Episodes

Clockwise from top: Sarah Dash, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, Cindy Birdsong In the 1960s there was a doo-wop girl group called the Blue Belles (sometimes known as The Bluebelles, or Patti and the Bluebelles). After Cindy Birdsong left the group in 1967 to become a Supreme, the group reinvented themselves and became Labelle. In the early 1970s they were a funk-rock group, recording covers of The Rolling Stones, Carole King and all kinds of other stuff that no other similarly-composed group would ...

Did you ever decide that you were in the market for something, let’s say you need a car, and all of a sudden you see advertisements for cars all over the place? Or, you learn a new word and suddenly you see it being used everywhere? This is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, and it’s a weird little trick our brains play on us. And recently, I was pranked by my brain in this manner. Episode 9 was devoted to songs that you may not have known were covers of other artists, and I thought at that...

Sad news from the world of music this week as we learn that Edwin Hawkins has died at the age of 74. I have to confess that this came as a surprise because I started doing the math and realized that Hawkins was in his mid-20s when “Oh Happy Day” became a hit. For whatever reason I thought he was at least twenty years older THEN. Hawkins was the founder of the Northern California State Youth Choir, and the choir recorded some songs to make a fundraiser album, which unfortunately didn’t get press...

Neil Young sang “It’s better to burn out, than to fade away,” but Damn, Janis, couldn’t you have burned with us just a little bit longer? Janis Joplin was a ball of raw talent who took a rough childhood and let it inform her musical style. And that almost certainly carried through to the listener. When she sounded sad, so did you. When she was feeling silly, it immediately conveyed. And when she sang in an anguished style, you were right there with her. What’s more, her band members, whether i...

Happy New Year! The group in 1961: Dub Jones, Carl Gardner, Cornell Gunter, Billy Guy. This was the configuration that was inducted into the Rock Hall. While they’re often mistaken for a doo-wop group, The Coasters were actually a rhythm-and-blues vocal group, whose greatest successes came when they were teamed with the composers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and when they had humorous material to work with.They made such an impression on other artists that it was a small wonder when, in 1987,...

Happy New Year, HGII fans! It was 1975 and David Bowie’s professional life was in some turmoil. He was in the middle of breaking a contract with his manager, and he was still trying to deal with the way his life had changed since “Space Oddity” became a hit a few years earlier. With the help of his new friend John Lennon (who advised him to get rid of the manager), he took a riff that his guitarist was noodling around with for another song, and turned it into his first #1 hit in the US. Lennon...

I can see my old house from here! Most people who know me personally know that I’m originally from New York, but it’s not because I have an accent, because I don’t. Well, I DO have an accent of sorts, but it’s tough to suss out that I’m from the NY metro area. Most people think I’m from the Downstate region of New York, like Poughkeepsie or Newburgh. But the fact is, I’m from a small town on the north shore of Long Island called Kings Park. When I was a small child, Kings Park had a huge mental...

This was the “goddess” label that Elektra Records used on the 45 in Columbia. Look! Boobies! It was the Summer of Love, and as Johnny Rivers sang, everybody kept on playin’ Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Everybody, that is, except for the fans of an underground band playing the clubs in Los Angeles, who kept calling the local radio stations and requesting a song from that band’s debut album. Eventually Elektra Records put out a shorter version of that seven-minute song, and before lo...

It was the biggest album of 1982, and the title track was the last Top Ten single to come from it. That’s seven singles out of nine tracks total. Michael Jackson wanted to top not only the success, but the ambition of his previous album, Off The Wall, and I think we can all agree that he more than succeeded. Thriller remains the largest-selling album of all time. What! you say, bigger than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Bigger than Dark Side of the Moon? Bigger than Bat Out of Hell? Ye...

Mick Jagger, as it turns out, became Carly Simon’s backup singer on “You’re So Vain” because he just happened to pop into the studio the day of recording. The bad news is, that put him on the list of candidates that people think Simon’s singing about. Before they were famous, lots of artists sang backup for other artists. But once in awhile, they’ll lend their talent to someone else because it’s fun, or because they owe someone a favor or maybe just because they were asked to. This week, we’re ...

When Jimmy Webb got his heart broken, what did he do? Why, he did what any other red-blooded American would do: he wrote a couple of hit songs and made a million bucks off the incident! OK, that’s not the most common reaction, but it’s what happened back in 1967, when he wrote a song that was turned down by The Association, but picked up by an actor who’d decided he wanted to conquer the music charts. If you’ve got a favorite podcatcher, you should be able to hear this week’s show already, or ...

The original promo 45, showing the edited A side. The full-length song is the B. In the late 1950s, Marty Robbins, who was commuting hundreds of miles between his home in Phoenix and various gigs in Texas, frequently passed through the town of El Paso on his journeys to and fro. The town inspired him to write a cinematic-level song with nine verses and three bridges—and no chorus. Plus, it clocked in at four minutes and forty seconds. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the song climbed ...

Hey, everybody makes a mistake now and then. That’s why they put erasers on pencils, am I right? But once in awhile, someone will make a mistake that manages to enhance rather than detract (“Eminence Front,” I’m looking at you.). And that’s where we’re going this week: we’ll look at four songs that had mistakes in them where the artists made a conscious decision to keep the error in place because it actually makes the song a little bit better. And, as usual, you can listen to the show via your...

Today we're commemorating the 40th anniversary of the plane crash that killed several members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd and their manager with a look at the song that became their signature tune.

This week we’re going to dive into famous songs that were recorded by other artists first. Some of them you’re going to know about because practically everybody knows about them, but I think there will be a few surprises in there. I know that one of them came as a pretty big surprise to me! If you hit me up on Twitter and ask real pretty, I may tell you which Stevie Wonder song I was talking about. As ever, you have a few listening options: Either your favorite podcatcher (iTunes, Castbox, Po...

This was the song that heralded the Dylan Goes Electric era, and when he first played it live at the 1965 Newport Music Festival, he was met with boos and charges that he’d sold out, or was somehow a “traitor” to his folk roots. But Bob Dylan stuck to his guns, and “Like a Rolling Stone” became, and remains, his biggest single ever. This is the picture sleeve of the 45. If it hadn’t been for a quartet from Liverpool and their obvious cry for Help!, it probably would have gone all the way to Nu...

This was the A side of the record, remember. This week we’re taking a look at a song that was never meant to be a hit. In fact, it wouldn’t even have appeared on a record if some musicians hadn’t been hanging around when someone realized that the record he’d been working on didn’t have a B side. So he rounded up whomever he could find and fortunately, the saxophone player had a tune he’d been fooling around with for a little while, plus he had a fondness for a certain beverage from South of the...

This is the original sleeve that the record came in. I still have mine, though not quite in this condition. In the mid 1970s, George Harrison was having a rough time of it. He was still embroiled in the lawsuit over “My Sweet Lord”, he was tangled up in other legal issues caused by his breakup with his business manager, his album Extra Texture had taken a beating by the critics, and to top it all off, while recording Thirty Three and 1/3 he was struck with hepatitis and couldn’t work for most of...

Wait, Phil Collins did what? He drowned a guy? Uh…no. He humiliated a coward? No. He shamed someone from his childhood? Also, no. Many stories swirl around the meaning of Phil Collins’ breakout hit from 1981, and so many of them aren’t true. Collins was in a world of hurt following the breakup of his first marriage, and he channeled a lot of that energy into writing the Face Value album. This week I go into that a little bit (but only a little bit; it gets kind of tawdry), plus I talk about ...

One of several labels used for the 45 of this song. I think this was the retail version of the original release, based on what the promo label looks like. Chester (“Chet”) Powers was a musician who was well-known in the café scenes on both coasts, and certainly had his influence on other musicians. He’s also known for being a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service. But for all that, he only wrote one song that was any kind of a commercial success, and that was after a virtual parade of...

Click here for a transcript of this week’s show. This week, we’re taking a look at the Buckinghams, a Chicago-based group which had five big hits, all of which charted in a single year, after which they practically disappeared off the charts. For thirty years I harbored a suspicion that most of their hits were all about the same person, so I did a little research to find out what the story was. And, of course, the answer practically dropped into my lap. As usual, if you haven’t subscribed via ...

This is the sleeve for the Danish release of the record. Click here for a transcript of this episode. For Episode 2, we take a journey to Japan and look into an international hit from a day when I was about four months old. I’ll tell you about: What ALL the lyrics to the song mean The political turmoil that led to a song about lost love Whatever happened to Kyu Sakamoto, anyway? Why I need to apologize to my wife Your favorite podcatcher should have this song by now, but just in case, you c...

Click here for a transcript of this episode. In our premiere episode, we take a look at 10cc’s biggest hit, “I’m Not In Love”. We’ll talk about: What does that title mean, anyway? Where did that ethereal sound come from? What’s the story behind the band’s name? Your RSS feed should have the post by now, but you can always listen to it right here: I think we can all tell that it’s been several years since I’ve been behind a microphone. It gets better, I swear. Some of the sources behind thi...