How Good It Is

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)...

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, to...

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...

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...

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...

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&#821...

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...

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 list...

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 a...

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, an...

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...

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 la...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 perfe...

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...

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...

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...

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 ove...

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...