Disco was alive and well in 1977. I am probably in the minority but I loved Disco. Truth be told, I still do. There are many number one Disco songs that we will talk about, but I am sitting here watching the Olympics on TV and they played a snippet from the 1977 number one by Rose Royce, “Car Wash”. I thought, “Wow, what a great song.”

“Car Wash” was the theme from the movie by the same name. It was about a day in the life of a L.A. Car Wash, the men who worked there and the crazy customers who came to have their cars washed. Written by Norman Whitfield, the song took about 3 months to get to number one. Whitfield worked for Motown and wrote and produced songs for the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Edwin Starr.

Rose Royce started out as an eight man ensemble, when Whitfield decided to add a woman, Gwen Dickey, to the mix. She ended up singing lead for the group. The song hit the top of the charts on January 29, 1977. Car Wash was the only number they had, but they had a decent run on the charts during the late seventies.

I just realized that I was in the hospital when Rose Royce hit number one. I remember that month very well. The main show on TV was “Roots”. I watched the entire thing. Weather was a major story that week as a major winter storm blasted through the east killing at least 54 people. President Jimmy Carter was said to be thinking about a 4-day work week in order to save fuel. Thirty years later, the state of Utah makes the news by doing that very thing. Progress is indeed slow.

Bad news that we all remember was the actor Freddie Prinze star of the TV show “Chico and the Man” died on this January day after a self-inflected gun shot. A sad day for the fans of that show. Besides “Roots”, we were watching “Little House on the Prairie”, “The Captain and Tennille”, whose number one song we will cover in this blog and “The Jeffersons”, among others.

In the grocery store, chicken could be bought for 39 cents a pound. Bananas were 12 cents a pound. You could get four cans of Del Monte vegetables for a dollar. A 25 pound of dog chow was $4.99. At the movie theater “Rocky” was doing a great run. Clint Eastwood was Dirty Harry in “The Enforcer” and Barbara Streisand stared in “A Star is Born”.

Put your dancing shoes on for “Car Wash” by Rose Royce.