I’m sure it has been done before, but it sounds like a bit of fun – and Lord knows we could use a bit of fun at the moment.
Simple premise: can we find a hatful of examples of famous musical artists who produced little gems long before they were famous? We’ll be needing a link to the gem in question, of course.
I’ll kick off with Neneh Cherry. It says here that she won a Grammy as Best Newcomer in 1990. All well and good, but in 1981 she was fronting Rip Rig + Panic when they produced the awesome Bob Hope Takes Risks. In my (admittedly failing) memory, this was one of the two or three occasions when I walked into a record shop as a song was playing, strode immediately to the counter and said: Get that off the turntable and put it in a bag, please. Here’s the money.
So that’s the idea – a musical gem made long before the artist in question subsequently became famous. What have you got?
Well, I don’t have a single song, but the poster child for albums is “Velvet Underground And Nico”. There’s the famous quote (allegedly by Brian Eno, I don’t know if that’s true) “Only 1000 people bought that album, but everyone of them formed a band”. Velvet Underground never became famous in their lifetime, only after (with a lot of push from Bowie) Lou Reed achieved solo fame.
Seriously? They were quite well known due to the Andy Warhol connection. Not successful, but people knew about them.
The quote was also attached to Big Star.
James Taylor’s first album (for Apple) was overlooked, and Child is the Father to the Man was only moderately successful and was overshadowed by the David Clayton-Thomas monster hits.
Renaissance was a major flop; few have heard of their first album. But that’s kind of a cheat: while the same name, they underwent so many personnel changes that none of the original members was part of them when they succeeded.
Pink Floyd was a weird little cult group before Dark Side. Not a lot of people listened to their first album.
The guitarist in this video was crowned “The Face of 1968” by a British teen magazine and went on to record one of the biggest selling albums of all time: The Herd -I Don’t Want Our Loving To Die
The very first studio recording ever to feature Jaco Pastorius was a funk number called I Can Dig It, Baby by a rather obscure artist named Willie “Little Beaver” Hale.
If Pastorius had hung up his bass and retired from music right there on the spot immediately after recording that track, he would have STILL been one of the greatest bassists ever to play the instrument, based on that recording alone.
Stefani Germanotta - D’yer Maker live at the Bitter End in January, 2006. After naming herself after a Queen song, she recorded her first album one year later and became famous as Lady Gaga.
