Years ago I attended a Bobby Vinton concert with my future wife and her folks. Even though I knew some of Vinton’s hits, I was surprised by how many of his hits I remembered during the course of the concert. I was really impressed by the amount of hits Bobby Vinton had.
Dead on…there’s some sort of black hole that most of the country and soft divorcecore pop got sucked down. 1983 also saw the rise of the second British Invasion and that music was waaaaaay more listener friendly (and still gets played today)
1983 brought forth a freaking tsunami of classic eighties music. The release of Thriller in late 1982 - and, more importantly, "Billie Jean" getting released as the second single in January 1983 - was like a psychological turning point. The second British invasion technically started with Human League in the summer of '82, but 1983 is when it really got going. It took some time for record labels to jump on the bandwagon, sign all these new acts and get the albums recorded and released, kind of like how Nirvana appeared in late 1991 but it wasn't until 1993 that grunge and alternative music really started to dominate.
the label of "one hit wonder" causes a lot of interesting chatter on here, what with US/UK diffs and us loyal CanCon survivors of the 70s to 90s on top 40 radio. as for Suvivor... it's fun to be reminded of stuff I'm mighty darn sure i once knew even if i don't go back to look this up or listen to the 7 other hits
If Wiki is correct, "Touch" wasn't released as anything other than a 12" single in the US, and that restricted its chart status. "Touch" was massive. If it'd gotten a "traditional" single release, 100% it would've made it to #1.
They're kind of the opposite of this thread: a band with a lot of classic songs (if you're a Kiss fan, anyway) that didn't make the top 40.
That's what I remember as well. "Home sweet home' maybe "Smoking in the boys room"......But even that was VIDEO......Motley had tremendous traction on MTV and through the "Rock Press" But as far as radio hits are concerned? Yeah...."Home sweet home' is about all I can think of.
There are a few songs that were really huge but that charted oddly low because they didn't get the "right" single release. I think they refused to issue "Can't Touch This" as a formal single because they wanted to force people to buy the album. And it worked! The surprising thing is that the subsequent 2 singles sold well. You'd think everyone already had them since they all bought the damned album!
It was re-issued when their greatest hits album came out in 1991 and made it to #37. Strangely, the hair metal power ballad might be the group's most enduring legacy. This wasn't the first power ballad per se, but it definitely kicked off a trend when originally released.
It's still crazy "Home Sweet Home" only got to 89 in its original release. That video got wall-to-wall saturation play!
Many '80s classics barely got radio play at all, but are remembered because of the videos, and now get airplay on classic-hits stations as a result. "Once In a Lifetime" by Talking Heads is a prime example.
Yeah, I'm aware of the discrepancy between "video hits" and "record hits", but it still surprises me that "Home Sweet Home" didn't chart higher!
My only Mötley Crüe CD I ever owned was 'Dr FeelGood'...on those days we didn't have cable so the music videos came via commercial TV channels, where every once in a while they showed 1 hour of current top USA hits...that's where I got to know Girls, Girls, Wild Side, Without You, Dr FeelGood, Kickstart My heart, and my late brother's fav 'Don't Go Away Mad'...that fits half a 12 songs GH record ...you can add those songs that I didn't like --early ones-- 'Shout At The DEvil', 'Smokin' in the Boys Room', 'Home Sweet Home,' Etc. EDIT: these were actually played on Mexican radio stations, they were way too popular here, but never came down to do any gig until the Corabi era, that was kind of a dissapointing show for many...but a great one for other friends who were there...20,000 people, sold out! one show only 1994...and you can't pack an arena like that without hits. Mötley Crüe Setlist at Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico City
There's a great episode of Hit Parade that discusses hair metal, and this song in particular. As always, it comes down to Billboard's "rules" and how they decide what's a "hit." And in the Eighties, when MTV was arguably the most dominant "radio station" in America, Billboard did not include video airplay of ANY kind in its tabulations. Now, in most cases, a hugely successful video would lead to demand from Top 40 audiences and radio would jump on the song. (See: Duran Duran, Peter Gabriel, Nirvana...) But Top 40 was mostly resistant to "hard rock" in 1985, and they wouldn't play "Home Sweet Home" at all. (Weirdly, they had played "Smokin In The Boys Room" earlier.... Still one of the Crue's biggest Top 40 hits.) The dam burst with Bon Jovi and "You Give Love A Bad Name," and after that, radio embraced pop metal and hard rock for a good half decade, although there were still some MTV staples they ignored. (Whitesnake's "Still Of The Night," which only reached #79! The very next single, with Top 40 support, went to #1!)
The dam started cracking with Quiet Riot and Def Leppard (not "hair metal," but close enough) in 1983, but Slippery When Wet really brought it down. It did for hair metal what the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack did for disco.
Well sure, but as the podcast argues, those were mostly anomalies. Top 40 still wasn't sold on hard rock. Def Leppard sold 10M of Pyromania but couldn't crack the Top 10 with a single. Van Halen hit #1 with "Jump" (mostly keys, not much guitar) but then "Hot For Teacher" (another huge MTV hit) missed the Top 40 completely. Motley Crue with "Home Sweet Home" fits into this. (Twisted Sister is another one with a giant MTV hit that does well on Top 40, but still met a lot of resistance.) Bon Jovi made it "safe" for Top 40 to fully embrace hair metal. And that's when you start getting #1 singles from Whitesnake, Poison, Warrant, GN'R, and Def Leppard themselves. "Love Bites" going to #1 when "Home Sweet Home" scraped #89 just 3 years earlier is entirely due to a paradigm shift in Top 40 programming. (A couple years later, the Crue goes Top 10 with "Without You," a God-awful power ballad that can't hold HSH's jockstrap, just to prove how dominant hair metal had become.)
so many groups and people explaining all their top 20 hits or top 40 hits of groups. Grassroots about 4 hits Paul Revere and raiders about 5 (they released 40 or 50 45s)
Yes, and it's also on the soundtrack as well. Imagine my surprise when I heard my daughter singing this and she knew all the words !!!
The Grass Roots' "Sooner or Later" from 1971 is being played somewhere in the world probably 3 or 4 times an hour 24 hours a day every day. "Temptation Eyes" probably at least once every couple hours. "Wait A Million Years", "Heaven Knows" and "Two Divided By Love" also pop up pretty frequently. And a few others now and then. As far as more hits than people realize, the Grass Roots had 14 Top 40 hits and 24 total Billboard Hot 100 hits. They are the definitive band for this thread. "Oh, the Grass Roots did that? And that?" "I didn't know that was by the Grass Roots!" "That wasn't the Grass Roots! It was???" Probably the only people who've had those conversations in their lives more often than I have are the people in the band. Drummer Joel Larson says he gets it all the time.
Creed Bratton was in The Grass Roots even within the Dunder Mifflin universe. There's an episode where he shreds on the guitar and talks about it.
Pearl Jam Creed Taylor Dayne (almost all of which were quite good by pop standards) Jefferson Starship/Starship John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band, so forgotten that I made a thread about the band and got most of the generally not-very-agreeable respondents to agree that it's the most forgotten American hit-maker of that era
JC&BBB had 1 US top 10, 1 more US top 20, 1 more US top 30, and 1 more US top 40. So that's a whopping 4 top 40 singles, only 1 of which anyone remembers. That's a "hitmaking" band?
