And once again my voice has a case of Peter Brady. I need to quit recording late at night.

We have a variety of diss tracks here for you, all but one of them dating back to before they were even called such a thing, before the rise of hip-hop music. This isn’t to take away from the overall impact of hip-hop on modern music but rather to demonstrate that, once again, what came before can have an influence on what we have now. Kitty Wells walked so that George Harrison could run, and all that.

But this was, in fact, a fun episode to research and write, and I think we may need to take another dive into this subgenre of music in a future episode.

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Today’s episode is about a song that was written just up the hill from where I was born and in the same town where my wife and and I were wed. So it most definitely “strikes close to home.”

Neil Young had emerged from the great north woods of Canada into the public limelight in the mid–1960s. He joined up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay to create the Buffalo Springfield, an LA-based band that asked the musical question “Stop, hey, what’s that sound” before disintegrating – but not before Young himself had quit and rejoined the band several times. Then, in 1969, he made a self-titled solo album that had great songs, including “The Loner,” (one of my personal favorites) but which didn’t sell well.

And then Young really came into his own. His second solo album got him some much needed publicity, and he hit a creative chord with an ensemble of garage musicians that he dubbed Crazy Horse. His next stop was to sign on with Crosby, Stills, and Nash (wherein he added his own last name to the group) and played the Woodstock festival with them. His participation in the CSNY album Deja Vu brought him both acclaim and paychecks, which he used to purchase a sprawling ranch in the mountains of the San Francisco Bay Area.

One day, Young took a ride around his newly purchased estate with the property’s caretaker, who was at least forty years older than Young at the time. The two men had a long conversation, and the result of that little open-air chat became the basis of one of Young’s most enduring acoustic songs. Let’s find out how the song came together, who played on it, and how the listening public took to it.

One of the things that always amazed me about the songs that became big hits in the pop era between the 1950s and the 1990s was the sheer variety of musical styles that topped the charts.

When doing research for this show I went into a bit of a spiral looking at Billboard charts for the late 1970s, and I got stuck on the summer of 1978, with the amazing wealth of songs that were in the top 20 at the time. Some of the songs, of course have fallen into the mists of time because they don’t get the oldies airplay anymore, and that’s a shame because there’s still some very good stuff there.

This was the Top 20 chart for the week ending August 19, 1978 according to The Real American Top 40 Wiki page:

1. Commodores – Three Times A Lady (↔)
2. Frankie Valli – Grease (↔)
3. Donna Summer – Last Dance (↔)
4. Rolling Stones – Miss You (↔)
5. Foreigner – Hot Blooded (↔)
6. A Taste Of Honey – Boogie Oogie Oogie (↔)
7. Pablo Cruise – Love Will Find A Way (↔)
8. Barry Manilow – Copacabana (↔)
9. Walter Egan – Magnet And Steel (↔)
10. Andy Gibb – An Everlasting Love (↔)
11. Olivia Newton-John – Hopelessly Devoted To You (↔)
12. Joe Walsh – Life’s Been Good (↔)
13. Toby Beau – My Angel Baby (↔)
14. Atlanta Rhythm Section – I’m Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight (↔)
15. Evelyn King – Shame (↑4)
16. Exile – Kiss You All Over (↑2)
17. Steve Martin – King Tut (↔)
18. Chris Rea – Fool (If You Think It’s Over) (↑3)
19. Earth Wind & Fire – Got To Get You Into My Life (↑10)
20. Jackson Browne – The Load-Out/Stay (↔)

Pretty much all of these songs, I wouldn’t mind listening to again. And that’s not always the case with songs at this level of the charts. (“Having My Baby,” anyone?) We have here a mix of disco, R&B, retro pop, ballads, a live track, a novelty song, a soundtrack title, about a half-dozen well-established acts and three one-hit wonders (I’m not counting Steve Martin there because it’s a novelty). And they’re all at varying levels of “good”!

All of this is prologue to the fact that Stevie Nicks was in the thick of the music industry for a three-year period, either as a writer, a lead or a backup singer. All of which cemented her in the musical firmament. If she’d done nothing else after 1979, she’d still be fondly remembered.

But in addition to being all the things above, she was also a muse for several artists, much of which we’re covering in this episode. I bumped into some problems with regard to quantifying songs about her, but I did my best and I’d be curious to know what you may think I’ve overlooked, because there were a few I did research on and got nowhere.