Well, OK, technically they could be considered a two hit wonder. But still they really just faded away.
But here’s the thing, they wrote some really great music. And most of it is in the same ‘feel’ as their hits - not as if they had a novelty hit. I know the music business is quirky and fickle but to my ears these guys should have been bigger.
Just in case no one responds to you (I know the feeling), your post reminded me of one of my favorite ‘guitar pop’ bands: Exit. And their album “Scenes from Next Week”. Especially the song “Anyway”. No one’s heard of them, either, except the friend who introduced me to them a decade ago.
Apparently they were able to cut themselves a pretty good deal when selling the rights to The Way, getting an advance of between $1 million and $3 million and having the rights revert to them after only three years. They also negotiated a guaranteed advance for the same amount for their next album, which worked out well for them since their follow up sold only 85,000 records. They’ve also apparently been touring pretty consistently for the last 20+ years, most of the proceeds of which would go to the band.
So regardless of whether or not they should have had more hits, at least the band members probably aren’t hurting financially.
The amazing thing about “Out of My Head” is that it has a sound/vibe that makes it seem older than it is (to me anyway). It sounds like it could be a cover of a song from the 60s or 70s. Same thing goes with Lenny Kravitz’s “It Ain’t Over til it’s Over.” (Both of which are beautiful pop songs, imo).
But, yeah, I was always surprised Fastball didn’t have more radio hits. Their first two seemed really solid.
And here I thought that “Fire Escape” was their second-biggest song. It was big enough, in any case, to be selected for inclusion in one of those grab-bag compilations that you see advertised on television now and again, which is the only reason I downloaded it off of iTunes. Catchy little tune. But the discography on Wikipedia does appear to bear out that “Out of My Head” was a little more successful.
To me, Fastball songs sound like something I’ve heard a couple of dozen times before, in many incarnations over the decades. Like warming up once hot water, but only barely so. Their craftsmanship feels very derivative, very safe.
Love these guys…bought the album when “The Way” hit and have bought every album since.
Says Wikipedia of “The Way”
Fastball frontman Tony Scalzo came up with the idea for the song after reading articles which described the June 1997 disappearance of an elderly married couple, Lela and Raymond Howard from Salado, Texas,[5] who left home to attend the Pioneer Day festival at nearby Temple, Texas, despite Lela’s Alzheimer’s and Raymond recently recovering from brain surgery. They were discovered two weeks later, dead, at the bottom of a ravine near Hot Springs, Arkansas, hundreds of miles off their intended route.[6][7]
Fire Escape got some air play. Creepy video
Here’s a funny one others wouldn’t know.
Here are Miles and Tony, sans Joey, covering a Kinks tune.
Named it that after a porn movie IIRC.
They have a page on Facebook where Miles was performing on Wednesdays…not sure if he still does. Says the band is touring with Squeeze in September.
I like them and have a few of their albums. Their music is well-crafted and sometimes catchy but, admittedly, not particularly ground-breaking or unique in style.
How I felt about “The Way” when it first came out, and how I still feel, is that it was trying to sound like Cake. I mean really, listen to Cake’s “Frank Sinatra”, released two years before “The Way”, and tell me Fastball didn’t copy it.
Now, I liked “The Way”, and I think they did a good job of appropriating the Cake vibe, but the reason why Cake are not a one-hit wonder and Fastball is, is that Cake had a distinctive continuity throughout all their songs while still making them sound different enough to be interesting. Consider, then, “Out Of My Head.” That, too, is a good song IMO and I liked it when it first came out and I still like it. But it sounds like it could be from a completely different band. It doesn’t have ANY of the vibe of “The Way”, not even the faintest vestiges. And so when it came on the radio, I’d guess that 90% of people would never have thought it was the same band.
At a time when the listening public valued consistency over diversity, that seems to me like the reason why Fastball didn’t have more success.
Lots of way more famous bands hate their own name. Pretty much all of the members of Smashing Pumpkins and Arctic Monkeys have expressed their hate of their names, and Dave Grohl has admitted he named the band “Foo Fighters” because of a short-lived obsession with UFOs at the time and he thinks it’s “the stupidest fucking band name in the world.”
The great majority of artists with one or two hits
Just have one or two hits, and
Are extremely talented.
We tend to not think about it that way because of course the FIRST bands you think of are the opnes with many hits. Aerosmith gets a lot more press than Fastball, but Fastball is the common example of a hit making band; Aerosmith is the outlier.
The following artists are all artists with just one or two real hits:
Spin Doctors
Edie Brickell and New Bohemians
Blind Melon
Lisa Loeb
KT Tunstall
Bobby McFerrin
Spacehog
Neneh Cherry
General Public
Stealers Wheel
A-ha
Midnight Oil (probably more than two hits in Australia)
Eddy Grant
This is just off the top of my head, and includes no novelty acts or joke songs; they’re all professional musicians with lots of high quality music. So yeah, Fastball is a good band, but ya know, it’s just how it is.
Pearl Jam, of course, spent months trying to name themselves after Mookie Blaylock, to the distress of the record company, and ended up with a compromise name.
Well, to be fair I never claimed they were ground-breaking. I was listening to other songs by them today I had yet to hear. I stand by my comment that they are very good songwriters.
I realize there are people who don’t appreciate music that is fun or comfortable. If you are looking for cutting edge then maybe Fastball isn’t for you. But of course it’s impossible to listen to them almost 25 years later in context. Listening today, they do sound safe.
But like comfort food, many people respond well to comfortable music. Take the case of the chord progression first made famous by Pachelbel’s Canon in D 300 years ago. Here’s a very short list of popular songs in that progression:
Hook, Blues Traveller
Basket Case, Green Day
Don’t Look Back in Anger, Oasis
Crying’, Aerosmith
Sk8r Boi
Torn
Let It Be
No Woman, No Cry
Take Me Home Country Roads
There are many more.
It’s not a cutting edge progression but all of those song’s artists have made it their own and I like all of those songs.
So different strokes, I guess, but I still think Fastball is better than they get credit for.
