For all the similarities between the music markets in the U.S. and Britain, some acts just never cross over. For every David Bowie, embraced as a taste-setter in America, there’s a Steve Harley – someone who scored lots of hits in the UK but never made a dent on this side of the pond.

If you set the WABAC machine for the early ’70s, you might hear Steve Harley, who died last week at age 73, mentioned in the same breath as Bowie and Marc Bolan – mostly by Harley himself, who didn’t lack for sneering confidence. He started out singing in a folk duo, became a music journalist and then glommed onto glam rock around the time it peaked in 1973.

For a couple of years he almost lived up to the boasting, landing a few singles in the UK Top 10 and releasing two well-regarded LPs that, like most glam, drew on the music hall tradition as well as pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll. Harley’s delivery sometimes made him sound a bit like Ray Davies of the Kinks, another act that scored much higher in Britain than America, or a cross between Bowie and Bolan.

Cockney Rebel was an actual band for those first two albums, but tensions grew when Harley refused to share songwriting with other members, leading all but his drummer to quit the group. Harley got the last laugh, assembling a new backing outfit from studio musicians and scoring a monster UK No. 1 single, “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me).” It sounds like a breakup song, but the lyrics are directed not at a love interest but his departed bandmates. It became one of the most-played records in UK radio history and was the only one of his records to chart in the US – at No. 96 on the Billboard Hot 100.

More than 120 artists have covered the tune, including Duran Duran and Erasure. Harley’s own favorite cover was by British pop-punk band the Wedding Present, because, he said, “They did a punk version and made it kick. They understood the venom in the lyrics.”

Harley had a long solo career and was still touring until he was diagnosed with cancer in December.

Popular Irish songs might sound ancient, but many aren’t very old. “The Fields of Atheny,” for example, is about the potato famine, but it was written in the 1970s. “Ragland Road,” the poem, dates to 1946, but it was set to music in 1971. Every war and rebellion in Irish history, and there are a lot of them, produced a crop of songs both during and after the conflicts, so some are recent, and some go back centuries.

After listening to a lot of them I came up with a rule of thumb: The easier the tale is to follow, the more recent its composition. The really old ones, garbled through the generations, make as much sense as an avant-garde French movie.

Consider “Whiskey in the Jar.” Its exact origins are unknown, but it probably dates to the 17th century, according to Alan Lomax. As with any folk song that predates music publishing, many variants exist, but its general plot and several of its lines copy a broadside ballad “Patrick Fleming” (also called “Patrick Flemmen He Was a Valiant Soldier”) about an Irish highwayman who waylaid travelers for years and murdered several of them. He was hanged in 1650.

The singer’s capture differs in most respects from historic accounts of Fleming’s, inaccuracies mostly copied from the poem. Fleming was ambushed, but he wasn’t alone – the sheriff nabbed him with 14 members of his gang. He was betrayed by the landlord of his gang’s hideaway, who turned them in for the reward money. The ballad’s one accurate detail: The landlord soaked the gang’s guns before the raid.

But the fickle woman (in the original poem “my whore,” but in the song usually Jenny or Molly) was invented, which might explain why her motivation is left unexplained – he brings her the loot, so why would she want reward money instead?

Some variants end with the protagonist in prison, others in exile. Some tack on a final verse about the narrator’s love of whiskey and women, perhaps to explain why whiskey is mentioned in the chorus at all, since liquor plays no role in the tale.

The tune’s popularity dates to the 1950s, when the Dubliners made it a signature song in their concerts. They recorded it three times in the ’60s. It made its way to America during the Great Folk Music Scare, when the collegiate group the Highwaymen included it on their 1962 album.

The song made the pop charts in 1973 when Irish rockers Thin Lizzy gave it a rock makeover. It made it to No. 6 in the UK and dominated the charts in Ireland, where it was No. 1 for an astounding 17 weeks.

It didn’t make the American charts until Metallica covered it on their 1998 covers album, “Garage Inc.” It didn’t reach the Hot 100, but it made No. 4 on the Mainstream Rock chart, helped by a video considered gross even by the standards of 1999. It inexplicably won a Grammy.

A theme song for the gubernatorial race. No editorial comment intended.

The Ink Spots, among the country’s most popular vocal groups in the 1930s and ’40s, had tremendous influence on the generation of musicians who started doo-wop and rock ‘n’ roll. They formed in the early ’30s, but soared in popularity after high tenor Bill Kenny joined in 1936. Their distinctive “top and bottom” arrangements, with Kenny taking the lead on the first and last verses and bass Orville “Hoppy” Jones reciting the verse between, became the group’s trademark ballad style.

“We Three” was a No. 3 Billboard hit in 1940, but not just for the Ink Spots. Frank Sinatra, singing with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, also reached No. 3 with the song the same year.

An old anecdote tells of the student who went to see “Hamlet” and complained, “It’s just a bunch of cliches strung together.” Indeed, absent the Bard, would anyone refer to today as the Ides of March?

This much is certain: Without him, this 1970 hit would be by the Shon-Dels.

That was the name a bunch of high school friends chose when they formed the band in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn in 1964. They changed their name two years later after their bass player was assigned “Julius Caesar” in English class.

They had been recording singles for several years and had some regional hits before frontman and guitarist Jim Peterik wrote “Vehicle.” He told the Wall Street Journal in 2016,

At the time, I was madly in love with this girl named Karen. I had a souped-up 1964 Plymouth Valiant, and she was always asking for rides. I drove her to modeling school every week. I was hoping flames would ignite – but they didn’t. I came home one day, dejected, and thought: All I am is her vehicle. And I thought: Wow! Vehicle! I came up with this song, taught it to the band, and the next thing I knew, we were recording in a CBS studio.

Horn bands were hot at the time, and a lot of people thought the song was by Blood, Sweat & Tears. The single quickly rose to No. 2 on the Hot 100, kept from the top spot by the Guess Who’s “American Woman.”

Though the Ides of March was a one-hit wonder, Peterik went on to greater success with his next band, Survivor, whose megahit “Eye of the Tiger” has become a sports anthem. He also co-wrote 38 Special’s biggest hits, “Hold On Loosely” and “Caught Up in You.” The Ides reformed in 1990 and remain active today.

By the way, Peterik and Karen married years later and are still together.

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado is among the 23 Republican House members who announced they would not seek reelection this year, but yesterday he went them one better: He’s not even going to stick around until the end of the month. He’s leaving at the end of next week.

Buck entered office as a Tea Party type, but he’s no longer far enough to the right for the MAGA crowd, and he’s not a Trumper. “I am not going to lie on behalf of my presidential candidate, on behalf of my party,” he told a reporter last month. “And I’m very sad that others in my party have taken the position that as long as we get the White House, it doesn’t really matter what we say.”

He hasn’t been diplomatic about his departure, either. Buck did not tell House Speaker “Moses Mike” Johnson ahead of time that he was ankling the show. The move also undermined show pony Lauren Boebert, who is seeking the nomination for Buck’s 4h District seat in the November election. By leaving early, Buck triggered a special election that will be held first, and Boebert can’t run in it unless she resigns her current 3rd District seat. “Shove it” indeed.

Everybody knows this as a Johnny Paycheck song, because he recorded it first and had a No. 1 country hit with it in 1977, but it was written by David Allan Coe. The ever-testy Coe resented people thinking Paycheck had written the song, so he recorded it the next year for his “Family Album” LP.

Eric Carmen, the frontman of seminal early ’70s power pop band the Raspberries, died over the weekend at age 74. He gained greater fame in the ’80s after he left for a solo career, and in recent years some infamy for outspoken right-wing political stances, but his concept of a band that combined Beatles melodies, Beach Boys harmonies and Who power chords – seen as derivative at the time – help found a rock genre that lives on.

The members of the Raspberries were seasoned veterans of an active late-’60s Cleveland rock scene that also spawned the James Gang. After Carmen failed to secure a role with the Choir, the top band at the time, he founded his own group, Cyrus Erie. When guitarist Wally Bryson got the boot from the Choir he joined Carmen, as did ex-Choir members Jim Bonfanti on drums and Dave Smalley on bass. They called themselves Raspberries, no “the,” named not for the fruit but the Bronx cheer, which Carmen later said was their response to the pretensions of then-popular prog rock.

The band’s first single, “Go All the Way” made a quick impact, reaching No. 5 on the Hot 100 in 1972. Bryson’s crunching guitar, Carmen’s soaring vocals and a series of great hooks, culminating in the Beatlesque “come on” bridge before the last chorus, made the song jump out of car speakers. It’s routinely cited as an avatar of the power pop genre, and if it sounds less exciting today it might be because so much music that came after it drew on it for inspiration.

Carmen said, “I wanted to write an explicitly sexual lyric that the kids would instantly get but the powers that be couldn’t pin me down for.” To avoid being blacklisted by conservative stations, he said, “I turned it around so that the girl is encouraging the guy to go all the way, rather than the stereotypical thing of the guy trying to make the girl have sex with him. I figured that made me seem a little more innocent.”

The band’s second LP, released later that year, reached No. 36 on the album chart, but its biggest single, “I Wanna Be With You,” a near-rewrite of “Go All the Way,” only made it to No. 16. The returns kept diminishing for two further albums before the feuding between Carmen and Bryson broke up the band. They reunited 20 years ago for a series of concerts, but old resentments put a quick kibosh on a permanent reunion. This was the first song of the first concert, 30 years after their last gig. The whole concert was eventually released on CD.

Carmen’s solo career also got off to a hot start, but having a quick hit with “All By Myself” got him typecast as a piano crooner, Barry Manilow with a better voice, and he kept at it for more than a decade. This song, released on his Greatest Hits LP, became his last U.S. hit when it reached No. 3 in 1988. He took a gig with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band in 1989, and released only one new album after that.