I saw that Ringo was mentioned, but what about the Beatles themselves? The US was really primed for emotional relief from the immediate after effects of the Kennedy assassination and here, for our much-needed amusement, is a funny-looking pop band from Britain, with a guy named <snark> “Ringo”.
“I Want to Hold your Hand” jumped from #43 to #1 in one week, which still holds the record for the biggest jump to #1 in Billboard history.
(Cite, kind of: “Timbaland showed off his cocky side when he said “this song gone top the charts” in his verse on “Give It To Me.” He was right though, as the song, which features Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, jumps all the way from 42 to number 1 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100, thanks to over 240,000 downloads.”)
Yes, there was. The fact that you had an 11-year-old made it seem like a bigger thing to you because 11-year-olds are into youth fantasy series - it’s on their radar and on their parents’ radar. You didn’t seen adults reading the books en masse, late show hosts referencing the series, and mass lining up at midnight until after 9/11.
Found a cite that contradicts (a bit) what I said about about “IWtHYH”:
"Another notable record is the biggest gain to #1 in Hot 100 history. This record has only changed hands twice since the Hot 100 implementation. Up until December 5, 1998, The Beatles held that record with “Can’t Buy Me Love”. The record was set on April 4, 1964, the exact same week when The Beatles had the entire top 5 of the Hot 100 occupied. The record was broken 34 years later when “I’m Your Angel”, a popular duet between superstars R. Kelly and Céline Dion, jumped from 46-1. In 2002, the record was again broken by American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, who posted a massive 52-1 gain with her song “A Moment Like This”. This is an example of how strong commercially released singles sometimes are compared to airplay-only songs: both “A Moment Like This” and “I’m Your Angel” broke the record during a time (1998 to present) when songs could chart based only on the strength of their radio airplay. This is different from pre-1998, when songs could only place on the Hot 100 if they were singles that were commercially buyable in stores.
The airplay and sales combined into a formula that Billboard used to determine the weekly song ranking. This makes the Beatles’ record even more impressive because a very large increase in both weekly sales and weekly radio airplay likely fueled the jump to number one; as opposed to the more recent record-holders, whose songs had been charting based only on strong radio airplay and then received a large jump due only to very strong first-week single sales. Mariah Carey, who tended to score high-peaking Hot 100 singles by selling the singles for incredibly low prices, once released a single that managed to jump from in the low 60’s to #2 in one week, due to massive sales that managed to offset the song’s lackluster radio airplay position. Such shady tactics have caused Billboard to alter their Hot 100 formula several times over the past six years, placing less and less of an emphasis on sales points and more of an emphasis on airplay points. The result is that the songs that place highly on the Hot 100 chart are now more likely than ever to be the same ones that are heard most often on the radio. Some people would argue that this has caused American radio playlists to become stagnant and boring and is also responsible for having depleted the American CD singles market."
I have to disagree with you on that point. If the Ramones had been around ten years earlier (i.e., the mid 60’s), they could’ve gotten a record deal like many of the “garage bands” of the period. In fact, I think they could’ve actually been more successful then they actually were if they had come up during that period since listeners and FM radio were more open to new sounds then. By the time the Ramones actually did put out their first album in 1976, mainstream rock and “the whole FM-AOR genre” had gotten more restrictrive and less open than it had ten years before. It is true the Ramones did have a successful run as a group but compared with the big groups that reguarly filled arenas and sold albums in the millions, they were regarded as cult favorites with a small but loyal fanbase.
I’ve got to disagree. I didn’t begin reading the books until #4, whenever that came out, but I remember 2000 word stories with full color pix in the Washington Post in the 1990s when she came to town. Even then the bookstores in downtown DC had long lines during the work day. That damn thing blew up and it blew up BIG.
Any reasonable analysis of the series’ timeline shows that this is not true. The series took off with Prisoner of Azkaban, which was released in 1999, which was a much less juvenile book than its predecessors. By the time Goblet of Fire was expected, the series had become the phenomenon it is - that was in the summer of 2000.
9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with Harry Potter’s success.
No. I have worked in a library for the entire Harry Potter run. 9/11 was a year after Goblet of Fire, which was bigger than any other book I’ve seen before or since. Since, the sequels have since gone to have bigger release day sales, but the excitement around the 4th one (the first to be published in the US and UK at the same time) was huge.
Despite the fact that the first movie came out in November 2001, which meant of course that it had been in the making well before 9/11. Warner Bros. paid $1.4 million for the movie rights to the first two books…in 1998. And Rowling had enough clout at the time to insist that the movie be made with just English actors.
Was Terry Brooks one of the first people to lay out a massive LoTR clone do you think? It was published a little before my time so I don’t know what the bookshops were looking like then. I’d be interested to know if he was one of the first guys just to write a behemoth fantasy in that style that was successful. I am sure that there must have been loads of rip-off merchants turning this stuff out in the 60s, but maybe they sank without trace?
I agree that the success of the Harry Potter novels had nothing to do with the events of 9/11. I read the first two books in the summer of 1999, after reading about them in the New York Times (and the first one had been on the bestseller list for months already, so if anything I was late to the party). I just found an email I sent to a friend in July 1999 recommending the books (so at least I was the one in our group who read the books first).
Well, look at it this way: Do you have Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets collection? How many of those bands have three songs that you know? How many have Ten? Twenty?
There was very little High Fantasy available at the time. It was a blatant rip off, but it was also well received despite being easily recognized as a Tolkien rip-off.
There were no other such blatant clones at the time. At least other than the parody “Bored of the Rings” from 1969.
I actually have the 4 CD Nuggets set which has quite a few bands. Of those, I would say there are probably about five that have three or more songs I know. The set also includes a lot of one-hit wonders (e.g., The Count Five and Strawberry Alarm Clock) that had like one BIG hit before fading into obscurity. In any case, I don’t know if that’s a fair question since it the answer depends entirely on my own personal knowledge of garage band groups from the 60’s and groups like The Ramones who are from the first generation of punk rock in the 70’s. I’m sure there are many people who couldn’t identify three or more Ramones songs. Likewise, there are people who have encyclopedic knowledge of 60’s garage groups that the rest of this would know nothing about beyond perhaps a particular group’s one hit.
Let’s see … back in the mid-1970s and from then on, I was primarily buying fantasy. You had your Conan, and that spawned a lot of imitators, such as Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee and John Norman.
If you wanted bigger fantasy you had to go back to Eddings’ The Worm Ourobouros, or the Ghormghast trilogy. There really wasn’t all that much out there.
I wish I could check my library, but after I got married in the '90s, my wife and I deaccessorized our combined libraries, much to our later regret (except the Gor novels; those we would have sold on eBay!)
I mentioned Peter Straub and said he was a good writer. But his popularity had a major element of luck. If he had been a good writer in mysteries or westerns or science fiction, he’d have almost certainly remained a semi-successful genre writer. But he happened to be just rising in the horror genre when it exploded.