-
How Marvin Gaye Made ‘What’s Going On’: The ‘Love Song’ Berry Gordy Refused to Release
On May 15, 1969, the Four Tops’ tour bus rolled into Berkeley, California, and Renaldo “Obie” Benson looked out at a street battle. Police were attacking anti-war protesters in People’s Park, in the violence that would be remembered as Bloody Thursday. Benson, a singer in one of Motown’s slickest harmony groups, found himself asking a…
-
How Neil Diamond Made ‘Song Sung Blue’: The Mozart Melody He Turned Into His Last Solo Number One
Some of the biggest hits are stolen, politely, from the dead. In the spring of 1972 Neil Diamond released a single built on a melody Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had written almost two centuries earlier, and he did not dress the borrowing up as anything fancy. Song Sung Blue is three minutes and fifteen seconds long,…
-
How Michael Jackson Made ‘Man in the Mirror’: The Demo Siedah Garrett Refused to Leave Until Monday
Of the eleven songs on Bad, Michael Jackson wrote nine. For an artist guarding the follow-up to Thriller, outside material was close to unthinkable — Quincy Jones warned songwriters that Jackson had not accepted an outside song in two years. Yet the album’s most enduring anthem came from two writers he had never worked with:…
-
How Madonna Made ‘Vogue’: The $5,000 B-Side That Was Too Good to Waste
It was supposed to be a throwaway. In late 1989, Madonna’s label wanted a cheap new track to prop up a forthcoming single, and the man hired to make it was given a budget of $5,000 — petty cash by superstar standards. Three months later that filler track had a David Fincher video, a No.…
-
How Luther Vandross Made ‘A House Is Not a Home’: The Seven-Minute Sermon He Sang to His Idol
The lights were low, the occasion was a tribute, and in the front rows sat Dionne Warwick — the woman whose records had taught a teenage Luther Vandross what singing could be. Vandross walked to the microphone at the 1988 NAACP Image Awards and began, very slowly, to sing Warwick’s own song back to her:…
-
How Lynyrd Skynyrd Made ‘Simple Man’: Two Funerals, One Hour, and a Producer Banished to His Car
Most rock anthems are written by men trying to sound immortal. Simple Man was written by two young men who had just buried the women who raised them. In 1973, within a short span, Ronnie Van Zant lost his grandmother and Gary Rossington lost his mother. The singer and the guitarist of a not-yet-famous Jacksonville…
-
How Louis Armstrong Made ‘West End Blues’: Twelve Seconds of Trumpet That Changed Jazz Forever
Before the band plays a note, before the tune is even stated, Louis Armstrong stands alone. For roughly twelve seconds he pours out a trumpet cadenza — unaccompanied, rhythmically free, climbing and tumbling with an operatic boldness that jazz records were simply not supposed to contain — and by the time the rest of the…
-
How Lionel Richie Made ‘Endless Love’: The 3 A.M. Duet That Outshone the Film and Ruled Nine Weeks at Number One
The film is a footnote now. The song is a monument. In 1981, Lionel Richie — still, officially, a member of the Commodores — was asked to supply music for a glossy teenage romance that the critics would savage, and he answered with a ballad he wrote, produced and sang with Diana Ross. Endless Love…
-
How Linda Ronstadt Made ‘Blue Bayou’: The Orbison Song Two Friends Talked Her Into, and the Hit That Became Her Signature
Roy Orbison’s Blue Bayou had been a beautiful near-miss: a song about a homesick working man saving his money to return to the place where the folks are fine and the world is mine, recorded in the early 1960s and largely overlooked in its writer’s own country. Fourteen years later it fell into the hands…
-
How Kiss Made ‘Beth’: The Drummer’s Joke Song That Buried an Anthem and Topped the Charts
Kiss built their empire on volume, fire and four-inch heels, and their biggest American hit contains none of it. Beth is two minutes and forty-nine seconds of piano, strings and a drummer singing softly about a woman waiting at home. It was written as a joke in somebody else’s band, smuggled onto a Kiss album…