vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 29, 2013 10:51:11 GMT 1
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 29, 2013 11:00:29 GMT 1
Drake Bell (12 January 2008)Drake & Josh is one of those inexplicably popular zit-coms, written presumably on the basis that pre- and early teens do not have a sense of humour that ranges above the puerile (albeit that applies to e.g. Men Behaving Badly as well). Following on the great British tradition of naming characters after their actors (c.f. Tony Hancock, plus any number of characters played by Sid James and Bernard “Mad Passionate Love” Bresslaw in Carry On films), the less-than-dynamic duo are named for the actors behind them, Josh Peck and Mr Bell. The third wheel in the series is some sort of bratty younger sister character, played by Miranda Cosgrove, whom Disney appear intent on turning into some sort of urbanist pop start. Hence her having a few chartbound hits (and a top ten album). Her first charter was “Leave It All To Me”, the theme to her follow-on series iCarly, which was credited to her “featuring Drake Bell”; perhaps to try to sell the song to an audience more familiar with him than her. It’s actually not a bad single, only spoilt by the extremely evident fact that Cosgrove cannot sing. As it is, that particular single is Bell’s only appearance in the US singles charts, although the album It’s Only Time did significantly more business, peaking at 81. Given that the second promoted track “ Makes Me Happy” made it as high as 45 on the Digital Songs chart, reached 103 on the Bubbling Unders, and shows that, even though the song is not my tasse de thé, he has a great deal more musical ability than Ms Cosgrove, he’s very unlucky to be in The 100 Club. A different weighting of airplay - say, ignoring it entirely - would have seen him score a most palpable hit on his own. Indeed, had it been the lead-off track, perhaps it would have done anyway. As it is, he is currently recording a new album, which would be his third, and so he might manage a proper chart hit on his own.
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vya
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Post by vya on Jun 29, 2013 20:53:49 GMT 1
Very interesting thread, so far, and no doubt to the end, thank you vas.
I do regretfully have to say that "well-deserved obscurity" is more or less what most of the tracks so far warrant, alas...
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 30, 2013 11:16:08 GMT 1
And will apply to most of the rest as well...at least there are some interesting stories about them.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jun 30, 2013 11:20:01 GMT 1
Britny Fox (1 October 1988) (2 weeks)
I wonder just how much payola is still going on with the charts. The turnover at number one throughout the 1970s strikes one as being Muggins’ turn; the collapse from the top spot of repeated singles, which took months to get up there, smack of the publicity tap being shut down once the act could be pitched as a chart-topper and so the single had no further use. And at the bottom of the charts nobody wanted the stigma of a number 100 position. Between 1977 and 1988, not only do we not have any new act join The 100 Club, but we don’t have a single single actually peak at number 100. A similar stigma applies to Cashbox; indeed they went throughout the eighties and the nineties - until the chart’s demise in 1996 - without a 100-ing single.
Britny Fox broke the run in Billboard and never managed to provoke a chart hit outside of “Long Way To Love”. Perhaps it was felt that it wouldn’t be so bad to inflict such an indignity on a band that had already had successful members - the group was formed by two ex-members of Cinderella (Michael Kelly Smith on guitar and Tony Destra on drums), who had already had a top five album; lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist Dean Davidson, who named the group after an alleged 17th century ancestor, had had no such previous, his earlier band World War III never making a chart.
Tragically for the band, Destra was killed in a road accident just as majors were sniffing around signing them up; they recruited Johnny Dee from Waysted*, and with constant bassist Billy Childs they were signed up to Columbia for an eponymous debut that made the US top forty. The Davidson-penned track “Long Way To Love” was their only homeland singles hit, follow-up “Girlschool” becoming their only British singles hit. A typically metallic series of line-up changes later, the band called it a day in 2008. Childs basses for a Led Zep tribute act, Dee is drumming with Doro Pesch’s band, Smith teaches guitar in Pennsylvania and Davidson tried out in various forgotten bands and missed with a solo album in 2007. The others’ careers are evidently more productive than being in BF - Davidson tried to re-unite the band in 2010 with original members, but they weren’t interested...he’s recording another solo album, provisionally titled New York City Night, probably as I type.
* you might never have heard of Waysted, but you will surely have heard their lead vocalist; Fin Muir sang the "Handbags And Gladrags" that was used as the theme to The Office.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 1, 2013 20:58:35 GMT 1
The Carroll Bros. (18 August 1962)They weren’t actually brothers, but at least one was called Carroll (c.f. The Walker Brothers, The Righteous Brothers or The Milltown Brothers). Guitarist Pete Carroll, that is. Who went to a school in Philadelphia with organist Dick Noble, and they decided to form a group together, with three other schoolmates, Jimmy Cicchini (aka Chick) (drums), Kenneth Dorn (sax) and Billy McGraw (bass). And that’s almost all I’ve got on them. They featured in a film with Bo Diddley, Pete Carroll married one of the singers on American Bandstand, but otherwise that seems to be it. At least as far as the pop industry goes - Dorn founded a music publishing company and was heavily involved in teaching music in schools, and Chick’s son is also a drummer, still in the Philly area. So Dorn might have had an indirect influence on a number of musicians, but as a group the Carrolls had no wider impact on the industry, no further bands or records or suchlike. Just one of the thousands of locally-popular groups that did their thing for a while and then disappeared into obscurity. Only, unlike most, the CBs managed to sneak a footnote in history. And by an odd quirk, managed to do so twice. Their one hit single, “Sweet Georgia Brown”, did climb as high as 80 in Music Vendor, but in Cashbox it topped out at 100 as well. Members of two 100 Clubs in one fell swoop. And you know this one without even hearing it. “Sweet Georgia Brown” is the theme tune to the Harlem Globetrotters. The Globetrotters’ version was performed by Brother Bones (And His Shadows), who took it into the top ten in 1948; the Carroll Bros.’ soundalike version following 14 years later. But it’s a good job you don’t need to hear it. Even though it’s out of copyright, those b*st*rd ****stain bloodsucking music-genocidists at Sony have had it barred on youtube. At least you can hear a sample here, but I would suggest not buying it, in protest.
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Post by Shireblogger on Jul 1, 2013 22:23:51 GMT 1
A very mixed bag so far.
I'm quite surprised the 1961 Jimmy Beaumont single didn't do much better. It still sounds jolly pleasant, and would certainly have been in tune with the times 50 years ago.
Vicki Anderson does sound great, but "Think" does rather feel like it was written by chain letter, with no one allowed to see the bit written 4 lines earlier.
And I'm forced to agree that the Drake Bell single isn't a wholly bad slice of 90s pop music, albeit recorded a decade too late.
The rest can justifiably be condemned to the dustbin of music history.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 2, 2013 22:39:12 GMT 1
We haven't reached the nadir yet either...
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 2, 2013 22:43:30 GMT 1
The Castle Sisters (21 July 1962)
Three weeks before the brothers, came the sisters. Unlike the Carrolls, none of them had the surname the record label saddled them with; also unlike the Carrolls, though, they actually were sisters. Backed by Billy Mure, whose band The Trumpeteers had briefly charted in 1959, Audrey, Josie and Joanie Kossol’s brief chart career belies a much more lengthy musical career, which saw them perform as a trio from 1956 all the way until Josie’s death in 2009
The trio - the last three of a 14-sibling brood to a Pittsburgh tailor (there was evidently less in the way of entertainment in the twenties and thirties) - got their break when they won the Arthur Godfrey talent show as The Kossol Sisters; their prize got them a couple of singles released on the early Epic label. However they already sounded ten years too late, and as Joanie, the youngest, had to finish off high school, they took a break from the industry. In 1958, as The Castle Sisters, they went to New York to make their name and changed their style to match the burgeoning girl group sound.
The metamorphosis saw them reach a creative peak, and saw them sign successive record deals, but did not see them gain chart success, so with their ninth single they reverted to maudlin nostalgia and an epithalamic ode to a wedding day. And finally “Goodbye Dad” gave them their one and only Billboard chart week. Poor returns, given that Cashbox and Music Vendor had them at 66 and 78 respectively. Nevertheless, it was just in time; the changes in musical taste and emphasis following the British invasion squished any chance that their follow-ups would ever bother the national lists again.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 3, 2013 8:08:50 GMT 1
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 3, 2013 8:18:13 GMT 1
The Charmettes (23 November 1963)Kenny Young was one of the many songwriters operating out of the Brill Building in the early sixties. He hit particular paydirt with “Under The Boardwalk”, which went top five for The Drifters in 1964, and continued writing and producing some under the radar hits (“Captain Of Your Ship” by Reparata & The Delrons, for example). And in the mid-seventies had an Indian summer of sorts as a co-writer with Australian singer-songwriter Susan Traynor, better known in period as Noosha Fox. It wasn’t the first time he’d worked with her; back in 1963 she was trying out the waters in the United States and often provided uncredited backing vocals. One of the songs on which she appeared was one of Young’s less-heralded hits, “Please Don’t Kiss Me Again”, credited to The Charmettes - a typically anonymous studio creation, but when the song gained a smidgeon of airplay a group had to be found to promote it. Kapp Records recruited a trio of singing nurses - Clara Byrd, Mittie Ponder and Betty Simmonds - to promote it, and they managed to sneak the song into the Hot 100, giving Young his first hit as a songwriter. For the rushed-in trio, though, it was their one and only chart hit; given its comparatively stellar performance in the other charts (24 in R&B, 62 in Cashbox, 66 in Music Vendor; the best Cashbox performance of any Billboard 100 Clubber, the second-best MV performance, and overall the most successful), it seems to be particularly unfair that it did not scramble higher and may have been either an airplay victim or symptomatic of a Billboard bias against the north-east (evident in a few other entries). Two Young-penned follow-ups went nowhere, although the second, “ (Preacher Man) Stop The Wedding” (a FAR better track than PDKMA), became popular in Brazil. Incidentally, there were several groups called The Charmettes, including a group of Kentucky students (one of whom was murdered in 1961), a duo that backed a chap called John Worthan, a trio who recorded in the late fifties and early sixties and backed a chap called John Shur on a comedy twist record, a funk band from the seventies and another one called The Sharmettes. So the sources needed some sifting... The trio that fronted the chart single seem not to have done anything else in music, although there is a suggestion that they re-named themselves The Golden Girls for an abortive mid-eighties comeback.
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Post by Shireblogger on Jul 3, 2013 12:23:09 GMT 1
may have been...symptomatic of a Billboard bias against the north-east (evident in a few other entries That's an interesting thought, which I'd never considered before. However, I think I'm right in saying all 3 publications were based in New York at the time. So, it might be as valid to postulate that Billboard had a better national sample than the other two. Cashbox & MV might have been too biased towards the North East in which they were located, and thus unintentionally pushed records that were popular in the North East too high in their own listings.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 4, 2013 8:27:27 GMT 1
It might be that Billboard was more mainstream, so squished out the more local tracks. Or its airplay policy made a difference - or even it pushed a lot of tracks into specialist charts, perhaps taking different returns samples. But given some of the songs that reached 1 in Cashbox and didn't in Billboard, and vice versa, Cashbox seems to me to be more representative of what people actually liked...
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 4, 2013 8:28:07 GMT 1
deadmau5 featuring Greta Svabo Bech (3 March 2012)
You can wait ages for a 100 Club member and then two come along at once. A week after a charming young chap who will pop along shortly managed to join, Joel Zimmerman, Canadian house producer, did the same. Although in both cases it is perhaps more likely than not that they will shake the monkey off.
deadmau5 shows off a useful example of how divorced the singles and albums charts are from each other. In the Billboard 200, Zimmerman has had a top ten and top fifty cut, whereas singleswise he has the one week at 100 and a bubbling under to his name. We’ve seen the phenomenon with country music stars in the past, and, indeed, the present; there seems to be something rotten in the state of airplay where tracks that people are buying are not being played. Twas ever thus.
This one took its sweet time to enter the chart, having been released in May 2011. However the song was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Dance category, and deadmau5 performed it at the following year’s awards ceremony in mid-February, so the publicity may have seen people looking it out.
So, deadmau5 may get off the list soonish, but perhaps Greta Svabo Bech might not find it so easy, as her current work with Italian producer The Bloody Beetroots has not bothered the charts anywhere. She is however the only Faroe Islands native to have hit the Hot 100 (well, I can’t think of another one OTTOMH), and was plucked from the comparative obscurity of fronting the band Picture Book - basically, the two sons of Kid Creole - when Zimmerman heard her voice via his label, and decided she was the one for “Raise Your Weapon”.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 5, 2013 18:10:16 GMT 1
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 5, 2013 18:11:52 GMT 1
Esthero (28 November 2009)Another one whose sole chart appearance is tacked on the end of someone else’s credit; Jenny-Bea Englishman, who took her nom de disque from a mashup of “Esther [as in book of the Bible] the hero[ine]”, appeared on a track with Timbaland and The Fray to get her US chart week. The Canadian singer gained experience at open mike nights in Toronto as a teenager, which saw her scouted by a music manager, who managed to place her with Warners. Her musical career has been somewhat magpie, with a seven-year collaboration-filled gap between her debut album in 1998 and follow-up Wikked Lil’ Grrrls (look, people of pop, it was funny when Slade did it, but that was 40 years ago now), which featured all sorts, from Gnarls Barkley to Sean Lennon, and then another eight-year collaboration-filled gap for her crowdsourced third Everything Is Expensive. It was one of these collaborations that gave her her one week of chart glory. All this effort has not given her much in the way of chart success; her second and third albums brushed the Heatseekers chart (for artists that have not made the Billboard 200), and last single “Never Gonna Let You Go” got to number 72 in Canada. At least enough people had faith in her to provide pledges to get Everything Is Expensive made, although the $150k option to have your initials tattooed on Esthero’s derriere remains unclaimed.
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 6, 2013 9:26:28 GMT 1
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 6, 2013 9:28:53 GMT 1
The Excels (5 June 1961)
With one doubtful exception, the most obscure band in the list, despite having one of the better tracks on it; the Bronx-based doo-wop group didn’t make any of the other charts and they seem to have left no impact on anyone’s memory. This was the last of their three singles, spread over four years, and each on a different (and independent) label, which gives you an idea of how difficult it was to get into the charts. Especially as you can hear how good in particular lead singer Freddy Orange’s voice was, in an era when you couldn’t rely on autotune, or even (sometimes) second takes.
There had been a delay between the first two singles as three members, Benito Travieso, Raymond Diaz and Harry Hilliard, formed The Minors with Yvonne Lee for a single on the side, before re-joining Orange and Joe Robles for their last two; their charting single was adapted from the musical Showboat. They never seemed to have followed it up, or indeed continued in the industry at all...
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 6, 2013 9:34:57 GMT 1
I can't even find a pic of The Excels, but three of them are on this pic of The Minors:
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Post by vastar iner on Jul 7, 2013 9:28:58 GMT 1
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