Near-Miss Hits: ’70s Edition

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History,

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1979, Sister Sledge changed the sound of wedding receptions forever with “We Are Family.” Believe it or not, the Chic-penned banger never made it to No. 1. Steely Dan helped invent Yacht Rock with 1977’s jazzy bop “Peg.” (They would have loved it better if it had cracked the Top 10.) And in 1972, Elton John told a timeless tale of a blue-jean baby, “Tiny Dancer.” Casey Kasem never counted it down.

Today on Hit Parade: Chris Molanphy celebrates “near misses”—now-ubiquitous hits that missed the mark on the pop charts, stalling out at No. 2, No. 11, or No. 41. In this episode, Chris zooms in on near-misses from the 1970s, including songs from Paul McCartney, the Spinners, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, Diana Ross, and Michael Jackson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine, about the hits from
0:19.5	coast to coast.
0:20.8	I'm Chris Melanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate Magazine. About the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst,
0:23.0	pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series on today's show.
0:29.1	47 years ago, in the summer of 1979, Sister Sledges, We Are Family, scaled the charts and took its place as an everlasting celebration anthem.
0:42.7	The only catch, it never reached number one, peaking on Billboard's Hot 100 at number two.
0:51.7	We are family.
1:06.0	Get up everybody and say. So, hit Parade always talks about numbers.
1:09.7	We're a chart show, after all, and numbers are pretty important.
1:12.4	But today on the show, we're going to talk about three very special numbers, two, 11, and 41. No, that's not your high school locker combination.
1:22.0	Those numbers represent near misses. Let me explain. Nearly a decade ago, we did a hit parade episode about a
1:31.1	trio of seminal, heartbreaking number two hits, The Miracles Shop Around, which reached number
1:38.3	two in 1961. My mama told me, you better shop around. Oh, yeah, you better shop around. The go-go's We got the beat of the beat, we got the beat, we got the beat, which peaked in the runner-up
1:52.0	in 1982.
1:59.0	And Kelly Clarkson's Since You Been Gone, which silver meddled in 2005.
2:37.0	But heartbreaking hits happen all over the number one hit, or a number 41. Want you let the good times roll. Billboard's charts measure popularity only one week at a time, but over time, some lower charting hits become legendary.
2:46.0	Anytime in chart history will have its share of near-miss hits, and some of them may surprise you.
2:53.4	So today, we're going to zoom in on one era of near-misses. In this episode, we're going to walk
3:02.0	through 70s chart history, and it's well-remembered number two, number 11, and number 41 hits.
3:14.4	By the way, near-Miss hits are still with us. Let me give you a few current examples. If you caught the recent
3:26.2	Grammy Awards, you may have seen Olivia Dean, the British R&B singer, winning the best new
3:33.0	artist prize. Her hit, Man I Need, has been knocking around the top 10 since last fall,
	...

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