For musicians and songwriters, a placement of your song in a film or TV show can be a career-changing break; even more so now that streaming has pretty much destroyed album sales.
Today I want to write about the biggest lightning strike of a song placement I'm aware of - even though there have been more seismic career advancing examples (like Sia's "Breathe Me" in the last Six Feet Under and Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" appearing on The O.C.).
This is the strange story of Billy Vera & The Beaters, "At This Moment", and the 80s sitcom "Family Ties."
Here's What Happened
Billy & The Beaters were a working rock band from the late 1960s with an early 1980s heyday, featuring lead singer and songwriter Billy Vera.
I would describe them as blues-based, with a horn section, and on the Rhino Records label which, like Alligator Records, featured a lot of straight-ahead rock-blues acts.
Vera wrote a personal love song called "At This Moment", originally released in 1981 on Rhino.
When I say "love song" I mean an "I got dumped" song, that's what most of them are.
While its structure is really nothing fancy, it's got plenty of feeling and played really straight on a record that was recorded live at The Roxy in L.A. and very impressive sound for a live single.
Billy and The Beaters weren't a massive act.
I happen to have seen them in Los Angeles mostly by accident, when I think they were slumming it playing at a glorified neighborhood bar called The Gas Lite on Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica.
With neither them nor Rhino Records being radio powerhouses, the song peaked at #79 on the Billboard charts.
So, why isn't this the end of the story?
What Would We Do Baby, Without Us: Family Ties
It's hard to believe now since the show has slipped through the cracks of history somewhat, but Family Ties was a massive sitcom in NBC's dominant period and a big part of the monoculture.
I contend that the show still really holds up - yes, Michael J. Fox was the breakout star, but the Friends or Frasier level of snappy sitcom writing there was always strong, as were costars Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney.
It was "the thinking man's Growing Pains."
In its fourth and fifth seasons, Family Ties was the #2 show on television.
By the time of the fourth season in the fall of 1985, Fox was now a legitimate movie star; Back to the Future came out that July AND Teen Wolf was released in August.
Season Four started with a new romance for Fox' character Alex: a college romance with a girl named Ellen (played by Tracy Pollan).
Pollan was on the show for one year but later got close with Fox on the film Bright Lights, Big City in 1988 and has been together with Fox through thick and thin for nearly 40 years now; she also happens to be the sister of excellent author Michael Pollan.
Anyway, they had great chemistry, and the season-opening two-parter featured the two falling in love.
What song did producers use for a slow dance song?
You guessed it: "At This Moment" by Billy & The Beaters.
Why?
Apparently one of the producers just happened to have seen the band locally in Los Angeles, and when it was time to find a romantic slow dance song, he remembered "At This Moment" and made it happen.
Voila, song placed.
By the way, this seeming randomness is how show business works about 25% of the time.
The Alex-Ellen thing really was pretty good, in my opinion. As I mentioned, that was a two-parter and the song got a full play in both episodes.
Full airing of a song in primetime is rare enough on its own.
So, even if the song's appearance only was this two-fer, it would have been memorable.
In 1986, the guest Ellen character left the show as planned.
But they started Season Five with an episode dealing with the breakup.
This is where Billy Vera really took off.
In the episode, Alex is brokenhearted and pines for Ellen; in doing so, he plays their song, "At This Moment" twice during the S5E1 show.
Two full song plays in one episode.
That might be a television record that never gets equaled.
On that night, October 2, 1986, NBC receives over 9,000 phone calls - the most in the network’s history at the time - asking about the song, according to the LA Times.
Millions of viewers hear "At This Moment" over multiple weeks.
Keep in mind that Family Ties was the #2 show at the time with a rating of 32.7, meaning that almost one third of Americans were watching it that night, or a little over 60 million people.
That number is hard to imagine in modern fragmented, streaming society.
Following the Family Ties exposure, Vera re-recorded elements in a studio to meet demand, and the single was issued by Rhino Records.
The song rockets to the top of the Billboard Top 100 years after its release, hitting #1.
"Running Up That Hill" in Stranger Things, "Bohemian Rhapsody" from Wayne’s World, and "Don’t Stop Believin’" on The Sopranos, among other examples.
But going from a forgotten song peaking at #79 then to NUMBER ONE?
That's unheard of.
A tune that got its opportunity and fizzled out on the charts suddenly became the number one song in America 5 years later. Wow.
Billy Vera's Career Arc
This should mean that Vera’s career changes because of this historic TV placement.
But is he a household name today?
Not so much.
I love Billy Vera also for his appearance in the delightfully odd 1980s movie curio The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Fifth Dimension.
Fans of the film will remember Buckaroo's crack team and band included Billy Vera, certified "that guy" Clancy Brown, and Jeff Goldblum.
Billy Vera made a great cash score (and recurring residuals) from the "At This Moment" experience, but not f-you money.
The real score for a placement is what it leads to.
I could say the same thing for guys who made singles out of theme songs - Gary Portnoy with the Cheers theme ("Where Everybody Knows Your Name" which hit #83 and Joey Scarbury with "Theme from The Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not)" which reached #2 on the charts in 1981.
Billy Vera, Gary Portnoy, or Joey Scarbury are not household names.
One-Hit Wonder?
Compare all of this to the current climate where the music industry has changed, and song placements are one of the last major revenue opportunities for a lot of artists besides touring.
Scoring a big placement is the dream.
And maybe the model fantasy shouldn't always just be discovery from a music label.
The sub-dream of the Billy Vera experience is for anybody playing in Los Angeles. Hopefully getting discovered at a random watering hole as happened with one of the Family Ties producers.
Or just as Kyle Gass and Jack Black (Tenacious D) got "discovered" at Al Bar's with David Cross in the crowd, who brought them to HBO as an executive producer.
There's your music dream.
Is Billy Vera a footnote?
Is he a "one-hit wonder"?
I've always hated that term.
It's said by the same type of people who make fun of the player at the end of the bench at an NBA game.
That band or that player is so much better at what they do that 99% of all people in attendance, so pardon my French, but shut the fuck up with making "one-hit wonder" a pejorative.
Here's what I do know about Billy Vera: He made an enduring classic with a little luck AND the band working their asses off for years, and he parlayed these efforts into a lifelong music career.
If that's the life of a one-hit wonder, it sounds pretty good to me.
