One Hit No More, No. 34: Zager & Evans & the Year 2525

Gives a man time to think...

The Hit
Rick Evans wrote the lyrics for “In the Year 2525” in 1964 (using the old film, Metropolis, for a backdrop), sometime after he met Denny Zager at Nebraska Wesleyan University and sometime before they parted ways for a while - Vietnam, life, etc. When they reconnected again in 1968 and Evans played his pass at the song for Zager, who found a lot in the lyrics, but less in the music. In Zager’s words:

“Rick (Evans) said he wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes in the back of a Volkswagen van after a night of partying and a lot of Mary Jane. He tried the song with a few bands he was playing with at the time, but the music wasn't right and it wasn't working. I thought the lyrics were intriguing, so I rewrote the music so it blended better with the lyrics.”

The reworked version became such a hit around the Nebraska /concert college circuit that an owner at one of the venues fronted the money to record it - with another Evans-penned tune (“Little Kids”) as a b-side, and the single blew up from the regional market to holding the top spot in the Billboard Top 100 for six weeks near or around the moon landing (so, July 1969). Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s a heavy tune that reports from a future dystopia over a burned-out riff on hippie-rock. To flag two takes on “In the Year 2525’s” meaning:

“…a Randian dystopia where, in one instance, people's actions, words and thoughts are preprogrammed into a daily pill.”

Or, more specifically:

One Hit No More, No. 33: Eddie Holman, The Lonely Boy

A vinyl collector would scream...

The Hit
Eddie Holman hit it big in 1969 (or 1970; I hate when sources don’t agree) crooning “Hey There Lonely Girl” in a shy, pleading falsetto. In this classic, tender soul slow-jam featuring bedroom horns and an intimate swing, Holman plays the lonely boy making warm promises to a lonely girl. A newly-lonely girl, actually. One he’s been pining about for a while. We’ve all been there, right, guys? And we probably handled it just as badly…

The song’s actually a cover - Ruby sang it to a lonely boy with the Romantics backing her up about seven years earlier - but Holman’s rendition went higher and thus became the standard. (Holy...Ruby and the Romantic's version just went straight to the next playlist...that bossa nova swing...)

The Rest of the Story
Holman grew up in New York with a great voice and a mother who strongly encouraged his love of signing. Holman speaks of her in glowing terms and the path she put him on, one that started when he won an amateur night at the Apollo Theater. He got plugged in pretty well after that - Jackie Wilson mentored him through a couple tours - and Holman liked where things were headed enough to earn a bachelor’s in music. When it comes to pop bands, college typically only comes up as the place where the members meet, but his career looked like must working musician’s does from there: writing songs, working to get them in people’s ears.

He came up in Philadelphia after college, putting out a string of singles - one of them, “This Can’t Be True,” hitting No. 17 on the Billboard (again…help…that’s two hits…what does “one-hit wonder” even mean? Also, good tune...). It took “Lonely Girl” for Eddie Holman to go international. The single peaked way up at No. 2 on the 1970 Billboard. Also, and this is very important, the song hit No. 4 on the UK charts four three-four years later.