“Now, I’m gonna play you a medley of my hit.” That’s the way the late Townes Van Zandt would introduce his song “Pancho and Lefty.” It wasn’t even a hit for Townes. It became a hit when Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded their duet. It’s also the way James McMurtry intros his song “Choctaw Bingo,” (always properly citing Townes). These are among the greatest singer-songwriters in America, with loads of quality songs. But they could only chuckle at how they would forever be tied to a single tune.
We’ve been talking a lot about one-hit wonders of late. I don’t really know why. I’m not a Freudian, so I don’t really care. But it’s an intriguing subject, isn’t it? How do you define the phenomenon? How do you explain it? Why has it taken on such a pejorative cast, as if creating a hugely successful song wasn’t a monumental achievement?
One-hit wonders are kind of like those Buffalo Bills football teams who get slammed for making it to four straight Super Bowls without ever winning one of them as if they’re some sort of lower-life form than teams that never even made it to the big game.
You should go beyond the one song you know from these one-hit wonders
So maybe I’m on a bit of a mission to rescue the one-hit wonders. OK – not all of them. Some are genuine novelties, frivolities, or simply downright inexplicabilities. I feel no need to rescue an act like Napoleon XIV, whose Dr. Demento-fueled “They’re Coming to Take Me Away” climbed the charts in the mid-60s. Staff Sergeant Barry Sandler doesn’t need rescuing. His lone hit, “Ballad of the Green Berets” makes it clear that he can rescue himself. (Quirky fact – Both of those songs came out in 1966. Strange year.)
But there are plenty of artists who deserve to be known for more than their lone hit. So what I’m setting out to do here is pick one representative band from each decade – from the 1960s through the 2000s – who deserve better than they have gotten from history. I’m leaving the 2010s out because that’s too recent. Any one of those bands could still crank out another hit tomorrow. Well, I suppose Zach Sobiech can’t, but that’s a sad story for another day.
Today, we’re all about good memories. Obscure perhaps, but good.
1960s – THE SEEDS – PUSHIN’ TOO HARD
The Seeds orbited ’60s protopunk like your stoned cousin who shows up at family functions and always manages to do something to capture your attention. Their hit, “Pushin’ Too Hard,” barely cracked the top 40 in 1966 (of course) and was eventually included in the original Nuggets album – a splendid collection of mid-‘60s garage rock. It came off their self-titled debut album, and another track, “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” barely missed Top 40 status.
Another four albums didn’t yield any other commercial success, and frontman Sky Saxon split the band up in the early ‘70s. He went on to work with other important bands like Dream Syndicate and the Plimsouls, while occasionally reforming the Seeds.
The original Seeds discography is filled with a fabulous array of oddities. From the drugged-out “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” to the Dylanesque “900 Million People Daily,” – from the hillbilly punk of “Falling Off the Edge of My Mind,” to the straight proto-punk of “Out of the Question,” Saxon’s snarl made everything interesting. If Jan Savage didn’t play the most technically proficient guitar, and if Daryl Hopper’s keyboards were all over the map – they were always insistent and usually compelling.
Saxon, who early in his career went by the stage name Little Richie Marsh, could even do a pretty good Little Richard on “Daisy Mae,” or could predict a band like the Dead Milkmen on “Wild Blood.” Today, we mainly think of the Seeds as lo-fi garage rock, but they had tidbits of Britpop and smatterings of psychedelia. They had showmanship. Above all, they had a lot of great songs.
1970s – TEN YEARS AFTER – I’D LOVE TO CHANGE THE WORLD
This is where it gets complicated. If you’re sitting here in the USA, there are a bunch of bands that had a single hit in America, but were huge in the UK. Can I really call Mott the Hoople or Free one-hit wonders? “All the Young Dudes” and “All Right Now” may be the only songs a lot of us in the States ever hear, but they both had several other top ten hits across the pond. The same is true of Thin Lizzy and T. Rex.
I suppose I could have gone with American artists Lou Reed or Warren Zevon since they also each have one song that kind of steals the air from the rest of their prodigious output, but Zevon hated being reminded of ‘Werewolves of London”, and if I start in on Lou Reed, I’ll never shut up. So I’ll go with Alvin Lee and his band Ten Years After.
Rolling Stone magazine regular Paul Evans dismissed TYA as fairly boring, saying about their best album Cricklewood Green that “it’s really only Lee’s guitar that smokes.” As if playing arguably the greatest, fastest blues-rock electric guitar ever was simply a throw-away. If you are a fan of blues guitar – from Jimmy Page to Stevie Ray Vaughan – you need to listen to Alvin Lee.
In the States, TYA’s hit was “I’d Love to Change the World,” which alternates between an Emerson Lake and Palmer psychedelic lyric and Lee’s blistering licks. You can criticize, as Paul Evans does, Lee’s vocals. They are average.
But TYA was never concerned with vocals. The voice was just a supporting instrument, either carrying a melody line on a song like “Working on the Road,” or turning into another percussive instrument, as on the titanic live Woodstock performance of “I’m Going Home,” which opens with a guitar solo that was attempted (and failed) by thousands of would-be shredders over the years. My favorite deeper cut comes from A Space in Time called “Ónce There Was a Time,” a simple mellow bit of delta blues that allows Lee to show off how good he could be even when not playing at light speed.
1980s – DEVO – WHIP IT
If you want to say Devo was just a new wave act that was never quite as good as the Talking Heads, I won’t really push back too hard. But where most non-Talking Heads' new wave acts grew pretty dull pretty fast, Devo remained interesting long after most of those who saw them in 1980 thought they would. That first time for many of us was in 1978, on an episode of Saturday Night Live, when they did a wacky cover of the Stones' “Satisfaction,” and a bewildering mechanical number by the name of “Jocko Homo,” with its refrain “Are we not men – we are Devo.” More than 45 years later I can still remember that.
“Whip It” came out a few years later, on their third album and climbed all the way to 14 in the US. It was their only top-40 hit. (They had more success in New Zealand – those wacky Kiwis!) But those first several albums are filled with punchy new wave. Though Devo sold themselves as mechanical, their music, especially early on, never devolved into the ennui of so much new wave.
“Uncontrollable Urge,” from the first album, bristles with manic energy while “Girl U Want,” which kicked off the “Whip It” album is prototypical new wave pop. “Mongoloid” might be a Ray Davies song if the Kinks grew up in Akron, Ohio, as the Mothersbaugh brothers did. Even as they did grow more and more mechanized after the “Whip It” success, synth songs like “Through Being Cool” and “Faster and Faster” were worthy of attention. True, they weren’t the Talking Heads. They were Devo.
1990s – MARCY PLAYGROUND – SEX AND CANDY
“Sex and Candy” dwarfed everything else Marcy Playground did. It was the second cut off of their debut album and it soared into the top 10 in 1997, becoming a fixture on FM radio. It was a laid-back, mellow jam, carving out different territory from their Minnesota brethren like The Replacements and Husker Du.
The rest of that debut album nibbled around those edges, getting a little sludgier on “Opium” or a little poppier on “Dog and His Master.” Anchored by the one big hit and another minor gem called “Saint Joe on the School Bus,” it has plenty of worthy pop songs.
They followed up the first album with Shapeshifter and no one seemed to care. It drifted away from the cool of “Sex and Candy” into more rock-tinged emo. They basically got swallowed up by too many similar bands, which is unfortunate because Shapeshifter has a lot to offer. “Pigeon Farm” should have been a single.
The poignant “America” is just a beautiful song. By the time MP3 arrived in 2004, frontman John Wozniak was writing harder-edge music which twenty years later, sounds like his best stuff, if also his least known. Marcy hasn’t released an album since 2009, and that was closer to a Wozniak solo effort.
2000s – JIMMY EAT WORLD – THE MIDDLE
Jimmy Eat World’s fourth album, Bleed American, launched the band. The single “The Middle” climbed all the way to number 5 in 2001. It was their first hit, and to date, their only visit into the top 50. Bleed American is a very solid collection of emo-rock, and a lot of listeners have been waiting for the band to get back to that level. They shouldn’t have been waiting, because Jimmy Eat World had already produced an album as good or better than Bleed American two years earlier with Clarity.
Clarity was where original singer Tom Linton ceded primary vocal responsibility to Jim Adkins (though Linton does sing a good rocker, appropriately titled “Rockstar.”) Linton’s higher register placed the music into pop-punkier territory and proved to be an ideal balance to the punk tendencies they began with. Clarity is filled with great songs, from the gentle “Anderson Mesa” to the scorcher “Robot Factory.” There is always a pulse that raises the music above emo ennui.
The band continued to crank out plenty of good tunes with the harder-edge Futures – with titles like “Kill” and “Pain,” and solid rockers like “Nothing Wrong” and the title track. I admit they may be growing a little stale after twenty-plus years, but as recently as 2016, Integrity Blues still had plenty of good – if somewhat toned-down – rockers.
Now, I think I will go listen to Lou Reed’s New York, an album with a half dozen songs as good, or better than, his one hit “Walk on the Wild Side.”