Robbed hit of the week 1/8/18 - RTZ's "Face The Music"...
from the album Return To Zero (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #49
This week's "robbed hit" comes from the arena-rock side-project group Return To Zero, who came together during a break in the mega-successful but sparsely fruitful band Boston, who had landed a #1 pop hit in the fall of 1986 with "Amanda". During the long time that Boston leader Tom Scholz would take for another record, lead singer Brad Delp reconnected with guitarist Barry Goudreau, who was in Boston's first successful incarnation in the late 1970's, but left to work on his own. After a solo effort reached the top half of the albums chart (and Delp-sung Boston soundalike single "Dreams" just missed the pop Hot 100) in 1980, he put together the band Orion the Hunter, which scored a top ten rock radio hit with "So You Ran" in 1984. Coming together as RTZ, or "Return To Zero", Delp and Goudreau finally released an album of equal billing together in 1991. The first single from the set, "Face The Music", was another stab at recreating the Boston sound if filtered through the recent versions of Chicago, Heart, and Starship. Written by Goudreau and band keyboardist Brian Maes (who was also in Orion the Hunter), the single nevertheless satisfied rock radio's need for Boston-esque music...
While "Face The Music" climbed all the way to #5 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart, the single stopped right above the halfway mark on their pop Hot 100 list in September of 1991. A second release, "There's Another Side", made it to #19 on the rock radio chart but missed the pop chart completely. However, their third effort, the power-ballad "Until Your Love Comes Back Around", would finally land them a big mainstream hit.
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Here's Goudreau and Maes performing live in 2008...
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