"Tapestry" and Other Popular Double-Edged Sword Albums.....

as big as that record was, I think it diminshed Carole King's standing....she was a legend songwriter for 10 years before making Tapestry, but that album came to define her....even after following that record with 5-6 solid followups, it's Tapestry that almost everyone thinks of, or cares about...

I think Peter Frampton's double live album did the same....his early work is overlooked, and that live album defines Frampton in rock history....granted he didn't follow that success as well as King, I'm not sure it would have mattered

what other double-edged sword albums are there?

 

Alanis' Jagged Little Pill is perfect for this. That album still sells 2-3 thousand copies on a given week showing up on the catalog top 200 frequently yet each of her followup albums have sold about 1/2 to 1/3 what the previous did. Havoc And Bright Lights has sold something like 60,000 copies since it came out last fall... yet Jagged still seems to sell. People seem to love JLP but not bother with anything else she's done, music listeners want her to eternally be 21 and hating men.

 

Tapestry is probably Caroles best work for Carole. But she is also well know for writing some of the most iconic songs in pop history.

As for Peter, if it wasn't for this album, the common person would probably have never heard of him. So I do agree with that.

 

I don't know that I would call Carole King a legend prior to Tapestry. She was a legend among people like us, of course; but I doubt too many of the millions of fans of the hits she wrote for others were aware of who she was, or even that the same couple wrote all those songs.

 

Even though Carole did have some other hits in the early/mid 70s... it seems like today, people only care about Tapestry. I remember working retail when she had a new cd out in the fall of 2001... one she even went on Oprah to plug. However, this was also right after 9-11 and "You Got A Friend" became one of those post-911 songs everyone was nuts about. Carole's new cd peaked at something like #158 on the chart... yet Tapestry was selling like hotcakes. If more people want your 30 year old album than your brand new one when you have a brand new cd out that you're plugging the hell out of, I think the previous album is a double edged sword.

 

Boston debut, nothing after even came close. The next 2 were fine albums but we're forever stuck with More Than A Feeling.

 

Michael Jackson's follow ups to Thriller were all seen as disappointments since the sales never matched so what I think your going for is when something that's universally embraced by the masses becomes an albatross to follow up....

 

a little different spin on it, but yeah, good example

 

I like a lot of his later music but you are right. No matter what he did after 1983 would always be in the shadows of Thriller. I always wished he had pulled a Springsteen/Prince take on it and just rebelled from the fame and did something different for the followup being fully aware he'd never top that success.

 

Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

Like the other albums mentioned, nothing came close before or after.

 

Even though Mac had some huge success afterwards... I notice this too

I remember being kinda ticked off as a Mac/Stevie fan when Glee decided to do a Rumours episode the exact same week that Stevie dropped "In Your Dreams", her first studio album in ten years.. and while Stevie's album did go top 10, Rumours seemed to get all the attention (and re-entered the album chart at #11 that week) when I felt like of all the weeks out there, it was unfair for her to drop a really strong album and yet all the attention was focused on an album she recorded with a band almost 35 years earlier thanks to Glee.

 

The Bee Gees - Saturday Night Fever.

 

Don McLean's American Pie is definitely an album worth mentioning in this thread. Don did have several other singles including Dreidel, Castles In The Air, Crying, to name a few that did have some success at the time.

 

Mmm....Tango In The Night did pretty well IIRC. Well, it did in Europe anyway.

 

Rumours was like an Albatross around their necks. <Rim Shot>

 

Tusk, Mirage and Tango all did fairly well.. I think what Rockclassics was aiming for was that Rumours has this towering success that to this day people immediately think of that album when they hear the name Fleetwood Mac. Kinda like MJ had a lot of big hits after Thriller but that album still was the album everyone namedrops.

 

diminished her?really?It is one of the best selling albums of all time..spawned half a dozen classic singles and made her a legend.....everyone should be diminished like that

 

yes, diminished....only a relative handful of us know her staggerring amount of great songs, or even her solid post-Tapestry body of work....she is diminished, because when I ask what great song Carole wrote, someone will say "you've got a friend" instead of "will you still love me tomorrow"

she was already a legend before Tapestry....the fact that you say Tapestry made her a legend proves my point

 

All I know is I'd kill for a double-edged sword.

 

I think this one qualifies as a triple-edged sword!

 

It's hard for me to look at these career defining, monster, commercial successes as double-edged swords. I just don't see much downside. Using Carole King as an example, who's to say her records that followed "Tapestry" would have had as much success as they did, if Tapestry hadn't been the success that it was?

More often than not, records that have monumental success are monumentally great records. And as a rule, most artists can not turn out monumentally great records one after another. And the ones that have are rare and even they will eventually exhaust their creativity to a large degree.

 

Its true. You can find 100 people who know "Tapestry", then ask them to name another one of Carole's albums. Maybe 5-10 max might say "Music" or "Wrap Around Joy" or something, but that's about it. To the average consumer, Tapestry is the only thing she ever did that matters.

 

Actually, Carole King wasn't a legend at all before Tapestry. As someone pointed out in an earlier post, prior to 1971 only truly hard-core rock 'n' roll freaks were aware that she had written so many iconic songs in the first half of the 1960s. As the second half of the decade came on, she had measurably fewer such successes. And she had only one medium-sized hit on her own as an artist ("It Might as Well Rain Until September") during all that time.

Her first album as an artist (as a member of the group The City) sank without a trace. Her first album as a solo artist (Writer) charted only after Tapestry became a success (and only made it to #84).

Your statement about "only a relative handful of us know" is true for virtually any artist. There will always be a small number of hard-core, extremely knowledgeable people like those of us who hang out here — and there will always be a far greater number of folks for which music is at most a pleasant diversion rather than a lifelong obsession.

Take the most notable example of all: ask a random sampling of 100 people to name their five favorite Beatles songs. What percentage of them would name a song that was an album cut rather than one of their hit singles? On average, the big hit singles will be the songs "that almost everyone thinks of, or cares about...."

It's easy to forget from the perspective of today — when information is ubiquitous and easily attainable — that decades ago, you had to really work at it if you wanted to attain a deeper knowledge of an artist's career. I can assure you, as an incessant listener to Top 40 radio from 1962 forward, that DJ's did not routinely outro "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" or "The Locomotion" by saying "There's a song written by Carole King."

It was the overwhelming success of Tapestry, in fact, that brought this heretofore largely unknown knowledge to the attention of the general public.

 

But I don't think Houston can be proven wrong. While there are other artists mentioned in this thread like Jackson and Fleetwood who have an album that towers over the rest of their discography in popularity... if you polled 100 "Thriller" or "Rumours" fans to name another MJ or FM album... I'd say at least 50-75% as a conservative amount could name you another album those artists put out (in MJ's case I'd say even a good 80-90% could name Off The Wall, Bad or Dangerous). "Tapestry" to Carole is like "Frampton Comes Alive", an album that practically absorbs the rest of their discography in terms of fame and the pop culture zeitgeist.

 

I understand and agree with the concept of this thread. I'd include Peter Gabriel's So.