PODCAST · music
How Good It Is
by Claude Call
Each episode I choose a song from the 50s through the 90s and dive into its history, the story behind the song and other items of interest. Find more stuff at www.howgooditis.com
Episodes
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178b–Naptime’s Over
Where have I been? Life, Cousin. Life got in the way. A lot of things sidetracked me, and even though I was keeping the feed for this show active, I still had several moments of “Yeah! Gonna get back to it soon!” alongside an equal number of “why bother?” moments. I’ve also been working on a...
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175: In the Still of the Night
After this many episodes, it gives me a moment of "Huh, isn't that interesting" when I start writing the post for an episode and discover that I haven't covered a song from that particular year before. In this case, that year would be 1956. In retrospect, that shouldn't be a surprise, given that...
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161: Stagger Lee
If you haven't been paying attention (and, based on the download statistics, you haven't), I'm part of a second podcast, where I take on more of a support role than as the lead voice. The show is called Words and Movies, in which my partner Sean Gallagher and I choose a pair of films and find the...
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159: The Yardbirds’ Jim McCarty
Screen capture of McCarty during our Zoom-based interview. Jim McCarty is one of the founding members of The Yardbirds, and he's recently published his second book, She Walks in Beauty: My Quest for the Bigger Picture. It's a journey that starts with the death of his wife Lizzie and then jumps…
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158: Give It Away
When the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik first came out, I'd just left a job working in a record store and was doing some part-time work as a mobile DJ. I had a few regular gigs here and there on Long Island, which is where it's at when you do that sort of thing, because you get to...
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157: Planet Earth’s Greatest Hits
This is a show that I made a long while back specifically for the Patreon crowd. Those are the folks who have been supporting the program and helping me to cover some of the hosting and other costs attached to doing the show (e.g. subscriptions, software, etc.). In fact, it was so long ago that…
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Ikigai–a special message for listeners
Hi, folks: I know, the feed has been quiet for awhile. Listen and you'll hear a little bit of the story, and what happens next. (Don't worry, I'm not quitting the show.)
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154: Everybody Have Fun Tonight
Wang Chung was a band that wasn't getting a lot of traction when they had a more traditionally Chinese name. I remember that early self-titled album Huang Chung and I have to admit I was a little put off by it, because it frankly wasn't especially cool-looking, so I didn't give it much of a…
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146: A Chat With John Hall
John Hall has been around the block a few times, and he's not finished traveling. In fact, when he and I chatted via Skype a short time ago, he was in the middle of a move from New York to Tennessee, and making that move in between gigs for both his solo shows and with the band that cemented his...
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142: Anthony Robustelli
This week I've got something extra-special for you. It's an interview with Anthony Robustelli, whom I got to speak with recently via Skype. Anthony is a musician who has toured with lots of big-name performers, he's written books about Steely Dan and The Beatles (with more to come currently on…
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Where I’ve Been
Where have I been? Let's start with: I'm okay, my family is okay, everybody's okay. My wife, as you may know, was considered especially vulnerable to the virus and spent a lot of time in the Southern Studio, but she's back home and everyone in the household is fully vaccinated, thank goodness.…
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125–Psycho Killer
Click here to become a patron of the show. It's about time I got around to covering the Talking Heads, don't you think? Weirdly, a lot of their material is kind of under-researched, unless you're willing to do deep dives into the biographies and such. However, that seems to be loosening up in...
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124–Paradise by the Dashboard Light
Meat Loaf was one of those performers who seemed to just come out of the blue, especially if you weren't familiar with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But in the early and mid-70s he was better known as an actor than a singer. In fact, he was a comedic actor, given that Jim Steinman met him while...
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121–Take On Me
Some songs seem to spring out of nowhere, and then you take a deeper look and you realize that it's a cover, or a rewrite, or it's a re-release that flopped the first time. "Take On Me" by A-ha, it turns out, is in the All Of The Above category. It was re-written several times and re-recorded a...
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117–Come Dancing
The Kinks are a band that seems to have some huge, HUGE adherents, and others who are more casual fans, and not much in between. And that seemed to reflect in their chart positions here in the United States. They'd get the positive reviews, they'd get the airplay, the singles would do well, but...
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116–Mister Blue Sky
Out of the Blue was an honest-to-god masterpiece of an album, and probably the pinnacle of the Electric Light Orchestra's use of the classical music instruments in rock and roll songs. And the centerpiece of this album was almost certainly Side Three. The four songs that comprised that side of…
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Episode 113–Shake It Off
WHAT! you say. We've been waiting a month and he brings us a Taylor Swift song? Well...yeah. But don't click away just yet. Here's the thing: I want to expand the scope of the show a little bit, and recently I heard a rather high-level discussion of Swift's work on another podcast called Switched...
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111–Werewolves of London
Warren Zevon was a talented musician and songwriter who had a lot of friends in the business, but didn't have the commercial success that his contemporaries had. One day in 1975 he, along with guitarists Waddy Wachtell and LeRoy Marinell, are just goofing around with their guitars when someone…
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110–Blue Moon
Holy Moley, kids. It's another overstuffed episode of the show for you. But, I guess that's what happens when you're dealing with a song that goes clear back to 1933. "Blue Moon" was written by Rodgers and Hart, and it was going to be used in a movie, then it wasn't. Then it was going to be used…
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Episode 107–Mister Roboto
First up: this should be the end of the oddball uploads. The show itself is completely migrated, and I've gotten a few personal issues out of the way, so I should be back to Sunday night releases beginning next week. Are we good now? OK. This week's show is a little bit on the short side, largely...
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Episode 104–I Want to Know What Love Is
Enjoy the photo. I spent five bucks on it. You're welcome. First up: A Hat Tip to Jeremiah Coughlin of the podcast Brine Time, a podcast dedicated (but not limited to) the Portland (OR) Pickles baseball team. He wanted to hear about some Foreigner, and coincidentally I just picked up a copy of...
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Episode 99–Purple Rain
First off, my apologies for the delay in this post. It appears that GoDaddy likes to do scheduled maintenance on Sunday nights, so I've been getting blocked out of the site on my end lately. At your end everything looks fine, but I can't create new posts or transcripts or anything, really. This...
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97–Like a Virgin
Madonna's sixth single and her first Number One hit was the one that established her as a genuine superstar, able to re-invent herself with each album.
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Episode 96–Deacon Blues
Aja, by Steely Dan, was one of the first albums I purchased with my own money. It wasn't that I was so enamored by Steely Dan; I'd just heard a lot of good stuff about it so I took a chance. And while fourteen-year-old me heard a ton of good stuff in it, doing a re-listen these many years later…
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Episode 94–Touch of Grey
The Grateful Dead were definitely a rock band, and at the same time they managed to defy most definitions with regard to their specific genre. Sometimes they were funky, sometimes they were bluesy, sometimes they were jazzy, sometimes even gospel. Usually they were jamming, and rather than...
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Episode 87–Hair
Click here for a transcript of this episode. In the late 1960s, both the music scene and the theater scene were changing, and the 1968 premiere of the show Hair on Broadway was a confluence of the two. Hair is generally considered to be the first rock musical, as opposed to a rock opera, where…
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Episode 85–Can’t Give It Away on Seventh Avenue
This week, we've got a super-sized episode of the show (nearly an hour!) as I sit down with Christopher McKittrick, author of Can't Give it Away on Seventh Avenue: The Rolling Stones and New York City. Chris and I had a fascinating chat about the band and their long-term relationship with New…
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Episode 80–YMCA
Yeah, I know it's supposed to be spelled with periods, but that really screwed with the file names, so let's all just live with it, OK? Victor Willis was hired on to be the voice of the Village People, but like Ron Dante and The Archies, he was pretty much all there was to the band until they...
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74–Quarter to Three
Gary US Bonds was still just "US Bonds" on the record labels until shortly after this record came out. This week we look at the story behind this song, and how it influenced another hitmaker to write and produce Bonds' 1981 comeback hit.
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72–Total Eclipse of the Heart
Click here for a transcript of this episode. In 1981 Bonnie Tyler had exactly one hit, 1977's "It's a Heartache", so it was no mystery why people were calling her a one-hit wonder. Her record label cut her loose, so she found a new manager and talked Jim Steinman, the guy responsible for Meat...
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71–Whip It
Devo's one trip to the Top 40 was a cultural touchstone partly because some people misunderstood the intent of the lyrics, and partly because MTV was starved for programming.
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69–In the Year 2525
Zager and Evans provided the soundtrack to one of the most eventful summers of the 1960s, and then they vanished, a true One Hit Wonder. What made this song catch the public's imagination?
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67–Everybody Wants to Rule the World
The story behind Tears For Fears' US debut single.
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Episode 66–Heroes
Click here for a transcript of this show. David Bowie had already released ten albums by 1976, and he was starting to feel the effects of burnout and a heavy cocaine habit. So where did he go to escape his drug habit? To the world's Heroin capital, of course: Berlin! Fortunately for Bowie and...
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Episode 65–Dust In The Wind
Click here for a transcript of this show. Kansas was literally on the last day of rehearsing for their fifth album when their producer asked them if they had anything else. Guitarist and songwriter Kerry Livgren reluctantly broke out an acoustic song that he was convinced the rest of the band…
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Episode 64–One Bad Apple
The Osmond Brothers got their real start in show business when they couldn't get an audition for one television show, and they wound up on another. Check out the audience reaction to them at first. It cracks me up every time. This clip, incidentally, is from the show Walt Disney's Wonderful World...
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Episode 63–Shel Silverstein, Part 2
Click here for a transcript of this week's show. Hi! Didja miss me? Apologies for the big gap in shows; life was getting in the way, plus I got sick somewhere in between and, while my voice would have been pure comedy on your end, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun on mine. No excuse…
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61–Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Indian)
John D Loudermilk wrote a song that's nearly devoid of actual facts. When it became a hit, a couple of interviews he did about that song turned out also to be mostly devoid of facts.
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60–Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
Neil Sedaka spent a bunch of time in the Top Ten, but this was his first trip to the Number One slot. And he took the song to the Top Ten again several years later with a vastly different arrangement.
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56–Shout
The Isley Brothers' first charting hit from 1959 got its start not as a song, but as a bit they'd do to extend another song they were already singing in concert.
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55–Ghostbusters
Ray Parker Jr wasn't the first person approached to come up with a pop song to support this film, but he was the last, and the best.
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54–Walk on the Wild Side
Lou Reed's signature song (he once joked that he knew his obituary would start with "doot, di-doot, di-doot...") has its origins in people he knew and worked with at Andy Warhol's studio, The Factory.
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52–Into the Night
Benny Mardones may be the only person to be a one-hit wonder twice, charting two times with the same version of the same song.
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51–Barbara Ann
This hit from early 1966 isn't quite the spontaneous fun party it sounds like.
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49–School’s Out
Alice Cooper's biggest hit was inspired by two things: Old movies and the last three minutes of the school day.
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48–Under the Covers, Part 3
It's been a while since we took a look at a bunch of songs that you may not realize are covers of other artists' work.
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47–Remembering Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018. This week's show takes a look back at the life and music career of the Queen of Soul.
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46–Mellow Yellow
Donovan struck lucky a couple of times with this song: first, it was the beginning of people looking into the deeper meaning behind absolutely every lyric. Second, the song got a weird boost from a practical joke being played by an underground newspaper out of Berkeley.
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45–Rapture
Disco was on its way out, to be replaced by Hip-Hop or New Wave, depending on the clubs you frequented. Blondie's last major hit in the US was a track that departed from their previous style and broke a few barriers along the way.
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Episode 44–Smoke on the Water
It was December of 1971 and Deep Purple was in Deep Trouble. They were all set to record their newest album, when the location they'd chosen for recording was accidentally set ablaze and burned completely to the ground. This is the Rolling Stones' mobile recording studio. This picture is probably...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does How Good It Is have?
How Good It Is currently has 190 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is How Good It Is about?
Each episode I choose a song from the 50s through the 90s and dive into its history, the story behind the song and other items of interest. Find more stuff at www.howgooditis.com
How often does How Good It Is release new episodes?
How Good It Is publishes regularly with 190 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to How Good It Is?
You can listen to How Good It Is on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts How Good It Is?
How Good It Is is created and hosted by Claude Call.
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