How Good It Is: Recent Episodes
Claude Call
Every week I choose a song from the 50s through the 80s and dive into its history, the story behind the song and other items of interest. Find more stuff at www.howgooditis.com
Despite the allusion in the title, today’s song has no spiritual content or religious references. It’s just a description of life on the road with a hard rock band that’s paying its dues. And, as the band members would tell you, they were–and are–a rock band, not a punk band, thank you very much.
AC/DC was formed in 1973 by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young in their hometown of Sydney, Australia. The band name came from an electrical adapter on a sewing machine owned by their sister and not, dear reader, from the street slang that hints at one’s sexual orientation. Within two months, the brothers Young were in the studio at their first recording sessions, and five months after that’s they were touring Australia supporting and opening for Lou Reed.
Their first lead singer, Bon Scott, joined the band in time to record their first studio album, High Voltage, in November 1974. That record was released in a limited market at first, but it did give the band its first Top 20 hit (“Baby, Please Don’t Go”) and their first radio play in the United States. The follow-up, T.N.T., led to an international deal with Atlantic Records in 1976.
The next five years were undoubtedly the golden years for the band. Their third offering, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, was released in late 1976, and the band toured extensively around Australia, Europe and the Americas for the better part of the next three years. Put yourself in their shoes — 4 albums in as many years, with each album requiring at least 128 concerts a year — and you’d start to think of the road as being hellish. And that’s the origin of the song we dive into in this episode.
And once again my voice has a case of Peter Brady. I need to quit recording late at night.
We have a variety of diss tracks here for you, all but one of them dating back to before they were even called such a thing, before the rise of hip-hop music. This isn’t to take away from the overall impact of hip-hop on modern music but rather to demonstrate that, once again, what came before can have an influence on what we have now. Kitty Wells walked so that George Harrison could run, and all that.
But this was, in fact, a fun episode to research and write, and I think we may need to take another dive into this subgenre of music in a future episode.
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Today’s episode is about a song that was written just up the hill from where I was born and in the same town where my wife and and I were wed. So it most definitely “strikes close to home.”
Neil Young had emerged from the great north woods of Canada into the public limelight in the mid–1960s. He joined up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay to create the Buffalo Springfield, an LA-based band that asked the musical question “Stop, hey, what’s that sound” before disintegrating – but not before Young himself had quit and rejoined the band several times. Then, in 1969, he made a self-titled solo album that had great songs, including “The Loner,” (one of my personal favorites) but which didn’t sell well.
And then Young really came into his own. His second solo album got him some much needed publicity, and he hit a creative chord with an ensemble of garage musicians that he dubbed Crazy Horse. His next stop was to sign on with Crosby, Stills, and Nash (wherein he added his own last name to the group) and played the Woodstock festival with them. His participation in the CSNY album Deja Vu brought him both acclaim and paychecks, which he used to purchase a sprawling ranch in the mountains of the San Francisco Bay Area.
One day, Young took a ride around his newly purchased estate with the property’s caretaker, who was at least forty years older than Young at the time. The two men had a long conversation, and the result of that little open-air chat became the basis of one of Young’s most enduring acoustic songs. Let’s find out how the song came together, who played on it, and how the listening public took to it.
One of the things that always amazed me about the songs that became big hits in the pop era between the 1950s and the 1990s was the sheer variety of musical styles that topped the charts.
When doing research for this show I went into a bit of a spiral looking at Billboard charts for the late 1970s, and I got stuck on the summer of 1978, with the amazing wealth of songs that were in the top 20 at the time. Some of the songs, of course have fallen into the mists of time because they don’t get the oldies airplay anymore, and that’s a shame because there’s still some very good stuff there.
This was the Top 20 chart for the week ending August 19, 1978 according to The Real American Top 40 Wiki page:
- Commodores – Three Times A Lady (↔)
- Frankie Valli – Grease (↔)
- Donna Summer – Last Dance (↔)
- Rolling Stones – Miss You (↔)
- Foreigner – Hot Blooded (↔)
- A Taste Of Honey – Boogie Oogie Oogie (↔)
- Pablo Cruise – Love Will Find A Way (↔)
- Barry Manilow – Copacabana (↔)
- Walter Egan – Magnet And Steel (↔)
- Andy Gibb – An Everlasting Love (↔)
- Olivia Newton-John – Hopelessly Devoted To You (↔)
- Joe Walsh – Life’s Been Good (↔)
- Toby Beau – My Angel Baby (↔)
- Atlanta Rhythm Section – I’m Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight (↔)
- Evelyn King – Shame (↑4)
- Exile – Kiss You All Over (↑2)
- Steve Martin – King Tut (↔)
- Chris Rea – Fool (If You Think It’s Over) (↑3)
- Earth Wind & Fire – Got To Get You Into My Life (↑10)
- Jackson Browne – The Load-Out/Stay (↔)
Pretty much all of these songs, I wouldn’t mind listening to again. And that’s not always the case with songs at this level of the charts. (“Having My Baby,” anyone?) We have here a mix of disco, R&B, retro pop, ballads, a live track, a novelty song, a soundtrack title, about a half-dozen well-established acts and three one-hit wonders (I’m not counting Steve Martin there because it’s a novelty). And they’re all at varying levels of “good”!
All of this is prologue to the fact that Stevie Nicks was in the thick of the music industry for a three-year period, either as a writer, a lead or a backup singer. All of which cemented her in the musical firmament. If she’d done nothing else after 1979, she’d still be fondly remembered.
But in addition to being all the things above, she was also a muse for several artists, much of which we’re covering in this episode. I bumped into some problems with regard to quantifying songs about her, but I did my best and I’d be curious to know what you may think I’ve overlooked, because there were a few I did research on and got nowhere.
Hidy, friends and neighbors. Good to be partnering up with Claude on another podcasting project! This episode is about a song whose title vaguely sounds like the result of a chemical spill, but which is actually a classic piece of rockabilly.
John Fogerty and his brother Tom were natives of Northern California, and their family vacations often were to a cabin in Yolo County, just west of Sacramento. That cabin was next to both a lake and a creek, and the Fogerty boys would play in and around that creek during vacations. And yes, you’ve guessed it, the water there did have a greenish tint because of algae and other natural phenomena. Coincidentally, Green River was John’s favorite flavor of soda pop as well (though I’m not sure I would drink anything with that name these days).
Fast forward a few years to the mid 1960s, and John and Tom, along with their buddies Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, are in a local band called the Golliwogs. They picked a new name in January 1968, shortly after they got their record contract, and were thereafter known as Creedence Clearwater Revival. They followed the natural route of local gigs, then national tours, and then record releases. The song titles are familiar: Susie Q, Bad Moon Rising, Born on the Bayou, Proud Mary (which Claude covered on an episode of How Good It Is a while back, and then the song that hearkened back to John’s salad days at that creek in Yolo County.
Give it a listen to see how Roy Orbison rubbed off on the boys from El Cerrito, and how the song fits into the overall CCR legacy.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, the queen of them all.
Pattie Boyd was the inspiration for a huge number of songs. Some of them went to the top of the charts, some of them weren’t released as singles, but nearly all of the songs about her are well-known, and not just because they’re about her; because they’re actually pretty darn good.
And the crazy part is that all of them came from two men: George Harrison and Eric Clapton. There’s a song in Clapton’s catalog that could have easily been about her if you try to read into the lyrics, but it’s more coincidence than anything else, since it wasn’t written by Clapton. But it’s also quite possible that the lyrical content is one of the things that gave it its appeal to Clapton. Who knows.
When I return to this topic (in two episodes), we’ll talk about the other contender for the big title.
If you’re a Patron of the show, you’ve already gotten this episode in your Patreon feed. Feel free to listen again here, if you’re so inclined. Newsletter should be back next week; I’m still readjusting my work flow. You can click here to become a Patron of the show.
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Where have I been?
Life, Cousin. Life got in the way. A lot of things sidetracked me, and even though I was keeping the feed for this show active, I still had several moments of “Yeah! Gonna get back to it soon!” alongside an equal number of “why bother?” moments.
I’ve also been working on a different podcast project with Mike Messner, who you might remember from a couple of Gordon Lightfoot episodes we did here. I talk about it during the episode, but you can check it out here.
Mike convinced me that there was still more to say; in addition he wanted to help me say it. In addition, I wanted to move the show a little closer to its original educational roots. There’s more about that during the episode, too.
So, bigger picture: Mike is going to take on some of the hosting duties, and I’m going to be doing a mix of new shows and a re-work of old shows. We have roughly the next 20 or so episodes mapped out, and while Mike will be writing and producing his own stuff, I’ll be reviewing scripts and dealing with final production, plus I’ll be dealing with the show notes (the stuff you read here) for the time being.
Have a listen, get The Rest Of The StoryTM, and let’s re-light this candle!
Of all the people in the Beatles’ inner circle, Jane Asher is perhaps the most mysterious.
Not because she’s reclusive–far from it, in fact. Jane Asher has spent lots of time on stage and on screens large and small from the time she was a child. But other than newspaper and magazine articles, and maybe a few video clips which survive from the 1960s, there isn’t a lot of first-hand knowledge about her relationship with Paul McCartney.
For about five years she was his girlfriend, and she had a front-row view of the beginnings of Beatlemania, the madness of touring, the changes in the band’s sound, the death of Brian Epstein, the psychedelic period, even the visit to India. But she finds it insulting when people ask her about those days. And even though she’s written several books, both fiction and non-fiction, none of them are about The Beatles. She may be the only person who’s had prolonged contact with the band who hasn’t written a book about it.
But Paul McCartney, tunesmith that he is, wrote several songs about Jane Asher. In later years, he’d mostly concede only that they were songs of a personal nature rather than saying something like “It’s about Jane,” possibly as a means of respecting both her and his late wife Linda, but a pretty straight line can be drawn between some of the events in their respective lives and the subject matter of his songs.
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In case you haven’t heard, we’re on a little bit of a journey, meeting various women who have had an influence on multiple pop songs. In today’s episode we’ll be visiting Rosanna Arquette.
The interesting thing here is that whether or not the songs in this episode are about Rosanna has been an on-again, off-again mystery. For a while they’re not, then they are again, and maybe, maybe not. Personally I think the evidence is there, although I can accept the explanation that there are other models for one song and there’s a deliberate ambiguity in the other, because of the nature of the music that was influencing the singer.
At any rate, there’s a terrific storm going on tonight and I’ve already lost power briefly one time; let me get this out before there’s another outage.
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For the next several episodes, we’re going to take a look at the women who inspired some of the Rock Era’s most iconic songs.
There will be six episodes in this series; five of them will concentrate on a specific woman, each of whom inspired multiple songs. The sixth episode will look at several women who each inspired a single song. A couple of the women I’ve chosen will be fairly obvious but I’m hoping a couple will come as a surprise to you.
And this episode, I hope, is one of the surprises. We’ll be taking a look at Renee Fladen-Kamm, who was just Renee Fladen back in the day. This young woman inspired three songs, all with a similar theme to them. Two of the songs became big hits for the artist, and the third…not so much. But there’s a pretty good cover that I mention during the episode.
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After this many episodes, it gives me a moment of “Huh, isn’t that interesting” when I start writing the post for an episode and discover that I haven’t covered a song from that particular year before. In this case, that year would be 1956.
In retrospect, that shouldn’t be a surprise, given that we’re reaching waaay back into the early days of the Pop music era. But it’s still a fun little statistic, regardless.
“In the Still of the Night” was originally “In the Still of the Nite,” partly because they didn’t want this song to be confused with a 1936 song written by Cole Porter and recorded several times over the years. The other reason is that it was a little bit of a trend to spell “Nite” like that. (See also The Dells’ “Oh What a Nite”.) Later on the spelling changed to the more conventional style, and you’d often see “(I’ll Remember)” tacked on. Why it’s “I’ll remember” and not “I remember”, I have no idea.
This wasn’t relevant to the broader story, but in 1986 Ronnie Milsap recorded a song called “Lost in the Fifties Tonight”, where he recounts some fond memories from listening to this song. As part of the chorus he actually sings a few bars of this song. That song went to #1 on the Billboard Country Chart and earned Milsap a Grammy for Best Country Male Performance.
And finally, I didn’t promise this during the episode, but here’s the song from the Trivia Question (go listen to the episode first!):
This link doesn’t have any actual video to it, but do a search and you’ll catch a lot of fun videos associated with the song. You won’t even mind hearing it repeatedly because it’s a genuine banger.
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This is an episode I wrote in the Southern Studio, so I may have been in a better mood than usual to write it than I ordinarily am, given the subject matter.
When Blue Öyster Cult first got together, they were a college band from Stony Brook, New York. That’s not far from where I grew up. Oddly, none of the band’s original members are from Long Island. Two of them grew up in New York City, one in upstate NY and the last was born in Alabama but moved to the Island as a child. Go figure.
They took on the name Soft White Underbelly first and used that from 1967-1969. Then they caught a bad review for a show and decided to change their name. After a few permutations they landed on Blue Öyster Cult, which they didn’t really like. But the fact is, they didn’t care enough at that point to come up with anything else.
I touched on this briefly in the episode itself, but it’s pretty clear that the band members were still pretty fond of “Soft White Underbelly”. Oftentimes when they played smaller clubs around the NY Metro area, that’s the name they’d use in those clubs. So when fans of BOC saw an ad in the local newspapers touting that band in the 1970s and 80s, they knew they were actually in for a Blue Öyster Cult show.
“Don’t Fear the Reaper” is notable for several different reasons. It was a new recording studio and they experimented with their sound in different ways. That would include having Buck Dharma sing the lead. (Dharma is the lead singer on “Godzilla” and “Burnin’ For You”, so they may have hit on something there.) You’ll hear about some of the bells and whistles they use.
And yes, you’ll hear a little bit about Saturday Night Live and how they feel about it.
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By 1968, Glen Campbell had moved from session musician to a star in his own right. His single “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” written by Jimmy Webb, was a huge hit for him. So when Campbell decided he needed another song, he turned back to Webb and asked him for another song.
For whatever reason, he asked Webb to make it a song about a specific location. Webb, at that time, was in the business of writing as many songs as possible about his ex, a woman named Susan Horton. (Coincidentally, Jim Holvay was also spending a lot of time writing songs about a woman named Susan, go figure.) Susan Horton was at the heart of “Phoenix” and “MacArthur Park, which had just been released when Campbell came calling again. So he cranked out yet another song ostensibly about Susan. That song was “Wichita Lineman.”
Now, Webb wasn’t as obvious about Susan as Holvay was, but in all of these songs you can hear some sense of loss and longing, so it’s pretty clear that he had it bad for her. And between Webb’s nearly-finished work and the production values that Campbell and producer/arranger Al De Lory, before long they had a genuine masterpiece on their hands. And honest to god, why haven’t I covered this song back when the show was still in single digits?
What else haven’t I covered that really needs some attention? Drop me an email at howgoodpodcast@gmail.com!
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Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!
Today we’re looking at three Christmas songs that are born from the anxieties of World War Two. Two of the songs aren’t direct references to the war itself, but it clearly informed the subject. Themes of separation and loneliness emerge, and a sense of nostalgia is present throughout.
Interestingly, one of the songs was so dark that the lyricist was asked to change the words…twice. For the other two songs, there’s a verse that usually goes unsung, though once in awhile we get to hear it. And one song was popular enough with the public that it still holds the Guinness record for most copies of a song sold—and it’s not even the original recording!
And, as promised: here are the original lyrics to “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”
Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
It may be your last.
Next year we may all be living in the past.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Pop that champagne cork.
Next year we may all be living in New York.
No good times like the olden days.
Happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who were dear to us.
Will be near to us no more.
But at least we all will be together.
If the Lord allows.
From now on, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
Happy holidays to ye!
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Sorry, no transcript this time.
…before we were so rudely interrupted…
This is a song that I’m long-overdue in covering, if only because of the backstory it has. It’s simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking. It’s a love letter from lyricist Doc Pomus to his wife. That’s not unusual, of course. Many songwriters compose songs dedicated to a loved one. But this one has an extra special twist to it. I shan’t spoil it here, though: you’ll have to actually listen to the show.
So in this episode we’ll learn about the genius of Doc Pomus, the genius of Dick Clark, and a little bit about children’s television.
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How many times now have I gone into the backstory with a song and learned that the person who wrote it says something akin to, “Yeah, I knocked that one off in about fifteen minutes.”
Oftentimes they also think that the song isn’t going to amount to very much, which I find kind of funny. But it also supports a working theory I have that it’s not always the song itself, but the way it’s presented. The Crickets (sans Buddy Holly) and a few others approached it one way, but Bobby Fuller and The Clash looked at it differently, and it paid off for them.
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I don't often play favorites on this show; in fact there have been a couple of songs I genuinely disliked, but I covered them anyway because the story behind them was kind of interesting. And I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify those songs, because I do try to be even-handed.
However.
I am going to take the time to gush about "Tiny Dancer" just a little bit, because it's one of my favorite songs by Elton John, and it may even be somewhere in my all-time Top Ten, if I took the time to compose such a list. Actually, I've already taken that time, and here's the episode.
Before you listen, however, I will note that my wife doesn't really like this song, and I can't convince her to sing along with me on the chorus. Ever. Spoilsport.
And, as promised, here's the "Tiny Dancer" clip from the 2000 film Almost Famous:
Kate Hudson shoulda been a bigger star.
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The Association was a band that just kind of floundered for awhile. First in was in their early years when they were known as simply The Men, then, in 1966 after their first album did well, the second one did...not so much.
Bones Howe
Part of the problem, it seemed, is that the band members playing their own instruments was mostly not a good idea. So for their third album, Warner Brothers (which had purchased The Association's label and therefore their contract) brought in a new producer. That producer, Bones Howe, in turn brought in a bunch of session musicians who later became known as The Wrecking Crew.
The Insight Out front sleeve.
The members themselves also made some changes with regard to their overall sound and the materials that they recorded, and they managed to break away from their Sunshine Pop sound and into a more eclectic feel. Some tracks were psychedelic, some were Baroque, some were folky, and there was even a touch of the Garage Band sound. That third album, titled Insight Out, performed about as well as the first one did and yielded two of their biggest hits. And in this episode we learn a little about one of those songs.
Click here for a transcript of the episode. (The Blubrry player is supposed to provide one now; if you try it let me know how that works for you.)
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One of my favorite titles for an album comes from The Animals. They did a bunch of albums up to 1969, then for a year or two there were a couple of compilation albums after they broke up. But in 1977 the Animals reunited and released a new album, titled Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted.
I don't know what made me think of that. Anyway. (heh.)
This was one of those episodes where, the more I found, the more there was TO find. And so what I thought would be a relatively short episode clocks in at close to twenty minutes. What a bonus for ye!
"Without You" has humble beginnings and a huge, happy ending, except for the composers, Pete Ham and Tom Evans. Although it was a huge hit for Harry Nilsson and later Mariah Carey, neither composer saw much money for it. They, themselves, didn't see much potential in the song, so they buried it in the dead center of the album, at the end of Side 1. Then in 1975, after years of mismanagement and legal squabbles, Ham committed suicide shortly after learning that all of his money had disappeared. Then, in 1983, following a dispute over royalties from the song, which had been in escrow going back to the Apple Records era, Evans also committed suicide.
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Giveaways Special videos Bonus Episodes A Sense of Pride for Having Helped Foster an Independent Creator
I think that by now the Monkees have overcome their epithet of “Prefab Four,” which I suppose was clever but not especially accurate. At least three of the Monkees were musicians who could act. I’d argue that Micky Dolenz was an actor who could play music. (More on that below.) Having said that, however, he’s got one of the best voices of the rock and roll era, so my label comes from the fact that he came from acting rather than from music, as the others did.
That they didn’t write most of their own music is really of no consequence, given that the pressure for artists to write their own material wasn’t really there yet. Similarly, the Monkees were under a tight contract, which made that difficult. Every move they made toward autonomy was met with resistance. In Michael Nesmith’s case, it meant some acrimony between him and the label.
At any rate, as I mention early in the show, “Daydream Believer” was the Monkees’ last Number One hit, but it was only their second-to-last Top Ten in the United States. (Their last was 1968’s “Valleri,” which peaked at #3.) After that, it was the bottom half of the Hot 100 for the band until a brief comeback in 1986.
While the band members had achieved the autonomy they sought, they were also drifting apart as a group. Dolenz had lost interest in drumming, preferring instead to let session musicians take over. Producer Chip Douglas also noted that Dolenz was the weak link musically. He said that Dolenz’ work on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. was cobbled together from several takes of the same song. The cancellation of the show and the poor reception of the film Head didn’t help either. Finally Peter Tork quit the group by buying out his contract at the end of 1968. By the time their television special 33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee aired in April 1969, Tork was long gone.
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- Giveaways - Special videos - Bonus Episodes - A Sense of Pride for Having Helped Foster an Independent Creator
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You might remember a few episodes back when I teamed up with Mike Messner. He’s the host of the Gordon Lightfoot appreciation podcast Carefree Highway Revisited. Well, Mike is back, and this time around we’re talking about Lightfoot’s first big American hit, “If You Could Read My Mind.”
I actually went looking around for the album that I’d first heard this song on, and it turned out that I was exactly correct about its title:
This was a four-album box set that came out in 1973, so clearly the folks at Warner Brothers didn’t have a lot of hope for the rest of the decade, musically. However, this is a pretty amazing collection. I don’t think K-Tel ever put anything like this together. And it’s a shame that A) it’s never appeared in cassette or CD format; and B) it’s not likely to be, considering the nightmare it’s got to be to get the rights to them by now. (You can get it on 8-track tape if you’re so motivated, according to Discogs.)
At any rate, I’ve actually wanted to cover this song for a long while, but didn’t really have enough material for an entire episode, so I was glad to have Mike along for the ride this time around.
Click here to support the show via Patreon. As a reminder: Patrons of the show get a newsletter in their email box every Sunday, whether there’s a new episode or not. So I’ve been keeping them apprised of what’s been happening in the news and in my life. They’ve been following me through the “medical issue” that I alluded to early in this episode. And they’ll be getting something extra-special in the next week or two.
This show doesn’t have a transcript except for the one provided by the Blubrry player.
To be honest, I didn’t really expect both of the musicians I approached this year to be both very open to the idea of an interview and so generous with their time. But I’m definitely glad that they were, especially because you get to benefit from the chats I had with them. And during this holiday season you get two long episodes instead of one semi-long one. Win-win all around!
Brandon Walker’s “Chinese Food on Christmas” isn’t as Baltimore-centric as David DeBoy’s song is, but it definitely has its origins in the fact that Brandon is from the Baltimore area, which is estimated to have about 100,000 people of the Jewish faith living here. Baltimore City is just under 600,000 people, so that’s a pretty big chunk of matzoh, there. And, of course, he shot the video at several spots in the immediate area:
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- Hunt Valley Towne Centre is a local outdoor shopping mall just north of the city. And yes, they spell it like that. 2. The Senator Theatre is in the northern part of town. You may recognize it from several John Waters films. 3. The Chinese restaurant (now gone) that appears near the end is in Owings Mills, MD. It’s perhaps best known for being where the Baltimore Ravens’ training facility is located. 4. And, of course, some of it was shot in his mother’s basement. I don’t think you can tour that or anything.
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So anyway, here’s my chat with Brandon:
And here’s the second, fun version of the video, which Brandon posted about 13 years ago:
As usual, interview episodes don’t have a transcript created by me, but I’m curious to know whether the transcript generator provided by Blubrry gets the job done for you.
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Over the last several years, radio stations have been snapped up by large corporations. Then, as a cost-cutting measure, certain functions have been centralized. One of these has been the stations’ playlists, the literal list of songs that a station has in its rotation. This has led to a homogenization of radio stations and it kind of makes them not as much fun to listen to when you travel.
That said, there are going to be variations to the playlists depending on requests and local tastes. For instance, Billboard lists the Top Song of 2022 as “Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy, but in Charlotte, North Carolina it comes out as #16 for the year.
In Baltimore, there’s a Christmas-related song that’s a perennial favorite among the locals. However, it gets next to zero airplay anywhere else. And the song’s author and performer is fine with that, because he knows that the song is very Baltimore-centric. His name is David DeBoy, and his song is called “Crabs for Christmas.”
David DeBoy is a local theater actor, a television and movie performer, a voiceover artist, a motivational speaker, and a generally cool guy. And I’m not saying that because he responded so quickly to my request for an interview. In today’s episode we spend some time talking about his career overall and some of the stories connected to “Crabs for Christmas.” And I think my opening question may have caught him by surprise.
Later this week I’ll have another Baltimore-oriented holiday song for you, and a chat with that song’s composer and performer.
Click here to visit Dave DeBoy’s website.
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(Sorry, no transcripts for interview shows. However, the Blubrry podcast player is now supposed to generate one automatically, so let’s see how well that works. )
Such a life I've had lately, what with getting Covid and then getting part of the house renovated...four weeks of a two-week project. And the job isn't even done, but that's not the contractor's fault. (Replacement parts, don'tcha know.) And for some reason it's taking forever to put the kitchen—the whole downstairs, really—back together.
Anyway.
This episode takes a peek at the song that arguably became the Four Tops' signature hit. The funny thing is, none of the Tops thought it would be a hit. What's more, none of them thought it SHOULD be a single, never mind a hit. But Berry Gordy isn't called "genius" for nothing, and he not only released the single, he made it the lead (and title) track for their fourth album. Reach Out (the album) is definitive Four Tops, and marks the bridge between early 1960s Motown and the sounds they were producing in the second half of the decade.
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If you haven't been paying attention (and, based on the download statistics, you haven't), I'm part of a second podcast, where I take on more of a support role than as the lead voice. The show is called Words and Movies, in which my partner Sean Gallagher and I choose a pair of films and find the links between them.
In an upcoming episode, we discuss a film from 2007 called Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover. There's a scene involving Glover's character and a blind musician played by Keb' Mo', who sings a couple of bars of "Stagger Lee," causing Glover to mutter, "I hate that song." We don't find out why until later in the film, but (spoiler alert) it's because when he was younger, he'd been in an incident similar to the one outlined in the song.
The interesting thing here, though, is that the song "Stagger Lee" was always about one man killing another. But when Lloyd Price recorded the song, he recorded two versions: one in which one man kills another over a dice game, and another where they merely get into a fight over a pretty girl. (The second version was for American Bandstand and for radio consumption in more conservative areas of the country.) The experience that Glover's character went through as a younger man appears to be a mashup of both versions of the song.
At any rate, "Stagger Lee" as a song has a very rich history, and it turns out to be rooted in a true story. Many times, when doing the research for an episode I reach a point where the more I dig, the more I find myself going in circles. This time, I tapped a rich mine of information, to the point where I found myself having to decide what to keep and what to toss to keep the episode to a reasonable length.
Enjoy!
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Pardon my allergies; I've sounded kind of rough for a week or so. There was a lot of throat-clearing to edit out of this one. I can't even blame the Southern Studio on this one; it's the direct result of spending too much time cutting the grass at home. (And THEN I can blame the Southern Studio a little bit, because I went there the next day and it certainly didn't help matters.)
How does one spend too much time cutting the grass? By having an electric mower and starting the job with a battery that isn't fully charged, that's how.
This is an episode topic I've wanted to return to for a long time, but for some reason I kept procrastinating. But way, way back in Episode 11, I featured a bunch of songs that had mistakes in them which were discovered before the final product was released, but they decided they liked it better that way and ran with it. And today we return to that well for another dip.
The tough part with songs like this is curating the best ones to use. Led Zeppelin often left in stray noises because they didn't really care (ringing phones), or because they were actually counting on it (squeaky pedal on Bonham's drum kit). So finding one that was both inadvertent and improved the recording? Absolute Gold, Jerry. Similarly, The Beatles would make an error in rehearsal or elsewhere and decide that that was something they needed to retain/reproduce (e.g. the wine bottle rattling at the end of "Long Long Long"), so those weren't really good candidates.
And, of course, you run into a story which is just plain wrong. Yes, Ronnie Van Zant was talking to the board operator when he said "turn it up" while recording"Sweet Home Alabama," but he did not mourn the loss of doughnuts near the end. (What you're hearing is, "Montgomery's got the answer.")
At any rate, I finally buckled down and did the necessary research, and I hope you have fun with this one as much as I did.
Incidentally, a big shout-out to the newest member of our Wall of Fame. Everyone say hello to Cousin Robert! If you want to join the family, you can click here to become a Patron of the show.
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Screen capture of McCarty during our Zoom-based interview.
Jim McCarty is one of the founding members of The Yardbirds, and he's recently published his second book, She Walks in Beauty: My Quest for the Bigger Picture. It's a journey that starts with the death of his wife Lizzie and then jumps back to earlier in his life, as he examines the various things that connect us to parts of the world that are just beyond our reach.
I was hooked immediately when I began reading this book, and no doubt you will be too. There's a search for spirituality weaved among stories about his musical career with, and since, the Yardbirds, and how the two occasionally intertwined. You can order the book from this site, or you can check out all the usual outlets (but it's guaranteed to be in stock there).
At any rate, because he's living in France and I'm living in Baltimore, he and I communicated via Skype. It was supposed to be Zoom, but he couldn't get it to work. Then I couldn't get it to work. So we bailed out and jumped over to Skype, where my camera wouldn't work but at least we could hear each other. I'm so glad we both persevered, because I think we had a fantastic conversation, and the date of the interview turned out to be important to both of us, for similar reasons.
At one point we talk about the Krishna Das cover of "For Your Love", which I gave him a heads-up that I wanted to talk about, and it turns out that he was quite familiar with it, and a little bit more. There's a short clip in the interview but the whole thing is here, and worth a listen. It's probably in my Top Ten all-time tracks:
Enjoy!
Jim McCarty Official Website
Yardbirds Official Website
Sarcoma Foundation of America
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(Sorry, no transcript for this episode.)
When the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik first came out, I'd just left a job working in a record store and was doing some part-time work as a mobile DJ. I had a few regular gigs here and there on Long Island, which is where it's at when you do that sort of thing, because you get to know your crowd and who likes what, etc. Weddings and birthday parties, etc. were just Death on a Triscuit, because you have guests of all different ages, and the old people want to hear one thing, and the young people want to hear something else, and there are always arguments about the volume...feh. I hated doing that stuff.
At any rate, I was working in a bar in Franklin Square, NY at this point and this crowd absolutely loved this track. That was a cool bunch, with a lot of that adult alternative stuff. I enjoyed working there except for two things:
The equipment was stored in the bar's basement, which meant going outside into the alley out back, going downstairs to get it, dragging it upstairs and setting it up, and having to und0 it all at the end of the night; The setup was on floor level, which meant that any drunk moron could—and sometimes did—crash directly into my stuff. And since I was still playing records sometimes, that made for some audio disasters.
I would have stayed longer if I hadn't broken my ankle and moved 30 miles away in the interim (long, long story there). I also liked my boss and he'd throw me other work from time to time. Ah, well.
Incidentally, I didn't mention this during the episode but the song has been covered about a dozen times and sampled more than twice that many. In fact, Busta Rhymes' "Break Ya Neck" owes so much to "Give it Away" that all of the musicians who played on "Give it Away" appear on the record's credits as co-writers. (It's not so much a sampling as it is Rhymes inserting the chorus into the song.)
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This is a show that I made a long while back specifically for the Patreon crowd. Those are the folks who have been supporting the program and helping me to cover some of the hosting and other costs attached to doing the show (e.g. subscriptions, software, etc.). In fact, it was so long ago that the show's logo changed in the interim. I had to re-do the cover art to accommodate the change. (Changing the lettering is easy; the rest of it was more complicated than it should have been. But now I'm just kvetching.)
Their money also funded the source materials for this particular episode. As it happens, there's only one place you can get it. And it's only available on LP, though with the LP came the ability to download digital files as well. At any rate, because the LP set was quite expensive, I decided to create the episode as a "Thank You" to those folks. I also knew that I would publish it to everyone else in the future, around this time of year.
For those of you who don't know: you can support the show financially at patreon.com/howgooditis. For a mere five bucks a month, you get a weekly newsletter where I share information from around the music world. The newsletter has a couple of Patron Saints, and that newsletter is delivered every single week (OK, there have been a couple of misses, usually due to illness) whether there's an episode or not. So while there haven't been any episodes in several weeks, the Patrons have been seeing newsletters.
So anyway: what we have in this super-sized episode is a look at the Golden Record. That's the collection of music curated by scientists and then mastered onto a disc, which was put on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and blasted off into space. The Voyagers are billions of miles away, and while their discovery by aliens is unlikely (because space is BIG, yo), there's a more-or-less permanent record (heh) of human culture out there in the universe.
This episode is a track-by-track view of the Golden Record. You don't hear most of the tracks in their entirety, but you do hear something from every track. It's a fascinating look at what was considered significant enough to represent the entire planet back in 1977.
Hi, folks: I know, the feed has been quiet for awhile. Listen and you'll hear a little bit of the story, and what happens next. (Don't worry, I'm not quitting the show.)
For the last few weeks I've been having some weird troubles with the websites for both this podcast and the other one (wordsandmovies.com, in case you didn't know), especially with the other one. Pages would load slowly on my end, or not at all, which made it very difficult for me to post anything. And in the case of this site, it rendered releasing new episodes nearly (but not completely) impossible. So, after many hours on the phone with my webhost provider—most of them on hold—I finally gave up on them and moved the sites to a new location.
A few bumps in the road were expected, and sure enough I got those. But for the most part everything has been going well over the last couple of days, so I took the time to record and post a new episode for you. (And apologies to the Patron crowd; that's the time I usually spend writing the newsletter.) There are still a few glitches here and there, and I'll be ironing those out as best I can. But I think in general we're all back on track.
All that said, we're looking at a rather faithful cover of a song that, in turn, was a cover of another recording. However, that first cover was rather different from the original. To find out how different, you'll have to listen to the episode itself. But then, that's why you're here, isn't it.
Despite being born in Westchester County, NY, Felix Cavaliere is closely associated with Long Island, enough so that he inducted Vanilla Fudge into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame. Most of Vanilla Fudge is from New Jersey, so there's that. I have to think that it's because both Vanilla Fudge and The Rascals earned a lot of their performing chops in Long Island clubs. At any rate, it was the "live" feel and energy of their performing "Good Lovin'" that the record's producers were hoping to capture when the track was cut, and it's pretty clear that they succeeded, even if Cavaliere and company didn't really like their performance on the record. In fact, they didn't think it would sell very well at all.
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If you want to get technical about it, Looking Glass was NOT a one-hit wonder.
"Brandy" was, to be sure, their biggest hit and the song that most people identify with the band. But "Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne," the opening track from their second album, spent only one week less on the Billboard Hot 100 chart than "Brandy" did. Okay, it peaked at #33 while "Brandy" spent most of its chart life at or near the top, but still.
"Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" was actually a departure from their usual sound, which was a little more Jersey Shore Rock and Roll. This wound up creating a little trouble for audiences who came to see them expecting to hear an entire evening of "Brandy"-grade music, and it probably contributed to the demise of the band.
Founding member Elliot Lurie left the band in 1974 for a solo career, and by the end of the next year the band changed names twice and moved into a power pop/metal sound. That band, called Starz, did have a couple of hits and they do still play from time to time. Lurie, meanwhile, moved into the production and music supervision side of things for awhile, and occasionally returns to live performances.
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Wang Chung was a band that wasn't getting a lot of traction when they had a more traditionally Chinese name. I remember that early self-titled album Huang Chung and I have to admit I was a little put off by it, because it frankly wasn't especially cool-looking, so I didn't give it much of a chance.
By the time their fourth album, Mosaic, came out, they'd switched labels a couple of times and had enlisted the help of people like David Geffen and Peter Wolf to get them on track. In fact, Wolf listened to the demo for "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" and made a suggestion that changed the tenor of the song, and turned it into the hit we all know and love (or hate, I don't know you).
So after all that, what does it mean to "Wang Chung tonight"? Well, I think Nick Feldman explained it best. He said, "Wang Chung is the feeling, not the word. It represents an abstract, an escape from pragmatic, complex ideas. Wang Chung means whatever you want it to mean. Have fun with it. That's the whole idea of the line 'Everybody Wang Chung Tonight.' It can mean a tribal dance, a Viennese waltz, a party in New York, or whatever."
And now you know.
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OK, I know it's not midweek, as I'd promised. But I am back after an unscheduled hiatus, and with any luck I'll be posting more regularly. Patrons, I'll be updating you regularly in the Newsletter (which I swear won't be so much about me, but you're on the journey too and I do appreciate your support).
"I Can Help" is one of those songs that managed to come together very quickly for Billy Swan, and it turned into his biggest hit as a songwriter, and his only hit as a performer. One of the things I like about it is the way that it feels like a generic offer of assistance, not unlike Bill Withers' "Lean On Me," and yet at the same time there's a little undercurrent of a guy who's desperate to get out of the Friend Zone ("If your child needs a daddy, I can help."—really?). But on the casual listen you don't really care, because of the way that Farfisa organ just carries you along, like you're in a skating rink and just along for the ride.
One of the cool things about Billy Swan, though, is that he really wasn't cut out to be a rock star. He greatly preferred being the sideman. And as soon as all the excitement over "I Can Help" died down, he went beck to playing in Kris Kristofferson's tour band. Part of that, he thinks, is because he was never comfortable having to talk in between the songs. If all he had to do was sing, he'd probably be okay.
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This episode is a special one, boys and berries. Mike Messner, from the podcast Carefree Highway Revisited, joined me a few weeks ago to talk about the Gordon Lightfoot hit "Sundown."
"Sundown" was Lightfoot's only song to reach Number One on the Billboard Hot 100. During our conversation we each took our own approach to the song. So what you're getting is a pretty well-rounded view of it.
In addition, we make a couple of fun diversions to another Lightfoot song and my own personal heartaches. It's a fun ride, and I invite you to join us.
If you're interested in listening to Mike's show, you can click on the link in the first paragraph, or just do a quick search in your favorite podcatcher.
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Click here for a (partial) transcript of this episode.
Oh, I do enjoy breaking format once in awhile to do special episodes like this one.
For this year's Christmas episode, I return to the songs that you don't seem to hear on the radio when the stations are playing All Christmas All The Time. You'd think that with the huge catalog of recordings to choose from (even if the list of songs is relatively limited), radio stations could go on for literally days without ever repeating a recording. But no, we're going to get Mariah Carey and Trans Siberian Orchestra over and over and over again.
There was one station that managed to have a pretty deep catalog one year. It was out in Colorado and I think I went four hours before I heard a repeat. So that was pretty good. I don't think they're still doing that, though, more's the pity.
I took a little more time to script this show than I did last year, so for those of you who are interested, there is a transcript this time. Last year, I was working off of notes, and it clearly shows. Hey, you live and you learn. Or you don't live long. (h/t to Lazarus Long)
Here's the playlist for this year's episode:
Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer (1979 version)—Elmo and PatsyChristmas Kisses—Ray Anthony and the BookendsChristmas on the Block—Alan Mann BandCrabs for Christmas—David DeBoyChristmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)—The DarknessHow to Make Gravy—Paul KellySanta Claus is Comin' to Town—Joseph Spence
And finally, let me note that Jenna Getty has come through again with a Christmassy version of the theme music, funded by the Patrons of the show. I haven't mentioned this enough: Patrons of the show got a special hour-long episode a couple of weeks ago as an extra "Thank You" for their support. Plus they get the Newsletter with my lame blatherings every single week, whether a show drops or not. And if you become a Patron of the show, you'll have access to all of that. If that sounds interesting to you, please click the link below.
Have a great and safe holiday!
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When the B-52s first hit the music scene, even their own reaction to the sound of their first album was "this is SO bleak!" because it was relatively unproduced. There was no reverb, no echo, no studio tricks filling out the gaps in the recording. And then they decided they liked it that way.
Their first single, "Rock Lobster," was originally much faster. Then it was slowed down a little and made longer. Then it was cut down for the 45. Then it was cut down again for the radio. It didn't matter; people liked it and they began to fill the clubs with their mashup of Surf Guitar and Punk with a splash of New Wave thrown in. The song never really tore up the Billboard charts but it's still the B-52s' signature song and we can't imagine a performance without it.
That's some stupid artwork, isn't it. They can't all be gems. I should note that the lobster photograph was taken by David Clode for Unsplash. Any adulterations to it are mine.
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This whole episode came about because of a request by someone who wanted to hear the story behind a song. Unfortunately there wasn't a lot to it, but it got me thinking about other songs with similar subject matter. And now that I'm typing this, I realize that all the songs I discuss came from roughly the same period of time. What the hell was going on in the late 70s, anyway?
Ah, well. With this episode I feel as though I've bookended a series that I started all the way back in Episode 80. Here's a couple of panels from a Sunday Doonesbury strip from 1979. Nerd that I was (OK, am), I remember when this first appeared:
For what it's worth, "Songs about prostitutes" is a well I could come back to repeatedly. I'm not sure I have the mental stamina to do so, frankly.
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John Hall, you may remember from a couple of episodes ago, is the founder of the band Orleans. He recently released a solo album, his seventh (if you count the John Hall Band material). After spending some time in local and national politics, he returned to Orleans and they're still making music. In fact, at the time of the previous interview they were putting the finishing touches on Orleans' first Christmas album.
That album is now finished and is available for your purchasing and listening pleasure. It's called New Star Shining, and it's a great piece of work. There's a lot of original material, a traditional Christmas carol and a single song from more recent holiday music canon. For lack of a better term, it's a kind of Yacht Rock Christmas album. I think the rowdiest track on it is their version of "Winter Wonderland."
John and I met in the atrium of a Nashville hotel (more details during the show itself), and I do hope you'll forgive a little ambient noise. Plus, there was a little bit of both of us fidgeting with our handheld microphones. For all that, once again John comes through as a very thoughtful fellow. By that I mean he's not spouting out canned answers to the questions I asked (although some of them were inadvertentely rehearsed--my recorder failed and we had to start over again). And even with that technical glitch, he was both gracious and forgiving, and managed to make me feel not as stupid as I originally felt when I looked at the recorder in horror and realized what happened.
Also, I'm a complete idiot because I didn't ask for an autograph, or a selfie of the two of us, or anything. So this recording is the only evidence that we were in the same space together.
As an aside, the next day I was in the Podcast Movement conference and chatting with the people from ElectroVoice Microphones. I was using some new EV microphones for the interview. I told them about my interview "right over there in the atrium," and some of the issues I had with the fidgeting noises and such. While we chatted, one of the EV reps walked away and then came back. He handed me a box and said, "Here, try this one." It was a different model microphone, which he said would probably solve that problem. Boom! Free microphone! I used it to record some other material you'll hear in an upcoming episode and I think you'll notice the difference! This is why I worship at the Church of ElectroVoice. I did get the opportunity to thank them again a couple of days later.
So here is my follow-up interview with John, which we did during the first week of August this past summer. Enjoy!
Sorry, no transcript available for this episode. Enjoy this instead.
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I gotta tell you, I've been trying like a maniac to record this episode for several days.
I typically take a break in August when I go to the Podcast Movement confab (every other year, it seems), and I come back with a bunch of actionable ideas and a few new contacts, and I kind of have to let it percolate in my head before I'm ready to come back.
In the meantime, I was working on a David Bowie episode, and I frankly got writer's block. I was going in a hundred directions at once, and the story wasn't jelling right for me, so finally I abandoned it in favor of this one.
And then, both of the computers that I use to produce this show died on me within a day of one another. I knew they were probably fixable, so I took them to my local shop, a guy I've used for years and would trust with my search history at this point. My problem is that he's really, really good and other people have figured it out, so now instead of a few days, the repairs are more like two weeks.
I decided to persevere--after all, I don't use the desktops when I'm in the Southern Studio, right? But for whatever reason, the laptop wasn't cooperating with recording. I sounded bad. I mean, really bad. After three fixes and three re-tries, it still sounded terrible. But fortunately, I got the word that the computers were ready for pickup this morning. So I spent a chunk of the evening re-assembling my studio (with the able help of my daughter), and then re-re-re-recorded the show. By this point I nearly had the thing memorized and I barely glanced at the script.
Anyway, it's been a frustrating few weeks and I thank you for hanging in there with me. I do have some cool stuff coming up over the next few episodes, some of it related to my trip to Nashville. I also have something that I've never done before: I'm working on a special Patron Exclusive episode which should be ready to go pretty soon. I had a pretty cool idea but it cost me a few bucks to get the source material, so I figured that the people whose donations made it possible for me to make that purchase should get first crack at it. And, incidentally, during this hiatus they got a newsletter every week except one, when I made the inexplicable mistake a couple of weeks ago of writing a newsletter and then not sending it out.
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John Hall has been around the block a few times, and he's not finished traveling.
In fact, when he and I chatted via Skype a short time ago, he was in the middle of a move from New York to Tennessee, and making that move in between gigs for both his solo shows and with the band that cemented his position in the Rock and Roll firmament, Orleans.
In this episode we talk about the early days of his career, including how a couple of Orleans' first few hits came to be. We also get into his time away from the band, working on solo projects and how that turned into dedicating himself to environmental causes. And how that, in turn, provided the impetus for him to embark on a political career for several years. He managed to sponsor some legislation that not only received vocal bipartisan support, it actually passed with a bipartisan vote. It was a pretty significant piece of law, and he'll tell you about it during the show.
After a health scare, John returned to playing music, both with Orleans and with his solo projects. He chronicled his journey in a book called Still the One: A Rock and Roll Journey to Congress and Back a couple of years ago, and this past year he released a solo album called Reclaiming My Time. (These are Amazon links but I don't get affiliate money for them.) And during the interview he also talks about a special project that Orleans is working on, which will be coming out in the fall.
During the interview, I made mention of Orleans performing "Dancing in the Moonlight" and mistakenly said I thought the clip was from the late 70s, when they first covered it as the title track for an album. In fact, that performance was from 2006 and I present it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7QMsALoZMQ&ab_channel=JohnMarsden
Sorry, no transcript for this episode.
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Original cover photo by awatif abdulaziz on Scopio
Olivia Newton-John was already a pretty big star by the time 1974 rolled around, but she still hadn't scored a Number One hit.
Then along came Peter Allen, who was coincidentally also from Australia. Allen was putting together an album of his own, and he enlisted Jeff Barry to help him with the songwriting. Together they put together "I Honestly Love You" and cut a demo. The intent of the demo was to have something to work from when they recorded it for the album.
Instead the demo wound up in the hands of Olivia Newton-John's producer, who played it for the singer. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Except, not quite. There were a couple of other things that needed to happen. But if I told you here, why would you bother listening to the episode? I ask you!
Because this episode is running a few days late, you're getting a treat: Episode 146, which will be an interview with John Hall, founder of the band Orleans, will drop either Monday or Tuesday, depending on how quickly I finish my post-production. Hall was a terrific interview and I hope to do a follow-up with him in the near future.
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The interesting thing about this song is that it was written for a specific singer. That said, it's been a pretty big hit for many different artists over the years.
"Everlasting Love" was written in 1967 specifically to match Robert Knight's voice, but it's proven to be quite the malleable tune. It's been rendered in R&B, in disco, in rock, in techno and god knows what else.
So the story behind the song isn't incredibly interesting. Interesting, but not incredibly so. But the journey it's taken to embed itself in the hearts of different generations is a fun one. Ride along with me, why don't you?.
This is not the episode that I teased earlier. That one's still coming; there's an interview attached to it and we've had some scheduling issues.
As promised, here's the video of the song by Sandra from 1987. It's got a very 80s feel to it. I think that comes from the editing and the "backstage" feel it's supposed to be conveying. I dare you to tell me I'm lying about the Natalie Wood thing:
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Since I was a young adult, I've liked listening to Janis Joplin. That bluesy rasp she always had going on really underlined her overall sound. And like so many others my age, I devoured her biography Buried Alive. One of the things that struck me then was the way so many of the people from her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, thought she'd ruined her voice because she'd sounded sweeter and purer as a teenager. Of course, they also bullied the hell out of her because she had an artistic mindset and she wasn't a racist at heart. (She did drop the N-bomb from time to time because it was originally the only word she had in her vocabulary for Black people.)
The other thing that struck me was that in all of her photos she seemed like kind of a mess. Her hair was everywhere. She wore a million beaded necklaces. She had the baggy, shapeless clothes on. In short, she looked kind of scuzzy and while it kind of matched her sound, it belied the emotion behind her delivery. It wasn't until a few years ago when I saw a black-and-white nude she'd done in 1967, that I was able to see her differently.
In that image, taken by Bob Seidemann but not released until after her death, her hair is a little more under control. She's still wearing lots of necklaces, but now they're nearly her only defense against the camera's eye. She's got some curves going on that you never suspected were there. But her face...her face is an expression of vulnerability, maybe even fright. You can see it in the cropped closeup to the right which I'm pretty sure is from the same session. Janis was always artistically naked on the stage, but now she was giving us a literal nakedness that allowed the young woman behind the bawdy broad to shine through.
And I think that might be at the heart of her rendition of "Me and Bobby McGee." Janis was able to channel more of a bittersweet sound than her usual Kozmic Blues thing, and then when the band opens up toward the end of the record, she's just along for the ride.
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This week I've got something extra-special for you. It's an interview with Anthony Robustelli, whom I got to speak with recently via Skype.
Anthony is a musician who has toured with lots of big-name performers, he's written books about Steely Dan and The Beatles (with more to come currently on the back burner), he's got a Beatles-based podcast that takes a whole new look at them, and his latest project is a 3D animated rock opera that takes place in the ashes of the 2016 election. Whether your politics lean red or blue, you'll probably find it fun (though admittedly it's a little more fun for the blue crowd).
This is a longer episode than usual—just a shade over an hour, total—but my hope is that you'll have as much fun listening as I had chatting.
If you want to encounter him elsewhere on the web:
Where you can find him on the Twitter Machine.
LIkewise, here's his Instagram profile.
His 3D animated rock opera, The So-Called President.
This is his main page.
shadybear.com Link to his production studio.
If you're interested in checking out his Beatles book, this is the place to go.
And last but not least, here's the direct link to his podcast, which is back up and running as of today! You should also be able to find it in Podcast Republic or your favorite podcatcher software: https://shadybearbklyn.podbean.com/
Enjoy.
No transcript this week, unfortunately. My apologies!
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James Taylor was a talented guy, but early in his career he was having a tough time getting a break. Even when the Beatles signed him to their label, it was at a time that the label was coming unraveled and promotion was scarce. Plus, Taylor had his own issues to deal with.
It took some time but he managed to get his act together, get himself cleaned up and get some talented people to work with him on his second album, which fortunately wasn't on Apple Records. With some support from Warner Brothers, Sweet Baby James became a hit album, and "Fire and Rain" became a breakout his for Taylor.
"Fire and Rain" is one of those songs that seems to have a lot of weird theories surrounding its subject matter, and the best I can tell you is that most of them are close, but not close enough to be considered correct. But the real stories attached to the song are more compelling, if not quite as exciting.
As I promised during the show, here's a sample of the old Smokey Stover comic strip that I referred to:
For my money, some of that art suggests that Bill Holman was a big influence on the MAD Magazine crew. It's also likely that Holman himself was influenced by George McManus, the artist behind "Bringing Up Father."
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Where have I been?
Let's start with: I'm okay, my family is okay, everybody's okay. My wife, as you may know, was considered especially vulnerable to the virus and spent a lot of time in the Southern Studio, but she's back home and everyone in the household is fully vaccinated, thank goodness. But that doesn't have a lot to do with where I've been.
The fact is, I'm a victim of my own success.
This show is considered "big, for a small podcast" which typically doesn't mean that much, but in recent months the show has seen a small surge in growth. This happens every now and again: I see a sudden uptick in downloads and then it levels off for a long while until another uptick comes along. My listenership managed to cross some critical thresholds this time around.
So it was time once again for me to think about choosing another provider to host the show. I've done it before and it's typically not a big deal. In fact, it usually goes so smoothly that you don't know the difference.
The problem that I bumped into this time is that the new host has limits for data uploads that I didn't know about, because the show's length (in minutes and seconds) isn't usually enough to create a problem for me. It's when I started migrating older shows into the new space that I suddenly had a problem, and I was prevented from uploading anything else until a month had gone by and the meter reset itself.
So my options were to buy more data to upload for a single cycle, or wait it out. I chose to wait it out, since I'd recently spent the money on the new hosting and the new theme music, some of which you haven't even heard yet.
There's a little more detail in this audio clip here, which should already be in your podcatcher:
Thanks for listening! I've got some exciting stuff coming up in the near future and moving into summer!
When I was in high school, there was a guy I knew named Phil. Phil and I shared an art class, a class I had to be talked into attending because I'd had a bad experience with an art class in the eighth grade. But I was told that the teacher was really good and kind of a cool guy, and sure enough he was.
Mr. L, our art teacher, let us bring in our own music to listen to while we worked. So one fine day in the spring of 1980, Phil brings in a bunch of 45 records, and one of them was this song.
"Cars" was the kind of tune that, at the time, was unlike anything I'd heard before, and I was both fascinated and hooked. The first opportunity I had, I went out and got my own copy of the record (I wasn't very album-focused yet), and played that record hard.
Numan didn't see a whole lot more action in the United States after that, probably because New Wave came along and nudged him out of the way, but I don't think I'll forget the impact of hearing that record for the first time, even on that crummy, bulky, big brown nearly-portable record player that so many schools used.
In retrospect, it occurred to me that you kind of have to see the original video--at least the first minute or so--to understand what they were doing with part of the Die Hard commercial, so here's the original 1979 video:
And here's the Die Hard commercial in full:
What song did you hear that just knocked you out on the first listen? Tell me in the comments!
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Laura Nigro was a sixteen-year-old musical prodigy who was trying on several last names, as creative types sometimes do. She happened to be "Nyro" when she finally started to catch on in the music industry, so Laura Nyro she became.
Nyro was never a huge star in her own right. But she left behind a musical legacy in a bunch of songs that became big hits for other artists. That's a roster that would include Three Dog Night, the Fifth Dimension, Barbra Streisand and Blood, Sweat and Tears.
Nyro wrote "And When I Die." Peter, Paul & Mary made it kinda-sorta famous. But it was Blood, Sweat and Tears that really brought it to the fore. David Clayton Thomas' voice, combined with Dick Halligan's arrangements made for a relatively light-hearted romp through the graveyard. And while BST's version is musically different from Nyro's, they never lost sight of that gospel feel that it had, even as they gave it the cowboy instrumental section.
In doing the research for this show, I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole of listening to Laura Nyro's music. I may have to do a whole bunch of shows dedicated to her sometime soon. Nyro is definitely an under-appreciated talent.
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In a relatively short period of time, Pink Floyd went from a band with a fairly small but loyal fan base to an international phenomenon. And it was taking its toll on the members of the group. Even as they were putting together this, probably their most cohesive album, they were largely working in isolation. Only occasionally were all four members in the studio at the same time as they worked on it.
This sense of alienation from each other and their newfound audience, plus the cynicism of the record label executives they met up with after the success of Dark Side of the Moon, gave rise to Wish You Were Here. (The story goes that they did, indeed, have someone ask them "Which one's Pink?") In addition, the band was sorely missing founding member Syd Barrett, who'd left the group a few years earlier after having a breakdown. There were a few attempts to bring him back, but Barrett just wasn't able to bring the spark he'd had previously.
Wish You Were Here the album explores all of these themes separately, but I'd argue that "Wish You Were Here" the song ties all of them into a neat little bow. From that point there are only about twelve minutes left to the album. That leaves twelve minutes of a coda bringing the whole thing to a tidy close.
So where have I been the last few weeks? I've been doing some pondering about re-working the show a little bit, and getting some new elements in. So you'll hear some big differences in the beginning of the show (and a little bit at the end), and I'll be trying out a couple of other things soon as well.
Here's a for-instance: the show has new theme music! Thanks to the generosity of the show's Patrons, I was able to commission some custom music for the show. I'll always have a soft place in my heart for "Surfing Day" but I think this new track has a little bit of the same feel and I hope you like it as much as I do. (You can hear it unsullied by my voice on the Facebook page.)
For what it's worth, the show has been away for a few weeks, but I haven't. I've been communicating with the Patreon crowd every Sunday morning via the newsletter. If you'd like to see what that's about, click here to become a Patron of the Show. You won't be able to see the recent newsletters, but you can see the ones from this past fall.
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It's kind of melancholy for a song that many consider to be a Christmas song, isn't it?
What you have in this tune is the true story of two people who re-encounter each other after several years of separation. And as they spend some time re-connecting, they both recognize that despite opening up to each other, it doesn't mean that anything else is going to happen for them. The moment has passed them by, and they're mostly just left with the restlessness and maybe even some self-pity that they hadn't even realized they were experiencing earlier.
They're glad they saw each other, and they still manage to come away sadder about their own situation, having gained and lost a shred of hope that this is the opportunity they've been waiting for.
Fogelberg always insisted that the story was true, but he never revealed the identity of the woman in the story. But shortly after he died in 2007, she came forward and did an interview with a Peoria, Illinois newspaper. Her name is Jill Anderson Greulich, and she says she hears from Fogelberg's fans all the time, with almost invariably positive messages, and especially around the holidays.
It's not really a Christmas song in the sense of Christmas songs we typically think of. It's set during Christmas, but it's not the overly-happy, sanitized Christmas we're used to singing about. It's more like the Christmas that actually happens to us.
And that's not always a bad thing.
I meant what I said about the cookies. If you come up with a guess, hit me up on the social media and I'll let you know if you got it.
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Bill Withers was an aspiring musician, but he kept his feet on the ground for a long time. Even after his first album started to climb the charts, he kept working his job assembling bathrooms in an airplane factory because he thought the music industry was fickle. He wasn't wrong, incidentally. But in his case he may have been pessimistic. It wasn't until "Ain't No Sunshine" went Gold that he finally left the factory job and went on tour to support the album.
Given the star power that supported him with the recording of his debut album, Just As I Am, it's a small wonder that he became such a huge star right away. When you've got Booker T. Jones producing and the rest of the MGs, plus Stephen Stills and Jim Keltner on drums, you're going to be a huge hit. Or, maybe you're not nearly as good as you think you are, and you may as well spend the rest of your life in that factory.
"Ain't No Sunshine" wasn't the first single off the album. And I don't think I'm spoiling any surprises here when I tell you this: It isn't too tough to figure out how it got all the airplay, and eventually all the sales, that it did.
Oh—and, as promised, here's the video of the cover by the Black Label Society from a few years back. They're a heavy metal band, but this cover is mostly acoustic. Zakk Wylde kind of digs the negative attention that the video got for the use of the horse masks (and more) that you'll see in this video. But maybe just lean back and enjoy it instead of reading into it too deeply.
I'm aiming for the next show to drop on January 3, so until then: have a Happy and Safe New Year!
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Merry Christmas!
I actually had a different show in mind but I got to listening to some old radio airchecks (not my own) and I was inspired to do something different from the usual show.
The first thing you'll notice is that it's a half-hour long. That's because I'm playing songs in their entirety and not really talking very much. (If any episode is going to net me a C&D letter, this'll be the one.)
In this year's Christmas episode, I'm playing eight songs that don't get airplay anymore for some reason. A few of them are kinda goofy, a couple are kind of derivative, and I daresay a few of them are seminal to their genre. And while I share a little history with you here and there, the intent this time is to just sit back and wonder why the All Christmas All The Time station in your area is sticking with the same twenty songs, and not playing any of these guys.
All of these songs can be found without too much hassle on Amazon Music or YouTube. If you want to revisit them, here's the playlist:
Merry Christmas, Mary—Tommy Dee and Carol KayMerry, Merry Christmas, Baby—Dodie StevensSanta's Song—The Oak Ridge BoysYulesville—Edd "Kookie" ByrnesSanta Claus Meets the Purple People Eater—Sheb WooleyPlease Come Home For Christmas—Charles BrownWhite Christmas—The RavensSilent Night—The Ravens (flip side of White Christmas)
And just for the giggles, here's one more song that didn't make it into the show itself. It's Bobby Helms' other shot at a Christmas tune, from 1965. He wasn't the original artist (I think he was the fourth) to release this song. I think the most popular version came from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in 1968, though Bobby Vinton's version is kind of well-known, too. At any rate, here's Bobby Helms:
Sorry, no transcript of this episode, since it's mostly music.
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NOTE: I got word that there was a problem with the uploaded file. It should be fine now. Apologies for those of you who had hassles.
(Original photo by Meg Wagener for Unsplash)
Let me start by thanking the show's newest Patron, Scott Fraser, for joining the family!
Next: my apologies: I counted on taking a week's break but not two. I got remarkably sick a couple of times in the past week, culminating with a trip that involved having testing swabs stuck up my nose to varying depths, depending on what they were looking for that time. They were relieved to tell me that I "only" had food poisoning...they think. Reassuring? Anyway, if I sound a little rough in this episode, now you know why.
There are several elements of the story behind "Maggie May" which are going to sound very familiary to you, if only because I've told a variation on them at some point in the past with regard to other songs.
On the other hand, there are definitely a few elements to "Maggie May" which you're not going to hear anywhere else, because not every song starts with getting deflowered at a jazz festival's swan song.
Oh--and as promised, here's Godley and Creme's first video, for their own "Englishman in New York."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQr6FYFEjI8&ab_channel=JoeyOddo
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When Sheryl Crow finished her debut album, she decided that it didn't sound the way she wanted it to. So she actually convinced A&M Records to scrap it and let her start over.
The result was a collaboration between her and several other Los Angeles-area musicians who met weekly to help each other with their songwriting. That quickly turned into a project dedicated to putting together Crow's second debut album. That group became the Tuesday Night Music Club, because that's the night they'd meet, and it also became the title of that album.
Now, some controversy arose around the TNMC and the album that arose from it, specifically who got credit for what, and it may have led to the death of one of the members. But that all came later on and as a result I didn't focus on any of that in this episode. Instead I stuck to Crow's early career and what led to the Club, her (second) first album and how "All I Wanna Do" went from a throwaway track to her breakout hit.
And as ever, I'm thankful for your support.
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So I'm in the Southern Studio again this weekend, which means I don't have a good handle on the way the show sounds until long after I've posted it. Also, I tried something very different with my workflow this week so I'm curious to know what you think of the way the shows sounds at your end. I won't be upset if you think it stinks, promise. Next week I'll be back in Baltimore, sounding more typical.
To tell the story of "Knock Three Times" we had to dive a little bit into the early career of Tony Orlando and how he got that way. Orlando had actually retired from singing and was doing well with producing and working in Columbia Records' music publishing department, when someone asked him a favor: could you please record this for us?
Orlando said, "No thanks. You're not even a Columbia label. "
They said, "Please? We'll give you three thousand dollars."
And Orlando said, "Don't put my name on this or there'll be trouble."
So Bell Records kept their promise and released the record under the name Dawn. They even took the time to fake a photo of the band for the 45's picture sleeve. Look at those guys over there. None of them are on this record. They're literally just four guys in a photograph. The band was composed of session musicians and a couple of backup singers, including Toni Wine, who co-wrote the song.
This wound up being a good news/bad news thing, because "Candida" was a pretty huge hit worldwide, and Bell Records got hot for a follow-up track. Orlando went back into the studio with the same session players and made an entire album, including a second single, "Knock Three Times." That song was an even bigger hit, and Orlando was forced to come out in the open, hire some genuine members of Dawn and go on tour.
But I'm pretty sure it worked out okay for him in the end, yeah?
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Elton John and Bernie Taupin were in a remarkably productive period in the early 1970s. Over a span of just two weeks they'd not only written enough material for an album, they'd written enough for two. And they were thematically similar enough that all the songs could be combined into a single two-LP package. That became the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which yielded three hit singles. It would have generated at least one more, but in the meantime John had cranked out yet another album (Caribou), and any more singles from Goodbye would have delayed Caribou's release.
So "Harmony" became a B side, and while "Candle in the Wind" had been released as a single in the UK, it never came out in the US. However, 1973 was early in the period when FM radio was starting to grow, and some radio stations were only too happy to play entire album sides without interruption. And since Side 1 of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road could be considered practically a single piece, "Candle in the Wind" got some FM airplay then. At any rate, it wasn't an unknown quantity by the time 1986 rolled around and Elton played it in concert in Australia, where the song made it onto the live album he released the next year and it WAS released as a single, this time charting in the US and (again) in the UK.
Because the song had gotten some national attention it turned out that Princess Diana was familiar with it to the point where she'd told Elton John that she'd found herself identifying with some of the predicaments that the Marilyn Monroe of the song had faced during her lifetime. So when Diana was killed in a car crash at the same age that Marilyn was when she died, and when the Royal Family asked Elton John to play at Diana's funeral, Elton asked Bernie Taupin to come up with new lyrics for the song.
And thus it was that "Candle in the Wind" found new life on the charts. But there's more to the story than just that. Tune in and find out what!
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First off, I have to note that I do have fun doing the artwork for these episodes.
Where were we? Oh yeah. Somewhere in the late 50s, early 60s. And Hank Ballard has a new song that's picking up traction in Baltimore thanks to the Buddy Deane Show, when suddenly it gets yoinked out from under him by a newcomer from Philadelphia.
That newcomer is named Chubby Checker, and the song is (surprise!) "The Twist," which rockets to the top of the charts just a few weeks after Dick Clark features Checker on his Saturday night show. Suddenly the floodgates open up and the nation is awash in Twist records for two years. I'm talking about a couple of dozen songs at least, and those are just the ones that made the charts.
No wonder The Beatles just walked in and took over. I kid! They'd have done that anyway.
This didn't make it into the show for some reason (though it's in the transcript), but Ballard wasn't even mad about Chubby Checker (and Dick Clark) hijacking his record. You see, Ballard's label didn't have a lot of confidence in it—hence its placement on a B side—and as one of the writers, Ballard made a pile of money on it anyway. Plus, his version peaked at Number 28 the same week Checker's version reached Number 1 the first time around. And Dick Clark made it up to Ballard by promoting his other single, "Finger Poppin' Time," which was at Number 7 that same week. So, all's well that ends well.
And, as promised, here's the Chubby Checker/Fat Boys video for ye. Man, I thought rap in the 80s was just the most fun.
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It's whiny. It's treacly. It's mushy. It's kind of a bad song. I'm not going to talk you out of any of those things. This isn't one of those shows where I try to convince you—and perhaps myself—that an objectively bad song is somehow good. (And if you don't know what songs those are, that means I'm doing a pretty good job.)
But the fact is, "Seasons in the Sun" absolutely dominated nearly the first half of 1974, and like Kurt Cobain, it was one of the first records I bought with my own money. I promise I'm not considering any self-injurious behavior today.
Not today.
And like Norman Greenbaum before him with "Spirit in the Sky", Terry Jacks was able to use the money he made from his song to do pretty much whatever he wanted for the rest of his life. Maybe we should all write a song with the title "[thing] in the [another thing]", hm? Could that be the secret to financial security?
Incidentally, I used different software to record this episode. Usually I use Audacity, but I heard a lot of good stuff about a program called Hindenburg, and while there's a bit of a learning curve involved, it's pretty good and may actually change my workflow once I get better used to it. If it sounds better or worse, I'd be curious to hear from you about it.
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By 1985 Peter Gabriel had released four solo albums, all of them titled Peter Gabriel. Nowadays most people subtitle them based on the cover artwork (e.g. Peter Gabriel (Scratch), Peter Gabriel (Melt), etc.), and while I suppose that amused Gabriel, it did not amuse the folks at his label.
They pushed back hard to get him to take marketing his work more seriously, so he came up with a title that wasn't really much of a title: So. But Gabriel had, perhaps because of his work on Birdy, had caught on to the worldbeat sound, and incorporated it into the compositions on So. In addition, he got ridiculously lucky with some very creative people to direct and produce the videos that supported the singles. "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time" in particular were very MTV-friendly, and all of a sudden Gabriel is himself on his way and making it in the Big Time, with So going Top Five around the world.
And the fact that the "In Your Eyes" single was a tonal changeup from most of the other singles ("Don't Give Up" notwithstanding), meant that Peter Gabriel was being taken more seriously as a versatile performer than he was previously, when he was thought of largely as a cult favorite.
I didn't promise this during the show, but I'm throwing it in here anyway. Here's the source material for some of the "In Your Eyes" video.
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I don't know why it fascinated me so much recently to poke around with songs that had foreign lyrics in them. But, here we are. This week's show (and I promise I'm done with the premise for awhile) looks at four songs between 1969 and 1984 which have non-English phrases in them. Some of them have been hilariously misunderstood for a long time. One of them is pretty obvious but I decided to throw it in anyway. And one may come as a surprise to you, especially if you don't speak Spanish.
As promised, here's an episode of the European game show Jeux Sans Frontières from 1975. This episode comes from Engelburg, Switzerland:
And here's another, airing from Vilamoura, Portugal in 1980:
And just for laughs, here's this week's episode:
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Mr. Mister is kind of a peculiar name for a band, but a lot of them have peculiar names, so there's that. This particular band, originally from the Phoenix, Arizona area, got their name from an inside joke about the Weather Report album Mr. Gone.
Sorry, not all the stories I have are great stories.
"Kyrie" is one of those songs that is very well understood by a certain slice of America. It's also very misunderstood by the rest of the country, and it largely depends on your religious upbringing, although if you know a lot about classical music, you may also have a clue. No, I'm not going to tell you here. Go listen to the show.
Also, I probably shouldn't mention this, but this is one of a few songs that will invariably have me Chasing Amy...so to speak. And if you think you're Amy, drop me a line.
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It's about time I got around to covering the Talking Heads, don't you think?
Weirdly, a lot of their material is kind of under-researched, unless you're willing to do deep dives into the biographies and such. However, that seems to be loosening up in recent years as more people get nostalgic about the 1980s. And now I'm realizing that that's like my grandparents being nostalgic for World War 2.
Anyway, that, I think, is why I was able to find a decent amount of material for this song. It was the Heads' first single and the one that encouraged David Byrne to keep on keeping on. Because, while it didn't chart huge in the US (peaking at Number 92 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart), it gave him the understanding that there was, in fact, an audience out there for his rather peculiar musical style.
And, as promised, here's a video of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performing their version of this song in 2009. Stay with it, it's pretty cool.
I am NOT, on the other hand, going to link you to "Psycho Chicken." You can find that one on your own. You have been warned.
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Meat Loaf was one of those performers who seemed to just come out of the blue, especially if you weren't familiar with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But in the early and mid-70s he was better known as an actor than a singer. In fact, he was a comedic actor, given that Jim Steinman met him while the two of them were working on the National Lampoon's show Lemmings.
Steinman had written a show called Neverland a few years earlier, and while it had seen workshopping, it hadn't seen much else, so he and Meat Loaf (or, "Mr. Loaf," as the New York Times likes to refer to him) chose a few songs from Neverland and used them as the heart of a seven-song suite that comprised an entire album. Meat Loaf's bombastic acting style and ability to sing combined to create a rock-and-roll soap opera that appealed to teenagers, especially inasmuch as the themes were aimed directly at their hearts...and maybe a couple of other organs. And it served him well when working with Todd Rundgren, who produced the album and thought that perhaps it was a parody of Bruce Springsteen records.
The first obstacle that Steinman and Mr. Loaf had to deal with was getting someone to fund recording and distribution based on the demos, which were usually live performances of Steinman on the piano and Meat Loaf (and occasionally Ellen Foley) singing for record executives, a process that took over two years. It got so bad that their manager once joked that they were creating companies for the sole purpose of rejecting Bat Out of Hell.
"Paradise" wasn't a huge hit from chart standpoint (there's a reason for that in the US, but you're just going to have to listen in), but it did get a ton of radio airplay, and the promotional film that he shot also saw a lot of activity on MTV, especially considering that the song was over three years old by the time that channel made its debut.
I should make one more point: during the show I pulled some audio from an interview with Jim Steinman. I wanted to give some credit, but I have no idea where it came from. If anyone knows, please enlighten me and I'll do what I can in that respect.
And, as promised, here's the GoPhone commercial that Mr. Loaf and Tiffany appeared in. You may want to listen to the show first for a little extra context.
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So this week has been a brief return to work for me, as my school has been preparing for what education is going to look like when classes resume in September. And it's been playing havoc with me. It's a stressful time to be a teacher, you bet.
On top of that, I got my second shingles vaccination early this week, and I didn't have the best of reactions to it, losing a couple of days to some of the side effects. It sucked hard, but it beats having shingles, given what I saw my mother and my father-in-law go through. I'll take two days of chills over a month of painful rash.
ANYway, today's episode comes to you as the result of a request by Paul Kondo over at Podcast Gumbo. Paul has done nice stuff for the show a few times, and he had me on as his guest a few weeks ago, so when he said he wanted to hear me talk about a 10,000 Maniacs song, how could I refuse?
I didn't really have an excellent reason for choosing this song other than I like it, despite its rather dark message. But that became part of the story, of course. Natalie Merchant-era songs from 10,000 Maniacs had that habit of disguising rather incisive lyrics with jaunty melodies so it took the average listener a little bit of time to realize what they were really listening to.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
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Tommy James and the Shondells started out as Tom and the Tornadoes in 1959, when Tom was 12 years old. A few years later they changed their name in honor of guitarist Troy Shondell, and they cut their second record in a local radio station after under-age Tom saw a band playing the song "Hanky Panky" in a club and noted the huge reaction it got from the crowd.
The record did well in the Midwest for a bit, and that was about it because it didn't have national distribution. Suddenly a Pennsylvania station picked it up, and that was the start of Tommy James becoming an employee of an organized crime family.
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Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Some songs seem to spring out of nowhere, and then you take a deeper look and you realize that it's a cover, or a rewrite, or it's a re-release that flopped the first time. "Take On Me" by A-ha, it turns out, is in the All Of The Above category. It was re-written several times and re-recorded a couple of times, and released three times before it finally became the hit we know today.
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Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Hi, gang. I'm recording in the Southern Studio this week (and next week) so apologies for audio issues. It's a lot harder to do what I do when I'm using different equipment to do it. Case in point: what you're getting here is actually the SECOND recording of the show.
You see, when I record the show, everything typically saves to a home server that I have. Unfortunately, when I saved the narration file (the part where I do all the speaking), not only did my recording software crash, my entire computer died. Blue Screen of Death and everything. And unfortunately my work couldn't be saved, so I had to record it all over again. Not TOO frustrating when it's already after 11:00 PM.
So now it's going on 3AM and I'm pretty cranky because it's all recorded and I'm writing this while waiting for Auphonic to finish processing the file. However: I think I've put together a decent story for you to listen to, about the guy whose recording career was jacked up by a clash of egos, but who still managed to do a lot because one of his unreleased songs got into the hands of Steve Miller.
Thanks again to Larry Glickman for suggesting this episode; I went down a bit of a rabbit hole of research but it was definitely worth it to hear some new (old) material.
I should also note a correction to a goof I made in the body of the show: I mentioned that Pena appeared at a festival in 1999; upon listening back I caught the mistake right away but I'd already taken my recording equipment apart (another hardship of the Southern Studio is that there's no studio). He actually appeared in 1995.
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Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Click here to become a Patron of the show.
Another bit I worked way too hard on. But it's worth blowing up if you're so inclined.
R.E.M. had released two albums and hadn't toured since 1989, so when it came time to put together the album that eventually became Monster, they were ready to break the mold a little bit and go back to rockers rather than the relatively quiet, introspective stuff they'd been putting out.
But the project was put through several different tests, including multiple illnesses and the deaths of a couple of Michael Stipe's close friends a relatively short time apart from one another. At one point the band members were so annoyed with each other that it was thought briefly that they'd broken up.
But they managed to get it together and put together an album that got generally good reviews, especially for the way they were experimenting sonically.
"What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" was inspired by an incident involving Dan Rather where he was attacked by someone who, when he was finally identified, turned out to have some severe psychiatric issues. At the time Michael Stipe and Company wrote the song, nobody had any idea who this person was, or if he even existed. But the phrase that Rather cited him repeating over and over during the assault became a bit of a catchphrase for awhile. And Rather himself came to have a sense of humor about it, as you can see in the 1995 clip from the David Letterman Show, below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhsv5zCk55E
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I considered putting this song in one of my Songs You Didn't Know Were Covers collections, but there's more backstory to "Wild Thing" than most of those songs get, so I committed it to its own episode. And now you're spoiled in that respect: yes, The Troggs' version of "Wild Thing" wasn't the first version of the song to be recorded.
It was, however, more faithful to the rather sparsely-recorded demo recorded by Chip Taylor, and it became the template upon which the many, MANY future covers of the song are based. And this week we're going to look at a bunch of them, in brief. Most of them are very good. Some of them...not so much, but your mileage may vary in that respect.
Click here for a transcript of this show.
The Kinks are a band that seems to have some huge, HUGE adherents, and others who are more casual fans, and not much in between. And that seemed to reflect in their chart positions here in the United States. They'd get the positive reviews, they'd get the airplay, the singles would do well, but they'd never really tear up the charts. And then a little while later, maybe a year or two, new material would come out and the cycle would begin again.
And every time a single dropped in both the US and the UK, it would do better in the UK.
Except for this one. "Come Dancing" got a boost in the US from MTV airplay, and then in the UK from all the attention it was getting in the US, which prompted Arista Records to re-release the single. And for all that, it's The Kinks' highest-charting single, tied with another song from many years earlier. Which one? Go listen to the show.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Out of the Blue was an honest-to-god masterpiece of an album, and probably the pinnacle of the Electric Light Orchestra's use of the classical music instruments in rock and roll songs. And the centerpiece of this album was almost certainly Side Three.
The four songs that comprised that side of the album were collectively known as the Concerto for a Rainy Day, meant to evoke the emotional responses that we have to the weather. And when the sun emerges after a storm, and it's just plain glorious outside, that's the feeling that "Mister Blue Sky" manages to convey so masterfully. As Jeff Lynne himself said in the 2018 book Wembley or Bust:
The lyrics to 'Mr. Blue Sky' are simple and easy to visualize. When the song is playing, you can picture everything that's going on and everybody knows what I'm talking about. It's the thought of, 'Oh, isn't it nice when the sun comes out?' And you know, it really is. 'The sky is blue, wow, what a thing.' It's a simple kid's story."
A couple of housekeeping notes on this episode:
First, I screwed up some of the geography involved with Lynne's writing of the album. The cabin was in Geneva, not Munich. However, he did record the rainstorm in Munich. Anyway, please forgive the error.
Second, I need to give credit to Soundjay.com for that needle-drop sound effect I used right before "Sweet is the Night."
Third, some parts of this episode were a nightmare to record, so I'm sure my family is wondering why they heard me saying the same things over and over again. (This may also account for my geography error, too, but I should have caught that before committing the episode.)
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
So I'm sitting here in my home office-slash-podcast studio, researching and writing this week's episode, and setting up the audio clips, and my dog is sitting at my feet pretty much the entire time. And as soon as I cracked the microphone open, he decided he needed to leave the room. Did he need to go outside? No. He just wanted to be in the next room. How's that for a criticism?
Ah, well. At least I have you. Right? RIGHT??
John Lennon's first non-Beatles single for which he gets sole writing credit was misunderstood and probably alienated Beatles fans, but you can't deny the power of Eric Clapton's guitar riffs and the claustrophobia of the mix provided by Klaus Voormann's bass and Ringo Starr's drumming. And it should be noted that the moaning and screaming at the end actually pre-dates Arthur Janov's book The Primal Scream, so once again Lennon was a little bit ahead of his time. (Albert Goldman's book about Lennon suggests that he and Mick Jagger got advance copies of the book, and that John Lennon actually underwent primal scream therapy for awhile. However, Goldman's book appears to have only a casual relationship with the truth.
It's allergy season and I'm sounding great, my friend. Have a listen.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
I worked about as not-very-hard on this picture as I worked very-hard on the Taylor Swift picture. Go figure.
In 1964 the Shangri-Las got on a sudden hot streak with their sultry recording of "Remember (Walking in the Sand)", written by George "Shadow" Morton.
Morton had bluffed his way into the Brill Building by telling Lieber and Stoller that he was a songwriter (he wasn't), and when he was asked what kind of songs he wrote, he said "hit songs" (also a lie). But Lieber and Stoller took his word for it and asked him to write a song. A week later, Morton came back not only with a song, but with a quartet of teenage girls from Long Island City called The Shangri-Las. Lieber and Stoller liked both the song and the girls, and signed them to a contract (well, their parents signed the contract; they were still minors at the time). I saw somewhere that there might have been some controversy about the Shangri-Las already being signed to another label, but I couldn't substantiate that claim.
And that's just one of several nebulous stories that surround the Shangri-Las and their first couple of hits. We look at a few of the ones that are connected to their second, much larger hit. Have fun with it.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
WHAT! you say. We've been waiting a month and he brings us a Taylor Swift song?
Well...yeah. But don't click away just yet.
Here's the thing: I want to expand the scope of the show a little bit, and recently I heard a rather high-level discussion of Swift's work on another podcast called Switched On Pop, which looks at songs and artists from a musical standpoint rather than a conceptual one. If you're not well-versed in the language of music (and I'm not), you might find some of it tough to understand (and I do), but it's still a pretty interesting show. Their look at Taylor Swift was one of their earliest episodes, so they were still looking at the 1989 album and "Shake It Off" as a new phenomenon. Anyway, they inspired me to take a modern-day look at her, a few years after her transition from Country to Pop.
And, since some people are kind of stubborn about modern-day artists, I thought it'd be a fun challenge to try and draw those folks in. Not you, of course--you're a very open-minded person. Other people.
But this was the leadoff single from her first purely pop album, and the reaction was generally positive, though there were some people who decried her turning her back on the Country music scene. And I get that--I do miss all that banjo in her music.
As promised, here's the clip of Dwayne Johnson lip-synching along with Taylor Swift:
For what it's worth, later in the show he synchs the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" to win the game. Also, Jimmy Fallon commenting that Johnson probably sings the song in his car proved to be kind of prophetic, because....
...here's Johnson in a clip from his show Ballers, which aired just a few months later. Which means he was probably learning "Shake It Off" for Lip Sync Battle around the time he shot this episode.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Don't forget to leave a review on Podchaser so they'll send some money to Wheels on Meals America through the #Reviews4Good program.
Or, The Episode Where I Can't Speak Welsh.
There's an old Doonesbury strip (Aug 1977) where rock star Jimmy Thudpucker is sitting on Bob Dylan's porch, chatting with Dylan (who appears as a disembodied voice coming from inside the house), and they're discussing the fact that then-President Jimmy Carter has just called him, looking for a quote to use during his next presidential chat with the public. Apparently the President thinks very highly of Dylan, who doesn't necessarily agree with this assessment:
And there's a little bit of this with the Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac song "Rhiannon": Nicks saw the name in a book and was taken with it, so she began to write a song centered around the image that the name presented to her. In fact, she began a series of songs about the Rhiannon that she had in her head.
Later on, she discovered that Rhiannon was a Welsh goddess whose attributes dovetailed rather nicely with the character she'd envisioned in her head. So when the song became a hit, she began to attribute the song as being about "a Welsh witch" (I can barely type that--no wonder I had trouble saying it). But the fact is, she knew nothing about the Welsh mythology when she first wrote the song.
That doesn't take away from the overall quality of the song, but it does, at least a little bit, suck away some of the mystique that Nicks attached to it during the live performance, methinks.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Don't forget to leave a review on Podchaser so they'll send some money to Wheels on Meals America through the #Reviews4Good program.
Warren Zevon was a talented musician and songwriter who had a lot of friends in the business, but didn't have the commercial success that his contemporaries had.
One day in 1975 he, along with guitarists Waddy Wachtell and LeRoy Marinell, are just goofing around with their guitars when someone asks them what they're playing. Zevon, referring back to a joke he'd recently heard, told that person that they were writing "Werewolves of London". The joke actually started to take shape, but was quickly abandoned.
That is, until other artists picked it up. According to Wachtel, it was one of the toughest recordings he'd ever done, but the appeal of the finished product—to practically everyone but Zevon—was undeniable. It became Zevon's highest-charting single, and even at that, it wasn't the monster (heh) hit people remember it being.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Holy Moley, kids. It's another overstuffed episode of the show for you. But, I guess that's what happens when you're dealing with a song that goes clear back to 1933.
"Blue Moon" was written by Rodgers and Hart, and it was going to be used in a movie, then it wasn't. Then it was going to be used in another movie, then it wasn't. Then it was again, and the publisher at MGM thought the melody would make a pretty nice popular song, so he convinced Lorenz Hart to change the lyrics. And it did take some convincing, for reasons you'll get to hear about during the show.
While you're here, let me give extra thanks to Bill Tyres for his permission to use the audio from one of his YouTube videos. You can find his over at his main webpage, or through his YouTube channel. Tell him I sent you.
Also, as promised, here are the stories about the woman who claims her dad was the true composer of the song:New York Times article (soft paywall)Liz Roman Gallese's website.
And finally, as a little bonus, here's Elvy Yost, singing the first incarnation of the song. She appeared on an episode of The Catch singing a later version of it (and it looked like a YouTube video in the show), but it doesn't appear that she actually made a video for YT consumption.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
The Go-Go's (somehow that always looks wrong) started out in the late 1970s as a punk band in Los Angeles, and they were a pretty solid presence in that city's Punk scene. But as they started to grow in prominence, they moved away from that edgy sound and into more of the pop scene.
When IRS records finally signed them in 1980, they cut their first album, which included a re-recording of their first single. If you listened to college radio, you probably remember the original version of "We Got The Beat," which was an import here in the US and was actually part of their demo record. You probably also found yourself wondering what happened to it when you finally heard the song released as a single in the early days of 1982, while "Our Lips Are Sealed" was making its slow climb back down the charts.
Well...wonder no more, because I've got that story for you right here.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Last week's show was short, time-wise, and I promised I'd make up for it. And make up, I did, because this is one of my longer non-interview shows, clocking in at 20:30. If you listen to this show during your morning commute, you may have to circle the block a few times before going in to work.
But it's so packed with stuff that I don't think you'll mind. This week we're looking at songs that were inspired by books, a topic that's turned out to be HUGE, and we'll be visiting again in the future if you're digging it.
As promised here are links to the stories I talked about during the show.
This is the link to "The Sound-Sweep." It's a little on the long side, but I think you'll like it.
This is Ray Bradbury's "Rocket Man." I think it was scanned into someone's computer because there are some weird typos.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
First up: this should be the end of the oddball uploads. The show itself is completely migrated, and I've gotten a few personal issues out of the way, so I should be back to Sunday night releases beginning next week.
Are we good now? OK.
This week's show is a little bit on the short side, largely because there wasn't as much story to tell as I thought there'd be, but I'm definitely going to wind up making up for it with next week's show. At any rate: Styx's attempt at a rock opera kind of concept was both very successful and very confusing to a big chunk of their fan base, who stayed away in droves. It managed to fracture the band at the end of the tour, and for thirty-five years they refused to play it in concert.
For those of you who are interested, here's a picture of the original Kilroy from the World War Two era:
This image, in fact, can be found etched into the World War II memorial in Washington, DC, and it's a pretty typical version of the image. Sometimes the words appeared below the line, or at another point, but you get the idea. And Kilroy does have dots for eyes; they're kind of tough to see here because of the granite surface.
Click here for a transcript of this show.
John Fogerty had already picked up some popularity with his band The Golliwogs, but Uncle Sam came a-calling in 1966. In order to avoid being sent to Vietnam, he instead enlisted in the Army Reserves, where he served for a while until he was discharged honorably.
In the days that followed the discharge, he wrote a song that he knew immediately would be a hit on the level of the bigger songs of the Tin Pan Alley days. And, given that other artists recorded the same song within a few months of its release, he was correct in that regard.
The new owners of their label, Fantasy Records talked the band into changing their name to something a little less offensive in exchange for the opportunity to record a full-length album (rather than the singles they'd been making), and the band, not being fools, agreed immediately. The original name had come from Fantasy's previous owner, so they weren't really married to it anyway.
Thus it was that The Golliwogs became Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Bayou Country their first album.
Click here for a transcript of this show.
True story: I hire models from Fiverr to do these pictures. All three of them, coincidentally, are from the same (non-US) nation. I don't do that on purpose but I'm starting to think I have a "type".
Thanks for your patience as the show migrates from one server to another. As I noted on the social media, I'm working hard to make it as invisible as possible if you listen via Google or Apple or Spotify, etc. And the website here is going to look kind of weird for awhile with a lot of double posts for previous episodes, until I pick my way through and fix them, one by one. Fun, Fun, Fun!
This week, we're taking yet another look at a few songs which you may not have known were covers, and nearly all of them were suggested by a listener named Kim, who didn't feel that a shout-out was necessary, but obviously I don't feel the same way. Kim had a list of songs that could work, and I said "Sure" to most of them, with a single exception, and that's mostly because the story is a little convoluted and I may have to turn it into an episode of its own down the road a ways.
Anyway: a new hosting partner means a new player here on the webpage for you, and I do have a little bit of customizing control over it (something I didn't previously have at all), so I'm happy to hear your suggestions. And, of course, please let me know if you hit any weird technical snags.
Finally, as promised: here's the original French song I discussed during the show. Check out those lyrics; it's rather poignant.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Enjoy the photo. I spent five bucks on it. You're welcome.
First up: A Hat Tip to Jeremiah Coughlin of the podcast Brine Time, a podcast dedicated (but not limited to) the Portland (OR) Pickles baseball team. He wanted to hear about some Foreigner, and coincidentally I just picked up a copy of Agent Provocateur, so we were off to the races. Anyway, Jeremiah and his partner Jake Silberman are a funny couple of guys who know how to convey their fandom in a fresh way. And now I kinda have an idea for another podcast. Aberdeen Ironbirds, are you paying attention?
Anyway.
I think I'm the one person who didn't hate Agent Provocateur as an album when it first came out in December 1984, because the critics gave it a beatdown. It ultimately yielded four singles, two of which did...okay, and the other two did very well, including this one, which was their only Number One track in the US and the UK, not to mention a bunch of other countries around the world.
Not bad for an album everyone hated.
But while the work was good, Lou Gramm was itching to work on a solo project, and he used "I Want to Know What Love Is" as one of his reasons for bailing out for awhile, so he could go work on his solo album Ready or Not almost simultaneously with their sixth album, Inside Information. And it seems like both albums suffered as a result.
So here's the show, and then go listen to Jeremiah and Jake.
And click here for a transcript of this episode.
Bear with me this week; I'm fighting off some kind of respiratory thing and I'm sounding like Peter Brady singing "Time to Change."
By the way, isn't it cool the way we get that flanging effect only when Marcia and Greg are singing solo, despite the group microphones?
Why yes, I am a fussbudget. Nice to meet you.
This week: it was Procul Harum's debut single, and at last count it was the song most played EVER on UK radio. Not a Beatles or Stones tune; this one. How about that!
I feel a little badly because I didn't really leave anything out of my script for the benefit of putting something cool here, so I guess you're out of luck in that respect. But if you're here to listen to the embed, I've got some good news for you: here it is!
Click here for the transcript to today's show.
Roberta Flack was one of those artists that the label couldn't quite pigeonhole, which meant that they couldn't find a way to make her accessible to listeners. As a result, her first two albums got some positive press, but the sales weren't especially great.
It wasn't until after her second album came out that a track on the first album caught the attention of a first-time movie director by the name of Clint Eastwood. He called Flack at home and asked if he could use the song in his film, a psychological horror film about a disc jockey called Play Misty For Me. It took a little bit of convincing (about two thousand dollars' worth), and the song made it into the film.
When Play Misty For Me turned into a hit, Atlantic Records finally saw the light and released a slightly shorter version of the song on a single, and it became the first of several big hits for Flack over the next few years.
What most people don't realize is that Flack's recording was a cover of a song written and recorded in 1957, and covered rather faithfully several times after that. But once it hit for her, the covers began to sound more like Flack's version. And while the song finally becoming a hit made its writer a ton of money, the truth is, he's never really liked anyone else's recording other than the one his then-girlfriend made.
Incidentally, here's the link to the Flaming Lips/Amanda Palmer video that I discuss during the show. It's definitely Not Safe For Work. You have been warned.
For you independent types who don't use Google Podcasts or some other podcatcher software, here's the show for your listening/downloading pleasure:
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
You should be forewarned that this episode takes a brief detour into subject matter that's a little bit on the touchy side. Specifically, there's a mention of a musician's gender identity and how it's affected their relationship with their fans and the media. I hope that's not a problem for ye.
Anyway, you're getting two episodes this week, to make up for the lapse I did two weeks ago. So either this is the bonus episode because it's Monday, or yesterday was the bonus episode and this one is a day late. How you choose to view that, I care not. Anyway, are we good now?
But the members of Nirvana had a tough time dealing with their quick rise to fame in 1990 and 91. They discovered that a lot of their new fans would be bopping about and singing along with their songs without having a lot of idea what the songs meant.
There's an old Steve Martin routine where he's playing the banjo onstage, and he comments that “The banjo is such a happy instrument–you can’t play a sad song on the banjo – it always comes out so cheerful.” He even makes an attempt at it: "Oh death, and grief, and sorrow, and murderrrrr..." and that's pretty much what Nirvana was going through, but in the other direction. Their songs had the benefit of being very catchy, even if the subject matter was kind of dark and alienated, so people were latching on to the hooks ('scuse the pun, there) in the songs and not really thinking about the lyrics, or the emotions evoked. This provided a weird disconnect for them, and Cobain finally took that emotion and put it into song form. Which didn't really help, of course, because now they're singing along to a song that's basically mocking them.
As the fourth single from Nevermind, "In Bloom" was Top Five in the US on the Album and Mainstream Rock charts, and Top 30 pretty much everywhere else. When the Singles box set came out in 1995, it re-surfaced on a few European charts for a bit. But at that point Cobain had already died by suicide, and Nirvana was no more.
Yeah, I think we're good here.
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Holy Moley! Episode 100! What a milestone!
This is the first of TWO episodes I'll be publishing this week. You're getting this one now, and another one sometime tomorrow, because I felt badly about taking my time with Episode 99.
As I mentioned during the show, the Phil Spector-produced Christmas album went through several re-issues and name changes between its release in 1963 and the early 1980s, including an unfortunate period when the album was remastered into manufactured stereo. In those days, that often meant that the higher-end sounds went to one channel and the lower-end stuff went to the other. It was a mess and really added nothing to the product overall.
At any rate, it was around the same time in the 1980s that a bunch of different events came together and allowed the song to finally break out. One was the reissue of the album on Rhino Records, in its original mono mixes. The second was Darlene Love's appearance in a Broadway show, which led directly to her string of performances on David Letterman's show on both NBC and CBS, and finally we have the cover version by U2 the following year. All of these things made for a resurgence in both the popularity of the song, and in Darlene Love's career.
Stay tuned! Very soon we'll take a look at a Nirvana song, by listener request!
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First off, my apologies for the delay in this post. It appears that GoDaddy likes to do scheduled maintenance on Sunday nights, so I've been getting blocked out of the site on my end lately. At your end everything looks fine, but I can't create new posts or transcripts or anything, really.
This week comes to us by request of Innkeeper Freddie, about whom I've gushed a little too much already. There are links to his show in the Episode 98 post below. He asked me to do this the day I met him, and who am I to disappoint.
"Purple Rain" the song was one of the last written for the movie, and it only became the title of the movie once the director managed to impress upon Prince how important it was to the scene he envisioned. Once he got a handle on that, Prince then asked him if the movie could also be titled Purple Rain. Given that hardly anyone expected anything to come of the film, the production company didn't have a problem with it.
The extraordinary thing about the Purple Rain soundtrack is that three of the songs—including the title track—were recordings made of the first time the band ever played them for an audience, at the First Avenue Club in Minneapolis. The other two songs needed a bunch of post-production reworking, but "Purple Rain" only needed to be cut for length and not much else.
It's unfortunate that, because of the Me Too movement, the film hasn't really aged well (women are treated pretty poorly), which is a bit of a shame because, considering that it was a first-time director working with an entire cast that had never been in a film before, it's not that bad. Also, as it turns out, Prince was a bit of a natural in the sense that the concert scenes were shot in about one-fourth of the typical time, partially because he didn't want to do a million takes of every song, so the director set up multiple cameras and each song was performed three times, tops. And, as the story goes, Prince hit his marks exactly each time, making the editing much easier later on.
For those of you who listen or download here, enjoy this bounty:
And as usual, you can click here for a transcript of this episode.
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This week we take a look at a couple of songs that have the same title but are different, and which had different lives on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Madonna's sixth single and her first Number One hit was the one that established her as a genuine superstar, able to re-invent herself with each album.
Aja, by Steely Dan, was one of the first albums I purchased with my own money. It wasn't that I was so enamored by Steely Dan; I'd just heard a lot of good stuff about it so I took a chance.
And while fourteen-year-old me heard a ton of good stuff in it, doing a re-listen these many years later has only cemented this album in my Top Ten of all time. (Small wonder that so many others agree with me on that one.)
Aja was released to rather mixed reviews, but over a relatively small amount of time, many of the critics who didn't like it at first were won over. It just took a second or third listen to appreciate that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were doing something genuinely new, fusing multiple genres into a cohesive whole.
As I strongly suggested during the show, go back and listen to this album with headphones. You'll be amazed at the intimacy of every element on it.
You're welcome.
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Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Bruce Springsteen was a local favorite and a darling of the critics, but that sort of thing doesn't cut any ice when you're Columbia Records and your artist has already released two albums without scoring any hits.
But Springsteen had an epiphany about what his next album should sound like, from both a lyrical and a sonic sense, and it was the start of his reputation as a serious perfectionist when it came to his recordings. The result was the album Born to Run, and its title track, which were both released on the same day: August 25, 1975.
The album went to Number 3 and just a couple of weeks later, Springsteen made a kind of history by being the first rock star to land on the cover of both Time and Newsweek Magazines during the same week, on October 27. According to biographer Peter Ames Carlin, that wasn't a coincidence: Jay Cocks of Time found out that Maureen Orth of Newsweek was doing a piece about Springsteen and convinced his editor to run a piece as well. Time's piece was all about his music, though, while Newsweek concentrated on the publicity machine that put someone like Springsteen on the map.
I, being only 12 years old at the time, remember seeing the covers but didn't read either magazine because we didn't have a subscription. But a pretty big deal was made about it in the newspapers and on TV at the time, so I have a memory of that too.
And as promised, here's the video of the Springsteen pastiche that appeared on Sesame Street:
Next week's show was inspired by a suggestion from a listener. In the meantime, have fun with this week's show:
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The Grateful Dead were definitely a rock band, and at the same time they managed to defy most definitions with regard to their specific genre. Sometimes they were funky, sometimes they were bluesy, sometimes they were jazzy, sometimes even gospel. Usually they were jamming, and rather than discouraging fans from recording their concerts, they encouraged it, often even giving them opportunities to plug recorders into their own equipment. Going to a Dead concert was a weird, beautiful, communal experience, and I think the closest equivalent in the absence of Jerry Garcia and Company would be...I don't know, maybe Phish? The one time I went to a Phish show was in 1999 at what was then the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (Now the PNC Bank P.A.C.), and it was a very similar vibe, right down to the joint being passed down the row from god knows where.
They started out as The Warlocks in 1965 but changed their name after they discovered that The Velvet Underground had already released an album with that title. Stories vary with regard to how they came up with the new name: Phil Lesh says that he found it in a Britannica World Language Dictionary; Garcia's story is that he found it in an old dictionary of folklore. At any rate, the name stuck and the concerts became known as special events to be experienced.
But while they were enormously popular, their records didn't exactly burn up the charts. While it took them a few years to crack the Hot 100, it was over 22 years before they saw their one and only Top Ten record. And coincidentally, that's the one we're talking about in this episode.
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This week's show was suggested by someone in the Listener Survey, so thank you, Kind Stranger, for making that suggestion. Maybe next time I do this sort of thing, I leave an optional space for putting your names in.
So the car in the episode artwork isn't THE vehicle in question, but it's the same make and model, and (I think) year. There are some stories that say it was a 1964 others that say it was a 1965. Both stories came from the Ides of March lead singer and songwriter Jim Peterik, so I went with a '65 and called it done.
The Ides of March, incidentally, got their name from the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. They were originally the "Shon-Dels," but Tommy James got there first, with a name that was close enough not to matter. Bass player Bob Bergland suggested the name change after reading the play, because they were still in high school and he'd read it as an English class assignment. They'd already gained some local acclaim with a song called "You Wouldn't Listen," which went Top 10 on the WLS surveys in June 1966 and made it to #42 on the Billboard Hot 100. See? You thought the Ides were a one-hit wonder, didn't you.
At any rate, here's Episode 93. Have fun with it!
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Apologies for the delay; once again I've been at a podcasting conference and I got in from Boston a little later than I expected to. This one was geared entirely toward educational podcasts (and yes, I do consider this show educational, though it's probably more in the "edutainment" corner), and I picked up a lot of information I'm hoping to take to my school and see what we can do about getting something launched with my students.
Aaaaanyway, I don't have a lot of backstory to add to this one, other than that two separate requests for this came in through the Listener Survey (it's still open; scroll down if you're still interested in playing along), and because the surveys are anonymous, I have no idea who put the requests in. But thank you so much for your input!
No, wait, I lied. I do have another thing to add. When I was doing the research for this song, I discovered that most people don't know that it's performed by King Harvest, which makes sense since they broke up before the song was a big hit. But when you do the Google searches, some of the wrong guesses will pop up in your results. Some people think it's Van Morrison, which is a pretty good guess actually, but he never covered the song. Neither did Elvis Costello, which is also a popular guess but not an especially good one. But the best guesses are the ones who kinda-sorta remember King Harvest but haven't quite nailed it. That would be the nonexistent artist Kink Harris. It's gotten to the point where you can do a search for "Kink Harris Dancing in the Moonlight" and get accurate hits to the song.
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Holy Moly! The show is back!
For those of you who don't follow the show on Facebook or Twitter, I'll be posting the pictures here in another couple of days, outlining the New Studio Project. My return to the Podcast Zone was delayed a little bit by a faulty cable I needed to replace, plus I was getting into a weird funk. But fortunately I got a mental boot in the butt by Greg Yates over at the No Head Trash Nation Podcast. I met Greg a few weeks ago when I was in Orlando and, while he considers himself a relative newbie to podcasting, I'm constantly finding myself saying "Yeah, this guy knows his stuff." "Holy cow, he's right." He and I spoke face to face for about twenty minutes and I'm practically ready to follow him into a burning house. Anyway, Greg's a smart guy and you should check out his show.
But first, you've been waiting forever for this show! And here it is! The songs in this show were actually selected several months ago, and I lost the list. (That does seem to happen to me a lot, doesn't it.) It turned up when I was cleaning out a computer bag, and I took it as a sign from above. Or from my computer bag, whatever.
At any rate, you probably know that most of the songs I talk about today are covers, but I'm pretty sure I still have a couple of surprises for you. Go check it out.
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What do you think? You like that picture? I PAID for that stock photo, like some kind of honest guy.
Despite this being perhaps The Hollies' biggest hit in the US, it still managed not to make it to the Number One position on the Billboard Hot 100. It was kept out of that position by Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" for both of the weeks that it spent at #2 with a bullet. And for all that time on the charts (11 weeks altogether), that's a pretty popular song, considering that nobody understands the words. At least, not until you've seen them. Then they totally make sense. Plus, I'd be willing to bet that it's not about what you think it's about.
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The Summer of 1969 was also the Summer of Woodstock. Hundreds of thousands of people made their way to Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York (they couldn't get a permit for the town of Woodstock, but the posters had already been made, and you know how it goes...) for a few days of Peace, Love and Music.
Woodstock proved to be like nothing else, before or since. Attempts to replicate its feeling, or its scale, or anything else about it gets washed away by nostalgia and the sense that someone's trying to make a buck off of it. And, of course, they are. They were trying to make a buck off the original show, too--in fact, the organizers were hoping to raise money to build a recording studio. That didn't work out because financially the show barely broke even. But the film and record rights put them back in the black several months later.
Several acts were barely known at the time of the show, including Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (performing for the second time ever), and Sha-Na-Na, which opened for Jimi Hendrix. Most of them have found a place in the rock and roll firmament following the show (e.g. Melanie was a relative unknown; Richie Havens, who opened the show, was barely known, Santana had been around for ten years but hadn't broken through yet); others were pretty much unheard-of afterward (Keef Hartley Band? ).
In the wake of the show were three things that gained lasting fame, and they all happened around the same time, in early 1970. The first was this:
The other two? We talk about those in this week's episode. I'm no spoiler.
Speaking of which, if you want to see the telegram sent to the band in today's trivia question, look under the spoiler button below this week's episode.
Finally, this is the text of the telegram related to the trivia question for this episode. See if you can find the hidden message! If you've heard the episode and you want to see what I'm talking about, click the button to show the art. If you haven't heard it yet, go back and listen first. It's OK, we'll still be here for you.
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This is the penultimate of my special episodes concentrating on the Summer of 1969, and this time around it concerns one of the more horrific crimes of the 20th Century--the Tate-LaBianca murders during the weekend of August 8 and 9.
The murders were incredibly savage, and intended to strike terror into the hearts of Californians, but the hidden agenda behind them was that they were meant to be a model for African-Americans to use as part of the uprising that, according to Charles Manson, was coming very soon, as predicted to him by The Beatles, when they seeded their self-titled album (usually just called "The White Album") with clues.
Manson's plan was to commit the murders, which would show Blacks "how to do it," then he and his family would hide in a deep hole in the ground while the ultimate race war, which he called "Helter Skelter", took place on the surface. Then, when the White race was wiped out and the Blacks realized that they hadn't been in charge in so long that they had no idea what to do next, that's when Manson and his followers would emerge from the hole and take over.
Crazy? Of COURSE it's crazy. Before 1968, all Manson cared about was staging orgies. Then he heard this album and it short-circuited the wiring in his head.
So this week we look at a bunch of songs that Manson took as clues to the messages that The Beatles were sending to him, and just how badly he'd gotten it wrong.
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In the late 1960s, both the music scene and the theater scene were changing, and the 1968 premiere of the show Hair on Broadway was a confluence of the two.
Hair is generally considered to be the first rock musical, as opposed to a rock opera, where all the dialogue is sung, and apparently there are debates about which one was first because there were several concurrent projects going on. At any rate, several songs from the show became pop hits in their own right, albeit from artists other than the ones who performed on the original soundtrack.
Also (perhaps coincidentally), all of those hits were recorded and released during a short period of time, short enough that one of them actually kept another one out of the Number One slot on the Billboard chart.
As I noted during the show, here's the clip of The Cowsills singing "Hair" on the Wonderful World of Pizzazz. (As I also noted, this clip has that watermark throughout, but it's by far the best quality clip, so let's all live with it.) Dig that laugh track, because people in gorilla suits are funny, I guess. Look closely and you'll realize just how small the set was for this segment:
This episode is coming a few hours early; next week's will likely arrive quite late in the day. Wife and I are going on a little road trip and I expect to be back home very late Saturday night. But don't despair! It's going to be another great, over-stuffed, super-size show!
In the meantime, however, feel free to enjoy this week's great, over-stuffed, super-size show:
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We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with a look at three records that commemorated the event.
This week, we've got a super-sized episode of the show (nearly an hour!) as I sit down with Christopher McKittrick, author of Can't Give it Away on Seventh Avenue: The Rolling Stones and New York City.
Chris and I had a fascinating chat about the band and their long-term relationship with New York. All of them, whether collectively or as individuals, spent a lot more time there than you probably suspect, and McKittrick takes us along on the journey, demonstrating how the city infused itself into their lyrics, perhaps subtly at first in albums such as Goat's Head Soup, but certainly more overtly by the time they got to one of their best albums, Some Girls.
Christopher took the time to run down a bunch of rumors related to the Rolling Stones, some of them started (as it turns out) by the band themselves. It's a fascinating journey for fans of both the Stones, the City, and Rock and Roll in general.
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If you'd like to purchase your own copy of the book, click here to get it from Amazon. This link will take you through the Amazon Smile portal, so if you're a participant, the purchase will go toward your chosen charity.
Click here if you want to see more of Christopher's writing (oh, I think you do).
NOTE: Because this show is largely unscripted, there is no transcript for the show at this time. My apologies to anyone who depends on those.
The Dixie Cups' first and biggest hit got its writers into a minor feud with Phil Spector.
The song that was pretty much a throwaway B Side for Carl Douglas turns into a worldwide hit, and turns Douglas into a one-hit wonder.
It's been a while, but once again we take a look at popular songs that you may not realize were recorded by someone else first.
Del Shannon's first and biggest hit got its distinctive sound from a musical instrument that his keyboard player pretty much invented.
Yeah, I know it's supposed to be spelled with periods, but that really screwed with the file names, so let's all just live with it, OK?
Victor Willis was hired on to be the voice of the Village People, but like Ron Dante and The Archies, he was pretty much all there was to the band until they needed to put in some live appearances. So, like The Monkees, a casting call went out. Sure, the criteria for being in the Village People were a little different from being in The Monkees, but most of the group was cast based on their ability to dance (and, presumably, grow a moustache) rather than on their musical talent.
But as a result of this, and the fact that Willis was a writer or co-writer on most of the Village People's biggest hits, the group has gone through some lengthy legal hassles in recent years. In 2012 he regained some control over the tracks, and in another lawsuit he stopped performance of that year's incarnation of the band when he discovered that recordings involving him were being used to promote the show. Recently--just a few weeks ago--he announced that he was going to re-boot the group, which also includes finding new characters to play the various parts.
But enough nonsense. Listen to the show and enjoy the effect that all the pollen in Baltimore is having on my voice.
Incidentally, here is the American Bandstand clip. From everything I've heard about Dick Clark, I'd be willing to bet that he was the one who caught the kids' actions and told the tech crew to capture them on camera so that he could not-so-subtly coach the group into adopting the arm letters. .
The first single from Simon and Garfunkel's final studio album wasn't their biggest hit, but technologically it was their most ambitious.
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The Who was gaining popularity in the UK, but they hadn't reached the point of having huge amounts of money yet. So when Pete Townshend found himself accidentally(ish) living in a posh neighborhood near Buckingham Palace, he noticed that everyone around him was treating him badly. So on his twentieth birthday, while sitting on a train, he composed this song, as a means of getting back at all the rich people who were mean to him.
Why didn't I think of that!? Oh, well.
Here, incidentally, is their performance during which Townshend nearly gets his head blown off. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a clip of the entire performance.
Here's this week's episode for your listening and/or downloading pleasure:
Finally, this is the artwork related to the trivia question for this episode. If you've heard the episode and you want to see what I'm talking about, click the button to show the art. If you haven't heard it yet, go back and listen first. It's OK, we'll still be here for you.
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Incidentally, I've gotten several positive comments and suggestions from listeners and I really appreciate them. Keep them coming!
Jefferson Airplane's breakout hit was written by Grace Slick's brother-in-law and first performed by her in a band formed by her then husband. Ain't nothing but a family thing.
Billy Joel's longest studio track has a lot of Long Island landmarks in it, and most of them are easily identified. But what restaurant was he referring to in this song? This week we look at some contenders.
Gary US Bonds was still just "US Bonds" on the record labels until shortly after this record came out. This week we look at the story behind this song, and how it influenced another hitmaker to write and produce Bonds' 1981 comeback hit.
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Let me open up with an apology for the delayed show. Those who know me well know that there was a medical issue in the family that distracted me, and that's got to come first, right?
For me, "Classical Gas" is one of those songs that passes in and out of my consciousness. I forget about it for a long time, and then I can't get enough of it for awhile. And when I did that trivia question last week about instrumentals, "Classical Gas" returned to my radar and I said, "Ooh, I gotta do this one!". Coincidentally, a listener happened to request that I cover the song, and I was only too happy to oblige, having already started the research. (My reply to him was "boy are you in for a surprise.")
This is the video that Williams re-scored for its use on the Smothers Brothers' Comedy Hour. Try to picture it using Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; I don't think it works nearly as well. (Also, this video--which was posted to YouTube by Mason Williams--sounds like a slightly different mix, but I could be wrong on that one.)
And I didn't promise you this in the show, but I'm going to link it here anyway, because I like it so much. This is the cover of "Classical Gas" by Vanessa Mae from 1995:
And here is the episode itself, for those who like to listen or download from here:
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Legend has it that Bonnie Tyler's biggest hit was originally written for Meat Loaf. But legends are sometimes wrong.
Devo's one trip to the Top 40 was a cultural touchstone partly because some people misunderstood the intent of the lyrics, and partly because MTV was starved for programming.
This week's episode arose from an essay I published on my blog several years ago. I was looking back on some of the stuff I wrote and found this particular piece, and thought, with a little re-writing it might make a decent episode of the podcast. So, re-write I did, and I'm generally happy with the result, though I'm once again fighting off a respiratory thing.
James "Sugarboy" Crawford
Anyway: James "Sugarboy" Crawford wrote "Iko Iko" in 1953, and recorded it with his band, the Cane Cutters. That version didn't go anywhere, chart-wise, and neither did any cover that followed, until 1965, when Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, using audio from the Dixie Cups' fooling around between takes, added a backing track and turned their version, with its nonsensical lyrics, into an international hit. The song became such a big deal that the Dixie Cups eventually received partial writing credit for the song because of all the changed lyrics.
And that's all I'm saying here, go listen to the show.
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Zager and Evans provided the soundtrack to one of the most eventful summers of the 1960s, and then they vanished, a true One Hit Wonder. What made this song catch the public's imagination?
The Stone Poneys' only hit was pretty much the nail in the coffin for that band; Capitol Records took every step they could to cut them out of the loop and take on Linda Ronstadt as a solo artist.
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David Bowie had already released ten albums by 1976, and he was starting to feel the effects of burnout and a heavy cocaine habit. So where did he go to escape his drug habit? To the world's Heroin capital, of course: Berlin!
Fortunately for Bowie and ultimately his fans, Heroin wasn't really his thing, and he not only managed to get healthy, but he also managed to find some creative juice in that city. He wrote, or co-wrote, material for three albums, although only the second one was recorded mostly in Berlin. Those albums today are called the Berlin Trio, or sometimes the Berlin Triptych. They didn't get a ton of love at the time, largely because Bowie was Bowie and he was streets ahead of everyone else. But "Heroes," the title track from the second album, grew in stature and in its level of meaning for fans everywhere.
OK, so I promised you a few videos during the show. The first one is his first time performing the song on TV, on the Marc Bolan show. The instrumentation is clearly different but I think he's singing live-to-track:
The second video is the warm-up to the third. If you've seen this one, you can just skip down to the next one. But a lot of people have heard the song without seeing the nearly two minutes of awkwardness that preceded it:
It was for that holiday special that Bowie produced this video, which also appears to be a live-to-track recording, with some extra echo and those extra fun pantomime moves.
But while all that's fun, it's probably not what you came looking for. This is probably what you came looking for:
Next week: a listener request takes us into the 80s for some Tears for Fears.
Thanks again for all your support!
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Kansas was literally on the last day of rehearsing for their fifth album when their producer asked them if they had anything else. Guitarist and songwriter Kerry Livgren reluctantly broke out an acoustic song that he was convinced the rest of the band would hate, because it was practically the opposite of everything Kansas had done until then. But it turned out to be exactly the opposite: they loved it, and they fine-tuned the song to give some of the other band members something to do (extra guitar, violin part, and a smidge of percussion), and it turned into the album's second single and the biggest hit of their career.
Dustiness here, dustiness there...no wonder Caroline is in a pond. She's gotta wash off all that dust.
And that's about it, there's not much mysterious about this song. It's been either used or referenced in countless pop culture arenas, and it's been successfully covered a few times, curiously enough by Country singers most of the time. Many people know about Sarah Brightman's cover of the song, but I'm going to encourage you to check out last year's recording by Caroline Jones. (No, I don't know why she's singing in a pond, unless she wanted to do the exact opposite of Kansas' video.)
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The Osmond Brothers got their real start in show business when they couldn't get an audition for one television show, and they wound up on another.
Check out the audience reaction to them at first. It cracks me up every time.
This clip, incidentally, is from the show Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, which most people seem to remember as The Wonderful World of Disney. Shoot, I was watching the show as a small kid (right after Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom), and remember it under the second title, which wasn't a thing until 1969. This episode was called "Disneyland After Dark", and the conceit behind it was that Walt Disney himself would start to introduce the different performers on the show, but he'd never see the acts himself because tourists kept interrupting him. The show, as it originally aired on NBC, was available on DVD for awhile, but appears not to be available now.
This would be later in the group's career with Andy Williams, since Donny is part of the group now.
The Disney gig led them to another show (The Andy Williams Show), and another. And finally, when they wanted to break out of their Variety TV Group image, they convinced their dad to let them record as a rock and roll band. So off they went to Alabama, as you do, and they put together an album that clearly had a Motown/R&B influence on it.
It wasn't their first album; in fact it was their SEVENTH. But it's the one that broke big for them.
The addition of Donny Osmond to the act, and the use of him in exactly the way Motown was using Michael Jackson at the same time, allowed the Osmonds to release their first hit single, and their first Number One record.
What's the secret to the song's success? There's a theory, and it involves fast food.
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Hi! Didja miss me?
Apologies for the big gap in shows; life was getting in the way, plus I got sick somewhere in between and, while my voice would have been pure comedy on your end, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun on mine. No excuse though; I should have posted SOMEthing in the interim. I'll do better next time.
Ray Sawyer, 1937-2018
Six episodes ago we took a peek at the work of poet/playwright/singer/songwriter/Renaissance Man Shel Silverstein, and I guess the most notable thing related to that show that's happened since then, is that Ray Sawyer, the singer/guitarist for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, died on New Year's Eve at the age of 81 after a short illness. Sawyer was the main singer on "Sylvia's Mother" and "Cover of Rolling Stone", among others.
So this week we're looking at some more of his work, including what's perhaps his most-covered song (and, oddly, a song that despite all the covers doesn't seem to do anything on the charts; I think it's just a song that people like to sing), and a quick look at his theater work.
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It's the holiday season, and that means that radio stations have moved a bunch of traditional songs into their rotations. Some of them have even gone All-Christmas-All-The-Time. But it seems as though some of these songs don't stand up to closer scrutiny as Christmas songs. They're set in the winter time, but they don't appear to mention Christmas at all, or they happen to take place during the season but that's about it.
And while I'm complaining about Christmas songs that don't stand up to scrutiny, have you really listened to Andy Williams' "Happy Holiday (The Holiday Season)"? Sometimes I think poor Andy had a stroke in the middle of recording that one. It's little more than a bunch of clichés strung together, and then he loses his mind and starts spouting nonsense lyrics, and failing miserably to make them rhyme. I'm going to blame Kay Thompson for this mess, because there's no way Irving Berlin is responsible.
And don't get me started (again) on "My Favorite Things."
During the show I mentioned a short cartoon version of "Frosty the Snowman" that's aired every Christmas season since 1955 on WGN-TV in Chicago. Here's that clip for your listening pleasure:
And while I'm providing extra goodies, here, also as promised, is the audio of Wally Schirra reporting a "UFO" in December of 1965.
When I was in the third grade I sent a letter to NASA, and they sent me a packet of stuff, including photos of astronauts on the moon, a photo of Earth taken from space, and a flyer with frequently-asked questions about outer space. I remember distinctly that one of the questions was about whether the astronauts had ever seen a UFO, and the answer was that Wally Schirra had reported a UFO that turned out to be Santa Claus. I presume they were referring to this event.
At any rate, the episode has been available for a little while now, but if you're the DIY sort you may want to download or listen here:
I'm likely to be out of town next weekend, so it's possible that I'll be taking a week off from the show. Next time around we finish Shel Silverstein for sure, and then I have a listener-suggested episode.
Have a great holiday! Thanks so much for your support!
John D Loudermilk wrote a song that's nearly devoid of actual facts. When it became a hit, a couple of interviews he did about that song turned out also to be mostly devoid of facts.
Neil Sedaka spent a bunch of time in the Top Ten, but this was his first trip to the Number One slot. And he took the song to the Top Ten again several years later with a vastly different arrangement.
Pink Floyd wasn't a band keen on releasing singles, since they viewed their albums as fully realized creations that needed to be taken as a whole. But a couple of tweaks to a song by an uncredited collaborator almost certainly was the impetus for turning it into a Number One hit worldwide.
The early-to-mid 1960s was a great time to be a folk singer, whether or not you were the protesting type. And Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie, had the decade pretty much fall into his lap. It didn't hurt that he was actually kind of good at it. And when, as a freewheeling 17-year-old, he and a friend took a fateful trip to the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts to visit a couple of friends for the Thanksgiving weekend. It turned out to be an adventure that he later immortalized in a song. Between airplay on a single radio station in New York City and its inclusion on the Newport Folk Festival's main stage, Arlo was able to get a record contract and the song became the entire first side of his debut album.
Arlo Guthrie in a still fromthe 1969 film Alice's Restaurant
And despite the song's 18-1/2 minute length, and its subject matter (much of which was taboo then), and some of the language used (some of which is taboo now), the song continues to get radio airplay, in full, and unedited.
Although the restaurant and the microbus are long gone, Guthrie continues to perform the song from time to time, though he'll update the lyrics so that they're either more topical or less offensive. Or both.
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Shel Silverstein was a humorist, a poet, a cartoonist, and a musician who had a strong, if not especially obvious, influence on pop music through the late 1960s, up into the 1980s. Most people know him for his poetry books largely aimed at a children's audience, but he also provided cartoons for Playboy Magazine, usually inserting a caricature of himself into the image:
That'd be Shel on the right.
And he's also responsible for the dark, subversively comic Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book, an alphabet book you do NOT want your kids to read (but you should, because it's hilarious):
But Silverstein was a songwriter who had an especially strong relationship with Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and that led to a couple of their bigger hits, including a song that was essentially a parody of the rock star life, but it led to the sort of fame that only he could imagine:
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The Isley Brothers' first charting hit from 1959 got its start not as a song, but as a bit they'd do to extend another song they were already singing in concert.
Ray Parker Jr wasn't the first person approached to come up with a pop song to support this film, but he was the last, and the best.
Lou Reed's signature song (he once joked that he knew his obituary would start with "doot, di-doot, di-doot...") has its origins in people he knew and worked with at Andy Warhol's studio, The Factory.
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Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. They're still stunning to look at.
The late 1960s was a great time for the fusion of folk and pop music, and a lot of singer-songwriters made their marks with recording their songs, and those of other performers, during that time. So it was when Judy Collins first heard Joni Mitchell singing "Both Sides Now" down a telephone line one late night in 1967. Collins met with Mitchell and Al Kooper that very night in the bar from which Kooper placed the phone call, and the song wound up as the opening track to Side Two of Collins' seventh album, Wildflowers.
For whatever reason, though, the song wasn't released as a single for about a year, but releasing the song turned out to be a great idea, because it turned into Collins' first foray into Billboard's Top 40 and propelled Wildflowers to the Number 5 position on their albums chart.
Joni Mitchell, in the meantime, managed to score a recording contract of her own and recorded it, along with several other songs that had already been cut by other artists (including "Chelsea Morning", which Collins had recorded and released as a single earlier that year) and a few new tracks. "Both Sides Now" became a stealth title track for her self-produced second album, Clouds, and finally propelled her into the public light.
The song has been covered literally dozens of times from 1967 all the way up to this decade, and by artists of all ages and genres so clearly this is a song whose impact will be felt for many years to come.
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Benny Mardones may be the only person to be a one-hit wonder twice, charting two times with the same version of the same song.
The Billboard Hot 100 chart has been around for about 60 years. In all that time, only seven songs which weren't recorded in English have made it to the Number One position. And there are several other foreign-language songs which enjoyed plenty of popularity without making it to the top spot, but the fact is, in United States it's tough to score a hit if your song isn't in English.
So this week I tried to come up with a comprehensive list of non-English songs that made it to the Top 20. This definitely became a case of "the more you find, the more there is to find" so I'm not at all sure I caught everything, but it's a pretty good list, and at over 18 minutes, it's an overstuffed episode besides.
I think that some of the songs that didn't make Number One are going to be a surprise to you, but a couple of the ones that did, may also be surprising. And there's one artist who actually hit the Top Five twice, with songs that aren't in English. And no, it's not Dean Martin. I shan't spoil it here, but I will say that this one really knocked me out.
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Alice Cooper's biggest hit was inspired by two things: Old movies and the last three minutes of the school day.
It's been a while since we took a look at a bunch of songs that you may not realize are covers of other artists' work.
Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018. This week's show takes a look back at the life and music career of the Queen of Soul.
Donovan struck lucky a couple of times with this song: first, it was the beginning of people looking into the deeper meaning behind absolutely every lyric. Second, the song got a weird boost from a practical joke being played by an underground newspaper out of Berkeley.
Disco was on its way out, to be replaced by Hip-Hop or New Wave, depending on the clubs you frequented. Blondie's last major hit in the US was a track that departed from their previous style and broke a few barriers along the way.
It was December of 1971 and Deep Purple was in Deep Trouble. They were all set to record their newest album, when the location they'd chosen for recording was accidentally set ablaze and burned completely to the ground.
This is the Rolling Stones' mobile recording studio. This picture is probably from the 1980s, given the computer screen over the mixing desk. The studio went through two major upgrades during its years of service; this was after the first one.
It took a little scrambling, but they managed to locate a hotel that had closed for the season and were able to use it for recording. The only problem was, the mobile recording studio couldn't be placed close to the recording space, so they had to run cables along walls, through a window, under a door, down a corridor, across a balcony, and who-knows-wherever else. This also meant that the band members had to traverse this route every time they wanted to hear their work played back. Ultimately they got tired of climbing all over the hotel and decided on-the-fly whether a particular take was any good.
The last song they recorded was one that they wrote pretty quickly, combined with an abandoned riff that Ritchie Blackmore had recorded without any particular project attached to it. It told the story of the fire, and the band's travails in locating another place to record.
Deep Purple didn't think the song had a lot of potential, but when they finally released it, it became one of rock and roll's great iconic tunes, and a touchstone for novice guitar players everywhere. And the town of Montreux, where everything took place, commemorated the event with a memorial marker.
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By nearly all accounts, the Supremes were starting to look like a failure. Between 1961 and 1963, they had recorded six singles, five of them for Motown, and none of them reached the Billboard Top 40 chart. There was a glimmer of light when the song "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes" reached #23, but the act still wasn't getting a lot of traction. It wasn't until the songwriting/producing team of Holland/Dozier/Holland (who also wrote "Lovelight") wrote a song and produced a musical track for the Marvelettes, which the Marvelettes hated and refused to record. Desperate to get an artist to record a vocal (lest they be forced to pay for the musicians out of their own pockets), they managed to strong-arm the "No-Hit Supremes" into recording the song, even though the finished music track wasn't in Diana Ross' key. But the key change, and the bad attitude that the girls brought to the recording studio, was enough to turn the song into their first Number One hit, and that was the start of a string of chart toppers. Surely, by now you know the drill: your podcast catcher should already have the song either downloaded, or ready to download. But if not, or if you prefer the Do It Yourself method, you can listen to/download the show right here:
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Gerry Rafferty was pretty much a known element to music fans as the voice behind Stealers Wheel and the song "Stuck In The Middle With You," but by the time that song came out, Rafferty had quit the band, which had to shoot the promotional film (they weren't quite called "videos" yet) without him. The guy lip-synching the vocals is Rafferty's partner Joe Egan. Shortly afterward, Egan talked Rafferty into coming back into the band, and they managed to put together their contractually-required third album.
https://youtu.be/OMAIsqvTh7g
Rafferty and Egan split up again, and the legal battles prevented both of them from recording for three years. But that didn't prevent Rafferty from writing songs in the interim. And it's pretty clear that "Baker Street" was a reflection of his mood through all the legal craziness that went on.
This is the cover of the 45 sleeve as sold in Italy.
But while the song was a huge hit internationally, there are two pockets of controversy surrounding it. One stems from that haunting saxophone solo, and the other comes from the fact that, at the time, no other song had spent as much time in the Number 2 position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart without ever reaching Number 1. (The "Most weeks at #2" record has been surpassed many times since then, but the six weeks that "Baker Street" spent there was the record in 1978.)
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Let me give an extra shout-out to Co.Ag Music, a YouTube channel that provided some of the moody music near the end of this week's show. They've got some cool stuff going on over there, especially if you like music with a science fiction bent to it.
No show next week! I'll see you on July 21 with something really special (no hints)!
The song that cemented Eddie Cochran's place in the Rock and Roll firmament was written in about an hour by a 19 year old Cochran and his manager.
Murray Head is one of those guys whose name you may or may not know, but you're certainly familiar with some of his work.
In 1970 he worked on a concept album with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The first single from that album was written and recorded before the entire rest of the album, and it was released by the record company to gauge interest in the idea of an entire album built around that idea. The song did poorly in the US, at least at first, but international sales were enough that MCA Records gave the go-ahead to the rest of the album. And that's how the original double album Jesus Christ Superstar came to be.
Fast-forward several years and Tim Rice again taps Murray Head to help him with a concept album, one that uses the chess rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union (no, literally: which country had the best chess players was a big deal in the 1970s and 80s) as a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Cold War. And once again, the success of the album leads to the production of a stage musical, called Chess.
And these two successes put Murray Head in an interesting place in the record books.
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One of The Drifters' bigger hits might have been a sequel to one of their earlier songs, but it was definitely a prequel to one of their later songs.
It's 1971 and Don McLean hadn't yet hit it big with "American Pie," so he was touring around and caught the attention of a singer-songwriter named Lori Lieberman, who was so touched by his performance that she wrote a poem which ultimately became a hit in multiple genres.
The rumor goes that Aerosmith was inspired by a Mel Brooks movie to write the song that provided them with not only their first Top 10 hit, but that gave them the lever to make a comeback in 1986. As far as the rumor is concerned, let me quote another Mel Brooks movie: "It's twoo, it's twoo!"
Mark Knopfler sees a band performing to a nearly-empty house in a South London pub, and turned the experience into Dire Straits' breakout single.
By early 1965, the Rolling Stones had scored a couple of hits, but they were still Just Another British Band Covering a Bunch of American R&B Songs. Then one night Keith Richards literally wrote something in his sleep, and it became the start of something that turned them into a worldwide phenomenon.
There was nobody named Thompson, and there weren't any Twins. But they were a part of the Second British Invasion of the 1980s, and this is how they got there.
In the mid 1960s, a group called The Detergents released an album of novelty songs, and a couple of them caught on, but one did especially well, a parody of the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack." Among that group was a young man named Ron Dante. A few years later, Dante was chosen to be the lead voice for a fictional band that was tied in with a cartoon series. That band was The Archies, and they had a short string of hits, peaking with "Sugar Sugar" in 1969. Dante provided all the male voices on "Sugar Sugar," and Toni Wine provided all the female voices. So yes, you appear to hear two women—one singing low and the other singing high—but in fact they're both Toni Wine. Wine left the group around the time "Sugar Sugar" became a hit, and the female portion of The Archies' follow-up single was voiced by someone else. You'll just have to listen in to find out who that was. The Archies, around the "Sugar Sugar" era. From Left to right: Toni Wine, Ron Dante, Jeff Barry, Hot Dog (taking a break from conducting), Ron Dante, Toni Wine. Heh. If your favorite podcast software doesn't have it for you already, you can always click below to listen to/download this week's episode.
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In 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis finally broke out of his role as a session musician at Sun Records, with a song that taught pretty much everyone that there's another way to play the piano.
In November of 1975, an ore freighter broke apart and went down very suddenly in a storm on Lake Superior. Singer Gordon Lightfoot thought that the story wasn't getting enough attention and gathered some news clippings together, then used that material to write a song about the event. This is the original article from Newsweek's November 24, 1975 article. The song was recorded within just a few weeks of the tragedy, and was released the following summer. Just a few days after the first anniversary of the sinking, the song hit Number One on the Canadian charts, and peaked at #2 in the US. I have to admit, though, that when the song came out, 13-year-old me had no idea that it was about a recent event. I figured it was either fictional, or it had happened many years ago. Imagine my surprise! One of the last dives. The bell has been replaced, and someone is in the pilot house, leaving a can of beer there. Nowadays, the ship's location is considered mostly off-limits to all recreational diving and most research dives or equipment, now. It's also located in a spot in Lake Superior where the border between the United States and Canada has moved several times, now. Right now the ship is on the Canadian side. What's that, you say? Your podcatcher hasn't picked up the show yet? Don't worry, you can listen to or download it by clicking on the player below. In addition, I hear it's now available on Google Play, so you can use that if you like. I'm still working on Spotify, but they're taking their time about it.
EDITED TO ADD: Holy cow, I can't believe I forgot to post the video of the ship's launching. There's no audio, more's the pity. If you've never seen a sideways ship launch before, you're in for a treat because it's pretty cool in general. The action starts at about three minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK1eAN_o_q0 See you next week! Click here to become a Patron of the show.
By the time Rosie and the Originals' only hit reached the Billboard charts, the band had already broken up, and Rosie herself was just beginning a decades-long battle for royalties. And the record isn't even that good; I'll fight you over that one.
What does Bobby Day have in common with The Pink Panther? Tune in and you'll find the anther! (heh.)
Phil Spector was looking for some male acts to pad out his all-female stable of talent when he heard the Righteous Brothers. Shortly thereafter they recorded a song that few people thought would be a hit.
Kim Carnes started writing songs at the age of four, and was a member of the New Christy Minstrels for a little while, before she got a publishing deal with Jimmy Bowen in 1969. A couple of years after that she released her first solo album, but it wasn't until 1980, when she re-connected with another former New Christy Minstrel, Kenny Rogers, to sing "Don't Fall In Love With A Dreamer". Later that year she covered Smokey Robinson's "More Love" and between those two tracks, Kim Carnes was "suddenly" a famous musician.
The picture sleeve for the 45, which is the same as the album's cover, except for the banner across the top.
The following year, Carnes' album Mistaken Identity was released, and the leadoff single, "Bette Davis Eyes" took over the first half of the Summer of 1981, after which Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" picked up and finished off the next ten weeks. Even Bette Davis herself was happy enough with the song that she wrote letters to Kim Carnes and songwriters Jackie DeShannon and Donna Weiss, thanking them for making her a "part of modern times. " And when the song won two Grammy awards, Davis sent them all flowers to celebrate.
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In 1970, Led Zeppelin band members Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wanted a new song to use as the centerpiece of their concerts. so they retreated to a cottage in Wales, as you do in these situations. And when they emerged, they had the genesis of the song that's made so many "Best of..." lists, it's actually created some backlash over the years, including from Robert Plant himself.
Despite being a single album, Led Zeppelin IV was originally packaged in a gatefold design, as though it was a double album. If you opened it out, this was the outside cover. That picture in the frame on the right is an oil painting!
The song proved so popular when the Album-Oriented Rock stations played it that people immediately asked, "Where can I buy this single?" And the answer was, You can't. Go buy the album.
The inner gatefold; the only time their lyrics were printed anywhere on their albums.
The album was Led Zeppelin IV (or, just "the fourth album", or Zoso if you like reading too deeply into things), and the song was "Stairway to Heaven" (because, duh). And while "Stairway" was never released to the public as a 45 single, the album sold like hotcakes, becoming one of the top ten selling albums of all time.
That's not to say that there wasn't a 45RPM record, however: a promotional copy was sent to radio stations (see below--note the small spindle hole), and a jukebox copy was created for play in those machines.
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Back in the 1950s, cover songs weren't a big deal at all, especially if you were in a doo-wop group. Most of those groups started out in churches and in schools, and performed on street corners or Amateur Hour shows, and they weren't writing their own material so much as they were adapting the songs that they'd heard and already knew. So it was with The Flamingos and their biggest hit, "I Only Have Eyes For You," which dates back to the 1934 film Dames, featuring Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Check out this mostly-instrumental "dance" number!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P76cUtCGRQs
For a song that's so well-known among Oldies fans, it didn't do that well on the charts in 1959, peaking at #11 on the pop chart and #3 on the R&B chart. And I have a theory about that, but you'll have to listen in.
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Everybody Say Yeah!
(Yeah!)
I love a good call-and-response.
Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips Part 2" was only the second Number One hit for Motown Records. The first was 1962's "Please Mister Postman" by the Marvelettes. (Fun Fact: the drummer on both these songs was Marvin Gaye! He was still an up-and-coming artist, so he played as a session musician on a lot of the early tracks for the label.)
But Motown had a bit of a tough time getting audiences to appreciate The 12-Year-Old Genius, and even this song wasn't the catalyst for his career. It took a little perseverance and the onset of puberty to turn him into one of Motown's biggest performers, with a career that's still going strong fifty-five years later, and counting.
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Clockwise from top: Sarah Dash, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, Cindy Birdsong
In the 1960s there was a doo-wop girl group called the Blue Belles (sometimes known as The Bluebelles, or Patti and the Bluebelles). After Cindy Birdsong left the group in 1967 to become a Supreme, the group reinvented themselves and became Labelle. In the early 1970s they were a funk-rock group, recording covers of The Rolling Stones, Carole King and all kinds of other stuff that no other similarly-composed group would even consider. But another couple of years went by and they reinvented themselves again, embracing the the Glam Rock look and sound, and it was during that era that they scored their biggest hit, a proto-disco-funk track called "Lady Marmalade", which went to Number One on the Billboard Chart in March of 1975.
Over the years since then, Labelle's influence can still be heard in the sounds of groups like En Vogue, the Pussycat Dolls, and Destiny's Child. Their fearlessness has inspired at least a couple of generations of pop musicians, and even their non-hit tracks are regularly covered. "Lady Marmalade" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003, and I'll bet you didn't even know that "Grammy Hall of Fame" was even a thing.
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Did you ever decide that you were in the market for something, let's say you need a car, and all of a sudden you see advertisements for cars all over the place? Or, you learn a new word and suddenly you see it being used everywhere?
This is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, and it's a weird little trick our brains play on us. And recently, I was pranked by my brain in this manner.
Episode 9 was devoted to songs that you may not have known were covers of other artists, and I thought at that time that it was kind of a fun idea, and I'd like to come back to it once in awhile. Now, I was thinking maybe another 20 or 30 episodes down the road, but then Baader-Meinhof got in the way and I started really noticing it when it was pointed out that a song I was listening to was a cover of another recording. So, because I have a tendency to write stuff down and then immediately lose the notes, I decided to return to the concept a little more quickly than I usually do. And the fun thing is, I'm saving the one that came as the biggest surprise to me for another show.
So this time around we're going to hear from musicians as diverse as Salt 'n' Pepa, Led Zeppelin and Linda Lyndell. Who? Just go listen, you'll be fine, I promise. In fact, you're going to be sad that you don't know who Linda Lyndell is, especially when you find out WHY you don't know who she is.
I noted this briefly at the end of the show, but something I noticed only while I was recording was that all of the songs enjoyed only modest success until the cover came out. But the other common thread is that the more successful artist made some sort of change to the song, almost as if that made the difference between whether or not the song was a hit.
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Also, my apologies for the late delivery of this episode; I had a technical issue that was frankly kind of scary, and had me wondering whether I'd be forced to A) re-record the episode after B) buying a new computer, but fortunately I managed to fix what was wrong and we're only a few hours late.
Sad news from the world of music this week as we learn that Edwin Hawkins has died at the age of 74. I have to confess that this came as a surprise because I started doing the math and realized that Hawkins was in his mid-20s when "Oh Happy Day" became a hit. For whatever reason I thought he was at least twenty years older THEN.
Hawkins was the founder of the Northern California State Youth Choir, and the choir recorded some songs to make a fundraiser album, which unfortunately didn't get pressed until after the event for which they needed the money. That event was a choral competition, and the NCSYC came in second, perhaps because "Oh Happy Day" wasn't one of the songs they sang. As it turns out, that wasn't one of their favorite songs!
The unexpected success of "Oh Happy Day" led to the group being asked to provide the backup singing for Melanie's tribute to her experience at Woodstock, "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)".
The Edwin Hawkins Singers experienced some more success on the Gospel charts over the years, and lead singer Dorothy Morrison gained acclaim as a backup singer for several rock artists.
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Neil Young sang "It's better to burn out, than to fade away," but Damn, Janis, couldn't you have burned with us just a little bit longer? Janis Joplin was a ball of raw talent who took a rough childhood and let it inform her musical style. And that almost certainly carried through to the listener. When she sounded sad, so did you. When she was feeling silly, it immediately conveyed. And when she sang in an anguished style, you were right there with her. What's more, her band members, whether it was Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Kozmic Blues Band, or the Full Tilt Boogie Band, really knocked themselves out to support her sound. Listen especially hard to the Pearl album, where a lot of the instrumentals were recorded over a ten-day span shortly after Joplin died. But Joplin's last recorded album track wasn't even necessarily meant to be on the album. It was a piece that started out as an a capella goof during a technical breakdown while recording, and the producer decided that it needed to be on the album. What's more, it needed to remain as-is, without any instrumentation. I don't know if her friends drove Porsches, but Janis certainly did. She bought the 1964 vehicle in 1968 for $3500 and used it as her day-to-day vehicle. The car now resides in Gull Lake, MI. "Mercedes Benz" was based on a piece by Beat poet Michael McClure, and it was a comment on the futility of social climbing by gathering material goods. It was an interesting time for rock musicians, because they were starting to get recognition AND the money that comes with fame, and in a lot of cases they purchased expensive stuff such as cars and big houses even as they decried them in their songs. Despite this somewhat mixed message, the car company took the tone-deaf step of using it in one of their ads. Next week: more surprise cover songs! I keep finding these things. And one in particular was a huge surprise for me. If your podcatcher of choice hasn't picked up the track yet, you're more than welcome to click on this link to download or listen (opens in a new window), or feel free to listen right here:
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Happy New Year!
The group in 1961: Dub Jones, Carl Gardner, Cornell Gunter, Billy Guy. This was the configuration that was inducted into the Rock Hall.
While they're often mistaken for a doo-wop group, The Coasters were actually a rhythm-and-blues vocal group, whose greatest successes came when they were teamed with the composers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and when they had humorous material to work with.They made such an impression on other artists that it was a small wonder when, in 1987, they became the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Yeah, I know I'm kinda splitting hairs, here: the previous year was all individuals plus the Everly Brothers. But I'm sticking by this assessment.)
One of the posters for the movie, which inspired the Coasters' song (but the song isn't based on the movie). This ain't a bad place to be, if you're Gary Cooper.
Their peak years, chart-wise, were between 1958 and 1960, when all of their Top 40 singles were released. In today's episode we talk about three of them: Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, and Along Came Jones. After these three came two more: Poison Ivy and Little Egypt, which were more clever than funny.
There have been numerous configurations of the group since the first day, so you could argue that the one in the photo above, which is responsible for most of the hits, was the magic bullet. Through many personnel changes, The Coasters never quite reached the same level of success.
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Happy New Year, HGII fans!
It was 1975 and David Bowie's professional life was in some turmoil. He was in the middle of breaking a contract with his manager, and he was still trying to deal with the way his life had changed since "Space Oddity" became a hit a few years earlier. With the help of his new friend John Lennon (who advised him to get rid of the manager), he took a riff that his guitarist was noodling around with for another song, and turned it into his first #1 hit in the US.
Lennon and Bowie backstage at the Grammy Awards, 1975.
In a BBC interview recorded only a couple of days before he died, Lennon said that David Bowie had a vast repertoire of talent, and it was interesting to see him do most of his song composition right there in the studio. "He goes in with, like four words and a few guys, and starts laying down this stuff, and he has virtually nothing, he's making it up in the studio."
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https://youtu.be/Kcoju5QP5iM
I can see my old house from here!
Most people who know me personally know that I'm originally from New York, but it's not because I have an accent, because I don't.
Well, I DO have an accent of sorts, but it's tough to suss out that I'm from the NY metro area. Most people think I'm from the Downstate region of New York, like Poughkeepsie or Newburgh. But the fact is, I'm from a small town on the north shore of Long Island called Kings Park. When I was a small child, Kings Park had a huge mental hospital plunked down in its center, and most of the 5000-odd people who lived in that town, worked at the hospital. Nowadays the hospital is closed, the grounds are long-abandoned, and the town population is close to 20,000.
This here is a "hint".
But for all that, Kings Park and its nearby cousin, Smithtown, manage to have a connection to a couple of Christmas songs. Kings Park was the center of a nationwide news story back in 2013 regarding the song "Silent Night", and as for Smithtown...well, you'll just have to listen to see what Smithtown has to do with any Christmas song.
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This was the "goddess" label that Elektra Records used on the 45 in Columbia. Look! Boobies!
It was the Summer of Love, and as Johnny Rivers sang, everybody kept on playin' Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Everybody, that is, except for the fans of an underground band playing the clubs in Los Angeles, who kept calling the local radio stations and requesting a song from that band's debut album. Eventually Elektra Records put out a shorter version of that seven-minute song, and before long it was climbing the charts nationwide, spending three weeks in the #1 slot in July of 1967. The self-titled album itself couldn't break Sgt. Pepper's hold on the Billboard's Albums chart, but being #2 to The Beatles is pretty respectable, nonetheless.
The Doors got their name from the title of an Aldous Huxley book called The Doors of Perception, which in turn came from a William Blake quotation: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
Today's show is a little bit on the short side, coming in at just over 10 minutes, and I think it's because I'm talking so damn fast. I shouldn't drink so much tea right before recording the show.
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It was the biggest album of 1982, and the title track was the last Top Ten single to come from it. That's seven singles out of nine tracks total.
Michael Jackson wanted to top not only the success, but the ambition of his previous album, Off The Wall, and I think we can all agree that he more than succeeded. Thriller remains the largest-selling album of all time.
What! you say, bigger than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? Bigger than Dark Side of the Moon? Bigger than Bat Out of Hell? Yes, indeed. As of this week, the top 15 all-time sellers are:
Artist
Album Title Year
Sales (in millions)
Michael Jackson Thriller
1982
66
AC/DC Back in Black
1980
50
Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon
1973
45
Meat Loaf Bat Out of Hell
1977
43
Whitney Houston / Various artists The Bodyguard Soundtrack
1992
42
Eagles Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975)
1976
42
Bee Gees / Various artists Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack
1977
40
Fleetwood Mac Rumours
1977
40
Shania Twain Come On Over
1997
39
Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin IV
1971
37
Michael Jackson Bad
1987
35
Alanis Morissette Jagged Little Pill
1995
33
Celine Dion Falling into You
1996
32
The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
1967
32
Michael Jackson Dangerous
1991
32
That's THREE albums Jackson has in the all-time Top 15, and Off the Wall isn't even one of them. (It's way down the list, a spot or two below HIStory.)
This was one of the pictures originally considered for the album's cover, which is why they used it for the Special Edition.
Anyway. Today we're looking at the title track, a song that started as "Starlight" and ended with Quincy Jones' wife recruiting Vincent Price to do a little white-boy rap.
Per our Standard Operating Procedure, if you've got a favorite podcatcher, you should be able to hear this week's show already, or you can just click the player below:
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Mick Jagger, as it turns out, became Carly Simon's backup singer on "You're So Vain" because he just happened to pop into the studio the day of recording. The bad news is, that put him on the list of candidates that people think Simon's singing about.
Before they were famous, lots of artists sang backup for other artists. But once in awhile, they'll lend their talent to someone else because it's fun, or because they owe someone a favor or maybe just because they were asked to.
This week, we're going to listen in on a bunch of songs that have famous people singing backups. Some of them are pretty well known; others may come as a surprise to you.
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When Jimmy Webb got his heart broken, what did he do? Why, he did what any other red-blooded American would do: he wrote a couple of hit songs and made a million bucks off the incident!
OK, that's not the most common reaction, but it's what happened back in 1967, when he wrote a song that was turned down by The Association, but picked up by an actor who'd decided he wanted to conquer the music charts.
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The original promo 45, showing the edited A side. The full-length song is the B.
In the late 1950s, Marty Robbins, who was commuting hundreds of miles between his home in Phoenix and various gigs in Texas, frequently passed through the town of El Paso on his journeys to and fro. The town inspired him to write a cinematic-level song with nine verses and three bridges—and no chorus. Plus, it clocked in at four minutes and forty seconds. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the song climbed in just a few weeks to take over the top spot on the Hot 100 for the first two weeks of 1960.
This is the consumer/retail version of the 45. The song is 4:40, even though it doesn't say so on the label. The B side is a song titled "Running Gun".
The song put both Marty Robbins, and the town of El Paso, at the front of everyone's consciousness, and it's probably the song that's most associated with him. But what inspired him? Is the song about anyone special? And how many sequels to one song can the music-buying public take? (Answer: more than you'd imagine.)
By the way, if you have a copy of Marty Robbins' book, I'd love to see it. That was a frustrating search.
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Hey, everybody makes a mistake now and then. That's why they put erasers on pencils, am I right? But once in awhile, someone will make a mistake that manages to enhance rather than detract ("Eminence Front," I'm looking at you.). And that's where we're going this week: we'll look at four songs that had mistakes in them where the artists made a conscious decision to keep the error in place because it actually makes the song a little bit better. And, as usual, you can listen to the show via your favorite podcatcher, or you can just play/download it from right here:
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Today we're commemorating the 40th anniversary of the plane crash that killed several members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd and their manager with a look at the song that became their signature tune.
This week we're going to dive into famous songs that were recorded by other artists first. Some of them you're going to know about because practically everybody knows about them, but I think there will be a few surprises in there. I know that one of them came as a pretty big surprise to me!
If you hit me up on Twitter and ask real pretty, I may tell you which Stevie Wonder song I was talking about.
As ever, you have a few listening options:
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This was the song that heralded the Dylan Goes Electric era, and when he first played it live at the 1965 Newport Music Festival, he was met with boos and charges that he'd sold out, or was somehow a "traitor" to his folk roots.
But Bob Dylan stuck to his guns, and "Like a Rolling Stone" became, and remains, his biggest single ever.
This is the picture sleeve of the 45.
If it hadn't been for a quartet from Liverpool and their obvious cry for Help!, it probably would have gone all the way to Number One on the Billboard chart.
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During the podcast I mentioned an interactive video that's connected to this song. Here's the teaser trailer:
But the real fun lies here: you can play with the original video on your own by clicking on this link. I will refund every dime of your money if you don't think this is cool.
This was the A side of the record, remember.
This week we're taking a look at a song that was never meant to be a hit. In fact, it wouldn't even have appeared on a record if some musicians hadn't been hanging around when someone realized that the record he'd been working on didn't have a B side.
So he rounded up whomever he could find and fortunately, the saxophone player had a tune he'd been fooling around with for a little while, plus he had a fondness for a certain beverage from South of the Border.
Erm...no. The one Down Mexico Way.
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This is the original sleeve that the record came in. I still have mine, though not quite in this condition. In the mid 1970s, George Harrison was having a rough time of it. He was still embroiled in the lawsuit over "My Sweet Lord", he was tangled up in other legal issues caused by his breakup with his business manager, his album Extra Texture had taken a beating by the critics, and to top it all off, while recording Thirty Three and 1/3 he was struck with hepatitis and couldn't work for most of the summer of 1976. A still from the promotional film (they weren't calling them "videos" yet) for This Song, from near the end. If you look closely you can see that George's playing hand is cuffed to the cop, played by Harry Nilsson. But he managed to turn it around with the release of this, the first single off the album. It didn't exactly tear up the charts (it peaked at #25 on the Hot 100), but it did remind us all that George was still around and could still bring it when he wanted to. This episode was inspired by a suggestion by a friend of mine, who originally asked me to write about a different song that appears on the same album. It turns out that the story behind that song is quite short, not long enough for a full podcast, so I'm saving it for a post you'll see in a couple of days. As usual, if you haven't subscribed via iTunes or your favorite podcast catcher, you can download it or you can listen right here:
And of course, if you're so inclined, please leave a review on your favorite podcast software. Thanks so much for your support! As promised, here's the video. So tell me: who can you identify? And is that vampiric-looking prosecutor really Michael Richards? https://youtu.be/T0i9rjTxhpY And just for the giggles, here's Billy Preston's version, which was recorded first. You can still hear the "He's So Fine" echoes in it, but I think that, compared to Harrison, Preston might have gotten away with it:
https://youtu.be/ih9r0yquoxw
Wait, Phil Collins did what?
He drowned a guy? Uh...no.
He humiliated a coward? No.
He shamed someone from his childhood? Also, no.
Many stories swirl around the meaning of Phil Collins' breakout hit from 1981, and so many of them aren't true. Collins was in a world of hurt following the breakup of his first marriage, and he channeled a lot of that energy into writing the Face Value album. This week I go into that a little bit (but only a little bit; it gets kind of tawdry), plus I talk about the sound that makes him instantly recognizable on so many records in the 1980s. And it's a sound that's making its way back into popular music these days.
Phil Collins during his appearance at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia during Live Aid. This particular still is from his performance of "Against All Odds".
With all the changes in the weather we've been having, it's been playing havoc with my voice. So if I don't sound quite right, there's a reason for it. Here's hoping I sound a little better next week.
Also: for those of you not in the know, that weird squeaky noise you hear during the Peter Gabriel clip isn't evidence that I use a cheap office chair, although it's true, I do. That sound is part of the Gabriel song.
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Links Department:
This is a great video from Vox.com that explains the concept of gated reverb in greater detail.
In the podcast, I mention my suspicion that gated reverb is making a comeback. Also from the Vox article is this Spotify playlist which confirms my theory. (I do hope I linked that correctly; if not then go to the Vox link and listen from there.)
Article from the Miami Herald from last year about Phil Collins finally opening up to the story behind the song.
But naturally, his ex is going to speak her piece. See? Tawdry.
I wasn't kidding about Ozzy Osbourne.
One of several labels used for the 45 of this song. I think this was the retail version of the original release, based on what the promo label looks like.
Chester ("Chet") Powers was a musician who was well-known in the café scenes on both coasts, and certainly had his influence on other musicians. He's also known for being a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service. But for all that, he only wrote one song that was any kind of a commercial success, and that was after a virtual parade of artists had already recorded it.
This episode also features a 2-1/2 minute clip from a show called "The Life and Times of Dan Ingram", a special program that runs for about six hours (no kidding) about one of the greatest disc jockeys of the Rock and Roll Era. It originally aired on RewoundRadio.com a little over a year ago. Thanks so much to Allan Sniffen, the heart of that website and the guy who knows pretty much everything there is to know about WABC-AM's Musicradio days. And if you go over there, you'll immediately recognize that this show's title is absolutely an homage. (No, I didn't tell Allan that until after he'd agreed to provide me with the clip. Heh.)
Coincidentally (because I'm terrible at planning ahead), I'm typing this post on Thursday evening, September 7. Today happens to be Dan Ingram's 83rd birthday. Happy Birthday, Big Dan!
Dan Ingram at WCBS-FM.
I got to meet him back in the summer of 1984 when he was doing the Top 40 Satellite Survey for CBS Radio, and he couldn't have been a nicer, more giving fellow, especially considering the way my 21-year-old self was sputtering my way through the interview. He had a fabulous way of putting me at my ease. Unfortunately, I no longer have the tape of that interview. (Divorce can be a suck-fest, kids.)
Here's a link to one of Allan's other labors of love:
Musicradio77.com is a collection of stories, photos, airchecks and other goodies for anyone who was a fan of WABC in its Musicradio heyday. Click on the music note at left to visit that site.
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Click here for a transcript of this week's show.
This week, we're taking a look at the Buckinghams, a Chicago-based group which had five big hits, all of which charted in a single year, after which they practically disappeared off the charts.
For thirty years I harbored a suspicion that most of their hits were all about the same person, so I did a little research to find out what the story was. And, of course, the answer practically dropped into my lap.
As usual, if you haven't subscribed via iTunes or your favorite podcast catcher, you can download the file, or listen from right here:
That said, I wouldn't complain too loudly if you went to iTunes and gave me a positive review. Even if that's not your podcast catcher, every little bit helps.
Some links related to today's show...
Rock ‘n’ Roll Stories: James Holvay (KLCS-TV interview) https://vimeo.com/88115020, retrieved 8/6/17. This is a great interview piece.
All Time Hits, WGN 1965, Several concatenated clips of the Buckinghams singing Beatles hits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RId6u8fNsng posted by Dennis Miccolis and retrieved 8/6/17
All Time Hits, WGN 1965, “Unchained Melody” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I90MXbMA-Xs posted by Museum of Broadcast Communications, Chicago and retrieved 8/6/17.
“Dennis Tufano Talks About and Sings ‘Susan’”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6TaZdGFudQ posted by Dennis Tufano Fans, retrieved 8/6/17
Buckinghams’ official website: www.thebuckinghams.com
http://www.rebeatmag.com/dennis-tufano-the-buckinghams-and-rocks-greatest-disappearing-act-part-1/ and http://www.rebeatmag.com/dennis-tufano-the-buckinghams-and-rocks-greatest-disappearing-act-part-2/, retrieved 8/6/17. The pieces don't appear to link to one another, so you'll probably have to come back here to get the other half.
McLane & Wong Entertainment Law, “The Buckinghams” (1996) http://www.benmclane.com/bucking.htm , retrieved 8/6/17
Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict; Hey Baby, They’re Playing Our Song: A Conversation with Carl Giammarese (2010?) http://popcultureaddict.com/interviews/buckinghams-htm-2/ , retrieved 8/6/17
This is the sleeve for the Danish release of the record.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
For Episode 2, we take a journey to Japan and look into an international hit from a day when I was about four months old. I'll tell you about:
What ALL the lyrics to the song mean The political turmoil that led to a song about lost love Whatever happened to Kyu Sakamoto, anyway? Why I need to apologize to my wife
Your favorite podcatcher should have this song by now, but just in case, you can listen to, or download it, right here:
Incidentally, I recorded this show about two weeks ago, and I made a brief mention of the song "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. At that time it was pretty much the Song of the Summer, but according to Billboard Magazine, it's reaching a new streaming record and about to tie with Mariah Carey & Boys II Men's "One Sweet Day" for the Most Weeks at #1 on the Hot 100 (that'd be 15 weeks at Number One). If it remains #1 for another two weeks, it'll be the sole record-holder. Get that story here.
Some of the sources for today's show:
The article from the Washington Post that I cited appears here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/06/02/americas-number-one-song-isnt-in-english-that-doesnt-happen-often/?utm_term=.18bbe4fba452 retrieved 7/24/17
Most of the song's background came from this article: https://formeinfullbloom.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/a-brief-history-of-i-look-up-as-i-walk-in-anime/ retrieved 7/25/17
Most of the translation I got from this YouTube video. Some of it came from Songfacts.com, but this one seemed a little more reliable.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
In our premiere episode, we take a look at 10cc's biggest hit, "I'm Not In Love". We'll talk about:
What does that title mean, anyway? Where did that ethereal sound come from? What's the story behind the band's name?
Your RSS feed should have the post by now, but you can always listen to it right here:
I think we can all tell that it's been several years since I've been behind a microphone. It gets better, I swear.
Some of the sources behind this week's show:
An interview with Graham Gouldman, songwriter and 10cc band member.
George Tremlett (1976). The 10cc Story. Futura. ISBN 978-0-86007-378-9.
Band name origin:
Snopes.com, "10cc"". Snopes.com. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
"Interview with Kevin Godley, Rock N Roll Universe online interview, April 2007". Rocknrolluniverse.com. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
"Godley & Creme interviewed in Pulse magazine, April 1988". Minestrone.org. Archived from the original on 20 November 2008. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
Bossa Nova version, Kathy Redfern’s contribution:
Buskin, Richard (June 2005). "Classic Tracks: 10cc – 'I'm Not in Love'". Sound on Sound. Cambridge, England: SOS Publications: 62–69. Retrieved 21 September 2015.
Chromatic Scale recordings:
Presenters: Richard Allinson and Steve Levine (9 May 2009). "The Record Producers – 10cc". The Record Producers. Season 3. Episode 4. BBC. BBC Radio 2.
Jump to Mercury Records: "I Write The Songs". The10ccfanclub.com. Retrieved 27 March 2014.