The following is a Ross On Radio guest article from Steve Greenberg, President of S-Curve Records.
In 1995, while an A&R man at Mercury Records, I was standing on the checkout line at a supermarket, thumbing through the magazines on the rack while waiting to check out. I picked up a teen magazine and leafed through it to see which pop acts were featured. But there were none–the magazine was filled exclusively with items about teen actors (Jonathan Taylor Thomas was a favorite).
I then realized that in the music environment of that moment, which was dominated by grunge, there were no popular artists who would be appropriate for inclusion in a magazine aimed at pre-teen girls. I thought that was a shame. I loved pop and I felt that there must be young people who would want it too. Kids couldn’t all really be so bummed out–surely many of them just wanted to have happy lives, friends, romance.
As if on cue, I was soon given a demo by three young brothers from Tulsa named Hanson. They’d already written and demoed “Mmmbop” and I was of course more than impressed. I flew out to see them, we signed them, and I spent the rest of 1996 making the record.
There were a lot of skeptics who couldn’t see how we could break the band by going straight to pop. We kept getting urged to take the record in a more Alternative direction, so we could start it at that format. But we stayed the course of pure pop. I’ll confess that while I had complete faith in the band and the record we were making, I was definitely worried that the straight-to-pop radio strategy might meet with resistance from programmers.
But then, during the first week of 1997, I heard “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls for the first time on U,S, radio—New York’s [WHTZ] Z100, to be precise. I knew the song because I’d spent some time in the U.K. the previous year, but back then there were a lot of U.K. pop records, especially by manufactured acts, that never got marketed in the U.S. I imagined the Spice Girls might fit into that category. And yet, here was “Wannabe” blasting from the biggest Top 40 station in the country, before it had even charted here. Z100 had added it “out of the box”!
I instantly smiled a huge smile, because I knew that if Z100 would play “Wanabe” before it had proven itself elsewhere in the U.S., there was no way they weren’t going to play “Mmmbop.” The Spice Girls blew the hinges off the door, making it easy for our record to break through.
Things happened quickly after that. By spring, “Mmmbop” made it to #1 in its fourth week on the Hot 100, joining the Spice Girls’ first two singles and Savage Garden’s “I Want You” as the advance guard of the new pop. That spring, there was a real feeling that CHR was determined to reinvent itself by playing pure pop again for the first time in years.
In May, on the occasion of their album release, Hanson performed a three-song acoustic set at the Paramus Park Mall in New Jersey, broadcast live on Z100. No one was prepared for what occurred that day. Over 6,000 screaming fans descended upon the mall, causing all the stores to be shut down. I called label President Danny Goldberg to tell him what was going on, but I was drowned out by the screaming fans. Danny asked me “What’s that noise? Is that their fans?” When I told him yes, he was stunned. “I’ve been to a lot of packed shows in my life,” he said. “Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, but I’ve never heard that sustained high-pitched screech at any of them.” A new generation of pop fans had arisen.
By mid-July, with the Hanson and Spice Girls juggernauts continuing to roll, the top 10 welcomed Robyn’s “Do You Know (What It Takes),” and then, the very next week, the Backstreet Boys made their first appearance in the Top 10, with “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart).” If anyone still had doubts, it was now crystal clear that a pop renaissance was upon us.
