Robbed hit of the week 3/5/18 - Lita Ford's "Shot Of Poison"...
from the album Dangerous Curves (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #45
This week's "robbed hit" comes from punk grrrl turned heavy metal vixen Lita Ford, who after playing with the seminal all-female band the Runaways, pursued a solo career. Her third album Lita broke her through with mainstream audiences in America, with two big pop hits in the late 80s in "Kiss Me Deadly" and her top ten duet with Ozzy Osbourne, "Close My Eyes Forever". Lita started the next decade with her Stiletto album, which continued her heavy metal conversion, but while the lead single "Hungry" climbed to #14 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart (the highest ranking of her career on that list), it only popped into the pop Hot 100 at #98. Regrouping quickly a year later, Ford released another record, Dangerous Curves, which would be her last on RCA Records. The first single from the set, "Shot Of Poison", was written by the singer with her drummer Myron Grumbacher and "song doctor" Jim Vallance, and was a bit more radio friendly and got Lita her last charting single...
While "Shot Of Poison" climbed to #21 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio format chart, the single stalled right under the pop Top-40 in November of 1991, just as that magazine and chart steady's rules changed to monitor radio airplay and physical sales electronically. The song was also a minor hit in the UK at #63, and in Canada at #66. "Shot Of Poison" earned Lita her second Grammy nomination, this time for Best Female Rock Performance, losing to Melissa Etheridge's "Ain't It Heavy".
She has since released one more studio album (Black) independently in 1995, then a hard rock holiday-themed record in 2009. Her most recent new material was Living Like A Runaway in 2012, which led her back to more bare-bones rock material.
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Here's Lita performing the song live in 2015, giving a nod to her Grammy nomination for the song...
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