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How Billy Ocean Made ‘Caribbean Queen’: The Hit With Three Names
Every hit record has a story, but Caribbean Queen has something rarer: three stories, under three different titles, on three different continents. The song that made Billy Ocean an international star in 1984 first flopped in Britain as European Queen, then conquered America as Caribbean Queen, while a third version, African Queen, charted in South…
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How Pat Benatar Made ‘Love Is a Battlefield’: The Slow Ballad Her Husband Refused to Leave Alone
By the summer of 1983, Pat Benatar had nothing left to prove. Four albums in four years had produced Heartbreaker, Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Promises in the Dark and Shadows of the Night, and her voice — a mezzo-soprano trained for opera and then aimed like a weapon at rock and roll —…
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How Bobby Darin Made ‘Dream Lover’: The Song He Wrote at the Piano and Stretched Into a Standard
Bobby Darin did not find Dream Lover. He built it, at a piano, out of a handful of chord changes he could not stop playing — and then, in the studio, he did the thing that separated him from every other teen idol of 1959: he made it bigger. Strings, voices, a swaying, sophisticated arrangement…
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How Marvin Gaye Made ‘Let’s Get It On’: The Rehab Prayer That Became Soul’s Greatest Seduction
The most famous invitation in soul music began as a prayer of thanksgiving. When Ed Townsend first sketched out Let’s Get It On, he had just come out of a rehabilitation facility for alcoholism, and the song he heard in his head was a religious one — a man urging himself to get on with…
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How Black Sabbath Made ‘Paranoid’: The Two-Hour Filler That Became a Metal Anthem
The most famous song Black Sabbath ever recorded was an afterthought. Paranoid — the title track of their second album, their biggest single, the riff every young guitarist learns — was written in a rush in June 1970 to fill a gap on a record that was already effectively finished. The band needed about three…
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How Patsy Cline Made ‘Sweet Dreams’: The Last Sessions and the Farewell No One Knew They Were Hearing
On the night of February 5, 1963, Patsy Cline stood in Bradley Studios in Nashville and listened to the playback of the song she had just recorded. According to an account passed down by singer Jan Howard, Cline held up two records: a copy of her very first release, and the brand-new recording of Sweet…
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Queen at Live Aid: Twenty-One Minutes at Wembley That Changed How the World Saw a Band
A summer afternoon in London On Saturday 13 July 1985, Wembley Stadium in London was already deep into one of the longest and most ambitious days in the history of popular music. Live Aid was not a single concert in the ordinary sense. It was two concerts, in London and Philadelphia, linked by satellite and…
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Fleetwood Mac: Tusk — The Million-Dollar Double Album That Refused to Repeat Rumours
After the biggest album in the world There is a particular kind of pressure that only follows a phenomenon. By 1979, Fleetwood Mac were not simply a successful band; they were, for a large part of the listening public, the sound of the late nineteen seventies. Their 1977 album Rumours had produced four American Top…
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Elton John: Two Nights at Dodger Stadium — The 1975 Weekend When a Piano Player Conquered a Ballpark
A ballpark that had said no to rock Dodger Stadium was built for baseball, and for a long time it stayed that way. The ballpark in the Chavez Ravine area of Los Angeles opened its doors for its first baseball game on 10 April 1962, and it quickly became one of the most admired stadiums…
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The Cars: Heartbeat City — How Mutt Lange Turned a New-Wave Band Into Pop Perfection
A band that already knew who it was By 1984, The Cars already knew who they were, and so did their audience. Formed in Boston in the late 1970s by Ric Ocasek, Benjamin Orr, Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes and David Robinson, they had made a series of albums that combined new-wave energy, power-pop melody, and…