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Yes, Virginia, guitar-based bands can still make a big chart entrance. In a spring and summer dominated by splashy top five debuts from R&B (Mary J. Blige), rap (Bone Thugs-N-Harmony), country (Tim McGraw), pop (Hanson) and even electronica (Prodigy) acts, old-fashioned rock bands have been all but absent from the top five. This week, 311 ends that drought with its Transistor album, which sold 129,000 copies to come in at No. 4 for the week ending August 10, according to SoundScan.
Other genres stayed strong, with R&B/hip-hop king Puff Daddy's "No Way Out" bumping aside Bone Thugs-N-Harmony to reclaim the No. 1 position with 228,000 albums sold. The Bone Thugs' The Art of War sold 183,000 copies to come in at No. 2, while the hip-hop-oriented Men in Black soundtrack stays at No. 3 with sales of 150,000. The week's other big debut was the R&B/hip-hop soundtrack to How to be a Player, which comes in at No. 7.
Following 311 were the Spice Girls' Spice (125,000); Hanson's Middle of Nowhere (108,000); the soundtrack to How to Be a Player (106,000); Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing (93,000); Matchbox 20's Yourself or Someone Like You (92,000); and Prodigy's The Fat of the Land (87,000).
Say what you want about Garth Brooks, but the man knows how to sell records. His HBO-sponsored extravaganza from Central Park last week paid off at the check-out counter. Brooks' 1996 release, Fresh Horses, re-emerges on the chart at No. 167, thanks to a weekly sales jump from 3,200 to 6,700 copies. Brooks' older albums got a boost as well: Hits jumps from No. 27 to No. 8 on the catalog chart, and No Fences catapults from No. 149 to 23.
What Brooks' label must be wondering is: What would have happened if, as once planned, his Sevens album had been released on the day of the Central Park show. Industry veterans suggest he could have sold close to 750,000 copies in just one week thanks to the massive HBO-driven exposure. Unfortunately, Brooks called off the planned release after several EMI staffers he had trusted to launch the album were shown the door.