The AT40 Blog/January 30, 1988: Well worth the wait for a cab

Rarely had the band INXS played around with as much electronic music as it did with a song before. Then again, no song by the Australian band ever climbed higher on the charts than "Need You Tonight" in this country did.

And the band can thank an unidentified cab driver for it ... even if he was a little ticked off over it.

INXS, which had formed in 1977, was coming off a sensational 1986 album, "Listen Like Thieves," which featured the band's breakthrough Top 10 hit in the United States, "What You Need." But the band felt the pressure of having to make a follow-up album, their fourth, that was bigger than "Listen Like Thieves."

So keyboardist Andrew Farriss and lead singer Michael Hutchence went to work on the next project, which would simply be called "Kick," in late 1986. They found inspiration in one form or another to craft together 10 tracks for the album. But the one intriguing song they put together started when Farriss was waiting on a cab to pick him up to take him to the airport in his native Sydney and on a plane heading to Hong Kong.

While waiting, Farriss suddenly heard a riff in his head and he needed to get it down somehow. And just when he thought he could complete his musical thought, the taxi driver arrived. Farriss reportedly made up an excuse to head back into his house and record the riff, saying he "forgot something." So he ran inside and the taxi driver patiently waited.

And waited. And waited. And continued to wait.

While the waiting went on, Farriss grabbed his guitar and a tape recorder he placed on a table next to his bed. From there, he sat down and began to play out the riff he heard in his head -- three stiff, quick notes, followed by a jumbled downslide, repeated twice. Total time to put the right track in his mind down: 55 minutes.

By the time he zipped his guitar up in its case and headed back out with tape in hand, there was one awfully upset taxi driver still waiting for him. Farriss knew it -- he gave the driver a good tip after getting to the airport and headed on the flight to Hong Kong to join up with the rest of the band. Once in Hong Kong, Farriss hooked up with Hutchence to finish the track, which the band would record in Sydney when they got back.

When recording the song with producer Chris Thomas, the band went more to the electronic side than it had ever done with any composition. They combine sequencers with drum tracks and numerous layered guitar riffs. They then combined that with click tracks for a frequent synthesizer chord and made sure the song was accentuated by rim shots by drummer/percussionist Jon Farriss, Andrew's brother.

By the time everything was put together, "Need You Tonight" was done. Well, almost done.

For the album, the band decided to segue "Need You Tonight" into another track that was almost finished, but needed a mutual compromise to get done, a song called "Mediate." Farriss had written the music, but had no words to it. So he asked Hutchence to write the "rap" words to it in exchange for Farriss finishing up Hutchence's musical piece with no words called "Guns To The Sky," which would be the first track on the album and cassette of "Kick." In the end, Hutchence took the full writing credit for "Mediate," while Farriss took the credit for "Guns To The Sky."

The two tracks together were five minutes and 37 seconds long, but it would be solely "Need You Tonight" that would be the leadoff single from the album. However, there was one more problem: When the band and manager Chris Murphy handed the finished product to Atlantic Records, they were not at all pleased.

"They hated it, absolutely hated it," Murphy told writers Jeff Jenkins and Ian Meldrum in 2007. "They said there was no way they could get this music on rock radio. They said it was suited for black radio, but they didn't want to promote it that way. The president of the label told me that he'd give us $1 million to go back to Australia and make another album."

Problem was neither Murphy nor the band were going back Down Under to re-record the album. It was a simple game of "take it or leave it." In a game of musical chicken, Atlantic blinked. They agreed that "Need You Tonight" would be the lead song for the album. Now it was time to do the music video and the band and Murphy called in Australian director Richard Lowenstein to shoot the video. Lowenstein had successfully captured the band in 5,000 still slides in split-second speed that made them famous for the music video of "What You Need," so he was quite confident he could pull another rabbit out of his hat with the band.

For the music video, he combined the band performing the song with different styles of animation for "Need You Tonight." To do that, Lowenstein said he cut up individual frames off of 35 mm film and photocopied the original frames, re-laying the frames on top of the original footage.

With that part of the video done, Lowenstein began work on the "other" part of the single, the unreleased "Mediate." For that, Lowenstein had a fresh approach from an idea of the past. He copied the 1966 music video of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," highlighted by Dylan showing cue cards with words form his song on them without lip-syncing in the video. The band wrote the key phrases of "Mediate" based off Hutchence's rapping rhymes on cue cards, all that end in the suffix -ate. Though all the band members did their best to keep up with Hutchence's flow, they managed to pull it off, finished by saxophone player Kirk Pengilly's playing to the coda as the last sign reads "Sax Solo."

The video for the song hit MTV for continual play in early October 1987 and soon after that, "Need You Tonight" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 93 on October 24, 1987. The single, which featured Hutchence's sly, sexy, teasing voice, the jarring guitar work of the third Farriss brother, Tim, and the bass work of Garry Gary Beers, would leap 22 notches to No. 71, then leap another 17 places to No. 54. After getting to No. 44 the next week, "Need You Tonight" made its Top 40 debut on November 21, 1987, at No. 38, the band's third Top 40 hit after "What You Need" and their 1983 debut hit, "The One Thing," which peaked at No. 30.

"Need You Tonight" would bound up nine places to No. 29, then another four to No. 25 on December 5, 1987. A week later, it was in the Top 20 at No. 18. Two weeks after that on December 26, 1987, "Need You Tonight" scampered six places from No. 16 to No. 10, giving the band a second Top 10 hit.

After the one week break from the chart, "Need You Tonight" leaped up to No. 6 and one week later on January 16, 1988, it was at No. 4, uprooting the band's biggest hit "What You Need." The next week, it jumped up another two places to No. 2 before landing at No. 1 the week of January 30, 1988, displacing Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel" from the top spot. The sweet success of their first No. 1 hit was short-lived for INXS, though. By the following week, they would be displaced from the top by Tiffany's hot smash and second chart-topper, "Could've Been." But "Need You Tonight" would end up spending eight weeks in the Top 10 and 16 weeks total in the Top 40.

In the end, "Need You Tonight," one of the many songs on an album that Atlantic Records wanted to scrap and demand a new album from the band, would finish 1988 as the No. 2 song of the year behind George Michael's No. 1 smash "Faith."

That album, by the way, would peak at No. 3 on the album chart in the U.S., and would score the band four Top 10 hits from it -- "Need You Tonight," "Devil Inside," "New Sensation" and "Never Tear Us Apart." Along with album tracks like "Guns To The Sky," "Mystify," "The Loved One" and the title track, "Kick" would be considered one of the greatest albums in college radio history. The album, which sold 6 million copies in the U.S., was the springboard to better things from the band as the 1980s became the 1990s.

However, the next two albums/CDs/cassettes, "X" and "Welcome To Wherever You Are," never had the "kick" to match "Kick," selling double platinum and platinum, respectively. Then "Full Moon, Dirty Hearts," released in 1993, did not sell well at all as the band was caught in the transitional period between rock and grunge music. They took off for the next four years, then came back in 1997 with "Elegantly Wasted." The CD, at times, sounded a lot like "Kick" did with its dance-like sound and funky style, but not quite the energy of the album that made the band famous. It did well on the American album chart, peaking at No. 14, giving the band some hope for future releases.

But the world of INXS changed tragically on the morning of Saturday, November 22, 1997 when Hutchence's lifeless body was found hanging from a belt he tied himself to in a Ritz-Carlton hotel room in Sydney, reportedly upset that he was not able to see his daughter, Tiger Lily, and girlfriend Paula Yates due to issues Yates was having in traveling from England to Australia while still haggling over the custody of her other two kids with British superstar and former husband Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Live Aid fame. Five days after his death, Hutchence was memorialized at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney and was ultimately cremated. A February 1998 autopsy concluded that Hutchence, who was two months away from his 38th birthday, had committed suicide and was depressed and under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

When Hutchence died, INXS pretty much died, too, that day. In 2005, the band held a contest on American television titled Rock Star: INXS to find the new lead singer. That honor went to Canadian J.D. Fortune, who immediatley joined the band in the studio to record the CD "Switch," and while the CD was successful in Canada, going triple platinum, and Australia, where it was double platinum, it did not sell well in the U.S., selling less than 400,000 copies. Drug problems dogged Fortune and in September 2011, he was released from the band. Tired of finding another singer, and tired of the whole music scene -- and never being able to find a replacement for the charismatic Hutchence -- INXS called it a day on November 11, 2012, ending a 35-year run as a group. Ciarin Gribbin, a Northern Ireland native, was called in to be the band's lead vocalist until the end.

Who knows how much bigger the band would have been if Hutchence had lived. But while they were hot, they made some amazing music. And that Lowenstein-directed video for "Need You Tonight/Mediate" would be a memory maker, too -- it would win five MTV Awards at the 1988 show, including the highlight Video of the Year.

All because a cab was late for one of the two main songwriters so he could have time to expand on a riff that was stuck in his head and all because the late cab driver patiently waited for the songwriter to put down that riff on tape.

It proves the point that in the end, some things are worth waiting for.

The AT40 Blog/January 24, 1987: The "Ties" that bound to No. 1

Billy Vera has Michael J. Fox and wife Tracy Pollan to thank for the biggest hit of his career. Fox and Pollan, though, may have a different view of that.

"Tracy and I couldn't get on the dance floor anywhere in the world for like 10 years without them playing 'What would you think...'" Fox sheepishly told Rachael Ray on her television talk show in 2007.

Thanks to the producers of the show Fox was a star on, Family Ties, Vera got a second chance at a hit song in late 1986. "At This Moment" was recorded during a live show at the Roxy in Los Angeles on January 16, 1981. That song and others was featured on a live album by Vera and his band, The Beaters, called "Billy And The Beaters."

Vera, born William Patrick McCord on May 28, 1944, in Riverside, Calif., was a blue-eyed soul singer dating back to the 1960s, scoring a No. 36 hit with duet partner and gospel singer Judy Clay on "Country Girl, City Man" in 1968.

But when the 1970s came along, Vera's career cooled down considerably. He'd continue to tour, but would have no luck in chart singles. He tried his luck with songwriting and one of his songs, "I Really Got The Feeling," would be on the "B" side of a No. 1 country hit called "Baby I'm Burnin'" by Dolly Parton in 1979. That gave him encouragement to leave New York and head back to Los Angeles and make it as a singer-songwriter there. And it was in L.A. that Vera reconnected with good friend and bass player Chuck Fiore to put a band together that had all the elements of Ray Charles' stage act of the 1950s and '60s, filled completely with backing vocalists and a horn section, pedal steel guitar, piano, drums, Fiore's bass and Vera on guitar and vocals.

Thus, the Beaters were born. The group made a name for themselves with Monday midnight shows at L.A.'s Troubadour. One record label that was listening to their sound was Alfa Records based in Japan, which had already opened an office in Los Angeles. The band signed with Alfa and the first project they got themselves involved with was a live album of what Alfa representatives saw in person at that club.

The album didn't garner enough buzz, peaking at No. 118 on the Top 200 album chart in the spring of 1981, but one of the songs from that live album caught on: The raucous "I Can Take Care Of Myself" offered Vera his second Top 40 hit and first in 13 years when it got to No. 39 before fizzling out.

Then came the second single from it, a beautiful song called "At This Moment," which incorporated the music Vera loved as a young man in the 1960s -- blues filled with powerful horns and an emotional vocal. Vera said he wrote the song when he was 33 years old and just started dating a 20-year-old, who told him about the guy whose heart she broke and how he felt about it when he dumped him for Vera. Vera was struck by the story and wrote two-thirds of the song that night, but could never finish the song until he found the heartache himself after she broke up with him. He said that's where he added the line, "I'd subtract 20 years of my life."

However, as positive as he felt about the song which was first rejected by Dionne Warwick and Olivia Newton-John in 1977 before he and the band performed it, the public didn't buy the single and radio stations didn't play the song. It got as high as No. 79 that summer. And Vera said he thought he knew why "At This Moment" didn't catch on the first time.

He said in an interview, "They (Alfa Records) had a very good promotion man ... Bernie was his name. And he wasn't getting along with the boss. So he quit just as 'At This Moment' came out. The guy they hired to take his place, he couldn't have promoted the Beatles. He was this terrible promotion man. So that's why 'At This Moment' didn't do what it should have done."

In 1982, Billy Vera did a self-titled solo album, but nothing came of it. And as fast as it was for him to have a Top 40 hit record with a band, it disintegrated just as quickly. Alfa Records closed its Los Angeles office in 1982, reportedly disgruntled with how Americans were running their L.A.-based office, and suddenly, Vera and the band had no record label and no possible record deal in the works

Meanwhile, in 1985, Vera and the Beaters were performing their regular show at a club in Southern California, still struggling to make it back into the spotlight. At the show, he and the band did all their well-known songs, including "At This Moment." In the audience, though, that night was a television producer that was about to turn things around for the band.

He was the producer of an NBC sitcom that just finished its third season on the air, Family Ties, starring Michael J. Fox as Alex Keaton, Meredith Baxter-Birney and Steven Gross as his parents and Justine Bateman and Tina Yothers as his sisters. The show finished fifth in the final Nielsen ratings for the 1984-85 year and it was during the show's down time that the producer was there to take in Vera and his band. It was in that show he heard the song that would be perfect for the burgeoning romance to start the new season between Fox's character and Ellen Reed, a new role for the fourth season played by Pollen.

That was "At This Moment." So one day, Vera, who had kept his music career going on weekends by taking on day jobs as an actor doing bit parts in the movies and television, got a phone call from the producer who inquired about using the song. Vera said he had his publisher make a deal with the producer and the show to use the song. To help aid the cause, Vera went back into a studio with the band to record "snippets" of the song since they were only going to be used in 15-20 second intervals and the fact the original version of "At This Moment" was done in front of a live audience and would have ruined the flow of the scene with the sound of the crowd cheering the band on.

So in the fourth season opener, a two-parter aired on September 25 and October 2, 1985, as the fledgling romance takes off with Alex falling for Ellen with the complication that Ellen is engaged to another guy. And in the backdrop during the shows was Vera's song, "At This Moment." It would be played throughout the season in different episodes.

And with the song's continual play on the show, people began to mail NBC's headquarters asking who the singer of the song was and where they could get a copy of the song. The mail got shipped to Vera, and he was more than overjoyed that the song got this kind of popularity. But there was a problem.

"It was no longer out, so you couldn't buy it," Vera said. "So I got the idea, 'Well, maybe somebody will let me record it again.' I went to all the record companies where I still had some contacts, and nobody was interested at all. And then I was talking to a fellow by the name of Richard Foos, who owned a company called Rhino Records, which was in the business of re-issuing oldies, and I told him what had happened. I said, 'Hey Richard, how many records do you need to sell to break even?' He had low overhead at the time, because it was a small company. He said, 'Oh, about 2,000 copies.' I said, 'Well, I'll tell you what: I'll guarantee 2,000 albums! I can sell them in the clubs if need be. Will you put it out?' He said, 'Sure.'"

So Foos and Rhino made a deal to gain ownership of the two Billy Vera & The Beaters albums made by Alfa Records. All seemed dandy, right? Well, by the time Foos and Rhino had made the acquisition, a bad thing happened, according to Vera.

"We missed the re-runs (of the shows featuring the song)," he said. "That was bad, but at least I had records to sell in the clubs."

Then, as if someone handed Vera another rope to pull himself up from disaster, the producers of Family Ties played the song again in the second episode of the fifth season on October 2, 1986, in which Ellen, ironically, was breaking up with Alex. But this time, it wasn't the re-recorded portions that Vera sang for the show in 1985. This time, Fox went up to a jukebox that had the song in it and played the original live version of the record from 1981 -- and America cried along with Fox as he began to weep openly as the song played.

The phones lit up the NBC switchboard like a Christmas tree after the episode ended. Vera said he had 20 phone messages waiting for him when he got home from a show that night. And NBC called him.

"NBC called us up, and they said, 'My God, we've never had any response like this in the history of the network for a song. The switchboards are lighting up, we're getting letters, telegrams, where can we find this record?'" Vera recounted.

Rhino had the rights to the song, but because they were not your average, run-of-the-mill record label that puts out new songs by new artists, there was no single for "At This Moment." Things changed, though, when local radio stations began asking for "At This Moment" to be played and Rhino, which had done some pressing of the song after acquiring the rights to it, did more work in pressing the 45 single for radio airplay and record buying.

And on the week of November 8, 1986, "At This Moment" made its Hot 100 return at a low No. 96. But in the next three weeks, the song went up the chart like a rocket launcher, going from No. 96 to No. 80 to No. 69 to No. 50. And on the week of December 6, 1986, "At This Moment" became the second Top 40 hit for Billy Vera & The Beaters at No. 38.

Two weeks later, "At This Moment" leaped 10 places to No. 22. And on December 27, 1986, it was camped in the Top 15 at No. 15.

With the holiday week taken off, "At This Moment" continued its climb, moving from No. 15 to No. 9, the band's first Top 10 hit. The next week, it jumped four places to No. 5.

Then on the week of January 24, 1987, 10 years after first writing the song and six years and eight days after recording the song live at the Roxy in L.A., Vera and his band found themselves in the odd situation of being at No. 1 with "At This Moment" as it leaped four notches from No. 5. It would spend two weeks at the top.

Vera would eventually sign at little Macola Records in 1987, recording the album, "The Billy Vera Album." As he set out to record the album, Rhino Records put out the original live album from 1981 with other material on it that Vera and the band recorded that they now owned called "By Request: Billy Vera & The Beaters." The album would peak at No. 17 on the Top 200 chart, easily the group's most successful album.

Vera continued to work with the Beaters into the 21st century even as the possibility of another hit was all but gone. Both he and the band still work and Vera has taken up another aspect of the music business -- historian, writing the liner notes for over 200 re-issued albums by artists ranging from Little Richard to Louis Prima to Sam Cooke to Ray Charles. In 2013, Vera won a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for the Charles box set "Singular Notes: The Complete ABC Singles."

There's no doubt that Vera has spread his wings, working as a historian, a songwriter and still recording to this day. Still, his biggest musical feat was getting a 10-year-old song he had recorded live four years later and recorded in bit parts four years after that to No. 1 two years later.

It's probably also certain that real-life husband and wife Fox and Pollan can safely go back onto the dance floor again with smiles on their faces.

The AT40 Blog/January 23, 1971: From anonymity to stardom

Dawn was singing for the shy and timid man on "Knock Three Times."

The studio group took this song written by L. Russell Brown and Irwin Levine and made every male petrified of ever approaching a woman feel comfortable about the fact they weren't alone.

Of course, the only "shy" thing about "Knock Three Times" was the identity of the group. When the act's first hit, "Candida" came out in the summer of 1970, it was Casey Kasem who tried to make heads or tails of the group on AT40, saying Dawn was "a studio group was from Philadelphia."

Well that wasn't all true. The studio group was actually from New York City, brought together by Hank Medress, a member of the group The Tokens, who scored a No. 1 hit in 1961 with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." By now, Medress was a producer at Bell Records and he had gotten a copy of "Candida," written by session writer-singer Toni Wine and Levine, but the singers that kept coming into the session weren't up to snuff for Medress. He disliked just about every one of them.

So Medress found and old buddy who was once a teen idol in the early 1960s, but had weened his way out of music to working for the publishing arm of Columbia Records, April-Beachwood Music. That man was Tony Orlando, a hit maker with such classics as "Bless You" and "Halfway To Paradise." By 1970, Orlando was 26 years old and content to working in publishing to help support a wife and a young son.

Medress asked Orlando to record this song called "Candida," because, it was found later, Orlando could sound a little more "ethnic" on the vocal than anyone else who came in to record the song (Orlando was part Greek and part Puerto Rican). Orlando had an itch to go back into the studio to record something, but working at Columbia Records and recording for Bell Records would have been a conflict of interest. However, knowing Orlando had the itch to record, Medress made a deal -- he'd be anonymous on the record and his vocal would be slightly dubbed so no one would know who was singing. During an off day, Orlando recorded "Candida" in front of backing vocalists that included Wine and Jay Siegel, another former member of the Tokens.

Getting the confidence that Orlando's name would not be put on the record, Medress named the act "Dawn" and four studio musicians -- none of which were Orlando -- found their way onto the cover of the 45 rpm single sleeve.

"Candida" climbed as high as No. 3 in this country, but was No. 1 in half a dozen countries to become a worldwide smash.

Something else happened, too -- Orlando caught the fever. He wanted to record more. So in September 1970, Orlando was back in the studio again, this time to record a song similar to "Candida." This time around, Wine, Siegel, Robin Grean and Linda November recorded the backing vocals behind Orlando. The song "Knock Three Times" is about a shy man who has a thing for a woman on the floor below him in their tenement and leaves a note for her. On the note, he simply asks her to knock three times on the ceiling if she wants to be with him and twice on the pipe "if the answer is no."

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 21, 1970, at No. 90. A week later, it zoomed up 25 notches to No. 65 and the week after that, December 5, 1970, "Knock Three Times" landed in the Top 40 at No. 33 after a gaudy 32-notch climb.

By the next week, December 12, it was in the Top 20 at No. 20. One week later, the song rocketed into the Top 10 up 14 notches to No. 6.

From there, "Knock Three Times" had gone to No. 4, then No. 3 and then No. 2 by January 9, 1971. It was inevitable that the song would be a No. 1 smash, but had to wait another week as George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" finished out its fourth straight week at the top.

And so on January 23, 1971, "Knock Three Times" made the final move from No. 2 to get to No. 1 and spend three straight weeks at the top of the Hot 100. "Knock Three Times" would spend an impressive 11 weeks in the Top 10 and would spend 16 weeks total in the Top 40. "Knock Three Times" would finish as the No. 10 song of the year, according to Billboard.

By the spring of 1971, Orlando was comfortable being up front with his employer and come clean that he was recording for a rival company. He eventually told Columbia what he was doing and that he resigned his post with the publishing company. And the timing could not have been more perfect because music critics and music fans were demanding to know who the heck "Dawn" was. And with two Top 3 hits, Bell Records wanted to send a touring act on the road to promote the hits and the album the studio group had just recorded.

So with Orlando in the fold, the next task was to hire backing vocalists. He knew two young ladies who worked at both Motown and Stax Records. Joyce Vincent-Wilson and Telma Hopkins were happy to join Orlando on tour in the summer of 1971. It wasn't until 1972's "Runaway/Happy Together" that Orlando, Wilson and Hopkins recorded a song together.

And the legend grew for Dawn, which then became Dawn featuring Tony Orlando and ultimately, Tony Orlando & Dawn. The trio would score 14 Top 40 hits and two more No. 1 hits -- "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round The Old Oak Tree" in 1973 and "He Don't Love You (Like I Love You)" in 1975. They had their own variety show in the mid-1970s and Orlando had all the fame any human could have and more.

But it all changed on the morning of January 29, 1977, when Orlando's closest friend and Puerto Rican soul mate, Freddie Prinze, the star of the TV show Chico And The Man, committed suicide at the age of 22 years old. It devastated Orlando, who didn't completely know about the bouts of depression his best friend was going through. The grief ate through Orlando, but as a professional he continued on. Then on July 22, 1977 during a show with Hopkins and Wilson in Massachusetts, Orlando inexplicably walked off the stage and didn't return. His friend's suicide, coupled with the recent passing of his sister Rhonda at the age of 21 from cerebral palsy had gotten to him.

Tony Orlando and Dawn was over.

Or so many thought they were over.

In 1988, Orlando, Wilson and Hopkins returned to do a tour. Orlando, now 43, was healthy again and in the right frame of mind. The trio (Wilson's sister Pamela filling in when Hopkins had to do acting work) toured on and off for five years until finally calling it over on their own terms in 1993.

Orlando continues to be front and center as a singer and most of the time, he has a show that he performs in his new home in Branson, Mo. He also continues to go on tour where he can and he'll be touring again in the summer of 2016.

At 71 years old, he's enjoying his life more than ever before. He's no longer in the shadows like he was when he asked to be under secrecy when recording for Madress and Bell Records in 1970.

In other words, he's not that shy kid wanting to get a girl's attention like in the song that gave him his first No. 1 hit in 1971.

The AT40 Blog/January 15, 1972: The tale about The Day The Music Died

Rarely does the experience of being a paperboy influence one's life. Usually, the job of the young boy -- or girl -- is to get the newspaper put together and placed either in the mailbox or on the driveway or on the front porch of the recipient. There's nothing that memorable about it.

Well, that is unless you were Don McLean and the day was February 4, 1959. It was that cold, winter Wednesday morning when McLean, then a 13-year-old living in New Rochelle, N.Y., opened up the stack of newspapers that had been dropped off that early morning to deliver to people leaving for work before he had to go to school. And it was there on the front page that McLean saw the story that changed his entire life.

The death of his music idol, Buddy Holly. Holly, the gangling Texan with the glasses who had scored major hits in the late 1950s with "Oh, Boy," "Peggy Sue" and "That'll Be The Day" with his group, The Crickets, was killed in a plane crash along with two fledgling stars of the young rock 'n roll era, J.P. Richardson, aka The Big Bopper, and 17-year-old Ritchie Valens, whose career was beginning to soar because of his single, "Donna." The trio of stars were flying out from Clear Lake, Iowa on a plane that Holly had chartered after a tour performance by the artists at a dance to take to Fargo, N.D., when pilot Roger Peterson flew into a blizzard he never got an advisory for to steer clear. The plane crashed killing the trio of stars and the pilot and it wasn't until the next day when among the snow drifts that had formed in the cornfield where the lifeless bodies laid could anyone get to them.

It was a tragedy that shook the country -- and McLean -- to the core. McLean lived with that memory all through the 1960s as he saw the world of music change dramatically and radically. And in early 1971, he started writing what would become a legendary opus while living in Cold Spring, N.Y. Once done, he got to perform his piece as the opening act for singer-songwriter Laura Nyro on Sunday, March 14, 1971, at Philadelphia's Temple University.

McLean put his heart-felt feelings of how his 13-year-old self reacted when he crafted the composition that would become "American Pie," calling it "the day the music died."

In an interview on the British TV show Songbook, McLean explained how he opened the song by saying, "For some reason I wanted to write a big song about America and about politics, but I wanted to do it in a different way. As I was fiddling around, I started singing this thing about the Buddy Holly crash, the thing that came out (singing), 'Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.' I thought, 'Whoa, what's that?' And then the day the music died, it just came out. And I said, 'Oh, that is such a great idea.'"

But it was far from a complete thought. McLean was about to embark on the 12-year journey of rock 'n roll after the plane crash and how things turned out.

"And then I thought, 'I can't have another slow song on this record,'" McLean said of the melancholy start to the record, looking to make a change of pace after the first verse. "I've got to speed this up. I came up with this chorus, crazy chorus. And then one time about a month later I just woke up and wrote the other five verses. Because I realized what it was, I knew what I had. And basically, all I had to do was speed up the slow verse with the chorus and then slow down the last verse so it was like the first verse, and then tell the story, which was a dream. It is from all these fantasies, all these memories that I made personal.

"Buddy Holly's death to me was a personal tragedy," McLean continued. "As a child, a 15-year-old, I had no idea that nobody else felt that way much. I mean, I went to school and mentioned it and they said, 'So what?' So I carried this yearning and longing, if you will, this weird sadness that would overtake me when I would look at this album, 'The Buddy Holly Story,' because that was my last Buddy record before he passed away."

Make no mistake -- McLean's grief over what happened on that February day still made an impact on him. The emotion was raw. In composing the other five verses, he introduced "other characters" in the next 12 years of the song to tell the story of rock 'n roll.

"The King," of course, was Elvis Presley.

"The Jester" was singer/songwriter/poet Bob Dylan. The line "While the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown" is an apparent reference to Dylan taking over for Presley as the prominent American male solo star of the 1960s.

"Helter skelter in the summer swelter, the birds flew off in a fall-out shelter -- eight miles high and falling fast" was in reference to The Byrds, the folk-rock act who had a hit single that had a drug aura to it in "Eight Miles High" in 1966.

When he sang "Sergeants played a marching tune," the thought was McLean was describing the Beatles and their legendary 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in which they experimented on the album with different sounds while reportedly taking acid.

"While Lenin read a book on Marx" may have been an elbow nudge and "name play" toward Beatle John Lennon and his so-called socialistic idology of Marxism he was partaking in after the Beatles' breakup and the beginning of his solo career.

The "helter skelter" part mentioned before had something to do with the Charles Manson cult murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969, killed by Manson's "followers" who reacted and acted through mind control and drug use.

"And there we were all in one place, a generation lost in space with no time left to start again" is an undeniable reference toward the famous three-day Woodstock concert in upstate New York in August 1969.

"And as I watched him on the stage, my hands were clinched in fists of rage. No Angel born in Hell, could break that Satan's spell," is another clear reference to the night of December 6, 1969, and the infamous free rock music festival at Altamont in California in which a young African-American man named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by members of the Hell's Angels gang who was hired by the Rolling Stones, performing when the murder took place, to "keep order" that night.

What McLean did was go from the innocence he felt as a young boy in the early days of rock 'n roll and show how that innocence got wasted away by the darker and bleek side of  the evolving music scene in the late 1960s in comparison.

After going through all six verses of this tune, McLean summed up his emotion that he couldn't go back to those "better" days of the 1950s, singing, "And in the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried and the poets dreamed. But not a word was spoken. The church bells all were broken. And the three men I admired most -- the Father, Son, and The Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast the day the music died."

McLean knew he had a masterpiece on his hands and when he recorded it, he did something clever with producer Ed Freeman -- they started the song in monotone to represent the style the music was recorded in during the 1950s, then when the beat of the song got faster and the story was being told of the next 12 years, it switched to stereo sound.

And what a recording! When it was all said and done, "American Pie" was a whopping, unheard of 8 minutes and 22 seconds, over two times longer than a normal song. And that caused a problem when United Artists Records decided to release "American Pie" as the first single from the album of the same name. They were not abashed by releasing it as the whole 8-minute and 22-second version on the album, but radio stations resisted playing it because of the length, some having a "rule" that no song was to hit the airwaves going longer than 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

So UA Records hatched yet another plan: The song would be cut into two halves for the single -- Part I was on the "A" side and Part II would be the "B" side. Even doing that, the song was still over four minutes long on both sides.

But those radio stations that did want to play it knew they had something special. And those stations did play the album version from start to finish, while the Top 40 stations would play either side "A" or side "B."

And when the song leaped from No. 69 to No. 34 on December 4, 1971, it left the staff at American Top 40 with a quandary of what to do or how to play the song. So they would normally play the "A" side of the single as the record jumped from No. 34 to No. 25 to No. 9 by December 18, 1971. The following two weeks when AT40 was off from the regular countdown to do a Christmas countdown show during that week and to count down the 40 biggest songs of 1971 the week of New Years, "American Pie" jumped from No. 9 to No. 3 to No. 2, now in the on-deck circle to become a No. 1 song.

So when AT40 returned with the regular countdown the following week on January 8, 1972, the show made the conscious decision to play the entire 8-minute, 22-second version. It probably wasn't what did the trick, but the very next week of January 15, 1972, "American Pie" had displaced "Brand New Key" by Melanie as the No. 1 song in America. It would begin a four-week run at the top, which would include February 3, 1972 -- the 13th anniversary of the deaths of Holly, Richardson and Valens.

AT40 would play "American Pie" one more time in its 8-minute, 22-second version the week of March 18, 1972 as it looked as if its run on the chart was over.

The song made McLean instantly famous -- something he never felt comfortable with.

""I was headed on a certain course, and the success I got with 'American Pie' really threw me off," McLean said in a 1973 interview. "It just shattered my lifestyle and made me quite neurotic and extremely petulant. I was really prickly for a long time. If the things you're doing aren't increasing your energy and awareness and clarity and enjoyment, then you feel as though you're moving blindly. That's what happened to me."

McLean never revealed the true meanings of any of the lyrics within the song after the first verse, saying that he left that up to others to interpret. But when asked in an interview in the 1980s what "American Pie" was all about, McLean jokingly said, "It means never having to work again for the rest of my life."

Well he did work. "Vincent," his ode to tormented painter Vincent Van Gogh, was a No. 12 hit as the follow-up. Overall, McLean finished with six Top 40 hits and had a second Top 10 hit in 1981 with a country-tinged remake of Roy Orbison's 1961 classic, "Crying," peaking at No. 5.

In 2000, Madonna brought "American Pie" back in a remake for a movie she starred in, The Next Best Thing. But even with the best of intentions, Madonna's version was badly panned and a lot of people consider her version of a legendary classic "the worst song ever recorded." But one person praised her for doing the song -- McLean. He put out a statement saying, " It is a gift for her to have recorded 'American Pie.' I have heard her version and I think it is sensual and mystical. I also feel that she's chosen autobiographical verses that reflect her career and personal history. I hope it will cause people to ask what's happening to music in America. I have received many gifts from God, but this is the first time I have ever received a gift from a goddess."

In April 2015, McLean's original manuscript for "American Pie" was sold at auction for a tidy little sum of $1.2 million. In the catalog description, McLean wrote, "Basically in 'American Pie' things are heading in the wrong direction … It is becoming less idyllic. I don't know whether you consider that wrong or right but it is a morality song in a sense. I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015… there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'"

And that alone makes "American Pie" the classic that it became, one of the greatest songs ever recorded. McLean said he was proud of making the song.

"It is biographical in nature and I don't think anyone has ever picked up on that," McLean wrote on his Web site, www.don-mclean.com. "The song starts off with my memories of the death of Buddy Holly. But it moves on to describe America as I was seeing it and how I was fantasizing it might become, so it's part reality and part fantasy, but I'm always in the song as a witness or as even the subject sometimes in some of the verses. You know how when you dream something you can see something change into something else and it's illogical when you examine it in the morning, but when you're dreaming it seems perfectly logical. So it's perfectly OK for me to talk about being in the gym and seeing this girl dancing with someone else and suddenly have this become this other thing that this verse becomes and moving on just like that. That's why I've never analyzed the lyrics to the song. They're beyond analysis. They're poetry."

Poetry that a former paperboy made into a pure classic.

The AT40 Blog/January 13, 1979: The splashy debut by a group of studio musicians

David Hungate had been a session musician for Boz Scaggs and Alice Cooper. Bobby Kimball had formed a band with three other members of the broken-up Three Dog Night called S.S. Fools and had been part of another band in Louisiana that would end up becoming LeRoux. Steve Porcaro had played as a session musician on Gary Weaver's 1976 album "Dream Weaver." Steve Lukather also worked as a session musician on Boz Scaggs' "Silk Degrees" album in 1976.

And David Paich and Jeff Porcaro worked with numerous musicians as -- you guessed it! -- studio players, playing alongside the likes of Scaggs, Cher, Glen Campbell, Jon Anderson of Yes, George Benson, Andy Williams and Chicago. And Paich's father, Marty, was a well-known arranger and who also worked on the music for television series, winning an Emmy Award for his work for his arrangement on the show Ironside. 

So when Hungate, Kimball, Steve Porcaro and Lukather teamed up with David Paich and Jeff Porcaro to work together as Toto in 1977, it wasn't as if they didn't have the demeanor of what to do in the music studio. They were tired, actually, of working for others. They wanted to make it as a group.

Soon as they formed, Paich began work on writing the songs that would make up the band's self-titled debut, slated for late 1978. While the band was in the studio putting tracks down, there were other bands at the same studio they were recording at in Los Angeles at the time. So to distinguish the demo reels from other acts, Paich scratched on the word "toto" so no one else would pick up the reels. The first person who noticed that was Hungate, who played bass guitar in the group.

The band worked from May until early September 1978 putting the songs together for what would be that debut album. And when it was completed with each member of the group working on the production, Paich wondered aloud what to name the group. Hungate, remembering what Paich scribbled down on those demo tapes, said, "Why not Toto?" Paich apparently looked at Hungate like he had three heads. But then Hungate explained further.

"Toto, in Latin, means 'all-encompassing,'" Hungate said. The band had played so many genres of music with so many different artists that it made sense. The name Toto stuck.

The album "Toto" was released on October 17, 1978 to mixed reviews with Rolling Stone blistering the band and album, saying, "None of the four lead singers in the group (Kimball, Lukather, Paich and Steve Porcaro) are better than passable."

Columbia Records thought one track in particular was good enough for an immediate release. That was Paich's solo composition, "Hold The Line," a song that features various members strongly throughout the record -- from Paich's piano work from the start to the searing lead guitar work of Lukather to Jeff Porcaro's drumwork to the soaring lead vocals by Kimball, who carries that song from start to finish with fiery passion kicking it into overdrive at points.

Everybody pretty much agreed at Columbia it was a sure-fire winner. "Hold The Line" hit the Hot 100 before the album was released, debuting on October 7, 1978, at No. 84. The single made two modest eight-point leaps to No. 76 then No. 68 before going up seven more places to No. 61 on October 28. Another modest move took place up to No. 53 on November 4.

Then it happened -- the leap it needed to be noticed. On the week of November 11, 1978, "Hold The Line" blasted up 16 notches to land the band their first Top 40 hit at No. 37. Two weeks later on November 25, it zoomed up 10 places from No. 33 to No. 23. Two more weeks later, it had gotten to No. 15. Two weeks after that, "Hold The Line" arrived in the Top 10, up from No. 13 to No. 10 on December 23, 1978.

After the holiday break and week off, "Hold The Line" resumed climbing, up to No. 8 on January 6, 1979. Then it took a swift move into the Top 5 on January 13, 1979 as it moved up from No. 8 to No. 5. Some people believed the smash hit had the power to propel itself to the top position.

It didn't happen that way, though. It held at No. 5 the next week and lost its bullet, ultimately dropping back to No. 8 by January 27, 1979 and eventually off the countdown.

Still, it gave the band the boost it needed for success. The album "Toto" would peak at No. 9 on the chart and finish as the No. 19 album of 1979.

There would be two more releases from the album. However, "I'll Supply The Love" peaked at No. 45 in March and "Georgy Porgy" got as high as No. 48 in June. The band would have to wait until early 1980 to once again hit the chart with "99," which would peak at No. 27 and come from their next album "Hydra."

When talking about the debut hit, the man who wrote it, Paich, said, "It started out with the piano riff that is in the intro. I started playing this riff and I just couldn't stop playing it. I played it for days, and I started singing, 'Hold the line, love isn't always on time.' It was a phrase that just came into my head ... it was a blessing. (The words) came to me in the night, and then I went to the verse. I wrote it in two hours. Sometimes songs come quickly like that, and sometimes I spend two years trying to finish a song."

Better late than never, you guess. But when the song hit the radio, Lukather said, "My mom called me up and said, 'Turn on (radio station) KLOS.' I started running around the house in my underwear, screaming, 'I'm on the radio!' My wife was cracking up. It was just a thrill."

Kimball had a different experience of hearing himself sing the famous first single.

"I was asleep," he said. "I had my alarm clock set for noon because we were gonna do something in the studio, some promo and when the alarm came on there was the radio and 'Hold The Line' was playing. And my room was totally black and I was looking for the telephone and I called Paich and I heard him scream, he was living over there with his girlfriend and he was screaming around and falling over trying to get to the radio."

Jeff Porcaro said he was trying to play the song like an idol of his, Sly & The Family Stone drummer Greg Errico.

"When we did the tune, I said, 'Gee, this is going to be a heavy four-on-the-floor rocker, but we want a Sly groove,'" Porcaro said. "The triplet groove of the tune was David's writing. It was taking the Sly groove and meshing it with a harder rock caveman approach."

"Hold The Line" was hard to classify. It was a pop song that didn't sound "pop" enough. It was a rocker, but it was coming from a band making it in the "pop music" world. It had heavy metal tendencies on it thanks to Lukather's wailing guitar solo, but the band was from being heavy metal.

And that is why Toto succeeded with their first hit song -- it had no classification and sounded like it came from a band that came from many different musical backgrounds, some wanting to rock, some wanting to lay it down a little more gently. In the end, "Hold The Line" may be the hardest rocking song the band ever did. Over the years, their sound evolved and became more worldly ... more pop-oriented.

Still, "Hold The Line" is one of those moments in time you don't forget. It may rank as one of the greatest debut singles ever.

And for a bunch of session musicians who wanted to do their own thing away from the superstars they played for, that was pretty freakin' good.

The AT40 Blog/January 22, 1983: MTV's "Darlings" make their debut

In the whole scope of 1980s music, Duran Duran was never supposed to be a big thing in the United States.

In 1982, the band from Birmingham, England released its second album, "Rio," but getting an audience in the United States was rather difficult. There were no bites. But as 1982 turned into 1983, Duran Duran was starting to get a ground swell of support from a place that would define their careers.

Music Television, aka MTV, not only brought the band to cable television with their music videos, but also helped to sell the band's persona as well. And the fans came out in droves, which propelled Duran Duran's first single to big-time status.

"Hungry Like The Wolf "was written on a spring Saturday morning in 1982. Keyboardist Nick Rhodes got the ball rolling by working with his sequencer in the basement of EMI's recording studios in London. All through the day as the various members arrived for working on the "Rio" album, each member put their piece of the puzzle into the composition.

The sound they were working with came from some of the new technology that was out there then. In the case of "Hungry Like The Wolf," the band combined the sounds from the Roland TR-808 drum machine with the Roland Jupiter-8 sequencer Rhodes was working with at the time. While Rhodes was fiddling with the sequencer, lead singer Simon Le Bon was coming up with the lyrics to the song. On guitar, Andy Taylor was putting together the guitar lick that hearkened back to the days of the late Marc Bolen and T. Rex and would give the song its distinct sound. And drummer Roger Taylor and bass guitarist John Taylor (no relation among the Taylors) completed the work.

The band went into the studio that night to put together the song they pieced one part at a time during the day and laid the track down, complete with the "doo-doo-doos" at the end of each verse line that Le Bon said was inspired, of all things, by the musical instruments' melody played on Gordon Lightfoot's 1971 breakthrough hit, "If You Could Read My Mind." And the flirtatious laugh at the start of the song and the moans at the end? Those were provided by Rhodes' then-girlfriend.

Colin Thurston, the band's producer for the "Rio" album, had the daunting task to edit and put parts together. He cut down on a lot of the excessive work and mixed everything into a simplistic final edit.

Soon as the final edit was done, the band jumped out onto a tour, but EMI had other plans. They sent the band to the country of Sri Lanka and spent $200,000 to make a music video for "Hungry Like The Wolf." Using the beauty of the country in the backdrop, they made the video into a mini-movie like that of the 1981 film Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring Le Bon in the starring role and featuring the band in other "key" roles, while all of this was directed by Russell  Mulcahy. While they were there, they also made a video for another song on the album, "Save A Prayer."

The song got released in the spring of '82 in England and climbed to No. 5. Soon after, Thurston asked the guys to return to London's AIR Studio to re-record "Hungry Like The Wolf," this version to be put onto the "Rio" album in America. If you ever listen to the two versions of the song, there's not much difference other than Rhodes' girlfriend sounds faint on the moans of the original.

Duran Duran had been hitting the British charts since early 1981 with songs like "Planet Earth" and "Girls On Film" and their videos were rather appealing, especially to the growing group of female fans.

Enter MTV. Started in August 1981, the network had played music videos by such "established" artists like Rod Stewart, The Who and Elvis Costello just to name a few acts, but really hadn't come across someone who could appeal to a "younger" crowd. Enter Duran Duran, the band who named itself after a character in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella. Not only were their videos titillating to anyone who laid eyes on them, but could help bring a new wave of music fans into the 1980s. So MTV played all the videos the band had out at the time, another one of those videos being the title track to the album, "Rio," set in Brazil off the Atlantic Ocean.

The buzz was rather large and in November 1982, Capitol Records, which owned Duran Duran's rights in the United States, gave the go-ahead to release the band's big 1982 UK hit to the U.S. public, "Hungry Like The Wolf."

"Hungry Like The Wolf" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 77 on the week of Christmas. From there, it stormed up the charts quickly, moving to No. 65 after the holiday break. It climbed another 12 notches to No. 53 for the week of January 15, 1983. Then the next week, radio airplay, record sales and MTV's saturation of the band all over the network's landscape pushed "Hungry Like The Wolf" into the Top 40 from No. 53 to No. 34.

And it went on -- it moved up from No. 34 to No. 27, then to No. 22 and No. 19. And for the week of February 19, 1983, "Hungry Like The Wolf" bolted up 10 places to go to No. 9. Two weeks later, it had matched its peak position in the U.K. by getting to No. 5. Still, it didn't stop. After two weeks at No. 5, it moved up to No. 4, then to No. 3 the week of March 26, 1983. It would end up holding at that position for three straight weeks before falling back to No. 6 the week of April 16, 1983.

The ball was rolling. MTV's non-stop airplay and radio's requesters had made Duran Duran a name in this country. And 1983 was a huge year for Duran Duran -- they would hit the No. 14 with "Rio," get to No. 4 with "Is There Something I Should Know?" their first No. 1 hit in their native country, and by the end of 1983, they'd have one last big hit with "Union Of The Snake," the first single release from the band's next album, "Seven And The Ragged Tiger," which would peak at No. 3.

In the 1980s, Duran Duran would score 13 Top 40 hits, eight of which would land in the Top 10 and two of those songs -- "The Reflex" in 1984 and "A View To A Kill" in 1985 -- would go to No. 1. For a while, the band broke up to do two separate offspring projects as Andy and John Taylor would form Power Station with Robert Palmer and drummer Tony Thompson of Chic fame and Le Bon, Rhodes and Roger Taylor would be the trio known as Arcadia. Though the band has splintered and reformed, then splintered with Andy Taylor leaving for good in 2003, it keeps going on. They released the CD/album "Paper Gods" in September 2015.

As for the video that put them on the map forever, Duran Duran made history at the Grammy Awards in 1984 when that music video won the first-ever honor for Best Short-Form Music Video.

Fledgling MTV had a lot to do with the success of Duran Duran in 1982-83 and over the years. The band could never be more appreciative for that success. And the band doesn't mind if you identify them with "Hungry Like The Wolf" at all.

After all, it made them mega-superstars.