Episodes

Somehow I think I undersold it when I called “Blue Suede Shoes” a game-changer. I think about stuff like this a lot when it comes to songs of this nature that I was too young to hear when it first came out: that opening drumbeat on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Grace Slick bursting out of the speakers on “Somebody to Love.” Dick Dale’s Mideast-inspired tones on “Misirlou”. And even the songs that maybe didn’t sound like anything especially new at first, but suddenly turned into a new experience, like...

Today’s episode is about a song that might make you wonder who—or what—is watching you. But despite what the title might suggest, George Orwell and Big Brother don’t really have anything to do with it. Alan Parsons was no stranger to a recording studio by the mid-1970s. He had worked on the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Let It Be, and served as an engineer on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Then, while sitting in the canteen at Abbey Road Studios one day, Parsons met songwriter and session pi...

I don’t remember if I mentioned this before, but when I first launched this podcast, I recorded the first four or five episodes and then decided that I hated them, so I recorded them again, and that’s what went out to the world. Now, every podcaster looks at their first few episodes and they cringe at how those episodes sound, and I’m no exception to that, but the purpose of re-doing a bunch of these older episodes is to bring them a little more in line with changes I’ve made in formatting and ...

Despite the allusion in the title, today’s song has no spiritual content or religious references. It’s just a description of life on the road with a hard rock band that’s paying its dues. And, as the band members would tell you, they were–and are–a rock band, not a punk band, thank you very much. AC/DC was formed in 1973 by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young in their hometown of Sydney, Australia. The band name came from an electrical adapter on a sewing machine owned by their sister and not, dea...

And once again my voice has a case of Peter Brady. I need to quit recording late at night. We have a variety of diss tracks here for you, all but one of them dating back to before they were even called such a thing, before the rise of hip-hop music. This isn’t to take away from the overall impact of hip-hop on modern music but rather to demonstrate that, once again, what came before can have an influence on what we have now. Kitty Wells walked so that George Harrison could run, and all that. B...

Today’s episode is about a song that was written just up the hill from where I was born and in the same town where my wife and and I were wed. So it most definitely “strikes close to home.” Neil Young had emerged from the great north woods of Canada into the public limelight in the mid–1960s. He joined up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay to create the Buffalo Springfield, an LA-based band that asked the musical question “Stop, hey, what’s that sound” before disintegrating – but not before Yo...

One of the things that always amazed me about the songs that became big hits in the pop era between the 1950s and the 1990s was the sheer variety of musical styles that topped the charts. When doing research for this show I went into a bit of a spiral looking at Billboard charts for the late 1970s, and I got stuck on the summer of 1978, with the amazing wealth of songs that were in the top 20 at the time. Some of the songs, of course have fallen into the mists of time because they don’t get the...

Hidy, friends and neighbors. Good to be partnering up with Claude on another podcasting project! This episode is about a song whose title vaguely sounds like the result of a chemical spill, but which is actually a classic piece of rockabilly. John Fogerty and his brother Tom were natives of Northern California, and their family vacations often were to a cabin in Yolo County, just west of Sacramento. That cabin was next to both a lake and a creek, and the Fogerty boys would play in and around tha...

Ladies and Gentlemen, the queen of them all. Pattie Boyd was the inspiration for a huge number of songs. Some of them went to the top of the charts, some of them weren’t released as singles, but nearly all of the songs about her are well-known, and not just because they’re about her; because they’re actually pretty darn good. And the crazy part is that all of them came from two men: George Harrison and Eric Clapton. There’s a song in Clapton’s catalog that could have easily been about her if y...

Where have I been? Life, Cousin. Life got in the way. A lot of things sidetracked me, and even though I was keeping the feed for this show active, I still had several moments of “Yeah! Gonna get back to it soon!” alongside an equal number of “why bother?” moments. I’ve also been working on a different podcast project with Mike Messner, who you might remember from a couple of Gordon Lightfoot episodes we did here. I talk about it during the episode, but you can check it out here. Mike convince...

Of all the people in the Beatles’ inner circle, Jane Asher is perhaps the most mysterious. Not because she’s reclusive–far from it, in fact. Jane Asher has spent lots of time on stage and on screens large and small from the time she was a child. But other than newspaper and magazine articles, and maybe a few video clips which survive from the 1960s, there isn’t a lot of first-hand knowledge about her relationship with Paul McCartney. For about five years she was his girlfriend, and she had a f...

In case you haven’t heard, we’re on a little bit of a journey, meeting various women who have had an influence on multiple pop songs. In today’s episode we’ll be visiting Rosanna Arquette. The interesting thing here is that whether or not the songs in this episode are about Rosanna has been an on-again, off-again mystery. For a while they’re not, then they are again, and maybe, maybe not. Personally I think the evidence is there, although I can accept the explanation that there are other models...

For the next several episodes, we’re going to take a look at the women who inspired some of the Rock Era’s most iconic songs. There will be six episodes in this series; five of them will concentrate on a specific woman, each of whom inspired multiple songs. The sixth episode will look at several women who each inspired a single song. A couple of the women I’ve chosen will be fairly obvious but I’m hoping a couple will come as a surprise to you. And this episode, I hope, is one of the surprises...

After this many episodes, it gives me a moment of “Huh, isn’t that interesting” when I start writing the post for an episode and discover that I haven’t covered a song from that particular year before. In this case, that year would be 1956. In retrospect, that shouldn’t be a surprise, given that we’re reaching waaay back into the early days of the Pop music era. But it’s still a fun little statistic, regardless. “In the Still of the Night” was originally “In the Still of the Nite,” partly beca...

This is an episode I wrote in the Southern Studio, so I may have been in a better mood than usual to write it than I ordinarily am, given the subject matter. When Blue Öyster Cult first got together, they were a college band from Stony Brook, New York. That’s not far from where I grew up. Oddly, none of the band’s original members are from Long Island. Two of them grew up in New York City, one in upstate NY and the last was born in Alabama but moved to the Island as a child. Go figure. They to...

By 1968, Glen Campbell had moved from session musician to a star in his own right. His single “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” written by Jimmy Webb, was a huge hit for him. So when Campbell decided he needed another song, he turned back to Webb and asked him for another song. For whatever reason, he asked Webb to make it a song about a specific location. Webb, at that time, was in the business of writing as many songs as possible about his ex, a woman named Susan Horton. (Coincidentally, Jim Ho...

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! Today we’re looking at three Christmas songs that are born from the anxieties of World War Two. Two of the songs aren’t direct references to the war itself, but it clearly informed the subject. Themes of separation and loneliness emerge, and a sense of nostalgia is present throughout. Interestingly, one of the songs was so dark that the lyricist was asked to change the words…twice. For the other two songs, there’s a verse that usually goes unsung, though...

…before we were so rudely interrupted… This is a song that I’m long-overdue in covering, if only because of the backstory it has. It’s simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking. It’s a love letter from lyricist Doc Pomus to his wife. That’s not unusual, of course. Many songwriters compose songs dedicated to a loved one. But this one has an extra special twist to it. I shan’t spoil it here, though: you’ll have to actually listen to the show. So in this episode we’ll learn about the genius...

How many times now have I gone into the backstory with a song and learned that the person who wrote it says something akin to, “Yeah, I knocked that one off in about fifteen minutes.” Oftentimes they also think that the song isn’t going to amount to very much, which I find kind of funny. But it also supports a working theory I have that it’s not always the song itself, but the way it’s presented. The Crickets (sans Buddy Holly) and a few others approached it one way, but Bobby Fuller and The Cl...

I don’t often play favorites on this show; in fact there have been a couple of songs I genuinely disliked, but I covered them anyway because the story behind them was kind of interesting. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to identify those songs, because I do try to be even-handed. However. I am going to take the time to gush about “Tiny Dancer” just a little bit, because it’s one of my favorite songs by Elton John, and it may even be somewhere in my all-time Top Ten, if I took the time to com...

The Association was a band that just kind of floundered for awhile. First in was in their early years when they were known as simply The Men, then, in 1966 after their first album did well, the second one did…not so much. Bones Howe Part of the problem, it seemed, is that the band members playing their own instruments was mostly not a good idea. So for their third album, Warner Brothers (which had purchased The Association’s label and therefore their contract) brought in a new producer. That pr...

One of my favorite titles for an album comes from The Animals. They did a bunch of albums up to 1969, then for a year or two there were a couple of compilation albums after they broke up. But in 1977 the Animals reunited and released a new album, titled Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted. I don’t know what made me think of that. Anyway. (heh.) This was one of those episodes where, the more I found, the more there was TO find. And so what I thought would be a relatively short episode clocks i...

I think that by now the Monkees have overcome their epithet of “Prefab Four,” which I suppose was clever but not especially accurate. At least three of the Monkees were musicians who could act. I’d argue that Micky Dolenz was an actor who could play music. (More on that below.) Having said that, however, he’s got one of the best voices of the rock and roll era, so my label comes from the fact that he came from acting rather than from music, as the others did. That they didn’t write most of thei...

You might remember a few episodes back when I teamed up with Mike Messner. He’s the host of the Gordon Lightfoot appreciation podcast Carefree Highway Revisited. Well, Mike is back, and this time around we’re talking about Lightfoot’s first big American hit, “If You Could Read My Mind.” I actually went looking around for the album that I’d first heard this song on, and it turned out that I was exactly correct about its title: This was a four-album box set that came out in 1973, so clearly the ...