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How Dire Straits Made ‘Tunnel of Love’: The Fairground Waltz That Opened Their Widescreen Album
The first sounds on Dire Straits’ third album are not by Dire Straits at all. Before Mark Knopfler’s guitar makes a single statement, a piano and organ drift through a graceful, old-fashioned waltz — music written in 1945 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for the Broadway musical Carousel. Then the waltz stops, the…
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How Dionne Warwick Made ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose’: The Song She Called Dumb That Won Her a Grammy
Dionne Warwick thought the song was dumb. She said so at the time, she said so fifteen years later in the pages of Ebony, and she has never really taken it back. The song was Do You Know the Way to San Jose — a bright, breezy two minutes and fifty-eight seconds about a failed…
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How The Who Made ‘My Generation’: A Stutter, a Bass Solo, and the Sound of Not Growing Old
People try to put us down — just because we get around. It is the most famous opening gambit in British rock, and it very nearly never happened. When Pete Townshend wrote My Generation in 1965, he was twenty years old, and by his own later account he was lost: a gangly art student turned…
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How David Bowie Made ‘Changes’: The Throwaway Parody That Became His Signature Song
It opened the album that made him, it carries the stutter everybody on earth can sing — ch-ch-ch-ch-changes — and it reads, in hindsight, like the mission statement for the most shape-shifting career in rock. Yet when RCA released “Changes” as a single in January 1972, it failed to chart at all in Britain and…
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How The Police Made ‘Message in a Bottle’: The Castaway Song That Gave Them Their First Number One
The premise is a fable simple enough for a children’s book. A man is shipwrecked alone on an island. He writes a plea for help, seals it in a bottle, and throws it into the sea. A year passes and nobody answers, and he begins to accept that loneliness is simply his fate. Then he…
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How The Pointer Sisters Made ‘Slow Hand’: The Slow-Burning Seduction Its Writers Never Imagined Them Singing
In the summer of 1981, the slowest record on American radio was also one of the biggest. Slow Hand did not rush anywhere — that was rather the point of it — yet it climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for three weeks, held off the summit only by…
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How Diana Ross Made ‘Love Hangover’: The Strobe-Light Session Behind Her First Disco No. 1
In 1975, Diana Ross did not want to sing a disco song. Disco was the music flooding out of the clubs and up the charts, and Motown — the most proudly polished label in Black music — had largely stood apart from it, as had Ross herself. The song that changed her mind was nearly…
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How The Temptations Made ‘Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)’: The Ballad Eddie Kendricks Sang on His Way Out
Listen to Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me) and you hear serenity: strings drifting like curtains in a breeze, a rhythm section moving at a walking pace, and Eddie Kendricks floating above it all in the most tender falsetto Motown ever recorded, singing about a love so perfect it seems real — until the…
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How The Isley Brothers Made ‘Fight the Power’: The Protest Song With One Word Radio Couldn’t Play
In the spring of 1975, the most unlikely troublemakers in American soul music were a family act nearly twenty years into their career. The Isley Brothers had been scoring hits since the late 1950s, surviving every shift in Black music from doo-wop to Motown. Yet the record that carried them to number one that year…
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How Deep Purple Made ‘Perfect Strangers’: The Reunion Song With No Guitar Solo
In the summer of 1984, five men who had barely spoken in a decade drove out to a converted studio in the Vermont countryside to find out whether they still had a band. Ian Gillan, Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord, Roger Glover, and Ian Paice — the Mark II lineup of Deep Purple, the five musicians…