How Good It Is

Before I do anything else, let me give a shout-out to a friend of the podcast, and one of its first fans who wasn’t related to me. Connie Paulson provided the artwork that you see in this post. You can see more of her stuff if you hook up with the show’s Facebook page .   In 1975 Aerosmith was pretty much just another rock band with a modest hit, but when they got writer’s b...

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...

There’s no doubt that Jerry Lee Lewis was a huge influence on the early days of rock and roll. There’s also no doubt that when he married an underage relative, he pretty much torpedoed his hitmaking career. But his star burned brightly for a little while, and while the jokes continued, he did manage to restore his reputation, and his influence on the genre is undeniable. Elvis Presley...

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 j...

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 D...

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 Plan...

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 bigges...

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...

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 Ro...

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....

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...

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...

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 mate...

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...

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 fac...

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 t...

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...

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 t...