Chad Cochran Loves Thomas Dolby “She Blinded Me with Science”

Chad Cochran Loves Thomas Dolby “She Blinded Me with Science”

One Hit History: Chad Cochran Nerds Out on Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science”

Chad Cochran, AKA Cowtown Chad, is a noted rock photographer and visual artist from Cleveland. His latest project, I Didn’t Want to Tell You, focuses on normalizing the conversation about mental health.

This week on One Hit History, Chad nerds out with Sloane over his favorite one hit wonder — “She Blinded Me With Science” originally released in 1982 by Thomas Dolby. Part of Dolby’s appeal is over his pure love of music in all its forms, which eventually led him away from the stage and into being an audio professor, and founding a technology company that created the iconic and polyphonic Nokia ringtone that was part of the soundtrack for the 90s.

List of links

Music mentions

  • Oingo Boingo
  • Foreigner
  • Soft Boys
  • Chic/Nile Rodgers
  • Orleans
  • Roger Waters/Pink Floyd
  • Def Leppard
  • George Clinton
  • Duran Duran — Annie Zaleski (author of Duran Duran Rio book)
  • Flaming Lips
  • Talking Heads

Don’t forget to give One Hit History a five star rating! 

Transcript

Sloane Spencer
I should maybe not tell a funny story on myself. So I got into a huge bar disagreement with somebody about “She Blinded Me with Science” because the person that was talking to me kept insisting that it was by Oingo Boingo, and I kept saying, “It’s Thomas Dolby!” And I was like, ready to get in a fist fight in a bar with some huge dude that this was Thomas Dolby and not Oingo Boingo. I should probably be way more embarrassed about that than I am….

This is Sloane Spencer.  Y’all might know me from my decades in radio, and you might know me from my pioneering podcast, long form interview, conversations with “musicians you don’t know you love yet” called Country Fried Rock. And also I’m an adult living with ADD — and that means that when I get inspiration, oh my God, I’m going to do four things, and I’m going to do them all in the next 48 hours.

And that is where this new podcast is. It’s called One Hit History, where I talk with music people about their favorite one hit wonder. So of course I hit up some of my favorite friends first to get us started. (I also like alliteration. If you don’t know that already.) You can support us on Patreon at patreon.com/onehithistory, where you’ll find bonus content and episode outtakes — and no, I’m not afraid to make fun of myself.

Or just listen on our website OneHitHistory.com or your favorite podcast app. It seems a little silly, but especially for a new program like this, those five star ratings and reviews really help.
So we’re going to chat with Chad Cochran. You might know him better as CowtownChad, a noted rock photographer and visual artist, been around the scene for quite some time with some amazing work and an incredible multimedia project called “I Didn’t Want to Tell You.” Let’s have him tell you a little bit about what’s going on these days.

Chad Cochran
Right. And Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to do this One Hit Wonders. It’s one of those things that I’ve always found completely fascinating. So when you messaged me and said something about this, you didn’t have to say anything. I was immediately ready to go.

Sloane Spencer
So I appreciate that about you and the fact that you are one of the people that I can text, like this five sentence text, and like, “Hey, by the way, you don’t have to answer me til later.”

Chad Cochran
Thank you. Yeah, and you as well. I know that we both use each other as sounding boards and I always appreciate that very much, so very much.

Sloane Spencer
So Chad Cochran, what project are you working on these days?

Chad Cochran
So the big thing I’m working on right now is I’m switching studios. So not as much projects as I normally am working on.

I can say that I’m excited that I picked up some work and it’s exciting to hopefully be towards the back end of the pandemic. And people are starting to have little more normalcy in their lives and touring is kicking back in. And so that’s making people get back on the road, which means they’re usually passing through or gives me the opportunity to also travel down to Nashville, which I was just recently at AmericanaFest and did a bunch of portraits down there.

But yeah, the big news is I had a wonderful experience at 70th street studios in Cleveland for a few years. And great news is that I have kind of outgrown the space. So I need a place that’s a little bit bigger and I want to get more into creating my own backdrops and my own things that are incredibly unique.

And I was a little bit limited with my ability to do that at that studio. And so starting in December, I will be moving to the east side of downtown Cleveland. It’s a great area and I’m excited to start something.

Sloane Spencer
This is exciting news and perhaps a great way to incorporate some of that visual art that you, how I first got to know you.

Chad Cochran
Absolutely very cool stuff.

Sloane Spencer
So Chad Cochran is known primarily as CowtownChad and Cowtown is the alternate name for Cleveland, so you can look him up real easily online: CowtownChad.com. We’ll talk more about what y’all can do if you are interested in reaching out to Chad at the end of the program. So let’s jump right in to One Hit History here.

What’s your favorite one hit wonder?

Chad Cochran
So the deep breath is needed because there were so many to choose from. Like, I love this subject. It is so good. Like that’s what I told you. Like when you messaged me, I’m like, I totally want to do this. Because I grew up around kind of like that yacht rock, one hit wonder type music, like Orleans, although Orleans had a couple of songs, but like Fireball, like those kinds of bands, like immediately came into my head because that was more like growing up in my parents’ era.

I tried to do it in more of a formative time. So I instead switched to the early and by early, I mean, very early MTV era. And I went with, “She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby.

Sloane Spencer
You’re talking my language!

Chad Cochran
… and I did a little homework. In my brain, but I kind of knew how old I was when that came out. And I kind of remembered that. So I would have been around 10 or 11 when that song came out and MTV debuted August 1st, 1981, that song was released, I think in August of 1982. So very, very early in the MTV phase.

Sloane Spencer
When you mentioned to me a list of a few songs you might want to talk about, I happened to be obsessed with every song you mentioned.

So I was like, oh, well, we can talk for a long time about this. This is all about the synth pop. We got this down. It reminded me of so many different, funny stories. One of which was I was talking with a friend who was getting her PhD. Acoustical architectural design. I hope that I’m naming this specialty correctly.

Chad Cochran
I think I know you’re going with this and this is great.

Sloane Spencer
This totally blew my mind. I was talking with this person, this person that I know’s specialty is designing acoustics of buildings for specific, very science-y and way out of my league, way, way out of my league. But this person was like, yeah, I’m getting my PhD at Johns Hopkins, and you won’t believe who my professor is.

And I’m like, “I literally have no idea.” I was like, “I can barely adjust the audio in my own programming,” and she said, “Thomas Dolby.” And I was like, “You are full of <expletive>!”
I said, “His name’s not even Thomas Dolby, whatever. It just was a guy who had some ridiculous video at MTV.”

And she’s, “No.”

And I was like, “Well, he’s not the guy who invented Dolby. That’s Ray Dolby.” And I know that because I like trivia. Okay. It is Thomas Dolby, professor at Johns Hopkins University! Been there since 2014, moved into a subspecialty in 2018–pandemic aside– has like dozens of audio patents, all kinds of stuff, and came into music because he was a computer geek.

Chad Cochran
And so, so let’s talk about that because I knew he was a professor. I don’t know why. I mean, you and I were the same way, like, you know, both way off the charts, music nerds, also, uh, dealing with ADD. And I remember that he was a professor now, granted, that’s all I had. And so I looked it up and his early career, he was a professor at the university of London.

He also taught at Oxford as well as Trinity College at Cambridge. So he has that. And then I also knew that he was heavily involved in the tech industry. Like I remember that that happened. And so in 1990 he created a company called Beatnik, a Silicon Valley based company. And it was like, it was a software company that the technology was used to play internet music.

And there was some connection with Nokia phones and stuff too that I can’t remember all that stuff, but turns out to be an incredibly fascinating guy.

Sloane Spencer
Fascinating dude! I didn’t know any of this stuff either. I knew like the music ephemera, so stuff like his collaborations, both in producing and composing stuff for like David Bowie, Roger Waters, Pink Floyd, Nile Rogers and Chic, and you know, stuff like that. Cause that’s the kind of trivia that I enjoy and absorb. He worked for like Foreigner and the Soft Boys.

Chad Cochran
Like all kinds of cool people, Def Leppard, George Clinton, like all kinds of stuff. You just would never. So many of the one hit wonders. I think when they make their mark, you just anticipate that that’s it.
Like they have now gone back to flipping burgers or working in a factory or being a school teacher or whatever it is, but there’s a lot of things. Have gone on to have very robust careers, so much more interesting than I ever expected.

Sloane Spencer
I really, truly thought that it was like a fake thing developed solely for the sake of MTV. I had no idea.

Chad Cochran
Had someone told me that he was a caricature, I would believe that.

Sloane Spencer
I’m thinking like Max Headroom.

Chad Cochran
If you watch that video, so the radio version is 3:42. There is an extended version. That’s 5:09.

Sloane Spencer
You know, what’s weird about that? He developed and storyboarded the video first, then wrote the song.

Chad Cochran
Really?

Sloane Spencer
Isn’t that fascinating?

Chad Cochran
And if you go back and watch the video, it’s horrible. Like so bad as being so good, right? I mean, it may be horrible is the wrong term. It’s just very…period specific, right? Like, you know, there were other videos being made. Michael Jackson was making amazing videos. Duran Duran was making amazing videos and

Sloane Spencer
Don’t y’all go knocking Duran Duran.

Chad Cochran
I know I was a huge fan. I was a Seven and the Ragged Tiger..Rio…all that I was very into.

Sloane Spencer
If you’re a Duran Duran fan, or closet Duran Duran fan, check out Annie Zaleski’s new 33 ⅓ book about Rio.

Chad Cochran
Annie, also a Clevelander.

Sloane Spencer
It is a small world.

Chad Cochran
It is a small world. So I also looked more stuff up on the video.

I know the song also peaked at number five on the U S charts. So let’s talk about the actual song. This song, you’re right, very heavily rooted in synth-pop like not surprising that it comes out of the UK, seems very in alignment with a lot of the music that was coming out, but this song was weird.

Like it is, it’s a weird song. Like it’s, it’s not an anthemic song. It doesn’t have a huge chorus you could really get behind. It was…

Sloane Spencer
Structurally, it’s all over the place.

Chad Cochran
Yes. Yeah. Like it’s a weird song. His voice is weird. He incorporates a lot of like noises and it was kind of like my gateway into that kind of music that was kind of on that slant.

It reminds me of what, like Talking Heads. You know, it made getting into the Talking Heads a lot more accessible because that made sense to follow that path. And then maybe later people like the Flaming Lips or more current, I just thought it was weird.

Sloane Spencer
Interestingly, I remember when this song came out well, mainly because I also have cousins that are English and who still live in England. And we were visiting them at the time that this was a huge video hit in the U S and “She Blinded Me with Science” was not a huge hit in the UK at all. It barely, I don’t even think it hit the top 50. It was not the big hit there at all that it was here. The main thing that it was known for was that the dude who goes, “Science!” which of course I’ve now been quoting for the last, however many decades.

That guy was like a TV personality from like the mid 1950s all the way up through that time. So generations of people knew who he was, and they thought that was funny. Like the song itself was a nothing.

Chad Cochran
Okay. So I had to look it up.
It’s a guy named Magnus Alfred Pyle.

Sloane Spencer
What a great British name!

Chad Cochran
He was a British scientist and TV presenter who repeatedly interjects “Science!” throughout the song.

Sloane Spencer
“Good heavens,. Ms. Sakamoto, you’re beautiful!” I don’t even know that that’s the right words, but it’s close to that.

Chad Cochran
No, that’s exactly it because I’m looking at it, and it has it quoted.

Sloane Spencer
I’m going to be that old person in the old folks home, just randomly quoting like MTV lyrics and the Clash. It’d be like, “Whatever Ms. Spencer.”

Chad Cochran
Yeah. You can only hope there’s going to be somebody our age that will go, “No, no, no, no. It’s a song. It’s their song lyrics.”

Oh man. So thank you so much for bringing this one up. And I know that we talked about a bunch of other songs and I’m excited to hear your other podcasts episodes to see who picked up what songs.
I will at least say one of the other ones was, “Oh, Sheila,” by Ready for the World. Are we allowed to deviate off of my topic and talk about it?

Sloane Spencer
So here’s what we’re going to do.
I really want to talk with you about “Oh, Sheila.” So let’s make that be a bonus content thing that we’ll do.

Chad Cochran
Okay, cool.

Sloane Spencer
That song turned out to be super interesting when I went to do it.

Chad Cochran
Oh, really? I haven’t done any research on that one. I will commit to you to pulling out my 45. Cause I know I have that somewhere in the original sleeve.

Sloane Spencer
You should hang on to that.

One Hit History. Chad Cochran, CowtownChad, thanks so much for joining us. Where can folks find out more about your work and what you do?

Chad Cochran
They can find me on all social media at CowtownChad, or they can go to the website cowtownchad.com, it will link you to all my social media pages, as well.

My “I Didn’t Want to Tell You” series, which is a mental health series that I started a few years back, and all of the stories can be found on the link through my homepage. Again, it’s cowtownchad.com.

Sloane Spencer
And can folks reach out to you to hire you?

Chad Cochran
Absolutely. Email Cowtownchad@gmail.com. And that link is also on all of my social media accounts. So you should be able to find it pretty easily.

Sloane Spencer
Chad Cochran, AKA CowtownChad, and Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science.” It’s One Hit History, and I’m Sloane Spencer. Thanks for listening.

DISCLAIMER:  This is a comedy podcast and is meant for fun. Anything said here is for entertainment only and not necessarily true or even the real opinion of the host or guests.

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