On and On and On and On

In my e-mail interview with John Picard, better known as Mister Zero of the Kings, we covered a lot of topics. (Scroll down  to see ‘em.) Like any writer would, I tried to cut the material down to the best stuff. And like most writers will at one time or another, I looked at the [...]

Look Around, No Disappears

Life is what happens while we’re making other plans. For the Kings, the failure of their second album and the decision to leave Elektra Records put them back on the road in Canada. Years went by, members got day jobs, but they also continued to play and record when opportunities arose. And 29 years after [...]

Lunatics Anonymous

When the Kings and producer Bob Ezrin brewed up “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide” in 1980, they did so in the privacy of the recording studio. Getting it out to the world was the next step. Copies began hitting music director’s desks in the summer of 1980, but it had to hit the right [...]

This Beat Goes On

Few of us who blog do so in a vacuum. The power of Google means in the nearly five-year history (!) of this blog, I’ve heard from several of my subjects—and best of all, none of them came bearing a cease-and-desist order or anything. Hearing from John Picard, better known as Mister Zero of the [...]

A Hope or Half a Chance

Today is One-Hit Wonder Day. I am not sure on what authority, but here it is. We’ve been writing about various one-hit-wonder-related topics for a week now (find ‘em all here). I’m wrapping it up today with this smorgasbord of one-shots.
Clean Living came from western Massachusetts, and was doing country rock up there before country [...]

It’s in the Book

On the subject of one-hit wonders, a reader writes: “It’s too bad the focus of this event is completely on the rock era, because Anton Karas took ‘Third Man Theme’ to #1 for 11 weeks in 1950.” Good point. Let’s do something about it.
The definitive source for the pre-rock era is Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories [...]