Forever #1 - Tito Jackson (Jackson 5)

[Gary]

Forever No. 1: Melanie’s ‘Brand New Key’
In addition to helping to make top 40 radio safe for racier songs by female artists, "Brand New Key" changed Melanie's image.


By Paul Grein

01/30/2024
Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor Melanie, who died on Jan. 23 at age 76, by looking at the pop star’s lone No. 1 hit as a recording artist: the charming (but risqué for its time) “Brand New Key.”

Melanie’s sing-song pop smash “Brand New Key” seems pretty innocuous today, but when it was released in 1971, it was considered fairly risqué. “Skates” and “key” were pretty obvious sexual metaphors, and this stanza was rife with sexual innuendo: “Don’t go too fast, but I go pretty far/ For somebody who don’t drive/ I’ve been all around the world.”

You have to keep in mind that this was a full decade before Olivia Newton-John’s sexually provocative “Physical,” which the Grease star fretted was going too far practically until the moment it was released. In 1982, Madonna arrived, eventually bringing gender parity to the whole notion of songs about lust. “Brand New Key” might have been the first step down the road that took us to Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and countless more.

Melanie (whose full name was Melanie Safka) acknowledged the possibility of fans hearing sexual innuendo in the lyrics, but has denied that was her intent. The oldies site Superseventies.com quotes Melanie as saying that she wrote the song in about 15 minutes one night: “I thought it was cute; a kind of old [1930s] tune. I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols, and pretty obvious ones at that. There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it.”


In addition to helping to make top 40 radio safe for racier songs by female artists, “Brand New Key” changed Melanie’s image. Prior to “Brand New Key,” she had been seen as cool by contemporary pop and rock audiences. She was one of just three solo women on the bill at the Woodstock festival in 1969, along with Joan Baez and Janis Joplin (who was backed by the Kozmic Blues Band).

As it began to rain during her performance on the opening night of that epic, three-day festival, hundreds of candles suddenly appeared, which inspired Melanie’s breakthrough hit, “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” In July 1970, that song became her first top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching No. 6. The Edwin Hawkins Singers, best known for their 1969 hit “Oh Happy Day,” were featured on the record, giving it a gospel quality that balanced her folkie sound.


In September 1970, Melanie made the top 40 on the Hot 100 with her follow-up, “Peace Will Come (According to Plan).” The following month, The New Seekers landed a top 15 hit on the Hot 100 with another Melanie song, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma.” (Melanie had recorded the song under the title “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” on her 1970 album Candles in the Rain.) The New Seekers followed that hit with their versions of two more Melanie songs, both of which also made the Hot 100 – the flower-power anthem “Beautiful People” (No. 67) and “Nickel Song” (No. 81), which Melanie would later have a No. 35 hit with.

Melanie performed at the Isle of Wight festival in August 1970 as well as the Glastonbury Festival (then dubbed Glastonbury Fayre) in June 1971. So, Melanie was a star even before the song that became her biggest hit.

People who just know Melanie from “Brand New Key” might be surprised to hear her other songs, which she sang in a husky voice and in an idiosyncratic style. “Brand New Key,” which Melanie wrote by herself, smoothed out the rough edges of her other records. It is more of a pure pop record, which is probably why it did so well.

The song, produced by Melanie’s husband Peter Schekeryk, was the first release on their own label, Neighborhood Records, following her departure from Buddah Records. The song (arranged by Roger Kellaway) opens with a simple piano intro, before Melanie lays out her predicament. She needs a key and she needs it bad. Her frustration is apparent as she sings, “It almost seems like you’re avoiding me/ I’m OK alone, but you’ve got something I need.” More than 40 years later, in “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepsen would capture that same sense of frustration, pining for a disinterested guy.

The chorus of “Brand New Key” is very sing-songy, which some found charming and others found grating. The wordless bridge lends some interest, “Oh, yeah, yeah/ Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah…” And in the final repetition of the chorus, Melanie omits the lines “I’ve been looking around awhile/You’ve got something for me” and replaces them with “La-la’s.”

In the week ending Oct. 30, 1971, “Brand New Key” entered the Hot 100 at No. 87. Eight weeks later, it dethroned Sly & the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” to become the No. 1 song in the land. It held the top spot for three weeks, bridging 1971 and 1972. Incredibly, it held Don McLean’s instant-classic “American Pie” to the No. 2 spot for two weeks before “Pie” was able to dislodge “Key.” And then “Key” stayed at No. 2 for three weeks, giving it a total of seven weeks in one of the top two positions – longer than any other song by a female solo artist in the first three years of the ’70s.

“Brand New Key” is a very short single — it runs just 2:26, shorter than any other No. 1 hit of 1971 or 1972. It’s ironic that “Key” was followed in the No. 1 spot by “American Pie,” which ran 8:37, which made it the longest No. 1 hit in Hot 100 history until recently. “Brand New Key” also reached No. 1 in Canada and Australia and climbed as high as No. 4 on the Official U.K. Singles Chart.

“Brand New Key” is easily Melanie’s best-remembered hit, but it was hardly the sum total of her chart impact that year. In the week ending Feb. 26, 1972, Melanie had three songs in the top 40 on the Hot 100: “Brand New Key” dropped from No. 14 to No. 24, “Ring the Living Bell” (the proper follow-up to “Key”) jumped from No. 39 to No. 34 and “Nickel Song” (which Melanie’s former label Buddah Records released to capitalize on her newfound success) leaped from No. 43 to No. 36. Melanie was just the second solo female to have three songs in the top 40 at one time (following Mary Wells in 1964), and the only woman to achieve the feat in the ’70s.


Critic Paul Gambaccini led his Singles column in Rolling Stone (March 16, 1972) with a discussion of Melanie’s three simultaneous hits. Under the headline “Melanie laughs all the way to the bank,” Gambaccini wrote “It has long been fashionable for rock critics to knock the recorded efforts of Melanie, but the woman with the little girl’s voice now has the last laugh. While most artists consider themselves fortunate to have one hit single, she has three.”

In his weekly American Top 40 countdown for week in question, Casey Kasem made note of Melanie’s triple play and said words to the effect that “Last year was the year of Carole King. It looks like this year will be the year of Melanie.”

In one sense, Casey was right. On Billboard’s year-end charts for 1972, Melanie was No. 1 on the Top Singles Female Vocalists chart, ahead of three legends – Cher, Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin, who held down the next three spots. But if Casey was suggesting that Melanie was moving up to superstardom, as it appeared at that moment, that didn’t come to pass. After those three early 1972 hits dropped off, Melanie logged just one more top 40 hit, “Bitter Bad,” which reached No. 35 in the spring of 1973.


Some of Melanie’s original fans had disdain for the novelty-shaded pop direction of “Brand New Key,” while her newfound pop fans proved fickle. Widely read industry pundit Bob Lefsetz wrote an assessment following Melanie’s death in which he opined that he “had some respect for her” prior to “Brand New Key,” but lost it with that one song. “Melanie had been a deep thinker, anything but light,” he wrote. “And now she’s released this adolescent, no, strike that, kiddie song about roller skating.”

Melanie made her final Hot 100 appearance in the first week of 1974 with a fine cover version of Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” She made her final appearance on the Billboard 200 in her lifetime that June with Madrugada.

In 1990, “Brand New Key” appeared on Vol. 7 of Rhino Records’ 25-volume Have a Nice Day series, which collected pop songs from the 1970s. I wrote the liner notes for that entire series (as well as the Grammy-nominated 1998 box set Have a Nice Decade, on which “Brand New Key” also appeared.)

Here’s what I wrote in 1990 about “Brand New Key”: “Melanie, whose ‘Brand New Key’ hit #1 in December 1971, wasn’t a one-hit wonder. She is, however, Exhibit A in the case of artists whose careers were hurt more than they were helped by hit records that projected the wrong image. The whimsical, nostalgic nature of ‘Brand New Key’ gave Melanie a lightweight, novelty image which was at odds with the contemporary pop/rock persona she had cultivated with her 1970 hit, ‘Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).’ It didn’t help that the follow-ups ‘The Nickel Song’ and ‘Ring the Living Bell,’ were also very light. Still, one imagines that the coy innuendos of ‘Brand New Key’ resonated for, say, Madonna, in a way that Carole King or Roberta Flack never did. In fact, it’s a small step from the tongue-in-cheek sass of ‘Brand New Key’ to ‘Like a Virgin.’”

In one interview, also featured in that Superseventies.com piece, Melanie expressed some ambivalence about the song. “I used to love singing ‘Brand New Key,’ at first,” she said. “It had great shock value, dropped in the middle of one of my concerts. I’d be singing along about Suffering and the Trials of Man, and then suddenly, ‘I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates…’ It had a great effect. After it became a hit, though, the fun kind of wore off, at least for me. Some things, I think, are better left a surprise.”

While Melanie struggled commercially after “Brand New Key,” the song itself has had an afterlife. A parody version titled “Combine Harvester,” recorded by a comedy folk act dubbed The Wurzels, topped the Official U.K. Singles Chart for two weeks in June 1976. The song depicts two farmers with one saying to the other, “I’ve got a brand new Combine Harvester/ And I’ll give you the key.” (If “Brand New Key” is novelty-shaded, this loopy track goes all the way.)


Melanie’s original recording was heard in the acclaimed 1997 film Boogie Nights, which was set in the 1970s. The song was used as an informal theme for Heather Graham’s Rollergirl character. (Roller skating became a genuine pop-culture fad during the disco era, long after Melanie’s song had run its course.) Country singer Deana Carter covered the song on her 1998 album Everything’s Gonna Be Alright, which went gold. The song has also been featured in the TV shows Family Guy and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Melanie’s legacy extends beyond “Brand New Key,” however: “Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma,” which she also wrote, was a much-admired and much-performed song of that era. The great Ray Charles recorded a marvelously funky and fresh version of the song that reached No. 65 on the Hot 100 in August 1972 and received a Grammy nod for best R&B vocal performance, male. In October 2012, Miley Cyrus released a video of an acoustic version of that song as part of her Backyard Sessions series. In 2015, Melanie joined her to duet on the song, in addition to “Peace Will Come.”


Melanie had other successes. too. In 1989, she won a Primetime Emmy (in tandem with Lee Holdridge) for outstanding achievement in music and lyrics for the “The First Time I Loved Forever.” They wrote the ballad for the CBS series Beauty and the Beast (not to be confused with the later film of the same name).

In 2010 and 2011, Melanie performed at 40th anniversary editions of famous festivals she had performed at originally – Isle of Wight and Glastonbury, respectively. She also endured as an avatar for Woodstock, playing a big part in the informal revival of Woodstock ’89. According to Variety, Melanie was in the studio earlier this month working on her 32nd album, Second Hand Smoke, a collection of cover songs.

Melanie died on Jan. 23 at home in central Tennessee. She is survived by her three children, daughter Leilah (named after the Derek & The Dominos classic “Layla”), daughter Jeordie and son Beau Jarred. Schekeryk, her husband of 42 years, died in 2010.

“She was one of the most talented, strong and passionate women of the era and every word she wrote, every note she sang reflected that,” her kids posted on Facebook. “Our world is much dimmer, the colors of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today, but we know that she is still here, smiling down on all of us, on all of you, from the stars.”

[Gary]

Forgot to put this here
Bill Hayes who died a couple weeks ago, spent 5 weeks at #1 in 1955

[Gary]

Forever No. 1: Steve Lawrence’s ‘Go Away Little Girl’
The loping ballad was the fourth No. 1 in just under two years for legendary songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King.


By Paul Grein

03/7/2024

Fred Hermansky/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Image
Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Steve Lawrence by looking at his sole No. 1 hit, the richly melodic but lyrically problematic “Go Away Little Girl.”


Steve Lawrence’s “Go Away Little Girl” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in January 1963 — becoming the biggest hit for the smooth, romantic singer, who died on Thursday (March 7) at age 88 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.

It was the fourth No. 1 in just under two years for legendary songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King, following The Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby” and Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

“Go Away Little Girl” is easily the least “rock and roll” of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers’ volley of four No. 1’s. The song showcases King’s melodic strengths, though Goffin’s lyric has not aged well. The lyric consists of a young man telling a young woman to stay away from him, so he won’t be tempted to betray his steady girlfriend by kissing her. (He calls her a “little girl,” which doubtless comes across as more patronizing — or worse — today than it did at the time.)

The most attractive aspects of the recording are the loping gait, which suggests a horse trotting around a track; the double-tracked lead vocal; and the modulation on the bridge: “When you’re near me like this/ You’re much too hard to resist.”


Vee, who had taken “Take Good Care of My Baby” to No. 1 in September 1961, was the first to record “Go Away Little Girl” (in March 1962). His version was not released as a single and the song landed with Lawrence, who was a 10-year veteran at that point. Lawrence had landed his first hit in 1952 with a cover version of Bing Crosby’s 1944 hit “Poinciana.”

Lawrence was 26 when “Go Away Little Girl” was a hit. But “Go Away Little Girl” isn’t really an adult song. It is, rather, a song about “young love and first crushes,” as Lawrence’s son David Lawrence said in the PBS documentary Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé: Memories of My Mom & Dad.

In that same doc, which premiered on Dec. 2, 2023, David Lawrence noted that his father could sing light pop songs like “Pretty Blue Eyes” (a top 10 hit in January 1960) and “Go Away Little Girl,” and also sing more sophisticated, jazz-accented fare like “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” “He could sort of position his voice in more of a pop arena and then turn around and swing like nobody’s business,” David recalled. “That’s that I find most impressive – he’s so versatile.”

If “Go Away Little Girl” was lightweight material for a singer of Lawrence’s age and vocal abilities, why was it such a big hit? It’s a pretty song, with a lovely melody and a warm vocal — and in early 1963, a year before The Beatles electrified the music business, that was often enough to get you to No. 1.

Lawrence had had a string of three consecutive top 10 hits on the Hot 100 in 1960-61 (“Pretty Blue Eyes,” “Footsteps” and “Portrait of My Love,” the latter first recorded by British singer Matt Monro), but his recording career had cooled in 1962. He released three songs that didn’t make the top 40, followed by two that didn’t even make the Hot 100.

Lawrence signed with Columbia Records in 1962 after stints on King, Coral, ABC-Paramount and United Artists. His first release for Columbia wasn’t much of a hit: “The Lady Wants to Twist,” a trendy twist/swing number written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, “bubbled under” the Hot 100 at No. 120.

So, it wasn’t really a surprise when “Go Away Little Girl” entered the Hot 100 in the bottommost rung in the week ending Nov. 10, 1962. But the song quickly made up for that slow start: It vaulted from No. 41 to No. 20 in the week ending Dec. 8, then made the top 10 the following week. In the week ending Jan. 12, 1963, it reached No. 1, dislodging the Tornadoes’ instrumental smash “Telstar,” a three-week leader. “Go Away Little Girl” remained on top for two weeks before being dislodged by the Rooftop Singers’ folk ballad “Walk Right In.”

Goffin and King also wrote several follow-up singles for Lawrence, including “Poor Little Rich Girl,” “Walking Proud,” “I Want to Stay Here” and “I Can’t Stop Talking About You” (the latter two were credited to Steve & Eydie).

Lawrence had five more top 40 hits on the Hot 100 after “Go Away Little Girl,” though he never returned to the top 20. His last Hot 100 hit was “We Can Make It Together” in 1972, a collab with his wife and The Osmonds.

A 1966 remake of “Go Away Little Girl” by The Happenings, released as the follow-up to their smash “See You in September,” reached No. 12 on the Hot 100. The peppy record echoes the hit sound of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons.

In September 1971, less than nine years after Lawrence’s single topped the Hot 100, a remake of the song by Donny Osmond also reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, making it the first song to top Billboard’s flagship songs chart by two different artists. Just eight other songs have subsequently equaled that feat – and no other pair of songs has reached No. 1 in such quick succession.


Osmond was 13 when “Go Away Little Girl” was a hit, making the song more age-appropriate for him than it had been for Lawrence. Osmond tweaked the lyric from “I belong to someone else and I must be true” to “I’m dating somebody else – I must be true.” Apparently, 13 was deemed too young by some in Osmond’s camp to “belong to someone else.”

While “Go Away Little Girl” was Lawrence’s biggest hit single, it wasn’t his most lasting claim-to-fame. He is better-known and remembered for his role in popularizing such standards as “More” and “I’ve Gotta Be Me” and for his long decades-long partnership with his wife, Eydie Gormé. The couple did some of their best work on a string of classy TV specials in the 1970s celebrating the music of George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. They won a Primetime Emmy in 1979 for Steve & Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin, which featured Carol Burnett, Sammy Davis Jr. and jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

[Gary]

Forever No. 1: Crazy Town’s ‘Butterfly’
The 2001 smash was the lone hit from the peak rap-rock era to reach the Hot 100's apex.


By Andrew Unterberger

06/26/2024

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Crazy Town frontman Shifty Shellshock by looking at their lone No. 1 as a group: the surprisingly nice and sweet rap-rock staple “Butterfly.”

By 2001, rap-rock and nu-metal had long since taken over the world. From the mid-’90s peak of Rage Against the Machine and instruments-era Beastie Boys through the late-’90s takeover of KoRn and Limp Bizkit and the eventually diamond-certified breakthrough of Linkin Park’s 2000 debut LP Hybrid Theory, bands mixing loud guitars with aggressive rhymes and copious record-scratching grew into a truly massive piece of the music industry. They infected TRL and dominated Woodstock ’99 and terrified your Backstreet-and-Britney-worshipping younger siblings. But they didn’t get to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 until Crazy Town.

To some extent, that’s not surprising. The dawn-to-dusk of the entire nu-metal era transpired when radio was still king on the charts, and top 40 airplay in particular formed the shape of the Hot 100. Many of the genre’s biggest bands were heavy and abrasive enough that they struggled to even secure regular alternative rock airplay, let along crossover playlisting on the pop stations. These groups often outsold the pop hitmakers at the top of the Hot 100, but they weren’t a particularly imposing threat to their supremacy on the airwaves. That was particularly true because, unlike in the hair metal era of the late ’80s and early ’90s — the prior period where hard rock played an obviously central role in music’s mainstream — few, if any of these bands made room for power ballads or love songs between their ragers, the kind of songs that could expand both their radio reach and their demographic appeal. In other (highly reductive) words, none of these bands of angry young dudes wrote songs for women.


Crazy Town did, though. Or at least, they wrote one, for one woman: “Butterfly,” co-penned by group frontman Seth Binzer — known professionally as Shifty Shellshock, who died this week at age 49 — was inspired by a new girlfriend who made him take a second look at his traditionally misogynistic lyrical content. “I was in love [with her,] and she was asking, ‘What’s up with all these lyrics? Is that what you’re like?'” Shellshock recalled to Fred Bronson in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. “So that made me come up with the concept of writing a song to her. Instead of writing a male chauvinistic song, I was going to write something nice and sweet to a girl I cared about.”

The lyrics to “Butterfly” are indeed nice and sweet — particularly compared to distinctly un-Hallmark prior Crazy Town singles like “Toxic” (“F–k the critics, we leave them hanging like INXS”) and “Darkside” (“Unearthin’ untamed perversion/ My bad brain’s workin’, circle-jerkin'”). Rather, “Butterfly” celebrates the titular love interest with a series of straightforwardly romantic and decently heartfelt verse tributes (“I used to think that happy endings were only in the books I read/ But you made me feel alive when I was almost dead”) and a chorus hook (“You’re my butterfly, sugar baby”) worthy of The Archies. A few questionable couplets, namely one from co-lead Brett “Epic” Mazur comparing him and his intended to storied punk lovers Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen — who died by murder-suicide at the former’s hand — invariably opened the song up to Awesomely Bad-type ribbing. But as far as 21st century mainstream rock love songs go, it’s actually pretty touching.

More critical than the lyrics, though, was that the song sounded especially nice and sweet. Whereas the overwhelming majority of signature nu-metal anthems were confrontational head-bangers, the beat to “Butterfly” is a slow-and-low shuffle, with the record-scratching mostly contained to a background flourish. And while no one would mistake Shellshock’s rapped lead for one of 98 Degrees, his come-ons wisely hew closer to gentle invitation than yawped insistence; the most striking vocals on the entire song come via the complementary toneless backing whispers on the hook (“You make me go CRAZY….“)


But what really gives “Butterfly” its wings is the Red Hot Chili Peppers sample. In fact, in terms of both inspiration and utility, you could make the case for it being one of the 10 most important pop samples of the entire 21st century — it’s hard to think of too many other hits this big where the lift was this crucial to both the makeup of the song and the reason for it taking flight. Especially because its source is at once both incredibly obvious (a mostly shirtless bunch of SoCal rap-rockers finding kinship with an RHCP track, duh) and remarkably obscure: The percolating bass, weightless guitars and rising-sun horns of “Butterfly” are looped not from one of the Chili Peppers’ hits, but from a pre-crossover 1989 deep cut called “Pretty Little Ditty,” a disorientingly gorgeous four-measure pattern that briefly materializes mid-song and disappears for good immediately after.

While the mini-groove was just a flash of divinity in the original “Ditty,” it makes up the whole musical spine of “Butterfly,” running throughout the entire track. Mazur admitted to Bronson he never expected to get the sample cleared, given the band’s traditional reticence for approving such recycling of their songs, saying, “If we had to fight to get it cleared or they didn’t like it, we would have come up with some other music.” It’s utterly impossible to imagine any version of “Butterfly” without the full “Ditty” sample, though — everything about the song’s particular alchemy depends not only on the sample’s melodies and sonics, but in the built-in (and lived-in) Chili Peppers reference point.

However, with the heavenly sample elevating Shellshock’s sealed-with-a-kiss mash note lyrics — and a perfect accompanying visual in the lush, pleasantly psychedelic music video, co-starring his eventual wife Melissa Clark — “Butterfly” flapped higher than even any RHCP hit. While the latter band’s generational power ballad “Under the Bridge” stalled at No. 2 on the Hot 100 (behind Kris Kross’ “Jump”), Crazy Town’s breakout smash got all the way to No. 1 on the chart dated March 24, 2001, replacing Joe’s “Stutter” on top. It then gave way to Shaggy and Rayvon’s “Angel” — another romantic ode based around a lovey-dovey-all-the-time rock lift — before reclaiming the top spot, then ceding it for good to Janet Jackson’s seven-week No. 1 “All for You.”

“Butterfly” was not only Crazy Town’s only visit to the Hot 100’s top spot, it was their sole cameo on the entire chart. Gift of Gab follow-up “Revolving Door” made the Official UK Singles Chart’s top 40, and “Drowning” (from 2002 sophomore LP Darkhorse) earned some rock airplay, but the group was never interested in attempting another “Butterfly,” and they broke up shortly after Darkhorse. Shellshock had better fortunes outside of the group, scoring another sublime summery smash with the Paul Oakenfold-led dance-rock skate-along “Starry-Eyed Surprise,” peaking just outside the Hot 100’s top 40 and making the U.K.’s top 10. He scored one more minor hit with the solo “Slide Along Side” (as just Shifty), but his music career was largely sidelined by substance abuse; when he returned to music television in the late ’00s, it was as a cast member on VH1’s Celebrity Rehab.


But even if “Butterfly” was the lone pillar of Shellshock’s musical legacy, it would still be a sturdy one. The song’s sun-drenched, genre-blending composition and unmistakably of-its-time sound and vision have made it an enduringly iconic snapshot of its era — further helped by its extensive usage in early-’00s comedies like Saving Silverman and Orange County and TV shows like Daria and Undeclared. And while later smashes from Linkin Park, Evanescence and Staind all were able to reach the top five of the Billboard Hot 100, “Butterfly” remains unaccompanied on its perch, still the only nu-metal song to top the chart in its history.

[Gary]

Forever No. 1: Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs' ‘Stay'
Story by Paul Grein • 2h • 7 min read

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer - a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single - by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Maurice Williams, who died on Aug. 5 at age 86, by looking at his lone No. 1, the doo-wop classic "Stay," which he recorded as the frontman of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs.

Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs meet the most common definition of one-hit wonders, as they had just one top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 – but, boy, what a hit. Their doo-wop classic "Stay" reached No. 1 in November 1960, sandwiched between two other top-tier classics, Ray Charles' "Georgia on My Mind" and Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome To-night?."
Over backing chants of "Stay!" by his fellow group members, Williams carries much of the song and its plea to a girl to stay out longer than she is supposed to. Her Daddy and Mommy won't mind, Williams argues, not entirely convincingly. Midway, he steps back and hands the lead to Henry Gaston for one of pop music's most unforgettable falsetto shouts - "Oh, won't you stay, just a little bit longer!"

Williams wrote the song in 1953 when he was just 15. The song was inspired by his crush on one Mary Shropshire. "[Mary] was the one I was trying to get to stay a little longer," Williams told the North Carolina publication Our State in 2012. "Of course, she couldn't." (The more restrictive mores of the 1940s and 1950s inspired such other great pop songs as the Oscar-winning "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and The Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie.")

"It took me about 30 minutes to write ‘Stay,' then I threw it away," Williams told ClassicsBands.com. "We were looking for songs to record as Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs. I was over at my girlfriend's house playing the tape of songs I had written, when her little sister said, ‘Please do the song with the high voice in it.' I knew she meant ‘Stay.' She was about 12 years old and I said to myself, ‘She's the age of record buying,' and the rest is history. I thank God for her."

The Zodiacs' producer, Phil Gernhard, took the demo, along with some others, to New York City and played them for all the label reps that he knew. Al Silver of Herald Records was interested, but insisted that the song be re-recorded as the recording levels were too low. He also said that one line, "Let's have another smoke," would have to be removed for the song to be played on commercial radio.


The track runs just 1:38. It is the shortest of the 1,174 singles that have reached No. 1 on the Hot 100. You could play the song in its entirety six times in the time it would take to play the longest-running No. 1 hit, Taylor Swift's "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)" (which runs 10:13, per the dominant version the week the song topped the Hot 100 in 2021) just once. But despite its historic brevity, the record never feels that short. It's simply exactly as long as it needed to be to tell its story. It's to the group's and Gernhard's credit that they didn't pad it just to make it longer.

The song entered the Hot 100 at No. 86 on Oct. 3, 1960 – though in a gaffe, Williams was credited as a solo artist. The billing was changed to Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs in Week 2, when the record vaulted to No. 40. The record hit the top 10 on Nov. 7 (when another great R&B record, The Drifters' "Save the Last Dance for Me," was No. 1). Two weeks later, it reached No. 1.

"Stay" was only the third No. 1 in Hot 100 history (which commenced in August 1958) that was both written and recorded by a Black artist. It followed Lloyd Price's "Stagger Lee" (which he co-wrote with Harold Logan) and Dave "Baby" Cortez's instrumental smash "The Happy Organ" (which he co-wrote with Ken Wood).

Williams and the Zodiacs' recording of "Stay" was the first major hit for producer Gernhard, who returned to the top five on the Hot 100 in the '60s and '70s as the producer of The Royal Guardmen's novelty hit "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron," Dion's poignant "Abraham, Martin and John," Lobo's "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" and "I'd Love You to Want Me," Jim Stafford's "Spiders and Snakes" and The Bellamy Brothers' "Let Your Love Flow," the latter, Gernhard's second No. 1 on the Hot 100.

The Billboard Hot 100 Chart for the week ending on November 27, 1960.
The Billboard Hot 100 Chart for the week ending on November 27, 1960.
Williams and the Zodiacs had two more Hot 100 hits in 1961, but both were minor – "I Remember" (No. 86) and "Come Along" (No. 83). The group had broken through near the tail-end of doo-wop's peak. Few doo-wop artists outside of the 4 Seasons, which had doo-wop roots, had extensive pop careers as Motown and, starting in 1964, the British invasion took over. A 1965 Williams song, "May I," seemed promising, but the group's label, Vee-Jay, went bankrupt just as the song was coming out. "May I" would become a top 40 hit in March 1969 for a white pop group, Bill Deal & the Rhondels.

Williams had had that same frustrating experience, on a much bigger scale, in 1957, when his group The Gladiolas released the original version of "Little Darlin'" (which Williams also wrote). The Gladiolas' version reached No. 11 on R&B Best-Sellers in Stores and No. 41 on the Billboard Top 100, a forerunner to the Hot 100. But as was common in that era, a cover version by a white group, The Diamonds, became the bigger hit. The Diamonds' version logged eight weeks at No. 2 on Best Sellers in Stores, and appeared in the 1973 film American Graffiti – a nostalgic film which was perfectly timed as the Watergate scandal broke wide open. American Graffiti received an Oscar nod for best picture and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1995. The double-disk soundtrack album, a first-rate oldies collection, reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200 in February 1974.


"Stay" was memorably featured in two films – American Hot Wax, a 1978 film about legendary DJ Alan Freed, and the 1987 blockbuster Dirty Dancing, another nostalgic film that provided relief from the woes of that era, including Iran/Contra and AIDS. "Stay" was featured on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, which topped the Billboard 200 for 18 nonconsecutive weeks.

Many artists have recorded successful cover versions of "Stay." In November 1963, the song was released by The Hollies, whose bright, effervescent version shifted the focus from doo-wop to rock'n'roll. Their version reached No. 8 on the Official UK Singles Chart, becoming their first of 18 top 10 hits in their home country.

Two cover versions have reached the top 20 on the Hot 100 – one by the 4 Seasons in April 1964 (with Frankie Valli taking on Gaston's falsetto part) and another by Jackson Browne in August 1978 (with David Lindley handling the falsetto vocals). Browne cleverly recast the song from a romantic plea to a performers' plea to the audience to let them play a little longer. Instead of saying Mommy and Daddy won't mind, he argues that the promoter, union and roadies won't mind (again, not entirely convincingly!). Browne's version directly followed his own song "The Load-Out" on his hit album Running on Empty, a No. 3 album on the Billboard 200 and a Grammy nominee for album of the year. That two-song coupling, which also featured vocalist Rosemary Butler, was recorded live at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland.


There have been many other notable cover versions of the song. The Dave Clark Five recorded the song for their studio album Glad All Over, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in May 1964. Andrew Gold recorded a version of "Stay" for his 1976 album What's Wrong with This Picture?, which also spawned his only top 10 hit on the Hot 100, "Lonely Boy." Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band teamed with Browne, Butler and Tom Petty to record the song at the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in September 1979. The recording appeared on a triple-disc album which made the top 20 on the Billboard 200 in January 1980.

Maurice Williams didn't have enough hits to receive major honors. He's not in the Songwriters Hall of Fame (despite writing two colossal hits). He and the Zodiacs haven't even been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But the placement of "Little Darlin'" and "Stay" in such iconic films as American Graffiti and Dirty Dancing helps ensure that those songs will live on forever.

And Williams' place in the Hot 100 record books seems secure: Even with hit songs getting shorter and shorter in the TikTok era, no one has yet passed Williams for his 98 seconds of pop perfection.

[Gary]

ENTERTAINMENT
Tito Jackson, Michael's brother and member of Jackson 5, dies at 70, sons say
Updated on: September 16, 2024 / 6:49 AM EDT / CBS/AP


Tito Jackson, one of the brothers who made up the beloved pop group the Jackson 5, has died at age 70, his sons say.

Tito was the third of nine Jackson children, which include global superstars Michael and sister Janet, part of a music-making family whose songs are still beloved today.

"It's with heavy hearts that we announce that our beloved father, Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Tito Jackson is no longer with us. We are shocked, saddened and heartbroken. Our father was an incredible man who cared about everyone and their well-being," his sons TJ, Taj and Taryll said in a statement posted on Instagram and Facebook late Sunday.

Fool In Love Festival 2024
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Tito Jackson of the Jackson 5 and The Jacksons performs during the Fool in Love Festival at Hollywood Park Grounds on August 31, 2024 in Inglewood, California.
GETTY IMAGES
Jackson's death was first reported by "Entertainment Tonight," which said in a social media post that, "Steve Manning, a longtime Jackson family friend and former Jackson family manager, tells ET that Tito passed away today. While an official cause of death has not yet been determined, Manning believes that Tito suffered a heart attack while driving from New Mexico to Oklahoma."

The Jackson 5 included brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael. The family group, which was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, produced several No. 1 hits in the 1970s including "ABC," "I Want You Back" and "I'll Be There."

The Jackson 5 became one of the biggest names in music under the guidance of their father, Joe Jackson, a steelworker and guitar player who supported his wife and nine children in Gary, Indiana. As the family's music careers took off, they relocated to California.

Born on Oct. 15, 1953, Toriano Adaryll "Tito" Jackson was the least-heard member of the group as a background singer who played guitar. His brothers launched solo careers, including Michael, who became one of the world's biggest performers and came to be known as The King of Pop.


Speaking to The Associated Press in December 2009, Tito Jackson said his younger brother's death pulled the family closer together.

"I would say definitely it brought us a step closer to each other. To recognize that the love we have for each other when one of us is not here, what a great loss," he said, adding he would personally never "be at peace with it."

"There's still moments when I just can't believe it. So I think that's never going to go away," he said.

In 2014, Tito Jackson said he and his brothers still felt Michael Jackson's absence in their shows, which continued with international tours.

"I don't think we will ever get used to performing without him. He's dearly missed," he said, noting that his spirit "is with us when we are performing. It gives us a lot of positive energy and puts a lot of smiles on our faces."

Days before his death, Tito Jackson posted a message on his Facebook page from Munich, Germany, on Sept. 11, where he visited a memorial to Michael Jackson with his brothers.

"Before our show in Munich, my brothers Jackie, Marlon, and I, visited the beautiful memorial dedicated to our beloved brother, Michael Jackson. We're deeply grateful for this special place that honors not only his memory but also our shared legacy. Thank you for keeping his spirit alive," he wrote.

Tito Jackson was the last of the nine Jackson siblings to release a solo project, with his 2016 debut, "Tito Time." He released a song in 2017, "One Way Street," and told the AP in 2019 that he was working on a sophomore album.

Jackson said he purposely held back from pursuing a solo career because he wanted to focus on raising his three sons, who formed their own music group, 3T. Tito Jackson's website offers a link to a single featuring 3T and Stevie Wonder titled, "Love One Another."

Tito Jackson also is survived by his brothers Jermaine, Randy, Marlon and Jackie, his sisters Janet, Rebbie and Latoya and their mother, Katherine. Their father died in 2018.

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