5 Beatles Songs Made the Top 10 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary Chart in the 1960s Billboard

The Beatles were the biggest and most important act of the 1960s, but you’d never know it by looking at Billboard’s Easy Listening chart (now called Adult Contemporary). Easy listening stations wanted to have a distinct identity from pop stations in the 1960s. Some artists did well in both formats, including Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark and Glen Campbell. But many artists fared much better on the Easy Listening chart than they did on the Hot 100. Among them: Jack Jones, Al Martino, Andy Williams, Perry Como, Vikki Carr, The Lettermen, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Eddy Arnold, Jerry Vale and Ed Ames.

Even “Yesterday,” one of the most classic (and oft-recorded) ballads in music history, failed to crack the Easy Listening chart. The 1965 single logged four weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, but it went nowhere (man) on Easy Listening. Those adult-skewing stations were more inclined to play the schmaltzy “Red Roses for a Blue Lady,” which was a top 10 Easy Listening hit for three artists that year — Vic Dana, Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra and Wayne Newton.

The Beatles didn’t crack the AC chart until November 1969, with George Harrison’s ballad “Something,” which reached No. 17. That was a song so undeniable that genre GOAT Frank Sinatra often introduced it in concert, as he did here, by saying: “It’s one of the best love songs, I believe, to be written in 50 or 100 years.”

The Beatles finally broke through at AC in 1970, just as they were calling it quits. “Let It Be” logged four weeks at No. 1 that spring; “The Long and Winding Road” peaked at No. 2. In the 1970s, the gap between what pop and AC stations played narrowed considerably, as such acts as Carpenters (whose first single was a ballad remake of the Beatles’ 1965 smash “Ticket to Ride”), Neil Diamond, John Denver, Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy regularly climbed high on both charts. Bee Gees, Chicago and Elton John, who, like the Beatles a decade earlier, bridged pop and rock, became AC mainstays in the 1970s.

By 1976, when The Beatles’ 1966 track “Got To Get You Into My Life” was belatedly released as a single (to promote the then-current Rock’n’ Roll Music compilation), it made the top 10 on both the Hot 100 and the AC chart. Easy listening stations that wouldn’t even play an exquisite ballad like “Yesterday” in 1965 now hopped on a vibrant pop/rock track. AC radio had gotten hipper and more contemporary over the preceding 11 years, thanks in large to The Beatles and the generation of acts they influenced.

Source: billboard.com/Paul Grein

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