Fact #94805
When:
Short story:
Comedian Steve
Martin releases the single King Tut on
Warner Bros Records in the USA. The backing group on the track, credited as The Toot Uncommons, is actually The Nitty Gritty Dirt
Band. The record will peak at No17 on the Billboard Chart and will
sell over one million copies.
Full article:
John McEuen (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) : We played the backing for the Steve Martin song King Tut, and Warner Brothers didn't want to release it. They said, "That's not a hit." My brother Bill, who produced it, said, 'You're a record company. You don't make records, you distribute them. Your purpose is to distribute plastic, not to govern what is on it.' He was very cocky about that.
So he made twenty acetates and shipped them to twenty major radio stations and within two weeks it was in the Top 20 without having any product inthe market place. Well, that forced Warners to release it and it ended up doing a million and a half units. Sometimes the market is there and the record company, the analysts, the numbers people, they don't know. They're not the people who created Jimi Hendrix.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, August 2013)
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So he made twenty acetates and shipped them to twenty major radio stations and within two weeks it was in the Top 20 without having any product inthe market place. Well, that forced Warners to release it and it ended up doing a million and a half units. Sometimes the market is there and the record company, the analysts, the numbers people, they don't know. They're not the people who created Jimi Hendrix.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, August 2013)