Episodes

This week’s episode arose from an essay I published on my blog several years ago. I was looking back on some of the stuff I wrote and found this particular piece, and thought, with a little re-writing it might make a decent episode of the podcast. So, re-write I did, and I’m generally happy with the result, though I’m once again fighting off a respiratory thing. James “Sugarboy” Crawford Anyway: James “Sugarboy” Crawford wrote “Iko Iko” in 1953, and recorded it with his band, the Cane Cutters. ...

Zager and Evans provided the soundtrack to one of the most eventful summers of the 1960s, and then they vanished, a true One Hit Wonder. What made this song catch the public's imagination?

Click here for a transcript of this show. The Stone Poneys was the group that launched Linda Ronstadt’s career, but the sad truth is that Capitol Records was never interested in the rest of the band, instead pushing for her to be a solo artist from the beginning. It was only through a little persuasion on the producer’s part that convinced the label that she wasn’t quite ready to work on her own. Indeed, when “Different Drum” came out as a single in September of 1967, the labels on the 45RPM re...

The story behind Tears For Fears' US debut single.

Click here for a transcript of this show. David Bowie had already released ten albums by 1976, and he was starting to feel the effects of burnout and a heavy cocaine habit. So where did he go to escape his drug habit? To the world’s Heroin capital, of course: Berlin! Fortunately for Bowie and ultimately his fans, Heroin wasn’t really his thing, and he not only managed to get healthy, but he also managed to find some creative juice in that city. He wrote, or co-wrote, material for three albums,...

Click here for a transcript of this show. Kansas was literally on the last day of rehearsing for their fifth album when their producer asked them if they had anything else. Guitarist and songwriter Kerry Livgren reluctantly broke out an acoustic song that he was convinced the rest of the band would hate, because it was practically the opposite of everything Kansas had done until then. But it turned out to be exactly the opposite: they loved it, and they fine-tuned the song to give some of the o...

The Osmond Brothers got their real start in show business when they couldn’t get an audition for one television show, and they wound up on another. Check out the audience reaction to them at first. It cracks me up every time. This clip, incidentally, is from the show Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which most people seem to remember as The Wonderful World of Disney. Shoot, I was watching the show as a small kid (right after Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom), and remember it under the sec...

Click here for a transcript of this week’s show. Hi! Didja miss me? Apologies for the big gap in shows; life was getting in the way, plus I got sick somewhere in between and, while my voice would have been pure comedy on your end, it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun on mine. No excuse though; I should have posted SOMEthing in the interim. I’ll do better next time. Ray Sawyer, 1937-2018 Six episodes ago we took a peek at the work of poet/playwright/singer/songwriter/Renaissance Man Shel S...

Click here for a transcript of this show. It’s the holiday season, and that means that radio stations have moved a bunch of traditional songs into their rotations. Some of them have even gone All-Christmas-All-The-Time. But it seems as though some of these songs don’t stand up to closer scrutiny as Christmas songs. They’re set in the winter time, but they don’t appear to mention Christmas at all, or they happen to take place during the season but that’s about it. And while I’m complaining abou...

John D Loudermilk wrote a song that's nearly devoid of actual facts. When it became a hit, a couple of interviews he did about that song turned out also to be mostly devoid of facts.

Neil Sedaka spent a bunch of time in the Top Ten, but this was his first trip to the Number One slot. And he took the song to the Top Ten again several years later with a vastly different arrangement.

Pink Floyd wasn't a band keen on releasing singles, since they viewed their albums as fully realized creations that needed to be taken as a whole. But a couple of tweaks to a song by an uncredited collaborator almost certainly was the impetus for turning it into a Number One hit worldwide.

The early-to-mid 1960s was a great time to be a folk singer, whether or not you were the protesting type. And Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie, had the decade pretty much fall into his lap. It didn’t hurt that he was actually kind of good at it. And when, as a freewheeling 17-year-old, he and a friend took a fateful trip to the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts to visit a couple of friends for the Thanksgiving weekend. It turned out to be an adventure that he later immortalized in a song. Bet...

Click here for a transcript of today’s show. Shel Silverstein was a humorist, a poet, a cartoonist, and a musician who had a strong, if not especially obvious, influence on pop music through the late 1960s, up into the 1980s. Most people know him for his poetry books largely aimed at a children’s audience, but he also provided cartoons for Playboy Magazine, usually inserting a caricature of himself into the image: That’d be Shel on the right. And he’s also responsible for the dark, subversivel...

The Isley Brothers' first charting hit from 1959 got its start not as a song, but as a bit they'd do to extend another song they were already singing in concert.

Ray Parker Jr wasn't the first person approached to come up with a pop song to support this film, but he was the last, and the best.

Lou Reed's signature song (he once joked that he knew his obituary would start with "doot, di-doot, di-doot...") has its origins in people he knew and worked with at Andy Warhol's studio, The Factory.

Click here to view a transcript of this show. Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. They’re still stunning to look at. The late 1960s was a great time for the fusion of folk and pop music, and a lot of singer-songwriters made their marks with recording their songs, and those of other performers, during that time. So it was when Judy Collins first heard Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now” down a telephone line one late night in 1967. Collins met with Mitchell and Al Kooper that very night in the bar from whi...

Benny Mardones may be the only person to be a one-hit wonder twice, charting two times with the same version of the same song.

This hit from early 1966 isn't quite the spontaneous fun party it sounds like.

The Billboard Hot 100 chart has been around for about 60 years. In all that time, only seven songs which weren’t recorded in English have made it to the Number One position. And there are several other foreign-language songs which enjoyed plenty of popularity without making it to the top spot, but the fact is, in United States it’s tough to score a hit if your song isn’t in English. So this week I tried to come up with a comprehensive list of non-English songs that made it to the Top 20. This d...

Alice Cooper's biggest hit was inspired by two things: Old movies and the last three minutes of the school day.

It's been a while since we took a look at a bunch of songs that you may not realize are covers of other artists' work.

Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018. This week's show takes a look back at the life and music career of the Queen of Soul.