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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Coming up next the story of one of the greatest, most epic rock songs in history: Layla. It has so many subplots, it’s a shock that it hasn’t been made into a biopic because you could never make this up. The song came from the writings of a 12th-century poet, and then hundreds of years later, that ancient story fell into the lap of legendary singer-guitarist Eric Clapton, who happened to be in the same situation as the man in the tragic story. Clapton was in love with his best friend’s wife, but that’s nothing. The song became shrouded in a cocktail of vices, from killing, adultery, drugs, and stealing… When I say stealing, the song was stolen from an iconic singer Rita Coolidge, who I have on the show to explain her side. The angled web of the greatest rock songs ever is finally revealed in all of its truth and drama next on Professor of Rock.

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Next we’re sharing the greatest underdog stories in music history. In our countdown of the strangest feats in music. including athen the incredible the incredible artist who sold almost 90 million records without ever playing a live concert. As well as an instrumental song that had over 2000 overdubs that became the soundtrack for one of the scariest movies ever, the Exorcist & went on to sell 18 million copies. A s well as a group of monks that came out of nowhere and leapfrogged over Soundgarden, Mariah Carey, Pink Floyd, and Pearl Jam to sell 4 million copies in the middle of grunge. Find out what happened in these stories and more, as we count down the Top 10 Most Unconventional Musical Feats ever.

NEXT on Professor of Rock.

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