How Good It Is

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...

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 replicat...

Click here for a transcript of this episode. 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 ag...

Click here for a transcript of this episode. 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 s...

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 yo...

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, t...

The first single from Simon and Garfunkel's final studio album wasn't their biggest hit, but technologically it was their most ambitious.

Click here for a transcript of this episode. 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...

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.

Click here for a transcript of this episode. 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 en...

Click here for a transcript of this episode. 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...

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 “Suga...

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?

Click here for a transcript of this show. 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...

The story behind Tears For Fears' US debut single.

Click here for a transcript of this show. 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, b...