On this day in 1978, Bruce Springsteen released the LP “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (June 2)
An insight into how prolific Springsteen’s writing was at this time was the release in 2010 of “The Promise”, 22 previously unreleased songs that were outtakes from the “Darkness” sessions, including “Because the Night”, which he initially gave to Patti Smith, becoming her breakthrough hit, and “Fire” a hit for the Pointer Sisters.
Appraising “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, Womack and Chapman said, "Springsteen drives away from the beach and boardwalk and into the ethos of the American heartland", and music journalist Joe Marchese suggested, "Darkness showed that one could marry hard rock with piano and saxophone", while writer Rob Kirkpatrick regarded it as "the album in which Springsteen leaves R&B behind and plants himself firmly in the world of hard rock, seventies style."
It went to #4 in the Netherlands, #5 in the US, #7 in Canada, #9 in Australia and Sweden, #11 in New Zealand, #12 in Norway, and #14 in the UK.
In 2020, “Darkness…” ranked at #91 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Here’s the first song off the album, “Badlands”:
Last week in 1982, the Huey Lewis & the News single “Do You Believe in Love” debuted on the Australian charts at #92 (May 31)
When legendary record producer “Mutt” Lange wrote the song and submitted it to the band, it was entitled "We Both Believe In Love", but was retitled after Lewis made some lyrical revisions.
The unrevised version was originally recorded by British band Supercharge, on which Lange sang lead vocals, on the 1979 album “Body Rhythm”.
The song became a breakthrough hit for Huey Lewis & the News, whose first few singles failed to chart, peaking at #7 in the US, #14 in Canada, #18 in Australia, and #36 in New Zealand.
In 1985 the song also went to #9 in the UK.
“Do You Believe In Love” got a massive boost courtesy of MTV, which was only about six months old when they put the song in high rotation in early 1982.
Fun fact: the girl in the video is Lisabeth Shatner, daughter of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, the legendary William Shatner!
Click on the link below to watch:
On this day in 1984, the Cyndi Lauper LP “She’s So Unusual” peaked on the US Billboard 200 Albums Chart at #4 (June 2)
In 1978, Lauper formed the band Blue Angel, who signed a recording contract with Polydor Records; however, their debut album, “Blue Angel”, was a commercial failure.
The band parted ways after firing their manager, who sued Lauper for $80,000 and forced her into bankruptcy.
Lauper went on to work in retail stores, waitressing, and also singing solo in many New York night clubs, and it was here she caught the eye of David Wolff.
He became her manager and subsequently got her signed to Portrait Records, (a subsidiary of Epic Records), who went on to release this, her debut solo LP.
Lauper co-wrote four songs on “She's So Unusual”, including the hits "Time After Time" and "She Bop".
While recording her hit single “Girls Just Want to Have Fun", Lauper found the original lyrics to be misogynistic, so she rewrote the song as an anthem for young women.
"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" became a worldwide hit, and her first song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
“Time After Time" became her first #1 hit on the chart and experienced similar success worldwide, while the next two singles “She Bop" and "All Through the Night" also peaked in the US Top 5.
This made Cyndi Lauper the first female singer to have four Top 5 singles on the Hot 100 from one album.
“She's So Unusual” is still her best-selling album to date and one of the best-selling albums of the 1980s.
It went on to peak at #4 on the Billboard 200 chart and stayed in the chart's Top 40 for a massive 65 weeks.
The album also went to #1 in Canada, #3 in Australia and New Zealand, #4 in Norway, #5 in Japan and Austria, #6 in South Africa, #8 in Switzerland, #14 in Italy, #16 in the UK, and #19 in the Netherlands.
“She’s So Unusual” helped Cyndi win Best New Artist at the 1985 Grammy Awards, and also received nominations for Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"), and Song of the Year (for "Time After Time").
“She's So Unusual” was ranked at #184 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time in 2020.
In 2019, the Library of Congress selected “She's So Unusual” for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The iconic front cover of “She's So Unusual” was photographed on Henderson Walk in Coney Island, New York, in front of a closed-down wax museum, in the summer of 1983 by the legendary Annie Leibovitz, with Lauper wearing a vintage red prom-style dress that she purchased at the vintage clothing shop where she used to work, Screaming Mimi's.
She is also seen holding a bouquet of flowers which were purchased from a vendor on the boardwalk at the time of the shoot.
The cover won Janet Perr the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in 1985.
The video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", featuring professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano, won the inaugural award for Best Female Video at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and made Lauper an MTV staple.
Click on the link below to watch “Time After Time”:
On this day in 1978, Thin Lizzy released the LP “Live and Dangerous” (June 2)
The acclaimed live double album climbed to #2 in the UK, #17 in New Zealand, #20 in Australia, #27 in Sweden, #41 in Germany, and #84 in the US.
The album's sleeve notes credit two concerts as its source: Hammersmith Odeon, London, England on 14 November 1976, and Seneca College Fieldhouse, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 28 October 1977.
Producer Tony Visconti later revealed that shows at the Tower Theater, Philadelphia on 20 and 21 October 1977, a week earlier than the Toronto gig, had also been recorded.
"That was us at our best," observed guitarist Scott Gorham, "before the bad drugs came in."
In 2010 “Live and Dangerous” was ranked #1 in PlanetRock.com's The Greatest Live Album Top 40, and in 2015, Rolling Stone ranked the album at #46 in its list of the greatest live albums of all time.
Click on the link below to watch the single released from the album “Rosalie”:
This week in 1975, the Bad Company single “Good Lovin’ Gone Bad” debuted on the Australian charts at #93 (June 2)
This classic rocker was written by the band's guitarist Mick Ralphs, and was the lead single from their popular album “Straight Shooter”.
The single only charted somewhat modestly however, peaking at #31 in the UK, #36 in the US, #48 in Canada, and #93 in Australia.
Paul Rodgers has one of the best rock voices going…
Click on the link below to watch:
Legendary Aussie singer Dave Gleeson was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, on this day in 1968 (June 3)
Gleeson co-founded The Screaming Jets in 1989, and later that year the Newcastle band had won youth radio station Triple J's National Band Competition.
They signed a recording deal with the leading independent label rooArt, and moved to Sydney in early 1990, recording their debut album “All For One” in mostly midnight to dawn sessions at a local studio, after playing live shows seven nights a week.
The band went on to cement themselves as Aussie pub rock favourites, with three albums peaking in the top five on the Australian ARIA Charts, and hit singles like “Better”, “Helping Hand”, and “Shivers”.
Then in May 2011, Chris Bailey and the Brewsters recruited Dave Gleeson to front the Angels, which he has done since then, playing live and also recording albums with the band.
On 19 June 2016, Dave Gleeson was inducted into The South Australian Music Hall Of Fame, alongside The Angels.
On 31 January 2022, Gleeson was on Australian rock radio station Triple M filling the 7-10pm nightly slot with his new show “Triple M nights with Dave Gleeson” broadcasting across Australia from Triple M Adelaide studio.
At the end of May in 2023, Dave Gleeson announced he was stepping down as lead singer of the Angels, to focus on an upcoming Screaming Jets LP and his Triple M commitments…
Click on the link below to watch “Helping Hand”:
On this day in 1989, the Go-Betweens single “Streets of your Town” debuted on the UK Singles Chart at #82 (June 3)
Originally released as the lead single from their 1988 album “16 Lovers Lane”, the single was re-released in the UK in 1989, in an attempt by Beggars Banquet to encourage the band's commercial momentum, however it peaked at its modest debut position of #82.
McLennan said of writing the song, "I was listening to 'Under the Milky Way' and I was just working it out–cause I'm a big fan of The Church.
And that afternoon I came up with a chord progression and a chorus."
The song was written in McLennan and violinist Amanda Brown's apartment in Bondi.
Brown said, "It was written in, I would say, 10 minutes. I was singing along and I sung that "shine" line, which is like the call and response answer in the verses.
And I don’t collect any songwriting royalties for that song, because that was a condition of my joining the band."
McLennan had not played the song to co-singer/songwriter/guitarist Robert Forster before entering the studio, prompting Forster to muse:
“It remains an odd fact – the one Go-Betweens song Grant and I never played before recording.”
Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison said, "We were in a park in Glebe when Amanda and Grant played the song to us for the first time, and I guess I was hearing it through Robert’s reaction, because Robert was so shocked.
So I was feeling his pain, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t see how magnificent that song was."
Forster later recalled, "This was obviously the most commercial thing we'd ever done, and it came out around October '88, which caught the summer here.
It was re-released in summer and it sat fantastically on Australian summer radio and then it sat well on English summer radio.
We were walking around Soho and we'd hear it on the radio, every jean shop and café. It was on Radio 1 and so we were hearing it as we were walking around."
Bass player John Willsteed played the beautiful Spanish-inflected acoustic guitar solo, which made it hard for the band to replicate live. Forster noted, "It was much more of a studio construction, and maybe the best version of it ever is on the album."
The original 1988 release peaked at #30 in New Zealand, #68 in Australia, and #80 in the UK.
Click on the link below to watch:
Singer, songwriter, musician, and actress Suzi Quatro was born in Detroit, Michigan, on this day in 1950 (June 3)
Suzi’s paternal grandfather was an Italian immigrant to the US.
Her family name of "Quattrocchi" ("four eyes", meaning "bespectacled") was shortened to Quatro.
A real trailblazer for women in rock, Suzi Q was the first female bass player to make it big.
Back in the day no other prominent female musician worked in rock simultaneously as a singer, instrumentalist, songwriter, and bandleader.
She had a real integrity and authenticity about her image and her work that shone through, with songs like “Can the Can, “48 Crash”, “The Wild One”, “Rock Hard”, and “Devil Gate Drive”.
Her duet "Stumblin' In" with Smokie's lead singer Chris Norman also reached #4 in the US.
In her own words:
“Before I did what I did, we didn't have a place in rock 'n' roll. Not really.
You had your Grace Slick and all that, but that's not what I did.
I was the first to be taken seriously as a female rock 'n' roll musician and singer.
That hadn't been done before.
I played the boys at their own game.
For everybody that came afterward, it was a little bit easier, which is good.
I'm proud of that.
If I have a legacy, that's what it is.
It's nothing I take lightly. It was gonna happen sooner or later.
In 2014, I will have done my job 50 years. It was gonna be done by somebody, and I think it fell to me to do because I don't look at gender.
I never have.
It doesn't occur to me if a 6-foot-tall guy has pissed me off not to square up to him. That's just the way I am.
If I wanted to play a bass solo, it never occurred to me that I couldn't.
When I saw Elvis for the first time when I was 5, I decided I wanted to be him, and it didn't occur to me that he was a guy. That's why it had to fall to somebody like me.”
Quatro has been a major influence on musicians like the Runaways and Joan Jett, Girlschool, Chrissie Hynde, Kathy Valentine from the Go-Go’s, and Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads.
On October 24, 2013, Quatro received the Woman of Valor Award from the organization Musicians for Equal Opportunities for Women (MEOW) for her role inspiring and influencing generations of female musicians.
Her work on Happy Days as Leather Tuscadero was also a highlight…
Click on the link below to watch Suzi as Leather Tuscadero doing “Devil Gate Drive”:
Singer, songwriter, and musician Ian Hunter was born Ian Hunter Patterson in Oswestry, Shropshire, England, on this day in 1939 (June 3)
He is best known as the lead singer of the English rock band Mott the Hoople, from its inception in 1969 to its dissolution in 1974, and at its 2009, 2013, and 2019 reunions.
As a solo performer, Hunter had the single “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” which peaked at #14 on the UK charts, and was covered by a number of bands, including The Angels...
Throughout his solo career, Hunter often worked in collaboration with Mick Ronson, David Bowie's sideman and arranger from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars period.
Click on the link below to watch “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” (featuring the talented Mick Ronson):
On this day in 1984, the Prince single “When Doves Cry” debuted on the US Billboard Hot 100 at #57 (June 2)
The lead single from the acclaimed “Purple Rain” LP went all the way to the top, and stayed at the #1 spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 for 5 weeks, making it the highest-selling single of 1984.
It was also a #1 in Canada and Australia, and a Top 10 hit in many other countries.
"When Doves Cry" was ranked #52 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and is included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. According to Acclaimed Music, it is the 31st most celebrated song in popular music history.
Remarkably for an 80s dance song it has no bass line!
This is what it sounds like…..
This week in 1986, Queen released the LP “A Kind of Magic” (June 2)
This album was the unofficial soundtrack for the 1986 film “Highlander”, for which no official soundtrack album was released.
There are only three songs on the album that did not appear in “Highlander”: “Pain Is So Close to Pleasure", "Friends Will Be Friends" and "One Vision," which was featured a year earlier in the film “Iron Eagle”.
A Kind of Magic was Queen's first album to be released since they had received acclaim for their performance at Live Aid in 1985.
It was an immediate hit in the UK, going straight to #1, and selling 100,000 copies in its first week.
It remained in the UK charts for 63 weeks, selling 600,000 in the UK alone.
It also went to #1 in Argentina, #2 in the Netherlands, #3 in Austria, #4 in Germany and Switzerland, #5 in Norway, #6 in France, #9 in New Zealand and Sweden, #10 in Finland, #12 in Australia, and #13 in Italy.
The album spawned four hit singles: the album's title track "A Kind of Magic", "One Vision", "Friends Will Be Friends", and "Who Wants to Live Forever", while the album's final track, "Princes of the Universe", is the actual theme song to “Highlander”.
Although Queen would release another two albums with Freddie Mercury still alive, “A Kind of Magic” would turn out to be his last album promoted with a concert tour, due to his diagnosis with AIDS the following year.
In the 1994 edition of The Guinness All Time Top 1000 Albums, the album was voted #171 in the all-time greatest rock and pop albums, and in 2007, Classic Rock ranked “A Kind of Magic” the 28th greatest soundtrack album of all time.
Click on the link below to watch the title track:
On this day in 1972, the Jethro Tull LP “Thick as a Brick” went to #1 on the US Billboard 200 Album Chart (June 3)
Another Jethro Tull masterpiece…
The album features a continuous piece of music, split over two sides of the LP, and is actually Tull’s parody of the concept album genre.
“Thick as a Brick” prominently features flute, acoustic and electric guitars and Hammond organ, which had been used by the band previously, but also features harpsichord, glockenspiel, timpani, violin, lute, trumpet, saxophone, and a string section—all uncommon in the band's earlier blues-inspired rock.
The original packaging, designed like a newspaper, claims the album to be a musical adaptation of an epic poem by fictional eight-year-old genius Gerald Bostock, though the lyrics were actually written by the band's frontman, Ian Anderson.
Anderson later said that the lyrics were partly derived from his own childhood experiences.
“Thick as a Brick” is considered by many critics to be the first Jethro Tull release to entirely consist of progressive rock music, and is a classic of the genre.
Anderson has also said that "the album was a spoof to the albums of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, much like what the movie Airplane! had been to Airport" and later remarked that it was a "bit of a satire about the whole concept of grand rock-based concept albums".
The album went all the way to #1 in Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the United States, #2 in Italy, #3 in the Netherlands and Norway, #4 in Germany and Finland, and #5 in the UK.
Rolling Stone listed the album at #7 in their "Top 50 Prog Albums of All Time".
Rush's Geddy Lee has said “Thick as a Brick” is one of his favourite albums, as has Iron Maiden's Steve Harris.
Click on the link below to watch Jethro Tull perform “Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Brick’”😉:
An insight into how prolific Springsteen’s writing was at this time was the release in 2010 of “The Promise”, 22 previously unreleased songs that were outtakes from the “Darkness” sessions, including “Because the Night”, which he initially gave to Patti Smith, becoming her breakthrough hit, and “Fire” a hit for the Pointer Sisters.
Appraising “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, Womack and Chapman said, "Springsteen drives away from the beach and boardwalk and into the ethos of the American heartland", and music journalist Joe Marchese suggested, "Darkness showed that one could marry hard rock with piano and saxophone", while writer Rob Kirkpatrick regarded it as "the album in which Springsteen leaves R&B behind and plants himself firmly in the world of hard rock, seventies style."
It went to #4 in the Netherlands, #5 in the US, #7 in Canada, #9 in Australia and Sweden, #11 in New Zealand, #12 in Norway, and #14 in the UK.
In 2020, “Darkness…” ranked at #91 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Here’s the first song off the album, “Badlands”:
Last week in 1982, the Huey Lewis & the News single “Do You Believe in Love” debuted on the Australian charts at #92 (May 31)
When legendary record producer “Mutt” Lange wrote the song and submitted it to the band, it was entitled "We Both Believe In Love", but was retitled after Lewis made some lyrical revisions.
The unrevised version was originally recorded by British band Supercharge, on which Lange sang lead vocals, on the 1979 album “Body Rhythm”.
The song became a breakthrough hit for Huey Lewis & the News, whose first few singles failed to chart, peaking at #7 in the US, #14 in Canada, #18 in Australia, and #36 in New Zealand.
In 1985 the song also went to #9 in the UK.
“Do You Believe In Love” got a massive boost courtesy of MTV, which was only about six months old when they put the song in high rotation in early 1982.
Fun fact: the girl in the video is Lisabeth Shatner, daughter of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, the legendary William Shatner!
Click on the link below to watch:
On this day in 1984, the Cyndi Lauper LP “She’s So Unusual” peaked on the US Billboard 200 Albums Chart at #4 (June 2)
In 1978, Lauper formed the band Blue Angel, who signed a recording contract with Polydor Records; however, their debut album, “Blue Angel”, was a commercial failure.
The band parted ways after firing their manager, who sued Lauper for $80,000 and forced her into bankruptcy.
Lauper went on to work in retail stores, waitressing, and also singing solo in many New York night clubs, and it was here she caught the eye of David Wolff.
He became her manager and subsequently got her signed to Portrait Records, (a subsidiary of Epic Records), who went on to release this, her debut solo LP.
Lauper co-wrote four songs on “She's So Unusual”, including the hits "Time After Time" and "She Bop".
While recording her hit single “Girls Just Want to Have Fun", Lauper found the original lyrics to be misogynistic, so she rewrote the song as an anthem for young women.
"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" became a worldwide hit, and her first song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
“Time After Time" became her first #1 hit on the chart and experienced similar success worldwide, while the next two singles “She Bop" and "All Through the Night" also peaked in the US Top 5.
This made Cyndi Lauper the first female singer to have four Top 5 singles on the Hot 100 from one album.
“She's So Unusual” is still her best-selling album to date and one of the best-selling albums of the 1980s.
It went on to peak at #4 on the Billboard 200 chart and stayed in the chart's Top 40 for a massive 65 weeks.
The album also went to #1 in Canada, #3 in Australia and New Zealand, #4 in Norway, #5 in Japan and Austria, #6 in South Africa, #8 in Switzerland, #14 in Italy, #16 in the UK, and #19 in the Netherlands.
“She’s So Unusual” helped Cyndi win Best New Artist at the 1985 Grammy Awards, and also received nominations for Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"), and Song of the Year (for "Time After Time").
“She's So Unusual” was ranked at #184 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time in 2020.
In 2019, the Library of Congress selected “She's So Unusual” for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The iconic front cover of “She's So Unusual” was photographed on Henderson Walk in Coney Island, New York, in front of a closed-down wax museum, in the summer of 1983 by the legendary Annie Leibovitz, with Lauper wearing a vintage red prom-style dress that she purchased at the vintage clothing shop where she used to work, Screaming Mimi's.
She is also seen holding a bouquet of flowers which were purchased from a vendor on the boardwalk at the time of the shoot.
The cover won Janet Perr the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in 1985.
The video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", featuring professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano, won the inaugural award for Best Female Video at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and made Lauper an MTV staple.
Click on the link below to watch “Time After Time”:
On this day in 1978, Thin Lizzy released the LP “Live and Dangerous” (June 2)
The acclaimed live double album climbed to #2 in the UK, #17 in New Zealand, #20 in Australia, #27 in Sweden, #41 in Germany, and #84 in the US.
The album's sleeve notes credit two concerts as its source: Hammersmith Odeon, London, England on 14 November 1976, and Seneca College Fieldhouse, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 28 October 1977.
Producer Tony Visconti later revealed that shows at the Tower Theater, Philadelphia on 20 and 21 October 1977, a week earlier than the Toronto gig, had also been recorded.
"That was us at our best," observed guitarist Scott Gorham, "before the bad drugs came in."
In 2010 “Live and Dangerous” was ranked #1 in PlanetRock.com's The Greatest Live Album Top 40, and in 2015, Rolling Stone ranked the album at #46 in its list of the greatest live albums of all time.
Click on the link below to watch the single released from the album “Rosalie”:
This week in 1975, the Bad Company single “Good Lovin’ Gone Bad” debuted on the Australian charts at #93 (June 2)
This classic rocker was written by the band's guitarist Mick Ralphs, and was the lead single from their popular album “Straight Shooter”.
The single only charted somewhat modestly however, peaking at #31 in the UK, #36 in the US, #48 in Canada, and #93 in Australia.
Paul Rodgers has one of the best rock voices going…
Click on the link below to watch:
Legendary Aussie singer Dave Gleeson was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, on this day in 1968 (June 3)
Gleeson co-founded The Screaming Jets in 1989, and later that year the Newcastle band had won youth radio station Triple J's National Band Competition.
They signed a recording deal with the leading independent label rooArt, and moved to Sydney in early 1990, recording their debut album “All For One” in mostly midnight to dawn sessions at a local studio, after playing live shows seven nights a week.
The band went on to cement themselves as Aussie pub rock favourites, with three albums peaking in the top five on the Australian ARIA Charts, and hit singles like “Better”, “Helping Hand”, and “Shivers”.
Then in May 2011, Chris Bailey and the Brewsters recruited Dave Gleeson to front the Angels, which he has done since then, playing live and also recording albums with the band.
On 19 June 2016, Dave Gleeson was inducted into The South Australian Music Hall Of Fame, alongside The Angels.
On 31 January 2022, Gleeson was on Australian rock radio station Triple M filling the 7-10pm nightly slot with his new show “Triple M nights with Dave Gleeson” broadcasting across Australia from Triple M Adelaide studio.
At the end of May in 2023, Dave Gleeson announced he was stepping down as lead singer of the Angels, to focus on an upcoming Screaming Jets LP and his Triple M commitments…
Click on the link below to watch “Helping Hand”:
On this day in 1989, the Go-Betweens single “Streets of your Town” debuted on the UK Singles Chart at #82 (June 3)
Originally released as the lead single from their 1988 album “16 Lovers Lane”, the single was re-released in the UK in 1989, in an attempt by Beggars Banquet to encourage the band's commercial momentum, however it peaked at its modest debut position of #82.
McLennan said of writing the song, "I was listening to 'Under the Milky Way' and I was just working it out–cause I'm a big fan of The Church.
And that afternoon I came up with a chord progression and a chorus."
The song was written in McLennan and violinist Amanda Brown's apartment in Bondi.
Brown said, "It was written in, I would say, 10 minutes. I was singing along and I sung that "shine" line, which is like the call and response answer in the verses.
And I don’t collect any songwriting royalties for that song, because that was a condition of my joining the band."
McLennan had not played the song to co-singer/songwriter/guitarist Robert Forster before entering the studio, prompting Forster to muse:
“It remains an odd fact – the one Go-Betweens song Grant and I never played before recording.”
Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison said, "We were in a park in Glebe when Amanda and Grant played the song to us for the first time, and I guess I was hearing it through Robert’s reaction, because Robert was so shocked.
So I was feeling his pain, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t see how magnificent that song was."
Forster later recalled, "This was obviously the most commercial thing we'd ever done, and it came out around October '88, which caught the summer here.
It was re-released in summer and it sat fantastically on Australian summer radio and then it sat well on English summer radio.
We were walking around Soho and we'd hear it on the radio, every jean shop and café. It was on Radio 1 and so we were hearing it as we were walking around."
Bass player John Willsteed played the beautiful Spanish-inflected acoustic guitar solo, which made it hard for the band to replicate live. Forster noted, "It was much more of a studio construction, and maybe the best version of it ever is on the album."
The original 1988 release peaked at #30 in New Zealand, #68 in Australia, and #80 in the UK.
Click on the link below to watch:
Singer, songwriter, musician, and actress Suzi Quatro was born in Detroit, Michigan, on this day in 1950 (June 3)
Suzi’s paternal grandfather was an Italian immigrant to the US.
Her family name of "Quattrocchi" ("four eyes", meaning "bespectacled") was shortened to Quatro.
A real trailblazer for women in rock, Suzi Q was the first female bass player to make it big.
Back in the day no other prominent female musician worked in rock simultaneously as a singer, instrumentalist, songwriter, and bandleader.
She had a real integrity and authenticity about her image and her work that shone through, with songs like “Can the Can, “48 Crash”, “The Wild One”, “Rock Hard”, and “Devil Gate Drive”.
Her duet "Stumblin' In" with Smokie's lead singer Chris Norman also reached #4 in the US.
In her own words:
“Before I did what I did, we didn't have a place in rock 'n' roll. Not really.
You had your Grace Slick and all that, but that's not what I did.
I was the first to be taken seriously as a female rock 'n' roll musician and singer.
That hadn't been done before.
I played the boys at their own game.
For everybody that came afterward, it was a little bit easier, which is good.
I'm proud of that.
If I have a legacy, that's what it is.
It's nothing I take lightly. It was gonna happen sooner or later.
In 2014, I will have done my job 50 years. It was gonna be done by somebody, and I think it fell to me to do because I don't look at gender.
I never have.
It doesn't occur to me if a 6-foot-tall guy has pissed me off not to square up to him. That's just the way I am.
If I wanted to play a bass solo, it never occurred to me that I couldn't.
When I saw Elvis for the first time when I was 5, I decided I wanted to be him, and it didn't occur to me that he was a guy. That's why it had to fall to somebody like me.”
Quatro has been a major influence on musicians like the Runaways and Joan Jett, Girlschool, Chrissie Hynde, Kathy Valentine from the Go-Go’s, and Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads.
On October 24, 2013, Quatro received the Woman of Valor Award from the organization Musicians for Equal Opportunities for Women (MEOW) for her role inspiring and influencing generations of female musicians.
Her work on Happy Days as Leather Tuscadero was also a highlight…
Click on the link below to watch Suzi as Leather Tuscadero doing “Devil Gate Drive”:
Singer, songwriter, and musician Ian Hunter was born Ian Hunter Patterson in Oswestry, Shropshire, England, on this day in 1939 (June 3)
He is best known as the lead singer of the English rock band Mott the Hoople, from its inception in 1969 to its dissolution in 1974, and at its 2009, 2013, and 2019 reunions.
As a solo performer, Hunter had the single “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” which peaked at #14 on the UK charts, and was covered by a number of bands, including The Angels...
Throughout his solo career, Hunter often worked in collaboration with Mick Ronson, David Bowie's sideman and arranger from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars period.
Click on the link below to watch “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” (featuring the talented Mick Ronson):
On this day in 1984, the Prince single “When Doves Cry” debuted on the US Billboard Hot 100 at #57 (June 2)
The lead single from the acclaimed “Purple Rain” LP went all the way to the top, and stayed at the #1 spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 for 5 weeks, making it the highest-selling single of 1984.
It was also a #1 in Canada and Australia, and a Top 10 hit in many other countries.
"When Doves Cry" was ranked #52 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and is included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. According to Acclaimed Music, it is the 31st most celebrated song in popular music history.
Remarkably for an 80s dance song it has no bass line!
This is what it sounds like…..
This week in 1986, Queen released the LP “A Kind of Magic” (June 2)
This album was the unofficial soundtrack for the 1986 film “Highlander”, for which no official soundtrack album was released.
There are only three songs on the album that did not appear in “Highlander”: “Pain Is So Close to Pleasure", "Friends Will Be Friends" and "One Vision," which was featured a year earlier in the film “Iron Eagle”.
A Kind of Magic was Queen's first album to be released since they had received acclaim for their performance at Live Aid in 1985.
It was an immediate hit in the UK, going straight to #1, and selling 100,000 copies in its first week.
It remained in the UK charts for 63 weeks, selling 600,000 in the UK alone.
It also went to #1 in Argentina, #2 in the Netherlands, #3 in Austria, #4 in Germany and Switzerland, #5 in Norway, #6 in France, #9 in New Zealand and Sweden, #10 in Finland, #12 in Australia, and #13 in Italy.
The album spawned four hit singles: the album's title track "A Kind of Magic", "One Vision", "Friends Will Be Friends", and "Who Wants to Live Forever", while the album's final track, "Princes of the Universe", is the actual theme song to “Highlander”.
Although Queen would release another two albums with Freddie Mercury still alive, “A Kind of Magic” would turn out to be his last album promoted with a concert tour, due to his diagnosis with AIDS the following year.
In the 1994 edition of The Guinness All Time Top 1000 Albums, the album was voted #171 in the all-time greatest rock and pop albums, and in 2007, Classic Rock ranked “A Kind of Magic” the 28th greatest soundtrack album of all time.
Click on the link below to watch the title track:
On this day in 1972, the Jethro Tull LP “Thick as a Brick” went to #1 on the US Billboard 200 Album Chart (June 3)
Another Jethro Tull masterpiece…
The album features a continuous piece of music, split over two sides of the LP, and is actually Tull’s parody of the concept album genre.
“Thick as a Brick” prominently features flute, acoustic and electric guitars and Hammond organ, which had been used by the band previously, but also features harpsichord, glockenspiel, timpani, violin, lute, trumpet, saxophone, and a string section—all uncommon in the band's earlier blues-inspired rock.
The original packaging, designed like a newspaper, claims the album to be a musical adaptation of an epic poem by fictional eight-year-old genius Gerald Bostock, though the lyrics were actually written by the band's frontman, Ian Anderson.
Anderson later said that the lyrics were partly derived from his own childhood experiences.
“Thick as a Brick” is considered by many critics to be the first Jethro Tull release to entirely consist of progressive rock music, and is a classic of the genre.
Anderson has also said that "the album was a spoof to the albums of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, much like what the movie Airplane! had been to Airport" and later remarked that it was a "bit of a satire about the whole concept of grand rock-based concept albums".
The album went all the way to #1 in Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the United States, #2 in Italy, #3 in the Netherlands and Norway, #4 in Germany and Finland, and #5 in the UK.
Rolling Stone listed the album at #7 in their "Top 50 Prog Albums of All Time".
Rush's Geddy Lee has said “Thick as a Brick” is one of his favourite albums, as has Iron Maiden's Steve Harris.
Click on the link below to watch Jethro Tull perform “Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Brick’”😉:
