It's almost always easier to find out the title and artist of a song I don't recognize today than it was when I was a kid. In pre-Internet times, you had to hope the DJ would announce the title and artist. If (s)he didn't, you could call the radio station and ask. If no one answered the request line phone, however, you were out of luck. If the song was a current hit and you were lucky enough to snag a copy of Billboard magazine from the library or a store, you could attempt to find it on the charts. Similarly, Joel Whitburn's The Billboard Book Of Top 40 Hits is still valuable for looking up titles, artists, and chart success going back to the start of the rock era.
When I wasn't able to find out a song's title and artist from one of those sources, however, I ended up in situations like these:
- A soft rock station played a tune with sincere lyrics and a fast, welcoming guitar part. Based on the lyrics, I thought the title might be "One Day, We'll All Understand." That was a logical guess, as it's sung three times in the chorus. I didn't hear it on the radio again for several years. Eventually, I learned it was Dan Fogelberg's first--and, in my opinion, best--hit, "Part Of The Plan."
- One radio station had the peculiar habit of saying multiple times, "Here's (or That's) Elton John," without giving the song title. I thought, "This should be easy to find in the top 40 hits book. This station only plays hits (or so I thought), and he has had about a gazillion hits, so I should be able to find the title." I thought the tune might be called "Ballerina," since that what John's singing about. I didn't find the title in my most reliable source, however, because the song was "Tiny Dancer," and it wasn't a hit.
- When a station played a new Steve Winwood single, I thought, "The fragment of it I heard sounds good enough, but it's a little difficult to decipher what he's singing in the chorus. It sounds like he's singing, 'The fire thins,' but that doesn't make sense. Even poets don't refer to a fire that's subsiding as thinning." The next time I heard the song, the DJ announced it as "The Finer Things."
