Listen Here

It’s One Hit Wonder Day today—a day for celebrating performers who hit the charts but one time and never again. And at this blog we’re celebrating performers who just made it. Earlier this week, we wrote about 13 records that records spent a single week on the Hot 100 in the anchor position and then fell [...]

Can’t Help Lovin’

(Edited to add WNEW.com links.)
It’s One Hit Wonder Week, when we celebrate the mysterious alchemy by which performer meets song meets historical moment and a hit record results, but never happens again. There’s a particularly interesting subset of the one-hit wonders: those who spent a single week at Number 100 in Billboard. Between 1955 and [...]

Backstage Pass

A backstage pass is one of the most sought-after totems in rock—but it’s also one of the more overrated. You expect tables laden with food, liquor flowing freely, and dissipated rock stars cavorting with scantily clad groupies. Maybe that happens with acts like the Stones or Van Halen, but in my experience, backstage is mostly [...]

No Words for Kaiser Bill

I was surprised to note today just how many posts I’ve done over the years about instrumental hits. In various contexts, we’ve discussed “Alley Cat,” “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In),” “Last Date,” “Music to Watch Girls By,” “Summer Samba,” “A Walk in the Black Forest,” “Tracy’s Theme,” “Calcutta,” and others. All of those [...]

This Time It’s for Real

Life ain’t fair. Each of us can think of dozens of songs that should have been big hits but weren’t. I’ve been thinking about one of mine for the last day or so: “Trapped Again” by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, which somehow failed to crack the Hot 100 in the fall of 1978 [...]

Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya

(This is the 900th published post in the history of this blog. If you have read them all, you deserve some kind of award. Or to put it another way: Why?)

We have noted here before that for the first eight or nine months of 1979, disco ruled the Top 40 airwaves, but some of the [...]