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Post by matt on Nov 3, 2021 10:34:02 GMT -5
To try and answer this - The question I have is why was it OK for the songs mentioned above to co-exist in the Top 40, but T-Rex had to change "Get It On" to "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" and Sheena Easton's "9 to 5" became "Morning Train" when they became hits in America? I suspect it had something to do with them being foreign artists while the songs mentioned in the first paragraph were all done by American artists. In both cases, it could also be because neither T. Rex nor Sheena had had a Top 40 hit Stateside to those points. For Sheena, "Morning Train" was also her first US chart single, while for T. Rex they'd had two Hot 100 charters prior to "Bang a Gong" (the first at the same time as Chase's "Get it On"). As for why there could be two "Don't Be Cruel"s, two "Hold On"s, and for that matter two "I Can't Wait"s, I'd surmise that labels just decided they no longer needed to bother changing titles to avoid confusion by the mid-to-later 80s (possibly with the one exception in 1993 - but again, I can't be sure that Heart's was specifically changed there). Another example of this (and another instance where both were American artists) was in the summer of 1984: Peter Wolf's "Lights Out" was originally titled "Dancing In the Dark", but was changed so as not to be confused with Bruce Springsteen's huge hit that was in the top 5 at the time of release. You could say it falls in the same category as the Pointer Sisters' "Jump" and Sheena Easton's "Morning Train" -- in each case the assumption is that the record company and their marketing people were at least partially responsible for pushing the title change to avoid the two different songs with the same title on the chart at the same time thing.
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Post by Hervard on Nov 4, 2021 9:24:00 GMT -5
There was also Kenny Loggins and "Welcome To Heartlight". Some (if not all) pressings of his High Adventure album list that song as simply "Heartlight", but when it came time to release that song, the two words were added to the beginning so as not to cause confusion with Neil Diamond's recent charter "Heartlight". It's true that they were not on the chart at the same time, but some stations were still playing "Heartlight" as a recurrent at the time.
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Post by 1finemrg on Nov 5, 2021 5:51:00 GMT -5
Guessing that's what happened when the Pointer Sisters released "How Long" in 1975. Record company added (Betcha Got A Chick On The Side) to the title to avoid confusion with Ace's #3 hit of the previous year.
Ace however had no problem with their "How Long" being confused with J. D. Souther's non-charting single with the same title from 1972. This song was also a single release covered by the Eagles on their 2007 "Long Road Out Of Eden".
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