I know they had one hit sometime around 1966, called In The Year 2525, which has been prominently featured in
thread elsewhere as the worst rock’n’roll song of all time.
I always kind of liked the song, don’t know why.
But who were Z. and E.? British or American? What pop or rock genre did they come out of, and whither did they go? Did either of them do anything after that one song?
They are from Lincoln, Nebraska. “In the year 2525” in 1969 was about it. Their last album “Food for the mind” was in 1971.
It’s funny how golden-throated one-hit 1960’s rock acts seem to have come from the Midwest. The Outsiders, of Time Won’t Let Me fame were from Wisconsin, I think. The vocal style of both groups seem to be similar.
I have fond kidhood memories of building plastic model Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury spacecraft while hearing 2525 over the radio. We thought the future was unlimited in those days, and even that song seemed to imply
that the only problems would be adjusting to the wealth
of labor-saving gadgetry that was sure to appear.
While their sole hit was science-fictiony, most of their songs were folk or story songs, like “Fred,” about a misanthrope who finds a suitable home in the army during Vietnam; “Mr Turnkey,” about a prisoner lamenting his sentence for having committed a rape; and “Carry Lynn Javes,” a song of lost love.
(I know this because I have most of their album.)
You can have your very own Zager & Evans In the Year 2525 45rpm vinyl record for about a buck on eBay.
A whole buck!?
I bought that album during the 70’s. It was without a doubt the worst record I ever owned.
For more information on Denny Zager and Rick Evans, check their entry in AMG (All Music Guide) which is one of the great web resources.
I know exactly what you mean. I bought a retrospective album by The Outsiders, because I liked that one song I’d mentioned above, and I couldn’t listen to the rest of the
album. I don’t mean that it was horrible, exactly, just that there was nothing else on the record that was worth
the trouble of getting it out of its folder, putting away
whatever other record was sitting on the turntable, etc…
The sub-title is ‘Exordium & Terminus’ (!)
According to Zager, ‘‘We were looking for uptempo material because most of the stuff we did was ballads. ‘In the Year 2525’ (written in half an hour in 1964 by Evans) was pulled out of the hat and we said, ‘let`s put it on stage.’ I didn’t go nutty over the song because it really wasn’t the style I wanted to do.’’
During the song’s second week at the top, Time ran a story on Zager and Evans. Of ‘In the Year 2525’, the article suggested: ‘‘This futuristic ballad sounds as though it were composed by a computer at the Rand Corporation.’’
From ‘‘The Billboard Book of Number One Hits’’
They never had another single make the Hot 100. Denny Zager explained that he had made up his mind while ITY2525 was a hit that it wasn’t the type of song he wanted to be known for, and had already decided to quit the duo before the record fell off the chart.
Rick is living in Lake Tahoe where he continues to write songs and appear in clubs. Denny has returned to private life.
Thank you all, thank you.
Yet again the protean blob of learning that is the SDMB community proves itself!!
Tit for tat. Do me a favor and elucidate your sig. Remember that all Dopers are not as Stooge-fanatic as you and I. Now, for clarity’s sake, you should have run the whole gamut, like in the Stooge short. IIRC, Curley, the cheese connoisseur par excellence, successively requests Roquefort, Camembert, and - the coup de grâce - Limburger every time Moe offers him plain cheese to bring him back to his senses.
Now the tour de force would be for you to compress all of this in a couple of lines.
Actually I will be revising my sig as soon but I’m not sure at this point what route that’s going to take.