Artists/bands that were once quite popular, yet nowadays are mostly ignored in canonical history books

Grateful Dead - Not Fade Away

yes but not UK

"It's Too Late" was a Chuck Willis song, which Clapton was probably a little more familiar with than the Holly cover.

xp sorry, missed that detail

perhaps but i mean we can be a bit elastic here maybe

xp

The Beatles did "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues" sometime in '69, turning up on Anthology 3.

Foghat: "That'll Be The Day"

John Lennon: "Peggy Sue"

beatles also did "Words Of Love"

...and "Crying Waiting Hoping" at the BBC.

Thought this next was for the BBC maybe, but no. The Fairport Convention had a side project called The Bunch which did a, um, bunch of covers including “Learning the Game,” a real keeper.

Stones did “Not Fade Away.”

Also Fairport Convention one of those bands influenced by The Band/tapping into something similar all though in the case much closer to the mark since they were trying to be some kind of UK equivalent.

Santana had a minor hit with their version of "Well All Right" in the late seventies.

> it's disappointing to read what's happened with her in the years since, the low point being her homophonic remarks (and at a show in San Francisco, of all places).

homophonic: when someone says clearly anti-gay things and then insists you just heard them wrong

michelle shocked sounds a lot like a certain person on the nww list who i won't name here with the initials fdb

don’t know whether it counts but let the record state that Mud did “Oh Boy”

I just heard "'65 Love Affair" by Paul Davis for the first time since ... well, possibly since it was on the radio in the early '80s. I looked him up, and indeed, not only did Paul Davis have a couple of other hits, but "I Go Crazy" (supposedly) once held the record for the longest chart run on the Billboard Hot 100. Weirdly, I've never heard that song before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THW-5OUTSt8

Nor have I heard any of his other singles, including "Cool Night," which went to #11 right before "'65 Love Affair." "Cool Night" is pretty slick, but "'65 Love Affair" is good enough that at some point I thought it was by Hall & Oates. Wiki says the official video "is composed entirely of news archives from the year 1965, including footage of then US President Lyndon Johnson, the Vietnam War, and the Watts riots." Ah, those were the days ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eHTZYglhZs

As a not-very-clever joke, my tweenage cousins once spent an entire evening calling up a Baltimore radio station every two or three minutes just to request "Cool Night." They played it twice, I think, before wising up.

I remember "65 Love Affair" well but don't particularly want to hear it again right now. I listened to a bit of "I Go Crazy." Dimly remember it but it made no impression on me then or now.

interesting. he has several songs above 50 on the Yachtski scale:

https://www.yachtornyacht.com/songs/227/Do-You-Believe-In-Love

https://www.yachtornyacht.com/songs/83/Cool-Night

https://www.yachtornyacht.com/songs/853/Let-Me-Know-If-Its-Over

A lot of what we consider to be seminal yacht rock acts (yeah, I can't believe I just typed that either) were pretty invisible, then as now. They were all over the radio back in the day, but Paul Davis, Firefall, Ambrosia, even Air Supply to some extent, interchangeable. A lot of people are shocked to see that many of these acts looked like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

I remember an ad in RS saying something like, "Ambrosia actually rocks, but you wouldn't know it from their hit single!"

Did some searching and yep:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71ghcYbVZDL._AC_SL1000_.jpg

Ah, the lost art of record-ad copy.

That's funny - I think I came across some Ambrosia on one of those pandora radio station things recently, and was surprised at how, well, rockin' it sounded.

That's a great self-effacing ad, reminds me of the old VW "lemon" ad campaign, or even the cover of that Howlin' Wolf album that "he doesn't like either."

Are U2 still taken seriously by anyone aside from their diehard fans in 2020?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e7/de/e7/e7dee753650d4356cd7a4fc1b2fa388d.jpg

I tried to ignore him, but he keeps coming back into my life.

10,000 Maniacs seem to have gradually become erased, sadly

U2 will probably be rehabilitated after they retire and a respectable amount of time has passed

I've thought about 10,000 Maniacs. With reference to the "biggest hit vs. legacy song" thread, their most-played track by far is their MTV Unplugged cover of "Because the Night" – which actually was their biggest hit, so not a surprise – but as far as studio albums / original material go, even their alt-rock smash "These Are Days" doesn't pop up too often. The band really does feel like an artifact of a specific time.

lmao @ ambrosia

I think 10,000 Maniacs was only modestly successful, and they were at their most successful right before Merchant left. If anything, she is the weird flip of this thread: she's only released a couple of albums of original material in the past two decades, iirc, but she still seems to have star status.

I didn't realize they also released a somewhat successful cover of Roxy Music's "More Than This" in 1997, after Natalie left. (It's their #3 track on Spotify.)

Are U2 still taken seriously by anyone aside from their diehard fans in 2020?

― pomenitul, Monday, August 17, 2020 2:02 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

U2 will probably be rehabilitated after they retire and a respectable amount of time has passed

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Monday, August 17, 2020 2:19 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you are looking at this from a ilx perspective not a real world perspective, they are comfortably in the eternal classic rock institution mode the stones, mccartney, metallica are in...their last tour they sold out 60,000 football stadiums and i mean, does kendrick lamar have someone from humble pie guest on his last album?

17 and 19 Joshua Tree Tour:

Commercial performance
On the opening leg of the 2017 tour, the band's two concerts at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena drew 123,164 attendees, grossing $15.7 million. In Chicago, the two shows at Soldier Field sold 105,078 tickets and grossed $13.4 million.[93] The first North American leg of the tour, comprising 20 concerts excluding Bonnaroo, grossed $123.7 million from 1,043,414 tickets sold,[94] ranking the band first among all 2017 global touring artists with an average gross of $7,276,551 per city.[95] The European leg grossed $83 million from 744,454 tickets sold. The second North American leg grossed $38,585,915 from 350,292 tickets sold,[96] maintaining the band's top rank globally with an average gross of $7,229,076 per city.[97] The Latin American leg grossed $70 million from 574,976 tickets sold;[96] the leg and the tour ended with four sold-out shows in São Paulo that sold around 280,000 tickets. In total, the Joshua Tree Tour 2017 drew 2,713,136 attendees to 50 shows and grossed $316,990,940,[98] making it the highest-grossing tour of the year.[99] It also ranked as the year's highest-grossing North American tour with $176.1 million earned.[100] U2 were the highest-paid musical act in the world in 2017 with $54.4 million in earnings, $52 million of which they netted from touring.[101]

For the 2019 tour, U2 grossed $35.7 million from eight concerts in Oceania and $38.1 million from seven shows in Asia. In total, the 2019 tour grossed $73.8 million and sold 567,000 tickets. Across the two tours, the band cumulatively grossed $390.8 million from 3.3 million tickets sold.[102]

Yeah, U2 is totally still popular and successful. In fact, I'm kind of surprised they haven't done something during the covid era (unless they have).

Huh, I had no idea that they were anything more than a punchline at this point. Good on them, I suppose.

Now a band like the Alarm ... they had something like 7 or 8 songs I know from the '80s. But apparently none of them were hits, so I wonder how I know them?

I often run into The Alarm on the "Classic Alternative" SiriusXM / DirecTV Music Choice channels of the world.

The "nobody I know voted for Nixon" attitude on ILX is fucking hilarious, and it's not just about massive arena-filling bands, either...the rolling metal thread is full to overflowing with posts effusively praising bands whose global audience numbers in the double digits, including immediate family members, and absolutely zero posts about/interest in any act the average metal fan would ever even hear about, let alone give a shit about.

Sometimes lose track of which is which: the Alarm, the Cult, the Call, the Church

*hangs head in 80s-kid shame*

The Alarm was one of the most blatantly U2-like bands, yet I can see them overlapping, sound-wise, with the Church and the Cult as well, neither of which sound particularly like U2 or each other, weirdly. They each have a little bit of what the other has.

Anyway, I knew the Alarm from being a kid listening to the radio in the '80s. How could a band get 7 or 8 songs on the radio that were played enough that I remember them yet were never hits?

(*though* neither of which sound like U2, that should be)

I knew of the Alarm in junior high and high school because a couple of Christian youth group kids wore their shirts. So I recognized their logo but never heard a note of their music.

I was mainly referring to U2 getting rehabilitated by critics/Pitchfork types. Kind of the way Springsteen was 15-20 years ago, even though he was massively popular for nearly all of his career

I think acts like Springsteen and U2 have been massively popular, critically and commercially tbh, for so long that they could only possibly be "rehabilitated" by people who were not fans to begin with.

The Edge seems to be pretty influential among guitar players afaict

Big Country were way more successful than the Alarm but equally as neglected by the world at large now, though that may not apply in Scotland

the rolling metal thread is full to overflowing with posts effusively praising bands whose global audience numbers in the double digits, including immediate family members, and absolutely zero posts about/interest in any act the average metal fan would ever even hear about, let alone give a shit about.

Didn't know you were a metal poptimist, unperson. Frankly, those bands average metal fans like suck at least 80% of the time.

xpost I think that would be a good example. People mostly know the hit, musos love the playing, but they kind of got lost in the shadow of U2.

This thread is reminding of this reconstruction of a quote I could never find the original of

I could've sworn the Alarm had one US top 40 hit, and I thought it was "Rain In The Summertime," but nope, none of their records got higher than #50 (for "Sold Me Down The River," which I don't think I've ever heard).

They were essentially a low-rent U2 tribute act; that said, they did the "authentic/rootsy/acoustic/WE JUST DISCOVERED AMERICA" thing before U2...in fact, I think U2 got most of the, um, "ideas" for Rattle & Hum from this Alarm footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTa_S_ypYQE

Frankly, those bands average metal fans like suck at least 80% of the time.

if we started a rolling "best new rock music" type thread the dynamic would be the same and with good reason