Ready, Unsteady

July 20, 2016 2:06 PM

In June of 1979, a song called "Ready 'N Steady" appeared on Billboard's "Bubbling Under" chart and persisted there for three weeks, struggling up to number 102 before vanishing into a legendary obscurity. For the next 37 years, music historians were unable to find any other evidence of the song's existence—no recordings, no memories of airplay, no band or label information. This month, the mystery of the "phantom record" was finally solved: "Ready 'N Steady" exists, and you can listen to it here.

("I can’t even begin to describe how disappointing the song is," writes Jim Cofer.)

posted by Iridic (48 comments total)

I would thank you for the cool post but you may have inadvertently cast me into this rabbit hole forever so I guess it's a wash
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:17 PM on July 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

Terrible song.

But I'm confused... if it never got radio play and never sold a single copy, how'd it get on a chart based on radio play and sales?
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 2:17 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wow, yeah, I can imagine that fitting seamlessly into the rotation of any classic rock station in America. You could hear it every day for a week and never even notice it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:18 PM on July 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

But I'm confused... if it never got radio play and never sold a single copy, how'd it get on a chart based on radio play and sales?

Aw, you're so cute ...
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:26 PM on July 20, 2016 [16 favorites]

I can’t even begin to describe how disappointing the song is.

I can see why a completionist would need to have a copy, but it charted for 3 weeks and peaked at 102. Why would anyone think it was any good?
posted by cardboard at 2:32 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

"We think—we think—that it’s a girl’s rock group from Chicago. Punk group, we think.” would have been so much better an outcome.
posted by crush-onastick at 2:33 PM on July 20, 2016 [10 favorites]

Is it weird that I'm wondering what the b-side would be?
posted by pxe2000 at 2:39 PM on July 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

You Should See the Other Guy: "Terrible song.

But I'm confused... if it never got radio play and never sold a single copy, how'd it get on a chart based on radio play and sales?"

I'll make my music boring
I'll play my music slow
I ain't no artist, I'm a business man
No ideas of my own

I won't offend
Or rock the boat
Just sex and drugs
And rock and roll

Drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool
My Payola!
Drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool
My Payola!
posted by symbioid at 2:43 PM on July 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

Why would anyone think it was any good?

A lot of my favorite stuff never got anywhere close to a top-100, I imagine I'm not alone there
posted by Hoopo at 2:43 PM on July 20, 2016 [16 favorites]

but it charted for 3 weeks and peaked at 102. Why would anyone think it was any good?

It might have been ahead of its time musically, or too raw and political for the airwaves. In the absence of all contextual information, "Ready 'N' Steady" was something like Schrödinger's cassingle: a quantum superposition of all possible songs, good and bad. It only collapses into rockabilly mediocrity after you press play.
posted by Iridic at 2:45 PM on July 20, 2016 [25 favorites]

But I'm confused... if it never got radio play and never sold a single copy, how'd it get on a chart based on radio play and sales?

YouTube and downloads. In 1979, you only had to have like 5 of each to be top 40.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:55 PM on July 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

I read the comments saying it was disappointing, and terrible, and I clicked, and I was really unprepared for just how bad it really is. It's really, really bad.
posted by curiousgene at 2:55 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Two word review: "Shit sandwich."
posted by Bob Regular at 2:57 PM on July 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

A lot of my favorite stuff never got anywhere close to a top-100, I imagine I'm not alone there

And I still have their indie USB keys because I cared. D.A. Is a band that failed at making any kind of impact whatsoever.
posted by cardboard at 3:02 PM on July 20, 2016

It's a bit like the Allman Brothers, if you replaced Gregg Allman with Jim Belushi and all the other Allman Brothers with Osmond Brothers.
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:15 PM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

I dunno, guys. I hate rock'n'roll-revival white-boy boogie-woogie booze-blues as much as the next guy, but I can totally see this fitting in perfectly well on the mid-1979 charts. Compare Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll," which was charting at the same time (and again four years later when Risky Business came out). George Thorogood was churning out the same sort of crap then too. The theme from America's Funniest Home Videos wasn't some kind of spontaneous anomaly.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:17 PM on July 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

I was in the radio biz in the late '70s and Billboard's whole "Bubbling Under" list was generally a mystery to me. Songs could hover between #101 and #110 for several weeks, but anything that didn't rise into the Hot 100 after one week had zero chance of going anywhere.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:17 PM on July 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

It sounds like Lou Reed. Sad!
posted by thelonius at 3:26 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I swear to god there's like 5 ironic garage blues hipster bands playing this exact sound on any given night here in Austin Texas. Probably hotel Vegas on a Tuesday night garaunteed.

And I mean, the worst part is I don't totally hate it. I mean, If the the beer's cold enough and there's an outside patio where I could talk to my friends it might actually be un-terrible background hipster bar band music.
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:56 PM on July 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

So this guy whose life has been devoted to the study of the Billboard charts has irrefutably proven that the Billboard charts are bullshit. What's he going to do now?

Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll,"
Coincidentally, I was listening to this song while in line at the hardware store today, thinking about how Seger is basically saying that the song he's singing right now is terrible.
posted by hydrophonic at 4:02 PM on July 20, 2016 [13 favorites]

Who the hell would even want to take Bob Seger to a disco? Bob Seger is literally the last person I would want with me if I were going to a disco. That part always struck me as sour grapes.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:31 PM on July 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll"

And now I can't get that damn song out of my head. Maybe I'll try listening to "Ready 'N Steady" to try to bump it back out - even if it's bad, it'll at least be new...
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:38 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

“We think—we think—that it’s a girl’s rock group from Chicago. Punk group, we think.”

I have the Dark Rooms single by the female-fronted Chicago band DA! and a copy of the Busted at Oz compilation that they were on, and DA! is a lot better than D.A.
posted by larrybob at 4:38 PM on July 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

1979 Bob Seger though?

This song doesn't strike me as being all that bad, it's just very generic blues rock.
posted by Flashman at 4:39 PM on July 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

> I dunno, guys. I hate rock'n'roll-revival white-boy boogie-woogie booze-blues as much as the next guy, but I can totally see this fitting in perfectly well on the mid-1979 charts.

> And I mean, the worst part is I don't totally hate it. I mean, If the the beer's cold enough and there's an outside patio where I could talk to my friends it might actually be un-terrible background hipster bar band music.

I agree with these comments; the rest of y'all are too goddamn hip for your britches. Sure, the backup chorus is appalling and there's a horrible instrumental break somewhere in there, but otherwise, yeah, it could have played on a bar radio pretty much any time in the '70s and nobody would have said "Turn that shit off!" It's like a cold Bud that's maybe a little past its expiration date and tastes like there just might be a trace quantity of mouse shit in it; as long as you've got a cold Bud already in you and there's another one on the way, you're not gonna complain. Don't tell me about no fuckin' microbrew, either; this ain't that kind of bar.
posted by languagehat at 5:24 PM on July 20, 2016 [23 favorites]

Not bad, but it's no "Rancid Polecat," that's for sure!
posted by kimota at 6:15 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Languagehat I got your back, we roll deep like that.
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:25 PM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

It sounds to me like bad imitation of Leroy Brown
posted by gt2 at 7:24 PM on July 20, 2016

That ain't so bad. Could be any Dr. Hook and the Medicine Band album cut.

it's not nearly as bad as, say, Ringo's song "Oh My My or for God's sake "You're Having My Baby." I'd include "Only Women Bleed" but that was a deliberate provocation.
posted by msalt at 7:24 PM on July 20, 2016

I like it because it sounds like royalty-free music you'd hear in a cheap B movie after someone says "come on, let's roll!" Maybe a driving scene that pads out the length of the movie.
posted by teponaztli at 7:26 PM on July 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

There was quite a lot of odd slick slogging corporate rock flailing round in the late 70's and early 80's. I had the impression at the time that record corporations were vaguely trying to tamper down those new waves or something.
posted by ovvl at 7:35 PM on July 20, 2016

That ain't so bad. Could be any Dr. Hook and the Medicine Band album cut.

They could be complex.
posted by ovvl at 8:01 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sure, the backup chorus is appalling and there's a horrible instrumental break somewhere in there, but otherwise, yeah, it could have played on a bar radio pretty much any time in the '70s and nobody would have said "Turn that shit off!"

Exactly. It's no "Surrender," but it's no worse than "Sad Eyes," "Lead Me On," "The Main Event," "Energy Crisis '79," "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'," or dozens of other 1979 songs that weren't just Bubbling Under. Those of y'all who think it's horrific weren't around in the 70s.
posted by blucevalo at 9:22 PM on July 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

Nope, I was around in the 70's. I love good rockabilly. This ain't that. I think what you meant to say was Those of y'all who think it's horrific either weren't around in the 70's or have some discernment.
posted by evilDoug at 9:45 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

So is anyone on MiFi music going to do a punk rock girl band cover of this song and close the loop?
posted by boilermonster at 10:25 PM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Nope. To hear good rockabilly, (let alone love it) you had to be around in the '50s. First rockabilly record I bought in 1956 was a 78 rpm of "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins. Dropped it on the way home and it broke in two, but some well placed Scotch tape made it playable on my old acoustic record player.
posted by carping demon at 11:30 PM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'd include "Only Women Bleed yt " but that was a deliberate provocation.

Me and you, outside.
posted by bongo_x at 12:40 AM on July 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

it sounds very much of its time - like an outtake from the rocky horror picture show - still, not having a record of it, but just a tape raises my suspicions a bit - this would be very easy to fake, wouldn't it? - was there ever another "record" that hit the billboard bubbling under chart without being an actual record and without being on the radio? - how did a mere demo tape end up on that chart when demo tapes were a dime a dozen back then?

this is an awfully mysterious outlier
posted by pyramid termite at 12:56 AM on July 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm inclined to think that the guy in the Youtube comments speculating that this was a tax fraud record is onto something, except it sounds like they never pressed any records.
posted by thelonius at 2:24 AM on July 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

More on tax-shelter records. The book Mansion on a Hill also has a look back at Morris Levy's tax-shelter records business.
posted by pxe2000 at 3:31 AM on July 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

Such a forgettable song. It's like someone finally found the Holy Grail but it's just a styrofoam cup.
posted by Lyme Drop at 4:18 AM on July 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

thelonius, the guy from the band says it was never pressed, but that doesn't mean it really wasn't. It's entirely possible (likely, even) that if it was indeed a tax fraud record, the band wouldn't have known it existed.

From your own link:

These type of releases usually come in a few different forms. Most often, they are demos sent in by hopeful musicians that got rejected. Often, the musicians themselves never know that the material got pressed until years after.

And from pxe's link:

Yes, I chatted via e-mail with Richie Zito and Joey Carbone of Snowball (released on Guinness), both of whom became very successful afterwards as producers and songwriters. Neither of them had any idea the album was actually released. In fact, when I sent off a quick e-mail to Joey Carbone (I found his e-mail address on the web) asking about the album, within less than 5 minutes I got a response that simply said: “This album was released? You have a copy?” He later confirmed that it was recorded by Bob Gallo in 1970 but somehow never got released at the time. They were pretty amazed when I told them the story about tax scam records and what they were. Members of many other bands on these labels have been contacted and also did not know about the records.

posted by Sys Rq at 10:13 AM on July 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

(And since the loophole was closed "around 1978 or so" per the second link, it would make sense for the record to show up in 1979, as the fake labels would have been emptying all the crap out of their warehouses at that time.)
posted by Sys Rq at 10:17 AM on July 21, 2016

This falls into "one of my favorite things" category: discovering true things that even the internet doesn't know. At least, not until you explain the solution on the internet.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:36 PM on July 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wonder if it's like, some promoter going around trying to get enough interested radio programmers to express interest or commit to a playlist add, and then using that to secure distribution & promotion, and this one just stalled out somewhere around getting the song (on paper only) added to playlists that ultimately got reported to Billboard, just enough to net a very low, very brief chart entry. There may have been actual fraud, or this might just be a curious clerical mishap that was par for the course in the low-level record biz hustle of '79.
posted by anazgnos at 2:56 PM on July 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

the low-level record biz hustle of '79.

I love this colorful bit of jargon: the name for the salesperson who sold cut-out LPs to retail outlets was a "rack jobber". ("Cut-outs": they marked LPs as unsold by snipping the corner, or sometimes cutting a notch into the edge near the corner, and they could then only be sold at deep discounts. They were allowed, I guess to write the inventory off as unsold, but do this too? Not real sure. )
posted by thelonius at 5:02 PM on July 21, 2016

Rack Jobber is often used a bit more broadly than that, for instance, convenience stores are often made up of rack jobbers - the soft drinks fridge from Coca-Cola or the potato chips rack from Frito Lay. But yeah it was used in the same sense as you describe for other media formats as well. In my early days in my movie distribution we worked with rack jobbers who were as colorful as the name. Mostly they were hustlers of one sort or another but there were some we definitely thought were low level gangsters trying to move product they just jacked.
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:04 PM on July 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think what you meant to say was Those of y'all who think it's horrific either weren't around in the 70's or have some discernment.

No, I said what I meant to say and you put words in my mouth.

It's not horrific -- it's not high art for those with "discernment" either. I never said otherwise.
posted by blucevalo at 10:07 PM on July 21, 2016 [1 favorite]