Classic, era-defining HIT songs that weren't such big hits

Cafe Society
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The other day I happened to be surfing around wikipedia (yeah, I was real bored) and began looking at the page for the U2 discography. I was more than a little surprised to see that some of U2’s signature songs were apparently not all that popular hits when they came out.

According to the singles discography chart, the song “New Year’s Day” only got as far as #53 on Billboard’s music chart, not even in the top 40! “Two Hearts Beat as One” didn’t even crack the top 100! Meanwhile, the songs “Gloria”, “I Will Follow” and even “Sunday Bloody Sunday” aren’t even listed as having charted at all.

Mind you, I am no kid who discovered the band years after they had been established as a classic rock staple. I was an adolescent / teen in the early 80s when U2 were still a band on the rise. I was a little too young to be into college radio or alternative culture (which was just beginning at that time), but definitely old enough to buy records and discuss bands with my friends. I remember U2 as being enormously popular; my brothers and I played the “War” Lp incessantly in our basement and one of my first concerts was seeing U2 at Buffalo’s Shea’s Theater. True, this was no stadium, but the auditorium was PACKED! I remember “Sunday Bloody Sunday” getting a whole lot of airplay on the radio. Had you asked me in 1983 how far up the Billboard chart “New Year’s Day” got, I would have guessed it was a number one hit. Thus, it was kind of a shock to see that they were apparently not a huge hit-maker at the time.

I scanned the discographies of a few other contemporary bands I used to love - I wasn’t too surprised that the Talking Heads discography wasn’t exactly littered with top 40 hits, but I was surprised that “Once in a Lifetime” is listed as only getting as high as #101 on Billboard. Again, I can remember the video for that being played constantly on MTV. I was slightly taken aback that “Roxanne” by the Police only got as high as #32. I always had that in mind as a #1 hit as well. And Peter Gabriel did not have a single top 40 hit before “Sledgehammer”; not “Solisbury Hill”, not “Games Without Frontiers”, not “Shock the Monkey.”

Anyway, I was just wondering if anybody else had this same experience; pop music you remember from your youth that wasn’t nearly as commercially successful as you remembered it to be. Or in other words, songs that are nowadays considered era-defining classics (song that are ALWAYS referenced in any type of nostalgic look-back at the period it hailed from) that were not as big hits as you remembered them.

And for the purpose of this thread, I want to limit to songs that were released as chart singles, not popular songs that were album cuts. Everybody knows, for example, that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was never released as a single, so it doesn’t count for this thread.

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“The Weight” by the Band only hit #63.

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The Grateful Dead only had one single, “A Touch of Grey” (aka, I Will Survive) chart higher than #64.

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Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” peaked at #65. The Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” reached only one slot higher.

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Isn’t the overlap between popular and important/influential tenuous at best?

I think The Ramones had few if any true hits.

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But “Stairway to Heaven” is exactly the poster child for this thread. It was never released as a single because of its length; FM stations played it anyway. (Heck, FM stations would play the full-length version of “Autobahn.”) Today it would count as a hit because airplays are factored in, but back then only sales counted. That’s why so many other classic rock songs don’t reflect their status in terms of single sales. Groups aimed their songs at an album audience. CSNY pumped out a string of #1 albums that defined the time and never had a top ten single until 1977. By the 1970s, the album market and the singles market went in different directions. Sometimes a song would do well in both formats, often not.

Lots of songs that became famous on early MTV had the same fate. Their videos got played to death, but they weren’t hitting the audience for singles. And MTV was very slow to play some music that was selling in huge numbers. Two different worlds.

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The chart popularity of singles is as much determined by radio airplay as it is by sales and in 1967, when “Purple Haze” was released, radio was lot different than it was now or even in the 80s. For one thing, AM was still by far the dominant band. For the purpose of determining the airplay component of the Hot 100 charts, the stations surveyed usually had Top 40 formats. Then as now, Top 40 radio is very regimented and formulaic and avoids any songs that are considered too hard-edged and outside the general pop cultural mean. “Purple Haze” was too abrasive and “out there” to achieve more than marginal popularity on the Top 100 singles charts. Where it and songs like it thrived was on FM radio stations which, because they had fewer listeners and were not as rigidly formatted, were more free form and willing to take chances playing music that was considered “outside the mainstream” for one reason or another (e.g., too harsh, too experimental, too controversial, and-especially-too long).

Soon afterward, of course, the mainstream caught up with the music and proceeded to format the hell out of it.

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Rush’s only Top 40 American single was a by now largely forgotten 1982 song called “New World Man”. “Tom Sawyer” and “The Spirit of Radio” bubbled under and peaked in the 40s.

One of my favorite songs from my teen years, Billy Thorpe’s “Children of the Sun”, peaked at #41; so did Styx’ “Sing For The Day”.

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Which leads to a great pub quiz question: Who had a UK top 10 hit with “Stairway to Heaven?”

Rolf Harris. Number 7 in 1993.

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Billboard charts didn’t exist in the thirties, but based on the number of surviving records I’d say that Happy Days Are Here Again was not a big hit when it first came out. It became an era-defining song because FDR used it as his campaign song, and it was kept alive because the Democratic Party played it at every convention until Clinton changed it to Don’t Stop in 1992.

Similarly, recordings of Charleston aren’t as common as one might expect based on its cultural impact. It was a very influential piece of music, in that it introduced a rhythm that was used by many composers and performers through the twenties. For example, Sweet Georgia Brown, Five Foot Two (Eyes of Blue) and Yes Sir! That’s My Baby all use the Charleston rhythm. And, of course, there’s the dance that goes along with it. But there really weren’t many records made of Charleston.

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I guess this thread is my cue to point out that Chuck Berry had just one #1 single:

My Ding-a-Ling.
mmm

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As another poster hinted at, the divide between AM Top 40 radio and FM AOR (album-oriented rock) and its predecessor, true “underground” rock was profound and absolute.

AM Top 40 considered singles only, and until the advent of the Soundscan system (sometime in the 90s, I believe), the actual sales of singles in the US was determined by polling a few representative retailers. In other words, as much guesswork as science.

The ratio of this figure to radio airplay in determining chart position varied over the years too. The bottom line is a song could receive heavy airplay on an FM AOR station (whether it was released as a single or not) but be a non-entity on the AM charts.

This situation obtained I would say until sometime in the 90s, when the whole concept of a “single” was pretty much abandoned. At the same time, the charts became more fragmented, to the point where I could begin to sort it all out now even if I cared to (which I most certainly don’t).
As far as nominations for this thread, you can go all the way back to the quintessential doo-wop song, “In the Still of the Nite” by The Five Satins, which only reached #24 in 1956.

Flash forward to 1980, and The Romantics’ ubiquitous “What I Like About You” only charted at #49. This song is an example of one that reached greater renown after the fact, after being used in a Budweiser commercial and becoming a staple of between-innings music at baseball games.

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Here I thought it was Neil Sedaka (who did have an early Sixties tune by that name)

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That may be true. I think that’s not as important as the number of copies of sheet music that it sold.

You have to look at the era. Most popular music came out of New York, either from Tin Pan Alley or from Broadway musicals, revues, operettas, and other performance pieces. There was no radio to speak of. Lots of people had records and record players, but the dominant form of social music was playing live on a piano or any other instruments handy. That required sheet music, which was by far the most important way music was spread.

The Charleston was introduced as a dance in April 1923 in *Liza *and boomed when a song of that title was included in the October 1923 Broadway musical Runnin’ Wild. Runnin’ Wild was an all-black musical, an oddity for the period, and got a lot of attention. It wasn’t just that the beat was used for other songs; the title was taken over into a multitude of knock-offs, much like The Twist in the early 1960s.

What spread the dance was that every nightclub in America could get the sheet music and play the song. And pretty much every nightclub in America did. It didn’t matter that people didn’t buy a record of the dance. They could play it themselves or go out and hear it every night of the week. And since they went out every night to drink and music brought them in, every speakeasy had at least a small band to drive the flappers into a frenzy. And they all played the Charleston.

It was a totally different musical world than any we are familiar with. It didn’t last that much longer, either. Between radio, talking pictures, the rise of phonographs, and the Depression music was originated through different channels and there was less incentive to go out and spend money dancing at nightclubs. But from what I see, 1923 was the prime year for something like the Charleston happening as a phenomenon.

I can’t find a source for sheet music sales numbers, so if anybody knows of one please post it.

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I was in high school 1979-1983, the era most film makers will signify by putting some new wave on the soundtrack. If you asked me to pick out the one new wave song everyone one would recognize and associate with early 80s, I’d pick Modern English’s I Melt With You. It was inescapable on the radio on album rock and new wave stations. MTV must have played it 10 times a day. Played at every freaking high school dance for the entire year. Every garage band in town played a cover. In 1999, KROQ-FM did a countdown of their most requested songs in station history, and it was #1. Eventually it showed up in a Burger King commercial. And yet, when I looked it up, I found it peaked at #78. Modern English weren’t even a one-hit wonder.

Similarly, once I was arguing with someone that Devo weren’t one-hit wonders. I’d followed them since they were guys in Ohio sending in tapes to Dr. Demento through their more punkish phase to the Freedom of Choice/New Traditionalist era until I lost interest around 1986 or so. Jocko Homo and Mongoloid were huge on Dr. Demento. Album rock stations played Freedom of Choice, Satisfaction, Beautiful World, Girl U Want, Gates of Steel, Through Being Cool, Working in a Coal Mine. I was sure my friend was wrong. So we looked it up. Sure enough, Whip It was their only Top 40 hit (#14) and one of only 3 songs that cracked the top 100 - one of which I’d never heard (Theme From Dr. Detroit)

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Pretty good example. CSN(Y)'s music is emblematic of the Woodstock era (including, of course, their song “Woodstock”), but none of them made the top 10:

Marrakesh Express: #28
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes: #21
Woodstock: #11
Teach Your Children: #16
Ohio: #14
Our House: #30

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Another interesting case: the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. The album itself was a massive hit, taking the top spot on the UK and US album charts for many weeks, but the band did not release any of the songs from the album as singles at the time* (and, thus, none of those songs became “hits”).

    • in 1978, there was a double-sided single release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band / With a Little Help From My Friends” and “A Day in the Life”, which did not crack the top 40 in either the UK or US.
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My brain just exploded.

Slee

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Part of this is that it took MTV a while to saturate the country and become available to everyone. That’s why those chart positions look especially out-of-whack for songs of 1981-1983 vintage.

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I think this is spot-on, especially for the OP’s experience with U2. “New Year’s Day” got played a ton on MTV, as well as the live version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” at Red Rocks. Peter Gabriel? Same thing, at least with “Shock the Monkey.” And as addressed elsewhere, songs like “I Melt With You” were played to the point of oversaturation on MTV … but exposure on MTV didn’t necessarily line up with radio play or sales chart success.

I can’t really explain why, unless it does have to do with the fact that in the early 80s MTV was available in certain areas (making the oft-played videos downright common to folks who could watch the channel, and the songs more likely to be heard on radio stations in those cities), but in other parts of the country that didn’t have access to MTV, they would have not a clue about many of these tunes. Just a thought, to agree with Ellis Aponte Jr, there.