Presumably you wouldn’t buy a ticket to their show just to hear that one song. The people who do are the people who like a lot of their songs.
Sugarloaf had a send top ten hit with “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You.”
The Youngbloods only had one hit single (two years after it was originally released), but were releasing acclaimed albums in the meantime.
There’s an old, interesting article written about Fastball after The Way had broken big in 1998. It goes a lot into the economics of the industry and how much money they could expect to make. Obviously, they ended up becoming a stereotypical one hit wonder. But they cut themselves a pretty good deal initially, getting a big advance and having the rights revert to them after only three years. They’re still touring.
I once saw an interview with Linda Perry from 4 Non Blondes. She not only disliked her one hit, but quit the band since it would have to keep making songs like that. But she made bank on that song! She bought a recording studio, launched two labels, and became a proficient songwriter and producer for a number of hits by other artists.
And that’s a key thing about being a OHW: make sure you get the rights to that one hit. Then you can follow your bliss.
A (cool) song, by the way, about the band’s struggles after that first hit.
I just checked, and I think “Truckin’” peaked at 64 in 1971 and to be a hit you’ve got to make it into the top 40 (which seems arbitrary but you gotta draw the line somewhere I guess). The Greatful Dead is one of those bands that’s difficult to classify. To dismiss them as a one hit wonder ignores just how successful they really were as they were raking in hundreds of millions in the 1990s. What makes it even more amazing is that their success came despite having very few hits on the radio. Which is yet another reason why we houldn’t necessarily laugh at one hit wonders.
I like Modest Mouse, but depending on which chart you’re looking at, they’re one hit wonders here in the United States with the only song I’ve ever heard of theirs on the radio being “Float On.”
An co-worker at an old job once told me a story about seeing Golden Earring in the early 70s. He said they played “Radar Love” at least 3 times; at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, and at the end. This was fairly early in their career, but they’d had several #1 hits in the Netherlands, and I have experience in the live music industry which makes me question the veracity of this story. OTOH I wasn’t even alive at this time so maybe non-American bands on their first American tours did this I don’t know.
I probably been to over two thousand concerts in my life starting in 1981 and the majority of my friends are big live music fans some of whom are well into their 70s and have been going to shows for 60 years. Obviously anything can happen but I have never seen or heard of anything like that happening. You are right to be skeptical.
Perhaps the King of all one-hit wonder songs not like anything else on the album was Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas.” I eagerly bought the album to hear more of the fabulous guitar playing. Nope. The rest of the songs were banal pop vocals, sung by Williams, who had about a two-note range. Not worth use as a frisbee.
This obviously varies, jibing with delayed gratification-related personality traits. A real life example that comes to mind is a Pop duo that were briefly nationally huge in the 90’s.
One of the guys bought a house, paid off his debt, invested wisely, and splurged only on building a home studio (a tool for future work). The other lived the big life while it lasted, had nothing left within a couple of years, and now struggles to pay the bills.
My WAG is that statistically speaking, acts that have one hit usually do not have a second one. The intelligent thing to do is to treat it like a one time windfall until you have evidence to the contrary.
I worked my whole career in tech. I got one very nice (not millions but well more than a year’s salary) stock option windfall just before the dotcom insanity. I immediately sold out and banked it. I didn’t buy anything fancy or expect anything more. I was one of about 25% of my co-workers who took that approach. I watch in horror or amusement depending on who it was at the rest of them as they either lost it all or even lost even more significant amounts of money. The arrogance of my co-workers and the disregard of how much luck was involved was absurd.
Remeber Gangnam Style? I believe there will always be one hit wonders, it’s in the nature of music, musicians and the market’s fads and quirks.
A different matter seems to be that the sheer number of songs released every day has grown enormously, and will probably grow even faster now with AI. My guess is that this development will make one hit wonders more frequent and more random. Even very good musicians will get drowned in the cacophony, some who are not particularly brilliant will make it big with a good program, a good technician and the help of the so called social media.
The first (and only) time I heard the Grateful Dead on AM radio before “Touch of Grey” was with “Uncle John’s Band,” released as a single in 1970. It did about as well as “Truckin’” did chart-wise. Interestingly, I heard “Uncle John’s Band” not on a Top 40 rock station but on what was known at the time as a “Middle of the Road” station. I guess the song’s easygoing style appealed to them. (Incidentally, “Goddamn” was cut out of the song for the single, by the record company.)
Katrina and the Waves basically knew they would be one hit wonders while Walking on Sunshine was still a hit. It was very different from the usual music and knew that fans of the song would never accept their “normal” style. The Record Company was in the driver’s seat and not going the direction they wanted.
I’m not sure I ever heard it on the radio, but “Touch of Grey” did fairly well on MTV. The video featured the Dead as skeleton puppets and was fairly memorable. But this is where memory really starts playing some games with me. I could have sworn I saw the video around 1985, but the video was filmed at a Dead concert in 1987, so my memory is obviously faulty. It’s entirely possible I heard it on the radio but just don’t remember. I just watched the video again for the first time in I don’t know how long. It’s a good song.
The Grateful Dead did have a fair amount of radio airplay during the '70s but not on predominantly AM Top 40 radio stations. They were favorites on FM Album-Oriented Rock (AOR) stations whose playlists were filled with songs that weren’t even released as singles let alone making the Top 40. Many of these songs later became part of the Classic Rock Canon.
It reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, so I’m fairly sure it did get a lot of airplay on mainstream rock stations at the time, though you may not remember hearing it then.
I had several friends during that era who were long-time Deadheads, and they were, at that time, a little disdainful of the new fans which that song had attracted, referring to the noob fans as “Greyheads.”
Touch Heads actually and disdainful is a giant understatement.
I plead it being a 30-year-old memory on my part. 