How Good It Is

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 definitely became a case of "the more you find, the more there is to find" so I'm not at all sure I caught everything, but it's a pretty good list, and at over 18 minutes, it's an overstuffed episode besides. 

I think that some of the songs that didn't make Number One are going to be a surprise to you, but a couple of the ones that did, may also be surprising. And there's one artist who actually hit the Top Five twice, with songs that aren't in English. And no, it's not Dean Martin. I shan't spoil it here, but I will say that this one really knocked me out. 

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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.

Donovan struck lucky a couple of times with this song: first, it was the beginning of people looking into the deeper meaning behind absolutely every lyric. Second, the song got a weird boost from a practical joke being played by an underground newspaper out of Berkeley.

Disco was on its way out, to be replaced by Hip-Hop or New Wave, depending on the clubs you frequented. Blondie's last major hit in the US was a track that departed from their previous style and broke a few barriers along the way.

It was December of 1971 and Deep Purple was in Deep Trouble. They were all set to record their newest album, when the location they'd chosen for recording was accidentally set ablaze and burned completely to the ground.

This is the Rolling Stones' mobile recording studio. This picture is probably from the 1980s, given the computer screen over the mixing desk. The studio went through two major upgrades during its years of service; this was after the first one.

It took a little scrambling, but they managed to locate a hotel that had closed for the season and were able to use it for recording. The only problem was, the mobile recording studio couldn't be placed close to the recording space, so they had to run cables along walls, through a window, under a door, down a corridor, across a balcony, and who-knows-wherever else. This also meant that the band members had to traverse this route every time they wanted to hear their work played back. Ultimately they got tired of climbing all over the hotel and decided on-the-fly whether a particular take was any good.

The last song they recorded was one that they wrote pretty quickly, combined with an abandoned riff that Ritchie Blackmore had recorded without any particular project attached to it. It told the story of the fire, and the band's travails in locating another place to record.

Deep Purple didn't think the song had a lot of potential, but when they finally released it, it became one of rock and roll's great iconic tunes, and a touchstone for novice guitar players everywhere. And the town of Montreux, where everything took place, commemorated the event with a memorial marker.

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After a mishap during a Frank Zappa concert destroyed the space that Deep Purple was going to use for a recording space, the band had to scramble to find a new space. Once they'd found it, they wrote a song outlining the story of the accidental arson and the search for a new location. While they didn't have big hopes for the song, it became their biggest hit.

By nearly all accounts, the Supremes were starting to look like a failure. Between 1961 and 1963, they had recorded six singles, five of them for Motown, and none of them reached the Billboard Top 40 chart. There was a glimmer of light when the song "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes" reached #23, but the act still wasn't getting a lot of traction.

It wasn't until the songwriting/producing team of Holland/Dozier/Holland (who also wrote "Lovelight") wrote a song and produced a musical track for the Marvelettes, which the Marvelettes hated and refused to record. Desperate to get an artist to record a vocal (lest they be forced to pay for the musicians out of their own pockets), they managed to strong-arm the "No-Hit Supremes" into recording the song, even though the finished music track wasn't in Diana Ross' key. But the key change, and the bad attitude that the girls brought to the recording studio, was enough to turn the song into their first Number One hit, and that was the start of a string of chart toppers.

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The Supremes were doing so poorly on the charts that people around Motown were calling them the "No-Hit Supremes". Then along came a song that nobody at the label wanted to record, and the Supremes, backed into a corner, recorded what turned out to be their first Number One hit.