Ho, Ho, Ho it’s Magic!

Anyone growing up and listening to music in the 70s and 80s can identify with “The Quest”: Trying to find a song from a few years prior that you missed at the time- or that you discovered a while after its initial release. Now it’s easy – 99 cents and a WiFi connection and you are listening to “Theme from SHAFT” in less than a minute. But in 1980? A different story.

One solution to the problem, which never really worked all that well, was to call up your favorite radio station (WPST 97.5 in Trenton, at this time) around 1 am, and make a request: “Hi- I’d like to request the song ‘Magic’ by Pilot”. 

Calling late at night hopefully avoided the constraints of mandatory playlists, and allowed you to talk to a bored-out-of-his-skull DJ. After the call, you would then go and set up your tape player. And Wait. And Wait. And Wait. Eventually, if you were LUCKY, you’d hear the words: Here is a request for a listener in Willingboro, who wanted to hear “Magic”.  Pressing  ‘Record’ and ‘Play’ at the same time (I don’t know why we had to do both, but we did), anticipation was building. Until the familiar refrain of Olivia Newton John’s “Magic” drowned the airways.

So- the next step was to visit every record store in walking/bike/begging-Mom-for-a-ride range. This worked well- if the song you were looking for came from a popular group that either had a greatest hits album out, or was considered ‘Rock’… and that could be quite a loose consideration… Ask Christopher Cross.  Looking for ‘Magic’, by Pilot, a song by a one hit wonder, this wasn’t going to work either.

Alas, there was one other way- oldies on 45s. 45s (or ‘Singles’) were the mp3s for the ‘Roger Moore was our James Bond’ generation.  Unfortunately, after a song had finished it’s run on Casey’s countdown, the 45s were sent back to ths distributor to be melted down. However- If you were really lucky, and the song was really popular, the record company would reissue a record with a big hit on either side as a “Golden Oldie” or a classic… This worked really well for bands like Aerosmith (Walk This Way/Dream On) or Seals and Crofts (Summer Breeze/Diamond Girl)… not so much for Pilot, or so I thought.

One day, while waiting for somebody to buy something at Woolworths (name not mentioned to protect the guilty) I was checking the oldies section in the record department. There it was: ‘Magic’, by Pilot. Backed with a song called ‘Just A Smile’  (no- I had never heard of it either). I got lucky. Apparently in the UK they were more than just a one hit wonder. Unfortunately, that would not be the case for the 70’s Supergroup Ides of March…