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73 episodes with Alan Freed
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3 episodes with Alan Freed
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2 episodes with Alan Freed
2 episodes with Alan Freed
2 episodes with Alan Freed
Air Week: March 2-8, 2026 The Moonglows, Pt. 2 – 1956-61 Much has been written about the great R&B vocal groups of the 1950s. Many of the classic groups were either great musicians and vocalists and never had the recognition or record sales to back it up or these groups were thrown together, they couldn’t sing very well and scored one, solid hit that still spins in the eternal jukebox of public consciousness. The Moonglows were one of the few groups to come out of the post World War II, pre-Elvis era, who were extremely talented and had the sales figures and notoriety to back it up. Originally called The Crazy Sounds, Harvey Fuqua and Bobby Lester led The Moonglows to a #1 R&B smash in 1954 with “Sincerely” on Chess, but that was after a somewhat bumpy start on Alan Freed’s Champagne Records and Chicago’s Chance Records. This week, Matt The Cat presents part 2 of a 2 part feature on the fantastic Moonglows, covering their career from 1956 through their breakup in 1958 and the singles that followed through the end of 1961. An interview with the late Reese Palmer reveals how Harvey Fuqua came to hire his group, The Marquees as the “new” Moonglows. This week’s “Juke In The Back” shares the rest of the story on this influential and important 1950s vocal group. LISTEN BELOW
Air Week: February 23-March 1, 2026 The Moonglows, Pt. 1 – 1953-55 Much has been written about the great R&B vocal groups of the 1950s. Many of the classic groups were either great musicians and vocalists and never had the recognition or record sales to back it up or these groups were thrown together, they couldn’t sing very well and scored one, solid hit that still spins in the eternal jukebox of public consciousness. The Moonglows were one of the few groups to come out of the post World War II, pre-Elvis era, who were extremely talented and had the sales figures and notoriety to back it up. Originally called The Crazy Sounds, Harvey Fuqua and Bobby Lester led The Moonglows to a #1 R&B smash in 1954 with “Sincerely” on Chess, but that was after a somewhat bumpy start on Alan Freed’s Champagne Records and Chicago’s Chance Records. This week, Matt The Cat presents part 1 of a 2 part feature on the fantastic Moonglows, covering their career from 1953 to 1955. Vocal harmony doesn’t get much sweeter than this, so don’t miss one note of this week’s “Juke In The Back” radio program. LISTEN BELOW
News; birthdays/events; do you care more about the food/party or the actual game on Superbowl Sunday?; word of the day. News; game: pop music #1 1976 hits; would you use cayenne pepper to help you stay warm in the Winter?; places in the world where people are forbidden to go. News; game: songs with the word "me" in the title; if you figured out a secret company recipe/formula...would you share it?; what are some of the new emojis coming out? News; game: I should have known that yes or no?; what's your color personality?; goodbye/fun facts....National DJ Day might celebrate the work of our favorite disc jockeys, but it stems from the work of ONE famous jock: Alan Freed, who was known as 'Moondog'. This 1950s DJ, who coined the term 'rock and roll,'---so we celebrate the talents of all the disc jockeys, from those playing the 'Chicken Dance' for the millionth time at a wedding to the club DJ's that help create that party atmosphere to the radio personalities who work on the air. In 1909, Ray Newby, a 16-year-old college student started playing records from a small transmitter — long before the term 'disc jockey' is popularized....that happened in 1935 when Walter Winchell coined the term 'disc jockey.'
Join Steve Stevens on an eccentric ride as he dishes out the latest weird news, brought to you by Elite Billiards and Alehouse. Aside from entertaining tales of oddball holidays, Steve delves into National Disc Jockey Day, sharing the legacy of Alan Freed and what makes DJs an integral part of the music world. So take a moment to appreciate your favorite DJs—and maybe Venmo them a special tip!
Today's show is about Alan Freed and features music performed by Big Joe Turner
Send us a textOn this Episode Tom and Bert introduce 2 more "Reel Dealz" Hall of Fame inductees (These are our next performers with more to follow in the future)Today's Podcast will cover 2 artists that have been "overlooked" by many "so called" Music experts over the years.Their Music speaks for itself and Tom and Bert will give you their take and tell you why you must not dismiss these outstanding Performers.We introduce you all to these 2 artists who sold Millions of Records Worldwide, had many top hits on Billboards Top 100 Lists, and were pioneers in the Music business with their own unique sound and singing style........This Artist is someone who has been credited by many Music historians with saving Rock n Roll in the early 1960's. His music, songs and sound were replicated by artists and recording studios in the USA and Abroad..........welcome Gary "U.S." Bonds Our next artist had an amazing career with 9 Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and 17 total records in the Top 40 from 1964 thru 1977. He has sold over 30 Million Records worldwide and is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, Producer and a Label Owner..........welcome Johnny RiversListen in as we go through their early beginnings and their outstanding talented careers.CHAPTER HIGHLIGHTS:(2:13) Intro Part 1 - Here is Gary "U.S." Bonds(4:18) The early years in Norfolk, Virginia(10:33) Frank Guida's Sound and the 1st hit Record..."New Orleans" (17:22) "Quarter to Three" hits #1(24:03) Bonds and The Boss, Bruce Springsteen!(28:30) Gary's impact and how it changed Music, His Top Hits and that's a wrap!_____________________________________________________________________________________________(34:30) Intro Part 2 - Here is Johnny Rivers(35:55) The early years in NYC and Baton Rouge Louisiana(41:21) Back to NY in 1957 , a meeting with Alan Freed kicks off his career(47:17) Johnny "Live" at "The Whiskey a Go Go in LA and "Memphis" hits #2(55:46) "Secret Agent Man" and "Poor Side of Town" skyrocket Johnny's Profile(1 Hour 2 Min) "Rocking Pneumonia" and "Swayin' To the Music" Top off his Hits and Johnny's final tour ends in 2023 and It's a Wrap!Enjoy the Show!You can email us at reeldealzmoviesandmusic@gmail.com or visit our Facebook page, Reel Dealz Podcast: Movies & Music Thru The Decades to leave comments and/or TEXT us at 843-855-1704 as well
Alan Freed's Rock 'n' Roll Dance Party #11
Alan Freed's Rock 'n' Roll Dance Party #22
Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! EL PADRE DEL ROCK AND ROLL William John Clifton "Bill" Haley (Highland Park, Detroit, Míchigan; 6 de julio de 1925-Harlingen, Texas; 9 de febrero de 1981) fue un músico estadounidense, uno de los propulsores del rock and roll, que popularizó grandemente este tipo de música a principios de 1950 con su grupo Bill Haley & His Comets, teniendo hits con ventas millonarias como "Rock Around the Clock", "See You Later, Alligator", "Shake, Rattle and Roll", "Rocket 88", "Skinny Minnie" y "Razzle Dazzle". Vendió más de 25 millones de discos en todo el mundo. A Haley se le considera el padre del rock and roll. Rock Around the Clock y el estallido del rock and roll En 1953, Haley tuvo su primer éxito nacional con una canción de su coautoría (con Marshall Lytle) titulada "Crazy Man, Crazy", una frase que Haley dijo oía decir a su público adolescente. "Crazy Man, Crazy" fue la primera canción de rock & roll en ser televisada por una cadena nacional cuando fue utilizada ese mismo año como banda de sonido de un programa de televisión protagonizado por James Dean. A comienzos de 1954, Haley sumó a Joey Ambrose como saxo tenor y poco después dejó el sello Essex por el más importante Decca Records de Nueva York. El 12 de abril de 1954, en su primera sesión para el nuevo sello, acompañados por Danny Cedrone en guitarra eléctrica y Billy Gussak en batería (reemplazando a Boccelli), Bill Haley y sus Comets grabaron "Rock Around the Clock". Se trata del más grande éxito de Haley y una de las canciones más importantes de la historia del rock and roll. Aunque su éxito inicial fue moderado, se estima que se vendieron 25 millones de copias según el Libro Guinness de los récords. Inicialmente "Rock Around the Clock" fue un éxito modesto. En su momento fue mucho más importante "Shake, Rattle and Roll", grabado a comienzos de 1954, con el que vendieron un millón de copias, anticipando el estallido que la banda protagonizaría al año siguiente. A fines de 1954, Haley grabó un nuevo éxito, "Dim, Dim The Lights". Estos éxitos impulsaron a algunos DJ, entre ellos Alan Freed, a redescubrir y difundir anteriores grabaciones de la banda, entre ellas "Rock Around the Clock".. El 25 de marzo de 1955 se estrenó la película Semilla de maldad ("Blackboard Jungle", cuya traducción textual es Jungla de Pizarrones), en la que Bill Haley y sus Cometas interpretan Rock Around the Clock como primera escena. El impacto fue grande en todo el país: el tema se convirtió en N.º 1 en las listas estadounidenses y se mantuvo en ese lugar durante ocho semanas. Era la primera canción de rock and roll en hacerlo. Los movimientos acrobáticos de Ambrose al tocar el saxo y Lytle montando el contrabajo como si fuera un potro, fueron marcas personales de la banda en sus presentaciones en vivo. A fines de 1954, Haley y sus Cometas aparecieron en un film corto titulado Round Up of Rhythm, tocando tres temas. Se trata de la primera película de rock and roll. Bill Haley y sus Cometas (nombre original Bill Haley & His Comets) fue una banda estadounidense de rock and roll creada en 1952 que continuó hasta la muerte de Haley en 1981. La banda, también conocida como Bill Haley and The Comets y Bill Haley's Comets u otras variaciones similares, fue uno de los primeros grupos de músicos blancos en tocar rock and roll atrayendo la atención del público de su país y de todo el mundo hacia ese nuevo estilo musical, de origen afroamericano. El líder del grupo, Bill Haley, había sido previamente un intérprete de música country y western (folclore norteamericano). Después de grabar en 1951 una versión "country" del tema "Rocket 88" (una de las canciones consideradas como iniciadoras del rock and roll), cambió su estilo para adoptar el nuevo sonido que terminaría llamándose unos años después "rock and roll". Si bien varios de los Cometas se volvieron famosos, Bill Haley permaneció como la estrella, con su rulo sobre la frente y la banda con trajes de etiqueta y su comportamiento enérgico sobre el escenario. Fueron considerados en su tiempo tan revolucionarios como Los Beatles o Los Rolling Stones en la década de 1960. Después de la muerte de Haley, no menos de seis grupos diferentes se han formado bajo el nombre de Cometas, todos ellos reclamando para sí ser la histórica continuación de aquel que dirigía Haley.😎Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de EDITORIAL GCO. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/2313218
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Lovin' Sam Theard | State Street Blues | The Copulatin' Blues | | Candye Kane | Marijuana Boogie | Comin' Out Swinging | | The Robert J. Hunter Band | They Think That I'm Fine | Say What (live) | | John Lennon | Medley- Rip It Up-Ready Teddy (2010 Remaster0 | Rock 'N' Roll | | Alan Freed | The Grey Bear | The Great Pretender | | Sleepwalkers | Sleepwalk | The Best Of British Rock 'n' Roll (Disc 3) | Savoy Brown (Kim Simmons) | Shockwaves | Voodoo Moon | | Troy Redfern | The Fever | Invocation | | Emma Wilson | Nobody's Fault But Mine | Feelgood | | | Rev Gary Davis | I Will Do My Last Singing In This Land Somewhere | Live at Newport: July 1965 | Blind Willie Johnson | Trouble Soon Be Over | | Washington Phillips | Washington Phillips Mix | | Joe Louis Walker | The Weight of the World | Weight of the World | | Ross Osteen Band | A No.1 | WILLIWAW | | Parlour Greens | West Memphis (extended version)
Alan Freed's Rock 'n' Roll Dance Party #03
Alan Freed è stato tra i disc jockey che hanno contribuito a diffondere in radio il rock'n'roll, ha organizzato il primo, sfortunatissimo concerto rock della storia ed è stato anche travolto dallo scandalo più noto legato al mondo della musica.
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins interviews the prolific chronicler of the American Mafia, Jeffrey Sussman. Listeners will learn about Morris levy and the mafia's influence on the roots of the world's most important cultural influences, American Rock and Roll. Two of the most important men who influenced the rise of rock and roll were Morris Levy and Alan Freed. Levy had close ties with the Genovese crime family. Levy was the notorious head of the record label Roulette Records. Reportedly, Morris Levy used illicit money from the family to fund his businesses, with several members of the mob said to be present at his meetings. At the time, Freed and other corrupt Disc Jockeys corrupted the entire industry with their "pay for play" of records, which became known as "Payola." Morris Levy terrorized young performers into giving up thier royalities. Meyer Lansky, AKA the “mob's accountant,” was one of the most successful mafiosos in history and had many investments in jukeboxes. Reportedly, he “controlled every Wurlitzer jukebox in the New York area”. So too, did the Chicago Outfit (who rose to power under Al Capone) have many dealings with Lansky and his jukeboxes. A mob history book, The Outfit, argues that the Wurlitzer Corporation accused Lansky and his Chicago associates of disrupting the distribution of Wurlitzer jukeboxes. The Outfit is also said to have worked closely with Jules Stein, head of the Music Corporation of America. Apparently, Stein, the mob, MCA, and Meyer Lansky had all worked at least in some form with the mob fixer Sidney Korshak, a prominent mafia name in Los Angeles. Click here to get Backbeat Gansters: The Rise and Decline of the Mob in Rock Music by Jeffrey Sussman. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!
Alan Freed's Rock 'n' Roll Dance Party #01
“Rock 'n roll is really swing with a modern name,” Freed once said. “It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm. It's the rhythm that gets to the kids – they're starved of music they can dance to, after all those years of crooners.”HISTORICAL ALAN FREED MOMENTS:Freed moved to WINS in New York in 1954 where his late night radio show became known as Alan Freed's Rock 'n' Roll Party. His popularity was immediate and so was the criticism.In July 1957, Freed was given his own nationally televisedrock 'n roll dance show billed as “The Big Beat" on ABC-TV. The show featured a mix of pop and R&B acts. Early reviews for the national show were good, but it was cancelled abruptly after Frankie Lymon, one of the show's black performers, was shown on air dancing with a white girl.The biracial dance scene enraged ABC's Southern affiliates and the network cancelled the show despite its growing popularity.Freed was featured in five of the earliest rock 'n' roll movies – Rock Around the Clock and Rock, Rock, Rock in 1956; Mister Rock And Roll and Don't Knock the Rock in 1957 and Go Johnny Go in 1958.Freed was initially interred in New York, the city where he died at 43 in 1965. His family moved his remains to Cleveland years later and then to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame Museum 12 years ago, his son Lance Freed said.“I thought this was the last move, but then I got this call to move him,” Freed said. “He said, ‘You've got to come pick him up.' ““The museum world is moving away from exhibiting remains” since ashes don't help tell a story, he was told.Bullshit. The Hall's Board simply felt human remains did not belong where they could depress those paying for admission.Alan Freed Urned His Right To Remain In The Home That Utilized His Rock and Roll Signature As It's Way Of Earning Millions Upon Millions Of Dollars.PLEASE VISIT THE ALAN FREED ARCHIVES AT:https://www.alanfreed.com/wp/archives/
Comedy is always something that brings people together, even if they like different styles. Matt and I get into some stuff that's laying heavy on his mind, sports, movies and what makes him truly tick...Radio/DJ and everything that goes with it. Enjoy! Mentions: Matt: https://www.instagram.com/realmattmysh/?hl=en High Speed Daddy: https://www.highspeeddaddy.com/?rfsn=7178368.317ce6 Live Rishi: Use the code "TABLE50" get 50% off your entire order - https://liverishi.com/ Composure: https://composurelifestyle.com/ use the code RAW Me: https://berawpodcast.com/ 'til next time! The History of the Radio DJ The radio disc jockey, commonly known as the DJ, has a rich history rooted in the evolution of radio broadcasting and popular culture. The role of the DJ has transformed dramatically over the decades, shaping and reflecting societal changes in music, technology, and communication. The Birth of the Radio DJ: 1920s-1930s The concept of a radio DJ emerged in the early 20th century, shortly after the invention of radio broadcasting. In the 1920s, radio stations primarily focused on live programming, such as news, lectures, and music performed by live bands. However, as phonograph records gained popularity, stations began to experiment with playing pre-recorded music. The term "disc jockey" was first coined in the 1930s by radio commentator Walter Winchell, combining "disc" (referring to records) and "jockey" (a rider or operator). Early DJs played an essential role in introducing audiences to recorded music, often providing commentary and curating selections to entertain listeners. The Golden Age: 1940s-1950s The role of the radio DJ expanded significantly during the 1940s and 1950s, an era often referred to as the golden age of radio. DJs like Martin Block, who hosted the popular "Make Believe Ballroom" on New York's WNEW, pioneered the art of creating a personal connection with listeners. Block's conversational style and his ability to simulate a live music venue using pre-recorded tracks revolutionized radio. During this period, DJs became cultural tastemakers, promoting emerging genres such as rhythm and blues and early rock and roll. Figures like Alan Freed gained national fame for their enthusiastic promotion of rock music, helping break racial barriers in the music industry by introducing black artists to white audiences. Freed's "Moondog Rock and Roll Party" in the 1950s is credited with popularizing the term "rock and roll," cementing the DJ's role in shaping music history. The Rise of Personality DJs: 1960s-1970s By the 1960s, radio had become more competitive, and DJs began emphasizing their personalities to stand out. This era saw the rise of "Top 40" radio formats, where DJs played a carefully curated list of the most popular songs. Radio personalities like Wolfman Jack and Casey Kasem became household names, blending humor, storytelling, and vibrant on-air personas with their musical expertise. During the 1970s, FM radio gained prominence over AM radio, allowing DJs to adopt freer, more experimental formats. Album-oriented rock (AOR) stations gave DJs the freedom to play entire records and explore deeper cuts, appealing to more niche audiences. This period also marked the emergence of specialized DJs for genres like country, jazz, and disco. The Modern Era: 1980s-Present The role of the DJ continued to evolve with the advent of digital technology and the internet. In the 1980s and 1990s, DJs transitioned to digital formats, using CDs and later MP3s to expand their libraries. Radio consolidation in the 1990s introduced more uniform programming, but it also made room for syndicated shows hosted by iconic DJs like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. In the 21st century, the rise of streaming platforms and podcasts transformed how DJs interact with audiences. Many DJs now operate across multiple platforms, blending traditional radio with digital content. While their role has shifted, radio DJs remain vital curators of culture, bringing music, stories, and community to listeners worldwide.
On the December 15 edition of the Music History Today podcast, the Spice Girls premiere, Glenn Miller disappears, the original version of Folsom City Blues is released, & happy birthday to Tim Reynolds of Dave Matthews Band For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support
Nous sommes le mardi 23 novembre 1954, à New York, dans le bas de Manhattan, au palais de justice. L'affaire qui y est traitée est celle qui oppose Louis Hardin, un musicien de rue aveugle, à l'animateur de radio, Alan Freed. Le premier accuse le second d'utiliser frauduleusement ses œuvres et son nom d'artiste, à savoir Moondog. Et en effet, l'animateur en question présente une émission de rhythm'n'blues sur la station WJW. C'est un programme qu'il a baptisé Moondog House du nom d'une chanson qu'il passe régulièrement, une chanson signée Louis Hardin. Alan Freed est condamné à des dommages conséquents, à une interdiction de diffuser le morceau et à changer de pseudo. L'animateur s'exécute et se souvient que quelques années auparavant, il avait intitulé son projet Moondog Rock'n'roll Party, non pas pour définir la musique diffusée mais pour parler de l'ambiance de fête. Il décide donc de supprimer Moondog et de ne garder que Rock'n'roll Party. Freed ne s'arrête pas là puisque, le soir même, dans un bar, il prend la décision de déposer l'expression « rock'n'roll ». Remontons aujourd'hui à la révolution musicale des années 1950… Avec nous : Daniel Dellisse. « Histoire(s) du rock'n'roll – La révolution musicales des années 1950 » aux ; éd. du félin. Sujets traités : Rock'n'roll, Moondog, Alan Free, Louis Hardin,New York , rhythm'n'blues, révolution, musique, radio Merci pour votre écoute Un Jour dans l'Histoire, c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 13h15 à 14h30 sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes d'Un Jour dans l'Histoire sur notre plateforme Auvio.be :https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/5936 Intéressés par l'histoire ? Vous pourriez également aimer nos autres podcasts : L'Histoire Continue: https://audmns.com/kSbpELwL'heure H : https://audmns.com/YagLLiKEt sa version à écouter en famille : La Mini Heure H https://audmns.com/YagLLiKAinsi que nos séries historiques :Chili, le Pays de mes Histoires : https://audmns.com/XHbnevhD-Day : https://audmns.com/JWRdPYIJoséphine Baker : https://audmns.com/wCfhoEwLa folle histoire de l'aviation : https://audmns.com/xAWjyWCLes Jeux Olympiques, l'étonnant miroir de notre Histoire : https://audmns.com/ZEIihzZMarguerite, la Voix d'une Résistante : https://audmns.com/zFDehnENapoléon, le crépuscule de l'Aigle : https://audmns.com/DcdnIUnUn Jour dans le Sport : https://audmns.com/xXlkHMHSous le sable des Pyramides : https://audmns.com/rXfVppvN'oubliez pas de vous y abonner pour ne rien manquer.Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.
Nous sommes le mardi 23 novembre 1954, à New York, dans le bas de Manhattan, au palais de justice. L'affaire qui y est traitée est celle qui oppose Louis Hardin, un musicien de rue aveugle, à l'animateur de radio, Alan Freed. Le premier accuse le second d'utiliser frauduleusement ses œuvres et son nom d'artiste, à savoir Moondog. Et en effet, l'animateur en question présente une émission de rhythm'n'blues sur la station WJW. C'est un programme qu'il a baptisé Moondog House du nom d'une chanson qu'il passe régulièrement, une chanson signée Louis Hardin. Alan Freed est condamné à des dommages conséquents, à une interdiction de diffuser le morceau et à changer de pseudo. L'animateur s'exécute et se souvient que quelques années auparavant, il avait intitulé son projet Moondog Rock'n'roll Party, non pas pour définir la musique diffusée mais pour parler de l'ambiance de fête. Il décide donc de supprimer Moondog et de ne garder que Rock'n'roll Party. Freed ne s'arrête pas là puisque, le soir même, dans un bar, il prend la décision de déposer l'expression « rock'n'roll ». Remontons aujourd'hui à la révolution musicale des années 1950… Avec nous : Daniel Dellisse. « Histoire(s) du rock'n'roll – La révolution musicales des années 1950 » ; éd. du félin. Sujets traités: rock'n'roll ,rhythm'n'blues, Moondog House, lan Freed., radio, chanson, révolution,Louis Hardin, musique Merci pour votre écoute Un Jour dans l'Histoire, c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 13h15 à 14h30 sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes d'Un Jour dans l'Histoire sur notre plateforme Auvio.be :https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/5936 Intéressés par l'histoire ? Vous pourriez également aimer nos autres podcasts : L'Histoire Continue: https://audmns.com/kSbpELwL'heure H : https://audmns.com/YagLLiKEt sa version à écouter en famille : La Mini Heure H https://audmns.com/YagLLiKAinsi que nos séries historiques :Chili, le Pays de mes Histoires : https://audmns.com/XHbnevhD-Day : https://audmns.com/JWRdPYIJoséphine Baker : https://audmns.com/wCfhoEwLa folle histoire de l'aviation : https://audmns.com/xAWjyWCLes Jeux Olympiques, l'étonnant miroir de notre Histoire : https://audmns.com/ZEIihzZMarguerite, la Voix d'une Résistante : https://audmns.com/zFDehnENapoléon, le crépuscule de l'Aigle : https://audmns.com/DcdnIUnUn Jour dans le Sport : https://audmns.com/xXlkHMHSous le sable des Pyramides : https://audmns.com/rXfVppvN'oubliez pas de vous y abonner pour ne rien manquer.Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.
Shelby teacher resigns after facing felony counts for alleged sex crimes: https://www.richlandsource.com/2024/10/10/shelby-teacher-facing-felony-counts-for-alleged-sex-crimes-resigns-from-district/ Today - A Shelby Middle School teacher, Stefanie Kellenberger, has resigned following her indictment on 21 felony chargesSupport the show: https://richlandsource.com/membersSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Joe Boyd produced Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and many others, released acts from all over the globe on his Hannibal label and has just written a mighty and definitive account of the history of popular music, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain, tracing the way different sounds from different countries became interwoven. Nobody is better qualified to write this book as you'll discover from this enthralling conversation. Among the highlights … … “if Mick and Keith had had Spotify there'd have been no Rolling Stones.” … the African roots of Little Richard's horn section. … how a Zulu folk tune from 1939 ended up on the Lion King soundtrack. … “Western musicians are governed by keys, valves and frets but what matters is the notes in between”. … the evolution of ska as rock and roll was too exhausting in the heat of Jamaican dancehalls. … Alan Freed, the “Pied Piper” that led white American teenagers into black music. … Duke Ellington and music “too complicated for white audiences to follow”. … the bossa nova in Nick Drake's River Man. … Paul Simon's Graceland and the meaning of authenticity. … world music's problem with drum machines. .. the attraction of music whose origin you can hear before the vocal comes in. Order Joe's highly recommended book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roots-Rhythm-Remain-Journey-Through/dp/0571360009Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Joe Boyd produced Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and many others, released acts from all over the globe on his Hannibal label and has just written a mighty and definitive account of the history of popular music, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain, tracing the way different sounds from different countries became interwoven. Nobody is better qualified to write this book as you'll discover from this enthralling conversation. Among the highlights … … “if Mick and Keith had had Spotify there'd have been no Rolling Stones.” … the African roots of Little Richard's horn section. … how a Zulu folk tune from 1939 ended up on the Lion King soundtrack. … “Western musicians are governed by keys, valves and frets but what matters is the notes in between”. … the evolution of ska as rock and roll was too exhausting in the heat of Jamaican dancehalls. … Alan Freed, the “Pied Piper” that led white American teenagers into black music. … Duke Ellington and music “too complicated for white audiences to follow”. … the bossa nova in Nick Drake's River Man. … Paul Simon's Graceland and the meaning of authenticity. … world music's problem with drum machines. .. the attraction of music whose origin you can hear before the vocal comes in. Order Joe's highly recommended book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roots-Rhythm-Remain-Journey-Through/dp/0571360009Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Joe Boyd produced Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and many others, released acts from all over the globe on his Hannibal label and has just written a mighty and definitive account of the history of popular music, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain, tracing the way different sounds from different countries became interwoven. Nobody is better qualified to write this book as you'll discover from this enthralling conversation. Among the highlights … … “if Mick and Keith had had Spotify there'd have been no Rolling Stones.” … the African roots of Little Richard's horn section. … how a Zulu folk tune from 1939 ended up on the Lion King soundtrack. … “Western musicians are governed by keys, valves and frets but what matters is the notes in between”. … the evolution of ska as rock and roll was too exhausting in the heat of Jamaican dancehalls. … Alan Freed, the “Pied Piper” that led white American teenagers into black music. … Duke Ellington and music “too complicated for white audiences to follow”. … the bossa nova in Nick Drake's River Man. … Paul Simon's Graceland and the meaning of authenticity. … world music's problem with drum machines. .. the attraction of music whose origin you can hear before the vocal comes in. Order Joe's highly recommended book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roots-Rhythm-Remain-Journey-Through/dp/0571360009Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
It was March 21st, 1952, in Cleveland, Ohio, at about 9pm, when the first 7,000 or more ticket holders streamed into the Cleveland Arena with high hopes of seeing 5 of their favorite Rhytm & Blues artists perform for a huge dance. By 9:30pm, the place was filled to capacity with over 9,000 teens- but there were still more than 10,000 more "Moondoggers" waiting outside. The doors broke down, glass shattered, seats were ripped from their moorings on the floor, and pandemonium ruled for the next hour. It was all the creation of a talented WJW radio DJ named Alan Freed, who, on his midnight shows, had been promoted The Moondog Coronation Ball for weeks. It was the first of many firsts that night- the first rock concert and dance, the first dance to which black teens were invited (although they made up 99% of the crowd), the first time "Rock and Roll" came to mean good music with a beat which could be enjoyed by all races, and the first time a concert had to be shut down by the police. Freed would go on to earn the title "The Father of Rock and Roll" and make 4 movies starring as himself, R&B would be recognized as the progenitor of Rock, and Cleveland, thanks to that seminal concert, would be chosen to host the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Story at 1001 Heroes, legends, Histories & Mysteries Podcast beginning Sunday Aug 25th.
Dan Flanigan holds a Ph.D. in History from Rice University and J.D. from the University of Houston. He taught Jurisprudence at the University of Houston and American Legal History at the University of Virginia. His first published book was his Ph.D. dissertation, The Criminal Law of Slavery and Freedom, 18001868.He moved on from academia to serve the civil rights cause as a school desegregation lawyer, followed by a long career as a finance attorney in private law practice. Dan became a name partner in the Polsinelli law firm in Kansas City, created its Financial Services practice, chaired its Real Estate & Financial Services Department for two decades, and established the firm's New York City office and served as its managing partner until October 2022.In addition to publishing five books since 2019, he has also written stage plays including Secrets (based on the life of Eleanor Marx) and Moondog's Progress (based on the life of Alan Freed). His novella, Dewdrops, was originally written for the stage and enjoyed a full-cast staged reading at the Theatre of the Open Eye in New York. Its director described the play as a “powerful” work about “addiction in America—addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, danger, power, and to finding ‘The Answer,' with characters that are “well drawn, real, and actors love to portray them.” He has written a feature film screenplay of Mink Eyes and a pilot for a TV series called O'Keefe.He serves on the Board of Directors of Childhood USA, the U.S. arm of the World Childhood Foundation, established by Queen Silvia of Sweden, working to end child sexual abuse and exploitation everywhere. He divides his time among Kansas City, New York City, and Los Angeles.http://danflaniganbooks.comThe Douglas Coleman Show VE (Video Edition) offers video promotional packages for authors. Please see our website for complete details.http://douglascolemanshow.com Please help us to continue to bring you quality content by showing your support for our show.https://fundrazr.com/e2CLX2?ref=ab_eCTqb8_ab_31eRtAh53pq31eRtAh53pq
Gene Di Pierro - Music/Program Director Hamilton Radio Hamilton Radio in the greater Trenton New Jersey area is unique among radio in that they ascribe to a way of broadcasting that no longer exists. A fresh look to the "good ole days" when Alan Freed, Cousin Brucie, Wolfman Jack and John "Records" Landecker ruled the airwaves. Listen in as we relive OUR glory days on a radio trip down memory lane. This intellectual property is copyright property of: WWTF®™ 88.7 FMI MADDOG MEDIA, LLC No portion of these presentations or any WWTF Radio 88.7 FMI™ Podcast show may be used, reproduced, altered, or uploaded in part or whole without the expressed written consent of Angelo T. DiSipio or any Network Executive authorized to do so.
Today's show is about Alan Freed and features music performed by Big Joe Turner
Join Dan and Mike as they rock and roll their way down Ohio's Backroads to Cleveland to determine if Alan Freed really coined the term “Rock and Roll” while he was a popular disc jockey on Cleveland radio in the 1950s. The city is known as the “Rock and Roll Capital of the World” and the Rock and Roll Museum is located on its Lake Erie shore, but did Alan Freed really coin the term that eventually bestowed these honors upon Ohio's north coast city? Let's find out! Please check other podcast episodes like this at: https://www.ohiomysteries.com/ Mike hosts a Facebook page called "Too Late for Autographs" and explores people and their stories with Ohio ties that have passed away: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1469825446606552/?hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen&multi_permalinks=3474200626169014 Dan hosts a Youtube Channel called: Ohio History and Haunts where he explores historical and dark places around Ohio: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj5x1eJjHhfyV8fomkaVzsA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
So many people peg Alice Cooper as the Father of Shock Rock or Creator of Shock Rock. Nay Nay! Thanks to a man named Alan Freed (famous radio DJ who pegged the slogan 'Rock n Roll' and a man named Screamin' Jay Hawkins - the original shock rock performance was Screamin' Jay singing I Put a Spell On You as he came out of a coffin. This famous performance deserves all the credit, and we talk about the whole history of the song and Jay Hawkins in this Roots Music History Podcast Episode Most recently known for the Hocus Pocus I Put a Spell On You Song, the song I Put a Spell On You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins has not only been around for decades, it was also the first song/artist who brought us 'Shock Rock' or 'Rock Operas' that people like Alice Cooper are most known for. It was also birthed by the man who came up with the term 'Rock and Roll', famous radio DJ Alan Freed. #rockandroll #rootsmusichistory #rootsmusichistorypodcast #historypodcast It's been covered by multiple artists including but not limited to: IZA, Nina Simone, Jeff Beck, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bonnie Tyler, Seal, John Debney, Kandace Springs, Queen Latifah, and more. While you might know every word to this diddy, you might not know the full story behind the man who wrote it. A man named Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Turns out, screamin' Jay was just as spooky and eccentric as the song itself. While most peg Alice Cooper as the 'Godfather of Shock Rock' and/or 'Rock Operas' we must give credit where credit is due: Screamin' Jay was actually the first performer to bring us the Shock Rock theatrics, thanks to famous radio DJ, Alan Freed. So pour yourself some goblin juice, and enjoy this episode of Roots Music History as we dig up the Roots beneath the song 'I Put a Spell On You' by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. #rootsmusichistory #podcast #documentary #rootsrockumentary #halloween2023 #halloweenparty #stories #storybehindthesong ✅Suggested Links Original Performance of I Put a Spell On You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGPhpvqtOc ✅Become a Roots Music History Member (Level 3 = Members Only Videos):
In an effort to not only promote rock but also defend it, Alan Freed helped spearhead the production of three rock 'n' roll-themed films that came out in the mid-1950s: "Rock Around the Clock," "Don't Knock the Rock," and "Rock, Rock, Rock!" In this episode, we take a look at these movies, make some smart-sounding commentary, and even riff on them a la MST3K. It's a bit academic and a bit campy, but it's all deep... (see what I did there? "deep" as in "Deep Tracks"? Cool, right?)
On this edition of Learned Lately, Justin tells us the twisting, tragic tale of arguably the most influential disc jockey of all time, Alan Freed, with a brief digression into the payola scandals of the 1960s, which doomed Freed's career.Theme music: "Thinking it Over" by Lee Rosevere, licensed under CC BY 2.0E-Mail: quizandhers@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quizandhers/Twitter: https://twitter.com/quizandhersInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/quizandhers/
In this action-packed episode we tackle the life of early rock's most influential and notorious DJ, Alan Freed--the very man credited with giving the genre its name!
Welcome to Mysteries to Die For.I am TG Wolff and am here with Jack, my piano player and producer. This is a podcast where we combine storytelling with original music to put you in the heart of a mystery. Some episodes are original stories, others will be classics that helped shape the mystery genre we know today. All are structured to challenge you to beat the detective to the solution. These are arrangements, which means instead of word-for-word readings, you get a performance meant to be heard. Jack and I perform these live, front to back, no breaks, no fakes, no retakes.For Season 6, Jack and I have again decided to go ad-free. I do this because I love mysteries, Jack does it because he loves me. Jack maybe a starving college student but it's because… We do ask you support the writers of our show. This week it's Nikki Knight. Check her out on her website and social, buy and read her stories, help other readers find her. Make writing for Mysteries to Die For the best decision she could have made. In your review, tell her Tina and Jack said ‘Ahowwwl'.This is Season 6, Things that Go Jack in the Night. This season contains truly imaginative mysteries around one of the most common words in the English language. From the brandy distilled from hard cider known as applejack to that nefarious one-eyed jack, to the animals, vegetables, fruits, tools, weapons, and slang, the way the word “jack” is used in the English language is truly unique, inventive, and too numerous for me to count. And yes, it is also the name of my piano player and producer.For Episode 3, The legendary DJ Wolfman Jack is the featured jack. This is This Never Happened to Wolfman Jack by Nikki KnightAbout Wolfman Jackhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfman_JackRobert Weston Smith (January 21, 1938 – July 1, 1995), known as Wolfman Jack, was an American disc jockey active for over 3 decades. Famous for the gravelly voice which he credited for his success, saying, "It's kept meat and potatoes on the table for years for Wolfman and Wolfwoman. A couple of shots of whiskey helps it. I've got that nice raspy sound."Cleveland's Alan Freed had originally called himself the "Moon Dog" after New York City street musician Moondog. Freed both adopted this name and used a recorded howl to give his early broadcasts a unique character. Smith's adaptation of the Moondog theme was to call himself Wolfman Jack and add his own sound effects. The character was based in part on the manner and style of bluesman Howlin' Wolf. At KCIJ, he first began to develop his famous alter ego, Wolfman Jack. According to author Philip A. Lieberman, Smith's "Wolfman" persona "derived from Smith's love of horror films and his shenanigans as a 'wolfman' with his two young nephews. The 'Jack' nickname was taken from the 'hipster' lingo of the 1950s, as in 'Take a page from my book, Jack', or the more popular, 'Hit the road, Jack.'"ABOUT Nikki Knighthttps://kathleenmarplekalb.com/nikki-knightNikki Knight describes herself as an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. An award-winning weekend anchor at New York City's #1 all-news station, 1010 WINS Radio, she writes short stories and novels including the newly released Grace the Hit Mom Mystery, WRONG POISON (July 2023, Charade Media). Her stories appear in magazines including Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, online, and in anthologies including DEADLY NIGHTSHADE: Best New England Crime Stories 2022. She's been short-listed for Black Orchid Novella and Derringer Awards. She, her husband and son live in a Connecticut house owned by their cat.WRAP UPThat wraps this episode of Mysteries to Die For.
In 2019, Miami New Times tweeted “Does anyone know Miami music better than Lolo Reskin?” Music is in this woman's blood. Lauren Reskin, better known as Lolo, is founder of Miami's iconic, Sweat Records. Lolo's father is a Julliard graduate, professional trumpet player, and composer. Her grandmother, a concert violinist. Even her great uncle, Alan Freed, was the (in)famous 1950's radio DJ who coined the phrase “rock and roll.” In 2005 Lolo opened Sweat Records, a must visit destination for vinyl lovers in Miami. She's a sought-after DJ and leading music tastemaker, who is in it for the love of culture and community. As a native Miamians, we can say that this woman is a bona fide local hero. Find awesome new music right now at SweatRecords.comShare your Swan Dive at www.swandive.us
Joe Pantoliano has starred in numerous films including Risky Business with a 21 yr old Tom Cruise, Midnight Run, The Matrix, Teddy and TV shows like The Sopranos. He is now starring in the highly entertaining musical Rock & Roll Man in New York City. In this exclusive interview we discuss: -What it was like growing up dirt poor and how that inspired him to go into show business -What it is like having roles in nearly 200 Films/TV shows/stage performances -How he get into the 1983 movie Risky Business and if he thought Tom Cruise would be the blockbuster star he is today -What he is most proud of among those 200 some odd roles and why -Why did he take his current dual roles in Rock & Roll Man and what intrigued him about the musical's central theme about rock pioneer Alan Freed and the challenges of integrating Rock & Roll for both black and white audiences -What he hopes audiences feels, learns and takes away from the show ultimately
Alan Freed was a Cleveland radio DJ who helped popularize rock and roll in the early 1950s. The new musical about his life, “Rock & Roll Man,” opened off-Broadway at New World Stages on June 21.“Rock & Roll Man” features classics created by legends such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, as well as original songs written just for the stage by Gary Kupper, who also penned the book for the show with Larry Marshak and Rose Caiola.Rock & Roll Man, starring Tony Award-nominee Constantine Maroulis and Emmy Award-winner Joe Pantoliano. Maroulis plays the Rock & Roll Man himself and he joins us now. His stage credits include Broadway's Rock of Ages (Tony nomination), RENT, Jesus Chris Superstar, and more. Maroulis also has an active career as a concert performer and competed on season 4 of “American Idol.”
In this episode of My Rock Moment, we sit down for Part Two of our discussion with Roger Steffens. Roger is a writer, actor, radio host, legendary reggae historian, and author of "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley" (which Rolling Stone headlined in its review “…[arguably] the Best Bob Marley Book Ever.”). Roger was co-host of the "Reggae Beat" on KCRW from 1979 to 1987 and "Reggae Beat International" from 1983 to 1987, which was syndicated internationally to 130 stations. Seven rooms of his home in Los Angeles house reggae archives, which include the world's largest collection of Bob Marley material. In Part Two of our interview with Steffens, he'll discuss how "Reggae Beat," took Los Angeles by storm...and led to two weeks on the road with Bob Marley and the Wailers. We'll also discuss his love of 1950s rock 'n' roll and the time he got to meet his idol, iconic 50s rock DJ, Alan Freed. Roger will also share how he got turned on to LSD and was almost pickpocketed the first time he touched down in Jamaica by one of the biggest reggae stars at the time. To find out more about Roger Steffens and his work, check out the links below: The Family Acid Website: http://www.thefamilyacid.com/ The Family Acid Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefamilyacid/?hl=en So Much Things to Say on Amazon For more on Host Amanda Morck and My Rock Moment, visit: The My Rock Moment website LA Woman Rocks on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/la_woman_rocks/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of My Rock Moment, we sit down for Part Two of our discussion with Roger Steffens. Roger is a writer, actor, radio host, legendary reggae historian, and author of "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley" (which Rolling Stone headlined in its review “…[arguably] the Best Bob Marley Book Ever.”). Roger was co-host of the "Reggae Beat" on KCRW from 1979 to 1987 and "Reggae Beat International" from 1983 to 1987, which was syndicated internationally to 130 stations. Seven rooms of his home in Los Angeles house reggae archives, which include the world's largest collection of Bob Marley material. In Part Two of our interview with Steffens, he'll discuss how "Reggae Beat," took Los Angeles by storm...and led to two weeks on the road with Bob Marley and the Wailers. We'll also discuss his love of 1950s rock 'n' roll and the time he got to meet his idol, iconic 50s rock DJ, Alan Freed. Roger will also share how he got turned on to LSD and was almost pickpocketed the first time he touched down in Jamaica by one of the biggest reggae stars at the time. To find out more about Roger Steffens and his work, check out the links below: The Family Acid Website: http://www.thefamilyacid.com/ The Family Acid Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefamilyacid/?hl=en So Much Things to Say on Amazon For more on Host Amanda Morck and My Rock Moment, visit: The My Rock Moment website LA Woman Rocks on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/la_woman_rocks/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Unlocked to build anticipation for Pt. III and the first EP of a brand new miniseries, "Comparative Paranoid Analysis of the History of Nazi Occultism"—both dropping this week! Subscribe to access the complete ParaPower Mapping catalog at: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping We discuss: The Mafia-military-MK-Ultra-music industrial complex; Paperclip; Zappa; mechanical failure synced w/ gnostic experience; man & machine; Pynchonian Luddism; St. Narcissus; nymphs; sexual transgression themes at Echo Courts; Is Pynchon King Kill 33° pilled?; Rites of Osiris; Book of the Dead; Hollander's argument that Oedipa & Metzger are Jewish; Pynchon's syncretic brew; St. Narcissus's role in moving Easter to Sunday; sanctification of the dead; the ghosts of wars' past's influence on world-historical events; Payola & the Payola scandal; The Paranoids; Pynchon's 'noided take on child prostitution in the music industry of the 1960s; Dick Clark; Alan Freed; Rep. Oren Harris; LBJ; Election Year 1960; JFK; Mafia & music industry connections; House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight; Oedipa's husband Mucho sleeping w/ underage girls; Metzger running off with an underage groupie to Arizona; Las Vegas; Area 51; Oedipa Maas as reference to French ethnologist & scholar of sacrifice Marcel Mauss; Émile Durkheim; The Courier's Tragedy & Thirty Years War era espionage; the Bohemica Confessio; The Second Defenestration of Prague; Thurn und Taxis connections to Rosicrucian Protestants?; Emperor Rudolph II; Bohemian Grove; MK-Ultra; Operation Paperclip; James Jesus Angleton; James Foster; The Dulles Bros; encroaching conspiracy; Project Blue Beam; Nazi involvement at Area 51; Zapf's Used Books being a reference to Hermann Zapf (Nazi typographer & calligrapher) AND Francis Zappa (the chemist father of Frank Zappa, who worked on human subject chemical experiments); the nexus of the Cali & NY military, intelligence, rock n roll, & writing scenes; bars like the White Horse Tavern in NYC acting as cross-sections of said nexuses; McGowan's Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon; the reasoning behind my belief that Pynchon left breadcrumbs leading to Francis Zappa, which in turn brings Edgewood Arsenal into view through the enthymematic riddle that is CoL49; psychochemical research at the Aberdeen Proving Ground; Frank Zappa's childhood playdates w/ mallets & mercury; growing up w/ gas masks on the wall; Herb Cohen = Genghis Cohen in CoL49; the overlapping bios of Pynchon, Richard Fariña, & Herb Cohen; Herb Cohen's possible involvement in Patrice Lumumba's downfall; his folk clubs in LA; management of acts such as Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Odetta, Tim Buckley, Linda Rondstadt, etc.; the fact that Pynchon was writing CoL49 from '64 - '66, the exact same years that The Mothers of Invention formed, hired Herb Cohen, & started gigging in LA; the uncanny fact CoL49 & "Freak Out!" were both released in June, 1966; Joan & Mimi Baez; Bob Dylan; possible allusions to LA kingpin Mickey Cohen as well as Herb Cohen w/ the Genghis character; Harvard U. anesthesiologist Henry Beecher's involvement in Operation Paperclip & MK-Ultra connected psychoactive compound research at Camp King in post-war Germany, calling back to MasSUSchusetts; tests conducted on military personnel & civilians at Edgewood; LSD; mescaline; THC; benzos; sarin; mustard gas; Winthrop Tremaine; gov't surplus stores; Dr. Diocletian Blobb; Scurvhamites; Tristero; English Civil Wars; CoL49 connections to Crowley's espionage in Mexico; the Tristero attack on Blobb as warning for King James I pre-Thirty Years War; musings about Tristero's counter-reformation & counter-revolutionary origins; "Grand Master" = Freemasonic GMs?; Angleton's Vessel Affair & his Nazi-smuggling project w/ the Vatican; & a helluva lot more... Songs: | Lodge 49 OST - "Theme" | | Broadcast - "Come On Let's Go" | | The Mothers of Invention - "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" | | Dead Kennedys - "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" | | The Coup - "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO" |
In this episode of My Rock Moment, we sit down with Roger Steffens. Roger is a writer, actor, radio host, legendary reggae historian, and author of "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley" (which Rolling Stone headlined in its review “…[arguably] the Best Bob Marley Book Ever.”). Roger was co-host of the Reggae Beat on KCRW from 1979 to 1987 and Reggae Beat International from 1983 to 1987, which was syndicated internationally to 130 stations. Seven rooms of his home in Los Angeles house reggae archives, which include the world's largest collection of Bob Marley material. While most of his career has been devoted to reggae and its luminaries, his love of rock ‘n' roll started back in 1953 as a devoted fan of Alan Freed. Part One of our discussion starts with Roger remembering one particular concert in 1967 in San Francisco - it was an unforgettable night of rock ‘n' roll, as Bill Graham introduced 2 then unknown acts to an anticipant audience. The concert was a poignant way to say goodbye to the U.S. as the next day he was sent off to Vietnam. We'll discuss the 2 years he spent there working in Psyops while protest rock erupted across the nation. We'll hear Steffens' incredible story about meeting the Countess De Breteuil in Marrakesh in 1971 and how that connected him to the passing of Jim Morrison. Steffens will also share the serendipitous circumstances that led to him meeting Bob Marley for the first time. To find out more about Roger Steffens and his work, check out the links below: The Family Acid Website: http://www.thefamilyacid.com/ The Family Acid Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefamilyacid/?hl=en So Much Things to Say on Amazon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of My Rock Moment, we sit down with Roger Steffens. Roger is a writer, actor, radio host, legendary reggae historian, and author of "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley" (which Rolling Stone headlined in its review “…[arguably] the Best Bob Marley Book Ever.”). Roger was co-host of the Reggae Beat on KCRW from 1979 to 1987 and Reggae Beat International from 1983 to 1987, which was syndicated internationally to 130 stations. Seven rooms of his home in Los Angeles house reggae archives, which include the world's largest collection of Bob Marley material. While most of his career has been devoted to reggae and its luminaries, his love of rock ‘n' roll started back in 1953 as a devoted fan of Alan Freed. Part One of our discussion starts with Roger remembering one particular concert in 1967 in San Francisco - it was an unforgettable night of rock ‘n' roll, as Bill Graham introduced 2 then unknown acts to an anticipant audience. The concert was a poignant way to say goodbye to the U.S. as the next day he was sent off to Vietnam. We'll discuss the 2 years he spent there working in Psyops while protest rock erupted across the nation. We'll hear Steffens' incredible story about meeting the Countess De Breteuil in Marrakesh in 1971 and how that connected him to the passing of Jim Morrison. Steffens will also share the serendipitous circumstances that led to him meeting Bob Marley for the first time. To find out more about Roger Steffens and his work, check out the links below: The Family Acid Website: http://www.thefamilyacid.com/ The Family Acid Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefamilyacid/?hl=en So Much Things to Say on Amazon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Subscribe to the Premium Feed at: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping to unlock the full version! This one's equal parts spooky & fun, with a thorough examination of possible allusions & references to MK-Ultra, the '60s SoCal folk + rock n roll scene, Mafia, Edgewood Arsenal human experiments, & Operation Paperclip in CoL49, folks. We devote considerable time & energy to the following topics, themes, subtextual references, & allusions: Mechanical failure synced w/ gnostic experience; man & machine; Pynchonian Luddism; St. Narcissus; nymphs; sexually transgressive themes at Echo Courts; Is Pynchon King Kill 33° pilled?; Rites of Osiris; Book of the Dead; Hollander's argument that Oedipa & Metzger are Jewish; Pynchon's syncretic brew; St. Narcissus's role in moving Easter to Sunday; sanctification of the dead; the ghosts of wars' past's influence on world-historical events; Payola & the Payola scandal; The Paranoids; Pynchon's 'noided take on child prostitution in the music industry of the 1960s; Dick Clark; Alan Freed; Rep. Oren Harris; LBJ; Election Year 1960; JFK; Mafia & music industry connections; House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight; Oedipa's husband Mucho sleeping w/ underage girls; Metzger running off with an underage groupie to Arizona; Las Vegas; Area 51; Oedipa Maas as reference to French ethnologist & scholar of sacrifice Marcel Mauss; Émile Durkheim; The Courier's Tragedy & Thirty Years War era espionage; the Bohemica Confessio; The Second Defenestration of Prague; Thurn und Taxis connections to Rosicrucian Protestants?; Emperor Rudolph II; Bohemian Grove; MK-Ultra; Operation Paperclip; James Jesus Angleton; James Foster; The Dulles Bros; encroaching conspiracy; Project Blue Beam; Nazi involvement at Area 51; Zapf's Used Books being a reference to Hermann Zapf (Nazi typographer & calligrapher) AND Francis Zappa (the chemist father of Frank Zappa, who worked on human subject chemical experiments); the nexus of the Cali & NY military, intelligence, rock n roll, & writing scenes; bars like the White Horse Tavern in NYC acting as cross-sections of said nexuses; McGowan's Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon; the reasoning behind my belief that Pynchon left breadcrumbs leading to Francis Zappa, which in turn brings Edgewood Arsenal into view through the enthymematic riddle that is CoL49; psychochemical research at the Aberdeen Proving Ground; Frank Zappa's childhood playdates w/ mallets & mercury; growing up w/ gas masks on the wall; Herb Cohen = Genghis Cohen in CoL49; the overlapping bios of Pynchon, Richard Fariña, & Herb Cohen; Herb Cohen's possible involvement in Patrice Lumumba's downfall; his folk clubs in LA; management of acts such as Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Odetta, Tim Buckley, Linda Rondstadt, etc.; the fact that Pynchon was writing CoL49 from '64 - '66, the exact same years that The Mothers of Invention formed, hired Herb Cohen, & started gigging in LA; the uncanny fact Pynchon's CoL49 & The Mothers of Invention's "Freak Out!" were both released in June, 1966; Joan & Mimi Baez; Bob Dylan; possible allusions to Mickey Cohen, LA king pin as well as Herb Cohen w/ the Genghis character; Harvard U. anesthesiologist Henry Beecher's involvement in Operation Paperclip & MK-Ultra connected psychoactive compound research at Camp King in post-war Germany, calling back to MasSUSchusetts; tests conducted on military personnel & civilians at Edgewood; LSD; mescaline; THC; benzos; sarin; mustard gas; Winthrop Tremaine; gov't surplus stores; Dr. Diocletian Blobb; Scurvhamites; Tristero; English Civil Wars; CoL49 connections to Crowley's espionage in Mexico; the Tristero attack on Blobb as warning for King James I pre-Thirty Years War; musings about Tristero's counter-reformation & counter-revolutionary origins; "Grand Master" = Freemasonic GMs?; Angleton's Vessel Affair & his Nazi-smuggling project w/ the Vatican; & a helluva lot more... Songs: | Lodge 49 OST - "Theme" | | The Mothers of Invention - "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" |
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
Mansfield Sr. grad Jeannine McKee, 93, was Beta Alpha Psi's first female member: https://www.richlandsource.com/open_source/open-source-mansfield-sr-grad-jeannine-mckee-93-was-beta-alpha-psis-first-female-member/article_f29ce79a-ccd2-11ed-bd3b-03b2d6c08a03.html Today – A Mansfield Senior graduate was Beta Alpha Psi's first female member.Support the show: https://www.sourcemembers.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A Alan Freed se le considera uno de los grandes disc jockeys de la historia. Un tipo que acuñó el término "rock and roll" para describir al género, pero que ya se usaba en letras del blues o el jazz para referirse a noches de juerga. Fue Alan Freed quien, también, organizó el que es considerado como el primer gran concierto de rock and roll de la historia: Moondog Coronation Ball (Cleveland, 1952).
A Alan Freed se le considera uno de los grandes disc jockeys de la historia. Un tipo que acuñó el término "rock and roll" para describir al género, pero que ya se usaba en letras del blues o el jazz para referirse a noches de juerga. Fue Alan Freed quien, también, organizó el que es considerado como el primer gran concierto de rock and roll de la historia: Moondog Coronation Ball (Cleveland, 1952).
Episode 201: Fires, Riots, Crashes & The Shoe Bandit: April and May of 1958 Amy & Joe cover April and May of 1958, where a crazy foot fetishist was on the loose, Nixon was getting hate, California started playing baseball, and air traffic was a mess! Plus: A deportation, a museum fire a concert riot and Andie MacDowell! Part of the Queen City Podcast Network: www.queencitypodcastnetwork.com. Credits Include: the Daily Beast, Time Magazine, Saginaw News, WAYNE STEWART. (2007). The Gigantic Book of Golf Quotations, Popculture.us, Wikipedia, New York Times, IMDB & Youtube. Information may not be accurate, as it is produced by jerks. Music by MATT TRUMAN EGO TRIP, the greatest American Band. Click Here to buy their albums!
FyreFest, Altamont, Woodstock '99, Astroworld are some of the biggest festival disasters in American history, today we'll look at some of the most flawed festivals in Ohio history in our Season 7 Finale. We start with BalloonFest '86 a fatally flawed world record setting balloon release festival in Downtown Cleveland. We relive the ecological disaster and dangerous consequences of the City of Cleveland's releasing of 1.5 million balloons in September 1986. We're joined by Cleveland sports personality and Twitter legend Chris McNeill, better known as Reflog_18 on Twitter to discuss 1980s Cleveland and the ill-fated BalloonFest '86. We'll also talk about Chris McNeill's leading role in the "Perfect Season Parade" to protest the Cleveland Browns winless 2017 NFL season. Follow Reflog_18 on Twitter and check out his Ohio-based weekly sports show, the BIGPLAY Reflog Show here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjqGMjGtAUKxlthtZ7hXt7Q Next we revisit the economic disaster that was AmeriFlora '92 in Columbus, Ohio. This horticultural exhibition was everything and nothing. Part theme park, part flower show, part mixed message branding nightmare. This $95 million boondoggle projected some 5+ million visitors but fell way short of those numbers. Tim Trad, the creator of onlyincbus, details the big swing and miss that was AmeriFlora '92. Follow @onlyincbus on Instagram and check out Tim's incredibly interesting content here www.onlyincbus.com We go all the way back to the 1950s for one of the first failed music festivals in American history. We replay an interview from a previous episode with Jerry DePizzo of the famous Ohio rock band O.A.R. about 1952's Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland. The rock n' roll show hosted by the famous DJ Alan Freed, the man created with popularizing the phrase rock n' roll music. We follow Alan Freed's career and his disastrous event at the Cleveland Arena in March 1952, regarded by many as the first rock festival in the United States. Lastly, we sit down with friend of the show Vince Tornero to discuss the wildly successful concert series the World Series of Rock in Cleveland during the 1970s. We hear clips from his great new podcast season for the Evergreen Podcast Network show PrOHfiles called The Wrath of the Buzzard. His show documents the meteoric rise and fall of 100.7 WMMS - the iconic Cleveland FM rock station that proved to be one of the most influential radio stations of all time. We also discuss the disasterous 1979 World Series of Rock that resulted in violence and even the breakup of the famous band Aerosmith following their headlining performance at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Check out The Wrath of the Buzzard here https://evergreenpodcasts.com/prohfiles We're proud to be part of the Evergreen Podcast Network. Go to www.evergreenpodcasts.com for our show and dozens of other great podcasts. Thanks for listening to Season 7, we'll see you all again in 2023 for Season 8. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week's podcast extra is about podcasts, but this story has its roots in the early days of rock 'n' roll. Alan Freed was a celebrity DJ on WINS in New York, famous for helping popularize the nascent genre through the 1950s. But, unbeknownst to his listeners, record promoters were secretly bribing Freed and other popular disc jockeys across the country for extra air time for their artists — in a rampant practice known as “payola,” which eventually caught the eye of regulators. In 1960, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlawed payola, requiring broadcasters to disclose any payments received. However, members of the music industry would continue to blow the whistle on similar behavior in the decades that followed. According to Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman, a similar culture of pay-to-play is taking hold in the world of podcasting. Her latest piece is titled, “Podcast Guests Are Paying Up to $50,000 to Appear on Popular Shows.”
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