Songs that made the whole world sing…or at least sit up and take notice. The Song: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Recorded by: Band Aid Story: In November 1984, Irish rock musician Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats saw a TV news report about the millions of people suffering from a famine in Ethiopia. He […]
While Uncle John was listening to Prince’s eight-minute-long “Purple Rain” on a loop over the weekend, he got to thinking about long songs. Really long songs. The Longest Hit Songs Before the late ‘60s, radio stations rarely played songs over four minutes long. It took a band as powerful as the Beatles to change that. […]
Rock stars are cool, but they don’t emerge fully formed. They have to pay their dues, and many paid their dues in bands far different from the ones that made them famous. Billy Joel Billy Joel’s music is pretty simple: piano, singing, standard pop-rock backing band. It worked pretty well: Joel racked up 33 Top […]
Most major rock guitarists have custom instruments built for them. Some are truly odd. Rick Nielsen’s Multi-Neck Guitars Cheap Trick is probably most memorable for two things: “I Want You to Want Me” and Rick Nielsen’s two-, three-, four-, and five-neck guitars. Up until about 1980, he’d line up as many as five different guitars […]
In the 1980s and ’90s, Prince introduced lots of young singers to the world, writing and producing songs for them. But how’d they do without Prince? Sheila E. She started drumming professionally as a teenager, and it helped that her father was iconic Latin jazz drummer Pete Escovedo. She was an accomplished session drummer by […]
Who invented the Hokey Pokey? It depends on who you ask, or where and when you lived. DO “THE HOKEY COKEY” In 1942 Irish songwriter and publisher Jimmy Kennedy, best known for “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” created a dance, and an instructional song to go along with it, called “The Hokey Cokey.” Written to entertain […]
The late Prince was a prolific singer-songwriter, writing and performing dozens of hit songs for himself. But he wrote so much material that he couldn’t record it all himself (or he didn’t feel it was right for him). Here are some Prince songs best known for not being “Prince” songs. The Bangles, “Manic Monday” Prince […]
Ever wonder how rock bands get their names? So do we. After some digging around, we found these origins. CHICAGO They originally called themselves Chicago Transit Authority, but had to shorten it after the city of Chicago sued. ALICE COOPER Lead singer Vincent Furnier claims to have gotten his stage name from a Ouija board, […]
There are only so many notes, so occasionally one hit song sounds a lot like another hit song. In 1982, the Australian rock band Men at Work hit #1 in the U.S. with “Down Under” a song about a proud Australian man traveling the world. It’s also notable for being one of few major hit […]
Merle Haggard went by many names—including Hag, Mighty Merle, and the Poet of the Common Man—and he was among the most influential singer-songwriters in country music history.
Music is a big part of the movies…except when the song gets cut out entirely. Producers of the 1965 James Bond movie Thunderball couldn’t make up their minds on a title song. After rejecting “Mr. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” by Shirley Bassey (who had done “Goldfinger” for Goldfinger), they asked Dionne Warwick to re-record it. […]
Trivia you don’t know about the songs you definitely do know. Penny Lane The song described real locations in Liverpool. Or at least they were real—the street called Penny Lane is no longer there, although the barber, banker, and “shelter in the middle of the roundabout” still stand. The barber and banker are still a […]
You would think that more bands would name themselves after lines in songs that they like—after all, who’s a bigger fan of music than musicians? 1. Lady Gaga gets her name from the Queen hit “Radio Ga Ga.” 2. The Australian alternative rock band Jet (“Are You Gonna Be My Girl”) named itself after the […]
George Martin passed away this week at age 90. He was best known for producing, arranging, and developing the sound of the Beatles. But his career lasted decades and he worked with dozens of acts. Here are some of the most unlikely.
35 years ago, MTV launched and played its very first video, “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. Here is a list of the next 19 videos they played.
Gossip and trivia from pop music. RADIOHEAD Bucking the tradition of rock groups trashing hotel rooms, Radiohead actually does the opposite. Not only do they clean up their own rooms, but they once snuck back into a hotel after checking out to clean up a room that their opening band had trashed. THE WHITE STRIPES […]
Sometimes a musician will create lightning in a bottle and write and record a song that storms the charts. Other times, it takes a little time—or a lot of time—for that song to become a hit. “A Little Less Conversation” Take 1: In 1967, singer-songwriter Mac Davis and his writing partner, Billy Strange (a session […]
The slang or vernacular of any subculture develops slowly and naturally over time. Not so with the words and phrases associated with the 1990s “grunge” music scene. BACKGROUND In the early 1990s, the biggest thing in rock music was grunge, a mixture of punk rock and dreary guitar riffs that shot bands like Nirvana and […]
