The term "one-hit wonder" is usually taken to mean a band or artist who manages to create one good song, and then makes a big hit with it. I remember Stephen Colbert joking one time about Carl Douglas and his huge hit song in 1974, "Kung Fu Fighting". Douglas managed to hit the intersection of two big crazes of that period – disco dancing and kung fu movies – and made one of the biggest hit songs of all time, with 11 million copies sold. Colbert was saying that his album had a lot of other songs on it, and none of the rest of them were about kung fu at all; the way he was saying it implied that they were all quite bad. I cannot say myself that I ever heard anything by Douglas other than his hit song, but he is often cited as a true one-hit wonder.
The American songwriter/producer trio of Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer has been a veritable cauldron of one-hit wonders over the years. They first teamed up in 1963 for the girl-group classic "My Boyfriend's Back" by the Angels. The following year, in the wake of the British Invasion, they decided to reinvent themselves as a band called the Strangeloves and to pretend that they were three brothers who grew up on a sheep farm in Australia. Once they came up with the hit song "I Want Candy" in mid-1965, they were put in the uncomfortable position of having to perform as live artists, so they brought a touring band with them (much as the UARB for July 2011 the Rip Chords had done). The sole album by the Strangeloves includes two other excellent songs that have been widely covered, "Cara-Lin" and "Night Time".
While on tour in Ohio, the Strangeloves discovered a local band led by Rick Zehringer. They brought him back to New York and pieced together Rick's vocals with one of their own melodies, creating yet another hit with "Hang on Sloopy" that was released under the name the McCoys. (That melody was later "sampled" in the cool novelty song "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" by the Royal Guardsmen; the tune was well known enough so that everyone understood the implied lyric "hang on, Snoopy" without its having to be uttered). I later saw Richard Gottehrer's name on recordings by Blondie, and he produced the first two albums by the Go-Go's, Beauty and the Beat and Vacation. With Seymour Stein, he was also the co-founder of Sire Records.
Rick Zehringer later changed his name to Rick Derringer, and he recorded and toured extensively with Johnny Winter and his brother's band, Edgar Winter's White Trash. Rick Derringer had his own one-hit wonder experience in 1973 with his song "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo" (which Johnny Winter had previously covered a few years earlier).
At a later date, Malcolm McLaren – the musical entrepreneur best known for managing the Sex Pistols – assembled the musicians in the band Adam and the Ants (after Adam Ant became a solo artist and also escaped with the band name) with a teenaged Anglo-Burmese singer dubbed Annabella Lwin. (She was discovered by McLaren while singing in the dry cleaners where she worked part-time). As Bow Wow Wow, they also recorded the old Strangeloves song "I Want Candy"; coupled with an early MTV video, this song became a worldwide hit in 1982. Before that, Bow Wow Wow popularized or parodied music pirating (which was then in its infancy) with a notorious cassette-only release called C-30, C-60, C-90, Go! where one side of the cassette was left blank (presumably for recording music from the radio or other sources). I have several albums by this band – which has been a longtime favorite – and do not think of them as a one-hit wonder at all. The band reformed in the 1990's and has released a few more albums.
The article by allmusic on Arlo Guthrie – who suffers not only from the long shadow cast by his legendary father Woody Guthrie, but also by the fear that Huntington's Disease might claim him as it did Woody – opens with: "Is it possible to be a one-hit wonder three times?" The whole idea of course is nonsense. True, Arlo's only Top 40 hit was "City of New Orleans" in 1972, one of the great train songs. Arlo writes most of his own music, though this song was written by Steve Goodman. But Arlo is at least as well known for his 18-minute monologue song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" in 1967; the story is based in fact, and he starred as well in the movie version of Alice's Restaurant. My sister Julie W. Kovasckitz managed to be in the audience one time when he performed that song live; when people start calling out that song as a request at his concerts, Arlo normally demurs and tells the audience that this is what records are for. The third item that allmusic is remembering is "Coming into Los Angeles", which Guthrie performed at Woodstock in 1969. But there is also his novelty "Motorcycle Song" (also from the Alice's Restaurant album), which I saw Arlo perform on Johnny Carson I believe on two occasions.
Arlo Guthrie is of course not a one-hit wonder of any type, but rather someone who has had a long musical career that spawns a hit song once in a while. Judy Collins is another example; she has been recording albums more or less steadily for over 50 years and is still touring (she came through Biloxi just last March). She has scattered several hit songs over this time with Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" in 1968, the gospel standard "Amazing Grace" (sung a capella) in 1971, and the Stephen Sondheim song "Send in the Clowns" in 1975. I am gradually purchasing Collins' catalogue, and her early albums in particular – from the folk music revival of the early 1960's – are truly remarkable, with lovely vocals, sterling guitar, and a real ear for finding good songs.
Linda Ronstadt was quoted at the height of her hit-making period in the 1970's as saying that Judy Collins has the kind of career that she would like to have; and to a large extent, this has become the case: Both women have made albums in a variety of styles and on their own terms, and each has an established fan base that has also changed considerably over the decades.
One of my favorite bands that truly does not deserve the one-hit wonder label is the Minneapolis band the Trashmen. Their 1963 song "Surfin' Bird" is one of my very favorite 1960's songs to this day – and believe me when I tell you that that is saying something! The story is that they were at a gig when drummer Steve Wahrer stopped playing and improvised a growling, spitfire performance of a doo-wop song called "The Bird's the Word" that he had previously heard being performed by a group called the Sorensen Brothers. He then coupled that with a similar performance of another doo-wop song "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" by the Rivingtons – not knowing that "The Bird's the Word" was also originally by that band. A local DJ Bill Diehl who was in the audience encouraged them to record the song, and they later won a Battle of the Bands competition.
The Trashmen were signed by Garrett Records and reached #4 on the charts with this wyld recording. On one of the over-priced but essential Born Bad CD's – also known as Songs the Cramps Taught Us – "Surfin' Bird" is preceded by the original recordings by the Rivingtons of "Mama-Oom-Mow-Mow" and "The Bird's the Word"; both songs were follow-up singles to their biggest hit "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow". It is in that setting that "Surfin' Bird" can best be appreciated: Their song could hardly be more different from these other much slower performances, yet in their own way, this surf rock band is also honoring the doo-wop tradition that formed much of the basis for the surf sound in the first place.
I have never gotten a copy of the hit 45 (or their first album either for that matter), but I did purchase a copy of the Trashmen's second single "Bird Dance Beat" at the time (it reached #30 on the singles charts); the flip side was a car song, "A-Bone" (the only thing surf bands love as much as surfing is cars). It is amazing enough to think of there being a surf band from Minnesota – which is about as far as it is possible to be from an ocean and still be in the United States – never mind one that is so uniformly excellent.
The Trashmen are often lumped in with the garage rock bands since their sound is garagey in nature (they certainly have the name for it also), even though the garage rock era was several years later (1965-1968). Allmusic summed it up well in their article on the band: "Unfairly depicted as a novelty act, the Trashmen were in actuality a top-notch rock & roll combo, enormously popular on the teen club circuit, playing primarily surf music to a landlocked Minnesota audience." They say that the Trashmen only released the one album Surfin' Bird, although I have a copy of a second album Bird Dance Beat that sure looks it could have been a follow-up album (though my copy was obviously much newer than the mid-1960's), along with The Great Lost Trashmen Album. Sundazed Records even put out a 4-CD box set in 1998 called Bird Call!: The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen.
As the legend of the Trashmen grew over the years, it was perhaps inevitable that somebody would create a band called the Trashwomen. Whereas the Trashmen were clean-cut Midwestern teenagers, the Trashwomen were apparently conceived with the term "white trash" in mind: They are all big women who are often decked out in leopard-print costumes. Mike Lucas with the surf revival band Phantom Surfers approached Tina Lucchesi and Dannielle Pimm with the idea of having an all-female band to perform Trashmen songs as the opening act for their band for a 1992 show. Once the two located a guitarist – Elka Zolot – the Trashwomen were born. Zolot was a talented guitarist, but that was not true of the other two: Pimm became the bass player because she happened to own a bass guitar, while Lucchesi became the drummer because she happened to be dating a drummer. They had only 4 weeks to learn how to play their instruments before the show.
The Trashwomen started off as a lark or even a joke, with mean-girl attitude, thrift-store outfits and over-the-top sleaze. But they turned in a great opening set, and the women started getting more requests for shows. The women began practicing weekly and writing their own songs; before long, they had a recording contract in hand. I have their final album, Spend the Night with the Trashwomen, which came out on Estrus Records in 1996. They previously released two other albums and two EP's; the band broke up in 1996 while on tour in Japan. They reportedly reformed in 2008, though I don't know of any further recordings. One curious fact about the Trashwomen: The Internet is littered with song lyrics on just about every singer and rock band you can think of, but I have not been able to find any lyrics out there of the songs by this band, for some reason.
Over the years, all three women have been in a variety of bands, both during and after the Trashwomen period. The three women along with Rusty Quan released a single under the name the Count Backwards; later, without Elka Zolot, the other three were members of the Bobbyteens. Dannielle Pimm was in another purportedly all-girl band called the Brentwoods, though there was actually a man in the band as well. Elka Zolot was in Bitch Fight before the formation of the Trashwomen and was later the guitarist for Eight Ball Scratch. Tina Lucchesi was probably the busiest of the three; besides running Lipstick Records, she was also in several other bands, including Top Ten, the Glamour Pussies, the Deadly Weapons, and AC/DShe.
Those are all just names in a list from what I know, but I do have an album by one of Tina Lucchesi's bands – this time fronting an otherwise male group – called TINA AND THE TOTAL BABES. The "total babes" backing Lucchesi on lead vocals are Johnny O'Halloran (bass), Jacques Wait (guitar), and Travis Ramin (drums); Wait and Ramin also helped out in the studio as the engineer and producer, respectively. O'Halloran and Ramin had previously been in a band called the Short Fuses with Miss Georgia Peach, who provides background vocals for Tina and the Total Babes.
Their only album She's So Tuff came out in 2001 on the Sympathy for the Record Industry label. This album is basically an homage to – or even a send-up of – the kind of female punk and power-pop that was rampant in Los Angeles 20 years earlier. There are mostly original songs here, but there are a few covers as well, such as Holly and the Italians' "Tell that Girl to Shut Up".
Allmusic gives their album four stars (out of five) and states: "The songs themselves are absolutely terrific; the melodramatic 'Tragedy,' which sounds like the Go-Go's covering the Shangri-Las, is alone worth the price of admission; but the presentation and attitude are so equally perfect that She's So Tuff is every bit the equal of the records that inspired it." The campy front cover – with Tina Lucchesi wearing a button showing the album name and stretching a long string of bubble gum from her mouth – is perfect to illustrate the fun that is found on the music within.
Johnny O'Halloran and Travis Ramin were later in a band called Nikki Corvette and the Sting Rays that released an album in 2006; Nikki's earlier band Nikki and the Corvettes released an album on Bomp! Records in 1980 and is one of the groups that Tina and the Total Babes are honoring in their album.
This was one of the first records that I cleaned up after the storm – it was among the first 19 that also included the UARB for May 2010, the Not Quite (see below) – and I used to get funny looks when I mentioned the band name to friends as I was telling them about records that went through Hurricane Katrina that I was now playing. My Trashwomen album was also among the early ones; it was in the third group of 19.
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Flashback: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for May 2010 – the Not Quite.
These guys are really good: As I mentioned in the original article on them, one reviewer called them a "major band"; they definitely took the 1970's psychedelic rock revival in a different direction, and they hung in there for about 17 years. I only have their final album, . . . Or the Beginning, which came out in vinyl only on the Bomp!-affiliated Voxx Records in 1990, and I do hope that I can find some of their other records.
I couldn't find anything by the Not Quite on YouTube, but all is not lost: There is a website on the band that has several songs available for (free) downloading – including some unreleased songs, and one called "This Song Has a Clever Title" (no, that really is the name of the song) from a predecessor band, the Starship Troopers. The one from the album that I have is a lovely cover of a Byrds song that I was not previously familiar with called "Draft Morning". Rather than point you directly to the song, I probably should put in the link for the website as a whole, and then you can navigate your way, on the History of the Band page, to the songs: http://americanentropy.com/music/not_quite/ . When I went there just now, the website was all tangled up with one of those "webrings" on unknown psychedelic music, so it might take you a while to get to the web page itself.