#10: Little Deuce Coupe by the Beach Boys
City: Hamilton, ON
Radio Station: CKOC
Peak Month: September 1963
Peak Position in Hamilton ~ #1
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #15
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #15
YouTube: “Little Deuce Coupe”
Lyrics: “Little Deuce Coupe”
Brian Wilson was born in Inglewood, California, in 1942. In biographer Peter Ames Carlin’s book, Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, he relates that when Brian Wilson first heard George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” it had a huge emotional impact on him. As a youngster, Wilson learned to play a toy accordion and sang in children’s choirs. In his teens he started a group with his cousin, Mike Love and his brother, Carl. Mike was born in Los Angeles in 1941 and Carl was born in 1946 in Hawthorne, California. Brian Wilson named the group Carl and the Passions in order to convince his brother to join. They had a performance in the fall of 1960 at Hawthorne High School, where they attended. Their set included some songs by Dion and the Belmonts. Among the people in the audience was Al Jardine, another classmate. Jardine was born in Hawthorne in 1942. He was so impressed with the performance that he let the group know. Jardine would later be enlisted, along with Dennis Wilson to form the Pendletones in 1961. Dennis was born in Inglewood in 1944.
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#11: Nova Heart by the Spoons
City: Hamilton, ON
Radio Station: CKOC
Peak Month: July 1982
Peak Position in Hamilton ~ #4
Peak position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Nova Heart”
Lyrics: “Nova Heart”
The Spoons were a band formed in 1979 in Burlington, Ontario. After several lineup changes they released their debut album, Stick Figure Neighbourhood. But they had to wait until 1982 with the release of their second album, Arias & Symphonies to get national attention. By that time the band consisted of Spoons co-founders Gordon Deppe (on lead vocals and guitar) and Sandy Horne on bass and vocals. The Spoons second drummer, Derrick Ross, joined the band in late 1979. The keyboard player, Rob Preuss, was the band’s second keyboard player after Brett Wickens departed.
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#12: Is She Really Going Out With Him by Joe Jackson
City: Hamilton, ON
Radio Station: CKOC
Peak Month: September 1979
Peak Position in Hamilton ~ #2
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #5
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #21
YouTube:”Is She Really Going Out With Him”
Lyrics: “Is She Really Going Out With Him”
Joe Jackson was born David Ian Jackson in 1954 in Burton upon Trent, England. In his teens he learned to play violin and piano. In 1970 when he was 16-years-old, Jackson was playing piano in bars and pubs. Out of high school he attended London’s Royal Academy of Music. In the early 70s he formed a British band called Edward Bear (different from the Canadian band from Ontario), which soon changed its name to Arms and Legs. David Ian Jackson started getting the nickname “Joe” because some people thought he looked like the Charlie Brown character Snoopy in his “Joe Cool” persona.
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#24: Jennifer Eccles by the Hollies
City: Edmonton, AB
Radio Station: CHED
Peak Month: April 1968
Peak Position in Edmonton: #4
Peak position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #40
YouTube: “Jennifer Eccles”
Lyrics: “Jennifer Eccles”
The Hollies are an English rock group formed by Allan Clarke and Graham Nash in the early 1960’s. Known for their distinctive vocal harmony style, they became one of the leading British groups of the 1960s and early 1970s. They enjoyed considerable popularity in many countries, although they did not achieve major US chart success until 1966. Nash left the group in 1968, and then formed Crosby, Stills and Nash. The Hollies had 30 charting singles on the UK Singles Chart, and 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their hits included “Bus Stop”, “I Can’t Let Go”, “On A Carousel”, “Stop, Stop, Stop” and “Carrie Anne” in the mid-60s.
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#13: She Sells Sanctuary by the Cult
City: Hamilton, ON
Radio Station: CKOC
Peak Month: March 1986
Peak Position in Hamilton ~ #2
Peak position in Vancouver ~ “also getting airplay”
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “She Sells Sanctuary”
Lyrics: “She Sells Sanctuary”
The Cult is a band formed in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK, in 1983. The band was fronted by Ian Astbury, who was born in Heswall, Cheshire, UK, in 1962. He lived in Hamilton (ON) from 1973 to 1979. In 1981, Astbury formed Southern Death Cult, a punk band. In 1983, Astbury formed Death Cult. He was joined on guitar by William “Billy” Duffy, who was born in 1961 in Manchester, UK. On bass guitar was Jamie Stewart, who was born in Middlesex, UK, in 1964. Before joining Death Cult, Stewart was part of a gothic-post-punk band called Ritual. Before appearing in January 1984 on a Channel 4 variety show called The Tube, Astbury changed the band’s name again to The Cult. They released their debut album, Dreamtime, in 1984, including a new drummer named Nigel Preston (born Birmingham, 1963). Several singles from Dreamtime cracked the Top 100 of the UK Singles chart.
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#14: Copperhead Road by Steve Earle
City: Hamilton, ON
Radio Station: CKOC
Peak Month: February 1989
Peak Position in Hamilton ~ #4
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #21
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ no Hot 100
YouTube: “Copperhead Road”
Lyrics: “Copperhead Road”
Stephen Fain Earle was born in 1955 in Ft. Monroe, Virginia. His father was an air traffic controller and the family moved to San Antonio, Texas, when Earle was a child. Earle began learning the guitar at the age of 11 and entered a school talent contest at age 13. He ran away from home at age 14 to search for his idol, singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. Earle was “rebellious” as a young man and dropped out of school at the age of 16. He moved to Houston with his 19-year-old uncle, also a musician. While in Houston Earle finally met Van Zandt. Earle was opposed to the Vietnam war as he recalled in 2012: “The anti-war movement was a very personal thing for me. I didn’t finish high school, so I wasn’t a candidate for a student deferment. I was fucking going.” The end of the Selective Service Act and the draft lottery in 1973 prevented him from being drafted, but several of his friends were drafted, which he credits as the origin of his politicization. Earle also noted that when he was a young man, his girlfriend was able to get an abortion despite the fact that abortion was illegal. Her father was a doctor at the local hospital in San Antonio while several other girls he knew at the time were not able to get abortions; they lacked access to those with the necessary power to arrange an abortion, which he credits as the origin of his pro-choice views.
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#524: I Believe In Music by Gallery
Peak Month: November 1972
9 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG’s chart
Peak Position #4
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #22
YouTube: “I Believe In Music”
Lyrics: “I Believe In Music”
Gallery was formed in Detroit in 1971 by Jim Gold, who was born in ‘the Motor City’ in 1947. In 1971, while he and a friend were playing at a Detroit club called the Poison Apple, he was discovered by Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore. Coffey learned to play guitar at the age of thirteen, in the Michigan Upper Peninsula town of Copper City. In 1955, as a fifteen-year-old sophomore at a Detroit high school, Dennis played his first record session, backing Vic Gallon in “I’m Gone”, on the Gondola Record label. In the early 1960s he joined The Royaltones who played sessions with other recording artists including Del Shannon and Bobby Rydell. By the late 1960s as a member of the Funk Brothers studio band, Coffey played on dozens of recordings for Motown Records, and introduced a hard rock guitar sound to Motown including distortion, Echoplex tape-loop delay, and wah-wah: most notably heard on “Cloud Nine”, “Ball of Confusion”, and “Psychedelic Shack” by The Temptations. He played on numerous other hit records of the era: Edwin Starr’s “War”, Diana Ross & The Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together”, and Freda Payne’s, “Band of Gold”.
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#23: Tear Drop City by the Monkees
City: Edmonton, AB
Radio Station: CHED
Peak Month: March 1969
Peak Position in Edmonton: #2
Peak position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #56
YouTube: “Tear Drop City”
Lyrics: “Tear Drop City”
Robert Michael Nesmith was born on December 30, 1942 in Houston, TX. His mother, Bette invented liquid paper and would later leave the $20 million estate to him. Affectionately nicknamed “Nez,” he learned to play saxophone as a young child and joined the United States Air Force years later. After two years in the Air Force, he left to pursue a career in folk music. In 1962 Nesmith won a talent contest at San Antonio College. He left Texas and moved to Los Angeles, with the intent of getting into the movie business. He became the “hoot master” at a regular hootenanny at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. In 1963 Nesmith released a 45 of a song he wrote called “Wanderin'”. In 1964 Nesmith wrote “Different Drum”, which was a #13 hit for Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys on the Billboard Hot 100 and #5 in Vancouver in 1967.
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#15: Wild World by Cat Stevens
City: Hamilton, ON
Radio Station: CKOC
Peak Month: April 1971
Peak Position in Hamilton ~ #2
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #11
YouTube: “Wild World”
Lyrics: “Wild World”
Steven Demetre Georgiou was born in 1948 in the West End of London, UK. His father was a Greek Cypriot and his mother was Swedish and they ran a restaurant. Young Steven learned the piano as a child and added mastery of guitar by the age of fifteen. After public school, in 1965 he studied for a year at Hammersmith School of Art, hoping to become a cartoonist. Concurrently, he began to perform in public billed as Steve Adams. That year he got a publishing contract and wrote “The First Cut Is The Deepest”. Georgiou hunched his name might not catch on with record buyers, so he decided on the stage name of Cat Stevens. A girlfriend had told him he had eyes like a cat, plus he thought the general public could relate to cats. In 1966, at the age of 18, Cat Stevens had a #2 single on the UK Singles chart titled “Matthew And Son”. This was followed by a song concerning workplace violence called “I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun” which also made the Top Ten in the UK. In 1967 a song he wrote, “Here Comes My Baby”, became an international hit for The Tremeloes.
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#16: Instant Replay by Dan Hartman
City: Hamilton, ON
Radio Station: CKOC
Peak Month: February 1979
Peak Position in Hamilton ~ #4
Peak position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #29
YouTube: “Instant Replay”
Lyrics: “Instant Replay”
Daniel Earl Hartman was born in West Hanover Township (PA) in 1950. He was a child prodigy who studied classical piano. Hartman joined his first band the Legends, at the age of 13 in 1964 at the request of his older brother David who asked him to play keyboards. Initially, the Legends were a soul band who morphed to a psychedelic rock band. Into the early 70s, Hartman left the Legends and joined the Edgar Winter Group. He sang on the pop hit “Free Ride” and played bass guitar on the number-one 1973 hit “Frankenstein”. Between 1974 and 1980, Hartman was a musician on three albums for Johnny Winter. In 1976, Dan Hartman released a promotional album titled Who Is Dan Hartman and Why Is Everyone Saying Wonderful Things About Him?
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