#250
Number in hundreds of thousands Geffen records hoped Nirvana’s first cd on the label ‘Nevermind’ would sell. To date, it has sold 11 million copies.
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#249
Amount of time (2 minutes 49 seconds) that was shaved off of The Who’s “Who Are You” from the album version of the song to the US single edit. US radio at the time was in a serious ‘Top 40’ mode which required songs to be edited for airplay so that more songs could be played in an hour. The edited version is rarely heard these days.
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#248
Length (2:48) of the song by the first fictional band ever to reach number 1 on the Billboard pop charts. The feat happened in 1969 when a cartoon band “recorded” and “released” the song which spent four weeks at the top of the US charts and 8 weeks on top of the British chart. The band: The Archies. The Song: “Sugar, Sugar.”
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#247
Number of seconds into Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’ when he begins to imitate a saxophone. Morrison has said about the writing of the song that he wrote the melody first by playing the melody on a soprano sax – which is the reason he chose to mimic the instrument in the song.
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#246
Number of years between the time Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his original “Air from the 3rd Orchestral Suite” in the early 1700s and the time Procol Harum released “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in 1967. The Hammond organ line in the Procol Harum song, played by Matthew Fisher, isn’t copied note for note, but is definitely inspired by Bach’s piece, which came to be known as “Air on the G String.”
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#245
Address of Wally Heider Studios – 245 Hyde Street in San Francisco, where the. Jefferson Airplane recorded Volunteers, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young recorded Deja Vu, Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded Green River and the Grateful Dead recorded American Beauty.
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#244
Minutes and seconds (2:44) of the only song the entire band of Kiss vetoed from putting on an album, the only song once it was on the album the entire band of Kiss vetoed from being released as a single and once it was released as a single it reached the highest peak of the Singles Charts for any of their songs. The song reached #7 on the US charts and was one of only two singles to ever go gold for the band.
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#243
Number of hours it took Billy Corgan to finish writing 1979 in order for it to be accepted on the Smashing Pumpkins’ album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadeness. According to statements in interviews, Billy Corgan worked nonstop and wrote about 56 songs for Mellon Collie, the last of these to be written being "1979". As the Mellon Collie sessions came to their conclusion, "1979" was just a couple of chord changes and a snippet of a melody without words. When the time came for choosing the songs to go on the album, the producer said, "1979" was "not good enough" and wanted to drop the song from the record. This, however, inspired Corgan to finish it in four hours and prove him wrong.
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#242
Typical number of customers per day observed going into an illegal brothel known as the Chicken Ranch in Fayette County, Texas, before authorities shut it down in the summer of 1973 after 68 years of operation. That same year, the brothel was immortalized as “that home out on the range” by Z.Z. Top in their song named for the Texas town closest to the Chicken Ranch – LaGrange.
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#241
Number of Olympic records that were broken at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The US and 64 other countries boycotted the games because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan the year before. Peter Gabriel allegedly wrote his song “Games Without Frontiers” to reinforce the theme of adults acting like children over the Olympics, which explains the lines about the different colored flags. But the name of the song was directly inspired by a popular 1970s French game show called “Jeux Sans Frontieres” in which teams from different European countries dressed in wacky costumes and competed for prizes by completing bizarre tasks in funny games. This added to Gabriel’s symbolism about the Olympics and explains the repetition of the French phrase Jeux Sans Frontieres, which was sung by Kate Bush. Another line you’ll hear in the song was inspired by the British version of the show, which was called “It’s A Knockout.”
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#240
Number of hours it took for Derek and the Dominoes to Record the album “Layla and other assorted…” The entire album was recorded in 10 days. They recorded this early in the sessions, a week before "Layla." There were some very talented people in the studio that made it work. Says keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, "When you let a horse run a race, it will run its finest race on its own. When you get some musicians and you get some creative people, you give them the opportunity to do what they're supposed to do, and they'll do just that. Given the right circumstances, they'll perform at their peak. They'll draw from the source. These songs don't come out of your head. They're not something you sit down and figure out. They're things that flow through you - we were just instruments, just like the instruments in our laps. We were provided an opportunity to lock ourselves away and let the creative principle of the universe flow through us." (I Looked Away)
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#239
Number of hours between the Kent State shootings and the release of ‘Ohio’ by CSNY. This is about the events of May 4, 1970, when the US National Guard shot 4 unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio. Neil Young wrote this shortly after seeing a news report on the tragedy. It was released 10 days after the shootings. Young reported that "David Crosby cried when we finished this take." Crosby can be heard keening "four, why? why did they die?" and "how many more?" in the fade.
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#238
Time in Baghdad on January 17, 1991 - 2:38 a.m. - when the massive coalition air campaign began for Operation Desert Storm - the first Gulf War. The first song played by Armed Forces Radio at the start of the war, and the unofficial anthem forU.S. forces during the war, was "Rock the Casbah" by The Clash.
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#237
Number of days between the time Randy Newman released a hit song in 1977 and the day legislation was introduced in the state of Maryland to make it illegal to play the song on the radio. Contrary to popular myth, the bill did not pass. Newman wrote “Short People” as a commentary on how some people treated others who did not live up to society's rigid standards.
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#236
Number of weeks between the release of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River” in 1974 and Talking Heads “Take Me To The River” in 1978.
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#235
Minutes and seconds into the Allman Brothers song "Blue Sky" where Duane Allman and Dickey Betts briefly play together as Duane hands the guitar solo over to Dickey. (Duane plays the first part, they play a couple of bars together, then Dickey solos.) "Eat A Peach" was Duane¹s last album with the band. It was also the first Allmans song that featured Dickey's vocals. Betts wrote the song for his then-girlfriend Sandy, whose Native American name was . . . . Bluesky.
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#234
Number of people (in hundreds of thousands) who didn’t cross the Union lines during the Miners Strike between March 12, 1984 and March 3, 1985. The end of the strike was felt as a terrible blow to loyal union members, though many understood that the extreme poverty being suffered after a year without wages was difficult to hold. Indeed, in many areas striking miners made a distinction between those who had returned to work after only a couple of months strike, and those who felt forced to return to work for the sake of their children, many months later. In all, 10 men died during the year long strike. The strike was the inspiration for Bono to write Red Hill Mining Town.
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#233
Minutes and seconds into the Rolling Stones song Street Fighting Man that you hear the strange wailing sound made by an Indian reed instrument called a Shehani, which continues as the song fades out. On the track, the instrument was played by English singer/songwriter/ founding member of Traffic Dave Mason. Mick Jagger wrote the song in reaction to student protests and a general strike which led to violent riots and clashes with police in the streets of Paris in the spring of 1968, as well as the Vietnam war protests in the US . . . . while, on the other hand, things remained mostly quiet in “sleepy London town.”
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#232
2.32 Miles. The distance from Woodley Road to Hank Williams’ gravesite. Though the song “Seven Bridges Road” refers to the road in Montgomery, Alabama that leads to the Oakwood Annex Cemetery, Woodley Road does not. It is however the only road with 7 well defined bridges. The official name of the road is Woodley Road but it is still often referred to as Seven Bridges Road where it runs from Fairview Ave. in the city to Mount Zion Rd. many miles out in the country.
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#231
Length in minutes and seconds of the instrumental intro to John Mellencamp’s “I Need A Lover.”
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#230
Minutes and seconds (2:30) into the Police song Don’t Stand So Close To Me that the lyrics refer to the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov and his controversial novel Lolita, which was about an older man who was obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl. "It's no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough, just like the old man in that book by Nabokov." The song portrays the internal struggle of a teacher and his attraction to his younger student. Although Sting had actually been an English teacher before he became a rock star, he's always denied that the song is autobiographical.
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#229
Point in the U2 song “Bullet The Blue Sky” (2 minutes 29 seconds) at which Bono makes reference to then President Reagan - "This guy comes up to me / His face red like a rose on a thorn bush / Like all the colors of a royal flush / And he's peeling off those dollar bills / Slapping them down.” The song was originally written about the United States' military intervention during the 1980s in the El Salvador Civil War. Bono told The Edge to "put El Salvador through an amplifier.”
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#228
Number of months between the release of a song by Gilbert O’ Sullivan and the release of a song by Biz Markie which sampled O’Sullivan’s tune. While this is not a major news story these days, in 1991 when O’Sullivan sued Biz Markie for unauthorized use of his song, the judge made a landmark ruling claiming that the usage by Biz Markie was in fact theft. From this point on, artists had to clear samples or be subject to costly lawsuits. The Biz Markie tune? Alone Again. The Gilbert O’Sullivan song he illegally sampled? Alone Again (Naturally).
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#227
Number of months that passed between the time The Velvet Underground released a live version of their song “Sweet Jane” and the Cowboy Junkies released their version of the song based on The Velvet Underground’s slower, live version – as opposed to the more rocking version which appeared a year later in 1970 on The Velvet Underground’s ‘Loaded.’
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#226
Number of days the musical Our House ran featuring Madness. The script for the musical told a tale of modern-day love set on the streets of London. It followed two different possible courses in the life of a young man, Joe, following his involvement in petty crime. Members of Madness played roles in the executive production of the show, and Madness frontman Suggs performed in the production for a while as the central character's father.
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