Twenty years ago, Stuck in the ’80s was barely a year old, podcasting itself was still something you had to explain to people, and somehow we found ourselves backstage at a concert with some of the biggest names of the decade.
Not bad for a bunch of people with microphones and absolutely no idea we’d still be doing this two decades later.
This week, we’re reaching deep into the Stuck in the ’80s archives for a 20th-anniversary replay of an episode originally released in 2006. Sean Daly, Cathy Wos and Spearsy headed to Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida, for the “We Are the ’80s” concert — a night featuring Rick Springfield, Loverboy, Eddie Money, and Patti Smyth with Scandal.
And somehow, we got backstage.
The resulting episode captures something that’s almost impossible to recreate now: Stuck in the ’80s during its earliest days, when the show was still figuring out exactly what it wanted to become. We knew we loved the music. We knew we wanted to talk to the people who made it. Beyond that, we were pretty much making things up as we went along.
Turns out, that wasn’t such a bad formula.
Listening again 20 years later, there’s an undeniable time-capsule quality to the whole thing. The podcast world was smaller. Social media hadn’t swallowed our lives yet. The idea that you could create your own show, put it on the internet and suddenly find yourself interviewing musicians you’d grown up listening to still felt a little ridiculous.
Actually, it still does.
The “We Are the ’80s” show itself was pretty spectacular. Rick Springfield was there. Loverboy was there. Eddie Money was there. Patti Smyth and Scandal were there. For anyone who spent the previous two decades wearing out cassettes, watching MTV and trying to call radio stations to request songs, it felt like somebody had assembled an entire chunk of our youth under one roof.
For us, it also offered an early glimpse of what Stuck in the ’80s would eventually become: part nostalgia trip, part conversation with the artists who created the decade, and part excuse for us to get into places where we probably didn’t belong.
A lot has changed since 2006. We’ve recorded hundreds of episodes, interviewed scores of ’80s legends and somehow kept this little show going for more than two decades.
But listening to this episode again is a reminder that the basic idea was there almost from the beginning.
Find the people who made the stuff we loved.
Ask them about it.
Then try not to embarrass ourselves.
Two out of three isn’t bad.
Listen to this special 20th-anniversary replay and travel back with us to 2006 — when Stuck in the ’80s was young, the microphones were probably considerably worse, and getting backstage still felt like we’d somehow pulled off the greatest scam in podcast history.