I pulled up a video earlier today to show my son: Cult of Personality, by Living Colour. I remember when this song came out. In fact, I saw the band live at the Uptown Lounge in Athens, Ga, just a week or two after this song hit MTV in a big way. These guys were supremely talented. They had charisma. They were handsome. Their lyrics were thoughtful, the bass line rocked its balls off. They had a bit of novelty about them, as there weren’t very many black heavy metal bands out there. And I always thought they should have been much bigger than they ultimately were. (I know, one Grammy and a VMA is far more success than 99% of bands achieve. But ultimately, these guys are remembered as “those black guys with that one song.”)
I always assumed that Dazz Band suffered a bit from bad timing: Let It Whip was awesome, but released about a year or two too late to capitalize on that disco/funk/jazz sound.
Are there bands that you thought should have had far more success than they did?
I saw Ben Harper a few times around 10 years ago. Not really my kind of music but, they were great shows, full of energy, tapped into the college neo-hippy-Rasta stuff. At the time I saw him he had big support from Europe and Australia and Jack Johnson was opening for him. After “Steal My Kisses” I figured he would release a few big albums and be a household name.
Personally, I thought it was the backup singers for Milli Vanilli, the ones who were actually singing the songs. That one record they made won multi platinums, grammys, etc. It seemed like they had all the talent in the world. I believe they tried but their next album never went anywhere.
Happy Rhodes, of course. She does have a worldwide cult following, but so far she’s hardly known outside that following (except to listeners of the radio show Echoes, fans like Neil Gaiman, Cameron Crowe, & Tori Amos, and some Dopers who have cats). I’m incredibly biased, but I’m still very confident that she will get her due one day, in one way or another. It could be 2 years from now, 20 years, 50 years, whatever. Her original music and gorgeous 4-octave voice is all too good to be ignored forever. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
Danny Wilson, named after a Frank Sinatra movie. They had one hit with Mary’s Prayer. It is still one of my favorite pop songs - I could play it 5 times in a row any day.
I saw their second single The Second Summer of Love only once on TV and rediscovered it on youtube recently. How many people ripped off the video played backwards effect?
**Emitt Rhodes. ** He wrote and performed on an album of perfect top-40 hits, but it didn’t catch on and his record company screwed him by insisting on an album every six months and a tour, especially difficult since he wrote all his music and played all the instruments on the album himself. The followup was weak and poorly promoted and he sank from sight.
Spirit. Four great albums, but they were breaking up as they made their last one (with the original lineup), The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus). Plusk, their record label was orphaned: it was a boutique label run by Lou Adler at Columbia. When the album came out, Adler had moved the label to A&M, so Columbia didn’t see much reason to promote it. It’s one of the best albums of all time.
Well, the two bands that typically top the ranks for this question are Badfinger in the UK and Big Star in the U.S.
Badfinger’s Baby Blue just got attention in Breaking Bad’s finale, but the band was signed to Apple and a favorite of McCartney’s, but then got caught up in awful situations with managers, record labels (including Apple - listen to the bittersweet Apple of My Eye), which led to suicides for two members. They had hits but not the chart-toppingly dominant long run people thought they had in them.
Big Star never even had the hits - started by Alex Chilton after singing The Letter for The Box Tops (“get me a ticket for an aeroplane; ain’t got time to take a fast train…”). Their first two albums are held up as power pop perfection to many musicians, but they never got the label support and faded as Chris Bell left the band (dying in a car accident soon after) and Chilton’s grip on things got a bit more tenuous.
There have been a few threads dissecting this. Lauper didn’t pursue world domination the way Madonna did. Lauper has had HUGE success in fits and starts, most recently with Kinky Boots which got her a Tony.
The Kills - full concert in HD She is somewhat known by her association with Jack White but this is her thing. He developed what you might call a unique guitar sound.
Went to see them twice with less than 2,000 people in small venues.
They are known in indie/art circles but that’s it.
Well, we’re all going to be partisans for some band or other. But here’s three from me:
Cowboy Mouth - I have seen - literally (in the word’s true sense) - several thousand bands live and this band functions at the ‘legendary’ level. But other than one medium-sized hit with ‘Jenny Says’ they never got any national exposure. Two reasons in my opinion. First, they were pushing straightforward rock with a country tinge in the 90s modern rock era and second, they were already late-30s or older when they got their attention. While that can be done - Art Alexakis from Everclear is as old as I am and was in his mid-30s when that band broke big - it’s a significant hurdle.
As an aside, to show how things go. I saw Cowboy Mouth teamed up with Barenaked Ladies twice over the course of two years or so. The first show BNL was opening for CM at a club and the second it was the other way around at a University gym. They both made fun of that fact.
Jill Sobule - For my money THE best of the ‘quirky girl’ singer-songwriter types from the 90s. A better songwriter and performer than Tori Amos and more distinctive than Sarah McLachlan and Fiona Apple, Jill got pigeonholed pretty quickly as ‘that chick who sings about being lesbian’ after “I Kissed A Girl” broke big. She’s carved out a career with a fine series of albums, but never hit national, long-term success.
Slade - A blast from the past and one our British contingent will likely be thinking ‘They need to be bigger?’, Slade is one of the all time great bands in the pub band/good time group genres. The songs are well done, written and performed tightly and are catchy. It’s just that they never translated all that well to the United States. But I still own all of their albums - even when I had to buy them on a trip to the UK to get some of them.
One of my all-time favorite albums is “Fun?” by a British band called the Candy Skins. The local college station played tracks from it extensively in the summer of 1993, and honestly, it should have been one of the biggest sellers of that year. EVERY song is spectacular, but it just didn’t get the exposure it deserved.
There’s a band from that era called Dumptruck that should have been huge, but wasn’t.
The 77s. Their 1987 self-titled album on Island Records was supposed to be their big breakthrough, but U2’s The Joshua Tree, also released on Island at about the same time, hit it big and got most of the attention and promotion.
I actually prefer their followup album, Sticks and Stones, which has alternate versions of four songs from the Island record and 10 new songs, most of them gems. (For some reason, the CD version, which has most of the customer reviews, is listed separately on Amazon.) Mahaloth’s recent thread on “albums everybody has heard” made me want to mention Sticks and Stones as an album that should fit that description.
