How Good It Is

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. Between airplay on a single radio station in New York City and its inclusion on the Newport Folk Festival's main stage, Arlo was able to get a record contract and the song became the entire first side of his debut album. 

Arlo Guthrie in a still fromthe 1969 film Alice's Restaurant 

And despite the song's 18-1/2 minute length, and its subject matter (much of which was taboo then), and some of the language used (some of which is taboo now), the song continues to get radio airplay, in full, and unedited. 

Although the restaurant and the microbus are long gone, Guthrie continues to perform the song from time to time, though he'll update the lyrics so that they're either more topical or less offensive. Or both. 

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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, subversively comic Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book, an alphabet book you do NOT want your kids to read (but you should, because it's hilarious): 

But Silverstein was a songwriter who had an especially strong relationship with Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and that led to a couple of their bigger hits, including a song that was essentially a parody of the rock star life, but it led to the sort of fame that only he could imagine: 

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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.

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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 which Kooper placed the phone call, and the song wound up as the opening track to Side Two of Collins' seventh album, Wildflowers.

For whatever reason, though, the song wasn't released as a single for about a year, but releasing the song turned out to be a great idea, because it turned into Collins' first foray into Billboard's Top 40 and propelled Wildflowers to the Number 5 position on their albums chart. 

Joni Mitchell, in the meantime, managed to score a recording contract of her own and recorded it, along with several other songs that had already been cut by other artists (including "Chelsea Morning", which Collins had recorded and released as a single earlier that year) and a few new tracks. "Both Sides Now" became a stealth title track for her self-produced second album, Clouds, and finally propelled her into the public light. 

The song has been covered literally dozens of times from 1967 all the way up to this decade, and by artists of all ages and genres so clearly this is a song whose impact will be felt for many years to come. 

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One fine evening in 1967, Judy Collins gets a call from Al Kooper and Joni Mitchell, and it turns into her first Top 40 hit.

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.