Johnny Rodriguez’s “That’s the Way Love Goes”: The 1973 Recording That Became His Third Straight No. 1
Johnny Rodriguez’s “That’s the Way Love Goes”: The 1973 Recording That Became His Third Straight No. 1
How a Lefty Frizzell–Sanger D. Shafer composition became another chart-topper for one of country music’s fastest-rising young stars of the 1970s.
A Classic Country Song Finds Johnny Rodriguez
“That’s the Way Love Goes” was written by country great Lefty Frizzell and songwriter Sanger D. “Whitey” Shafer. Frizzell recorded the song for his 1973 album The Legendary, but Johnny Rodriguez soon gave the composition its first major chart success.
Rodriguez recorded the song for his second album, All I Ever Meant to Do Was Sing, with Jerry Kennedy producing. Mercury released it as a single in December 1973.
The timing was ideal. Rodriguez had already enjoyed a spectacular breakthrough year, and the new single arrived while he was rapidly establishing himself as one of country music’s most successful young performers.
What Does “That’s the Way Love Goes” Mean?
The song presents love as something powerful, unpredictable and impossible to control completely.
Rather than treating romance as a simple promise of happiness, the lyric accepts that love can bring both pleasure and disappointment. People continue pursuing it despite the emotional risks because attraction and attachment are part of human nature.
That mixture of tenderness and resignation suited Rodriguez’s smooth country delivery. His performance does not force the emotion; instead, it allows the melody and lyric to express a mature acceptance of the way relationships can unfold.
How Strongly Did Audiences Respond?
There is no reliable historical statistic showing exactly how many individual fans the recording created, so chart performance provides a better measure.
The single became Johnny Rodriguez’s third consecutive No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart. It spent one week at the top in February 1974 and a total of 14 weeks on the chart.
In Canada, it reached No. 2 on the RPM country chart.
The song’s durability is also demonstrated by later recordings. Merle Haggard took his own version to No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart in 1984, proving that the Frizzell-Shafer composition could succeed with another generation of listeners.
What Did the Song Do for Johnny Rodriguez’s Career?
“That’s the Way Love Goes” strengthened one of the most impressive early runs by a new country artist in the 1970s.
It followed Rodriguez’s earlier No. 1 singles and became his third consecutive Billboard country chart-topper. That sequence confirmed that his breakthrough was not based on a single successful record.
Rodriguez’s Mexican-American background and occasional use of Spanish also gave him a distinctive identity in mainstream Nashville country music. His success helped make him one of the most prominent Latino country performers of his era.
“That’s the Way Love Goes” therefore served as both a commercial milestone and confirmation that Rodriguez had become an established country star rather than a temporary newcomer.
Why “That’s the Way Love Goes” Still Matters
The song has an unusual legacy because two major country singers took it to No. 1 a decade apart.
Johnny Rodriguez gave the composition its first chart-topping interpretation in the 1970s. Merle Haggard repeated the achievement in the 1980s and later won a Grammy for his version.
For Rodriguez, however, the song belongs to the remarkable opening chapter of his career. It was his third consecutive No. 1 and helped cement his position in mainstream country music.
More than fifty years later, his recording remains an elegant example of early-1970s Nashville country: concise, melodic and emotionally restrained.
Watch and Listen
Johnny Rodriguez – That’s the Way Love Goes (Official Audio / Universal Music Group)
Sources
Johnny Rodriguez Official Artist Channel / Universal Music Group
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUKEEu1Mw4E
Billboard chart history as compiled in Joel Whitburn, Hot Country Songs 1944–2008.
American Songwriter — history of “That’s the Way Love Goes”
https://americansongwriter.com/on-this-day-in-1984-merle-haggard-became-the-second-star-to-take-this-lefty-frizzell-penned-classic-to-the-top-of-the-country-chart/
Historical discography and chart summary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_the_Way_Love_Goes_%28Johnny_Rodriguez_song%29
Four Dead Students, One Magazine, and a Song That Could Not Wait
The photographs did not allow Neil Young the comfort of distance. In May 1970, Life magazine brought the violence at Kent State University into American homes, including John Filo's harrowing image of 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling beside the body of student Jeffrey Miller. Young saw those pictures and responded with "Ohio," a song written not as historical reflection, but as an alarm sounded while the crisis was still unfolding.
On May 4, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd during a campus demonstration against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder were killed; nine other people were wounded. Some of the victims had been protesting, while others were passing nearby. The photographs made the event impossible to reduce to an abstract argument about war or campus unrest.
From the Page to the Guitar
David Crosby later recalled giving Young the magazine and watching the images hit him hard. Young withdrew with his guitar and returned with a song. Whatever private process took place in those minutes, the finished work carried the speed of first response: blunt language, a narrow harmonic frame, and a central question that refused to offer comfort.
That immediacy distinguishes "Ohio" from songs written after public wounds have become history. Young did not build an elaborate narrative or explain the politics in detail. He compressed the shock into repeated phrases, accusatory images, and the grim counting of four deaths. His guitar sounds raw and unsettled, more like an exposed nerve than a polished statement.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded the song on May 21, 1970, little more than two weeks after the shootings. Young and Stephen Stills supplied the electric-guitar tension, while bassist Calvin Samuels and drummer Johnny Barbata gave the track its heavy, marching momentum. The group's harmonies, normally associated with careful blend and control, feel strained by grief. Near the end, Crosby's anguished vocal cries push the performance beyond formal protest and toward something almost unbearable.
A Release That Could Not Follow the Schedule
CSNY already had music in the marketplace, including "Teach Your Children," when the group decided "Ohio" had to come out immediately. Rather than save it for a future album campaign, they pressed for a rush release. Atlantic issued it as a single in June 1970, backed with Stills' "Find the Cost of Freedom."
That decision mattered. Popular records usually moved through long cycles of planning, manufacturing, promotion, and radio programming. "Ohio" entered circulation while Kent State remained a living national argument. Its direct reference to President Richard Nixon made the single politically confrontational, but listeners did not need to share every conclusion to recognize its urgency. The record reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.
More than half a century later, "Ohio" still sounds unusually close to the event that created it. There is little sense of hindsight and no attempt to smooth the edges. Young saw photographs of young Americans lying on a college campus, wrote before the shock could settle, and recorded before outrage could become ceremony. Listen again, and the most striking quality is not polish but pressure: four musicians treating delay itself as a failure to respond.
Why a Folk-Rock Star Hid His Voice Inside a Machine
Neil Young's robotic voice on "Transformer Man" was not an attempt to erase emotion. It helped him confront how difficult communication could be within his own family.
Released on the 1982 album Trans, the song grew from Young's experiences with his son Ben, who was born in 1978 with cerebral palsy. Ben had limited voluntary movement and could not speak, leaving his parents to search for ways to understand his needs and help him interact with the world.
Young and Ben's mother, Pegi, devoted themselves to demanding therapy and communication efforts. That experience reshaped Young's thinking about language: A person could have a rich inner life yet remain unable to make others hear it. Technology might offer a bridge, but it could also underline the distance that remained.
Making the Barrier Audible
By the early 1980s, Young had already built a career on abrupt changes of direction, moving among acoustic country, hard rock and more reflective singer-songwriter records. Trans, however, sounded like a particularly sharp break. Synthesizers, electronic rhythms and heavily processed vocals replaced much of the ragged warmth associated with his best-known work.
On several tracks, Young sang through a vocoder, a device that reshaped his voice into synthesized tones. The effect could make words difficult to decipher. Young later explained that the album's preoccupation with machines and distorted speech was connected to his attempts to communicate with Ben. The obscured vocals were not simply a futuristic costume; they represented people reaching toward one another through an imperfect system.
"Transformer Man" is the album's most tender expression of that idea. Its melody is gentle and reassuring even as the vocal treatment creates separation between the singer and listener. The music suggests both wonder and frustration: Technology expands what may be possible, yet the human voice still seems trapped inside it.
The song's language of controls, signals and transformation also takes on a personal dimension in that context. Rather than presenting Ben only through his disability, Young imagined ability, agency and potential. The child at the center of the song is not passive. He is someone learning to direct his surroundings and reveal himself to those who love him.
Hearing the Person Inside the Sound
When Trans arrived, its electronic production puzzled many listeners who expected another familiar Neil Young record. Its combination of conventional rock songs and computerized experiments could feel fragmented, while the vocoder made the album's emotional core easy to miss. What sounded cold on first contact was rooted in an intensely personal concern.
Young made that tenderness easier to recognize when he revisited "Transformer Man" acoustically for his 1993 MTV Unplugged performance. Without the electronic mask, the song sounded almost like a lullaby. The later arrangement did not invalidate the original; it clarified what had always been inside it.
Seen through Ben's story, the processed voice on Trans becomes less a barrier than a portrait of one. "Transformer Man" asks the listener to hear beyond an unfamiliar surface and recognize the person trying to connect. That tension between machinery and affection remains the song's most moving quality—and the best reason to hear Young's strange electronic turn with fresh ears.
