How Good It Is

This week we take a look at a couple of songs that have the same title but are different, and which had different lives on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Madonna's sixth single and her first Number One hit was the one that established her as a genuine superstar, able to re-invent herself with each album.

Aja, by Steely Dan, was one of the first albums I purchased with my own money. It wasn't that I was so enamored by Steely Dan; I'd just heard a lot of good stuff about it so I took a chance.

And while fourteen-year-old me heard a ton of good stuff in it, doing a re-listen these many years later has only cemented this album in my Top Ten of all time. (Small wonder that so many others agree with me on that one.)

Aja was released to rather mixed reviews, but over a relatively small amount of time, many of the critics who didn't like it at first were won over. It just took a second or third listen to appreciate that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were doing something genuinely new, fusing multiple genres into a cohesive whole.

As I strongly suggested during the show, go back and listen to this album with headphones. You'll be amazed at the intimacy of every element on it.

You're welcome.

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Steely Dan's fifth single, and the second from the album Aja, was not, in fact, inspired by Wake Forest's struggling football team.

Bruce Springsteen was a local favorite and a darling of the critics, but that sort of thing doesn't cut any ice when you're Columbia Records and your artist has already released two albums without scoring any hits.

But Springsteen had an epiphany about what his next album should sound like, from both a lyrical and a sonic sense, and it was the start of his reputation as a serious perfectionist when it came to his recordings. The result was the album Born to Run, and its title track, which were both released on the same day: August 25, 1975.

The album went to Number 3 and just a couple of weeks later, Springsteen made a kind of history by being the first rock star to land on the cover of both Time and Newsweek Magazines during the same week, on October 27. According to biographer Peter Ames Carlin, that wasn't a coincidence: Jay Cocks of Time found out that Maureen Orth of Newsweek was doing a piece about Springsteen and convinced his editor to run a piece as well. Time's piece was all about his music, though, while Newsweek concentrated on the publicity machine that put someone like Springsteen on the map.

I, being only 12 years old at the time, remember seeing the covers but didn't read either magazine because we didn't have a subscription. But a pretty big deal was made about it in the newspapers and on TV at the time, so I have a memory of that too.

And as promised, here's the video of the Springsteen pastiche that appeared on Sesame Street:

Next week's show was inspired by a suggestion from a listener. In the meantime, have fun with this week's show:

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Bruce Springsteen's breakout hit took over six months to record, and another several months of clever publicity to make it big.

The Grateful Dead were definitely a rock band, and at the same time they managed to defy most definitions with regard to their specific genre. Sometimes they were funky, sometimes they were bluesy, sometimes they were jazzy, sometimes even gospel. Usually they were jamming, and rather than discouraging fans from recording their concerts, they encouraged it, often even giving them opportunities to plug recorders into their own equipment. Going to a Dead concert was a weird, beautiful, communal experience, and I think the closest equivalent in the absence of Jerry Garcia and Company would be...I don't know, maybe Phish? The one time I went to a Phish show was in 1999 at what was then the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (Now the PNC Bank P.A.C.), and it was a very similar vibe, right down to the joint being passed down the row from god knows where.

They started out as The Warlocks in 1965 but changed their name after they discovered that The Velvet Underground had already released an album with that title. Stories vary with regard to how they came up with the new name: Phil Lesh says that he found it in a Britannica World Language Dictionary; Garcia's story is that he found it in an old dictionary of folklore. At any rate, the name stuck and the concerts became known as special events to be experienced.

But while they were enormously popular, their records didn't exactly burn up the charts. While it took them a few years to crack the Hot 100, it was over 22 years before they saw their one and only Top Ten record. And coincidentally, that's the one we're talking about in this episode.

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While the Grateful Dead was a very popular band, it took them 22 years to score their only Top Ten hit.

This week's show was suggested by someone in the Listener Survey, so thank you, Kind Stranger, for making that suggestion. Maybe next time I do this sort of thing, I leave an optional space for putting your names in.

So the car in the episode artwork isn't THE vehicle in question, but it's the same make and model, and (I think) year. There are some stories that say it was a 1964 others that say it was a 1965. Both stories came from the Ides of March lead singer and songwriter Jim Peterik, so I went with a '65 and called it done.

The Ides of March, incidentally, got their name from the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. They were originally the "Shon-Dels," but Tommy James got there first, with a name that was close enough not to matter. Bass player Bob Bergland suggested the name change after reading the play, because they were still in high school and he'd read it as an English class assignment. They'd already gained some local acclaim with a song called "You Wouldn't Listen," which went Top 10 on the WLS surveys in June 1966 and made it to #42 on the Billboard Hot 100. See? You thought the Ides were a one-hit wonder, didn't you.

At any rate, here's Episode 93. Have fun with it!

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A teenage boy is inspired by his on-again, off-again relationship with a girl who only seems to like him for his cool Plymouth Valiant.