Checking in at #34 — as Casey Kasem might have said and probably did — is "Spinning Wheel" by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears. It was written by their lead vocalist David Clayton-Thomas and it hit the charts in 1968. I liked this song and thought it was interesting how often it turned up on variety shows performed by very mainstream artists. Some time in the seventies, I read an article where some critic who covered shows in Las Vegas cited it as the song he was the most sick of hearing in everyone's stage act.
The lyrics are full of drug references but it's like everyone loved the tune so much, they decided to just ignore that aspect of it. A lot of very popular songs of the day wound up being sorta laundered this way to the point where they even turned up on TV commercials. I have a vague memory that "Spinning Wheel" did for some product…maybe a casino or lottery.
As usual here, I link to a video of the song being performed somewhere. I could have picked several videos of Blood, Sweat and Tears performing it but I was intrigued by this one made by someone matching visuals to the record…with a special emphasis on the Wheel of Fortune game show and some very literal images…
While we're at it, here's the lovely Barbara Eden performing the song on a TV variety program. I posted this here once before and we had a big mystery about what show it appeared on. There were many guesses of either The Sonny & Cher Show or the series Sonny did without Cher, and my pal Mike Clark thought he recognized the camera work as being a Bob Hope Special. It turned out Mike was right. It was from a special Mr. Robert Hope did on March 18, 1970…