vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 22, 2013 9:14:39 GMT 1
Right, I’ve done the UK singles, and UK albums; now I can move onto the US singles. (No chance of doing the same for the US albums, I’m afraid, I don’t have the resources to find who spent their time at the US album chart basement...)
The premise of this thread is simple - find out who had the most transient possible Hot 100 chart career. Never clambering above the bottom spot of the Billboard chart. There were other US charts - Variety, Cashbox and Music Vendor/Record World, which were often more reflective of the US market, as they tended to rely more on sales than airplay - but none of them lasted as long as the Hot 100. Plus I don’t have the Variety charts at all...
I’m putting it here as it doesn’t deal with the current charts, more a glance at some obscure acts who have that odd statistical quirk. I’m also putting the youtube videos on a separate post, as otherwise my computer will crash too often; I’m not sure how much discussion these acts will get, the vast, vast majority of them were completely unknown to me before doing this.
As far as I can make it, this is up to date to the end of 2012. And we don’t have to go far to get to the first one. There are over 8,400 charting artists in the States; the first 100 Club member is the 11th, in alphabetical order, to make the 100.
A.B. Skhy (6 December 1969)
Guitarist Denny Geyer had always enjoyed playing the blues. Bit of a problem that he was born in Milwaukee. Nevertheless in 1965 he formed a band called The New Blues with a few schoolmates and acquaintances, including Jim Peterman, who ended up part of The Steve Miller Band. After a few line-up changes Geyer found bassist Jim Marcotte and the group became The AB Skhy Band.
Milwaukee not being a hotbed of bluesrock, the band moved to California, and coalesced around Geyer and Marcotte, with a new keyboardist (Howard Wales, who had an extensive repertoire from touring and sessioning), and Terry Anderson on drums.
After developing a live reputation that impressed even Jimi Hendrix, the band were signed up to MGM in 1968, which funded them an eponymous album. It did not quite take off, perhaps not helped by the choice of single. “Camel Back” was an instrumental, so not quite reflective of the more normal vocal style.
Wales did not stick around for a second album, as he teamed with Jerry Garcia on some of the latter’s side projects. Geyer and Anderson quit, leaving just Marcotte for the follow-up Ramblin’ On, along with seemingly most of The Steve Miller Band (Curley Cooke, a former New Bluesman, had joined SMB and keyboardist Ben Sidran helped out). Given such disintegration it’s perhaps unsurprising that they did not complete their third. Geyer joined The Zydeco Band, Anderson Phil Keaggy’s, Marcotte moved to Washington State and still performs and Wales worked with The Dead as well as continued with his sessionism.
Incidentally, I have no idea why that name, unless it's a take-off of B. B. King, whom the band emulated in live shows.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 22, 2013 9:15:11 GMT 1
A. B. Skhy - Camel Back
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Post by Shireblogger on Jun 22, 2013 20:21:36 GMT 1
Well, this will be absolutely fascinating. But I fear you're right about a possible shortage of comments; I suspect I won't have heard of any of the artistes, unless there is a British act that only just scraped onto Billboard.
As for AB Skhy, I think you have to be in a specific mood and a specific location to enjoy that one. And it is at least 20 years since I was in the mood, nevermind the location.
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Post by Shireblogger on Jun 22, 2013 20:21:49 GMT 1
Well, this will be absolutely fascinating. But I fear you're right about a possible shortage of comments; I suspect I won't have heard of any of the artistes, unless there is a British act that only just scraped onto Billboard.
As for AB Skhy, I think you have to be in a specific mood and a specific location to enjoy that one. And it is at least 20 years since I was in the mood, nevermind the location.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 23, 2013 9:46:03 GMT 1
Well, this will be absolutely fascinating. But I fear you're right about a possible shortage of comments; I suspect I won't have heard of any of the artistes, unless there is a British act that only just scraped onto Billboard. I think I could say I had heard of six of the acts before doing this, and two were British (and one Australian). One of them though came as a total surprise; I would have thought she (clue there) would have had a lot more success Stateside. And one entry is British but I had never heard of the group, although as it turned out its members were no chart strangers. As for AB Skhy, I think you have to be in a specific mood and a specific location to enjoy that one. And it is at least 20 years since I was in the mood, nevermind the location. I am wondering whether hallucinogenic substances might have been of some assistance as well. Think it's better with videos first, incidentally, so here's the next.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 23, 2013 9:48:45 GMT 1
Alpha Rev (15 May 2010)
Casey McPherson has known his fair share of tragedy. Both of his parents committed suicide, for example. Music was his outlet for frustration, and after the failure of an early band, in 2005 the Texan formed Alpha Rev, named for the first letter of the Greek alphabet and with a nod to revolution and revolving, half-Latin, half-Greek. A new beginning to turn the world.
“New Morning” is the title track to their second album, and their major label debut after debut The Greatest Thing I’ve Ever Learned was given a limited, local, independent release. The single received heavy rotation on VH1, thanks in part to a video directed by Mark Pellington (The Mothman Prophecies), but the saturation did not help sales much; the album snuck into the album charts at number 195, the same week as the single even more snuck onto the singles listing.
At the time of the album the other Alpha Revs were Derek Dunivan (guitar), Tommy Roalson (drums), Dave Wiley (cello), Alex Dunlap (bass), Brian Lewis Batch (violin) and Derek Morris (keyboards). By the time that follow-up album Bloom came out this March, three out of the seven had moved on, with McPherson, Dunlap, Batch and Wiley of the original line-up still on board; McPherson’s view is Alpha Rev is more a loose collective than a band. Roalson and Morris have since performed together on an album by Karen Chisholm and separately on other LPs, Dunivan (a southpaw guitarist) has also done session work for a whole bunch of acts, as well as tour with ex-New York Doll Sylvain Sylvain, and is one of the better-regarded producers on the Houston scene.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 24, 2013 19:16:38 GMT 1
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 24, 2013 19:19:10 GMT 1
Vicki Anderson (8 April 1967)Remember Carleen Anderson? Ex of The Young Disciples? She came from a musical family, stepfather being Bobby Byrd of The Famous Flames, and mother being Vicki Anderson. Whose sole taste of chart credit came in a duet with James Brown. Brown himself claimed in his autobiography that Vicki Anderson was the best female singer he ever employed, and on the evidence of this single that sweeping claim has some backing. After a couple of failed singles, she joined Brown and the Flames in 1965, remaining on and off until 1972 when she went permanently solo; her most notable recording had come in 1970, “ Message From The Soul Sisters”, some copies of which were printed up under her birth name Myra Barnes, and which has been sampled a couple of dozen times. After a flop single in 1975 - sadly, she never released any albums, other than in collaboration with her husband Byrd - she concentrated on touring and did not cut any more tracks until 1994. She still occasionally performs. Oddly, despite a consistent run of powerful singles, not only did she never make the Billboard singles charts in her own right, she never made the R&B charts either. “Think” did clamber as high as 98 in the Record World charts, but otherwise her chart career is as fleeting as you can imagine - one week at number 100, collaborating with someone else. But here’s a curiosity. Carleen wasn’t Vicki’s only daughter. She had another, Jhelisa, who teamed with The Shamen on a couple of top tens - but, more interestingly and crucially, had a single (“Friendly Pressure”) that peaked at number 75 in the UK in 1995. Amazingly enough, we have a mother-daughter transatlantic chart-bottom pair...
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 25, 2013 19:24:36 GMT 1
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 25, 2013 19:47:59 GMT 1
Pete Antell (8 December 1962)As you all know, the Hot 100 is an amalgam of a number of charts. You need to have a single perform across the board in order to become a success. Twas ever thus. No airplay, no hit. Whereas the other charts in the States took different views. Music Vendor, for example, which became Record World in 1964, took into account jukebox plays, like the Hot 100, until the late sixties; however it seems not to have taken airplay into account. Which means that a number of less accessible records (especially those on the R&B side of things) became bigger hits in Record World than in Billboard. A good example is Pete Antell’s sole hit “Night Time”. Only the barest week in Billboard, whereas in Music Vendor it charted a month earlier and stayed until a week after Billboard deigned to mention it, peaking at a much healthier 65. Cashbox was similarly more generous to Pete; seven weeks in the charts, although peaking down at 87. One of the most successful 100 Clubbers in the other charts. It’s not the only time Antell was stiffed by Billboard. He had previously been a member of the vocal group The Chants (not to be confused with The Chantays, The Chantels, The Chantones or The Chanters, all of whom charted, rather than chanted, in the early sixties), whose “ Respectable” made number 79 in Music Vendor but suffered the agonizing fate of sticking at 101 in Billboard. In fact, New Yorker Peter Antonio's solo career in fact was a bit of an accident; having worked with various songwriting partners and side-projects - The American Twisters, Jay Walker & The Pedestrians, The Percells and so on - he knocked out the "Night Time" demo having spent the day recording someone else, pressed it up and sent it to the burgeoning Cameo label, and was somewhat surprised - and chagrinned - that they released it as was. Nevertheless, even though a follow-up single flopped, as well as a trio of 45s three years later, Mr Antell had a very decent industry career. He founded Survey Music, a publishing/production combine that placed Bob Dylan with Elektra Records, as well as performing with many household names - Fleetwood Mac, Four Seasons, Tony Orlando - on tours, and providing soundtracks for many American television series.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 25, 2013 19:49:05 GMT 1
And if you want to see what the 1964-model Pete Antell looked like:
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 26, 2013 22:25:37 GMT 1
Let's try an experiment then...
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 26, 2013 22:30:17 GMT 1
Brian Auger & The Trinity (10 October 1970) (2 weeks)
Some one hit wonders are much better known than others. Arthur Brown came up with one of the most memorable, The Wiseguys’ hit is more remembered than they are themselves, “Layla”, “Sugar Sugar” and so on. One of the more ambitious one-hit wonders was a group that people probably don’t think of as one-hit wonders; Brian Auger & The Trinity, who credited member Julie Driscoll separately on their exquisite version of Dylan’s “This Wheel’s On Fire”. Later of course updated by Driscoll and number one-ster Adrian Edmondson as the Absolutely Fabulous theme. They did manage to score an album success, but their brand of psychpop had a short populist shelf-life - by the end of the sixties everything had become jaded and somewhat mainstream.
Auger was one of those whose reputation overlies record sales. His first band was The Steampacket, which never had a hit on its own, but split up into a number of hitmakers. The group was formed by Long John Baldry, fresh out of The Hoochie Coochie Men, bringing along with him a couple of HCM alumni, namely Driscoll herself - former manager of The Yardbirds fan club, and brought into singing by their manager Giorgio Gomelsky - and a Scots Londoner called Rod Stewart. After Stewart left in 1966 the band split into various components, with Driscoll, organist Auger and guitarist Vic Briggs sticking together.
At least until after their hit, when Driscoll left for more experimental pastures. Auger thereupon broke up the original Trinity and recruited a new set for his own take on jazz. For the album Befour he tried an experiment with the track “Listen Here”, by having four drummers, with each drummer taking on a specific drum part, Clive Thacker on lead drums, Mickey Waller (regular Trinity sticksman) on cymbal, Barry Reeves on snare and Colin Allen on bass. And David Ambrose and Roger Sutton on bass guitars, with of course Auger on keyboards. They just jammed away in the studio for ten minutes and left it as one take. It became the promo single and buried itself away at the foot of Billboard for a fortnight.
Album done, Auger re-grouped himself as Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, out of which grew The Average White Band. And Auger is still going, still touring, still on the express to oblivion.
Incidentally, there is a more famous, and more successful, British act to come in this list.
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Post by ManicKangaroo on Jun 26, 2013 22:32:48 GMT 1
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 26, 2013 22:35:03 GMT 1
Yes, got it now, many thanks. The preview pane misled me. What do people prefer?
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Post by ManicKangaroo on Jun 26, 2013 22:36:21 GMT 1
It will certainly help with page loading times
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 27, 2013 20:20:04 GMT 1
Let's try it with the next entry as well then.
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 27, 2013 20:21:28 GMT 1
But hang on, what's this?
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 27, 2013 20:24:42 GMT 1
Jimmy Beaumont (25 December 1961) Jimmy Beaumont & The Skyliners (22 March 1975)
A bit of a cheat, this one; a bit Ruthless Rap Assassins-ish. Jimmy Beaumont was, simply, the lead singer of The Skyliners, a doo-wop group who started life out as The Montereys. In 1956, when performing at an Italian social club in Pittsburgh, an A&R scout at ABC spotted them, was taken in particular with Beaumont’s one-off lead vocal, and signed them up. Two years later, following a name change in honour of jazzman Charlie Barnett’s theme song, the scout, Joe Rock, and at 21 scarcely older than the band he was pushing, gave them some lyrics to which Beaumont added his own music, and they all realized pretty quickly they had a hit on their hands. The slight problem was that labels were not interested in “Since I Don’t Have You”, and it was thanks to a small local label, and Rock’s relationships with stations, that he was able to break it through in New York, and thence via Dick Clark nationwide. The Skyliners ended up with a top ten hit in Cashbox (and even topped their R&B charts - the first chart-topper for a white group) and not far short in Billboard and Music Vendor, and gave them a bit of a chart career.
Which ended in litigation and confusion over royalties, and a break-up. Beaumont left and tried a solo career, the biggest result of which was his number 100 hit, a change to a more soulful sound not working chartwise. Original member Jack Taylor brought The Skyliners name back in 1965, with different members, and scored a minor hit with the Doc Pomus-penned “Where The Action Is”; in 1970 Beaumont and other founder members Janet Vogel, Wally Lester and Joe Verscharen got the band back together and recorded an album.
So far, so simple. Beaumont’s solo career qualifying him for this list easily. But in 1975, thanks to a doo-wop revival tour and a strong local push in Pittsburgh, the group made an unexpected return to the charts, this time with Beaumont specifically billed as lead. So should it count for the list? I reckon so, in that Beaumont’s solo career is very different to his Skyliner career. If anything the cheat is the second single, which should really be credited to The Skyliners alone; the line-up has more in common with their 1959-61 chart run than (say) The Drifters’ incarnations over the same period, and only one in common with Beaumont’s Beaumont-centric solo hit. Besides which, Beaumont is not the only solo 100 clubber who had hits as part of a band; we finish off in fact with someone whose name is on a chart-topper.
The melancholic and valedictorian “Where Have They Gone” was a chart swansong for the group. They broke up permanently in 1976 and in the 1990s Beaumont recruited a new set of Skyliners for more revival touring. The song “Since I Don’t Have You” did eventually reach the UK top ten 34 years later, via the unlikely covering source of Guns N’ Roses...
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 27, 2013 20:29:28 GMT 1
^Beaumont in singles guise
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