How Good It Is

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In 1981 Bonnie Tyler had exactly one hit, 1977's "It's a Heartache", so it was no mystery why people were calling her a one-hit wonder. Her record label cut her loose, so she found a new manager and talked Jim Steinman, the guy responsible for Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, into partnering with her for a new album. Steinman wasn't easily convinced, but ultimately he came to her with a couple of older songs that he thought she could record, and when she agreed to those, he came to her with a nearly complete package: here's the song, here's who else is going to be performing on it, you just need to come in and sing your little heart out.

That doesn't match with the popular narrative, that "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was originally written for Meat Loaf as part of his follow-up album to Bat Out of Hell, but it turns out that the guy responsible for that popular narrative about Meat Loaf was...Meat Loaf. But the story caught on, because if you listen to "Eclipse," you could easily imagine its huge levels of production as being Meat Loaf-esque. But "Eclipse" wasn't written for him, nor was the other song (a hit for Air Supply) to which he laid the same claim.

As I noted during the show, the song's video is about eleven different kinds of ridiculous, and I think New York magazine summed it up best. Click here to read the review (it's a quick read).

And you know the rest of the bit. Either you have it or you don't. If you don't, here it is:

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Devo's one trip to the Top 40 was a cultural touchstone partly because some people misunderstood the intent of the lyrics, and partly because MTV was starved for programming.

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. That version didn't go anywhere, chart-wise, and neither did any cover that followed, until 1965, when Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, using audio from the Dixie Cups' fooling around between takes, added a backing track and turned their version, with its nonsensical lyrics, into an international hit. The song became such a big deal that the Dixie Cups eventually received partial writing credit for the song because of all the changed lyrics.

And that's all I'm saying here, go listen to the show.

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I was a fan of the HBO series "Treme", and the frequent use of the phrase "Jockamo Fee Na Nay" in many songs had me wondering whether it actually meant anything. Turns out, it does, sort of.

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?

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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 release credit the band "Featuring Linda Ronstadt". Ronstadt herself was still reluctant to leave the band, enough that she financed the Stone Poneys' entire third album herself, losing a ton of money in the process, before finally embarking on her solo career.

The tune was written by Michael Nesmith, of The Monkees fame, and while he didn't record the song himself until 1972, he did perform it (badly, on purpose) during an episode of The Monkees titled "Too Many Girls". This would have been right around the time that the original recording, by bluegrass band The Greenbriar Boys, would have come out.

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The Stone Poneys' only hit was pretty much the nail in the coffin for that band; Capitol Records took every step they could to cut them out of the loop and take on Linda Ronstadt as a solo artist.

The story behind Tears For Fears' US debut single.

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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, although only the second one was recorded mostly in Berlin. Those albums today are called the Berlin Trio, or sometimes the Berlin Triptych. They didn't get a ton of love at the time, largely because Bowie was Bowie and he was streets ahead of everyone else. But "Heroes," the title track from the second album, grew in stature and in its level of meaning for fans everywhere.

OK, so I promised you a few videos during the show. The first one is his first time performing the song on TV, on the Marc Bolan show. The instrumentation is clearly different but I think he's singing live-to-track:

The second video is the warm-up to the third. If you've seen this one, you can just skip down to the next one. But a lot of people have heard the song without seeing the nearly two minutes of awkwardness that preceded it:

It was for that holiday special that Bowie produced this video, which also appears to be a live-to-track recording, with some extra echo and those extra fun pantomime moves.

But while all that's fun, it's probably not what you came looking for. This is probably what you came looking for:

Next week: a listener request takes us into the 80s for some Tears for Fears.

Thanks again for all your support!

The "big hit" from David Bowie's Berlin period wasn't much of a hit until later on, and there was more than one story connected to its origin.