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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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.

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 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.

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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.

Despite the lyrics, David Allan Coe’s breakout hit isn’t about a woman.

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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In 1981 Bonnie Tyler had exactly one hit, 1977’s “It’s a Heartache”, so it was no mystery why people were calling her a one-hit wonder. Her record label cut her loose, so she found a new manager and talked Jim Steinman, the guy responsible for Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, into partnering with her for a new album. Steinman wasn’t easily convinced, but ultimately he came to her with a couple of older songs that he thought she could record, and when she agreed to those, he came to her with a nearly complete package: here’s the song, here’s who else is going to be performing on it, you just need to come in and sing your little heart out.

That doesn’t match with the popular narrative, that “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was originally written for Meat Loaf as part of his follow-up album to Bat Out of Hell, but it turns out that the guy responsible for that popular narrative about Meat Loaf was…Meat Loaf. But the story caught on, because if you listen to “Eclipse,” you could easily imagine its huge levels of production as being Meat Loaf-esque. But “Eclipse” wasn’t written for him, nor was the other song (a hit for Air Supply) to which he laid the same claim.

As I noted during the show, the song’s video is about eleven different kinds of ridiculous, and I think New York magazine summed it up best. Click here to read the review (it’s a quick read).

And you know the rest of the bit. Either you have it or you don’t. If you don’t, here it is:

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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.

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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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.

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.

And please don’t forget to share the show, and/or leave a rating somewhere.

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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?

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The Stone Poneys was the group that launched Linda Ronstadt’s career, but the sad truth is that Capitol Records was never interested in the rest of the band, instead pushing for her to be a solo artist from the beginning. It was only through a little persuasion on the producer’s part that convinced the label that she wasn’t quite ready to work on her own.

Indeed, when “Different Drum” came out as a single in September of 1967, the labels on the 45RPM release credit the band “Featuring Linda Ronstadt”. Ronstadt herself was still reluctant to leave the band, enough that she financed the Stone Poneys’ entire third album herself, losing a ton of money in the process, before finally embarking on her solo career.

The tune was written by Michael Nesmith, of The Monkees fame, and while he didn’t record the song himself until 1972, he did perform it (badly, on purpose) during an episode of The Monkees titled “Too Many Girls”. This would have been right around the time that the original recording, by bluegrass band The Greenbriar Boys, would have come out.

As usual, your podcatcher software should have the show by now, but if you want to download or listen to it here, have at it.

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The story behind Tears For Fears’ US debut single.

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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!

Click here for a transcript of this show.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With any luck, you’ve already got this in your podcatcher, but if not, here it is for your listening/downloading pleasure:

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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.

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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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. 

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. 

And as usual, for the nine of you who don’t use the podcatchers, here’s the episode for listening or downloading:

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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: 

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: 

You know the drill by now–Either you have the episode, or you’re looking to get it here: 

And if you’ve taken the time to leave a rating somewhere, thanks so much for the boost! If you haven’t, that’s OK but please consider doing so. 

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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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. 

As usual, your podcast software should have this show by now, but if you dig listening to it from here (looking at you, Brother Of Mine), by all means have at it:

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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.

This hit from early 1966 isn’t quite the spontaneous fun party it sounds like.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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:

1. 1. 1. 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.

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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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.

In 1971, Don McLean was a known artist but hadn’t yet hit it big with “American Pie.” Lori Lieberman was a 19-year-old singer-songwriter who’d recently scored a contract. Lieberman attended one of McLean’s shows and she was so struck by his performance

of the song “Empty Chairs” that she wrote a poem about it, more or less on the spot. She took the notes to her collaborators and they put together a song for her album. It became her first single, but it was quickly overshadowed when Roberta Flack covered it.

While the song was covered numerous times, including versions by artists as diverse as Perry Como and Michael Jackson, it wasn’t until The Fugees put together a hip-hop cover that the song gained new life. Lauryn Hill’s singing gives the song an extra emotional ache, perhaps because their original idea was to turn the song into a cautionary tale about substance abuse, an idea that the original writers didn’t support.

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