Steve Greenberg was not the only person who saw value in “Who Let The Dogs Out.” The original version, “Doggie,” was already phenomenal in the Caribbean, the kind of song that vacationers talked about or tried to hunt down after returning home. Jonathan King, the ‘60s and ‘70s U.K. hitmaker known (although not exclusively) for a particular sort of A&R-of-opportunity, had already recorded his own version.
But King was the sort of record person who cranked out cover versions and novelties as tonnage. (One of his studio acts is particularly aptly named.) King moved on, but Greenberg set out to engineer “Who Let The Dogs Out” as a “Lambada”-like international phenomenon. In the process of doing so, he would sign the Baha Men yet again after several tries, find them a new lead singer, walk out of a just-signed A&R deal, and launch S-Curve Records, which he still heads up 20 years later. Faced with skepticism from almost every collaborator, Greenberg was clearly the only person who could have made “Who Let The Dogs Out” what it became.
All of this is amusingly recounted in the first episode of “Speed Of Sound,” which launches July 28 as an iHeartRadio podcast. Greenberg’s second episode is the road to Beatlemania–not a tale that only he could tell, but still engagingly related and with the dots well connected. Whether dealing with Baha or Beatles, the series’ focus is the decisions and twists-of-fate that helped make songs or acts what they became, e.g., why it was a good thing that Capitol turned down the first three Beatles singles.
A&R folklore often focuses on the rock band or rapper discovered in the clubs at 1 a.m., preferably on their way to critical acclaim. Even before that scenario became literally impossible this March, it was always somewhat apocryphal and increasingly uncommon. Yet even the seemingly spontaneous phenomena of today’s TikTok and Spotify stories often have increasing levels of music business calculation. As Greenberg points out early on, left-field sleepers take a lot of planning, and he does a good job of making some of A&R’s more inside aspects accessible to non-industry listeners.
Greenberg recently told the story of signing Hanson and that act’s role in CHR’s resurgence in RadioInsight. In his podcast’s 12-episode first season, there’s an episode on ‘90s teen pop coming up, as well as ‘70s disco, “The Twist,” “Rapper’s Delight,” and more. “Speed Of Sound” is cheerfully about creating hits, of every sort, making it more mainstream in its focus than much of what’s currently in the music podcast space. Find it here.
