Lisa Hartman's Lack of Success as a Solo-Singer

Billy Nolan

Billy Nolan

Telly Talk Well-Known Member
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micmic said:
I really love Lisa, i think she’s very pretty and very talented, but i also think she doesn’t have that extra star quality that’s required to really make it big out there.

She also doesn’t strike me as the do-or die kinda girl. Not saying she’s lazy but she looks like a work life balance kinda girl, whereas artists like Madonna made work their entire life and worked super hard in order to succeed.

Plus to succeed you also need industry connections, a team to stand behind you and promote you and she probably didn’t have that.
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You might be right. In my opinion, she had her best chance in the mid-80s. I suspect she would have focused more on her singing career if the renewed KL offer hadn't come along. At least, that's what she said in interviews. She wanted to do PR for Letterock as "Ciji" and then primarily focus on her singing career. Incidentally, that was also a kind of minor criticism James Houghton leveled at her at the time: "She only took the role to market her album and then launch her singing career."
In the mid-80s, she appeared again on music programs like "Solid Gold," filmed the movie "Where The Boys Are," and then wanted to make it big. The film wasn't a commercial success, and Knots Landing left her no time for a new album. She probably should have concentrated on one thing more and focused more on it.
The grit and the "hard work" you mentioned are also relevant. In 1990/1991, she accepted countless TV roles, earning her the jokingly nickname "Queen of the TV Screen." This stemmed from her need for money; a manager had swindled her out of her fortune. But she didn't receive any major blockbuster offers, or she declined them. When asked in the late 1990s if she'd ever considered appearing in a big-screen film, she said she probably wasn't "tough enough" to handle such a shoot and that she had her limits.

Perhaps this also applies to her music career. She already experienced firsthand what all this entails—hard work, touring, and so on—with her ex-boyfriend Paul Stanley (KISS), with whom she dated in the mid-1980s.
 
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