10 Superstar Artists Who Unbelievably Only Had One Really Good Year
If you’re a regular REBEAT reader, you may have noticed that I have a fascination with so-called one-hit wonders, groups who managed to have just one Top 40 hit on the Billboard popular music charts and that was it — “it” generally meaning a subsequent fade into obscurity. My guess is that when you read about those groups you had heard of some of them, but because of their limited footprint, many of them weren’t well known to most readers, even if some of their songs were very big hits.
This week, I thought I’d look at groups who were not one, or even two hit wonders, but who may have had several Top 40 hits, and are probably well-known names to almost anyone who knows anything about music. The catch is that these are groups who, though well-known, had multiple hits and killed it for roughly one year and then… nothing. I’m not suggesting they were bad or totally unproductive after that, but based on charting singles the bulk of their success basically came in one 12-month period (give or take a couple of months). Some of the names on this list may really surprise you.
1) The Ronettes, 1963
I’ll kick this list off with a group so big and so well known that they’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Be that as it may, every single one of their five Top 40 chart hits came in slightly more than a one-year period when “Be My Baby” peaked at #2 for three weeks in October 1963, followed by “Baby I Love You”(#24), “Breakin’ Up”(#39), “Do I Love You?”(#34), and finally in October 1964, when “Walking in the Rain” peaked at #23. Their most notable and well-known hit after that, “I Can Hear Music,” peaked at #100 two years later, and oddly enough it took a Beach Boys’ cover to take that excellent song to the Top 40 (#24) in 1969. Perhaps it bears mentioning here that “Be My Baby” was Brian Wilson’s favorite song, and he had a very high regard for the Ronettes as well. Yet despite their Hall of Fame status and legendary reputation, this is a group who had only one Top 10 hit followed by four midrange chart hits in a little more than one year.
2) The Dixie Cups, 1964
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCcguiMik5M
In terms of their status as an early-’60’s “girl group,” they’re only slightly behind the Ronettes in terms of their critically acclaimed stature. Their first chart hit was the #1 smash “Chapel of Love” in May 1964, followed by “People Say”(#12), “You Should Have Seen the Way He Looked at Me”(#39), “Little Bell”(which didn’t break the Top 40), and the highly underappreciated “Iko Iko”(#20) in April 1965. That was their last pop chart record at any level, Top 40 or otherwise. Nevertheless, their reputation as a front-rank female trio has endured for decades.
3) The McCoys, 1965
By the end of their chart careers, the McCoys had notched a lot of chart records in the Top 100, but almost all of them came in late 1965 and early-to-mid 1966, and all of their Top 40 records fell in an even smaller window. Their very first chart record, “Hang on Sloopy,” hit #1 the fall of 1965, and their next release, “Fever,” entered the charts in November of that year. Their next song, “Up and Down” only made it to #46, followed by “Come On Let’s Go”(#22) in the spring of 1966. Five Top 100 records would follow, but none would make the Top 40.
Oddly enough, McCoys member Rick Derringer (that’s him on guitar and singing lead) would have a similar track record as a solo artist, when “Rock and Roll, Hootchie Koo” would be his only Top 40 hit in 1972, and he would also play with the Edgar Winter Group (see below), another group that had just one good year.
4) The Buckinghams, 1967
In November 2014, I did a two-part interview with Buckinghams lead singer Dennis Tufano, and I have to admit that the idea for this list came from that interview. As we were discussing the group’s success in 1967, a year in which Billboard magazine declared the Buckinghams to be “the most listened to band in America,” we talked at length about how in 1968, the group just fell apart after “one good year.” And so it did.
Nineteen sixty-seven began with their first release, “Kind of a Drag,” racing up the charts and ultimately reaching the #1 position by February where it stayed for two weeks. Their next release, “Lawdy Miss Claudy” barely missed the Top 40 after peaking at #41, but after that the group would have one, two, and sometimes three songs in the Top 100 almost every week that year as they passed each other on the way up and down the charts, including “Don’t You Care” (#6), “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” (#5), “Hey Baby (They’re Playing Our Song)” (#12), and “Susan” (#11), their last Top 40 record. It peaked on December 9th, 1967, and in 1968 they had just one release that charted, and it wouldn’t even break into the Top 40. That was their last chart record of any kind as the original group.
Obviously all of the groups here only had one strong year, but the fact that the Buckinghams had five songs chart in the Top 12 spots and then nothing from then on is an unbelievable and dubious distinction indeed.
5) Brenton Wood, 1967
Maybe the fact that Brenton Wood is on this list is not as amazing as is the case with some of the acts listed above, but in 1967, he was a very hot property. I’m also betting that even if you don’t recognize his name immediately, you probably know some of his songs. “The Oogum Boogum Song” was his first chart hit, and it peaked at #34 in the spring of 1967. “Gimme Little Sign” came next, going to #9, followed by “Baby You Got It,” which also stalled at #34 in late 1967. His next release, and the first of 1968, “Lovey Dovey Kinda Lovin,” died a lonely death on the charts at #99 in March 1968 and that was it. One year, four chart records… then nothing.
6) The Chairmen of the Board, 1970
When Holland, Dozier, and Holland left Motown to form their own record label, they sought out acts with great potential who just hadn’t quite made the big time yet. They chose well because the three biggest names under contract in the Invictus label’s debut year of 1970 were Freda Payne, Parliament, and the Chairmen of the Board. In the case of the Chairman of the Board, led by frontman and former lead of the Showmen General Norman Johnson, they had the most initial success as they scored big right out of the gate with “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” which raced up the charts to #3 in early 1970. Several excellent releases followed, although both “You’ve Got Me Dangling on a String” and “Everything’s Tuesday” stalled at the #38 spot on the charts.
Their last release of 1970, “Pay to the Piper” climbed to #13, and so after four Top 40 chart records in 1970, it would have seemed the group was poised for a promising year in 1971. But if you’ve read this far, you know what’s coming: no more chart records. One release in 1971 just missed making the Top 40, another in 1973 peaked at #59. That was it. Johnson would eventually go solo with little success, then reform the group and target the Carolina Beach music crowd, remaining one of the genre’s biggest acts until his death in 2010.
7) Gilbert O’Sullivan, 1972
To say Gilbert O’Sullivan’s music is not to everyone’s taste may be an understatement. Nevertheless, from the middle of 1972 until the middle of 1973, he was a very successful chart presence in the US. His first hit in the States, and the song for which he is still probably best known today, was the mournful “Alone Again, Naturally,” which went all the way to #1 in 1972. He followed this with “Clair,” which peaked at #2, and in 73 released “Out of the Question”(#17), “Get Down” (#7), and “Ooh Baby”(#25). In a little more than a year, five Top 40 hits, then no more.
To be fair, O’Sullivan was always bigger in Europe than in the US, and overseas he had a string of successful chart hits from 1969 to 1980 and even placed a song on the low end of the British charts in 1990! But to date, he’s had just one big year in the US.
8) The Edgar Winter Group, 1973
It’s probably not really fair to put Edgar Winter on this list (and the same would be true for his brother Johnny), because his reputation and success was far less dependent on big Top 40 chart hits than it was on the fact that he was just a rock star — period. He’s one of those artists, like Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, whose importance and influence aren’t really tied to Top 40 chart success. But in 1973, suddenly Winter and his group had a string of chart hits, starting with the #1 hit “Frankenstein.” “Free Ride” was released in August and rose to #14, followed by “Hangin Around,” which didn’t break the Top 40, then their final Top 40 hit in 1974, “Rivers Rising”(#33). That was it.
Though the group didn’t have any further chart hits, they were always known as an assemblage of exceptional artists, including Rick Derringer (mentioned in the McCoys write-up, above), guitarist extraordinaire Ronnie Montrose, and Dan Hartman (seen singing lead in the video above, and who would also chart as a solo artist in the ’70s with “Instant Replay” and in the ’80s with “I Can Dream About You.”)
9) Shaun Cassidy, 1977
I have to admit it didn’t feel quite right putting teen heartthrob Shaun Cassidy on this list, mainly because he doesn’t have close to the same gravitas as most of the other acts here. Nevertheless, to teenagers in the late 1970s, he was a pop icon, and in the late ’70s he was just about as popular as his brother David had been earlier in the decade; and he does have the hits to merit his inclusion here. He had his first chart record, a cover of the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” hit #1 in July 1977, and that was followed by “That’s Rock ‘N’ Roll”(#3) and “Hey Deanie”(#7) later that year. “Do You Believe in Magic” broke the Top 40 in the spring 0f 1978, then one more release broke the Top 100 that year, but that was it for chart records.
10) The Knack, 1979
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kocj5jsqaQY
The Knack is the perfect group to cap off a list of acts who started big, had impressive reputations but had just one good year. No group saw that scenario play out as forcefully as the Knack did. “My Sharona” was #1 in the US for an amazing six weeks from August and through the month of September in 1979, and was the #1 record for the whole year. They followed that with another solid song in 1979, “Good Girls Don’t,” which peaked at #11. Unfortunately, each successive single charted lower. In 1980, “Baby Talks Dirty” stalled at #38, and their next two singles didn’t even break the Top 40. Initially hailed by some fans and critics as the next Beatles, and the darlings of rock ‘n’ roll in 1979, a year later they were essentially done.
