How a Made Up Word Became a Rock Classic: 1983’s Musical Mysteries

Today we're going “Casey Kasem style,” counting down ten stone-cold classics from 1983. It’s our weekly Saturday Morning countdown where we feature songs from a throwback year that left a lasting mark on rock history… and shockingly never made the top 40, even though many of these are some of the biggest songs of the time. It's a musical mystery — how did these rock standards get passed over? As usual, we’ve got some great stories and guests, including how Billy Idol stole the master tapes for his new record and held them hostage to get the label to change the cover art on the album. He was about to bootleg them to the public if they didn’t cave. Or how about the song Blue Monday that New Order wrote because they were sick of coming back out on stage for encores. Their plan was to just have sequencers play it and have a robot sing it while they walked off. But it became their most famous song. And then there was the band that made up a word in their song as a joke, and it became a classic. And then there was the Journey classic Ask the Lonely that got pulled from an album at the last second and was banished to a crappy movie. Stick around for the latest episode of Professor of Rock.

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