All posts by J.A. Bartlett »
The #1 Albums: “Led Zeppelin III”
On October 24, 1970, Led Zeppelin III blased onto the Billboard 200 album chart at #3. The next week, it knocked Santana’s Abraxas from the #1 spot and remained there four weeks, before Abraxas
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World’s Worst Songs: “Playground in My Mind” by Clint Holmes
Is there anything more lovely than the voices of little children in song? Most things, actually. At World’s Worst World Headquarters, we did not bother looking up from our Super Sunday chili-making to listen
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The #1 Albums: Santana’s “Abraxas”
My first radio was a green plastic box with a giant dial and tubes inside. I didn’t care that it got only AM—it got WLS, the Top 40 giant from Chicago, and that was
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World’s Worst Songs: Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You”
(Stay with me on this one. I think I can make the case.) Even though some people believe that profanity is a linguistic copout or the sign of a failed imagination, sometimes a profane
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World’s Worst Songs: Harry Chapin’s “Sequel”
Hell yes, I read your comments. And you asked for it: this week’s installment of World’s Worst Songs stars “Sequel” by Harry Chapin. But first a bit of historical perspective. When “Sequel” came out
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The #1 Albums: “Blood Sweat & Tears 3″
At a distance of more than 40 years, we forget how big Blood Sweat and Tears was at the turn of the 1970s. Their second, self-titled album spent time at #1 in the spring
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World’s Worst Songs: “Taxi” by Harry Chapin
Good storytelling involves not only what you leave in, but what you leave out. What’s left out is what makes Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” so compulsively listenable over 45 years after it
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The #1 Albums: “Woodstock”
Years ago, I worked at a radio station in small-town Illinois. An on-air discussion about Woodstock prompted one of the sales reps to collar me in the hall afterward. “I was there, you know,”
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