Last year, in the midst of compiling my “Worst Number One Songs of the Rock Era” series, I began contemplating the sad, sorry fate of those records that have come up just short of the top slot on Billboard’s pop charts. After all, nobody celebrates even the greatest, or biggest-selling, #2 hit as a colossal achievement, the same way even the worst #1 hit ever (“Honey”?) is honored. You don’t see Fred Bronson compiling five editions of The Billboard Book of Number 2 Hits, do you?
Put it this way: “Waiting for a Girl like You” sat at #2 for 10 weeks in 1981, behind a bunch of fat guys doing aerobics. “I Want to Know What Love Is” got to #1 for two weeks in 1985. A quarter-century later, which song is considered Foreigner’s biggest hit?
So, beginning this week we honor some of those great songs that, for whatever reason, never got that Casey Kasem drumroll on American Top 40. And when I say “for whatever reason,” I mean it: Sure, many times a single has simply been blocked by a bigger, better rival, but heaven knows there have been plenty of payola/cocaine/label/radio shenanigans through the years that have kept a deserving song from ascending to glory. As I explored last year, the Top 40 has never been a perfect beast; who knows how many times a single has gotten stuck at #2 because some program director’s girlfriend just adored those cute Osmond boys?
Today we start with five singles that never reached the top during the post-“Rock Around the Clock” 1950s. But first, a brief explanation of my methodology for including records in this survey. Initial choices were based on quality; if one’s first response to a song title is “I can’t believe that didn’t make it to #1,” or if a #2 single seems (in retrospect) infinitely better than the song that screwed it out of the top spot, it’s here. Beyond that, over the course of the survey I’ll feature some singles that topped out at #2 during the latter stages of another song’s extended run in the top spot, figuring things might have been different if it weren’t for some amount of programming inertia at radio. After I identify my picks for each decade, I’ll list some other #2s and open the comments section for debate on who got shafted the worst.
Here we go! (more…)
For a few precious years in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the most communal experience on the pop touring circuit was a family affair. Recording artist-producer Don Dixon and his wife, the singer-songwriter Marti Jones, traversed the nation practically nonstop during those years, giving audiences in rock clubs and small theaters an irresistible two-for-one package: great tunes, of course, and the casual banter of two free – and kindred – spirits who were at the peak of their creative powers and clearly having the time of their lives.
“Those shows at the 9:30 Club were definitely special,” Jones told me last week. “We loved those audiences, because they obviously knew our songs and they were so wonderfully warm to us. We felt like we attracted fans who were a lot like us, so a lot of times it seemed like we were in a roomful of friends. There were a number of places like DC and the 9:30 Club during that time – pockets around the country where we got more airplay and could play larger venues, where we could count on folks showing up who were actual fans of our music. But then there were also times like the show I did at a little club in Detroit, where the marquee said ‘Mary Jones.’ I mean, that’s my grandmother.”
When Gwen and I were choosing among graduate-school options during the spring of 1990, we fretted about the impending student-loan debt only slightly more than we worried about losing the cosmopolitan life we imagined we were living in DC at the time. So it was with a mixture of bemusement and horror that we viewed the University of Pennsylvania’s admissions brochures, which couldn’t get more than a sentence or two into their sales pitch for Philadelphia before noting that the city is “midway between the financial and political capitals of New York and Washington, DC.” Really? Your best selling point is that I can hop on a train and get somewhere else in a hurry? Really? 
Jon: I dunno … Hannah doesn’t seem so awesome to me.
But 10 Things was much more than a showcase for Ledger and Julia Stiles, the co-star who also used the film as a springboard to greater fame and fortune. For all the contrivances of its Shakespearean plot, the film is among the most sensible and believable of the teen genre, full of warm and funny performances from a terrific supporting cast. Grown-ups Larry Miller and Alison Janney get some of the best moments, happily – particularly Miller as an Ob-Gyn so paranoid about his daughters dating that he forces them to “wear the [empathy] belly around the living room” before they leave the house. “Kissing? That’s what you think happens [at the prom]? I’ve got news for you. Kissing isn’t what keeps me up to my elbows in placenta all day long.”
Whether you were a child of the ’60s or (like me) of the ’70s, the Beatles’ perpetual presence on the radio seemed something of a birthright. Every “official” Beatles single between “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “The Long and Winding Road” reached the Billboard Top 40, and for five years after the band’s 1970 breakup all four members were reliable fixtures on AM radio. That omnipresence began to fade in 1975 as John Lennon went into retirement, George Harrison’s hitmaking became hit-or-miss, and Ringo … well, Ringo seemed to lose his mojo right around the time he found producer Arif Mardin.
A couple of funny things happened to Macca on the way to the ’80s, however. Sixteen days into the new decade, he was handcuffed at Tokyo International Airport while trying to smuggle a rather large quantity of weed into the country, and instead of giving him a slap on the hand and looking the other way, Japanese authorities locked him up for nine days and threatened to throw away the key (before eventually relenting). He returned home to find erstwhile bandmate Denny Laine exploiting the event with a single called “Japanese Tears,” and suddenly Paul found himself without a band once again.
Lenny LeBlanc and Pete Carr were high school classmates in Daytona Beach, Fla., whose musical ambitions danced around one another for nearly a decade. LeBlanc led bands in Florida and Cincinnati, while Carr focused on production and eventually settled in Muscle Shoals … zzzzzzzzzzz. For crying out loud, wake me when the backstory’s over! (I told you they had no business naming anything after themselves…) So these two guys finally hooked up and started recording together around 1975, and instead of giving themselves a cool name like one of the bands Carr had produced (Sailcat) or one of LeBlanc’s former groups (Whalefeather), they decided to go by … LeBlanc & Carr. Narcissists! 
My interest was piqued, however, during the extended bout of Beatlemania with which I was afflicted after John Lennon’s death. It was while reading Nicholas Schaffner’s essential book The Beatles Forever that I became obsessed with exploring all the “clues” identified during the “Paul is Dead” hysteria of 1969, including the supposed White Album backward incantations “Paul is dead man, miss him, miss him” (at the end of “I’m So Tired”) and “Turn me on, dead man” (during “Revolution 9”).