Helen Reddy, "Emotion"

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm pleased to introduce a guest blogger taking the reins today. Mike Schaefer is a longtime friend of mine - a fellow KFOG 10@10 time traveler - who spent years in New York radio before moving to San Francisco, where he shares my love of pop/rock music and the charts and trivia therein. L&Gs, here's his history lesson on a pretty melody from the early '70s that surfaced in a few different iterations - and then surfaced again this weekend. Take it away, Mike!

Last weekend I was listening to the '70s version of "Classic Casey Kasem." It was a chart from March of 1975, and what popped up but Helen Reddy's lovely, forgotten "Emotion," a ballad that peaked, shockingly, at only #22 - breaking Ms. Reddy's then-hot streak of 7 consecutive Top 15 singles. I was reminded that the song was the endpoint of a series of versions of the tune. And so today, a musical history lesson: the evolution of a song.

In 1972 Véronique Sanson recorded (in French) a song about a young woman who's just lost her virginity: "Amoureuse." You may recognize the melody. The following year, a pre-Elton Kiki Dee took a more-or-less literal English translation (also titled "Amoureuse") into the U.K. Top 15.

Sanson then recorded the English version herself, and it garnered some U.S. airplay, becoming something of a "turntable hit" in 1974 at NYC's prog-rock powerhouse WNEW-FM, where it was a fave of deejay Dennis Elsas. That version - I had not yet heard the previous two - instantly became one of my favorite "shouldabeen" hits. (I just love that line about feeling "the rainfall of another planet.") Olivia Newton-John would also record this version.

In the meantime, however, a woman named Patti Dahlstrom wrote a new and different set of English lyrics to Sanson's melody and called it "Emotion." Dahlstrom was a friend of Paul Williams - who had a major connection to Helen Reddy, who'd just had a huge hit with his "You and Me Against the World." That got the song to Helen, who recorded it. When it popped up in the Top 40 in early '75 I was confused, since I recognized the melody but not the lyrics. It would be decades before the interwebs afforded me the opportunity to put the above pieces together in the proper order. Thank you, Wikipedia!