The Hustle

For August's Deep Dive we welcome back another legendary producer, this time it's the great Rupert Hine (ep158)! We go behind the scenes on the creation and recording of The Fixx's 1983 masterwork Reach The Beach. This landmark album produced three top 40 singles including "One Thing Leads to Another" and "Saved By Zero" and is their biggest seller moving 2 million copies. We also cover how the ba...

Ahh the 70s. That period of burgeoning hard rock and soft, smooth sounds. Among the many artists filling the airwaves with ear candy were England Dan and John Ford Coley. The successful duo racked up half a dozen or so hits in the second half of the decade.  Songs like "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" and "Nights are Forever Without You" provide touchpoints to simpler times, back when AM radio...

Singer Dolette McDonald felt ever-present in the 80s. Her striking voice, and equally striking looks, made her feel front and center while she was supporting musical giants like Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and most notably Sting. When he left the Police and went solo, he brought Dolette along for the ride. This is on celluloid forever in the Bring On The Night documentary, as well as those ama...

Gene Loves Jezebel personified the 80s. A strikingly garish style mixed with a perfected merge of goth and pop music that many 80s bands tried to nail and couldn't. Along the way, alternative radio gobbled up hits like "Desire," "The Motion of Love" and "Jealous." Unfortunately, rock history is riddled with brothers that can't get along and GLJ are no different. Twins Jay and Michael Aston have be...

Is there a more lovable song than "Mary's Prayer" by Danny Wilson? It's always welcome, always warms your heart, always makes you sing and smile. That song, which reached #23 in the US in 1987 was written and sung by this week's guest, Danny Wilson frontman Gary Clark. As much promise as the band had, they only managed two albums before calling it quits at the end of the 80s. Gary spent the dawn o...

If you were a kid of the 80s with an eye towards the inventive new wave music coming out of the UK, no doubt you saw the name Dave Bascombe everywhere. This influential producer/engineer/mixer lent his talents to some of the most important alternative and pop albums of the decade. His name graces the credits of landmark albums like Depeche Mode's Music For The Masses, Peter Gabriel's So, and Tears...

This month we're honored to bring back the legendary producer Ron Nevison as we discuss Heart's 1985 comeback album. The Wilson sisters were not in a good place until Capitol Records revived their careers, but it came with some stipulations that the girls still aren't happy about. Despite them distancing themselves from the people they were at this time, we love the record and Ron gives us all the...

Has any rock god from the 80s been torn down only to rise back up more often than Kip Winger? His band Winger stormed out of the gate in the mid-80s with giant hits like "Seventeen" and "Headed For a Heartbreak" but the naysayers and bullying quickly overwhelmed an otherwise successful career. After grunge wiped all of them out, Kip retreated to the desert to reconnect with his muse eventually res...

Noel Fogelman from Reliving My Youth podcast and Jon team up again to countdown their top 20 soundtrack songs from the 90s. Here's part 1 where we go from 20 to 11. 

Modern English will forever be known as the band that gave us "I Melt With You." Those guys achieved the miraculous feat of recording a song that has been embraced by every generation since it's release in 1982 (contrary to popular belief, the song was not actually a hit originally). In this entertaining conversation, frontman Robbie Grey discusses the spoils of a song that's evergreen and we disc...

Former guest Robert LaRoche has just released the best album of the year. In his brand new EP, A Thousand Shades, the former frontman for 90s power poppers The Sighs creates six songs reflecting a dark, but beautiful, night of the soul. LaRoche and I discuss the sad break-up that inspired these songs, how he's never lost his knack for hooks, and who all contributed to the album. Do yourself a favo...

Guitarist Randy Jacobs has a list of credits a mile long. The Detroit native's career goes back over 40 years and includes just about every genre there is - including a few years with Bonnie Raitt here, a couple with Paul Kelly there, etc. A guy doesn't get asked to play with the likes of Michael Henderson, Seal, Tears For Fears and Bruce Hornsby if he doesn't know what he's doing. But he may be b...

The boys are back and fielding a full team this time (sorta) as Jon and Jan welcome sometime producer Paul Underwood of Glory Days Radio and Chief Marketing Officer Andy Schaal. We discuss the last few months of episodes, awkward listener reactions, even more awkward facebook interactions with former guests, and some listener questions. Jan was traveling and only able to chime in once in a while,...

People often forget that one of the biggest bands of the 70s was Flint Michigan's own Grand Funk Railroad. They may forget this because the band isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they have a bunch of hits, but they haven't been played to death like "Stairway to Heaven," and they aren't written up continuously in Rolling Stone magazine. Original member and drummer Don Brewer and I discuss wh...

For June's episode of Deep Dive we welcome back legendary guitarist Marco Pirroni (ep 200) to educate us on the creation and recording of the breakout album by Adam and the Ants, 1980's Kings of the Wild Frontier. This is really the album that made Adam a star and titillated music lovers who wanted all they could get from the swashbuckling pirate with the Indian stripe across his nose. Where did t...

Since their buzzworthy debut in 1989, Hershey Pennsylvania's Ocean Blue have never strayed from their perfect mix of the Smiths meets the Cocteau Twins to the delight of their rabid fanbase. Today these fans have reason to rejoice because they guys have just released a new album, Kings and Queens/Knaves and Thieves and it's just good as anything else they've done in the last 30 years. In this conv...

William Wittman is another producer/engineer/mixer whose name may not sound familiar, but who no doubt has worked on scores of songs you know and love. His first major work was on Cyndi Lauper's monumental She's So Unusual. Included on those sessions were the guys from The Hooters, which lead to WW doing their breakthrough Nervous Night. The same team went on to help craft Joan Osborne's smash Rel...

Mike Peters has a lot going on. His band The Alarm have a brand new album called SIGMA dropping on June 28th and lead single "Blood Red Viral Black" is an indication that the band is as fiery and powerful as ever. They are also kicking off a North American tour in July with Modern English and Jay Aston's Gene Loves Jezebel. Plus he's still running his vital cancer organization the Love Hope Streng...

This week we welcome another music academic, Allmusic.com critic Mark Deming. Mark has been a contributor to the platform for many years and in this conversation we discuss how he became a rock writer, what music criticism even means today, and , of course, we debate a bunch of stuff like why some artists are lionized no matter what they do and why others never get the credit they deserve. As much...

Remember in the 90s when electronic music was poised to take over the world? Groups like Portishead, Chemical Brothers, and Olive were doing something so innovative it seemed techno and trip-hop would become the new norm. Well, it didn't really work out that way. Among some of these innovative artists was a duo from Liverpool called Mulu made up of producer Alan Edmunds and singer Laura Campbell....

Wang Chung are releasing a special new album today called Orchesography which re-imagines some of their biggest hits and deepest cuts in a classical setting. You may have already seen the video for "Dance Hall Days" which had a real viral moment when it was released about a month ago. Hearing these classic songs in this new context adds a freshness that is sure to delight listeners. Frontman Jack...

You might consider South London's Kitchens of Distinction forebears of the shoegazer genre that defined alternative rock in the UK in the early 90s. Fronted by bassist Patrick Fitzgerald, the Kitchens perfected the art of layering swirling guitars into infinity creating some of the most gorgeous noise ever recorded. But, after four albums in 6 years without a major breakthrough, the band called it...

In 1986 David Bowie did his buddy Iggy Pop a solid offering to help produce a new album and bring him the commercial success he so richly deserved. Bowie threw together a crack team including guitarist Kevin Armstrong and recorded Blah Blah Blah. The album featured the hit “Real Wild Child” and brought Iggy some mass success. But was it art? Kevin returns (ep 187) to go deep on the recording proce...

Whether you know the name or not, chances are you've rocked out to scores of songs produced by the legendary Ron Nevison. Can you believe he first got his feet wet engineering The Who's Quadrophenia? And then Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti? From there he applied his genius to albums by the likes of Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, UFO and the Babys. And that was just the 70s! In the 80s he produced the...

If you looked up New Wave or Power Pop in the dictionary, one of the skinny-tied artists you'd see next to The Knack would be the great Greg Kihn. He's practically the poster boy for that unmistakable sound bubbling up in the late 70s when long-haired rockers were cutting their hair and their songs shorter and embracing the new wave. This transition scored him some huge hits like "The Breakup Song...