One-Hit Wonder Stars Who Were Poorer Than You Realized

Becoming a one-hit wonder is a complicated notion. Imagine spending one's entire life following the dream of musical expression and widespread artistic renown, and it leads to a massively successful hit single — one that tops the pop chart or comes close to doing so. And then, with both the goodwill of the public and the pressure to repeat the feat looming, they fail to do so, never again writing or recording a popular song, rendering them forever in that list of flash-in-the-pan, living fads. But at least they scored that one song, one that could live on forever and generate a little bit of money for the artist here and there.

Nobody expects a musician with just one big hit to be wildly wealthy — the big money is reserved for the superstars who knock out smashes with regularity. But we also don't expect them to be destitute, because their lonely hit objectively sold a lot of copies and continues to get airplay and soundtrack placement. Here are the stories of some of the most notable one-hit wonders of all time, and how they didn't earn as much money from that one song as we all probably thought they did.

In 1993, Whitney Houston set a record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (14) with "I Will Always Love You," her cover of a Dolly Parton ballad from the movie "The Bodyguard." If not for that song, Tag Team would've had the biggest song of the year, with its No. 2-peaking pop-rap song "Whoomp! (There It Is)." The song's title became a catchphrase, and both tune and quip battled for attention in the spring and summer of 1993 with 95 South's "Whoot, There It Is." But Tag Team, a duo consisting of rappers D.C. the Brain Supreme and Steve RollN, proved victorious commercially, as 4 million copies of "Whoomp! (There It Is)" were sold. Tag Team couldn't sustain the public's interest, likely because the pair wouldn't stray far from the formula that gave it its only hit. Subsequent singles like "Addams Family (Whoomp!)" from "Addams Family Values," "Here It Is, Bam!" and "Whoomp! (There It Went)" all flopped.

In the decade after the success of the song, Tag Team's untold story didn't end. Its members still earned an income considerably modest relative to the popularity of "Whoomp! (There It Is)." The group plays corporate parties and conferences for $5,000 a pop, while royalties from their one hit earn D.C. the Brain Supreme and Steve RollN each about $250,000 a year.

With a bluesy, electrified guitar riff and a hypnotic groove, Norman Greenbaum's 1969 single "Spirit in the Sky" combined the sounds of the late 1960s with lyrics seemingly taken from an old religious hymn. That mix made the song irresistible, and it went to No. 1 in the U.K. and No. 3 on the U.S. pop chart. This would mark the only time Greenbaum would enter the Top 40, either as a solo act or with his previous group, Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band, which had a minor hit in 1967 with the novelty tune "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago." But oh how "Spirit in the Sky" endured. In the mid-1980s, film and TV soundtrack supervisors revived the hit, and it's since been used in more than 100 works and a whole lot of commercials.

As the sole listed performer and songwriter, Greenbaum received the majority of the royalties and fees generated by the 2-million-selling, frequently played "Spirit in the Sky," until he sold the publishing rights. Nevertheless, he still gets at least $10,000 whenever his song shows up in a movie or TV show. As of the mid-2000s, a retirement-age Greenbaum resided in a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Rosa, California. "It's not like it's made me rich, as you can see," he told The New York Times. "But because of 'Spirit in the Sky,' I don't have to work. So in that sense, it's a comfortable living."

Walter Egan spent most of the 1970s collaborating with some of the decade's biggest names in rock. Country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons recorded Egan's song "Hearts on Fire," Jackson Browne added him to his band, and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham co-produced his LP "Not Shy." The 1978 release included Egan's long-awaited commercial breakthrough in his own name, the top-10 pop hit turned classic-rock radio staple "Magnet and Steel." 

Follow-up singles and albums sold poorly, and Egan spent most of the 1980s working as a graphic artist. He also appeared on TV in a non-musical capacity, competing on broadcast game shows. He quietly ended a recording sabbatical of 16 years with the independently released "Walternative" in 1999, and by the 2010s, Egan had settled into a career as a part-time touring musician. He supplemented his income through two decades of work as a substitute music teacher in Williamson County, Tennessee.

A quintessential song of the 1980s, Toni Basil's "Mickey" was one of the first songs to really break through thanks to an assist from its music video. The 1982 single already sounded like a pep rally chant, and Basil, a former cheerleader turned choreographer with an extensive resume in television and film, conceptualized and directed the video as a series of routines. "Mickey" went to No. 1 in the U.S, but she never took another song anywhere near the Top 40.

Despite the ubiquity of "Mickey," it didn't earn Basil much money because she didn't write it. British band Racey recorded a song called "Kitty" in 1979, and Basil flipped the gender of the subject and changed their name, so original "Kitty" songwriters Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn took home the authorial royalties. And much of the money to which Basil was entitled, she argued, she never received — the singer filed a lawsuit against numerous record labels and media companies in 2017 to reacquire the copyright to her recording, used frequently in film, TV, and commercials. Basil emerged victorious with the lawsuit in 2022.

Rap was in its early stages and confined mostly to New York in 1979, when Sugar Hill Records co-owner Sylvia Robinson witnessed Lovebug Starski performing at a Harlem club, rapping over an instrumental piece of Chic's disco hit "Good Times." Realizing that this was about to be a cultural phenomenon, Robinson put together a group of young men, named the collective the Sugarhill Gang, and put them in a studio to capture a mishmash of rhyming stories and boastful rapping prowess (atop a part of "Good Times") called "Rapper's Delight." That song brought hip-hop into the mainstream, and it's the first rap hit single, peaking at No. 36 on the U.S. pop chart and No. 4 on the R&B chart.

The performers on the song didn't see much money for their work. Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards forced Sugar Hill Records to list them as co-writers on the song. Robinson claimed a big portion of the song's proceeds by giving herself a songwriting credit and had signed members Wonder Mike and Master Gee to such restrictive contracts that they made a total of $250,000 in the 30 years after the song's release.

New York City is the birthplace of hip hop, and one popular and respected act that emerged in one of the first waves of the genre in the 1980s was the trio 3rd Bass. The group made three well-received albums before it could claim a bonafide hit single. "Pop Goes the Weasel" hit the top 30 of Billboard's R&B, dance, and pop charts in 1991, gaining some attention because it was a savage diss track targeted at then-superstar rapper Vanilla Ice, who put music on the back burner for an unexpected career change.

MC Serch launched a moderately successful solo career in 1992, which marked the end of 3rd Bass. Another member, Pete Nice (real name: Peter J. Nash), took the baseball pun in his previous group's name and ran with it, embarking on a new if certainly lower-paying career as a historian of the national pastime. It took Nash seven years to research and write "Baseball Legends of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery," which concerned the final resting place of 200 important early baseball figures. Nash additionally published "Boston's Royal Rooters," about the Boston Red Sox, and operated a baseball memorabilia shop near the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. What money he did make, he was ruled to have accumulated fraudulently: He was sued over phony merchandise and charged with tax fraud.

TRL disappeared from MTV when viewers lost interest in the teen pop that dominated music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Young, photogenic singers like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera paved the way for second-tier pop acts like Willa Ford, who released the album "Willa Was Here" in the dying days of the trend in 2001. That spawned one notable single, the No. 22 hit "I Wanna Be Bad." There may have been more hits for Ford if not for the intervention of tragic world events diminishing their potential significance or appeal. "A lot of people don't realize this, but my second single was released on September 11, 2001," Ford told Billboard. "Everything that happened that day froze; the world stood still, as it should have. My second single didn't do well because anything that launched that day kind of got canned." With no more career momentum, Atlantic Records shelved and never released Ford's next album.

Ford moved into other areas of entertainment, landing guest spots on TV shows like "Raising Dad" and "Leverage," starring in a remake of "Friday the 13th" and the made-for-TV "The Anna Nicole Smith Story," and posing for "Playboy" in 2006. She now works in a lead creative position at her home design company, WFord Interiors.

In 1978, a band called Valentine released a single, self-titled album that didn't much register with the public. Five years later, one of its members scored a solo hit single when his first-pumping anthem about perseverance was selected for inclusion on the soundtrack of a long-awaited sequel to a popular movie. That performer: Frank Stallone. The song: "Far From Over," a No. 10 hit thanks to prominent use in "Staying Alive," the Broadway-oriented sequel to the 1978 disco drama "Saturday Night Fever." The movie was directed by Stallone's more famous brother generally best known for his acting: Sylvester Stallone.

The elder, better-known Stallone helped out his brother whenever he could, getting his songs into many of his films, including "Paradise Alley," five "Rocky" installments, and "Over the Top." It didn't bring Frank Stallone much fame or fortune, however, because he never scored another hit song after "Far From Over." By 2008, he had signed up to star on the reality show "Hulk Hogan's Celebrity Championship Wrestling" out of financial desperation. "I was pretty broke at the time; I didn't have any money," he told Metro. In 2024, he sold off much of his extensive guitar collection via his Instagram page.

The real meaning behind "Turning Japanese" is complicated. Acceptable to general audiences in the relatively less enlightened year of 1980, the song is told from the point of view of a man desperately fixated on a woman he can't be with, and it suggests he commits an act of self-love; the "Japanese" part is emphasized with the recurring use of a stereotypical, generic motif of East Asian-adjacent music. At any rate, this song by the U.K. New Wave band the Vapors was a top five hit in the band's home country, and it scraped into the Top 40 in the United States. Record buyers found follow-up singles lacking, and the Vapors never had another hit and broke up after its second album similarly flopped in 1981.

The Vapors reconvened in the 2020s and recorded a couple of independently released albums. When he first put the band together in the late 1970s, frontman Dave Fenton was studying law, and in the decades between Vapors activity periods, he worked as an attorney. Before he retired, his most recent position was as the resident lawyer for the U.K.'s nonprofit Musicians' Union.

"The Greatest American Hero" ran for three seasons in the early 1980s, a failed superhero show that should've gotten another chance. An action-comedy about a bumbling teacher who can't quite figure out how to operate his alien-bequeathed superhero suit, the series used a soaring soft rock theme song co-written by "Hill Street Blues" and "Magnum P.I." composer Mike Post. A session and backup singer named Joey Scarbury was selected to sing the song as well as a number of other pleasant numbers for use on "The Greatest American Hero." That main title song, "Believe It or Not (Theme from 'Greatest American Hero')," went all the way to No. 2 on the pop chart and No. 3 on the adult contemporary chart in 1981. A second Scarbury song from the show, "When She Dances," stalled at No. 49, and "The River's Song," written by Post, managed to get to No. 76 on the country chart. By 1984, Scarbury's recording career was finished.

While paid the legal minimum fee to record the song, Scarbury earned a steady and modest income from "Believe It or Not" over the years. "I made the money back a hundredfold in residuals and royalties," he told Noblemania. "I'll go a year and make $3,000 and the next year tens of thousands." In the 2010s, Scarbury was managing a car dealership in Santa Monica, California.

An aspiring musician and actor, Jamie Walters got his big break in both areas when he landed the lead role of wannabe rock star Alex O'Brien on "The Heights," a Fox soap about a struggling rock band produced by the same team that made "Beverly Hills, 90210." A studio-recorded single, "How Do You Talk to an Angel," was a TV theme song that became a huge pop hit. Attributed to the show's fictional band, which was also called the Heights, with Walters singing for real, it hit No. 1 on the pop chart in November 1992 a few weeks after the show debuted — and a week before it was canceled due to low ratings. Two years later, Walters joined the cast of "Beverly Hills, 90210," enough of a boost to give his music another shot. In 1995, his rock ballad "Hold On" made it to the top 20 of the pop chart and the top 10 on the adult contemporary list. Managing one smash with the Heights and one on his own, Walters thus became the rare double one-hit wonder.

Rather than continue to chase the performance bug and try to rack up a fortune that way, Walters left Hollywood and in 2002 followed another childhood dream to earn his living. He became a firefighter and paramedic for the Los Angeles City Fire Department. "I'm thankful that I was able to switch gears and do something that I'm proud of and that my kids find interesting and cool," Walters told The U.S. Sun in 2024.

"Come On Eileen" was as unlikely of a hit as it was a big one. Under the direction of leader Kevin Rowland, Dexys Midnight Runners affected an early-20th-century street-urchin look and rocked a sound influenced by American R&B, early rock n' roll, and traditional Celtic music. "Come On Eileen" includes fiddles, a banjo solo, and a mid-song chant, and it somehow interrupted Michael Jackson's slew of "Thriller" singles occupying the No. 1 spot on the pop chart.

Dexys Midnight Runners took another eight singles to the Top 40 in its native U.K., but none after 1986, and "Come On Eileen" was the only one of its songs to have a commercial impact in the U.S. The group made a lot of money for Rowland, its singer and primary musical director. By 1987, he'd blown through most of his earnings on cocaine and heroin, was evicted from his home in London, and filed for bankruptcy.