Far Out Forensic Files: The hit song that never really existed
As per the rules of the tall poppy syndrome, it is only right that artists who experience wild success come under public scrutiny, but in more recent years, that scrutiny has developed slang names that muddy the experience of public slander even more.
Now, musicians can’t enjoy their record’s rapid rise to success without the horrible phrase, ‘industry plant’ being smeared all over them. The phrase is essentially an undermining term that seeks to reduce the achievements of an act down to some sort of nepotism or bureaucratic strategy.
The metric for whether or not a band fits into that category is inevitably the charts: a bona fide leaderboard where music can be measured and ranked against one another, clearly outlining who may have the added push of a label’s might behind them.
But back in 1979, such a term wasn’t yet coined. There was no speedy quip for music fans to deliver when they saw a relatively unknown entity threaten the chart positions to then just vanish altogether. That is exactly what happened with DA’s ‘Ready N Steady’.
This seemingly debut single lurked beneath the surface of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where, after three weeks, it peaked at number 102, before disappearing altogether. Music fans literally blinked, and they missed it, never seeing the song or DA ever again and were left wondering if, in the midst of all their psychedelic experimentation, they had imagined this song altogether?
What’s more bizarre is that, in the years that followed, copies of the record ran relatively scarce, and no music historians could dig out any evidence of its existence, not even the high and mighty board members of the Billboard 100.
So, the music industry responded in a way it does best and circulated the rumour mill to try and find the true source of this historic industry plant. Many simply claim that the song never really existed in the first place, which is backed up by music researcher Joel Whitburn, whose Record Research chronicles the history of every Billboard chart that ever existed, who claims to own a copy of every single song that’s hit the chart except this one.
Then came his theory, which he unveiled in a 2014 interview, stating, “We think that it’s a girl’s rock group from Chicago. Punk group, we think”.
However, in 2016, the song appeared in the world once again, being played on Minneapolis’ Crap From the Past radio show, where the entire mystery was solved. According to the radio station, DA was a humble mortgage broker named Dennis Armand Lucchesi, explaining the acronym, backed by his collaborator Jim Franksm, who eventually handed a copy of the song to Paul Haney, who ended up spinning the song on the show.
From there, the mercurial career of DA came to light. ‘Ready N Steady’ wasn’t their only song, but they had at least four more records from 1979, which were made after a label executive offered them some studio time. That small flurry of industry interest can only be accounted for by the song’s brief chart position, which it managed without even having the song pressed on vinyl. It was a very brief moment in the sun for this industry plant, which never received the watering required to keep alive for longer than four weeks.
