Songoftheday 5/1/24 - Out on the road today, I saw a Black Flag sticker on a Cadillac...
"The Boys Of Summer" - The Ataris
from the album So Long, Astoria (2003)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #20 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 8
Today's song comes from the pop-punk band the Ataris, which started up in central Indiana in the mid-1990s with Kris Roe and Jasin Thomasin. From a demo they put out they was signed to the indie label Kung Fu Records, and adding a drummer Derrick Plourde and bass player Mirko DeSantis, they released their debut album Anywhere But Here in 1997. However, when they decided to permanently settle in California where it was recorded, Thomasin stayed behind, and after a brief tour they split up.
Roe re-established the band with all new players (Mike Davenport on bass, Chris Knapp on drums, and Patrick Riley on guitar) and recorded a sophomore set, Blue Skies, Broken Hearts...Next 12 Exits which came out in 1999. A third and final album on Kung Fu, End Is Forever, arrived two years later.
By 2003, the group was already on their fourth guitarist John Collura, but with the buzz they were accruing they were signed to Columbia Records for their fourth record, So Long, Astoria. The lead single from the record was "In This Diary", which broke them on rock radio, just missing the top ten on Billboard magazine's Alternative Rock chart at #11.
But in a somewhat stroke of luck, for better or worse, radio stations started playing another album cut from the set, which was a cover of a big hit of the 1980s. "The Boys Of Summer" was written and recorded by former Eagle Don Henley in 1984, and reached the top-5 on Billboard's Hot 100. Much like another 80s song from an iconic artist remade by a pop-punk band, Alien Ant Farm's take on Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal", it seemed to be the band's inside nod to their youth on the record. In this case, however, the Ataris play it more angrily and serious than the AAF's funky and fun turn, with only the "Deadhead sticker" replaced by a "Black Flag" one. Still, it was a familiar song, and once radio grabbed ahold of it their planned follow-up to "Diary" was shelved, and this became their unwanted biggest hit...
The Atari's version of "The Boys Of Summer" climbed to the top-20 on Billboard's Hot 100 in September of 2003. On the radio, the song climbed to #10 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart, #18 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, and made both the Alternative (#2) and Mainstream (#36) Rock Airplay lists. Internationally, the single reached the top-40 in New Zealand (#17) and Australia (#24), and was a minor hit in Germany (#45) and the United Kingdom (#49). The So Long, Astoria album, released in March of that year, climbed to #24 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a half-million copies.
To try to ride the momentum of this nostalgic hit, Columbia put out the ballad "The Saddest Song" as the next single. However it only managed to rise to #27 on the Alternative Rock chart, missing the pop lists altogether. After a tour including a Live At The Metro album released in 2004, Davenport and Knapp left the Ataris, who also departed from Columbia.
Roe and Collura regrouped and expanded the band to seven members in 2005, and two years later released their most recent studio album Welcome To The Night on their own indie label Isola Records, which spent a solitary week in the Billboard 200 at #85. However none of the songs got much attention on the radio. After that, the "Ataris" were simply an outlet for Roe, releasing a collection of material called Silver Turns To Rust from a myriad of unreleased recordings. He was also shuffling through bandmates like a revolving door. Most recently, a live album back on Kung Fu Records recorded in 2019 came out the following year.
(4/10)
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and lastly, Roe doing a radio gig last year...
Up tomorrow: The final pop hit for an R&B force gone too soon.
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