July 30, 1983 - 38 Years Ago Today: Billy Joel had the Hot Shot Debut at No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart with his single, "Tell Her About It." This self-penned song was the leadoff single from Joel's ninth studio album, "An Innocent Man," and the first of 6 hit singles from the album. "Tell Her About It," became Joel's 21st chart entry and his 18th Top 40 hit and 2nd No. 1. It also became his 3rd No. 1 single on the Billboard AC Chart where it enjoyed a 2-week run at the top. Joel's songs reflected his new found bachelorhood as he was recently divorced from his first wife, Elizabeth, and began dating supermodels Elle Macpherson and Christy Brinkley. Joel had said in several interviews that he felt like a teenager again and the songs written for this album just poured out of him in about 6 weeks time. He said, for the first time, he felt like a rock star. The songs he wrote purposely reflected his teen years with the doo-wop sound of ...
Four decades ago, inspired by a double-feature of two infamous movie musicals — Olivia Newton-John’s Olympian roller-boogie fantasy Xanadu and the Village People’s last-days-of-disco debacle Can’t Stop the Music — entertainment publicist John Wilson held the potluck Oscar party that launched the Golden Raspberry Awards recognizing the very worst in film. The inaugural Razzies took place during a fascinating on-the-cusp age of musical cinema, the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, when hard rock, punk, new wave, glam, disco, and even big-band all merged and mashed — sometimes successfully ( Grease , Fame , Pink Floyd’s The Wall ), sometimes not much ( Sgt. Pepper , The Apple , KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park , Pennies From Heaven, Popeye , and of course, the two above-mentioned flicks). Xanadu , for what it’s worth, “lost” the Razzie to the Village People (as did Neil Diamond’s even cringey-er nominee, The Jaz...
MTV VJs Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn, and J.J. Jackson (Photo Mark Weiss/WireImage) At midnight on Aug. 1, 1981, Martha Quinn, Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter, and J.J. Jackson stood inside the Loft restaurant in Fort Lee, N.J., to watch music history being made. The now-iconic “moon landing” guitar riff blasted; Warner Cable executive John Lack intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock ‘n’ roll”; the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” hit the small screen… and just minutes later, the new cable channel MTV suffered its first technical difficulty. But it didn’t matter. Eventually, everyone in America wanted their MTV, and the music business was forever changed — as were the lives of the five original MTV VJs. Below, Yahoo Entertainment chats with Quinn, Goodman, Blackwood, and Hunter [Jackson died in 2004] about MTV’s early days and what it was like to hold down “the greatest job we'll probably ever have.” Martha Quinn: People say to me, “Will you...
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