3 DOORS DOWN
3 Doors Down is an American rock band from Escatawpa, Mississippi that formed in 1996. The band rose to international fame with their first single, “Kryptonite”, which charted in the top three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The band then signed onto Republic Records and released their debut album, The Better Life, in 2000. The album was the 11th-best-selling album of the year and was certified 6x platinum in the United States. Since the start of their career, 3 Doors Down have sold over 20 million albums worldwide. (More from Wikipedia)
The biggest rock band to come out of our area, 3 Doors Down (from the community of Escatawpa near Pascagoula) had a #3 hit song “Kryptonite” and a hit album The Better Life in 2000. The song was a radio hit here for years before that though, and I have already told the story of how much I loved the song and how hard I worked to at last find that early demo CD, 3 Doors Down. They are still going strong: Their fifth album Time of My Life (2011) debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 charts; and their two previous albums, Seventeen Days (2005) and 3 Doors Down (2008) hit #1. Next year, the band celebrates the 20th year since its founding, and 3 Doors Down has sold 20 million albums.
I bought a CD by another local rock band at about the same time as 3 Doors Down; it was Super Feinds by Level with the Ground. It is an excellent album, and everyone thought that they might hit the big time also. I read on the Internet years later that the album sold an amazing 5,000 copies; I have never heard how many copies of the 3 Doors Down demo CD were sold. Level with the Ground began performing with another hot local band, Stereo Crisis; and later the two bands merged to form Seven Left.
(December 2015)
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Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.
December 2015 – 1990’s pop/punk band AMANDA JONES; Story of the Month on the early American singles by the Beatles; also, Rochelle Harper, Lisa Loeb, 3 Doors Down, Level with the Ground, Chris Stamey with Yo La Tengo, Meri Wilson, Bobby Brown, the Cruzados / the Plugz, Terence Trent d’Arby, An Emotional Fish, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Hunters & Collectors, Looters, Shakespear’s Sister, Robert Tepper, Y Kant Tori Read / Tori Amos, Ugly Kid Joe, Paul Young, the Rolling Stones, Mandy Brix, the Joneses.
(Year 7 Review)
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There are plenty of rock bands out there that do not have a Wikipedia article yet, and I already have the LP or CD in hand. I alphabetized my CD’s a year or so back, and picking a row almost at random, here are some potential future UARB’s and UARA’s: King Richard and the Knights (a wonderful 1960’s garage rock band from Albuquerque that actually I was pretty sure had a Wikipedia article, though I can’t seem to find it now), Level with the Ground (a local band that came along about the same time as 3 Doors Down – as with Schattenfreiheit though, a German duo who put out a self-published album that is among my all-time favorites, they are too obscure to make the UARB list), Looters (I have written about them before but had not realized they were a potential UARB – an inventive world-music band that, unaccountably, was a favorite of many Bay Area punk rock bands, including Dead Kennedys), the Love Drunks (an Alive Records punk rock band, with quite affected vocal stylings), and Martin (how could I resist that one? His full name is Martin Kember). That is actually a pretty good list of potential UARB’s and UARA’s; I will have to do this more often!
(Year 8 Review)
