Professor of Rock

No way in hell was Jim Kerr and Simple Minds going to record today’s featured song… (a future #1 hit from an iconic 80s’ film.) Don’t You (Forget About Me) for the movie The Breakfast Club. They wanted nothing to do with it. They didn’t care if it was a lock. It was band policy… they only recorded songs they wrote themselves. End of story. In fact, they turned down this track six times. Finally, t...

Coming up, it’s the remarkable story of a #1 rock song from 1984 that was written on the porcelain throne. ya the Yes #1 classic rock standard, Owner of a Lonely Heart was written by Trevor Rabin while sitting on the pot In fact, Trevor said he wasn’t ashamed to sing in the loo. well, it’s hard to argue with the results. But even more importantly, this song was instrumental in bringing one of the...

Roger Hodgson grew up a happy boy but then his parents sent him away to a punishing boarding school. He put this horrendous experience and his search for sanity into an all-time 70s classic called The Logical Song. When he brought it to his band Supertramp a key member, Rick Davies hated it… but an adventurous recording session gave the song a true uniqueness including a strange instrument he Boug...

It should’ve been the zenith of his career… On a fateful night backstage in Knoxville, Tennessee in the summer of ’77… Instead…it was a coup de grace that led to his exit from the supergroup he helped create. Randy Meisner of the Eagles was allegedly too sick to sing his encore spotlight classic rock hit Take it To The Limit with its legendary high note finale. He and Glenn Frey got into a shoutin...

Coming up next, a very special interview that I was over the moon to get.. Mike Ness of Social Distortion. This Rock Icon released his debut album in the early 80s... It was self-funded, but then his career would take a long 5 year hiatus as he became homeless, sleeping on friends' couches while Struggling with addiction, and was even in and out of jail… He took these real-life born-to-lose experi...

James Hetfield was exhausted from a world tour and to make matters worse he missed his girl so in a burst of inspiration he wrote an extremely vulnerable song called Nothing Else Matters that was hell bent on no one EVER hearing… Later his bandmates in Metallica happened upon this personal song and tried to talk him into recording it for their next record…but he wanted no part of it. Get this… He...

Coming up….the story of a song that epitomizes the powerful effect of music on the human soul. Leader of the Band by the late great Dan Fogelberg. He didn’t compose it to be hit…it wasn’t even a conscious thought… it just fell out of this gifted singer songwriter. It’ was bold, It was real and deeply vulnerable. So much so that Dan Fogelberg had no intention of releasing it. Certainly not as as si...

Although He would become one of the biggest-selling male artists of his time, Bryan Adams failed for years… Missing the charts time and again. But this rookie rocker was brash and unrelenting, and even had enough swagger to convince one of the greatest frontmen of all time to sing backup on his album…For FREE And that may have made all the difference. Because that record propelled him to superstar...

One of the greatest Power anthems in rock history was actually sort of written by this legendary band’s fans! Queen and We Will Rock You was inspired by the band’s fans and the band wanting to include them. The legendary singer/guitar duo of Freddie Mercury and Brian May wrote a song that would unite the masses and It began as live improvisation and even though it has one of the biggest driving be...

Coming up an interview with a mysterious new wave band name the Motels who haunted the first half of the 80s with 4 hits including the 1983 #1 hit that is so exotic, so strange it defies meaning. Suddenly Last Summer. The year before that they had another huge hit called Only the Lonely and both songs are truly haunting. I’ve actually waited for years to find out the stories behind their hits and...

Coming up next, an interview with an 80s artist whose signature song has become a teenage anthem for the outcasts and a quintessential 80s classic… Nik Kershaw and his teenage anthem Wouldn’t It Be Good. It was recorded for his debut album and the song was so big it put the rookie on the biggest live stage in the world in front of billions of people at Live Aid including playing with many of his h...

Up next… an interview with Kevin Cronin, the frontman about an 80 rock classic that is on the short list of greatest opening lines ever. Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another you’ve been messing around. Yep, it’s Take it On the Run by 80s rock legend REO Speedwagon and it helped the band hit #1 for 15 weeks on the charts It’s become a part of 80s lore. A son...

Coming off one of the most ground-breaking albums of the early 80s in The Hurting, today’s featured duo, Tears for Fears really upped the ante for their 1985 follow-up Songs from the Big Chair. True titans of rock and pop, nobody was bigger that year. And the echoes of today’s featured song still shake us…Shout not only went to #1 it became A key track that would have the arenas chanting along in...

Back in 1984, today’s featured band was teetering on the brink of extinction… After crushing it with four straight landmark LPs in the 70s, everything went sideways for the rock band Heart led by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson to start the neon decade. Band members quit, three albums failed to deliver, and their record company kicked them to the curb. Word on the street was they had lost their mojo....

THE WORST SONG OF ALL TIME… it’s a question that’s been asked and answered a million times It’s been voted on. it’s been the subject of intense debate. Well, today’s song has been part of most of the polls out there… We Built This City by Starship. In many of these lists, it’s always #1. yet this song continues to drive our culture decades later…we still can’t resist its charm.” Written by Elton J...

He was a left-handed virtuoso that loved science fiction, parakeets, and getting high…But not everything about this Jimi Hendrix was as it seemed.  Since his untimely death, there are myths galore about his life, and some strange fiction that helped inspire one of rock’s most influential tracks… the 60s classic Purple Haze.   We sift through the different theories from a stalker kidnapping a victi...

Today, we’re going to go behind the Top 10 songs of this very same week from the year 1986. If you need a break from the sheer insanity of the 2020s, we’ve got you covered. We’re hopping into the DeLorean and returning to the golden era of rock. After counting down the Top 10 songs from 37 years ago, we’re re-ranking them according to how much the world has listened to them since. So by the end, w...

They were likely Rock’s first supergroup and it all started when these virtuosos who went by the name of CREAM starring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker all took in a Jimi Hendrix concert, and the bassist Jack Bruce was so juiced with inspiration by what he saw, he went home and created one of rock music’s most familiar and magical riffs. Sunshine of Your Love One that gets stuck in your...

Making a comeback is a punishing challenge. In the entertainment business, it is extremely difficult, if not utterly impossible. But the Bee Gees beat ASTRONOMICAL ODDS by mounting a successful comeback not once, not twice but an amazing THREE times and on the third comeback they had to do it twice.. once in the UK and then again in American with two different songs. Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb and R...

Sibling rivalry, band-member infighting, and an ongoing wrestle for creative control all led to the break up of today’s featured band. Creedence Clearwater Revival... Theirs was a bottled lightning career, but they were no one hit-wonder. In fact, they kicked out 9 Top 10 hits in the space of two years… John Fogerty and his band never landed a #1, but they did have a record 5 #2 hits. Today’s song...

Up next, a tale about legendary singer songwriter Jackson Browne who wrote plenty of entries in the great American songbook including a deeply poignant classic that he wrote when he was only 16 years old called These days He was an old soul and after taking radio by storm in the 70s he decided to do something no other band or musician had done before Cut a completely Live rock album of all new mat...

Coming up next, an interview with one of history's only rock singer-songwriters that has had a big hit in the 70s, 80s, and the 90s. Dennis DeYoung of Styx is a bonafide "3 Decades Icon." He did in the 70s with Babe, in the 80s with Mr. Roboto, and Show Me The Way in the 90s. Well, In the late 70s, Dennis needed a birthday present for his wife, so on the fly, he sat at the piano and wrote a very p...

Struggling to stay faithful to his wife while on the road, the Man in Black, Johnny Cash wrote her a mournful love ballad backstage at one of his concerts to clarify his feelings he called it Because You’re Mine but it later turned into I Walk The Line. However, when he got the song to the studio, his producer increased its tempo, turning it completely on its head. And Cash hated it. Well, that is...

Coming up we present the story of a song that is truly a musical miracle …Aerosmith and their classic 70s and 80s hit Walk This Way. First of all the masterful riff from this 70s and 80s classic instantly came out of nowhere at a soundcheck… Then the iconic lyric came to singer Steven Tyler when he was in the middle of a movie at a theater. Steven Tyler wrote the lyrics in a flash but on recording...

After Ozzy Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath, the band he’d fronted and helped make famous for a decade, a lot of people thought his career was finished. That he was a washed-up has-been. Exiled for being a drunk and a drug addict, and fighting demons and wild mood swings, you can’t really blame them. Even Ozzy thought his career was over. However, with the aid of an up-and-coming guitar hero...