October 6, 2020 • 49 mins
The inside story behind Pop's resurgence in the mid 1990s from the power players who orchestrated it- including the iconic voice behind MMMBop, Taylor Hanson of Hanson. Steve's also joined by music mavens Danny Goldberg, Tom Poleman, Phil Quartararo, Karen Glauber and Johnny Wright. It's an absolutely legendary listen!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
The nineties kicked off with an audio rebellion against the superficial,
telegenic and overly spandex hair metal bands that were grabbing
screen time on MTV and dominating the radio airwaves. When
(00:24):
Nirvana's second album, never Mind dropped in, in many ways,
it obliterated that entire scene and ushered in the grittier, angrier,
and more angst the era of grunge. But soon pure
pop music would find its way back to the mainstream.
I'm Steve Greenberg, and this is Speed of Sound. Okay.
(00:49):
So it's sometime and I'm in the supermarket standing on
the checkout line to kill time. While I'm waiting to
check out, I pick up a copy of a teen
magazine that was on the rack. I think it was
Tiger Beat magazine. I remember Tiger Beat from when I
was a kid. It was the magazine that featured teen
idol singers like Donnie Osmond or David Cassidy. Later on
(01:10):
in the eighties, you saw new Kids on the Block
on the cover a lot. So I'm leaving through Tiger
Beat and I realized there are no singers in the
magazine at all, it's filled with teen actors like Jonathan
Taylor Thomas, the star of a sitcom called Home Improvement. Hey,
Dad knew we should get Mom the heater for a birthday. Birthday,
(01:32):
Dad forgot Mom's birthday, did not? Did not. So I'm
thinking to myself, why are there no singers in this magazine?
But then it quickly hits me that, of course, people
like Eddie Vetter from Pearl Jammer, Chris Cornell from Sound Garden,
the biggest bands of the day aren't really appropriate for
(01:52):
a magazine named at twelve year old girls. And furthermore,
I couldn't really think of any currently popular singers that
were And then I started to think about how the
whole pop music scene at that particular time was addressing
a sensibility that was kind of negative, kind of depressed, pessimistic.
I thought to myself, there must be a lot of
kids out there who are in jaded or feeling hopeless,
(02:14):
who just want to have a happy life, who want
to have friends, or want to fall in love, or
just want to be happy, and there's really no music
speaking to those kids. I refused to believe that this
whole generation of kids was just bummed out in cynical
and so at that point I resolved to keep my
eyes and ears open for a musical artist who could
(02:35):
bring back optimism, bring back happiness. But it was clear
that launching a teen idol wouldn't be an easy thing
to do, even if I found the right singer or group.
In fact, right around the same time as my trip
to the supermarket, a new group that fits the bill
did release their first single, and it failed to get
much attention at all, despite a major push by their
(02:55):
record label. If anybody in the music business talked about
that group at all, it was to present them as
exhibit a for why a pop group couldn't be successful
in the current climate. The group was called the Backstreet Boys.
Their manager, Johnny Wright recalls, we tried to put a
record out, you know, in the United States, produced by
then Max Martin and Dennis Pop, called we Got It
(03:16):
going on. At that point in time, as you talked about,
nobody cared about a boy band, you know. In fact,
they were happy to see new kids on the block
go away. It was a lot of grunge and everything
else was happening. These guys, Backstreet Boys, I'll tell you,
they did openings of pet stores and stuff like that
in order to try to get known and try to
move that record. And for the most part, the stations
(03:36):
that we did promo for they gave us suspended two
but it just really never connected. And at that point
in time, I think Giant Records was in a position
of well, maybe this is just not gonna work, and
there was this worry that the guys were going to
get dropped from the label. But that's when I said, well, look,
the boy band situation is happening in Europe, give us
another shot. Let us go over there and see if
(03:57):
we can make something happen. And we ended leave. In
the US, pop music certainly felt irrelevant in a music
scene that had been turned upside down by the arrival
of Nirvana's album never Mind. At the end of that
(04:21):
Nirvana introduced mainstream America to grunge music, which had been
incubating in Seattle since the late nineteen eighties. Musically, grunge
was kind of a hybrid of metal and punk more
or less, and by combining guitar distortion with lyrics that
dealt with isolation, frustration, and depression, it spoke to its
audience of gen xers in a way that just seemed
(04:42):
more authentic and relatable than the rock music that was
on the radio at the beginning of the nineties. In fact,
grunge very quickly made the music it replaced seemed very dated.
Danny Goldberg, who managed Nirvana, recalls that moment in time.
The MTV pop rock culture was known for what we
used to call hair bands, rock bands that had some
(05:04):
metal influences. The lead singers inevitably had this long, blow
dried hair, and in the music videos usually there was
a fan off camera blowing it, and they had a
lot of them. Artists like Winger and Warrant and Poison
had kind of pop choruses and melodies, but with kind
(05:24):
of a frame of of what was becoming more and
more of a retro rock bon Jovie was a big
artist then two and the biggest of that era was
Guns and Roses. So there was sort of a feeling
among college kids and kind of the intellectual cutting edge
side of the rock audience that that was an empty,
(05:45):
shallow culture. In the early nineties. Grunge music was the
latest manifestation of what had become known as alternative music.
That term was coined way back in nineteen seventy nine
by a man named Terry Tolkien, who was looking for
an umbrella term to describe the punk and post punk
music he was writing about in a publication called Rockpool Newsletter.
(06:07):
As the nineteen eighties wore on, alternative music became more
and more popular as an underground scene, and it finally
exploded onto the mainstream with the release of never Mind.
Danny Goldberg Remembers and Nirvana and the song Smells Like
the Inspirit in September of ninety one just touches that
nerve depend up frustration of more than ten years of
(06:28):
Republican presidency. The shallowness of what had been now become
perceived to a lot of young people as as a
corporate rock. Smells Like Teen Spirit became a most unlikely
pop radio hit in the winter of and it immediately
caused an esthetic shift in the music world. Karen Glauber,
who was an editor Hits Magazine during this period, summed
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up the appeal of grunge. Kids just saw themselves. It
was the first time they could see a singer who
reminded them of the and most kids are not popular.
Most kids are not really I haven't don't have their
lives figured out. Kids are a mess. So this is
the first time a kid could connect with an artist
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and say, this is not even aspirational. This is relatable
because the whole fantasy of MTV was this is a
life you can aspire to, and now it's this guy
is me. Alternative rock very quickly commanded center stage in
the music world. Danny Goldberg recalls, for a period of time,
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alternative rock was pop. I would argue that Nirvana was
kind of the last rock band to also be a
giant pop act that in back in the day, Kurt
Cobain was a celebrity the way Rhanna or Justin Bieber
or Taylor Swift is. You know he was. He was
not just the most famous rock artist, he was kind
of the most famous artist for a minute. Seattle's grun
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scene had its own distinct culture during that era, and
it encompassed not just the music but also its own
fashion and a general lifestyle. And the scene was pretty
resentful of efforts by mainstream culture to co opt it.
There was a real disdain for the establishment. A New
York Times reporter was once sent to Seattle to write
a serious sociological piece on the culture of grunge, and
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an employee of the alternative record label Subpop fooled him
into thinking that grunge actually had its own lingo, consisting
of terms like swinging on the flippity flop and cob noveler,
which were completely made up. The Times actually published these
terms under the heading a lexicon of Grunge breaking the Code,
and they wound up pretty embarrassed. Anyway. Pretty soon the
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grunge scenes started to spread nationwide, impacting every aspect of
pop culture. As Karen Glauber recalls, people wanted to whether
it was hot topic coming into business, and kids could
go into stores and and all of a sudden, emerged
instead of going to thrift stores like we did to
look a certain way when we were younger, you could
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go to hot Topic. You could go to Macy's, you
got anywhere and buy some torn flannel, cut off jeans,
you know, a chain belt, Doc Martin's. You could look
the part. Alternative culture even spawned its own hit movies
like Singles, complete with a soundtrack featuring songs by alternative
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superstars like Smashing Pumpkins and Paul Westerberg of the Replacements.
If you can't find Love, You settle for six right
now or something really outrageous. I think you got the
wrong number, lady, but they'll be right over. And even
TV shows were leaning on alternative music to seem cool,
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with bands like Mud Honey and Buffalo Tom getting exposure
on primetime shows like My So Called Life, Can Wait,
Don't Go Somewhere. Sure, inevitably, grim and alternative even took
(10:13):
over pop radio. Tom Pulman became program director of New
York's top forty music station Z one hundred, and he
remembers what it was like when I got the job
at SEE one. Top forty was really in a grunge
space at the time. So the big songs back then,
we're like Atlantis, Moore said, Radiohead, Soul, Asylum, Oasis, Live,
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Green Day, all those songs were really big, and people
were saying that that was the pop music at the time.
So when I got there, Z one was taking the
grunge ride. It was so popular bands like Pearl Jams, Stone, Temple, Pilots, Atlantis,
Moore said, it kind of felt like that was by
definition the pop music because it was the most popular thing.
(10:59):
Did straight ahead pop record have a chance in that moment?
Not really? I would look at our research and I
would see all the songs that we were supposed to
play according to the research, and they were all like
rock and grunge, and there was no way in that
mix of music that I could throw on a pure
pop record. Eventually, the grunge scenes started to suffer from overkill.
(11:23):
Karen Glauber explained how that happened. Truly, all those Seattle
bands were getting a shot. And what also happened is
that every A and R person was start going to Seattle,
and the Four Seasons was always teeming with A and
R people looking to sign the next grung jack. And
what happens in any scene is that it starts to dilute.
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So people were signing bands that you were the only
thing they had going for them is that they were
geographically desirable. They became very, very popular. You know that
they had their shot. And with an seen, once that
becomes too popular, and once your little brother and sister
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are going around the house singing Nirvana lyrics, it's just
not cool anymore. You gotta go find the next thing.
Danny Goldberg points to another reason for the decline of
alternative rock. So, yeah, it was a pretty brief rain
that the alternative rock had. At the time, it seemed
like it was going to go on forever, but it
was really only a few years. And the reason for
(12:27):
that was because it was kind of the last gasp
of rock and roll as pop music because of the
growing ascendance of hip hop. The difference between pop and rock,
to me, has a lot to do with two things,
age and gender. Pop is younger and skew is much
more female. Rock is a little bit older, and skew
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is much more male. And uh, you know, African American
music had mostly been pop music. R and B was
mostly pop. It didn't have that male energy that got
you know, headben angers and guys, you know, deriving their
identity from it. But hip hop did. And hip hop
was the first time that that you could kind of be,
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as the cliche was in politics, an angry black man
and be a star. It went from being a liability
to a virtue commercially, and that sucked up a lot
of the social and cultural energy that alternative rocket had
just a few years earlier. So by the second half
of the nineties, that balance of power was already shifting
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in favor of hip hop, and it created a pop
vacuum me. I personally began to sense that the alternative
scene was running out of creative steam in mid when
I heard a record on Z one by Soul Asylum,
a band I generally respected, but the lyrics to this
song sounded to me like a parody of the whole
scene can stop. It was around that time that I
(14:14):
really resolved to search for a pop band. And I
wasn't the only one with that idea. In England, where
the British version of alternative called brit Pop was ruling
the charts acts like Oasis and Blur. An artist manager
named Simon Fuller also noticed the dearth of pure pop
on the charts, and he also made a mental note
to do something about it. Now. Closer to home, Tom
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Pullman of radio station Z one hundred had a similar
epiphany at the station's very first jingle Ball concert and
New York's Madison Square Garden. So here was my moment,
okay at ze Because we were in eighteenth place, we
were talking about changing formats, we did format searches, we
contemplating going full on alternative. But anyway, we built jingle Ball.
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The artists that we started to book, we're all female.
So we ended up calling a Girl's Rule Yule and
we had like Tracy Chapman and Gwen Stefani from No Doubt,
Cheryl crow Jewel at that show. I remember being under
the rafters, you know, kind of like that backstage area
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No Doubt, being on stage in the place, being packed
with all these teenage girls and they were all bouncing
at the same time. I was by myself in that
back area, and I could feel the ground shaking, and
I was like, my god, if we can elicit this
kind of response out of people, we're still alive when
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we come back. Pop Salvation appears at a town fair
in Kansas. In early I was working of Mercury Records
as an A and R man. They're the people who
looked for new talent and then helped make the records.
(16:06):
People at the label knew I wanted to make a
pop record, and so one day I received a phone
call from one of our executives on the West Coast,
a woman named Alison Hamamura. Allison had a lot of
cred in the alternative rock community, and so she felt
she wasn't the right person to follow up on this
demo tape that she had gotten from her boyfriend Jeff Rabhan,
who had gotten it from his friend Christopher Sebek, who
(16:27):
managed the band. But Alison Hamamura thought maybe it would
be up my alley and I might want to check
it out. What she didn't tell me is that this
act had already been passed on by every label in
the business. Now. When I played the demo, I was flabbergasted.
It was this little kid whose voice hadn't even broken yet,
but it was an amazing voice, and he was singing
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this song that he'd supposedly written with his two brothers,
who were also just young kids, and they all claimed
to be playing their own instruments, even the ten year
old drummer. The band was called Hanson and they were
from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Incredibly, their demos sounded as though they
hadn't been listening to contemporary radio at all. It sounded
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like they've been listening to old Jackson five records or something.
I decided to go check them out at a town
fair in Coffeeville, Kansas. This was in March. To be honest,
I went half expecting to find out that it was
all a put on, that they couldn't really sing as
well as they did on the demo, or they couldn't
really play their own instruments, or maybe they had a
third eye in the middle of their foreheads. I was
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ready for something to be wrong with this picture. When
I got to Coffeeville, it was a pretty sad scene.
The town was economically depressed. Most of the shops on
main Street stood empty. The fair, officially called the Coffeeville
New Beginnings Festival, was intended to boost the town spirits,
but it was poorly attended. Maybe a dozen or so
girls waiting in front of the stage for the band
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to appear. The stage, by the way, was the back
of a flatbed truck. On the side of the stage,
there was a woman standing by a table with hands
and T shirts for sale. I surmised she must be
their mother. No one was buying the T shirts, so
I decided I'd buy one because I kind of felt bad.
And by the way, I still have that shirt to
this day. Their mom didn't know I was from a
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record company, and she kept wondering to me why the
turnout was so light. She figured the festival must have
been poorly publicized. Well, the band came on and they
were great. They sang great, they played great, and they
look great, and those dozen or so girls in front
of the stage, they were smitten. After the show, I
introduced myself and said I wanted to sign them to
(18:36):
a record deal. I found out later that after I left,
they figured I was kidding and that they'd never hear
from me again. When I got back to New York,
I told Danny Goldberg, yes, the same Danny Goldberg who
used to manage Nirvana but who was now president of
Mercury Records, that I wanted to sign these kids. I
was kind of expecting him to be dismissive, but instead
he immediately agreed we were on our way. I'll let
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Taylor Hands and pick up the story from here. Every label,
major label in out there passed on the record and
passed on the band, and I think, you know, even
with Mercury, I think technically there were three different folks
that passed on our demo until until it finally reached
you and and Danny and the spark. I think was
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that understanding that that pop music had a place in
kind of modern music, and we just figured that we
hadn't found the right person. It turns out that my
hunch about Hands and not listening to the radio was correct.
They spent some of their childhood living in Latin America,
where their dad was sent for work by an oil company.
The only music they listened to during that time was
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a series of cassettes released by Time Life that featured
year by year top hits of every year from the
late nineteen fifties to nineteen seventy. Here's Taylor again, Sadden.
You hear Chuck Berry and you hero otis reading, and
you hear you know, this early rock and roll, and
it just clicked. Um. So it was almost like we
were in a bubble um of our own, a bubble
(20:04):
within a bubble, and here at you know, nine years
old and even younger actually, Um, I just remember having
that that spark and and hearing music and feeling like
it was for me, and feeling like it was as
current as anything else that was out there. I mean,
Little Richard could have been the latest single, you know.
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Hearing or just writings, you know, sitting on the dock
of the bay, or hearing Michael Jackson's voice, it was
just like this is this is alive and new. We
moved the band and their family out to l a
and set about writing and recording their debut album. While
everyone at the label agreed that Hansen's demo was great,
there were a lot of skeptics who couldn't see how
we could break the band with a straight pop record.
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I kept getting encouraged to take the record in a
more alternative direction so we could started an alternative radio
like most hits of that period. I was determined to
stay the course and keep the project pure pop, but
I did hedge my to produce the album. I brought
in the Dust Brothers, who had just produced Beck's album.
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The Beck album still hadn't been released, but someone at
Mercury Records played me an advanced copy, and I thought
the record was just great. It had a fresh sound,
and yet you could tell that the producers had a
real affection for old records. When the Dust Brothers hurd Umbop,
they immediately agreed to produce the album. These were just
the guys who could update that Jackson five sound for
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the nineties, and it didn't hurt that they could bring
a little alternative credit to the project. Taylor Hanson remembers
the best thing about the Dust Brothers was they understood
that we were essentially cut from the Jackson five cloth.
You know, we we were not emulating something that wasn't authentic.
They they got that we were talking about music, um,
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both as people that loved a style and were authentically
creating it. It wasn't a gimmick. And so we talked
about records and you know when they were bringing in there,
you know, their style and you know, bringing in loops
from vintage records and and sitting there and talking about
music right there in there, you know, house in silver Lake,
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and we were having the conversation that we'd have with
you know, with you Steve about you know, the history
of music where records that made us want to play.
And so I think that that respect, there was always
actually a uh a kind of respect that we could,
you know, talk music. The Dust Brothers recorded all the
basic tracks of them Bob the Guitar, Bassed and the
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drum Loop, which actually was a sped up sample from
a record called Synthetic Substitution by Melvin Bliss, with the
drums being played by the legendary R and B drummer
Bernard Prudy. It was a pretty cool basis for the track,
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but it wasn't completed and they hadn't even begun to
try and record the vocal when suddenly the Dust Brothers
ghosted us. They just stopped showing up at the studio,
which was their own studio. It turns out that between
the time we hired them and when we started to
record the Beck album was released to great acclaim, and
the Dust Brothers were suddenly extremely hot producers. Add in
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the fact that they had very little patience for the
studio antics of the band's ten year old drummer, Zach Hanson,
who was acting like a ten year old, and the
Dust Brothers just decided that there were things they'd rather
be doing. So we were left without a producer for
the project. But luckily I had a backup idea, and
so in late June I headed to London to meet
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with Stephen Larni. Now, Stephen Larni wasn't the toast of
the music industry at that moment like the Dust Brothers,
but he had just produced an incredibly cool album by
an English band called Black Great. Also years earlier, Stephen
(24:07):
Larni played drums in the great Scottish band Altered Images,
fronted by his future wife and star of the movie
Gregory's girl, Claire grow Stephen Larni, like the Dust Brothers,
was genuinely excited about Hansen's pop roots, and perhaps just
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as importantly, he had the temperament to work with three
young brothers. Besides ten year old Zacht, that was thirteen
year old Taylor and the old man of the group,
fifteen year old guitarist Isaac Hanson. So it was a
very fruitful trip to London. I even got to hear
a cool new song on the radio over there that
was just being released that week. I thought to myself,
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cool British pop record. But I don't know if those
radio guys in America are going to give it a shot. Anyway.
Back in l A, Stephen Lauroni added a lot to
the Dust Brothers basic tracks onto him, bob more drums,
extra guitars, and even some keyboards. Taylor Hanson recalls his contribution. Really,
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Stephen is who made that record of reality and was
such a great um ear and such a great producer
and arranger to work with us. He turned what was
a kind of an inspiration into a record. The only
problem was, try as we might, we couldn't get a
usable vocal out of Taylor Hanson. You see, he was
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thirteen years old and his voice was in the middle
of changing. There were thoughts of dropping the key of
the record so the high notes wouldn't be so difficult
to reach, but I was really stubborn about the fact
that I wanted to keep the song in its original key.
It was just too exciting that way, and I didn't
want to lose that. So we teamed the group up
with a vocal coach named Roger Love. When the biggest
(25:57):
stars in the world need to find their true voice,
they turned to one expert, and no other voice coach
in history has been more commercially successful than Roger. Roger
Love worked with the Handsome Brothers all summer and into
the fall, getting snatches of the vocal for umbop here
and there when Taylor's voice cooperated. But finally we reached
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the end of recording the entire album and there was
one note that Taylor could simply no longer seeing the
way he had on the original demo, no matter how
many times he tried, and so we cheated. We slowed
down the tape, Taylor sang the high note, and then
we sped the tape back after when it was time
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to mix them. Bob our mixer, a legendary engineer named
Tom Lord Algae, added one final touch to the record.
In the last chorus, he deconstructed the track, breaking it
down to just drums and a scratch sample. The scratch
had been originally inserted into the record by the Dust Brothers,
and it was actually a sample of a scratch from
the record Buffalo Gals by Malcolm McLaren. Now, in the
(27:09):
Dust Brothers version, the scratch was buried way down in
the mix. Tom Lord Algae though he turned it way
up and on that breakdown the scratch was just staring
right at us, completely exposed. We knew we couldn't get
away with that, and so we changed the pitch of
the scratch and manipulated the final note so that now
it was sufficiently different from the one on the Malcolm
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McLaren record. What is truly amazing about h Bop is
that the three brothers really did write it all by themselves,
and it's actually a pretty profound song about valuing the
relationships that truly matter, because those are the only people
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who stick with you until the end. But listeners may
not have caught onto the lyrics because as great as
Taylor Hanson's vocal was his annunciation was pretty in a cipherable.
I remember playing the record for Glenn Ballard, who was
Atlantis Morris as producer, and his reaction was great, record,
but it sounds like he's singing in esperanto for me.
That was part of the record's appeal. It made it
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kind of mysterious. Now for the songs that became the
album's other hit singles, we brought in the top songwriters
in the music business to co write with Isaac Taylor
and Zach There was Desmond Child he co wrote Weird.
(28:46):
There was the great husband and wife's songwriting duo Barry
Man in Cynthia while they co wrote the ballad I
Will to You with the Boys, And most significantly, there
(29:12):
was Mark Hutson. Mark had been in a successful three
brother rock band himself back in the seventies, the Hudson Brothers.
They even had their own weekly TV show for a while,
The Hudson Brothers Show starring Bill Mark pret The Hunson Run,
and in the early nineties, Mark Hutson wrote the Arrowsmith
(29:34):
hit Living on the Edge. Mark Hutson knew what it
was like to be in a band with your brothers,
and he proved to be a big brother of sorts
to Hanson. He also co wrote their hit Where's the Love.
(30:03):
So Mark Hudson is you know, brilliant and you know,
one of those people we've continued to work with in
respect he he was monumental. Um, I'd say, even more
than the fact that he understood, you know, brother dynamics,
having been with you know, a group with his brothers,
he understood singing, his respect for the Beatles and the
(30:24):
Beach Boys, and having signed with his brothers, he understood
the power of harmony. On my first day back in
the office in New York, I turned on the radio
and heard this and hearing Wanna Be by the Spice
Girls on New York Radio. Well, I'll tell you that
(30:44):
really embold in me because I thought, Okay, if they
can play this on the radio, then there's no way
anybody can say no when we show up with um Bob,
because the door has just been blown wide open. Tom
Pullman remembers that moment in pop history as well and
see her to have confidence that we could be a
pop radio station again. We made that commitment. Okay, we're
just gonna play all the hot music because that's the
(31:07):
only thing we can own. We can't own one particular genre,
but we can own the genre of playing the best
of the best. And so we started to look for
any kind of pop sounding hit, and when we heard
Spice Girls, it was like, oh my god, this is
a fun song. It reflects the attitude of people feeling
(31:30):
good again and just fun. So we put that on
Z one hundred and it exploded. When we return Girl
Power Conquers America. A British manager named Bob Herbert took
(31:54):
out an ad in Stage magazine looking for girls to
audition for a new group. Basic idea was to form
a girl group called Touch, which was intended as kind
of a female equivalent of the popular British boy band
Take That. Four Hundred young women auditioned and in the
end Bob Herbert and his son Chris chose five Melanie Brown,
(32:15):
Melanie Chisholm, Emma Button, Victoria Adams and Jerry Halliwell. In
a two thousand and seven BBC documentary, Victoria Adams these
days known as Victoria Beckham remembers the audition, Tons and
tons and tons of girls auditions for it, and everybody
was there singing pop songs and I sang mine hair
(32:36):
from cabaret. The Herbert spent over a year grooming the girls,
recording demos and developing dance routines, but never succeeding in
getting them a record contract. Oddly enough, they never signed
the girls to a management contract, and eventually the girls
decided to ditch the Herberts as their managers. They eventually
(32:59):
found on their way to Simon Fuller, who managed Annie Lennox,
formerly of the Rhythmics. Simon Fuller had noticed a hole
in the pop market and thought the time was right
for Britain to move past the homegrown alternative music known
as Britpop and embrace pure, unadulterated pop, and he thought
(33:23):
these girls would be an ideal vehicle for making that happen.
Jerry Halliwell suggested changing the name of the group to Spice,
and Fuller, to make the name more appealing to the
younger set, suggested adding the word girls. Thus were christened
the Spice Girls. Years later, Simon Fuller credited his other client,
Annie Lennox, with providing the Spice Girls with a crucial
(33:45):
ingredient that would turn them into superstars. You see, Annie
Lennox met the girls very early On, and she encouraged
each of them to be louder, more brash, and much
more specific in defining their own individual personas well. Simon
Fuller quickly got the Spice Girls a contract with Virgin Records,
and he decided they should co write their material for
(34:06):
their first album, so he teamed them up with songwriters
Richard Stannard and Matt Row and at their very first
songwriting session, they came up with a song called Wanna Be.
Wannabe was more than a pop song, It was a
(34:28):
manifesto of female solidarity. The Spice Girls ethos was summed
up by the slogan girl power, which was actually lifted
from the British pop punk group Shampoo, whose single girl
Power was released earlier. I Wanna Be by the Spice
(34:50):
Girls shot to number one in the UK in July
and wound up as the UK's number one song of
the year. Almost immediately upon the release of Wanna Be,
the five Girls were re christened with their memorable nicknames
Baby Scary, Posh Ginger and Sporty mel B, also known
as Scary Spice. Recalled the origin of the nicknames, which
(35:11):
were coined by Peter Lorraine, who was editor of the
British magazine Top of the Pops. Well, you know, it
was actually a lazy journalist that couldn't be bothered to
remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames
and we were like, oh, well that kind of works.
I don't mind my name. Do you like your name?
Baby postions, We're like, let's just go with it. The
Spice Girls debut album, released that fall, sold close to
(35:34):
two million albums by Christmas, making get the fastest selling
British albums since the days of Beatlemania. But even so,
their team approached the USA with great caution. Phil Cordorero,
who was president of Virgin Records, American label at that time,
remembers the challenge. Well, we were in that era, right,
smashing pumpkins in the verve, and we had a lot
(35:57):
of that, a lot of that at that time. Yes,
in the mid nineties there were two um contrasting things
going on, but one was the grunge movement, but there
was also a hip hop component that was on the
radio at the time, which was you know, Snoop Dogg
and that kind of stuff. We hear this, Spice Girls,
But to your point, that era on radio was filled
(36:20):
with um grunge and Seattle Sound, Roger bands, you know all,
you know, and we had a few of those, which
was great, but I looked at where we were in
the charts and I knew that really we were still
a year away from being able to get away with
a pop girl band at radio. So Phil Corderero waited,
(36:42):
but he needed to convince his colleagues at the British
label to be patient, telling them American radio is not
going to play this record right now, no matter how
good it is. You know, we'll get at the airplate,
but it won't be as bigger, as fast as it
needs to be because it needs to go fast when
the when you move across the genre, when the pendulum
does swing act and radio shifts, the first one through
(37:02):
the pipe have to be very, very strong because that's
what pushes the shift. So we can be that record,
but we can't be that record now because the market
is still embracing you know, the rock stuff at the moment.
So they came up with a plan. So what we
agreed to do was that they would be starting the
(37:23):
record around the world, which is what they did. It
blew up in England and went through Europe, they got
really a good foothold in Asia and Japan and South America,
like basically the whole world. And we didn't have the Internet,
don't forget at that point, not nearly to the degree
we have now, So it was not it was not
going to spread virally without us manually driving it. So
(37:46):
it allowed us a campaign where despite the first track,
would break everywhere in the world first and would get
here when we need it with a lot of horsepower.
And that was the plan, and that's exactly what we
did it. So by the time it got here, it
was proven already and you know, it was already number
one in a dozen markets. It shows up here exactly
(38:09):
when the market was shifting, so it exploded here. When
it was finally released in the US at the beginning
of Want to Be by the Spice Girls quickly shot
to number one, and so did their album. They were
an immediate pop culture sensation, and so emboldened by the
success of The Spice Girls, I just knew we'd have
a big hit with Hanson, and so we set to
(38:30):
work getting all the elements just right to introduce the
band to the world in the spirit of bringing in
the dust Brothers. We recruited an incredibly talented and cred
director named Tamara Davis to direct the Unbach video. She
had previously done videos for alternative artists like The Smiths
and Sonic Youth, and incidentally was married to Mike de
(38:51):
of the Beastie Boys. Danny Goldberg understood the power of
having people like Tamra Davis involved. Yeah, I was very
smart the Dust Brothers to be as users who had
worked with Beck and who had a cred, and then
Tamra Davis doing the video, who was kind of done
Beastie Boys stuff and had some cred to it, and
to just give it kind of permission for the old,
(39:14):
you know, fourteen or fifteen year old boys to not
hate it, and it differentiated it from just a pure
retro pop thing, you know. I think, um, we all
also kind of wanted Hanson to be a little cooler
than they actually were, just for our own notion of
who we were in the world, and it really benefited them.
(39:37):
The great video Tamra Davis directed proved to be crucial
to Umbob's success, As Danny Goldberg recalled, it's hard for
people to remember who aren't older. How powerful MTV was
at that time. You know, it still exists as a channel,
but it's not twenty four hours a day and music videos. Uh.
And there was no YouTube obviously there was no Internet.
(40:00):
It could play videos, I think the email was already there,
but it wasn't a video medium. So MTV was this
eight hundred pound gorilla in the music business, and if
a video worked for them, radio usually would follow. I
remember we had a guy named Jason Lynn working for us,
who was the guy that used to bring videos to MTV.
(40:23):
And the day that he came back from the music
meeting with his big smile on his face that they
quote unquote loved it done. You know, that was so
powerful that everything after that was like um peddling a
bike downhill. The excitement at the record company was building
to a fevered pitch. As Taylor Hanson remembered, I think
(40:44):
everybody on the team, you know, got the idea that, uh,
there was something special happening. But at the same time,
sometimes the special thing is ahead of its curved too much.
You don't necessarily hit that perfect moment. You know, you
could just as easily have just missed that window because
it's so short. Uh, to have the right thought and
(41:04):
the right sound and something that really snaps. But um
Bob hit it just the right time. The Spice Girls
had set the stage and Hansen sees the moment. Um
Bob was released to radio in April, and by Memorial
Day it was the number one song in the country.
But even before we achieved that chart feat, we could
feel an intensity building. To celebrate the release of Hanson's album,
(41:25):
Radio Station Z one decided to hold an event at
the record store in the Paramise Park Mall in New Jersey.
Taylor Hanson recalls the scene. You could feel there's there's
an energy in the air as we pulled up to
the mall and there was not a parking space in
that mall left open, and all of us sort of
had this almost eeries of like a t Rex. You know,
(41:47):
you could have couldn't been Jurassic Park where the t
Rex like suddenly walks in. It was like, there's a
spooky reality to something that's going on here. Nobody can
quite put their finger on and you make jokes like, oh,
who's got a sale on at Macy's. You know, this
is must be something happening. What was happening was that
Hanson were about to explode into instant stardom. Well, the
song had made its appearance, and it had resonated enough
(42:11):
that that mall was packed from wall to wall with
what they estimated was maybe close to eight thousand people
or something something mind boggling um. Walking into that acoustic performance,
it felt like we had just fast forwarded into a
movie that we had hoped to be in. You know,
(42:34):
we've been cast in the film of of a record
that suddenly worked. And quite frankly, I I held my
breath after we finished that and walked in, got into
the car and thought, I want to do anything I
can to keep this feeling, to be able to do
what I'm doing right now, because it feels so amazing
(42:57):
to stand in a room singing a song that you
wrote in your garage that means something to you and
have people feeling that and singing it back to you.
It's a powerful, powerful thing and probably one of the
most addictive drugs you can find, which is that connection
that music you know creates. It's it's that night change everything.
(43:18):
Tom Pullman from Z one D also remembers Promise Park
Mall as a watershed event. I was at the station
at the time, but I got a call from our
head of promotions saying, you're not going to believe this,
but this place is insane. Right now, the place is
mobbed and there's just this incredible reaction. Again, it was
(43:39):
one of another one of those moments where, my god,
there's something else happening in music right now. That something
happened with the pendulum Swing. I don't know if it's
because everybody was burnt out on alternative music at the
time and you just needed something different, But you know,
that was another one of those moments again, like sitting
under the the seats at a ball and feeling the
(44:01):
place rocking from inside the mall. I called Danny Goldberg,
who was back at the Mercury offices, but he couldn't
really hear me through all the screaming. I remember he
said to me, kind of incredulously, what's that their fans? Remember?
This was completely unexpected? I shouted Yes. He later told
me he'd never heard that high pitched screaming sound before,
(44:22):
even though he'd worked with some of the biggest acts
in rock music. Yeah, because it's young girls, right, It's
a pop it's the younger female audience. And now Zeppelin
didn't get that sound, or did The Beatles did, and
so does every generation you know, and you know that's
that's that sound. Yeah, that's true. That was the first
time I had one of those. Yeah. But the Paramas
(44:43):
Park Mall event also carried with it an air of danger,
as the Hanson Brothers will certainly never forget. We're about
to go ahead and do a performance which was on
a stage that was a foot riser. I'm not set
up for some mega concert, but we had to get
I think about thirty feet from the from the door
behind kind of the backstage of the mall to this
little spot. And it was as if we were going
(45:06):
into battle just to get to that stage, because there
was there were thousands of bodies just pressed up against
each other. So once we finished the three songs, which
went by in a flash, um, we were done. We
didn't have anything else to do. We had we didn't
have a concert ready to share, so um moving from
that stage back thirt again to get back to the door. Um.
(45:28):
Halfway through it, the entire this little you know, invisible
uh line that was you know, um, a velvet rope
I think in a stanchion fell and Zach went right
down to the floor and, um, you know that moment,
you have this kind of what did I sign up for?
(45:48):
You know? Is this? This isn't music, this is anywhere
what's happening right now? But yeah, we pulled through, and
his um, he will forever, you know, layers of agoraphobia
in his back of mind based on that experience. Here
almost twenty years later, the situation was saved when a
hulking Mercury Records promo man named Dave Bouchard lifted Zach
(46:11):
Hanson up over his head and carried him out of
the mall to safety. But he really was on the
verge of being crushed by the crowd. Now, word of
that event spread across the music industry instantly. Karen Glauber
remembers hearing about it in Los Angeles, but says she
wasn't surprised. Girls like cute boys. There's always been forever.
(46:31):
It's team pop is important. Whose photo do you want
to have on your wall? Whose picture it's always gonna be,
Whether it was David Cassidy or Michael Jackson when you're
growing up, or I had Neil Diamond. I was a
little weird. Neil diamonds. Picture was on my on my
wall from hot August night when I was a child.
But there's as long as they're girls and hormones, there's
(46:52):
gonna be an affection for boys that make music, and
especially if they're marketed in packaged together, those are always
going to go crazy for them. And whether and then
when they proved their musical chops, when they evolved, when
they grow up, when their voices change, whatever happens, then
if they actually have the talent, they're going to sustain
(47:14):
a great career. The Screaming Hysterical Girls continued to follow
Hanson everywhere they went, as Conan Brian discussed with the
band when they appeared on its TV show H Big Group.
When I was coming along was the who. They had
the world record for loudness of screaming Girls at a concert,
which was a hundred and twenty six descibls. You guys
broke that record, right. I don't know the exact statistics.
(47:41):
All I know is this is really loud. Meanwhile, is
the pop revolutions swept America. The Backstreet Boys and their
manager Johnny Wright, watched from Germany, where they've been steadily
developing their career since their failure to break America. As
Johnny Wright recalled, when you to call America no fan
(48:01):
land because nobody knew who the band was. And I
will tell you this is that when we were there
and we heard the Spice Girls coming, and then when
we heard Umba play on radio in the United States,
that's when we said, guys, it's time and go home.
(48:28):
On the next episode of Speed of Sound, the Spice
Girls implode handsome demures while the Backstreet Boys find superstardom,
followed by another boy Man and America's Sweetheart Until next Time.
(48:56):
You can find me on Twitter at Stevie g Pro.
Speed of Sound is executive produced by Lauren Bright Pacheco,
Noel Brown and me. Taylor Shacogne is our supervising producer,
editor and sound designer. Additional sound designed by Tristan McNeil.
I'm Steve Greenberg. Until next time. Keep listening from music
(49:17):
that moves You. Speed of Sound is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
The nineties kicked off with an audio rebellion against the superficial,
telegenic and overly spandex hair metal bands that were grabbing
screen time on MTV and dominating the radio airwaves. When
(00:24):
Nirvana's second album, never Mind dropped in, in many ways,
it obliterated that entire scene and ushered in the grittier, angrier,
and more angst the era of grunge. But soon pure
pop music would find its way back to the mainstream.
I'm Steve Greenberg, and this is Speed of Sound. Okay.
(00:49):
So it's sometime and I'm in the supermarket standing on
the checkout line to kill time. While I'm waiting to
check out, I pick up a copy of a teen
magazine that was on the rack. I think it was
Tiger Beat magazine. I remember Tiger Beat from when I
was a kid. It was the magazine that featured teen
idol singers like Donnie Osmond or David Cassidy. Later on
(01:10):
in the eighties, you saw new Kids on the Block
on the cover a lot. So I'm leaving through Tiger
Beat and I realized there are no singers in the
magazine at all, it's filled with teen actors like Jonathan
Taylor Thomas, the star of a sitcom called Home Improvement. Hey,
Dad knew we should get Mom the heater for a birthday. Birthday,
(01:32):
Dad forgot Mom's birthday, did not? Did not. So I'm
thinking to myself, why are there no singers in this magazine?
But then it quickly hits me that, of course, people
like Eddie Vetter from Pearl Jammer, Chris Cornell from Sound Garden,
the biggest bands of the day aren't really appropriate for
(01:52):
a magazine named at twelve year old girls. And furthermore,
I couldn't really think of any currently popular singers that
were And then I started to think about how the
whole pop music scene at that particular time was addressing
a sensibility that was kind of negative, kind of depressed, pessimistic.
I thought to myself, there must be a lot of
kids out there who are in jaded or feeling hopeless,
(02:14):
who just want to have a happy life, who want
to have friends, or want to fall in love, or
just want to be happy, and there's really no music
speaking to those kids. I refused to believe that this
whole generation of kids was just bummed out in cynical
and so at that point I resolved to keep my
eyes and ears open for a musical artist who could
(02:35):
bring back optimism, bring back happiness. But it was clear
that launching a teen idol wouldn't be an easy thing
to do, even if I found the right singer or group.
In fact, right around the same time as my trip
to the supermarket, a new group that fits the bill
did release their first single, and it failed to get
much attention at all, despite a major push by their
(02:55):
record label. If anybody in the music business talked about
that group at all, it was to present them as
exhibit a for why a pop group couldn't be successful
in the current climate. The group was called the Backstreet Boys.
Their manager, Johnny Wright recalls, we tried to put a
record out, you know, in the United States, produced by
then Max Martin and Dennis Pop, called we Got It
(03:16):
going on. At that point in time, as you talked about,
nobody cared about a boy band, you know. In fact,
they were happy to see new kids on the block
go away. It was a lot of grunge and everything
else was happening. These guys, Backstreet Boys, I'll tell you,
they did openings of pet stores and stuff like that
in order to try to get known and try to
move that record. And for the most part, the stations
(03:36):
that we did promo for they gave us suspended two
but it just really never connected. And at that point
in time, I think Giant Records was in a position
of well, maybe this is just not gonna work, and
there was this worry that the guys were going to
get dropped from the label. But that's when I said, well, look,
the boy band situation is happening in Europe, give us
another shot. Let us go over there and see if
(03:57):
we can make something happen. And we ended leave. In
the US, pop music certainly felt irrelevant in a music
scene that had been turned upside down by the arrival
of Nirvana's album never Mind. At the end of that
(04:21):
Nirvana introduced mainstream America to grunge music, which had been
incubating in Seattle since the late nineteen eighties. Musically, grunge
was kind of a hybrid of metal and punk more
or less, and by combining guitar distortion with lyrics that
dealt with isolation, frustration, and depression, it spoke to its
audience of gen xers in a way that just seemed
(04:42):
more authentic and relatable than the rock music that was
on the radio at the beginning of the nineties. In fact,
grunge very quickly made the music it replaced seemed very dated.
Danny Goldberg, who managed Nirvana, recalls that moment in time.
The MTV pop rock culture was known for what we
used to call hair bands, rock bands that had some
(05:04):
metal influences. The lead singers inevitably had this long, blow
dried hair, and in the music videos usually there was
a fan off camera blowing it, and they had a
lot of them. Artists like Winger and Warrant and Poison
had kind of pop choruses and melodies, but with kind
(05:24):
of a frame of of what was becoming more and
more of a retro rock bon Jovie was a big
artist then two and the biggest of that era was
Guns and Roses. So there was sort of a feeling
among college kids and kind of the intellectual cutting edge
side of the rock audience that that was an empty,
(05:45):
shallow culture. In the early nineties. Grunge music was the
latest manifestation of what had become known as alternative music.
That term was coined way back in nineteen seventy nine
by a man named Terry Tolkien, who was looking for
an umbrella term to describe the punk and post punk
music he was writing about in a publication called Rockpool Newsletter.
(06:07):
As the nineteen eighties wore on, alternative music became more
and more popular as an underground scene, and it finally
exploded onto the mainstream with the release of never Mind.
Danny Goldberg Remembers and Nirvana and the song Smells Like
the Inspirit in September of ninety one just touches that
nerve depend up frustration of more than ten years of
(06:28):
Republican presidency. The shallowness of what had been now become
perceived to a lot of young people as as a
corporate rock. Smells Like Teen Spirit became a most unlikely
pop radio hit in the winter of and it immediately
caused an esthetic shift in the music world. Karen Glauber,
who was an editor Hits Magazine during this period, summed
(06:52):
up the appeal of grunge. Kids just saw themselves. It
was the first time they could see a singer who
reminded them of the and most kids are not popular.
Most kids are not really I haven't don't have their
lives figured out. Kids are a mess. So this is
the first time a kid could connect with an artist
(07:13):
and say, this is not even aspirational. This is relatable
because the whole fantasy of MTV was this is a
life you can aspire to, and now it's this guy
is me. Alternative rock very quickly commanded center stage in
the music world. Danny Goldberg recalls, for a period of time,
(07:33):
alternative rock was pop. I would argue that Nirvana was
kind of the last rock band to also be a
giant pop act that in back in the day, Kurt
Cobain was a celebrity the way Rhanna or Justin Bieber
or Taylor Swift is. You know he was. He was
not just the most famous rock artist, he was kind
of the most famous artist for a minute. Seattle's grun
(07:57):
scene had its own distinct culture during that era, and
it encompassed not just the music but also its own
fashion and a general lifestyle. And the scene was pretty
resentful of efforts by mainstream culture to co opt it.
There was a real disdain for the establishment. A New
York Times reporter was once sent to Seattle to write
a serious sociological piece on the culture of grunge, and
(08:19):
an employee of the alternative record label Subpop fooled him
into thinking that grunge actually had its own lingo, consisting
of terms like swinging on the flippity flop and cob noveler,
which were completely made up. The Times actually published these
terms under the heading a lexicon of Grunge breaking the Code,
and they wound up pretty embarrassed. Anyway. Pretty soon the
(08:42):
grunge scenes started to spread nationwide, impacting every aspect of
pop culture. As Karen Glauber recalls, people wanted to whether
it was hot topic coming into business, and kids could
go into stores and and all of a sudden, emerged
instead of going to thrift stores like we did to
look a certain way when we were younger, you could
(09:03):
go to hot Topic. You could go to Macy's, you
got anywhere and buy some torn flannel, cut off jeans,
you know, a chain belt, Doc Martin's. You could look
the part. Alternative culture even spawned its own hit movies
like Singles, complete with a soundtrack featuring songs by alternative
(09:25):
superstars like Smashing Pumpkins and Paul Westerberg of the Replacements.
If you can't find Love, You settle for six right
now or something really outrageous. I think you got the
wrong number, lady, but they'll be right over. And even
TV shows were leaning on alternative music to seem cool,
(09:47):
with bands like Mud Honey and Buffalo Tom getting exposure
on primetime shows like My So Called Life, Can Wait,
Don't Go Somewhere. Sure, inevitably, grim and alternative even took
(10:13):
over pop radio. Tom Pulman became program director of New
York's top forty music station Z one hundred, and he
remembers what it was like when I got the job
at SEE one. Top forty was really in a grunge
space at the time. So the big songs back then,
we're like Atlantis, Moore said, Radiohead, Soul, Asylum, Oasis, Live,
(10:37):
Green Day, all those songs were really big, and people
were saying that that was the pop music at the time.
So when I got there, Z one was taking the
grunge ride. It was so popular bands like Pearl Jams, Stone, Temple, Pilots, Atlantis,
Moore said, it kind of felt like that was by
definition the pop music because it was the most popular thing.
(10:59):
Did straight ahead pop record have a chance in that moment?
Not really? I would look at our research and I
would see all the songs that we were supposed to
play according to the research, and they were all like
rock and grunge, and there was no way in that
mix of music that I could throw on a pure
pop record. Eventually, the grunge scenes started to suffer from overkill.
(11:23):
Karen Glauber explained how that happened. Truly, all those Seattle
bands were getting a shot. And what also happened is
that every A and R person was start going to Seattle,
and the Four Seasons was always teeming with A and
R people looking to sign the next grung jack. And
what happens in any scene is that it starts to dilute.
(11:46):
So people were signing bands that you were the only
thing they had going for them is that they were
geographically desirable. They became very, very popular. You know that
they had their shot. And with an seen, once that
becomes too popular, and once your little brother and sister
(12:06):
are going around the house singing Nirvana lyrics, it's just
not cool anymore. You gotta go find the next thing.
Danny Goldberg points to another reason for the decline of
alternative rock. So, yeah, it was a pretty brief rain
that the alternative rock had. At the time, it seemed
like it was going to go on forever, but it
was really only a few years. And the reason for
(12:27):
that was because it was kind of the last gasp
of rock and roll as pop music because of the
growing ascendance of hip hop. The difference between pop and rock,
to me, has a lot to do with two things,
age and gender. Pop is younger and skew is much
more female. Rock is a little bit older, and skew
(12:47):
is much more male. And uh, you know, African American
music had mostly been pop music. R and B was
mostly pop. It didn't have that male energy that got
you know, headben angers and guys, you know, deriving their
identity from it. But hip hop did. And hip hop
was the first time that that you could kind of be,
(13:08):
as the cliche was in politics, an angry black man
and be a star. It went from being a liability
to a virtue commercially, and that sucked up a lot
of the social and cultural energy that alternative rocket had
just a few years earlier. So by the second half
of the nineties, that balance of power was already shifting
(13:29):
in favor of hip hop, and it created a pop
vacuum me. I personally began to sense that the alternative
scene was running out of creative steam in mid when
I heard a record on Z one by Soul Asylum,
a band I generally respected, but the lyrics to this
song sounded to me like a parody of the whole
scene can stop. It was around that time that I
(14:14):
really resolved to search for a pop band. And I
wasn't the only one with that idea. In England, where
the British version of alternative called brit Pop was ruling
the charts acts like Oasis and Blur. An artist manager
named Simon Fuller also noticed the dearth of pure pop
on the charts, and he also made a mental note
to do something about it. Now. Closer to home, Tom
(14:36):
Pullman of radio station Z one hundred had a similar
epiphany at the station's very first jingle Ball concert and
New York's Madison Square Garden. So here was my moment,
okay at ze Because we were in eighteenth place, we
were talking about changing formats, we did format searches, we
contemplating going full on alternative. But anyway, we built jingle Ball.
(15:01):
The artists that we started to book, we're all female.
So we ended up calling a Girl's Rule Yule and
we had like Tracy Chapman and Gwen Stefani from No Doubt,
Cheryl crow Jewel at that show. I remember being under
the rafters, you know, kind of like that backstage area
(15:22):
No Doubt, being on stage in the place, being packed
with all these teenage girls and they were all bouncing
at the same time. I was by myself in that
back area, and I could feel the ground shaking, and
I was like, my god, if we can elicit this
kind of response out of people, we're still alive when
(15:45):
we come back. Pop Salvation appears at a town fair
in Kansas. In early I was working of Mercury Records
as an A and R man. They're the people who
looked for new talent and then helped make the records.
(16:06):
People at the label knew I wanted to make a
pop record, and so one day I received a phone
call from one of our executives on the West Coast,
a woman named Alison Hamamura. Allison had a lot of
cred in the alternative rock community, and so she felt
she wasn't the right person to follow up on this
demo tape that she had gotten from her boyfriend Jeff Rabhan,
who had gotten it from his friend Christopher Sebek, who
(16:27):
managed the band. But Alison Hamamura thought maybe it would
be up my alley and I might want to check
it out. What she didn't tell me is that this
act had already been passed on by every label in
the business. Now. When I played the demo, I was flabbergasted.
It was this little kid whose voice hadn't even broken yet,
but it was an amazing voice, and he was singing
(16:49):
this song that he'd supposedly written with his two brothers,
who were also just young kids, and they all claimed
to be playing their own instruments, even the ten year
old drummer. The band was called Hanson and they were
from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Incredibly, their demos sounded as though they
hadn't been listening to contemporary radio at all. It sounded
(17:10):
like they've been listening to old Jackson five records or something.
I decided to go check them out at a town
fair in Coffeeville, Kansas. This was in March. To be honest,
I went half expecting to find out that it was
all a put on, that they couldn't really sing as
well as they did on the demo, or they couldn't
really play their own instruments, or maybe they had a
third eye in the middle of their foreheads. I was
(17:32):
ready for something to be wrong with this picture. When
I got to Coffeeville, it was a pretty sad scene.
The town was economically depressed. Most of the shops on
main Street stood empty. The fair, officially called the Coffeeville
New Beginnings Festival, was intended to boost the town spirits,
but it was poorly attended. Maybe a dozen or so
girls waiting in front of the stage for the band
(17:54):
to appear. The stage, by the way, was the back
of a flatbed truck. On the side of the stage,
there was a woman standing by a table with hands
and T shirts for sale. I surmised she must be
their mother. No one was buying the T shirts, so
I decided I'd buy one because I kind of felt bad.
And by the way, I still have that shirt to
this day. Their mom didn't know I was from a
(18:15):
record company, and she kept wondering to me why the
turnout was so light. She figured the festival must have
been poorly publicized. Well, the band came on and they
were great. They sang great, they played great, and they
look great, and those dozen or so girls in front
of the stage, they were smitten. After the show, I
introduced myself and said I wanted to sign them to
(18:36):
a record deal. I found out later that after I left,
they figured I was kidding and that they'd never hear
from me again. When I got back to New York,
I told Danny Goldberg, yes, the same Danny Goldberg who
used to manage Nirvana but who was now president of
Mercury Records, that I wanted to sign these kids. I
was kind of expecting him to be dismissive, but instead
he immediately agreed we were on our way. I'll let
(18:59):
Taylor Hands and pick up the story from here. Every label,
major label in out there passed on the record and
passed on the band, and I think, you know, even
with Mercury, I think technically there were three different folks
that passed on our demo until until it finally reached
you and and Danny and the spark. I think was
(19:22):
that understanding that that pop music had a place in
kind of modern music, and we just figured that we
hadn't found the right person. It turns out that my
hunch about Hands and not listening to the radio was correct.
They spent some of their childhood living in Latin America,
where their dad was sent for work by an oil company.
The only music they listened to during that time was
(19:43):
a series of cassettes released by Time Life that featured
year by year top hits of every year from the
late nineteen fifties to nineteen seventy. Here's Taylor again, Sadden.
You hear Chuck Berry and you hero otis reading, and
you hear you know, this early rock and roll, and
it just clicked. Um. So it was almost like we
were in a bubble um of our own, a bubble
(20:04):
within a bubble, and here at you know, nine years
old and even younger actually, Um, I just remember having
that that spark and and hearing music and feeling like
it was for me, and feeling like it was as
current as anything else that was out there. I mean,
Little Richard could have been the latest single, you know.
(20:24):
Hearing or just writings, you know, sitting on the dock
of the bay, or hearing Michael Jackson's voice, it was
just like this is this is alive and new. We
moved the band and their family out to l a
and set about writing and recording their debut album. While
everyone at the label agreed that Hansen's demo was great,
there were a lot of skeptics who couldn't see how
we could break the band with a straight pop record.
(20:46):
I kept getting encouraged to take the record in a
more alternative direction so we could started an alternative radio
like most hits of that period. I was determined to
stay the course and keep the project pure pop, but
I did hedge my to produce the album. I brought
in the Dust Brothers, who had just produced Beck's album.
(21:09):
The Beck album still hadn't been released, but someone at
Mercury Records played me an advanced copy, and I thought
the record was just great. It had a fresh sound,
and yet you could tell that the producers had a
real affection for old records. When the Dust Brothers hurd Umbop,
they immediately agreed to produce the album. These were just
the guys who could update that Jackson five sound for
(21:30):
the nineties, and it didn't hurt that they could bring
a little alternative credit to the project. Taylor Hanson remembers
the best thing about the Dust Brothers was they understood
that we were essentially cut from the Jackson five cloth.
You know, we we were not emulating something that wasn't authentic.
They they got that we were talking about music, um,
(21:52):
both as people that loved a style and were authentically
creating it. It wasn't a gimmick. And so we talked
about records and you know when they were bringing in there,
you know, their style and you know, bringing in loops
from vintage records and and sitting there and talking about
music right there in there, you know, house in silver Lake,
(22:12):
and we were having the conversation that we'd have with
you know, with you Steve about you know, the history
of music where records that made us want to play.
And so I think that that respect, there was always
actually a uh a kind of respect that we could,
you know, talk music. The Dust Brothers recorded all the
basic tracks of them Bob the Guitar, Bassed and the
(22:35):
drum Loop, which actually was a sped up sample from
a record called Synthetic Substitution by Melvin Bliss, with the
drums being played by the legendary R and B drummer
Bernard Prudy. It was a pretty cool basis for the track,
(22:59):
but it wasn't completed and they hadn't even begun to
try and record the vocal when suddenly the Dust Brothers
ghosted us. They just stopped showing up at the studio,
which was their own studio. It turns out that between
the time we hired them and when we started to
record the Beck album was released to great acclaim, and
the Dust Brothers were suddenly extremely hot producers. Add in
(23:23):
the fact that they had very little patience for the
studio antics of the band's ten year old drummer, Zach Hanson,
who was acting like a ten year old, and the
Dust Brothers just decided that there were things they'd rather
be doing. So we were left without a producer for
the project. But luckily I had a backup idea, and
so in late June I headed to London to meet
(23:44):
with Stephen Larni. Now, Stephen Larni wasn't the toast of
the music industry at that moment like the Dust Brothers,
but he had just produced an incredibly cool album by
an English band called Black Great. Also years earlier, Stephen
(24:07):
Larni played drums in the great Scottish band Altered Images,
fronted by his future wife and star of the movie
Gregory's girl, Claire grow Stephen Larni, like the Dust Brothers,
was genuinely excited about Hansen's pop roots, and perhaps just
(24:28):
as importantly, he had the temperament to work with three
young brothers. Besides ten year old Zacht, that was thirteen
year old Taylor and the old man of the group,
fifteen year old guitarist Isaac Hanson. So it was a
very fruitful trip to London. I even got to hear
a cool new song on the radio over there that
was just being released that week. I thought to myself,
(24:54):
cool British pop record. But I don't know if those
radio guys in America are going to give it a shot. Anyway.
Back in l A, Stephen Lauroni added a lot to
the Dust Brothers basic tracks onto him, bob more drums,
extra guitars, and even some keyboards. Taylor Hanson recalls his contribution. Really,
(25:14):
Stephen is who made that record of reality and was
such a great um ear and such a great producer
and arranger to work with us. He turned what was
a kind of an inspiration into a record. The only
problem was, try as we might, we couldn't get a
usable vocal out of Taylor Hanson. You see, he was
(25:35):
thirteen years old and his voice was in the middle
of changing. There were thoughts of dropping the key of
the record so the high notes wouldn't be so difficult
to reach, but I was really stubborn about the fact
that I wanted to keep the song in its original key.
It was just too exciting that way, and I didn't
want to lose that. So we teamed the group up
with a vocal coach named Roger Love. When the biggest
(25:57):
stars in the world need to find their true voice,
they turned to one expert, and no other voice coach
in history has been more commercially successful than Roger. Roger
Love worked with the Handsome Brothers all summer and into
the fall, getting snatches of the vocal for umbop here
and there when Taylor's voice cooperated. But finally we reached
(26:19):
the end of recording the entire album and there was
one note that Taylor could simply no longer seeing the
way he had on the original demo, no matter how
many times he tried, and so we cheated. We slowed
down the tape, Taylor sang the high note, and then
we sped the tape back after when it was time
(26:39):
to mix them. Bob our mixer, a legendary engineer named
Tom Lord Algae, added one final touch to the record.
In the last chorus, he deconstructed the track, breaking it
down to just drums and a scratch sample. The scratch
had been originally inserted into the record by the Dust Brothers,
and it was actually a sample of a scratch from
the record Buffalo Gals by Malcolm McLaren. Now, in the
(27:09):
Dust Brothers version, the scratch was buried way down in
the mix. Tom Lord Algae though he turned it way
up and on that breakdown the scratch was just staring
right at us, completely exposed. We knew we couldn't get
away with that, and so we changed the pitch of
the scratch and manipulated the final note so that now
it was sufficiently different from the one on the Malcolm
(27:29):
McLaren record. What is truly amazing about h Bop is
that the three brothers really did write it all by themselves,
and it's actually a pretty profound song about valuing the
relationships that truly matter, because those are the only people
(27:50):
who stick with you until the end. But listeners may
not have caught onto the lyrics because as great as
Taylor Hanson's vocal was his annunciation was pretty in a cipherable.
I remember playing the record for Glenn Ballard, who was
Atlantis Morris as producer, and his reaction was great, record,
but it sounds like he's singing in esperanto for me.
That was part of the record's appeal. It made it
(28:13):
kind of mysterious. Now for the songs that became the
album's other hit singles, we brought in the top songwriters
in the music business to co write with Isaac Taylor
and Zach There was Desmond Child he co wrote Weird.
(28:46):
There was the great husband and wife's songwriting duo Barry
Man in Cynthia while they co wrote the ballad I
Will to You with the Boys, And most significantly, there
(29:12):
was Mark Hutson. Mark had been in a successful three
brother rock band himself back in the seventies, the Hudson Brothers.
They even had their own weekly TV show for a while,
The Hudson Brothers Show starring Bill Mark pret The Hunson Run,
and in the early nineties, Mark Hutson wrote the Arrowsmith
(29:34):
hit Living on the Edge. Mark Hutson knew what it
was like to be in a band with your brothers,
and he proved to be a big brother of sorts
to Hanson. He also co wrote their hit Where's the Love.
(30:03):
So Mark Hudson is you know, brilliant and you know,
one of those people we've continued to work with in
respect he he was monumental. Um, I'd say, even more
than the fact that he understood, you know, brother dynamics,
having been with you know, a group with his brothers,
he understood singing, his respect for the Beatles and the
(30:24):
Beach Boys, and having signed with his brothers, he understood
the power of harmony. On my first day back in
the office in New York, I turned on the radio
and heard this and hearing Wanna Be by the Spice
Girls on New York Radio. Well, I'll tell you that
(30:44):
really embold in me because I thought, Okay, if they
can play this on the radio, then there's no way
anybody can say no when we show up with um Bob,
because the door has just been blown wide open. Tom
Pullman remembers that moment in pop history as well and
see her to have confidence that we could be a
pop radio station again. We made that commitment. Okay, we're
just gonna play all the hot music because that's the
(31:07):
only thing we can own. We can't own one particular genre,
but we can own the genre of playing the best
of the best. And so we started to look for
any kind of pop sounding hit, and when we heard
Spice Girls, it was like, oh my god, this is
a fun song. It reflects the attitude of people feeling
(31:30):
good again and just fun. So we put that on
Z one hundred and it exploded. When we return Girl
Power Conquers America. A British manager named Bob Herbert took
(31:54):
out an ad in Stage magazine looking for girls to
audition for a new group. Basic idea was to form
a girl group called Touch, which was intended as kind
of a female equivalent of the popular British boy band
Take That. Four Hundred young women auditioned and in the
end Bob Herbert and his son Chris chose five Melanie Brown,
(32:15):
Melanie Chisholm, Emma Button, Victoria Adams and Jerry Halliwell. In
a two thousand and seven BBC documentary, Victoria Adams these
days known as Victoria Beckham remembers the audition, Tons and
tons and tons of girls auditions for it, and everybody
was there singing pop songs and I sang mine hair
(32:36):
from cabaret. The Herbert spent over a year grooming the girls,
recording demos and developing dance routines, but never succeeding in
getting them a record contract. Oddly enough, they never signed
the girls to a management contract, and eventually the girls
decided to ditch the Herberts as their managers. They eventually
(32:59):
found on their way to Simon Fuller, who managed Annie Lennox,
formerly of the Rhythmics. Simon Fuller had noticed a hole
in the pop market and thought the time was right
for Britain to move past the homegrown alternative music known
as Britpop and embrace pure, unadulterated pop, and he thought
(33:23):
these girls would be an ideal vehicle for making that happen.
Jerry Halliwell suggested changing the name of the group to Spice,
and Fuller, to make the name more appealing to the
younger set, suggested adding the word girls. Thus were christened
the Spice Girls. Years later, Simon Fuller credited his other client,
Annie Lennox, with providing the Spice Girls with a crucial
(33:45):
ingredient that would turn them into superstars. You see, Annie
Lennox met the girls very early On, and she encouraged
each of them to be louder, more brash, and much
more specific in defining their own individual personas well. Simon
Fuller quickly got the Spice Girls a contract with Virgin Records,
and he decided they should co write their material for
(34:06):
their first album, so he teamed them up with songwriters
Richard Stannard and Matt Row and at their very first
songwriting session, they came up with a song called Wanna Be.
Wannabe was more than a pop song, It was a
(34:28):
manifesto of female solidarity. The Spice Girls ethos was summed
up by the slogan girl power, which was actually lifted
from the British pop punk group Shampoo, whose single girl
Power was released earlier. I Wanna Be by the Spice
(34:50):
Girls shot to number one in the UK in July
and wound up as the UK's number one song of
the year. Almost immediately upon the release of Wanna Be,
the five Girls were re christened with their memorable nicknames
Baby Scary, Posh Ginger and Sporty mel B, also known
as Scary Spice. Recalled the origin of the nicknames, which
(35:11):
were coined by Peter Lorraine, who was editor of the
British magazine Top of the Pops. Well, you know, it
was actually a lazy journalist that couldn't be bothered to
remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames
and we were like, oh, well that kind of works.
I don't mind my name. Do you like your name?
Baby postions, We're like, let's just go with it. The
Spice Girls debut album, released that fall, sold close to
(35:34):
two million albums by Christmas, making get the fastest selling
British albums since the days of Beatlemania. But even so,
their team approached the USA with great caution. Phil Cordorero,
who was president of Virgin Records, American label at that time,
remembers the challenge. Well, we were in that era, right,
smashing pumpkins in the verve, and we had a lot
(35:57):
of that, a lot of that at that time. Yes,
in the mid nineties there were two um contrasting things
going on, but one was the grunge movement, but there
was also a hip hop component that was on the
radio at the time, which was you know, Snoop Dogg
and that kind of stuff. We hear this, Spice Girls,
But to your point, that era on radio was filled
(36:20):
with um grunge and Seattle Sound, Roger bands, you know all,
you know, and we had a few of those, which
was great, but I looked at where we were in
the charts and I knew that really we were still
a year away from being able to get away with
a pop girl band at radio. So Phil Corderero waited,
(36:42):
but he needed to convince his colleagues at the British
label to be patient, telling them American radio is not
going to play this record right now, no matter how
good it is. You know, we'll get at the airplate,
but it won't be as bigger, as fast as it
needs to be because it needs to go fast when
the when you move across the genre, when the pendulum
does swing act and radio shifts, the first one through
(37:02):
the pipe have to be very, very strong because that's
what pushes the shift. So we can be that record,
but we can't be that record now because the market
is still embracing you know, the rock stuff at the moment.
So they came up with a plan. So what we
agreed to do was that they would be starting the
(37:23):
record around the world, which is what they did. It
blew up in England and went through Europe, they got
really a good foothold in Asia and Japan and South America,
like basically the whole world. And we didn't have the Internet,
don't forget at that point, not nearly to the degree
we have now, So it was not it was not
going to spread virally without us manually driving it. So
(37:46):
it allowed us a campaign where despite the first track,
would break everywhere in the world first and would get
here when we need it with a lot of horsepower.
And that was the plan, and that's exactly what we
did it. So by the time it got here, it
was proven already and you know, it was already number
one in a dozen markets. It shows up here exactly
(38:09):
when the market was shifting, so it exploded here. When
it was finally released in the US at the beginning
of Want to Be by the Spice Girls quickly shot
to number one, and so did their album. They were
an immediate pop culture sensation, and so emboldened by the
success of The Spice Girls, I just knew we'd have
a big hit with Hanson, and so we set to
(38:30):
work getting all the elements just right to introduce the
band to the world in the spirit of bringing in
the dust Brothers. We recruited an incredibly talented and cred
director named Tamara Davis to direct the Unbach video. She
had previously done videos for alternative artists like The Smiths
and Sonic Youth, and incidentally was married to Mike de
(38:51):
of the Beastie Boys. Danny Goldberg understood the power of
having people like Tamra Davis involved. Yeah, I was very
smart the Dust Brothers to be as users who had
worked with Beck and who had a cred, and then
Tamra Davis doing the video, who was kind of done
Beastie Boys stuff and had some cred to it, and
to just give it kind of permission for the old,
(39:14):
you know, fourteen or fifteen year old boys to not
hate it, and it differentiated it from just a pure
retro pop thing, you know. I think, um, we all
also kind of wanted Hanson to be a little cooler
than they actually were, just for our own notion of
who we were in the world, and it really benefited them.
(39:37):
The great video Tamra Davis directed proved to be crucial
to Umbob's success, As Danny Goldberg recalled, it's hard for
people to remember who aren't older. How powerful MTV was
at that time. You know, it still exists as a channel,
but it's not twenty four hours a day and music videos. Uh.
And there was no YouTube obviously there was no Internet.
(40:00):
It could play videos, I think the email was already there,
but it wasn't a video medium. So MTV was this
eight hundred pound gorilla in the music business, and if
a video worked for them, radio usually would follow. I
remember we had a guy named Jason Lynn working for us,
who was the guy that used to bring videos to MTV.
(40:23):
And the day that he came back from the music
meeting with his big smile on his face that they
quote unquote loved it done. You know, that was so
powerful that everything after that was like um peddling a
bike downhill. The excitement at the record company was building
to a fevered pitch. As Taylor Hanson remembered, I think
(40:44):
everybody on the team, you know, got the idea that, uh,
there was something special happening. But at the same time,
sometimes the special thing is ahead of its curved too much.
You don't necessarily hit that perfect moment. You know, you
could just as easily have just missed that window because
it's so short. Uh, to have the right thought and
(41:04):
the right sound and something that really snaps. But um
Bob hit it just the right time. The Spice Girls
had set the stage and Hansen sees the moment. Um
Bob was released to radio in April, and by Memorial
Day it was the number one song in the country.
But even before we achieved that chart feat, we could
feel an intensity building. To celebrate the release of Hanson's album,
(41:25):
Radio Station Z one decided to hold an event at
the record store in the Paramise Park Mall in New Jersey.
Taylor Hanson recalls the scene. You could feel there's there's
an energy in the air as we pulled up to
the mall and there was not a parking space in
that mall left open, and all of us sort of
had this almost eeries of like a t Rex. You know,
(41:47):
you could have couldn't been Jurassic Park where the t
Rex like suddenly walks in. It was like, there's a
spooky reality to something that's going on here. Nobody can
quite put their finger on and you make jokes like, oh,
who's got a sale on at Macy's. You know, this
is must be something happening. What was happening was that
Hanson were about to explode into instant stardom. Well, the
song had made its appearance, and it had resonated enough
(42:11):
that that mall was packed from wall to wall with
what they estimated was maybe close to eight thousand people
or something something mind boggling um. Walking into that acoustic performance,
it felt like we had just fast forwarded into a
movie that we had hoped to be in. You know,
(42:34):
we've been cast in the film of of a record
that suddenly worked. And quite frankly, I I held my
breath after we finished that and walked in, got into
the car and thought, I want to do anything I
can to keep this feeling, to be able to do
what I'm doing right now, because it feels so amazing
(42:57):
to stand in a room singing a song that you
wrote in your garage that means something to you and
have people feeling that and singing it back to you.
It's a powerful, powerful thing and probably one of the
most addictive drugs you can find, which is that connection
that music you know creates. It's it's that night change everything.
(43:18):
Tom Pullman from Z one D also remembers Promise Park
Mall as a watershed event. I was at the station
at the time, but I got a call from our
head of promotions saying, you're not going to believe this,
but this place is insane. Right now, the place is
mobbed and there's just this incredible reaction. Again, it was
(43:39):
one of another one of those moments where, my god,
there's something else happening in music right now. That something
happened with the pendulum Swing. I don't know if it's
because everybody was burnt out on alternative music at the
time and you just needed something different, But you know,
that was another one of those moments again, like sitting
under the the seats at a ball and feeling the
(44:01):
place rocking from inside the mall. I called Danny Goldberg,
who was back at the Mercury offices, but he couldn't
really hear me through all the screaming. I remember he
said to me, kind of incredulously, what's that their fans? Remember?
This was completely unexpected? I shouted Yes. He later told
me he'd never heard that high pitched screaming sound before,
(44:22):
even though he'd worked with some of the biggest acts
in rock music. Yeah, because it's young girls, right, It's
a pop it's the younger female audience. And now Zeppelin
didn't get that sound, or did The Beatles did, and
so does every generation you know, and you know that's
that's that sound. Yeah, that's true. That was the first
time I had one of those. Yeah. But the Paramas
(44:43):
Park Mall event also carried with it an air of danger,
as the Hanson Brothers will certainly never forget. We're about
to go ahead and do a performance which was on
a stage that was a foot riser. I'm not set
up for some mega concert, but we had to get
I think about thirty feet from the from the door
behind kind of the backstage of the mall to this
little spot. And it was as if we were going
(45:06):
into battle just to get to that stage, because there
was there were thousands of bodies just pressed up against
each other. So once we finished the three songs, which
went by in a flash, um, we were done. We
didn't have anything else to do. We had we didn't
have a concert ready to share, so um moving from
that stage back thirt again to get back to the door. Um.
(45:28):
Halfway through it, the entire this little you know, invisible
uh line that was you know, um, a velvet rope
I think in a stanchion fell and Zach went right
down to the floor and, um, you know that moment,
you have this kind of what did I sign up for?
(45:48):
You know? Is this? This isn't music, this is anywhere
what's happening right now? But yeah, we pulled through, and
his um, he will forever, you know, layers of agoraphobia
in his back of mind based on that experience. Here
almost twenty years later, the situation was saved when a
hulking Mercury Records promo man named Dave Bouchard lifted Zach
(46:11):
Hanson up over his head and carried him out of
the mall to safety. But he really was on the
verge of being crushed by the crowd. Now, word of
that event spread across the music industry instantly. Karen Glauber
remembers hearing about it in Los Angeles, but says she
wasn't surprised. Girls like cute boys. There's always been forever.
(46:31):
It's team pop is important. Whose photo do you want
to have on your wall? Whose picture it's always gonna be,
Whether it was David Cassidy or Michael Jackson when you're
growing up, or I had Neil Diamond. I was a
little weird. Neil diamonds. Picture was on my on my
wall from hot August night when I was a child.
But there's as long as they're girls and hormones, there's
(46:52):
gonna be an affection for boys that make music, and
especially if they're marketed in packaged together, those are always
going to go crazy for them. And whether and then
when they proved their musical chops, when they evolved, when
they grow up, when their voices change, whatever happens, then
if they actually have the talent, they're going to sustain
(47:14):
a great career. The Screaming Hysterical Girls continued to follow
Hanson everywhere they went, as Conan Brian discussed with the
band when they appeared on its TV show H Big Group.
When I was coming along was the who. They had
the world record for loudness of screaming Girls at a concert,
which was a hundred and twenty six descibls. You guys
broke that record, right. I don't know the exact statistics.
(47:41):
All I know is this is really loud. Meanwhile, is
the pop revolutions swept America. The Backstreet Boys and their
manager Johnny Wright, watched from Germany, where they've been steadily
developing their career since their failure to break America. As
Johnny Wright recalled, when you to call America no fan
(48:01):
land because nobody knew who the band was. And I
will tell you this is that when we were there
and we heard the Spice Girls coming, and then when
we heard Umba play on radio in the United States,
that's when we said, guys, it's time and go home.
(48:28):
On the next episode of Speed of Sound, the Spice
Girls implode handsome demures while the Backstreet Boys find superstardom,
followed by another boy Man and America's Sweetheart Until next Time.
(48:56):
You can find me on Twitter at Stevie g Pro.
Speed of Sound is executive produced by Lauren Bright Pacheco,
Noel Brown and me. Taylor Shacogne is our supervising producer,
editor and sound designer. Additional sound designed by Tristan McNeil.
I'm Steve Greenberg. Until next time. Keep listening from music
(49:17):
that moves You. Speed of Sound is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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