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- [00:00]
Amazon Music Announcer
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music.
- [00:13]
Chris Melanphy
Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One Series. On our last episode, we ran down more than three decades of hits spawned by television. From theme songs to montage soundtracks to reinvented oldies. We are now up to the 1980s, when, in the wake of Miami Vice's success, TV music supervisors were curating songs for maximum exposure and turning underappreciated gems into hits. Certain mid-80s TV shows did try to replicate the Miami Vice model. The ABC screwball comedy Moonlighting, for example, starring Cybill shepherd and Bruce Willis, capitalized with a full soundtrack and a radio push for its theme song by jazzy R B singer Al Jarou. Moonlighting. The song reached number 23 in 1987. Or prolific TV theme composer Mike Post. He'd scored some actual hits in the prior decade with his themes for the Rockford Files and Hill Street Blues, both of which cracked the top 10. Post tried putting together a 1988 album containing several of his TV themes, and he centered it around his theme for the late 80s NBC hit LA Law. The album failed to chart. These glossy TV soundtracks were hit and miss. But one single fluky song used on NBC's smash sitcom Family Ties was very much a hit.
- [02:28]
Various Song Singers
What did you think I would do at this Moment?
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Chris Melanphy
At this Moment was a soulful saloon ballad penned by veteran LA singer Billy Vera in the 70s and first issued as a single in 1981, when it actually charted briefly, peaking at number 79 on the Hot 100. Five years later, an NBC producer happened to catch Vera and his band the Beaters in an LA nightclub at a moment when the producer was looking for a love theme for the character Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties, played by Michael J. Fox. The producer offered to license Vera's song At this Moment, and Vera eagerly said yes, but had to figure out how to get his out of print recording re released. It took Vera months to convince a label, in this case Rhino Records, to reissue at this Moment. It had already appeared on Family Ties twice before Rhino agreed to put it out. Ellen. Alex, please let me go. Ellen. I'm sorry.
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Various Song Singers
I slipped. Ellen.
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Chris Melanphy
NBC and Vera himself had been flooded with requests for the song, but it was only after at this Moment appeared on Family Ties a third, third time, in the fall of 1986 that Vera's re released single finally re entered the Hot 100 and began climbing after a dozen weeks. In January 1987, at this moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters reached number one.
- [04:44]
Amazon Music Announcer
NBC says they have never received so many letters and phone calls about one song. They let the recording artist know about it and he heard opportunity knocking, so he seized the moment and the rest is history. This week, the new number one song in the USA is At this Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters.
- [05:08]
Chris Melanphy
Decades later, in an article for Billboard about songs resurrected by TV like Kate Bush's Running up that Hill, radio consultant Sean Ross said, quote, I think think at this Moment had a lot to do with starting the trend because it established a route to radio for songs that weren't of a piece with what else was on the radio, unquote. TV itself was not the immediate beneficiary of this trend. Sean Ross noted that the would have been should have been fad of the late 80s, which we talked about in our Hit Parade pilot episode about the chart return of UB 40s. Red Red wine was the most obvious successor to at this Moment. Also at first, movies more than TV took advantage of the trend, bringing back such hits as the Beatles Twist and shout from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ben E. King's Stand by Me from the 1986 movie of the same name, and of course, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, which was resurrected in 1992 by a TV sketch comedy routine turned hit movie Wayne's World. But in the decade after at this Moment, TV was no slouch in the Bring Back movement. The Wonder Years, a late 80s show about 60s nostalgia, used Joe Cocker's cover of the Beatles with A Little Help From My Friends and got that song back on adult contemporary playlists. The song had only been a number 68 hit back in 1968. In addition to giving the Rembrandts a huge theme song hit, Friends also gave Hoodie and the Blowfish an unlikely hit with a former B side called I Go Blind. At the peak of Friends mania, I Go blind reached number 13 on the radio songs chart and number two at adult top 40 stations. And the mid-90s, Fox TV hit Party of Five chose an obscure song by roots rock band the Bodines Closer to Free as its theme song and turned it belatedly into a top 40 hit. Closer to Free reached number 16 on the Hot 100 in 1996, three years after it was first released.
- [08:25]
Various Song Singers
Everybody wants to be closer to.
- [08:34]
Chris Melanphy
Even cartoon metalheads Beavis and Butthead were resurrecting songs and artists in the 90s the animated duo arguably sparked the entire career of hard rocker Rob Zombie when they endorsed his band White Zombie and their 1992 funk metal single Thunder Kiss 65. As with the Bodines, White Zombie found themselves with a belated hit. Thunder Kiss 65 broke on Billboard's rock charts in late 1993, more than a year after it was released. They should play this video all day long. It reached number 26 on the mainstream rock chart, giving Rob Zombie his big break. It was still possible for TV in the 90s to break artists as well as songs. For example, back in 1992, the short lived Fox TV show the Heights spawned a fake band of the same name. And like the Monkees or the Partridge Family before them, the Heights scored a Real World number one hit with how do you talk to an Angel? The lead singer of that fake band. Singer actor Jamie Walters spun off that success into a brief career as a pop hitmaker akin to the Ricky Nelson model. Walter's hold on, building off of his fame from the Heights as well as on Beverly Hills 90210 reached number 16 in 1994.
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Various Song Singers
Hold on, Hold on to me but.
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Chris Melanphy
Perhaps no performer was given a bigger break by TV in the 90s than singer songwriter Vonda Shepherd. Back in the 80s, in a bit of a Fluke, she appeared on a top 10 hit duetting with balladeer Dan Hill on his single can't we Try.
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Various Song Singers
Can we try just a little bit harder? Can we give just a little bit more?
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Chris Melanphy
Can we, can't we try? Reached number six in 1987. It didn't do much for Shepherd's career. She spent the early 90s recording and scoring only minor hits. It was Fox's aforementioned legal satire Ally McBeal that turned Vonda into a star. In 1997. The show cast her as a nightclub singer and gave her multiple televised performance slots as well as picked her five year old single Searchin My Soul. As the show's theme song. Searchin My Soul made the charts in a half dozen countries, and in America it reached number 22 on the adult Contemporary chart more than half a decade after it was first recorded. Even when a TV show picked a proven contemporary hit for a sink, the TV association could rebrand that hit and extend its life. Consider Paula Cole's single I Don't Want to Wait so open up your morning.
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Various Song Singers
Light say a little prayer for I you know that if we are to stay alive and see the peace in.
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Chris Melanphy
Every in 1998, the teen drama Dawson's Creek chose Cole's single as its theme song. By the time the show premiered on the WB Network on January 20, 1998, I don't want To Wait had already that very week reached its peak of number 11 on the Hot 100. Independently of the TV show to that point, it had had a 12 week chart run. But that wasn't the end of the story for Cole's hit. Dawson's extended the life of I Don't Want to Wait. Cole's single remained lodged in the top 20 for months. All told, I Don't Want to Wait rode the hot 100 more than a year 56 weeks, thanks largely to Dawson's Creek, whose success encouraged radio stations to keep rotating it long after it had peaked. By the time the Cole song finally dropped off the charts, Dawson's was deep into its second season. Entering the new millennium, TV showrunners and music supervisors were looking further afield for sinks, as the term is now known songs their TV shows could in a sense own. If a song was previously undiscovered or under heralded, and the show made it bigger, so much the better. In 2003, a new Fox Teen drama, the O.C. became renowned for curating a selection of fairly hip indie rock for its soundtrack. Phantom Planet, an LA power pop band that developed a larger following after drummer Jason Schwartzman became a famous Hollywood actor, provided the OCS theme song. California. California had already been a minor hit on the modern rock chart in 2002, but the premiere of the OC happened to coincide with the launch of Apple's iTunes music store. California quickly became a best selling 99 cent download. By 2005, when the OC was in its third season, California became Phantom Planet's only gold certified single thanks largely to digital downloads. The OC also helped break the career of British electropop artist Imagin Heap, Spin Me Round Again and Rub My Eyes Discard her moody electronic acapella single Hide and Seek soundtracked the show's season two finale. Like California, Hide and Seek became a gold selling digital download and it eventually spawned a hot 100 number one when later in the decade Jason Derulo prominently sampled it for his 2009 smash Whatcha say, Which probably would not have existed had the OC not popularized Imogen Heaps original among millennial TV shows. The King of Sinks, you might say was Shonda Rhimes long running ABC medical drama Grey's Anatomy. Two major pop hits of the aughts were essentially made by Grays, the ballad Chasing Cars by the Scottish Irish band Snow Pat.
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Various Song Singers
Just lay here would you lie with me and just forget the world.
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Chris Melanphy
And the pop rock song how to Save a Life by Denver, Colorado band the Fray. Both songs soundtracked major plot points in Grey's Anatomy's second season. By the fall of 2006, both tracks were in the Hot 100's top five. Simultaneously, Chasing Cars reached number five, how to Save a Life, number three. Each track sold millions of downloads and still rank among the best selling rock songs in digital music history, all because of their association with the doctors of Seattle Grace Hospital. But probably the most celebrated and debated TV sink of the decade was this Diddy. A point Point of clarification Journeys Don't Stop Believing, originally a number nine hit on the Hot 100 in 1981, was not single handedly revived in the aughts by TV. Journey songwriter and keyboardist Jonathan Cain says he noticed the song's digital sales first shot up in the fall of 2005 when baseball's Chicago White Sox adopted Don't Stop Believin as the theme of their celebrated 2005 World Series run. However, in 2007, don't stop believin became better known for this televised event.
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Various Song Singers
Foreign.
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Chris Melanphy
The legendary and infamous finale of HBO's the Sopranos, which cut to black as Tony Soprano listened to the Journey song on a Holston's diner jukebox with his family. The incongruousness of the soaring rock anthem with this domestically wholesome, possibly murderous final shot captured the public's imagination as 12 million viewers watched the finale. After the exposure on the Sopranos, digital sales of Don't Stop Believin shot up nearly 400% in a week 41,000 downloads sold in that week alone. Billboard's rules at this time precluded old songs without current pop radio airplay from re entering the Hot 100. For an explanation of these rules, please listen to our previous Hit Parade episode about Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is yous. Nonetheless, the Journey anthem did reach number 21 on Billboard's digital song sales chart, a sign it could very well have re entered the Hot 100, much the way Kate Bush's anthem did later in 2022. And don't stop Believin just kept selling. It went on to become the all time best selling catalog song in itunes history with more than 7 million downloads sold. Thanks, you might say, to the jukebox tastes of Tony Soprano. In the last decade and a half, television showrunners and music supervisors have mixed and matched elements of all of these approaches in their efforts to brand and define their shows. For example, the Fox TV hit Glee built entirely around music, and acapella singing proffered a mix of classic oldies like that Journey song prominently featured in the show's pilot, And more contemporary hits like the Glee cast's acclaimed take on Katy Perry's Teenage Dream. At the height of Glee's TV popularity and the height of the dollar download, the show sold so many digital tracks that it briefly set a record for the most chart entries in Hot 100 history by a single artist with an asterisk. Of course, that this so called single artist was actually a multifarious array of singer actors. In any case, The Glee cast's 207 Hot 100 entries was later eclipsed by rapper Drake. More important, the show was evidence that TV viewers who loved a song now had faster ways than ever to express that love through digital consumption and see the results directly on the charts. TV aimed at children and tweens also experienced a digital song explosion. Whether it was the show that launched Miley Cyrus's career, Hannah Montana, Or the Disney Channel movie series High School Musical, which spawned its own universe of hits including the number four Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens hit Breaking Free, Premium cable shows continued to mine and recontextualize classic oldies such as Badfinger's 1972 number 14 hit Baby Blues, used memorably in the 2013 series finale of AMC's Breaking Bad. As with Journey on the Sopranos, the reaction on digital services to the Breaking Bad finale was immediate. Billboard reported that in the handful of hours after the finale aired, baby Blue sold 5,000 copies, up from under 200 the previous week. And by 2013, with Spotify taking off in America, streaming services also tracked the Baby Blue renaissance. Streams on the song blew up by more than 9,000%. The Bad Finger song broke onto Billboard's digital songs chart at number 32. But even with all that digital activity, the Badfinger song did not return to the Hot 100. In fact, even today, deep into the streaming era on the charts, it's still pretty hard for an old song. These so called television bring back hits to make an actual comeback on the big chart. A sudden burst of digital sales and streams does help, but against the competition of current hits, which have not only digital consumption but also current radio airplay in their favor. And Billboard's rules which state that an old song can only come back if its combined points would put it within the top 50. The is very high, which is what makes the current status of Kate Bush's running Up that Hill. So remarkable. As we noted at the top of our show in its first run in 1985, running up that hill topped out at number 30 on the Hot 100, Kate Bush's only American top 40 hit ever. And ironically, as I noted, it was peaking on the big chart at the same moment as the hits from Miami Vice. But oh, how the charts have evolved since that peak Vice moment. Those TV syncs had to make their mark on the charts through physical record stores and a different generation of top 40 radio stations. Jan Hammers and Glenn Fry's hits were set up with the public and radio programmers for months before they reached their chart peak, Whereas now the public reacts to a song on a TV show instantaneously, like they did with Journey's song in the Sopranos. But even that digital phenomenon is on steroids now that Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services reach about a third of US Households. It's one thing to buy a single digital copy of Don't Stop Believin'. It's quite another to play it on a streaming service over and over again. There's also another kind of streaming that didn't exist when the Sopranos was first broadcast streaming tv. These services Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Amazon, Apple TV plus HBO Max collectively reach millions more people than premium cable did in its heyday. And few streaming hits are as big as Netflix's Stranger Things. Mom and dad were both arguing in the next room, so I plead you the mixtape I made you. It was the first time he got into music. Real music. The Duffer Brothers teen sci fi horror series set in the early to mid-1980s, makes ample use of period specific 80s songs, and the Stranger Things music supervisors give special showcases to songs that weren't necessarily big hits the first time Should.
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Various Song Singers
I stay or should I go.
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Chris Melanphy
Should.
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Various Song Singers
I stay or should I go Now?
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Chris Melanphy
The Clashes Should I stay or should I go now one of the most recognizable songs of the post punk era, was only a number 45 hit in 1982. The Clash song played a prominent role in Stranger Things first season. Its streams grew as a result of the show, but it didn't return to the Hot 100. Neither did 80s synth pop veteran Lamal. Lamal's synth pop classic The Never Ending Story, a number 17 hit in 1984, was prominently featured in the finale of the third season of Stranger Things and.
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Various Song Singers
What you see will be.
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Chris Melanphy
In July 2019. Lamal's 35 year old hit blew up up on download and streaming services, but again, not quite enough to make Billboard's charts, but Kate Bush's Running up that Hill in the just issued fourth season of the show, the song is practically a character.
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Amazon Music Announcer
You belong here with me.
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Chris Melanphy
You're no, really, you're oh, but I am, Max. I am. In the world of the show. Running up that Hill has the power to break the character master Axe out of her prison in the dark realm known as the Upside Down. The placement of the song is as heartfelt as at this moment was in Family Ties, as aching as I Don't Want To Wait was in Dawson's Creek, and as soaring as Don't Stop Believin was in the Sopranos. But unlike those prior TV song sinks, Running up that Hill is benefiting from its newfound exposure instant, instantaneously. As of the week I'm recording this, Billboard reports that Running up that Hill is the number one download in America. Remember, even after the Sopranos, Journey's song got no higher than number 21 in downloads, it's also now the most streamed song in the country, streamed more than 29 million times. That's something that neither Bad Fingers, Baby Blue nor the Stranger songs by the Clash and Lamal pulled off. Running is even generating airplay at current top 40 stations. Last week its radio audience told totaled 2.4 million, nearly as big as current hits by Post Malone and Justin Bieber Sales streams radio these are the components of the Hot 100, and Kate Bush's song is blowing up in all of them. So yes, Kate Bush's night 1985 hit is a 2022 mega hit, thanks largely to TV and the way the charts have evolved in the last half century, we're long past the days of Davy Crockett, Hawaii 5o and even Miami Vice. But at the end of the day, Running up that Hill is just a brilliant song, one that's been waiting for discovery. Discovery by a new generation. In an age when Gen Z listeners compile playlists where all songs have an equal shot at immortality regardless of their era, Kate Bush's song just sounds like it fits. Picture it playing on a 2022 teenager's Spotify playlist next to the latest sad boy synth pop by Glass Animals Sometimes. Or a self assured sigh of a single by Billie Eilish. The transition to Running up that hill, even 37 years after Kate Bush recorded it, is seamless. It's already matched the top five success of those hits from Grey's Anatomy. But will Kate Bush's song reach number one the way Billie Vera or Jan Hammer did in the mid-80s? Who can say? Say at this moment, only one thing is certain. Kate Bush finally has an American Top five hit, not just because her song was on TV or because it reminds us of the past, but because it still sounds like the future. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanthe. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis. Kevin also produced the latest installment of our monthly Hit Parade the Bridge shows, which are available exclusively to Slate plus members. In our latest Bridge episode, I talked to music publishing executive Mara Coogee, who's placed music in shows like Shameless and Succession and tells us about the mysterious art of TV and movie sinks. To sign up for Slate plus and hear not only the Bridge but all our shows the day they drop, visit slate.com hitparadeplus Alicia Montgomery is the Executive producer and Derek John the supervising Narrator producer of Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way way. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melany.