One Hit No More, Chapter 8: "Party Doll" Was the Life of the Party for Buddy Knox

Early branding issues (& Knox is 3rd from left.)

One of the more relatable bands in the sample, honestly. They sound like the ones I came up watching.

The Hit
If I’d ever heard Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll” before working on this chapter, it slipped my mind. Despite being something of a groundbreaking tune – which I’ll get to – it doesn't sound so different from everything else you hear from the early rock of the late 1950s. And yet it was a little risque for its time: the King of American Bandstand, Dick Clark, refused to pick up Knox’s single due to the signature line in its chorus: “I want to make love to you.”

That racy line surprises less once you know that Knox fronted the Rhythm Orchids, a band that became all the rage at West Texas State College. Despite getting inspiration to record from two straight-up legends - they hardly get bigger than Roy Orbison or Elvis Presley (Knox recalls Presley telling him after he met him after a show, “Man, if you've got a band and some good songs, get into a recording studio cause something is fixing to happen”) – the Rhythm Orchids didn’t have visions of fame dancing in their heads when they stepped into “the recording studio.” They cut the singles – “Party Doll” b/w “I’m Sticking With You” – to pass on as “souvenirs” for their fans at WTSC and beyond. They were lucky to get that:

“Norman was an electrician who had built his own studio. His echo chamber was in the top of his dad's garage with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. Every time a truck passed by, it sounded like it was in the studio with us.”

The “Norman” referred to above was Norman Petty. Anyone who knows that name is a couple steps ahead on one of the Points of Interest (see below).

In any case, Knox and his bandmates paid $60 bucks for three days’ worth of recording time at a studio that had no interest in operating as a professional outfit. The recording sessions ran from midnight to 6:00 a.m. so they wouldn’t have to share the microphones with those trucks. That flyer scored them a No. 1 hit that ultimately 15 million copies and went gold within its first year.

Not bad for a kid from Happy, Texas, who was surely the most famous of his high school graduating class of 26 kids.

One Hit No More, Chapter 7: Mickey, Sylvia and Their Strange Love

Mickey & Sylvia

Thanks to research done during an earlier (*and yet later) chapter in this series, I knew how one story ended going in. [*Ed. - I've pushed the first iteration of this series to the early 1980s, but I'm rebooting to fill in some gaps.] You may too, depending on your own travels....

The Hit
It neither lasted all that long nor rose all that high – just two weeks atop Billboard’s R&B charts, and only to No. 11 on the Pop charts – Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” has enjoyed a long, lingering run in pop culture. Movies that want to hearken to a certain time, place and/or mood in the length of an snippet of a song – the short-list includes Badlands, Casino and, most famously, Dirty Dancing – have used it, but it also lives on in reinterpretations by Paul McCartney, the Everly Brothers (gave ‘em a UK hit), and Peaches & Herb...and I recommend sticking with the original, for what it's worth.

The plucked, twanging, yet rich and variegated guitar stands out, along with the shuffling Latin beat and undertones and the vocals, which pine almost theatrically. They go back and forth in a playful call-and-response in the single’s bridge, but it’s mostly a dreamy duet with the two of them singing like two lovestruck kids holding hands...as they explore the pain and ecstasy of love in song. Despite being released in 1957 and has rock-guitar tones all over it, “Love Is Strange” listens more like a spin rock-influenced pop tune than rock-‘n’ roll. And what’s that than another way of saying Mickey & Sylvia’s most famous single grew from different roots. To borrow a quote from 2014 retrospective on Sylvia in Dazed Digital:

“Mickey and I were working at the Howard Theatre in Washington. Bo Diddley was on the same bill and he would play this chant where Jerome Green, his maraca player would say to him, 'Bo? How do you call your woman?' And Bo would say, 'C'mere woman!' And it went on like that until Bo finally says, 'Baby, my sweet baby'. I told Bo that he should record that tune, but when he took it to Leonard Chess, he told him it was nothin'.” Undeterred, and with Bo's approval, Sylvia rearranged the song to fit into the Mickey and Sylvia mode and then took the track to RCA subsidiary, Groove. That label too was unimpressed and it was only when Sylvia threatened to leave them all together, that they let her record ‘Love Is Strange.’ The result was a sensual, latin-flavoured call and response groove that became an overnight jukebox and radio sensation. All of a sudden they were the number one pop band in America.”

Another source, She Shreds, tightened the back-story into this thesis:

One Hit No More, Chapter 4: "Be-Bop-a-Lula," aka, Gene Vincent's Happiest Moment

Yeah, no. Not even he could be drunk enough...

Some discrepancies betwixt the sources in this one. And some guns...

The Hit
I have a personal connection to Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula”: my dad used to wake me for Sunday school with renditions of old rock ‘n’ roll songs, all of them flat as they were loud.

Vincent sang his signature song differently, obviously, with pinched, passionate phrasing that hinted at a man on the edge of ecstasy and a far from accidental dash of Elvis. The backing music – heavy on twang, surprisingly muted, but steady, steady, steady – lacks the sound and fury of some of the early rock records, and it turns out that’s the drummer, Dickie Harrell, screaming in the background because he wanted to prove to his mom that was him playing on the single.

Sources disagree how the song came together, but they all agree on where: in the U.S. Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, where Vincent spent about half a year recovering from the motorcycle accident that shattered his leg (and almost saw it amputated). As for the how, a couple sources hold that a fellow patient named Don Graves wrote the words – with one source crediting a local stripper for the inspiration – while Vincent filled in the music. Other sources say Vincent bought the song, another says Vincent’s future manager, “Sheriff Tex” Davis, bought it while another has Davis claiming he wrote it with Vincent. Wikipedia’s entry on the song seconds a secondary theory in another source in saying that the inspiration came from the old Little Lulu comic strip, but that came from Vincent who admitted to rescuing that story from a blackout. Of which Vincent had many. So, let’s talk about how that happened...

The Rest of the Story, Briefly
He was born Vincent Eugene Craddock to Mary Louise and Ezekiah Jackson Craddock in Norfolk, Virginia in February of 1935, but his formative experiences happened in a small Virginia town called Munden Point. Vincent’s parents ran a general store in the town that did well enough that they could buy young Vincent a guitar. His first taste of music came from the old Grand Ole Opry mega broadcasts, but the move to Munden Point introduced him to black musical styles like gospel and blues. Once he had that guitar, he’d sit at the front of the store learning as he played; some of the locals egged him on by tossing out requests.

Vincent struggled in school, both socially (scrawny kid) and scholastically, leading him to drop out at age 17 to join the U.S. Navy (his dad signed the papers). He served during the Korean War, without seeing any action, but liked either Navy life enough, or the money, to re-enlist for another five-year hitch in 1955. Vincent traded his re-enlistment bonus for the Triumph motorcycle that would get nailed by a car (possibly driven by a drunk) and, more or less, destroy his leg. This is another place where sources disagree, but most of them agree he started wearing the “heavy metal brace” after this vehicular accident, as opposed to the later one. Something else that came with that brace: Vincent’s booze and pain pill habit.

One Hit No More, Chapter 3: The Chords (Literally) Go "Sh-Boom"!

A little who's who for ya.

My all-time favorite doo wop song. Hands down.

The Hit
“’Sh-Boom’ is supposed to have been titled after the threat of an atom bomb explosion which, in the midst of Cold War posturing in 1954, was a very real topic on the public's mind. However, this demented ditty also included the surreally optimistic message that everything was ultimately fine and as the rest of the lyrics suggested, ‘life could be a dream.’”
- Allmusic.com

I wish this was true with all my heart. But...

“It had nothing to do with the A-Bomb particularly. It was just a thing that happened to happen.... Jimmy was a great one for telling stories and he may have embellished it in that direction.”
- Buddy McRae (the once last-living Chord, New York Daily News)

Choose your universe, people...

Much like what happened with The Penguins and “Earth Angel,” the Chords came to their label with an original song called “Sh-Boom” and the label couldn’t give less of a shit about it. What excited them? A cover of the Patti Page tune, “Cross Over the Bridge.” The similarities don’t stop with the label guessing wrong – e.g., the same DJ (LA’s Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg) flipped over the 45 and found the hit, the crossover from R&B to the Pop charts, the goddamn Crew Cuts cashing in on another act’s single – and they kept going in the big picture (e.g., singing second banana to another group their manager liked/valued more). The doo wop craze had a real gold-rush quality to it, at least in the first (mostly Black) wave.

The single itself is all energy, bright and irrepressible – and the return to the regular vocals after a bass-led bridge, in particular, really stands up that line in Allmusic.com’s history about a “demented ditty [that] also included the surreally optimistic message hat everything was ultimately fine.” Which isn’t bad for a single written by a bunch of kids in a ’54 Buick convertible. The public ate it up after its July 3, 1954 release, lifting it to No. 2 on the R&B charts (The Drifters’ “Honey Love” kept it out) and keeping it up there for 15 weeks. It climbed as high as No. 5 on the Pop charts, the first Top 10 hit by an R&B act since Louis Jordan’s (profiled here) long-time domination of over the 1940s.

One Hit No More, Chapter 2: The Penguins Dancing with an Earth Angel

You're motoring/what's your price for flight?

Always liked this tune. Sounds like a slow-jam embrace feels...

The Hit
“’Earth Angel’ -- like so many '50s doo-wop ballads -- was structured on the chord changes of Rodgers & Hart's ‘Blue Moon,’ in a progression commonly known as ‘ice cream changes’ or ‘Blue Moon changes.’ Because so many '50s ballads use the same structure, oldies groups can string together seamless medleys of doo-wop classics.”
- Honolulu Star Bulletin featured, September 14, 2001

That takes care of the structure, now the story. As with The Crows’ “Gee,” the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” wasn’t the A-side of its 45. That was “Hey Senorita” (better song, for me) and their label pushed that one, only to have radio DJs flip the 45 and find the song that became the hit. It never reached No. 1 – their version only climbed to No. 9 on the pop charts (hold that thought) – but, by way of some creative math, Songfacts.com dubbed “Earth Angel” the “top R&B record of all time in terms of continuous popularity.” [Ed. – They arrived there by counting every version of the song (there are many), which yielded a total of 30 million copies sold.]

Personally, it takes me back to big dances that happened twenty years before I was born, scenes stolen from high school dances from movies and TV shows set in the 1950s. And the intimacy of the song – the slow, swaying rhythm, perfect for the side-shuffling clutch of teenage slow dancing, the lead vocals that float over it, as if lifted by the backing harmonies – has a way of making a pair of doting lovers feel like the only people in the world, even in a crowded room. A nice song, in other words, but one that kicked off one hell of a legal tussle.

Legal battles over the publishing and authorship rights to the song kicked off in April of 1955, about six months after it came out. As with a lot of civil suits, it didn’t have to happen and at least one of the wrong people won. Worse, it was just one piece in a larger falling out.

The Rest of the Story, Briefly
The Penguins started late in 1953, when two recent graduates from Los Angeles’ Fremont High School, Cleveland Duncan and Curtis Williams, bumped into one another at a California Club talent show. Williams was in a group called the Hollywood Flames at the time (who come up again in the soon-to-be renumbered chapter in this series on Bobby Day), but still struggling to figure out where he fit in (the rest of the band called him “too independent”). He had been working on “Earth Angel” with another member, Gaynel Hodge, under the tutelage of an up-and-coming songwriter named Jesse Belvin. According to everything I read for this chapter, that kind of collaboration happened all the time in this scene – i.e., people trading ideas, doing a little borrowing, etc. After the show, Williams pitched the song to Duncan, telling him his voice fit it. Duncan caught the pitch and went with it, all the way down to rewriting the melody.

One Hit No More, No. 119: Studying Modern English

Ah, the glory days...

You remember this one because you have never been allowed to forget it.

The Hit
“The lyrics, I sat down on the floor in London in my house and I wrote those lyrics in 20 minutes. I was stoned, I had a joint, sat down on the carpet, and I just wrote them all out in about 10 to 20 minutes.”
- Robbie Grey, to The Big Takeover, 2020

That’s probably the best story about Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” a single that achieved a level of pop culture ubiquity rare for a one-hit wonder. Wikipedia tells me it never climbed higher than No. 76 in the States – something I find completely unbelievable, if only because I still remember every edit in that original video.

The song appeared on their second album, which meant it came out of nowhere in more ways than one. After self-producing a very different debut album, the band called in a professional producer named Hugh Jones, who Grey (the only guy you really hear from) credits for teaching them the songwriting craft. It paid off gloriously, both at the time – the driving rhythm at the open with an frantic acoustic rhythm over, how that gives way to that clean plucked melody and those memorable double thwaps on the drum – and for the rest of the band’s long, (once) ongoing career.

People of a certain age will recall them re-releasing the “I Melt With You” in 1990, with very different look and sound, but they released it again in 2020 to give people a happy breathe of nostalgia during the pandemic.

At any rate, they released the song on the 4AD label in the UK on 1982’s After the Snow. Sire Records carried it States-side and it just got picked up one radio station at a time until it smothered the airwaves and then slipped into the Valley Girl soundtrack (which featured a couple by Sparks too; and had The Plimsouls as a house band at the wimpiest punk bar in Los Angeles). It was big. And it changed their world over night...

One Hit No More, No. 115: Tom Tom Club, a Club Without David Byrne

Think this gets to it best.

Was it all just a plot to escape the soul-sucking gravity of David Byrne? I kid. I kid.

The Hit
“We only said no one time that I can think of right now. It was one of those over-the-top gangster lyrics. We wouldn’t dream of censoring anyone’s lyrics but we reserve the right to deny permission to use our music if we think its garbage.”
- jambands.com interview with Chris Frantz (2001? Really?)

Because the making of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” is no different from everything else they did, I figured I’d fill this section with its multiple second lives as a popular simple. The first act to repurpose it was Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde for “Genius Rap,” but “It’s Nasty” by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five couldn’t have been too far behind. The (very likely incomplete) of artists who have borrowed it, for better or worse, continues from there – e.g., Tupac Shakur, Puff Daddy, Coolio, Busta Rhymes, L’Trimm, Funkdoobiest, Busta Rhymes, Mariah Carey, etc. etc.

I honestly can’t recall the first time I heard it, but I’m confident I had no clue who performed it; honestly, the first time I gave it any thought was when I heard Mariah Carey's "Fantasy" and thought, "hold it, I know that sample." And had someone said “Tom Tom Club,” I’m almost certain I would either said, “who?” or assumed it was some mid-‘80s synth act I ignored...so I fucked up.

What’s not to love about a song that melds bubbly and twitchy so seamlessly? Obviously, that means I actually listened the lyrics for the first time for the first time this week and; 1) I never caught all the name-drops and 2) it’s unclear whether or not Frantz was the “laughing boyfriend” referenced in the song, but he claimed it in at least one interview.

The Rest of the Story
“[Q:] Those early Tom Tom Club singles were pretty groundbreaking in mixing up disco, funk, reggae and rap with post-punk art-school attitude. Was that a conscious strategy?”

“[Tina Weymouth]: It was sort of organically grown that way. We wanted to make a dance record, we didn't want to sound like our other band and compete with that. We wanted to make something more escapist. And I think we succeeded rather well, actually.”

One Hit No More, No. 114: Red Rider, CanRock Kings (+ Cars!)

Yes, seriously. Regular musicians.

The hardest ones to write about are the work-a-day musicians....

The Hit
When some source reminded me that MTV had Red Rider’s “Lunatic Fringe” on heavy rotation, my first thought was “yep.” A very young me mainlined their famous single and took in its half-paranoid lyrics and sound-scape as a glimpse into the world of adults and adult concerns. The eerie beginning sets the mood nicely, though I think it’s the way the strum-bursts of guitar play with the picked guitar foundation that most people recognize in game-show time. The main thing I remember is the contrast between the raw scrape and soaring notes in the slide guitar bridge/solo – which makes sense, seeing that I came to the song through the music video. I’m not sure I knew a guitar could do that at the time (10, I was 10).

Like a growing number of hit singles in this series, I describe the genre as “rock of a certain time and place” – Canadian, for one thing, and I’ll get to that – but, listening to it now...shit, 40 years later, and with the added context, I can’t get away from “sounds like Brian Adams.” And yet it doesn’t really.

MTV could only push it so far, but “Lunatic Fringe” did all right in the States, but mostly – and for that particular single – on what Billboard’s its “Rock Albums & Top Tracks” chart, where it hit No. 11. Red Rider hit Billboard’s regular-ol’ Hot 100 with three completely different songs, but if you meet someone who can name different single by Red Rider that isn’t “Lunatic Fringe,” congrats, you found yourself a rare animal. Or, just as likely, a Canadian. Tom Cochrane, the man who wrote the song, acknowledged its longevity and steady popularity in a 2017 conversation with The Wire Megazine (best source for color commentary, fwiw):

“It’s in the top 300 rocks songs of all time for airplay, so I’m very proud of ‘Lunatic Fringe.’ And, the subject matter is very contemporary when you look at what’s happening in the world today. So I’m very proud of that tune.”

He’s not kidding about its ongoing relevance, especially lyrically...even if I think he overrates half the equation:

“'Cause you've got to blame someone/
For your own confusion/
We're on guard this time (on guard this time)/
Against your final solution/
Oh no.”

Oh, and it’s big among the pro-wrestling and/or UFC scenes. Kurt Angle used it back when...

One Hit No More, No. 112: Soft Cell, More Tainted than "Tainted Love"

Odd pair, but, damn, it worked.

This single spent 43 consecutive weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100. That record no longer stands. Not even close, really.

The Hit
“We were living in a crummy Housing Association bedsit. The view from my bedroom window was the wasteland where the body of The Yorkshire Ripper’s last victim was found – there was still police tape on the site.”
- David Ball, 2018 interview, Classic Pop Magazine

That introduces the multiple incongruities around “Tainted Love,” one of the few natural pop songs Soft Cell ever wrote. The real/radio single opens with the unmistakable synth blast - three simple chords, the shortest of progressions – before Ball fills in the sound-scape with longer synth tones to ground it and the simplest electronic kick/snare you’re ever likely to hear. Marc Almond’s voice comes in, clear and cool, but also defiantly wounded; the synth blasts pulse into the verses, appropriately intrusive. It’s a little anti-melodic, musically, or rather Soft Cell rely on Almond to provide the melody – particularly in the extended version, which goes out on a reworking of The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go.”

That last detail seems less out of place if/once you know “Tainted Love” is a cover of a largely-forgotten song Northern Soul singer named Gloria Jones. Even that has a whole “circle of life” aspect to it, in that both Ball and Almond were big fans of T. Rex back when, and Jones was romantically involved with Marc Bolan (and driving the relevant car, if memory serves) when he died.

According to at least one source (Wikipedia), “Tainted Love” also represented something of a last chance for Almond and Ball. After making a little noise in the “northern” scene, they signed to the UK label Phonogram and recorded, "Memorabilia" (which video features a certain famous, Cindy Ecstacy) a single that did all right on the club circuit (particularly in the States, oddly enough), but that didn’t impress the label so much. Soft Cell came back with “Tainted Love.” There they were, two lads just out of Leeds Polytechnic and here they had a No. 1 hit in 17 countries, some for nearly all of 1981. Apparently.

The Rest of the Story
The oddest thing about Soft Cell could be where they came up – Ball in Blackpool, UK, Almond in Southport. Both men figured that setting informed their sensibilities, if in expected ways. As Almond recounted to On: Yorkshire Magazine:

One Hit No More, No. 108: Benny Mardones Goes Off "Into the Night"

There was some amount of not the best idea...

Another one I didn’t know till it popped up in the queue. Maybe if I’d been born in Syracuse…

The Hit
“She’s just 16-years-old/
leave her alone/
they say…”

Those are, 1) the opening lyrics to Benny Mardones, “Into the Night” and, 2) not great, obviously, and it didn’t help that Mardones was 33 years old when the single dropped. And, as you keep digging…yeah. From Wikipedia’sentry on the single:

“The video opens with Mardones walking down a street and approaching a house. The song plays over the video, and the lyrics serve as Mardones's monologue. He is met at the door by a bearded man who tells him, "She's just 16 years old. Leave her alone." Mardones leaves and walks around to the back of the house, peering through a window at a girl sitting sullenly in her room. The video then cuts to Mardones at a pay phone, speaking to the girl on the other end of the line and professing his love. The video then cuts again to Mardones returning to the girl's house, carrying a rolled-up carpet. He crawls through her bedroom window, unrolls the magic carpet, and taking the girl's hand, they take flight into the night sky. The video closes with Mardones serenading the girl as they embrace; the scene finally fades to black as they kiss.”

All…that notwithstanding, the song has a touching backstory. Mardones fleshes out the full story in an audio clip posted to Songfacts in 2011, but, long story short, the father of a family that lived in his building Spanish Harlem left his wife and three kids for a member of a chorus line. Equal parts touched and angry by the desertion, Mardones gave each of the three kids odd jobs (and overpaid them), and he tasked the youngest girl (age 16) with walking his basset hound, Zanky(sp?) every morning. When a long night of working on some songs turned to morning, the young girl knocked on the door for Zanky’s daily constitutional. After she closed the door behind her, Mardones’ then-writing partner, Bobby Tepper, started with something like “my God (as Billboard’s obit put it, he “got leery”) and Mardones cut him off with, “she’s 16, leave her alone.” He comes off like a decent guy, and I believe it, but that video…

Getting back to the song, it’s a soft-rock ballad with some nice piano twinkles, but it’s mostly washed-out synths and a simple, sparing arrangement of traditional rock-band instruments that lay out like a stage for Mardones’ vocals - who, when he really gets going, doesn’t sound so different from Journey’s Steve Perry (eh...on further listening, I was in a mood). He picked up “The Voice” as a nickname for a reason…

One Hit No More, No. 107: Stealing Away with Robbie Dupree

Quite possibly wishing he was elsewhere.

Hold on. Putting on my sailing cap…though something about it doesn't feel right...

The Hit
There’s a better than fair chance that even the people who know 1980’s “Steal Away” think somebody besides Robbie Dupree recorded it. God knows someone else did. When he heard it, a music writer for the Los Angeles Times named John D’Agostino ripped it as a “blatant, wimpy rip-off of the Michael McDonald/Kenny Loggins’ composition ‘What a Fool Believes’”; the Washington Post flagged similarities in Dupree’s vocal style and the backing keyboards. McDonald didn’t give a shit, apparently, but his publisher flirted with a lawsuit for theft.

If you toggle back and forth between “Steal Away” and “What a Fool Believes” over and over again - as I’m sure D’Agostino and McDonald publishers did - yeah, the similarities in the backing keyboards come through. But the vocals?

Once you expand to the song as a whole - i.e., include the thicker (better) bass on “What a Fool Believes,” or the way the musical elements in “Steal Away” play together, while McDonald’s tune has more contrasts and oppositions - you get what the critics heard, basically, all the way down the “wimpy,” but Dupree’s slipped in some nice touches - e.g., the big, twanging strings that dominate the bridges, the way the song fades in as if you’re waking up to it. You don't have to love it, but give it credit for having a different mood.

The song came out of nowhere - and it took a minor miracle for it to go anywhere further than Dupree’s head - but he did not.

The Rest of the Story
As just about anything you read or hear about Robbie Dupree points out, you’d think he was from anywhere but Brooklyn. Born Robert Dupuis in 1946, he grew up and went to school much like anyone else - i.e., he didn’t have any immediate household influences - but he loved music, especially soul/R&B artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye and played from an early age. When he made the decision to take a swing as a working musician, Dupree moved north to Woodstock, New York - which, as he regularly points out, was not the sight of the famous/infamous 1969 rock festival. In a 2018 retrospective on PopMatters, Dupree recalled his Woodstock:

One Hit No More, No. 106: Utopia's "Set Me Free" & Freedom from Prog

O.G.

Nope. Didn’t know this one either…

The Hit
The only remarkable thing about Utopia’s “Set Me Free” is that it came from the primary musical project of one of the most prolific men in 1970s music. Maybe. And yet, no great tales surround it’s creation - it’s the opposite, if anything - it didn’t make Utopia famous (already there), and it came less from a sound that defined them as an act than it dropped a marker on their evolution. According to Wikipedia, that single and the album it appeared on (Adventures in Utopia) derailed their career arc.

It does sound like its time, with the warm 1970s sound (especially on the keys) blending with the cooler synth production the 1980s made popular. If I had to compare it any song I’d ever heard before, I’d go with “Believe It or Not,” the song Joey Scarbury wrote for TV’s The Greatest American Hero.

It didn’t chart that high - it only reached No. 27 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and didn’t blow up internationally - but that’s entirely on-brand for Utopia.

The Rest of the Story
“Utopia as a group is to convince people of the potential reality of the concept. Utopia isn't even the greatest potential reality, it's just what we can afford now. We're the Disneyland of rock and roll bands. Anyone can get into it with a little bit of effort.”
- Todd Rundgren, a 1973 feature in the UK Guardian (reissued in 2013)

Utopia started as “Todd Rundgren’s Utopia,” and it was very much his baby. The original members included various musicians he’d worked with on his post-Nazz solo material, and even all that happened somewhat by accident. Shortly after Nazz petered out, Rundgren found himself without a job, a band and, as he explained to Songwriter Universe in a 2018 interview, “I did not have any confidence as a solo artist.” He had, however, started writing songs for Nazz “because that’s what bands did…after the Beatles.” Rundgren’s first songs trafficked in the usual themes - e.g., the ecstasy and agony of romantic love - and, after having to force himself to sit down to write the first few, it didn’t take him long to understand how easily the process slipped into formula. And hold that thought for now.

One Hit No More, No. 105: Pucker Up and Kiss...Lipps Inc.

The band's all here. For a time.

On the one hand, who does not know this song? On the other, who knows where it came from and how that connects it to a musical legend?

The Hit
For anyone who has ever wondered what puts the digital fry into vocals in the verses in Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” it’s a vocoder, the parent (or grandparent) of Auto-Tune. For anyone who thinks of it as a disco anthem, it dropped nine months after the rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night. As noted on the official Funky Town site:

“’Funkytown’ put the Minneapolis group Lipps, Inc. on the map, at a time when popular music was pre-Prince and post-punk. The obituaries for disco were being written; Lipps, Inc. put the funeral on hold.”

Shit. I meant to bury the Prince reveal, but the way he flits on the edges of the story flags an important divide in the larger, yet brief narrative.

As for the song, it starts with a naked kick-drum that could lead into just about any pop song. To put the rest in a Name That Tune frame, I’m guessing 40% of contestants when the rattling cowbell comes in (0:04); the snare drum (0:08) doesn’t give much away, but the honking car horn (0:12) might knock another handful of contestants off the fence; another 20% would catch on with the loping bass (0:23), and I’m confident you’d arrive at 100% after the first four notes on the keys, maybe even two. It’s a lot of wash-rinse-repeat from there and the album mix probably goes on longer than you think (just south of eight minutes), but, when you’re on the dancefloor (probably a touch high), you don’t give a shit. As the great Marv “The Leatherman” Gomez says in the film classic, Thank God It’s Friday, “Dancing! Everything else is bullshit!”

Musically, it serves a purpose. Thematically, it speaks to something broader. From a 2018 edition of Time Out from “Funkytown’s” Wikipedia page:

One Hit No More, No. 102: The Boomtown Rats, the Ghost of Woody Guthrie & Cod Reggae

Somewhere around their peak...

This chapter covers one of my favorite bands through the second half of high school. When someone told me the ‘keeper on my high school soccer team loved them as much as I did, I tried to bond with him, but he wasn’t having it. I took it well, honest. Both own-goals were totally unintentional…

The Hit
“A reporter reached Spencer by phone while she was still in the house after the shooting, and asked her why she committed the crime. She reportedly answered: ‘I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.’”

The “Spencer” in that quote refers Brenda Spencer, a troubled young woman who fired shots at the elementary school across the street from her house in January of ’79. A pair of Irish musicians named Bob Geldof and Garry Roberts caught wind of the story and decided to make a song out of it, and a statement. You can see Geldof very briefly explain in a 1981 appearance on Merv Griffin’s show (and do stick around for the banter at the end of it, because both men seem to get a kick out of needling each other). To wrap up Spencer’s story, it’s a sad one. She lived in squalor with a single dad who drank too much and what sound like some serious mental health issues. Suffice to say, her father wasn’t very supportive:

“Spencer later said, ‘I asked for a radio and he bought me a gun.’ Asked why he had done that, she answered, ‘I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.’”

The song was The Boomtown Rats' “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the only U.S. hit the band ever had. If you’ve ever heard Johnnie Fingers opening piano figures, you know it in an instant. It never occurred to me till that performance on Merv Griffin that the instrumentation doesn’t seem to go beyond what they had on stage: a piano, a swelling synth to fill in the sound and a timpani (or something similar) to give it a nice little boom. Still, it contains many touches of your average Rats song, most notably a knack for cutting to the bone of troubling subject-matter and the call-response in and around the chorus that…for lack of a better word, comes off like camp.

I never find a source that said how high “I Don’t Like Mondays” climbed up Billboard’s Hot 100 - though Wikipedia makes clear it stalled below the Top 10 - and I have no idea how long it stayed there. I do, however, remember coming back to that one sometime after hearing my first song by The Boomtown Rats, the radio edit of “Up All Night” that MTV played back in its early days (a lot, certainly the Geldof remembers). Suffice to say, I got the drift of The Boomtown Rats one big U.S. hit, even the lyrics aren’t entirely linear, far earlier than I figured out “Up All Night.” Sadly, “I Don’t Like Mondays” remains topical as the day he wrote it. From a 2020 interview with a site that was one called Hot Press:

One Hit No More, No. 101: The Crusaders and Their Damn Long Crusade

The time they really committed to the word association.

I apologize in advance for this post on the grounds that, it’s pretty much: a handful of dudes put an actual shit-ton of music and over 30 years. They might have done it under a couple different names, some key members came and went (but only after 14 years), but this basic story here isn’t more complicated than talented professional musicians releasing a ton of material and landing a hit somewhere in the early middle. But, because I have a format.

The Hit
The Crusaders’ “Street Life” came out in late 1979 and, based on all the one-hit wonders I’ve heard around it and my general sense of the mainstream sound of the era, something close to out of nowhere. It’s less than it doesn’t sound like its time - between the vocal style (especially with the lonely opening), the entire rhythm underlay, the pulse of electric organ, the funk guitar, the “warmth” of the production, it very much does - but that fucker’s north of 11 minutes long and I never saw a radio edit (even the Youtube clip gets within a few tics of 10 minutes). That didn’t stop it from breaking into the Top 10 on the R&B charts and sneaking as high as No. 36 on Billboard’s Top 100. (Fans in the UK lifted as high as No. 5.) The album did all right too. No. 18 on the pop charts ain’t bad.

Well, that takes care of that.

The Rest of the Story
“This group took the blues-based saturation of Texas, and melded that with the gospel and soul from the church…”
- Jake Feinberg, in an interview with Wilton Felder (which puts it sometime before September 27, 2015)

The story begins with three friends who attended high school together - Joe Sample (piano), Wilton Felder (tenor sax, at least then), and Nesbert “Stix” Hooper forming a band they called The Swingsters in 1954. It continues with Sample checking out for a couple years to study piano at Texas Southern University - where he definitely met Wayne Henderson (trombone), and might have met Hubert Laws (flute) and Henry Wilson (bass). After taking a head-count, they updated their name to the Modern Jazz Sextet and continued to build their name as a hard bop act. After introducing some R&B influences to their sound, they updated their name to the Nighthawks and/or Nite Hawks, and, for those wondering at home, nearly all of these notes will be chronological and, yes, most of it comes from Wikipedia’s entry on The Crusaders. I had what I had to work with and…mostly lucid as Felder was through it, that Feinberg interview felt too much like the latter badgering the former for what he wanted to get out of him.

One Hit No More, No. 99: Randy Van Warmer Needed You. Most.

Think this honors him best.

The Hit
The man’s name sounded like a parody stage name and the one big hit he landed probably would only deepen that impression for someone listening over 40 years later. Randy Van Warmer’s “Just When I Needed You Most” makes the average easy-listening song sound medium-rock at a minimum; his melted-butter vocals let it go down even easier. If you listen closer (or just again), Van Warmer’s smarter touches come through - e.g., the way he hangs his verses over the bar-line, the spindly, picked guitar that, if you’re willing to stretch far enough, evokes a spider’s web.

Lyrically, “Just When I Needed You Most” tells a tale of abandonment, but with a kicker of his failure to stop his special someone from leaving and how he keeps reaching out too late to get anything back but silence. It's a damn sad song, regret piling on regret.

Bouncing around the Internet, I found multiple origin stories for Van Warmer’s heartache - everything his father’s passing when he was just 12 (Wikipedia), a girlfriend that broke his heart (Country Thang Daily), even his favorite old car breaking down on his way to work in Denver (also, Country Thang). The thing about the girlfriend comes up most - a deep-dive into his songwriting process/career on American Songwriter puts it on a high school sweetheart who moved with him to England only to leave - so my money’s on that fount of heartbreak.

The inspiration aside, two key figures helped Van Warmer put polish on the song: one, an Englishman in the music publishing business named Iam Kimmet, who took him under his wing when he started songwriting, the other Hot Chocolate’s Tony Wilson. The song did really well on its release - which was a minor miracle for several reasons - but it landed him a No. 8 on the UK charts, a No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary charts and an impressive No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song includes an autoharp bridge, one played by John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful fame. Van Warmer credits the bridge for making the song a hit…now about that minor miracle…or series of them.

One Hit No More, No. 98: Steve Forbert, an Unlikely Romeo

First impression.

The Hit
With Steve Forbert’s 1979 hit, “Romeo’s Tune,” we hit…yet another song I’d never heard. No memories or associations with childhood, nothing about the old man playing it and telling me about “real music” (his tastes go back 20 years prior, for the record), which leaves just the song itself.

To speak in the royal mode, Forbert comes off as an acquired taste the first time you hear him. Musically, it’s a fine song, great even, for people who are into sparkling piano phrases tangling with extended keening altos on the guitar and, a personal favorite, that warm, grounding glow an electric organ lends a song…and then Forbert starts singing. His voice sounds pinched to where you wait for him to clear his throat and, if not flat, possessed of a similar quality. Unless he’s not rasping out something like a shout, his vocals seem to fade into the music of the chorus, and so on.

And then, as one does when listening for what else someone did in his career, you keep listening. You find Forbert’s voice growing on you, and in a way you can’t put words to until someone does it for you - in this case, a Rolling Stone article from 1980, where they noted what sold Danny Fields, one of the original interpreters of New York punk to the mainstream, on Forbert as a performer:

“He attacked his acoustic guitar fiercely, took raw, careening harmonica solos, and sang in a manner nobody had heard before — hoarse, almost whispering at times, but with a sure command of texture and nuance and a sense of high drama.”

And, sure, I guess that makes his voice an acquired taste. To wrap up “Romeo’s Tune” - and it is a great song, worthy of a No. 11 hit - Forbert wrote it about a girl he either knew or heard about in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, but he had it dedicated to Florence Ballard of The Supremes out of sympathy for the way the music business screwed her over. As I discovered bouncing around the internet, that seems pretty on-brand for Forbert.

One Hit No More, No. 96: Tom Johnston, A Doobie Ducks Out Mid-Toke

Not flattering, but definitely rock 'n' roll.

The Hit
“Savannah Nights” open with bare-naked percussion - bongos (I think), definitely a snare, some quick taps on a hi-hat (toms?) - until a percussive rhythm guitar comes in, then horns, then a full standard rock ensemble takes over and it’s off to the races. When the vocals start, you’re pretty sure you know that voice…

…and, if you’re a fan of 1970s Bay Area rock, you do. Shit, how do I approach this one?

The Rest of the Story
“It’s not what I grew up doing and where I came from. So I just said, ‘You know, go ahead and do your thing. That’s cool. I’m gonna go do mine.’ That’s kind of where I left it until such time.”

That’s Tom Johnston, founder, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter for the Doobie Brothers talking about his bad luck, yet brief departure from the band that made him pretty damn famous. And that’s the rub with this chapter of the One Hit No More series: whenever someone talks to Johnston, pretty much all they talk about is the Doobie Brothers. Johnston more or less backed into his solo career and it didn’t last that long, at least not on the studio side. He recorded just two albums - 1979’s Everything You’ve Heard Is True and 1981’s Still Feels Good - and I’ve already covered half the story of his solo career with that one quote.

Talking about the rest of it requires talking about the Doobie Brothers, but I can only do that for so long without going against the animating presence of this series - i.e., learning and writing about one-hit wonders. “Savannah Nights” was Johnston’s one hit as a solo artist - and that only reached No. 34 on the Billboard (in 1980, for the record). That’s not to say the Doobies charted high or often - they didn’t, not for all the materail they put out - but they have legacy (e.g., “China Grove,” “Listen to the Music,” and “Long Train Running”) that stretches toward iconic, if mostly for their era (I know; the Doobies 2.0 had some hits of their own). They also have the kind of longevity that most bands can only dream of. As such, this post covers only how he got started and how his solo career came about, because it’s pretty much all Doobies on either side of that.

One Hit No More, No. 95: The Buggles, Seeing the Future in Novels

A visual of the production equipment.

The Hit
MTV didn’t have to think too hard about the first video it aired for its August 1, 1981, launch; the song they chose even handed them a gauntlet to throw down. Released over a year earlier (January 1980), The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” had already topped the charts in 16 countries, giving it title/tune recognition for plenty of people across the Western world. Perhaps even more fittingly, everything about it screamed, “FUTURE.”

With all the bells ‘n’ whistles in its production, Trevor Horn, one of the song’s three co-authors, once estimated that it would take 26 musicians to recreate live. You have to listen real close to hear that; I mostly get the piano, the (theme-appropriate) compression on the vocals, a couple layers of keys, plus the usual accoutrements of your modern (or even post-modern) rock band, aka, the rhythm section; call in a couple back-up singers, and you’d feel like you’ve got it…then again, it goes without saying that some kid with sufficient motivation could recreate the same song on a modern laptop with the right software (and maybe top-line audio equipment). That only increases the “wow-factor” of Horn, guitarist named Bruce Woolley and keyboardist Geoffrey Downes pulling all that together with pre-1980 technology - i.e., before the Commodore 64 was even a glimmer in the consumer computer market’s eye.

Hearing a song that future-drenched reference “tuning into” someone one 1952 a wireless goes a little way to helping place it in time; it feels like the further back you go, the futurists of the time seem to have bigger, brighter, even happier dreams. (while those of us living in the future they imagined know it ain’t all it’s cut out to be). The Buggles composed a nice, bouncy, trebly tune around all that, with a chorus you can sing along to for days, and it parks in your head like any good pop-tune should. That belies the lightly dystopian theme, of course, something inspired by something Horn and Woolley had been reading:

“It was a nod towards technology. Trevor and Bruce were the other two writers of the song, and came up with the initial ideas. They had been reading some very obscure science fiction novels, and then I came in and did all the orchestrations and the intro, the bridge section. Once we got it into that shape, we felt it had some potential, and that was it. It just came about like that.”

That’s Downes describing the song’s creative arc. And, based on what I’ve read, that’s a fair description of the timing. And now…

One Hit No More, No. 94: Get the (Arguably Over-Maligned) Knack

In all her glory. (I'm pretty sure.)

The Hit
“It seemed to us that there’s nothing more natural for a rock song than a teenage guy singing about trying to screw a teenage girl.”

And hold that thought. The Knack’s debut album, Get the Knack, went gold in just 13 days - a record at the time, and it’s too much damn work to figure whether that’s still a record - and it sold six million copies within seven weeks. Their label, Capitol Records, held the release of the album’s famous single for two weeks, but all the radio stations that received copies of Get the Knack picked out “My Sharona” almost immediately and without any prompting. Radio built it, in other words, and real damn fast.

For just about everyone except the young fans in Los Angeles who caught their shows at Whiskey and the Troubadour, The Knack’s monster hit came out of nowhere. It’s a funny song when you listen to it closely - even more so when you hear members of the band breakdown their parts in it, as drummer Bruce Gary does in a short video shot in 2004, and the rest of the members did across a three-part video titled, The Knack - About My Sharona (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). It started when backing guitarist/vocalist, Berton Averre, played the famous guitar riff out of the blue at a rehearsal; sooner or later, he slapped out the drum figure on his knees for The Knack’s front-man, Doug Fieger, one borrowed from Smokey Robinson’s “Going to a Go-Go,” and they passed it off to Gary who made it heavier with some things he carried over from playing in surf-rock bands (e.g., the stutter on the floor and high tom beats). With Prescott Niles’ bass line following the drums in something close to lock-step (until the pre-chorus), all the instruments work to amplify the rhythm: it has melodic elements, of course, but “My Sharona” is a remarkably rhythm-driven song.

Among the young fans who noticed was a young woman named (yes) Sharona Alperin, then 17-years-old and part of an informal fan group that members of the band called The Knackettes. Fieger had a massive crush on her and acknowledges her as his muse for the single…so that’s a 27-year-old man singing about screwing a teenage girl, for those doing the math at home. As Alperin recounts in one part of the About My Sharona doc, the band played it for her one night. She doesn’t mention loving the attention or hating it; as much anything, she talks about it like something she had to take in.

Sharona Alperin was selling real estate when that mini-doc came out. And, according to Fieger’s interview with Classicbands, she was damn good at it. And she and Fieger did get together, but, in keeping with the song, it was more a rush of lust than forever (I kid, I kid. I don't know how long they lasted).