Note: This is a pre-production script and may deviate from the finished show.
Hey there, Cousiiiin! Welcome to the next episode of How Good It Is, and today we’re meeting another inspirational woman. Do it for me one time, Jenna!
[♫HGII♫]
I’m Claude Call, and I’m proud to be amongst you. And this week I think the trivia question I have for ye might be on the easy side, so I’m going to complicate it a little bit. The Rolling Stones’ first single to feature horns was a Top Ten record in both the US and the UK, among a few other countries, but there was something else about the single release that upset some people perhaps more than necessary. What was the song, and what was so problematic about the record?
I’ll have that answer near the end of the show.
We’re just ramping up in this series of women who inspired hit songs, and this time around we’re looking at Rosanna Arquette. She was born in August of 1959 in New York City. Her mother Brenda was an actress, a poet, a theater operator and a therapist. Her dad was Lewis Arquette, an actor who’s probably best known for playing the part of J.D. Pickett on the show The Waltons. Pickett owned a metal factory where Erin Walton worked in later seasons of the show. But Rosanna’s most famous ancestor would be Lewis’ father Cliff Arquette. And while that name doesn’t come easily to most people’s minds, folks of a certain age will remember him as the bottom-left square on The Hollywood Squares, in his Charley Weaver persona. Now, Charley Weaver’s gags were generally old, but he still had an cool delivery that often put a slight twist on them to make them new again.
[CHARLEY WEAVER]
And while most celebrities on the show were known for bluffing their way through some of the questions put to them, it was a pretty good bet that when Charley Weaver gave his answer, it was usually correct and you’d do well to agree with him.
But back to Rosanna. Starting around 1977, she began to get regular work in both television and feature films. In 1982 she was nominated for an Emmy award for her appearance in The Executioner’s Song, though for a while she regretted that role because the nude scene she did for European TV made her uncomfortable, and for some time a lot of the offers she got involved her doing similar scenes. Now around that same time, Rosanna Arquette was dating Steve Porcaro, the keyboardist for the band Toto.
[ROSANNA]
But the band’s song “Rosanna” wasn’t written by Steve Porcaro but by their other keyboardist, David Paitch. Now, before you jump to any conclusions, the answer is No. This isn’t a Left Banke situation where one band member is pining after the girlfriend of another band member. That said, the song is definitely about Rosanna Arquette, though for many years both she and the band denied it. And we can accept Paitch’s explanation that she wasn’t the only inspiration for the song; there were some former girlfriends of his own in the mix. But finally, in his 2018 memoir The Gospel According to Luke, Steve Lukather said that not only is the song about Rosanna Arquette, but that Rosanna herself has finally broken down and admitted it.
For what it’s worth, “Rosanna” is probably the band’s favorite track. They consider it to be the ultimate Toto track because of its overall complexity and the way it conveys different shades of pop music. And you can’t really argue with that, given that it’s got some horns, some synths, some power chords, some softly-sung notes alongside some searing highs…it might even be a representative sample of an 80s song. Oh, and here’s an extra bit of trivia: the video for that song, which also came out in 1982, features a young woman dancing throughout most of the video, pursued by several greaser types. In the last third of the song, a second group of dancing greasers shows up. The young woman—who is clearly made up to look a little like Rosanna Arquette, by the way—is Cynthia Rhodes. And one of the greasers in the second group is an unknown actor named Patrick Swayze. Five years later, both Cynthia Rhodes and Patrick Swayze would break out as the power couple at the start of the film Dirty Dancing. Coincidence?…yeah, probably.
The other song, interestingly enough, also has a little bit of dispute around it regarding whether Rosanna is the inspiration. Now, if you want the entire story of the song, go back to Episode 128 where I discuss in great detail the tale behind Peter Gabriel’s hit “In Your Eyes.” I’ll be a little bit briefer here.
In 1986 Gabriel was involved with Rosanna Arquette for a little while, though they kept it on the down low because he was still married at the time. Now, Gabriel has said that the original inspiration was a cathedral he’d visited in Barcelona, which led to a song called “Sagrada”—Spanish for “sacred”—that he later scrapped and then recycled some of its elements into “In Your Eyes.” Gabriel was pretty immersed in the worldbeat sound and the African rhythms at the time, so it kinda makes sense that his songs follow the African tradition of maintaining an ambiguous relationship in songs, where they can easily be about both a relationship with another person, or a relationship with God. That said, both Rosanna and her brother David Arquette have argued that the song is about her. And here’s where the story gets a little interesting.
Three years later, Cameron Crowe is working on the film Say Anything, and he gets to the climactic scene with John Cusack holding the boombox over his head. In the original version of the film, it was a Billy Idol song playing. Now, he and producer James Brooks knew that song wasn’t going to work, so they looked for something else. Crowe heard “In Your Eyes” on a mixtape and realized that that was the song he needed. He called David Geffen to get permission to use the song, but Peter Gabriel has a reputation for NOT giving permission for movies to use his stuff. So Geffen promised to try but wouldn’t guarantee anything. Crowe, in the meantime, put together a new rough cut of the movie and someone at Geffen Records didn’t like the movie, so Crowe thought, well, that’s the ball game. But Rosanna Arquette herself put in a good word for Crowe to Peter Gabriel, and that was at least enough for him to ask for a copy of the film so he could make a decision. A few days later, Crowe was asked to call Gabriel in Europe, and during the phone call Gabriel turned him down, but he also expressed some confusion about why Crowe thought the song would work given the scene involving the overdose. It was then that Crowe realized that Gabriel had been watching Wired, the biopic about John Belushi and not Say Anything, the coming of age flick starring John Cusack. There are some versions of the story where Gabriel gave permission despite his confusion, but Cameron Crowe maintains that consent didn’t happen until after Gabriel had seen the correct movie.
[BUMPER]
And now it’s time to answer that trivia question. Back on Page Two I asked you about the song by the Rolling Stones that was their first to use horns in the arrangement, but there was something else about the record that had some people a little upset.
The song was “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?”, which may also have the record for the longest title for a Rolling Stones single. That’s just a guess on my part, so if I’m wrong I’m happy to be corrected. It was a Number Nine record in the US, Number Five in the UK and Top Ten or Top 20 in other European countries, and it was the first Stones single to feature a horn section. Keith Richards has said that he’d wanted to use horns since around the time of “Satisfaction,” but this was their first opportunity to do it well, and while it sounds truly electric in retrospect, none of the Rolling Stones were quite happy with the way the record came out, though they liked the song itself. But the other thing that had some tongues wagging was the record itself, or more precisely the picture sleeve. It’s on the front of the sleeve in the US and on the back in the UK release, and it’s a picture of the entire band in drag, with Bill Wyman sitting in a wheelchair wearing what appears to be a woman’s military uniform and the other band members behind him, all dressed as women. According to the book The Rolling Stones: All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, by Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, the women’s names were Penelope, Flossie, Milly, Sara and Millicent, though they don’t say who’s who. The photo was taken by Jerry Schatzberg in New York City’s Central Park.
[OUTRO]
And that, Cousin, is a full lid on yet another edition of How Good It Is. If you’re enjoying the show, please take the time to leave a review in your podcast app, or better yet, share it with a friend. Who knows, maybe they’ll be so thankful that they’ll invite you to dress in drag and appear on a record sleeve. I’m on the socials as How Good It Is Pod, and if you’re doing the email thing we’re—“we’re”? Who the the hell is “we”?—anyway, it’s HowGoodPodcast@gmail.com. The theme music for the show is by Jenna Getty, and everything else you can blame on me. Next time around we’ll be looking at songs inspired by Jane Asher. Thank you so much for listening, I’ll talk to you soon.