As a singer/songwriter of extremely moderate acclaim, I freely admit to spending the entirety of my career trying to write that one song that somehow found its way through the industry maze of bullshit & cronyism and established both itself and me as viable contenders on the national stage.
Many a night was spent blowing the months' rent in one windowless recording studio or another not knowing whether I was coming or going, but believing with absolute certainty that the song I had just finished recording would finally obliterate the obscurity that had hounded me like a movie villain with no perceivable weaknesses.
As I walked out of the studio with the final mix in my hands and heard the finality of the soundproof studio door swinging shut behind me, the last bit of adrenaline coursed through my veins. By the time I made it to my car, reality had set in and the only thing keeping me from driving off the nearest cliff was the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, this time would be different.
Maybe this song would open other doors that I had only dreamed about. Maybe it would even lead to other bigger songs and a career that read more like a movie script with a stereotypical happy ending than a guide of what not to do to get ahead in the music business.
Climbing into the car, I tossed the CD-R into the backseat and drove the fifteen hours home in complete silence. Around about Utah, my ears were screaming for noise so I flipped on the radio.
I'd been this way before a thousand times and knew that it was a dead zone. If I managed to pull in anything at all, it would be that lousy country station that called itself "The Frog", whose crude billboards of a large bug-eyed frog sticking its tongue out at you served only to remind you just how alone you were in the world.
Even so, I tapped the search button and hoped for the best.
After what seemed like an hour of searching, the radio finally found signs of life and the chorus to Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars" filled the interior of my 1996 Toyota P.O.S..
Now, I don't remember the first time I heard "Counting Blue Cars", but I do remember the ten-thousandth time I heard the song because I'm pretty sure they both took place the same week. To say that commercial radio had embraced Dishwalla would be an understatement, as the song received ASCAP's coveted "Most Played Song Of The Year" award for the calendar year of 1996.
And 1997.
As if to drive home this point, as the song on the radio faded out, the next song was "Counting Blue Cars" again.
I immediately wondered if somebody wasn't having a larf at my expense and, after the sixth play, opted for silence once again.
This strange encounter did get me thinking, however, about the oddly unexpected perils of having one's dream come true.
After all, Dishwalla had once been just a band with a goofy name trying to make it in the world, when, lo and behold, the third single from their debut album, Pet Your Friends, inexplicably took off at modern rock radio.
What could have ended up being just another modern rock radio "hit" quickly jumped the tracks and wormed its way onto Top 40 playlists, where it found its way into "medium rotation", at which point sales of the single began climbing steadily at retail, leading radio stations to bump the song up to "heavy rotation", where it stayed for what felt like an eternity.
As one can imagine, Dishwalla were now living the rock & roll dream. Surely the monster success of "Counting Blue Cars" would open people's ears to the rest of the band's awesome debut album and that the hits would just keep right on coming.
Thing is, before radio will start playing your next single, they actually have to scale back airplay of the previous single, but that never happened. The album's fourth single, "Charlie Brown's Parents" is, in fact, still waiting for airplay of "Counting Blue Cars" to subside.
Meanwhile, nothing the band has done in the twelve years since "Counting Blue Cars" peaked at #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 has received even a whiff of interest from commercial radio.
Still, for all the airplay lauded upon "Counting Blue Cars", the album from which the song came still couldn't get within a stone's throw of the Top 40, which leads one to believe that at no point during the ninety bazillion spins the song received did anyone listening ever say to themselves, "Gee, I wonder what the rest of the album sounds like."
Even more disconcerting was the fact that the hundreds of commercial radio stations that couldn't play "Counting Blue Cars" enough and couldn't wait to get the band into the studio for an interview and an intimate in-studio performance of the song also couldn't care less when the band released their follow-up album, And You Think You Know What Life's About, in 1998.
When they found themselves unceremoniously freed from their contractual obligations to A&M Records after that album's commercial failure, yet they could still turn on the radio and hear "Counting Blue Cars" with stunning regularity, the members of Dishwalla must have been left wondering what the hell happened.
While this writer would agree 'tis better to be known for one song than to not be known at all, it can also be argued that when one song's success stops a band's artistic growth dead in its tracks and prevents anything the band ever does from being taken seriously, you almost have to ask "Was it worth it?"
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