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How Good It Is

Each episode I choose a song from the 50s through the 90s and dive into its history, the story behind the song and other items of interest. Find more stuff at www.howgooditis.com

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184: Highway to Hell

Despite the allusion in the title, today’s song has no spiritual content or religious references. It’s just a description of life on the road with a hard rock band that’s paying its dues. And, as the band members would tell you, they were–and are–a rock band, not a punk band, thank you very much. AC/DC was formed in 1973 by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young in their hometown of Sydney, Australia.…

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183: Diss Tracks

And once again my voice has a case of Peter Brady. I need to quit recording late at night. We have a variety of diss tracks here for you, all but one of them dating back to before they were even called such a thing, before the rise of hip-hop music. This isn’t to take away from the overall impact of hip-hop on modern music but rather to demonstrate that, once again, what came before can have an…

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182–Old Man

Today’s episode is about a song that was written just up the hill from where I was born and in the same town where my wife and and I were wed. So it most definitely “strikes close to home.” Neil Young had emerged from the great north woods of Canada into the public limelight in the mid–1960s. He joined up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay to create the Buffalo Springfield, an LA-based band that…

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181: Influential Women Part 5–Stevie Nicks

One of the things that always amazed me about the songs that became big hits in the pop era between the 1950s and the 1990s was the sheer variety of musical styles that topped the charts. When doing research for this show I went into a bit of a spiral looking at Billboard charts for the late 1970s, and I got stuck on the summer of 1978, with the amazing wealth of songs that were in the top 20 at…

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180: Green River

Hidy, friends and neighbors. Good to be partnering up with Claude on another podcasting project! This episode is about a song whose title vaguely sounds like the result of a chemical spill, but which is actually a classic piece of rockabilly. John Fogerty and his brother Tom were natives of Northern California, and their family vacations often were to a cabin in Yolo County, just west of…

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179: Influential Women, Pt. 4–Pattie Boyd

Ladies and Gentlemen, the queen of them all. Pattie Boyd was the inspiration for a huge number of songs. Some of them went to the top of the charts, some of them weren’t released as singles, but nearly all of the songs about her are well-known, and not just because they’re about her; because they’re actually pretty darn good. And the crazy part is that all of them came from two men: George…

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178b–Naptime’s Over

Where have I been? Life, Cousin. Life got in the way. A lot of things sidetracked me, and even though I was keeping the feed for this show active, I still had several moments of “Yeah! Gonna get back to it soon!” alongside an equal number of “why bother?” moments. I’ve also been working on a different podcast project with Mike Messner, who you might remember from a couple of Gordon Lightfoot…

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178: Influential Women, Part 3–Jane Asher

Of all the people in the Beatles’ inner circle, Jane Asher is perhaps the most mysterious. Not because she’s reclusive–far from it, in fact. Jane Asher has spent lots of time on stage and on screens large and small from the time she was a child. But other than newspaper and magazine articles, and maybe a few video clips which survive from the 1960s, there isn’t a lot of first-hand knowledge about…

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177: Influential Women, Pt.2–Rosanna Arquette

In case you haven’t heard, we’re on a little bit of a journey, meeting various women who have had an influence on multiple pop songs. In today’s episode we’ll be visiting Rosanna Arquette. The interesting thing here is that whether or not the songs in this episode are about Rosanna has been an on-again, off-again mystery. For a while they’re not, then they are again, and maybe, maybe not.…

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176: Influential Women, Pt1–Renee Fladen-Kamm

For the next several episodes, we’re going to take a look at the women who inspired some of the Rock Era’s most iconic songs. There will be six episodes in this series; five of them will concentrate on a specific woman, each of whom inspired multiple songs. The sixth episode will look at several women who each inspired a single song. A couple of the women I’ve chosen will be fairly obvious but I’m…

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