There are bound to be a few; songs you remember, but no one else you talk to have heard of or remember.
For instance, as a kid, I distinctly remember my parents owning the 45 of “Like a Sunday In Salem” by Gene Cotton. My brother and I must have played it so much that we wore the vinyl out.
Yet he doesn’t remember either of them. Not even playing them for him sparked a memory.
Finally, there’s “Girls” by Dwight Twilley. I love this song. Always have. But no one seems to remember it, despite it seemingly having been in heavy rotation on MTV.
You must have a few of your own. Spill them here. See if anyone else remembers them besides you.
When the Blake Edwards movie “10” first came out, there was a novelty-type song that came out to cash in on the whole ‘rating people by their looks’ craze. It was a country-ish (I think) song about a guy in a bar who says a woman there is a 10, but then she starts rating the guy on everything from his shoes to his car outside, and thoroughly humiliates the guy.
I think I heard this song once and have no idea what it was called or how to find it.
Barbara Keith disliked her eponymous 1972 album so much, she returned the advance money and left the music business. The album sold badly and did not reappear online for about 40 years.
I first heard the song A Stone’s Throw Away playing in a record store shortly after the album’s release, but didn’t have the six bucks needed to buy the album. A few weeks later when I decided to buy the album, it was no longer in the stores. I looked for it over the years, but it pretty much disappeared until it finally showed up online in the 2000’s. So I’m confident few remember this one.
A no-hit wonder group called The Smiths tried to break out with 1968’s “Now I Taste the Tears.” Basically country music “my woman left me” lyrics attached to a sad minor key melody, it builds to a surprising (for 1968) finish.
Shortly after that, their label dropped the band, two of the members reformed as “Smith,” they added a strong female lead singer and became a one-hit wonder. NITTT was eventually covered in the 1980s, but I remember this version.
When Hammond and Hazlewood wrote and composed “Gimme Dat Ding,” it was one selection from their musical sequence “Oliver in the Overworld,” which formed part of the British children’s show Little Big Time, hosted by Freddie and the Dreamers; this narrated a surreal story of a little boy seeking the parts to mend his grandfather clock. The lyrics relate to this story, the song being sung by a metronome who has been expelled by the Clockwork King. The “ding” has been stolen from the metronome by the “Undercog”. The original version, as performed by Freddie Garrity, was released on the album Oliver in the Overworld in 1970.
