"I've Got A Lot To Learn About Love" by the Storm

1991 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.34 out of 5!

Here's a song that owed much of its popularity to a deceptive telemarketing campaign.

The Storm was formed partly from former members of Journey, and this record came right between two eras of lost hits. I consider lost hits from before 1991 and those from after 1991 to be distinct categories. One reason is that 1991 is when Billboard made its biggest change ever to its formula for computing the Hot 100. But then American Top 40 infamously stopped using that chart, so there was no longer an easy way to analyze hit singles. The Storm's single was on the Hot 100 right when this change occurred. Another reason I consider 1991 the frontier between two eras is that 1991 ushered in the grunge revolution. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana debuted on the Hot 100 the week after Billboard's new formula was rolled out. This debut showed how new musical styles and acts were taking hold and wiping away the chart stagnation of the previous few years. Unfortunately, local pop radio didn't get the message, and continued to become softer and softer over the next few years, but we were a little bit backwards around here.

Bands like the Storm and Alias seemed instantly antiquated when grunge and rap became more popular. But an online search of old Billboard issues reveals a Storm scandal! The February 1, 1992, edition says a Denver-based telemarketing company was calling up radio stations with gobs of requests to play the Storm's song. A station in Roanoke, Virginia, blew the lid off this campaign after a caller admitted she was making bogus calls to hype the record.

It gets weirder.

It turned out the telemarketing firm had also been hyping records by Winger - and that the company was based in an office owned by a real estate firm that belonged to Kip Winger's dad.

The FCC said these campaigns didn't qualify as telephone fraud under its rules, as no money was actually exchanged. But the FCC did say the calls might have violated payola laws, which were the bailiwick of the Justice Department.

Promoters had launched bogus request campaigns before. But, unlike those, the Storm and Winger campaigns used an outside firm and were very sophisticated. They managed to call stations when the music director was on the air, so they had some inside knowledge of the radio industry.

All of this boosted the Storm in the short term, but I don't know how much good it did them in the long run. I don't think I've heard their song on the radio since 1996, and it was already hardly ever heard anymore even then.