Ranking The Rock Era

Ranking the Rock Writers, 1955-1991 Writer Team #40:  Eddie BRIGATI/Felix CAVALIERE The world of pop music is replete with stories of acts that had magical runs of about eighteen months.  The Supremes.  Andy Gibb.  The 4 Seasons.  Add to that list the Young Rascals/Rascals. In 1967 and 1968, they strung together seven hits in 18 months that averaged nearly 5 times the chart strength of the average song around them.  That included two that ranked well into the top 1%: Groovin’ and People Got To Be Free . The band only charted two songs not written by Eddie Brigati and/or Felix Cavaliere.  First was “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Any More” by Lori Burton and Pam Sawyer.  Pam Sawyer charted 30 songs as a writer including co-credit on the Supremes’ biggest hit, Love Child ; Lori Burton was co-credited on the Royal Guardsmen’s song-against-type, Baby Let’s Wait . The other, Good Lovin’ , has more of a story, because there were two vers...

Recently, on Lou Simon’s SiriusXM show “The Diner,” a caller asked who took the most cover songs to the Top 40.  Her thought was Johnny Rivers—pretty good guess, it turns out--and covers were certainly his long suit.  I decided to try to find the answer rigorously. I took my 1955 to 1991 Top 100 database and restricted it to Billboard only.  Note that many of these songs were written and originally recorded long before the rock era,  but I’m only counting the 1955-1991 time period.  I restricted it to songs appearing more than once, and ordered each group of repeat songs by date of appearance on the chart.  I did not require that the original and cover songs be separated in time.  Whether that should actually be done is an arguable point.  I then tested to see if any repeat appearance peaked in the Top 40. Eight hundred fifty-two unique songs fit this category; there were a total of 2859 recordings of these songs. From this list of so...

Here's a video tour: From  Rock Around The Clock  to  Smells Like Teen Spirit:  The data set is huge—all three major magazines, 24,426 songs, 11,834 writers and 10,773 writer teams. Each song is scored, then the score is allocated to rank each writer and writer team in the era.  What's more, to avoid confusion and duplicate entries, writer aliases and similar names have been rationalized to assign one name to each writer and one writer to each name. There are two major indexes--All the songs and all the writers along with the top 2000 writer teams, scored and ranked.  Vital statistics and specialty lists. See more at http://ranking.rocks