5 One-Hit Wonder Rock Songs From The '60s That Still Have Us Hooked Today

Look, most people never have even a single hit, so a one-hit wonder is already far ahead of the majority of the mass of humanity, but for whatever reason, some performers only notch a single memorable, successful track. Some of those songs, however, are so good that they still have us hooked today. The fact that these acts only had one big hit doesn't necessarily mean the rest of their work isn't good (though it can mean that, absolutely) just that they were fated to enjoy only one lone lightning-in-a-bottle moment before fading into a limited, trivia-night relevance.

Real one-hit wonders aren't novelty songs, but genuine creative works. And even though well-known bands may have one song that outshines all the rest of their catalogue in prominence, a one-hit wonder has ... one hit. The real test is that, often, the actual name of the band isn't nearly as well remembered as the name of the song. After all, you don't generally need the name of the band to find a song on a jukebox or streaming service, and if there were heavy demand for the rest of the Tornados' catalog or some solid Zager & Evans B-sides, we'd know it by now.

Along with sunshine, exercise, and being born into wealth, surf rock is a powerful natural antidepressant. The playful-yet-chill, reverb-heavy genre arose exactly when you'd think, in Southern California in the early 1960s, when young Americans had time to have fun on the beach between the generation-bracketing buzzkills of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The Surfaris were right there to ride the wave with "Wipeout," an instrumental that nearly everyone knows even if they don't remember the name. 

"Wipeout" opens with a high cackling laugh and the intonation of the title word, leading into energetic drums and the immortal "na na na NA NA na na na" lick from the guitars. It's perfect as an earworm: The actual drumming is intense, but the melodic beat is simple and memorable enough to drum on a desk at work, a thigh while waiting in line, the skull of a cat trying to rest (gently, of course). Nothing else by the Surfaris cracked the public consciousness in the same way, but given the number of times "Wipeout" has been played and licensed, they arguably didn't need anything else. They already captured what surf rock was all about.

It's one of the great drunken misinterpretations of musical history: Iron Butterfly's organist and singer Doug Ingle, full as a tick of wine, tried to say "In the Garden of Eden" and missed. Drummer Ron Bushy's phonetic record of what Ingle was trying to say became "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," the title of one of the longest, most idiosyncratic rock tracks of the '60s, with the official version clocking in at over 17 minutes, longer than "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "American Pie" combined.

High, climbing, borderline operatic synthesizer leads into the arrival of drums and distorted guitars and the first intonation of the mysterious magic words ... and we're off on a musical odyssey almost as long as a standard sitcom episode. Lucy and Ethel get fired from the chocolate factory, Ginger and Mary Ann build a raft, and we're still listening to a good-but-not-amazing drum solo that begins not even halfway through the marathon song. 

A little over nine minutes in, we transition into a smoky interplay of drum and synth that sounds like music for a Dario Argento movie that takes place in an opium den, only in the very long run to smash back into the main melody and come back to the vocals near the end of the song. "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is undeniably cool, but it's not surprising that the public only had the appetite for one Wagner-scale acid-rock manifesto.

"Telstar" doesn't sound like the "Star Trek" theme, but it sounds like it could have been. The same futuristic sound, the same optimistic vibe, the same synth-driven call-to-adventure energy. Ethereal without being insubstantial, the track is simply beautiful music, almost wholly instrumental except for some wordless vocalizing near the end that, frankly, it doesn't need: Holst used the human voice to imply the vastness of space at the end of "The Planets," but he didn't have a synthesizer.

"Telstar" went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December of 1962 and stayed there for three weeks, but the Tornados never landed a comparable intergalactic hit. One of the primary reasons was the erratic behavior of Joe Meek, an enthusiastic experimenter with music and sound but, by all accounts, an extremely difficult man to work with. Openly gay before it was widely accepted (and eventually arrested for allegedly "importuning" in public, per Electronic Sound, grating and acerbic in his personal interactions, and eventually a heavy drug user, Meek didn't have the personal qualities to make a bigger success of his bold ideas. He came to a bad end, murdering his landlady right before dying by suicide in 1967.

Call them the Nostradamus (Nostradomi?) of the singer-songwriters: Zager & Evans' mournfully prophetic "In The Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)" muses on the deep future and, in the way of vague predictions, seems to have gotten a few things right. The trick, as always, is to look at the world around you and ask how it could get worse, then try to make it rhyme. Mood-regulating medications, allegedly helpful technology taking over too many human functions, and human embryos chosen in a lab were all imaginable in 1969, no clairvoyance required.

Zager & Evans' real genius lay in unabashedly rhyming "five" with "five" and mastering a wistful delivery that captures a pessimism about the future softened by the generalized assumption that the worst of the future won't arrive within the listener's expected lifespan. For this, they rightly landed on the one-hit wonder honor roll and also notched a rarer accolade: a parody on an episode of "Futurama," whose characters confront far-future shrimp monsters and tyrannical giraffes to the strains of Zager & Evans soundalikes.

The real accomplishment of "Who Put The Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)," by a singer whose name you probably don't remember (Barry Mann), is that it's so very much fun. It's silly in the way of doo-wop tra-la-la '60s nonsense lyrics, poking gently at the trope while unabashedly playing the same game. It's easy to sing along, and you absolutely don't need to remember the lyrics because half are gibberish and the other half is about a pretty girl, which you can easily swap out to sing to a pretty boy or a beloved pet, as the situation requires.

You can even put the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp into high culture. Try it with William Carlos Williams: "Who put the plums, put the plum-pa-plum-pa-plum / who put the plums, put the plums in the icebox." It's good to report that, while Mann never landed a comparably successful track as a singer, he's had a successful career in songwriting, often working with his wife, lyricist Cynthia Weil.