David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars was named the best album of the '70s by listeners of Rockin' the Suburbs on Tuesday (April 9) morning.
The daily podcast, hosted by Patrick Foster and Jim Lenahan, staged what it called "'70s Album Madness," loosely based on the NCAA's "March Madness" college basketball tournament.
Beginning in March, listeners of the podcast were invited to vote on matchups posted on Facebook that pitted popular '70s albums against each other until the winner was finally determined this morning.
Like the NCAA tournament, "70s Album Madness" began with 64 titles vying for the top spot until the tournament was whittled down to the sweet 16, elite eight, and final four.
While listeners of the podcast were forced to make some tough choices, for Lenahan and Foster, the difficult decisions occurred while they were coming up with the 64 albums to be included in the tournament.
"It was very tough and very stressful," Lenahan said in a Zoom interview with Music Times. "We laid out some criteria for it based on popularity, sales, radio airplay and critical acclaim and we considered some things like legacy and impact, which is really kind of hard to do."
While some listeners were disappointed their favorites didn't make the cut, Lenahan was fairly pleased with the 64 picks he and Foster had chosen for the tournament. "We didn't want to have all artists that you would hear on one radio station," he explains. "We want to make sure it was diverse, and we got some soul, reggae and country in there."
Much like the NCAA tournament it was modeled after, "'70s Album Madness" came down to a final matchup -- a battle between two classic albums -- David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers. Bowie's 1972 epic ended up winning by a vote of 76-54.
"The winner is absolutely a totally worthy champion, but I don't know that I would have picked that one out of the 64," Lenahan says. "It was an obvious contender but when we created it, we really thought it was wide open and there were a dozen of albums that could win the whole thing."
Occasionally, the podcast would feature episodes that recapped the action of the tournament, where it had avid listeners Jason Goebel and Bill Mulligan weigh in with analysis on the latest matchups, much like a pre- or post-game panel on ESPN. "Those guys were great," Lenahan says. "Jason brought that sort of Dick Vitale/Charles Barkley kind of humor and Bill was much more methodical in his analysis, looking at the numbers and parsing them out, so it made for a great studio team."
A final "'70s Album Madness" wrap-up show is set for Wednesday' (April 10) episode of the podcast.
"'70s Album Madness" follows a similar tournament the podcast stage last year to determine its listeners' favorite American band. That tournament was won by R.E.M., which beat the Talking Heads in the final. The other contenders in the final four were the Beastie Boys and the Replacements.
In the "'70s Album Madness" tournament, some listeners seemingly took it to heart and expressed their disappointment and frustration when their favorites were eliminated.
Others were surprised that some classic punk albums performed as well as they did, knocking some classic rock albums out of the tournament. In a couple such upsets, the Clash's self-titled album knocked Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks out of contention before it lost to Sticky Fingers in the final eight. Also, in the ultimate battle between prog rock and punk rock, The Ramones' self-titled album knocked out Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon before it was beaten by Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run in the final eight.
In the end, Lenahan was pleased with the way the tournament played out and happy it was mostly a positive experience for the hosts and the podcasts' listeners. "There weren't too many people who took the opposite view and tried to bash the thing," he says. "Overall, I felt like it was a really positive experience for people, and I think we just celebrated how many great albums came out in the '70s, and that makes me happy."
For next year's tournament, Lenahan says there's already been talk of "80s Album Madness," but he expects that to be even tougher to field. "That feels like the next natural thing but getting a field of 64 for that's going to be even harder," he says. "Even though the '70s produced a lot of huge albums, the '80s was kind of beginning of the mega-selling album era and then on top of that, there was this whole sort of indie ecosystem developing where you had a lot of critically acclaimed artists that really didn't have to sell huge numbers."
Rockin' the Suburbs was launched in January 2017. Foster and Lenahan were previously the hosts of Dad Rock, which they began in 2014 when they were both employed at USA Today, but that podcast went dark when they left the company in 2016.
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