Bay City Rollers, "You Made Me Believe in Magic"

While walking home from Sunday football-watching, I came across a box of discard vinyl, and took the opportunity to add to my modest record collection. Among the recovered was It's a Game, a 1977 album from the Bay City Rollers that included their last two pop hits, "The Way I Feel Tonight" and "You Made Me Believe in Magic".

Most people, if they know the BCRs at all, know them only for tartan outfits and an earworm of a chant: "S! A! T-U-R! D-A-Y! NIGHT!" But I far prefer YMMBIM, an example of encroaching disco giving trash singles their last gasp on the radio. Where at the start of the '70s there was plenty of room for nonperforming songwriters to pitch pleasant if disposable tunes to nonwriting performers, as the decade progressed there was a larger expectation to write one's own material and be more complicated about it. Still, you'd get the occasional appearance on the radio of an assembly-line discofied melody rendered competently by an artist who probably didn't use more than a take or two to get it down: Jimmy Ruffin's "Hold On to My Love," Pink Lady's "Kiss in the Dark," even Leif Garrett's "I Was Made for Dancing." And "Magic," which is utter bullshit - the boys, having been touring for years and no doubt already realizing how many millions they were being swindled out of, surely had gotten over believing in magic by this point - but that rasp on the refrain-concluding "into my li-uh-ife" is such a great half-twist that it doesn't matter that he sings it the same way each time.

The Bay City Rollers may not have brought much to "You Made Me Believe in Magic," but neither did they get in its way, and they were rewarded with a surprise Top 10 hit by the people who actually do believe in magic and being truly in love. Whom I kind of envy sometimes.