We tend to think that the cream rises to the top, but according to an author who was lucky enough to be selected by NPR for an interview about his book, that’s not necessarily the way it works. Evidently luck plays a major role here.
Princeton professor Matthew Salganik conducted an experiment to see if different groups of randomly-selected teenagers would rate the same set of songs in a way that was at least similar.
As it turns out, they didn’t.
In fact, as the story explains, one song that was rated No. 1 in one group was ranked at No. 40 in another.
If one takes that on its face, then success is just a crap shoot.
But let’s not take this too far. There is a reason your uncle’s bar band didn’t get its break, and it wasn’t because they never left town.
In the professor’s second study, what he found was that a certain level of quality was needed, which is why your uncle and his buddies never became rock stars. (The fact that they were drunken derelicts poorly playing the same Eagles and CCR covers as every other bar band, as it turns out, was a pretty big factor.)
As the story summarizes, “It is hard to make things of very poor quality succeed — though after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn’t is essentially a matter of chance.”
Accordingly, one can hear critic using that excuse to explain why T Rex never made it in the states or why Big Star never made it at all.
But not so fast.
Jeffrey Thiessen, in another recent article over at popmatters.com, effectively argues that some bands’ lack of success wasn’t just timing or bad luck.
Quite likely, he opines, that lack of success was for good reasons.
Thiessen goes down a short list of cult acts, Anvil, Rodriguez, Death and Big Star, and explains why they didn’t make it, and it wasn’t just luck.
He also argues that those bands’ (and others’) lack of success is okay, that we don’t need to romanticize them into some could’ve, should’ve, would’ve heroic tragedy.
Perhaps the fact that we’re talking about them afterward is the way it should be. At least they get some respect, even if it’s late.
For every band that has popular success, there are hundreds (thousands?) that don’t, and logic would follow that somewhere buried amongst the drivel is also some amazing music.
For me, one of the bands that never got what it deserved was Atlanta-based Drivin’ N’ Cryin’. I simply cannot understand how they didn’t become a bigger success.
While they did have some level of success, enough that they’re still doing it almost thirty years after they started, it has never been in synch with the quality of their output.
I remember hearing the title track from “Fly Me Courageous” sometime around 1990 or 91 and knew I had to own that album. That guitar riff was unlike anything I’d heard, and the song just rocked like nothing else.
My customary practice was to buy the single, and if the B-side was good, then I might spring for the whole album. But “Fly Me Courageous” was such a great song I didn’t need to hear any of the other songs off that album to know I need it. My life would simply be incomplete without it.
But I was obviously missing something because neither MTV nor any one I knew seemed to give a rat’s petard, and the album was only mildly successful.
Unfortunately, Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ didn’t hit it big with any of their other albums, either, even though they’re all great. As one would imagine, they’ve got a pretty long list of excellent songs.
One of those songs is the band’s other “hit,” “Straight to Hell,” a fantastic country song that is either really funny or really sad or sometimes both. It’s a song that found its way onto several of my mix tapes and left my wife rather unimpressed when our then four-year-old daughter started singing along to the chorus in the van. All-in-all, I suppose it wasn’t the right song for a toddler to be singing.
But it’s still a great song, and Kevn Kinney, the lead singer and principal songwriter for Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, has many more where that one came from.
But big-time success is unlikely to find its way to Drivin’ N’ Cryin’. Either they didn’t get their lucky break, as our Princeton professor would suggest, or there was some other fatal flaw, as Thiessen over at Popmatters would infer.
But the fact that the band still exists, writes new music, and plays shows is more than enough; it’s a treasure we should be happy to enjoy.
Now I just need to convince the family to take a drive to Georgia so I can see them play.