Damn, now I want a business card like that!
Isn’t that kind of the definition of popular group? Seasons in the Sun, baby (that would be Terry Jacks.). Shaun Cassidy, Styx, Journey, Foreigner, Supertramp, many more, days gone by and passed now.
Just because the OP reminded me, in the early 80s, I helped tear down the stage after a Nashville hotel ballroom Lisa Welchel presentation, and then stuck around to set up for a Dr. Hook concert. The Dr. Hook crew was much nicer than the Welchel one, and they offered me free concert admittance to boot.
I used to love prog rock, there are a lot of bands I don’t EVER hear any more:
Curve Air (Piece of Mind, or better yet, listen to the whole album while smoking pot, it’s niiiice.)
Renaissance – Running Hard, The Black Flame
I’ll second “Its A Beautiful Day” – check outDon and Deweywith a guest shot with Jerry Garcia.
As kunilou said
Talk about being almost totally forgotten - they still have yet to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Only one of their songs (“Just Like Me”) made it into their Top 500).
However, since the Dave Clark Five did get inducted a few years ago, being snubbed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isn’t nearly such an insult. (No doubt the Archies, Josie and the Pussycats and the Banana Splits will someday meet the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s stringent standards.)
Holy shit. That was 11 years ago, really? Yeah, feeling a bit old.
These are my role models for people of the ilk the OP is referring to. Hot acts for tweens and such for a short while. Cover of Tiger Beat and all that. Then pffft.
(I did see an ad for them a long while back, apparently circa 2000, in the local free paper appearing at one of the smaller clubs in town. Just another group in the list of upcoming acts.)
You can look at the One Direction, Justin Bieber types and just know they are going the way of Hanson and similar acts into the Bay City Rollers Hall of No Fame.
For some inexplicable reason the 4th largest city in the US, Houston, just has one classic rock station (Eagle) and it’s got the preformatted, limited selection playlist mentioned several times in this thread. Thankfully I heard recently that a new, low power station is coming to the NW side that will play what I think they called an “open DJ” format, no set playlist, just whatever classic rock he wants to spin, requests included. I believe they said it’ll be 9 or 10 watts but they’re hoping it’ll become popular enough that it’ll be picked up and rebroadcast via the internet to a more regional audience. I hope this works and that we do indeed experience a revitalization of many of the worderful, overlooked period pieces out there.
Jackson Browne. They might play ‘Load Out’ or ‘Running On Empty’… maybe ‘She’s Got To Be Somebody’s Baby’ when “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” is going to be on TV.
So Many good songs, if even they’d look even a Little deeper into his collected works…
One they Never play; One I called out in concert once and he played… (and Thank You, by the way…!)
I love the idea myself, but unfortunately, I understand why this approach either scares program directors or fails.
I love all kinds of lengthy art-rock songs from the Seventies. But would I play those songs if I were a DJ or program director? Maybe not. People who hate “Satisfaction” usually won’t change the station because they know it will be over in 2 and a half minutes. But if I play a 10 minute Yes or ELP or King Crimson song, some people will get bored and turn the dial.
There are dozens of Zeppelin and Who songs I love besides the chestnuts that get played to death. I think it would be nice to hear “A Legal Matter” instead of “Baba O’Riley” occasionally. But people often switch the channel when they hear an unfamiliar song, even if it’s by an established artist.
Donny & Marie
Leif Garret
Shaun Cassidy
Captain & Tennille
Aw, now you guys got me nostalgic for when I worked College Radio in the early 80s – WJHU, 10 mighty watts of power, on a good day we made it to the other side of Baltimore harbor. Where I learned about Eno and Roxy Music, playlists were completely up to whoever found her/himself in the chair, and midnight-to-5am were entirely freeform resulting in some confused people over at CMJ (College Media Journal, who did the charts for college stations) when we filed airplay reports (our Big Hit of 1983: Understanding Gout, the Remix). Good times…
Neil Sedaka, Helen Reddy, Anne Margaret, Boy George, George Michael, INXS
I hear INXS, Boy George, and George Michael (both as a part of Wham and solo) quite a bit on oldies stations that play 80s stuff. INXS also still gets airplay on “Adult Alternative” formatted stations.
As for Sedaka and Reddy, I hear them a lot less often. I’ve actually heard Sedaka’s early 60s songs more often then his hits from the 70s.
http://kexp.org/ a Seattle station, kinda low power at least compared to the bigger ones, has a full on Dj plays whatever the hell they want format. I personally love it, I love not hearing the same god damned band every 3 hours (I am looking at you Nirvana and 107.7) or the same song 3 times a day. For the most part you can listen to this station for Weeks and the only songs you will hear multiple times are the Dj theme songs for some of their shows (they have 3 hour Dj sets with a set genre each day of the week). You can check them out online.
As for the “they only play one or two songs by famous person X” part, that is a major rule in programmed radio.
In the later part of Wolfman Jack’s career, he had a weekend oldies show. But he could only select songs from a short playlist. The list had something like one Buddy Holly song, two Elvis songs, etc. Most DJs are lucky to have that flexibility.
Why certain really popular at one time groups don’t make the list at all is a good question. Would it kill the programmers to make the list longer???
If you want a recommendation of an oldies online station, my favorite is KISN Good Guys. 50s-70s with a lot of rare stuff.
Funny that I mentioned this, because I did indeed hear the original Supertramp version yesterday.
My brother and his wife were college radio DJs in the late 1980s (in fact, that’s how they met 
) and he would sometimes work the midnight to 6am shift - AS A VOLUNTEER. That’s how much he enjoyed doing it, plus between those hours, FCC regulations didn’t apply, so he could literally play ANYTHING.HE.WANTED. 
He would go through the stacks and pull anything with profanity on the cover, regardless of what it might have sounded like, just to play it. 
When Nirvana hit the big time, I asked him if he ever played stuff from “Bleach”, and he replied that he did, and if a time traveler had come from the fall of 1991 and told him that this band would release an album that would hit #1 in every country in the world that kept a chart and totally turn popular music on its ear, he’d have thought they were nuts.
And I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that DAVE GROHL was actually the heart and soul of that band, and that he would go on to have a long, extremely successful, and largely scandal-free career. As for Krist Novoselic, he’s used his fortune to do his own thing, which I understand has mostly been working in Washington state politics.
p.s. I recently found the CD with this song on it at a rummage sale. In the mid 1990s, my city had a terrific alt-rock station that played this song. Oh, I knew it was heavily programmed, but for a while, it was fabulous.
I knew the format was going to change when it suddenly switched to The Sheryl Crow Channel. I kid you not; for several months, they literally played her for every 3rd or 4th song.
The song is “Black Steel” by Tricky. SFW.
This isn’t a popular music group that gets very little radio play today so much as an entire popular music genre that gets very little radio play today: bubblegum rock (or just “bubblegum”). The term “bubblegum” is now used to describe a large number of artists and music styles but during the late 60s and early 70s it usually referred to inoffensive rock music aimed at pre-teens (especially girls) by fictitious producer-created “groups” of interchangeable studio musicians. I never realized how much bubblegum rock made up the playlist of your typical Top 40 radio station until I listened to the air-check for Chicago’s WLS covering the end of New Year’s Eve 1968and the beginning of New Year’s Day 1969. Yet today, about the only bubblegum rock song you hear oldies stations play is “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies and that’s probably because it was also connected with the “Archie” Saturday morning cartoon show. (On a related note, if an oldies station has to play “Sugar Sugar”, could they occasionally mix things up and play the Wilson Pickett version?)
well, I think they play “Sugar Sugar” because it’s a GREAT HAPPY SONG. I never heard of an Archies cartoon, though I suppose the song had to come from somewhere.
I would add, instrumentals. In general. They seem to be passe.