as Nixon was preparing to receive his nomination, Wattstax was arriving in Los Angeles. On August 20th, the pioneering Memphis-based soul label Stax staged a festival commemorating the 1965 Watts Riots, a series of racially-charged confrontations between police and members of the predominantly Black L.A. neighborhood.

Festival promoters initially worried that a small regional label like Stax would be unable to fill the Los Angeles Coliseum. But with tickets selling for a dollar a pop, more than 112,000 people showed up to see gospel legends the Staple Singers, father-daughter soul duo Rufus and Carla Thomas, powerhouse blues guitarist Albert King, and Isaac Hayes, who celebrated his 30th birthday by headlining the event.

The landmark performance was immortalized the following year in a Golden Globe-nominated documentary.

With all of that said, there is just one song from the Wattstax setlist that coincides with this week’s countdown.