Professor of Rock

Fine Young Cannibals blew up 1989. They seemed to come out of nowhere and were gone just as quickly. For one year they ruled the charts. #1 on the album charts with the Raw and the Cooked and then two #1 hits including She Drives Me Crazy and Good Thing. When the English Beat broke up, Andy Cox and Dave Steele decided to form a band using MTV to find a singer. After auditioning 500 singers they fi...

The 1970s #1 Classic Rock hit Black Water by the Doobie Brothers is has been called the rock and roll equivalent of Gone with the Wind meets Huckleberry Finn. The classic rock band wrote it as a love letter to the south. They thought the song was ok but don’t think it was a hit so it was relegated to a b side when out of nowhere a DJ played it and suddenly the request lines lit up like a CHRISTMAS...

Robert Smith and the Cure had a lot that went into their song that broke the band to the world, Boys Don’t Cry… written in the late 70s and released in the US in the 80s it set up the decade perfectly. the song came from years of antics by Robert and his band. He was expelled from school for several live shows that incited craziness… He was beaten up for wearing his mother’s dress to school. He al...

When Soundgarden released Black Hole Sun, a surreal and sinister trip into the unknown… the song's sonic beauty resembled a psychedelic apocalypse. Authored by legendary Seattle musician Chris Cornell during a late-night drive, he quickly rushed home to capture this haunting melody. When he finished the song he completely underestimated it, calling it a decent third or fourth single. Little did he...

The story behind the 1983 classic Space Age Lovesong by A Flock of Seagulls. Mike Score of A Flock of Seagulls tells the amazing story of this perfect 80s hit. He started out as a hairdresser during the day and played in an experimental rock band at night. In this exclusive interview he reveals how he created the shimmering new wave wall of sound that he dubbed Punk Floyd. and how he wrote a perfe...

We’re counting down the Top 10 songs of this very same week from the year 1985. This time around we’ve got some of the biggest hits from the 80s duking it out for that #1 spot. It was a legendary week for sure. You had Dire Straits, Billy Joel, Tears for Fears, Aretha Franklin and Huey Lewis and the news all vying for the coveted #1 spot along with a great one hit wonder and Somehow, we’ve managed...

Olivia Newton John was one of a kind. A beloved icon of the 70s and 80s, she felt like a member of our family. She will always be a key part of our childhood. Her kindness and purity always shined through. She also had the biggest hit of the 80s with Physical spending an amazing 10 weeks at #1. She had five #1 hits including Physical, Magic, I Honestly Love You, Have You Never Been Mellow and Hope...

Riding high on satire…Weird Al Yankovic seemed unstoppable in the mid 80s after Eat It! and Like A Surgeon. but when his fourth record, Polka Party essentially flopped, he almost called it quits. But instead, he started writing for his life. And out of this trepidation, he created a supersized song patterned after the King of Pop Michael Jackson’s latest hit Bad called Fat. It not only won over li...

The story of the #1 Eighties (80s) Duet between Aretha Franklin and George Michael...one of the powerhouse duets of all time or was it a match that was too good to be true? We get the inside info from the legendary #1 hit producer Narada Michael Walden who was there orchestrating the whole thing. You had George Michael an up and comer who had already hit #1 a couple of times with Wham! and was rea...

Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon...Imagine if you will an album so legendary.. So in Demand that there were factories working around the clock to manufacture it and still couldn’t keep up.. or so the legend goes or urban legend that is. . And it'’s still selling like hotcakes. It spent almost 20 years on the charts but never went to #1 in its native land..It has spawned more folk tales than an...

How Led Zeppelin followed one of the biggest selling albums of all time, the 70s classic, Led Zeppelin IV with a bold venture that utterly confused their core faithful. It would’ve been a ’no-brainer’ to simply stay the course, and give the fans what they were used to. But Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham went the other way, and purposely abandoned the heavy blues rock sou...

Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Jack Tempchin, who wrote several Eagles classics including Peaceful Easy Feeling and Already Gone tells the story of writing with his best friend and eagles co-frontman Glenn Frey after the Eagles broke up in the early 80s. The wrote the first post Eagles hits including the #15 hit, The One You Love. Jack shares the hilarious story of how Glenn set up a room with...

The compelling story of Ain’t Too Proud to Beg by the Temptations...An up and coming writer producer named Norman Whitfield got the Temptations to record his song...He purposely put the key a step above the lead singer David Ruffin's top range to push him to reach for his best… a fierce and passionate take.. the legend is the singer was sweating buckets by the time it was done but he killed it! Th...

Up next the story of one of the biggest #1 soundtrack hits of the 80s. Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now by Starship for the 80s cult classic movie Mannequin starring Andrew McCarthy. It was a duet between two power house voices in Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick who started Jefferson Airplane back in the 60s and then became Jefferson Starship in the 70s and just Starship in the 80s. This #1 hit written b...

It has been called a flop, a letdown, and a failed album... Pretty much erased from the pages of music history, Red Hot Chili Pepper’s 6th studio album, the 90s classic, One Hot Minute has become a ghost record. It has been overshadowed by the massive success of its predecessor Blood Sugar Sex Magik and its follow-up Californication. But climbing to #4 on the Billboard Album Chart and selling over...

In 1971, considered the greatest year in music history by many, with Led Zeppelin, the Who and Joni Mitchell all releasing monumental albums, a band from Fort Worth, Texas horrified & fascinated radio listeners with a song about about a grisly plane crash. The single was widely banned from the airwaves for its explicit subject matter, and for containing the eerie wailing of ambulance sirens th...

After major success in the 70s, the band Heart hit a wall in the early 80s and went years without a hit. They were struggling so much that lead singer Ann Wilson thought the band's career might be over. Then they pulled off one of the greatest comebacks of the decade When they scored their fist #.1 album in 1985 followed by two consecutive #1 hit, These Dreams and the 1987 smash... the power balla...

Coming up, the story of a rare hit song that went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 two different times. You Keep Me Hanging On went to to #1 for the Supremes in 1966 and then in 1987 for Kim Wilde. But! That’s not all. 2 other versions were top ten hits as well.. In fact the first time it hit #1 with it's soaring up beat hook laden take, just a few months later a totally different version fr...

The Fixx Came at the right moment in the early 80s and captured those times so eloquently in their new wave radio hits but strangely enough their songs seems to be the perfect soundtrack of the times we are living through right now. up next their lead singer Cy Curnin tells the story behind the 1983 classic Saved By Zero that may well be their signature song and how the song was written as a way t...

"Coming up…the story of metal rock icon, Lemmy Kilmister who toiled behind the scenes as a roadie for the great Jimi Hendrix, and was fired from a band after being arrested for drug possession. He was a scruff from Newcastle with the most famous chopstache of the Rock Era, who LOVED to gamble- while playing his music with Motorhead ‘fast and vicious.’ We push up the ante, and play with the 'dead m...

Coming up next an interview with 80s underground band Violent Femmes.. They somehow sold 1 million copies of their self titled Violent Femmes debut album with absolutely no promotion. No radio play, no label support... nothing. The album had several familiar songs that the children of the 80s know by heart, like Add it Up, Blister in the Sun, Kiss Off and Gone Daddy Gone but the album was like con...

The story of the one album wonder: Glass Tiger The Thin Red Line that had 3 top 40 hits. In the past we’ve talked about those rare hit songs that have been Lightening in a bottle. Where an artist or band releases a song that rips up the charts and shakes the earth for a time and then never rises to those levels again… Sometimes we cover An album that has multiple hit singles and rockets up the cha...

Up next another edition of our series Bottled Lightening One Album Wonders… Where an LP had multiple hit songs and then the artist Never had another hit. Rupert Holmes had three hits on his album Partners in Crime. the #1 smash Escape the Pina Colada Song and top 10 hit HIM and then the #32 hit Answering Machine about outdated tech that is pretty funny. but this story ups the ante. . Instead of fa...

What is your favorite song of all time. It’s a question that gets asked a lot… Well in one of my all time pinch me moments I got to interview the cowriter and co singer of my favorite song ever Mike Lindup of the 80s classic band Level 42 on the story of the 1986 hit Something About You, a glorious synth pop new wave jazz classic and even plays parts of the songs to show how he came up with the so...

It’s manipulative, it’s menacing, and it’s a masterpiece. the Metallica 80s song Master of Puppets is a grim parable about the abuse of power and the cost of addiction. And it just so happens to be set against one of the heaviest hitting riffs of all time by a band praised for their speed and skill, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton dug deep with this one. . No surprise th...