How Good It Is

This week, it's a look at hit songs that have backup singers who are well-known, because they're also famous.

Reminder: next week I'm taking off for the Thanksgiving weekend. See you in two weeks!

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 going to listen in on a bunch of songs that have famous people singing backups. Some of them are pretty well known; others may come as a surprise to you.

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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.

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Love it or hate it, Richard Harris' song from 1968 certainly seems to create some strong reactions. Here's the story behind the song, and how (as it turns out) one woman inspired three different hit songs from the same writer, and another one in Europe.

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 in just a few weeks to take over the top spot on the Hot 100 for the first two weeks of 1960.

This is the consumer/retail version of the 45. The song is 4:40, even though it doesn't say so on the label. The B side is a song titled "Running Gun".

The song put both Marty Robbins, and the town of El Paso, at the front of everyone's consciousness, and it's probably the song that's most associated with him. But what inspired him? Is the song about anyone special? And how many sequels to one song can the music-buying public take? (Answer: more than you'd imagine.)

By the way, if you have a copy of Marty Robbins' book, I'd love to see it. That was a frustrating search.

If you've got a favorite podcatcher, you should be able to hear this week's show already, or you can  just click the player below:

And, as usual, if you were to go to iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts and leave a rating, and maybe even some feedback, I probably wouldn't complain too loudly.

Let us turn back the clock to 1959, when Marty Robbins put a small town in a corner of Texas on everyone's mental map.

Everybody goofs now and then. That's why they put erasers on pencils. But once in awhile someone makes a mistake that's so good, you just have to leave it alone. This week we look at four songs with mistakes that the artists chose to retain because they thought it made the song better.

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.

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=76&v=B1aRrEnOv3o

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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.

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