I loved Nervous Night, their breakthrough album, and thought thir followup, One Way Home, was even better.
But not too many people agreed with me about One Way Home, and they fell off the face of the Earth shortly after that one.
They toured as the opening act for Bryan Adams one year, and they blew Bryan off the stage. Tha twas a band I always thought would be (and should have been) a lot bigger.
I never liked Arthur Lee or Love, but I really liked the Hooters’ cover of “She Comes in Colors.”
Oh, I agree; I don’t use the term literally. I have several bands with two songs on my “One Hit Wonders” playlist. The point is, it is bands that had brief heydays in the eighties and then were never heard from again. Bands like Re-Flex, Wang Chung, Plimsouls, etc.
Of course, Eric Bazlilian wrote Joan Osborne’s hit “One of Us” and Rob Hyman wrote Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” so they’re not waiting tables or driving cabs today. They’re doing all right!
True. Larry Magid, the promoter on the Philly concert, insisted they be on the bill. I liked this nugget from the Live Aid write-up on Wikipedia:
Sadly, putting the band’s name in YouTube yields far more results related to the, er, restaurant.
But it did bring back this memory.
I agree; One Way Home is a great album (that holds up pretty well, IMHO). I listen to it fairly regularly. It’s a very cool mix of Americana and 80s rock production values.
Their first album was an independent release called Amore, I think it was just released in the Philadelphia area. I like it much more than Nervous Night. A few of the Amore tracks made it to Nervous Night, including All You Zombies, but I like the Amore version better. Something about the electronic-y reggae beat in the later version turned me off.
They used to play everywhere they could in those days, including my high school gymnasium. That’s where I first heard and fell in love with And We Danced.
And we did.
They really were a solid band. I still remember hearing “All You Zombies” for the first time and loving it. And I’d completely forgotten about “Johnny B” until this thread… I like that song a lot.
I’ve always wondered if they would’ve had more success if they hadn’t had such a terrible band name. And yes, I know the origin of the name - it’s still a lousy name.
I don’t.
From Wikipedia:
They took their name from a nickname for the melodica,[1] a type of keyboard harmonica which is German in origin and created by Hohner after a friend of Eric Bazilian lent Rob Hyman a Hohner model Piano-36 which was used on their recordings and never returned to the friend.
I saw them at Live Aid and would definitely put them in the top ten performers that day. Many of the groups just couldn’t find a groove but The Hooters rocked (it probably helped having the home field advantage at JFK).
Oh man, I really loved Johnny B when it came out. Haven’t heard it in 25 years, so thanks for the reminder. Doesn’t quite hold up to my memory of it, but it’s solid. And We Danced, of course, is still killer.
I first heard about them from an Australian exchange student who stayed with my family in 1986.
Loved The Hooters. I recall they were under-appreciated and I could never figure it. Even lots of rocker friends were in the dark. “Who?” Oh well.
I don’t know if they intended the double-entendre in the name, but the band came to the scene right about the time in my life (and my classmates’) that “hooters” = “boobs” (giggle). One girl in our class, well-endowed for a 16 year old (actually, well-endowed for a 30 year old) proudly wore her Levis jean jacket every day with a “Hooters” bumper sticker on the back of it. Which naturally prompted regular greetings of “Nice hooters, Kris!” as we walked down the hall in school.
Good times.
Wow I just flashed back to college with that one. Pretty boys with lots of hair, sigh.
Glad to see so many others remember and appreciate the band!
Hooters are one of the few Philadelphia Rock Bands that actually got somewhere, although to hear most Philadelphians (including me) you would think they were never anything but local. Philly produced a lot of underground, oddball stuff in the 80s (think Dead Milkmen) and probably did better on the Hip-Hop & Rap scenes but the Hooters were pretty much the only real success that weren’t one hit wonders. I recall that the city had high hopes for Robert Hazard and the Heroes, but they imploded early on, allegedly because Hazard got drunk and signed a record deal without consulting the rest of the band.
California girl here. Had at least 2 albums on vinyl :eek: and wore them out. Now I must go replace! Awesome group.
…skimming down the thread all the youtube links are marked as “read” which felt kinda strange until I clicked the link and started bopping my head up and down: these are some of my favourite songs. And I didn’t even really know the name of the band who sung them.
I still have One Way Home squirrelled away in my tape collection. One of my favourite albums along with REM’s Life’s Rich Pageant.