Robbed hit of the week 1/7/19 - "Hero" from David Crosby with Phil Collins...
from the album Thousand Roads (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #44
This week's "robbed hit" comes from veteran folk-rock artist David Crosby, who had a long career between his membership in the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and most importantly, Crosby, Stills Nash (& sometimes Young), as well as a myriad of side projects as well. I last featured him with Crosby, Stills & Nash, where in 1982 their album Daylight Again scored them two big hits with "Southern Cross" and the top ten pop single "Wasted On The Way". As a solo artist, David had released If Only I Could Remember My Name way back in 1971 when the CSNY unit released four separate solo albums (years before KISS). The album peaked at #12 and went gold (selling over a million copies), while single "Music Is Love" spent a week on the American pop chart at #95. He didn't put out another solo disc until 1989, when after CSNY was done promoting their American Dream album, he arrived with Oh Yes I Can, which spun off a big rock radio hit with "Drive My Car", which spent a week at #3 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock radio chart.
After helping out Phil Collins with his ...But Seriously album on two tracks including the #1 hit "Another Day In Paradise", Collins returned the favor by producing and co-writing the lead single from David's next album, Thousand Roads. "Hero", an anti-violence creed, was a welcome clarion call for peace following the Reagan-Bush years...
While "Hero" was a big hit on easy listening radio, spending four weeks at #3 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, the song peaked right under the top-40 on the pop Hot 100 in July of 1993. Internationally, the single was bigger in Canada, peaking at #4 for a week, while being a minor hit in the UK at #56. Despite not putting out another album until 2014, Crosby has released four more studio albums since then, with Here If You Listen coming out last fall.
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And here's Crosby appearing on Arsenio Hall...
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