Harvest time is always celebration, mon.
It’s time to start off another week with some good stuff that’ll be sure to begin your Monday on a high note. That’s the day The Nest rolls up another splendid spliff out of that home stash of lost hits we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive! DJ Scratchy’s your dealer of high quality audio enhancing drugs, while the Sponkies sit idly on the sidelines in their D.A.R.E. shirts. If all goes well, this post will go live at 4:20 AM….
The concept of the one hit wonder seemed to emerge from the boom in 80’s nostalgia that started early, just before the turn of the millennium. And when it comes to acts well known for just one song, that decade certainly holds a plurality of the OHW club. That certainly doesn’t mean one hit wonders are exclusive to the 80’s…. no, far from it. There were plenty of flashes in the pan from the 70’s as well…
What the typical one hit wonder of the 70’s might look like.
By virtue of having his only hit song released in 1970, a singer/songwriter by the name of Bobby Bloom became one of the decade’s first OHW’s. Bloom was a co-writer of Tommy James & the Shondells’ 1968 hit “Mony Mony,” and two years later he recorded one of his own songs he wrote with producer Jeff Barry, which made it up to #8 in the U.S. That would be the Caribbean flavored “Montego Bay.”
You should know from these posts that I love songs with a nifty and prominent bass line, and Montego Bay certainly delivers on that. It’s a great song that has become almost as forgotten as its singer has. Bloom didn’t accomplish much after hitting it big with “Montego Bay,” not that he really had much chance to. He died just four years later in 1974 at the age of 28… not from an overdose of drugs or choking on a ham sandwich like other famous musician deaths of the 70’s, but from what was ruled an accidental self-inflicted gunshot. He had apparently shot himself while cleaning his gun…
It could happen to anyone…
Join me next Monday for another song that went up in smoke…
