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Category: 1994

167: Without You

One  of my favorite titles for an album comes from The Animals. They did a bunch of albums up to 1969, then for a year or two there were a couple of compilation albums after they broke up.  But in 1977 the Animals reunited and released a new album, titled Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted.

I don’t know what made me think of that. Anyway. (heh.)

This was one of those episodes where, the more I found, the more there was TO find. And so what I thought would be a relatively short episode clocks in at close to twenty minutes. What a bonus for ye!

“Without You” has humble beginnings and a huge, happy ending, except for the composers, Pete Ham and Tom Evans. Although it was a huge hit for Harry Nilsson and later Mariah Carey, neither composer saw much money for it. They, themselves, didn’t see much potential in the song, so they buried it in the dead center of the album, at the end of Side 1. Then in 1975, after years of mismanagement and legal squabbles, Ham committed suicide shortly after learning that all of his money had disappeared. Then, in 1983, following a dispute over royalties from the song, which had been in escrow going back to the Apple Records era, Evans also committed suicide.

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133: All I Wanna Do

When Sheryl Crow finished her debut album, she decided that it didn’t sound the way she wanted it to. So she actually convinced A&M Records to scrap it and let her start over.

The result was a collaboration between her and several other Los Angeles-area musicians who met weekly to help each other with their songwriting. That quickly turned into a project dedicated to putting together Crow’s second debut album. That group became the Tuesday Night Music Club, because that’s the night they’d meet, and it also became the title of that album.

Now, some controversy arose around the TNMC and the album that arose from it, specifically who got credit for what, and it may have led to the death of one of the members. But that all came later on and as a result I didn’t focus on any of that in this episode. Instead I stuck to Crow’s early career and what led to the Club, her (second) first album and how “All I Wanna Do” went from a throwaway track to her breakout hit.

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119–What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

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Another bit I worked way too hard on. But it’s worth blowing up if you’re so inclined.

R.E.M. had released two albums and hadn’t toured since 1989, so when it came time to put together the album that eventually became Monster, they were ready to break the mold a little bit and go back to rockers rather than the relatively quiet, introspective stuff they’d been putting out.

But the project was put through several different tests, including multiple illnesses and the deaths of a couple of Michael Stipe’s close friends a relatively short time apart from one another. At one point the band members were so annoyed with each other that it was thought briefly that they’d broken up.

But they managed to get it together and put together an album that got generally good reviews, especially for the way they were experimenting sonically.

“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” was inspired by an incident involving Dan Rather where he was attacked by someone who, when he was finally identified, turned out to have some severe psychiatric issues. At the time Michael Stipe and Company wrote the song, nobody had any idea who this person was, or if he even existed. But the phrase that Rather cited him repeating over and over during the assault became a bit of a catchphrase for awhile. And Rather himself came to have a sense of humor about it, as you can see in the 1995 clip from the David Letterman Show, below.

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