Podcast appearances and mentions of Alan Price

In this week's Talking Tech, Poppy is joined by Alan Price, CEO of BrightHR, to discuss the recent employment law changes which came into effect in April 2025. These changes could have a significant impact on UK businesses, so we explored what exactly the changes are, and how they could affect workplaces.

He's written some of the darkest entries in the American songbook but became world famous with a sunny celebration of friendship on the soundtrack of “Toy Story”. Inbetween can be found a staggering range of songs dealing with everything from short people to Vladimir Putin, from performing bears to the Louisiana Flood., from ELO to the Great Nations Of Europe, all of which show up in this authoritative new biography from Robert Hilburn, for years the rock writer of the Los Angeles Times. Topics touched on in his chat with David Hepworth:  … when you called your book “A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country”, did you know it was coming out in Election week? … why Robert's review of Elton John at the Troubadour in 1970 transformed the life of one piano player from Pinner while his review of Randy in the same same venue in the same year didn't have the same effect on this local hero. … how Randy finds his inspiration by sitting in front of the TV with a big stack of hardback books. … what his famous uncles taught him and how he has spent a lifetime trying to follow their lead. … how he got his first break from Cilla Black, Alan Price and the British chart, … what he said when he finally got as Oscar after years of nominations. … why he can write quickly when commissioned but moves agonisingly slowly when relying on inspiration. … why he's the only biographical subject to insist his children are interviewed. … what he thinks of Donald Trump.Order Robert's book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Few-Words-Defense-Our-Country/dp/1408720361Find 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.

He's written some of the darkest entries in the American songbook but became world famous with a sunny celebration of friendship on the soundtrack of “Toy Story”. Inbetween can be found a staggering range of songs dealing with everything from short people to Vladimir Putin, from performing bears to the Louisiana Flood., from ELO to the Great Nations Of Europe, all of which show up in this authoritative new biography from Robert Hilburn, for years the rock writer of the Los Angeles Times. Topics touched on in his chat with David Hepworth:  … when you called your book “A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country”, did you know it was coming out in Election week? … why Robert's review of Elton John at the Troubadour in 1970 transformed the life of one piano player from Pinner while his review of Randy in the same same venue in the same year didn't have the same effect on this local hero. … how Randy finds his inspiration by sitting in front of the TV with a big stack of hardback books. … what his famous uncles taught him and how he has spent a lifetime trying to follow their lead. … how he got his first break from Cilla Black, Alan Price and the British chart, … what he said when he finally got as Oscar after years of nominations. … why he can write quickly when commissioned but moves agonisingly slowly when relying on inspiration. … why he's the only biographical subject to insist his children are interviewed. … what he thinks of Donald Trump.Order Robert's book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Few-Words-Defense-Our-Country/dp/1408720361Find 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.

He's written some of the darkest entries in the American songbook but became world famous with a sunny celebration of friendship on the soundtrack of “Toy Story”. Inbetween can be found a staggering range of songs dealing with everything from short people to Vladimir Putin, from performing bears to the Louisiana Flood., from ELO to the Great Nations Of Europe, all of which show up in this authoritative new biography from Robert Hilburn, for years the rock writer of the Los Angeles Times. Topics touched on in his chat with David Hepworth:  … when you called your book “A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country”, did you know it was coming out in Election week? … why Robert's review of Elton John at the Troubadour in 1970 transformed the life of one piano player from Pinner while his review of Randy in the same same venue in the same year didn't have the same effect on this local hero. … how Randy finds his inspiration by sitting in front of the TV with a big stack of hardback books. … what his famous uncles taught him and how he has spent a lifetime trying to follow their lead. … how he got his first break from Cilla Black, Alan Price and the British chart, … what he said when he finally got as Oscar after years of nominations. … why he can write quickly when commissioned but moves agonisingly slowly when relying on inspiration. … why he's the only biographical subject to insist his children are interviewed. … what he thinks of Donald Trump.Order Robert's book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Few-Words-Defense-Our-Country/dp/1408720361Find 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.

Pro Audio Design Engineer Andy Bereza summarises his impressive career in a chat with Paul Gilby. Andy founded Allen & Heath Mixers before working for TEAC/Tascam, where he conceived the TEAC Portastudio the portable multitrack cassette tape recorder that revolutionised the home recording market in the 1980s. He then co-founded Bandive-Turnkey where he developed a range of budget signal processors and the famous Great British Spring reverb to sell to the rapidly expanding Home Studio Recording market. At the same time, he was a consultant for the Fostex X15 multitrack cassette as well as helping to steer further product designs. Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:34 - Getting Into Electronics01:45 - Building Custom Desks04:09 - Allen & Heath Mixers06:07 - The Minimixer08:54 - The Pink Floyd Desks12:24 - Allen & Heath Mod II Mixer13:20 - Expanding The Company15:23 - Moving To Tascam 16:58 - Constructing The Portastudio 21:57 - Setting Up Bandive / Turnkey24:55 - Creating Products For The Home Studio 29:03 - Fostex Releases in the 80s30:48 - Bandive Seck Mixers32:08 - Expanding Turnkey35:14 - Selling To Harman38:38 - Launching Digital Postcards41:07 - A Brief Career Summary42:13 - Proudest Career MomentAndy Bereza BiogAndy Bereza started his career as a Audio Design Engineer after moving to London in 1967 to study Electronics at Chelsea University. A chance encounter with Siggy Jackson in Tin Pan Alley gave him his first custom commission and many more soon followed, with Andy building mixers for Bill Shepherd (producer of the Bee Gees), Alan Price, Maurice Gibb and also a location recording mixer for the Clockwork Orange movie.In 1970 Andy became the Founder of Allen & Heath, where he initially developed the black range of mixers, then their first mass market product the Minimix. At the same time he creating custom quadraphonic live desks for The Who along with Pink Floyd's Pompeii and Dark Side Of The Moon touring desks.In 1975, Andy joined TEAC America and was employed to introduce Tascam into Europe. Then in 1976 he was contracted directly with TEAC Japan where he developed the iconic Portastudio that changed the face of the home recording industry. In 1977 he became one of the founders of Bandive Ltd and helped to develop further products for the home recording market and created the popular Turnkey By Mail catalogue during the late 1970s to mid 80s. Bandive then opened the Turnkey retail store in central London.Following the sale of Bandive / Turnkey to Harman UK in 1987, he briefly became their Marketing Director, before signing up to become Managing Director of Fostex in 1991. Later in the 90s Andy left the Pro Audio industry and turned his attention to multimedia where he developed interactive product catalogues on CD-ROM.Paul Gilby BiogPaul Gilby is the co-founder, along with his brother Ian, of Sound On Sound magazine in 1985. Having written many product reviews and interviews over the years he now heads up the Digital Media side of the business managing the team that looks after the SOS website as well as the video and podcast productions.Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts

Reviewing 'Do More With Less' - Recruitment Efficiency in 2024   Recruiters have been under pressure all year - maybe even longer than that - to 'do more with less'. This means either increase effort or increase efficiency. And given that we are already at 100% capacity with reduced TA teams, the latter is the only option!   How have we done - what examples have we seen of recruitment efficiency at company wide level?   We will discuss the following:   - How to measure recruitment efficiency? - How to identify which areas of inefficiencies to tackle. - Buy or Build: how to make the right choice? - How to reduce switching costs? - Managing internal communications - Stakeholder management - Managing up to C-level - How do you know it's done - Examples of improvement in recruitment efficiency - What to look forward to in 2025?   All this and more on Brainfood Live On Air.   We're with Alan Price, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, (Deel), Manjuri Sinha, VP of Talent Succcess (OLX) & Jane Curran, Global Head of Talent Operations (JLL) on Friday 13th September, 2pm BST / 9am ET   Follow the channel here (recommended) and click on the green button to register for this show.     Ep272 is sponsored by our friends Metaview   Still furiously scribbling or typing interview notes? It's time to leave note-taking in the pre-AI era and join the thousands of recruiters already using Metaview.   With the magic of Metaview's AI-powered recruiting notes you'll:   Cut hours of admin out of your week: Never waste time cleaning up notes or writing candidate reports for hiring managers again. Metaview's AI records and transcribes your most important recruiting conversations, then crafts perfectly-structured, accurate summaries. All without you having to do anything.   Upgrade the candidate experience: Put 100% of your focus on the candidate in the moment. Not worrying about capturing detailed notes.   Supercharge your efficiency: Whether it's automatically generated candidate TL;DRs, auto-filled scorecards, or any of our other AI-assisted features, Metaview makes every step of the interview process delightfully efficient.   Make more confident hiring decisions: With perfect, instantly-queryable candidate data at your fingertips, you can be sure you're making hiring decisions based on what actually happened in interviews.   Don't just take our word for it. Here's what Hung himself had to say about the power of Metaview in his 2023 recruiting roundup:   “For the employers who think seriously about talent acquisition and recruitment efficiency, interview intelligence is no longer any kind of secret.”   The secret's out, so don't get left behind.   Get up and running in minutes & try Metaview for free today.

In 1959, Charles Brown & Amos Milburn recorded a beautiful duet called "I Want to Go Home." It's like a nice highball, two ingredients that blend well (Milburn is the Rum and Brown is the Coke). Sam Cooke later transformed the song into "Bring it On Home To Me", which he sang with Lou Rawls, an impassioned vocal performance with some Gospel call and response. The Animals then brought the song to England and Eric Burdon hogged the song all to himself, but that's ok because there's Alan Price's organ. Girl group The Thrills did a high-tempo version that'll ... well ... thrill you. It's a guarantee! In '67, some Jersey garagers named Hole in the Wall did a cover of the Animals version and there's some amazing harmonies and organ. Finally, Seattle's The Fall-Outs essayed the song in '86 and it's charming and shambling and very non-grunge. Ha!!

Life Changes Show with Filippo Voltaggio and cohost Mark Laisure, with Executive Producer Dorothy With Guests, Contemporary Violinist Alan Price and The Placemaking Guy Jeremy Ferguson Featuring Performance Guest, Contemporary Violinist, Alan Price; and Interview Guest, The Placemaking Guy, Santa Monica Placemaking Director, and Board Director for the Santa Monica History Museum, Jeremy Ferguson, on The Life Changes Show, Episode 801 Interview Guest: JEREMY FERGUSON; and Performance Guests: ALAN PRICE

Avec George Harrison, les Beatles, The Animals et Paul McCartney. On peut dire que George Harrison, le plus mystique des Beatles, avait un rapport particulier avec le soleil, sur son album "Brainwashed" sorti après sa disparition, en 2002, on retrouve "Rising Sun" le soleil levant. Et puis, un des plus grands titres qu'il a écrit pour les Beatles est "Here Comes The Sun"écrit dans le jardin du guitariste Eric Clapton. En 1964, The Animals cartonnent avec la reprise d'un traditionnel : “The House of The Rising Sun”, la maison du soleil levant, ils vont conquérir le monde et mettre en avant le talent du claviériste Alan Price et la voix d'Eric Burdon. En bonus sur la version CD (et K7) de l'album "Flowers in the Dirt" de Paul McCartney de 1989, "Où est le soleil ?" est une bizarrerie de sa carrière produite par Trevor Horn, un des "Buggles". --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be 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.

Avec les Beach Boys, Xavier Rudd, Arctic Monkeys et les Beatles "The Warmth of The Sun" est un titre des Beach Boys sorti en 1964, enregistré peu après le 22 novembre 1963, date de l'assassinat de JFK, le groupe était encore sous le choc. "Follow The Sun" en 2012, signé Xavier Rudd, surfeur, musicien et activiste australien nous invite à prendre la route du soleil. En 1964, sur "Beatles For Sale", leur 4e album, les Beatles publient "I'll Follow The Sun", Paul McCartney l'a écrit bien avant de devenir un des 4 garçons dans le vent, en 1959. En 2006, sur son premier album, le groupe britannique, Arctic Monkeys propose "When The Sun Goes Down", qui est le second single à se hisser à la première place des charts en Grande-Bretagne. MARDI 180624 Avec Muse, Neil Diamond, Norah Jones et Police. Sur son premier album, Muse dévoile "Sunburn", cette brûlure du soleil qui imprègne l'atmosphère de leur première production intitulée "Showbiz", sortie en 1999. En 1968, Neil Diamond nous convie à savourer le soleil dominical avec "Sunday Sun". En 2004 sur son deuxième album "Feels Like Home", Norah Jones publie "Sunrise" hymne au lever du soleil. C'est un soleil bien moins doux et beaucoup plus menaçant qu'on retrouve avec Police et "Invisible Sun" en 1981, climat de violence et de tourmente qui règne en Irlande du Nord. Frances Tomelty, une des épouses de Sting, est originaire de Belfast et on sent cette influence sur le groupe. MERCREDI 190624 Avec George Harrison, les Beatles, The Animals et Paul McCartney. On peut dire que George Harrison, le plus mystique des Beatles, avait un rapport particulier avec le soleil, sur son album "Brainwashed" sorti après sa disparition, en 2002, on retrouve "Rising Sun" le soleil levant. Et puis, un des plus grands titres qu'il a écrit pour les Beatles est "Here Comes The Sun"écrit dans le jardin du guitariste Eric Clapton. En 1964, The Animals cartonnent avec la reprise d'un traditionnel : “The House of The Rising Sun”, la maison du soleil levant, ils vont conquérir le monde et mettre en avant le talent du claviériste Alan Price et la voix d'Eric Burdon. En bonus sur la version CD (et K7) de l'album "Flowers in the Dirt" de Paul McCartney de 1989, "Où est le soleil ?" est une bizarrerie de sa carrière produite par Trevor Horn, un des "Buggles". JEUDI 200624 Avec Sheryl Crow, The Rivieras, Bill Withers et Katrina and the Waves. En 2002, Shery Crow nous propose "Soak Up The Sun", ce qui veut dire "profiter du soleil", l'artiste pointe du doigt notre réaction attentiste par rapport aux changements climatiques. 1964 avec ce titre du groupe américain The Rivieras "California Sun", formation à l'existence assez courte, de 62 à 66 mais qui se reformera en 2000 jusqu'à 2010. "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone" de Bill Withers en 1971, titre mélancolique a pour origine un film qui a particulièrement touché Bill Withers : "Le jour du vin et des roses" de 1962. Composé par le guitariste Kimberly Rew, fondateur de Katrina and The Waves, ce "Walking On Sunshine" sort en 1985. VENDREDI 210624 Avec Bob Marley and The Wailers, Blondie et Soundgarden. "Sun Is Shining" est un classique de Bob Marley enregistré à deux reprises par l'artiste, tout d'abord en 1971 produite par un autre grand nom du Reggae, Lee Perry. 7 ans plus tard, pour l'album "Kaya" Bob Marley et ses Wailers, en enregistrent une version "modernisée". En 1971, le groupe de rock progressif Yes est au sommet de son art avec l'album "Fragile" et "Heart of the Sunrise" qui nous emmène au cœur d'un rayon de soleil avec des rythmes complexes et des influences musicales très variées allant du jazz-rock fusion à Stravinsky. En 76, c'est la chanteuse Debbie Harry et son groupe Blondie qui nous transporte au soleil sur “In The Sun ", extrait du tout premier album intitulé “Blondie”. Seattle avec un soleil inquiétant "Black Hole Sun" de Soundgarden, trou noir/ce soleil noir évoque des pensées moroses qui n'empêcheront pas ce titre de devenir le plus grand tube du groupe en 1994. --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be 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.

Missing being on tour and exasperated by internal disputes, Nick Mason set out to tour small-scale venues with his band Saucerful Of Secrets in 2018. They're mid-way through another world tour (Gary Kemp's the main singer and one of the guitarists). He doesn't miss the stadium circuit where “you need a golf cart to get from one side of the stage to the other” and they play only the early psychedelic Floyd material, from their first singles up to (but not including) the Dark Side of the Moon, which audiences are less inclined to want to be note-perfect versions of the records. And he talks mid-set about the origins of the songs and his memories of Syd Barrett and life at the time. This podcast looks back at the first live shows he saw and played himself and how Saucerful of Secrets came about. Which includes … … Tommy Steele at the Hackney Empire – “I came straight from school in short trousers with my satchel”. … seeing the Rolling Stones on a ‘63 package tour.   … performing Beatles songs at parties in Cuban heels and Oliver Goldsmith shades. … playing the International Times launch party at the Roundhouse in ‘66 on the back of a cart. …. early gigs at the Countdown Club, Regent Street Poly and the Albert Hall (with Alan Price and Peter & Gordon). … the difference between Saucerful of Secrets and the stadium circuit – and the time Roger Waters played with them in New York. … and the ‘60s demos of unreleased Floyd songs they're hoping to add to the set. Saucerful of Secrets tour dates here …https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kjkhMKXv4wPaR2XVbZ6h3WVMJ4ivesVn/view?usp=drivesdk  Buy tickets here …https://myticket.co.uk/artists/nick-mason-saucerful-of-secrets Nick's re-released solo albums here …https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uwB_CYLuszOUNqsfeiWQH3nXd2TxGVf7/viewSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Missing being on tour and exasperated by internal disputes, Nick Mason set out to tour small-scale venues with his band Saucerful Of Secrets in 2018. They're mid-way through another world tour (Gary Kemp's the main singer and one of the guitarists). He doesn't miss the stadium circuit where “you need a golf cart to get from one side of the stage to the other” and they play only the early psychedelic Floyd material, from their first singles up to (but not including) the Dark Side of the Moon, which audiences are less inclined to want to be note-perfect versions of the records. And he talks mid-set about the origins of the songs and his memories of Syd Barrett and life at the time. This podcast looks back at the first live shows he saw and played himself and how Saucerful of Secrets came about. Which includes … … Tommy Steele at the Hackney Empire – “I came straight from school in short trousers with my satchel”. … seeing the Rolling Stones on a ‘63 package tour.   … performing Beatles songs at parties in Cuban heels and Oliver Goldsmith shades. … playing the International Times launch party at the Roundhouse in ‘66 on the back of a cart. …. early gigs at the Countdown Club, Regent Street Poly and the Albert Hall (with Alan Price and Peter & Gordon). … the difference between Saucerful of Secrets and the stadium circuit – and the time Roger Waters played with them in New York. … and the ‘60s demos of unreleased Floyd songs they're hoping to add to the set. Saucerful of Secrets tour dates here …https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kjkhMKXv4wPaR2XVbZ6h3WVMJ4ivesVn/view?usp=drivesdk  Buy tickets here …https://myticket.co.uk/artists/nick-mason-saucerful-of-secrets Nick's re-released solo albums here …https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uwB_CYLuszOUNqsfeiWQH3nXd2TxGVf7/viewSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Missing being on tour and exasperated by internal disputes, Nick Mason set out to tour small-scale venues with his band Saucerful Of Secrets in 2018. They're mid-way through another world tour (Gary Kemp's the main singer and one of the guitarists). He doesn't miss the stadium circuit where “you need a golf cart to get from one side of the stage to the other” and they play only the early psychedelic Floyd material, from their first singles up to (but not including) the Dark Side of the Moon, which audiences are less inclined to want to be note-perfect versions of the records. And he talks mid-set about the origins of the songs and his memories of Syd Barrett and life at the time. This podcast looks back at the first live shows he saw and played himself and how Saucerful of Secrets came about. Which includes … … Tommy Steele at the Hackney Empire – “I came straight from school in short trousers with my satchel”. … seeing the Rolling Stones on a ‘63 package tour.   … performing Beatles songs at parties in Cuban heels and Oliver Goldsmith shades. … playing the International Times launch party at the Roundhouse in ‘66 on the back of a cart. …. early gigs at the Countdown Club, Regent Street Poly and the Albert Hall (with Alan Price and Peter & Gordon). … the difference between Saucerful of Secrets and the stadium circuit – and the time Roger Waters played with them in New York. … and the ‘60s demos of unreleased Floyd songs they're hoping to add to the set. Saucerful of Secrets tour dates here …https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kjkhMKXv4wPaR2XVbZ6h3WVMJ4ivesVn/view?usp=drivesdk  Buy tickets here …https://myticket.co.uk/artists/nick-mason-saucerful-of-secrets Nick's re-released solo albums here …https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uwB_CYLuszOUNqsfeiWQH3nXd2TxGVf7/viewSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eric Idle uses his return to hosting Saturday Night to turn the show into a telethon to "Save Great Britain" (complete with the Queen herself).The episode is VERY Idle-influenced.  There are no Coneheads or Samurai, but we do get a Sherry appearance, a lot of British-style comedy, and some interesting musical numbers from Neil Innes. Unfortunately, we also get a couple of performances from Alan Price.Thomas Sena from the SNL Hall of Fame and Pop Culture Five podcasts is back to help sort through it all!Subscribe today! And follow us on social media on X (Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook.

Alan is here to talk about the new article in the Catholic Herald    Rabbi Seth is the Executive Director of the Exodus Project 

The Writer's Strike is over! We got a biting new email from Finn Gurrer who has Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes on the brain. Luke's down with the sickness. The Amazon FTC lawsuit has been kept hush hush. Lauren Boebert and Taylor Swift have successfully distracted the nation. Luke isn't impressed by Hunter Biden. There is some Russell Brand banter mixed in here too. Plus we have so much more! These notes are brief today because I gotta get to bed. We love you all! We are very pleased with our little world that we have formed together thanks to this show. This talk show has little substance to it without you listening and emailing us your thoughts. We close the show with Poor People by Alan Price. If any of our nonsense provokes your thoughts, please share them with us at isitsafepod@gmail.com or check out our newDiscord:https://discord.gg/wXPdgujdSj

Percussion Discussion - Episode 114 - Ian Palmer.Joining me today is my good Friend Ian Palmer.Ian is a remarkable drummer that has played at the highest level from a very young age, he has gone on to play for the likes of Ray Russell Music, The Ghosts, Martin Taylor, Randy Brecker, Mark Egan, Mo Foster, Alan Price, Leo Sayer, Roy Wood, Jane McDonald and many more!We talk about so much in this conversation including Ian's passion for constant learning from lessons with the legendary Joe Morello in New York through to lessons with Ian's friend and mentor Dom Famularo and funk drumming legend David garibaldi Ian also tells us about a recent recording with American composer, arranger and guitarist Richard Niles, a band that was packed to the rafters with the most talented musicians you could ever wish to hear, the result is the album Niles Smiles, a beatifully crafted album that is now released and available for everyone to hear. This album showcases Ian's wonderful and tasteful drumming style perfectly. As well as being a superb drummer, Ian has another side to his career, an airline pilot for Virgin Atlantic, this puts him in a pretty exclusive club of musicians that fly aeroplanes including Bruce Dickinson and former Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse.This was a fantastic conversation (as i knew it would be) Ian, thanks so much for giving up your time to do it!www.ianpalmer.com

Regresamos a aquella primera mitad de los años 60. Todos los estilos que confluyeron en las listas de éxitos y dieron forma a la música popular de esos días son el manantial inagotable del que extraemos las canciones de este coleccionable.Playlist;(sintonía) THE CHANTAYS “Pipeline”THE SURFARIS “Surfer Joe”STEVIE WONDER “Fingertips (part 2)”THE MARVELETTES “Please Mr Postman”CHUBBY CHECKER “Pony time”BOBBY RYDELL and CHUBBY CHECKER “Teach me to twist”LITTLE EVA “He is the boy”DIONNE WARWICK “Walk on by”ARETHA FRANKLIN “Rock-a-bye your baby with a dixie melody”ERMA FRANKLIN “I don’t want no mama’s boy”LITTLE RICHARD “Memories are made of this”SWINGIN BLUE JEANS “Good Golly Miss Molly”THE ANIMALS “I’m cryin’”ALAN PRICE “I put a spell on you”SCREAMIN’ JAY HAWKINS “Nitty Gritty”THE SHADOWS “F.B.I.”KATHY KIRBY “Dance on”ARTHUR ALEXANDER “Call me lonesome” Escuchar audio

Today is the 81st of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame keyboard player, founding member of The Animals, Alan Price! On today's show you'll hear from his former Animals bandmate, John Steel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Having survived the apocalypse, Andrew and Dave have decided to pursue a far more meaningful goal: selling coffee in the northern parts of the UK! Okay, maybe they aren't selling coffee in the north, but Mick Travis, the protagonist of director Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!, certainly is. What do the podcasting duo make of Anderson's not-exactly-a-sequel-to-If.... epic comedy? Is this the most likeable Malcolm McDowell has ever been on screen? And just how stellar is Alan Price's score to the film? Tune in and find out!Next Episode: Before Jackson, there was... BAKSHI!All music by Andrew Kannegiesser. Editing by Dave Babbitt.

Edith Wharton ranks as one of the Gilded Age's most prolific and popular writers. In this episode, Professor Stacy Holden tells us about her research on Wharton's lesser known travelogue In Morocco, a revealing account of the author's travels to the French and Spanish colony. It tells us a great deal about American and European imperialism, and the Orientalism that pervaded her thinking.Essential Reading:Edith Wharton, In Morocco (1920).Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (2007).Recommended Reading: Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton's Writings from the Great War (2004). Alan Price, The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War (1996). Andrew Patrick, America's Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919 (2015). Andrew Priest, Designs on Empire (on the podcast in 2022). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Tommy McClennan  | Blues Trip me this Morning (1942)  | Broadcasting the Blues, volume 2 | Alan Price & Rob Hoeke  | Careless Love  | Two Of A Kind  |  | Little Monsters  | Three Times A Fool  | Little Monsters  |  | Aynsley Lister  | Cast A Light  | Along For The Ride  |  | Tomislav Goluban  | Can't Find Myself  | Chicago Rambler  | Spona 203 | Blind Lemon Jefferson & George Perkins (P)  | Rising High Water Blues  | Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order | Bonnie Mac Band  | Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean  | Pleasure and Pain  |  | Henri Herbert  | It Dont Mean a Thing  | Boogie Till I Die  |  | Struggle Buggy  | Rag, Mama, Rag  | Tear 'Em Down  |  | One String Willie  | Church I'm Fully Saved Today  | If I Had My Way: A Cigar Box Tribute To Blind Willie Johnson | The Golden Gate Quartet  | When They Ring the Golden Bell  | Gospel Masters: Rock My Soul | Geraint Watkins  | Heaven Only Knows  | Rush Of Blood  |  | Chuck Berry  | Around and Around  | The Ultimate Collection cd 1 | Duane Eddy  | Peter Gunn  | The Rocking Guitar Man | Hot Tuna  | Hit Single #1  | Hot Tuna-New York Academy Of Music  9261974 | Guy King  | King Thing  | TRUTH (mp3)  |  | Vegas Strip Kings  | It Ain't  | Jackpot  |   | 

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Nick WaetjenThe Animals “House of the Rising Sun” from the 1964 album "The Animals" released on Columbia/MGM. Traditional arrangement from Alan Price and produced by Mickie Most.Personel:Eric Burdon - vocalsHilton Valentine - electric guitarChas Chandler - bass guitarAlan Price - vox continental organJohn Steel - drums and percussionCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.

The House of The Rising Sun canción lanzada en julio de 1964 por la banda de Rock Británico The Animals, fue grabada sin editarse en la dramática voz de Eric Burdon , el órgano de Alan Price, y el guitarrista Hilton Valentine. Este tema sería la primera canción en el género Folk Rock, y la misma catapultaría a la fama y el éxito a esta agrupación musical. Esta canción sonó en radios, y captó millones de fans posicionándose en los primeros lugares de las listas de música de todo el mundo. En el Reino Unido llegó a ser la canción número uno de la época, y en los Estados Unidos marcó un antes y un después en la música popular del siglo XX. No se conoce el autor de este canción, pero la grabación más antigua fue hecha por Clarence Ashley y Gwen Foster en 1934. A continuación escucharemos The House of The Rising Sun, interpretada por The Animals.

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Nick WaetjenThe Animals “House of the Rising Sun” from the 1964 album "The Animals" released on Columbia/MGM. Traditional arrangement from Alan Price and produced by Mickie Most.Personel:Eric Burdon - vocalsHilton Valentine - electric guitarChas Chandler - bass guitarAlan Price - vox continental organJohn Steel - drums and percussionCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:The B-52's “Rock Lobster”The B-52's “Love Shack”They Might Be GiantsFamily GuyREMWidespread PanicPhishTrey AnastasioVelvet RevolverBob Dylan “Masters of War”The PixiesThe Strokes “Is This It”Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers “American Girl”The Strokes “Last Night”Sturgill SimpsonWoody GuthrieQueens of the Stone AgeSuicide GirlsThe KillsRaising ArizonaForrest GumpThe Ronettes “Be My Baby”Jimi Hendrix “All Along the Watchtower”GreensleevesLedbellyDave Van RonkThe Ed Sullivan ShowNirvana “Unplugged”Kurt CobainChuck BerryThe Allman Brothers “Whipping Post”Phantom of the OperaThe Doors Herman's HermitsDonovanThe Jeff Beck GroupYoko OnoJohn LennonThe BeatlesKornRed Hot Chili PeppersCasinoRobert de NiroJoe PesciSteve Winwood  “Back in the High Life”Bob Dylan “Desire”Bob Dylan “One More Cup of Coffee”Joan BaezHowlin' WolfMuddy WatersLynyrd Skynyrd “Free Bird”The Rolling StonesScreamin' Jay Hawkins “I Put A Spell On You”The Eagles “Hotel California”Frijid PinkDeep PurpleThe White StripesJoe AromDolly Parton “9 to 5”Jerry GarciaTony RiceDavid GrismanJeremy RennerMuseJohnny DeppNina SimoneBon JoviFive Finger Death PunchWestworldRamin DjawadiKanye West “Runaway”Deadwood

The show begins as it always does. Scott got a job and he doesn't know how to feel about it. Luke would kill for a job he could skate at. Mike recalls a relative easy job he could skate by at for awhile. Of course rehab and failing others are involved. Cold call sales jobs, they're the worst, right?! Telemarketing comes up and supposedly one dude made 400 calls per hour or per day. It's unclear but neither are absurd. Luke witnessed embezzlement at a young age when he worked at Staples and then suddenly Mike's girlfriend pops in! How do you determine if a person looks like someone famous? The fellas dissect doppelgangers versus similar looking people. Scott has a serious issue with January Jones and her thousand yard stare. Luke says his favorite move is Oh Lucky Man, but Mike thought it was Two-Lane Blacktop. Of course Scott starts talking about Warren Oates. Luke loves Alan Price. There are some poor sound clips mixed in from the movie in the meantime. It turns out Trump and Fred Durst are very similar. Sam Harris nailed it perfectly a couple years ago about why Trump is so appealing to the every day person. CKY and Disengage The Simulator come up after Break Stuff starts a musical discussion. We have one email from Mr. Pink this week. He brings up the Mar-A-Lago raid which we hadn't thought of at all until the email. Olivia Newton-John died and Scott has to put the death of celebrities in context once more. Nobody cares says John Scott. We decided to close the show with Two Gunslingers by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. If any of this nonsense inspires you for better or for worse, email the show at isitsafepod@gmail.com

R&SRNR_164 – “THE COMPLETE HIT SINGLES HISTORY OF THE ANIMALS” This episode salutes one of the great British invasion bands of the 1960s that we feel deserves more attention than it's gotten, probably because their hits were only on the rock charts in the U.S. and the U.K. from 1964 to 1969. These performers actually comprised two different groups – a founding lineup from 1962 to 1966. And then a brand-new act fronted by their original lead singer. We know you know that we're talking about the Animals and then Eric Burdon & The Animals.  We'll track every one of their hit singles starting with their iconic “House of the Rising Sun,” along with any original versions of those songs by other artists who inspired them. Plus, their original version of a song that later became a trademark tune for the Three Dog Night. We'll also cover the U.S. and U.K. hit singles by two Animals alumni – Eric Burdon and Alan Price.

Faces [00:33] "Miss Judy's Farm" A Nod Is as Good as a Wink... to a Blind Horse Warner Bros. Records BS 2574 1971 The lads at peak form, produced by none other than Glyn Johns. Soft Cell [04:09] "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Sire SRK 3647 1981 Excellent low-key groove from these Leeds lads. There's fun cover of this by Japanese duo Salon Music and Russell Mael of Sparks (https://youtu.be/s6M69rLUMfE). Aidan Baker & Karen Williams [09:37] "Meeting in the Dark" Nonland Gizeh Records GZH74 2017 Guitarscapes by Aidan Baker and percussion by Karen Willems. Atari Teenage Riot [15:03] "Atari Teenage Riot" Not Your Business EP 1996 Grand Royal GR039/Digital Hardcore Recordings DHR US 12.1 Yup, digital hardcore was a thing. The Partridge Family presentado a Shirly Jones y David Cassidy [20:26] "Nadie Desea Ser Amada (Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted)" Al Dia (Up to Date) Bell Records 2308 004 1971 Jeez leweez, never trust a kid to refile records correctly. Why is there a copy of The Partridge Family's Up to Date in the sleeve for The Partridge Family Notebook? And why is the label in Spanish but none of the songs are in Spanish. Oh well. Herb Ellis [23:07] "Big Red's Boogie Woogie" Nothing but the Blues Verve Records MG V-8252 1957 Hot! Featuring Stan Levey on drums, Ray Brown on bass, Stan Getz on tenor sax, and Roy Eldridge on trumpet. Big Star [28:46] "When My Baby's Beside Me" No. 1 Record Big Beat Records WIK 53 1986 (original release: Ardent Records DS-2083 1972) Every day someone is born who has never heard Big Star. If you are one of those people, enjoy! The Number Ones [32:09] "Sharon Shouldn't" The Numbers Static Shock Records SSR024 2014 Hot mid-teens power pop punk from Dublin. Iron Maiden [35:56] "The Prisoner" The Number of the Beast Harvest ST-12202 1982 Bruce Dickinson's debut outing with Maiden. This album loomed large in my adolescence. Evidently Mr. Dickinson is touring with a spoken word show? (https://youtu.be/R9jfm-9L0q4) TacocaT [41:59] "Psychedlic Quinceañera" NVM Hardly Art HAR-079 2014 So many awesome songs on this album that it's hard to pick just one, but really... This Is the One! From the lyrics to the trumpets, what's not to love? Romeo Void [44:10] "Never Say Never" Never Say Never Columbia/415 Records 5C 38178 1981 Every day someone is born who has never heard "Never Say Never". If one of those people is you, enjoy! Thank goodness for the early days of MTV otherwise I would have had no idea this sound existed. Alan Price [50:16] "O Lucky Man!" O Lucky Man! Original Sountrack Warner Bros. Records BS 2710 1973 I've been obsessed with this Alan Price soundtrack since I first heard it in this over-long shaggy dog of a film by Lindsay Anderson. L.A. Witch [54:44] "Heart of Darkness" Octubre Suicide Squeeze SSQ166 2019 Mellow down spooky. Bobbie Gentry [57:12] "Mississippi Delta" Ode to Billie Joe Captiol Records ST-2830 1967 One of the hottest track one side ones you could ask for. Mulatu Astatke [01:00:22] "Munaye" Mulatu of Ethiopia Worthy Records W-1020 1972 (2003 reissue) Putting the funk in Ethiopian jazz. The Cramps [01:03:54] "I Can't Hardly Stand It" ...Off the Bone Illegal Records ILPIC 012 1985 The Cramps give this Charlie Feathers number (https://youtu.be/8h_O6U1xMlc) a fine take. There's some great local television footage of Alex Chilton helping The Cramps record at Sun Studios if you shake the internet. Music behind the DJ: "Goldfinger" by Mantovani

"CAPTAIN BILLY’S MAGIC 8 BALL" - " MY POLITICAL EDUCATION" - FEATURING THE ALBUM "O LUCKY MAN" By ALAN PRICE IN HIGH DEFINITION WITH NARRATIVE - EPISODE # 44 - THE CAPTAIN DELIGHTS WITH INSIGHTS OF HIS 8 TRACK TREASURES!

Stef and Gilda recap Season 2, Episode 20 of Saturday Night Live. Hosted by Eric Idle, with musical performances by Alan Price & Neil InnesHey there! We're Gilda and Stef - your High Priestesses, aka your Hosts. We're two stoner babes who love smoking up and talking about Saturday Night Live. Join us, as we dive deep into the Saturday Night Live Vault, episode by episode - while also bringing you weekly recaps of the newest shows!Twitter - https://twitter.com/SatNiteHighPodGmail - satnighthighpod@gmail.comFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/SaturdayNightHighPodcastwww.satnighthighpod.com

GROOVY TIMES ARTIST: PAUL PETERSEN LABEL: WOOWI DIGITAL MUSIC (PTY) LTD COMPOSER: ALAN PRICE PUBLISHER: PT MUSIC     DURATION: 03:32 ABOUT: Guitar maestro, Paul Petersen - of Spirits Rejoice fame - released his debut solo single, "Groovy Times" -  composed by Alan Price of the Animals. On first release it became a No. 1 smash hit in Cape Town. Now, freshly remastered - here it comes, again... RELEASE DATE: Jul-21             ATTACHED: MP3

"Nice to be here hope you agreeLying in the sunLovely weather, must climb a treeThe show has just begunAll the leaves start swayingTo the breeze that's playingOn a thousand violinsAnd the bees are hummingTo a frog sat strummingOn a guitar with only one string"Yes, it's certainly "Nice To Be Here", it's my 3rd Anniversary of Sunday Afternoons on The Independent 88.5. We'll celebrate with musical gifts from The Blue Dolphins,10CC, Van Morrison, REM, The Byrds, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Warren Zevon, Pure Prairie League, Batdorf & Rodney, Blodwyn Pig, 4 Non Blondes, Alan Price, Hall & Oates, Nilsson, Foreigner, Flying Burrito Brothers, Steve Stills, The Faces, Poco, Crosby Stills & Nash, Simon & Garfunkel, Humble Pie, Counting Crows and The Moody Blues.

Percussion Discussion - Episode 59 - Darby ToddDarby Todd is without doubt one of the most talented drummers in the UK Today, he has a remarkable talent for playing drums and applying it to any style!Join Darby and myself as we chat about his amazing career so far from his early days taking lessons with legendary uk drum teacher/educator Colin Woolway and the world renowned Thomas Lang.Darby has played for some incredible bands and musicians including Justin Hawkins, The Darkness, his regular gig with Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre, Alan Price, Gary Moore and many more.we also chat about his recent solo album that features contributions from some of the finest musicians on the planet including Don Airey, Kee Marcello, Adam Wakeman, Laurence Cottle, Marco Minnemann and Andy Newmark to name but a few!We had to talk about Darby's recent gig with Canadian mega star singer/guitarist Devin Townsend, headling the Bloodstock Festival with very little rehearsal time! Since the interview Darby has gone on to recorded the drum parts for Devin's new album, so i think we can safely assume that he was impressed with Darby's incredible talent! it was a total pleasure chatting to Darby, i thank him very much for finding the time in his ridiculously busy schedule to do this!Please leave a review if you are enjoying these interviews, it really helps! thank you

Sunday, September 12, 2021 - The Power of Prayer - Bro. Alan Price

Word of the year...."INCREDIBLE"....everyone seems to use this word on every TV programme every five minutes....it's incredible........ .......... ABBA are reforming to do a concert with themselves computerised.....they have just brought out a single which is absolutely brilliant....the production is a masterpiece and at last some decent music to listen too....HOWEVER.... some music critic called Neil McCormick who "takes no prisoners" has given it a 2 star rating and called it a flop......this obviously being the only way he can get himself noticed and keep his job at the Daily Telegraph...what a berk....I doubt if he could play a tambourine ....and this is the problem....when the record sells millions which it will I hope he is informed as to where he can stick his opinion. I always tell young up and coming hopefuls that to get on in showbiz you have to really go for it and if I can do it anyone can...an example was in 1977 when I wrote a song which I thought could do O.K. on the Opportunity Knocks Song Contest....the problem was you had to record a demo and send it off with top line manuscript and chords which was a problem as I couldn't read or write music.......so giving up is never an option.....it's all about BELIEF. There was an interesting article on Radio 2 with Jeremy Vine where restaurants were complaining that people who put bad reviews about them on line was affecting their business as they were unable to respond........which would put other morons off trying to get in on the act. This week's bad song which I have never recovered from....."Rosetta" by Alan Price and Georgie Fame with the constant repeating of the hook "Rosetta are you better are you well well well"......definitely puts it in my personal musical dustbin....I saw them at a club in Liverpool back in the day....they were worse than this record....again just my opinion

Sunday, September 5, 2021 - The Wilderness Journey - Bro. Alan Price

Russell Gilbrook is the latest drummer for the British rock band, Uriah Heep.Over the last few years Gilbrook has been establishing himself on the UK clinic tour scene. He has supported artists such as Greg Bissonette and completed a tour with Liberty DeVitto. He has worked/toured with Chris Barber and his band and also Alan Price, on whose album, Liberty, Gilbrook featured. He also replaced Cozy Powell in Bedlam (where he played with the brothers Dave and Denny Ball, plus singer Frank Aiello). Gilbrook has also played with Pete Bardens and featured on one of his albums.Gilbrook has also worked with Tony Iommi, Lonnie Donegan, John Farnham, Van Morrison and Tobias Sammet.Gilbrook teaches on the musician's channel on Sky Television and holds a position at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music and has published several teaching guides. He has demonstrated specialist drum clinics across Europe. He claims, though, that a rimshot cannot be used on a tom drum, just snares only. For the last few years he has also drummed with the Essex based covers band, Exposé, with Dave Moore (vocals), Pete Finch (keyboards), Alan Montague (Bass) and Ben Newton (guitar).Gilbrook has co-designed, with Marrell Drums, the bass drum beaters that he plays. He uses British Drum Company drums, Code drumheads, Baskey Drum Mats and Rug Lugs, Paiste cymbals and Pellwood drumsticks.In 2012, it was announced that Gilbrook would be the drummer in the 2013 album of the metal opera project Avantasia, called The Mystery of Time.This has been edited from an episode from our weekly show that streams LIVE @ 9pm Every Tuesday on Facebook LIVE, TWITCH and YOUTUBE.https://www.thosedamncrows.com/crowcastvideo See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sunday, August 15, 2021 - Our Confidence In Him - Bro. Alan Price

Sunday, June 21, 2021 - Christ Means More - Bro. Alan Price

Luke, Matt, Scott and Mike go over the latest trials from their softball team. Matt reminds everybody that I-75 traffic going up north and returning is always a nightmare in the summer months. Matt is the resident Mad Max expert here and Luke is not. Blade Runner 2049 is also a questionable film according to Luke. Tina Turner turns everybody on and we find out she lives in Sweden! Then a big sector of the show is dedicated to lambasting the University of Michigan and their handling of the horrendous claims made against former scumbag Dr. Anderson. Is Bo Schembechler culpable? Why are so many institutions put before the well-being of others? Then, the show goes off the rails in the best way possible. Listener Eric created a treasure trove of audio drops from all of our previous episodes. The laughs ensue from there and you can get a great breakdown on chicken sandwiches from Luke. Listener Danny emailed the show with two concepts for each of the fellas to answer: what was the best Detroit sporting event you've ever been to and what experience you went through that was originally very painful, but eventually you came to see as a useful experience? There is music in this show too. Luke demanded Poor People by Alan Price of The Animals. Mike had to be annoying with Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake and Palmer first. Give us your thoughts on any of this nonsense by emailing us at isitsafepod@gmail.com

In this episode we welcome back club president Alan Price in a special brief recording to follow up on our recent fundraising efforts. Did you buy a brick? Did you enter the Easter raffle? How much did we raise and what has this enabled the club to do? You can still buy a brick, there is still much to invest in including Paul Eynon's favorite topic at the moment, pitch lighting. Take a look here: https://harlowrugby.club/your-club/recovery-fund/

This week we start off with one for the kiddos (and all you parents out there). Author of the children's book "Build With Bricks" - Ray Alan Price - talks writing a "Pigquel" to the classic "Three Little Pigs" tale. Ray was an awesome guest, not only did he have great insights into the children's lit creative process but he's also a huge fan of J. Cole so we riffed on his lyricism for a moment or two--which is a first on this podcast if I'm not mistaken. For more of Ray Alana Price, visit his Amazon author page and/or visit his social media feed for the latest to come from this author. INSTAGRAM - @buildwithbricks.rp, & TWITTER - @raymondaprice For more of A.R. Mirabal, visit "www.Neotino.net". There you'll find galleries of all our art, a store for current and soon-to-be-released merch and books, as well as some free short stories and a contact page for our services. Social Media Links: ALL LINKS - linktr.ee/AR_Mirabal INSTAGRAM - @allegoryoftheend TWITTER - @OfficialNeotino REDDIT - u/Official_Neotino PATREON - patreon.com/neotino

"THE ANIMALS OFFICIAL HOME PAGE":http://www.theanimalswebsite.com/

Joining Steve for the 52nd Fantastival Podcast is the brilliant Darby Todd (currently touring with Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre, previous drum credits include The Darkness, Alan Price, Gary Moore, Kee Marcello (Europe), Joe Lynn Turner (Rainbow) Gary Moore, Carl Verheyen, Robert Plant, Disney's The Lion King, Robben Ford, Paul Gilbert and many others), aswell as his solo album released earlier this year. We had a brilliant chat about all things music, his music experiences, tastes and as an artist and fan plus lots more as Darby also collated his Fantasy Festival which is absolutely brilliant. After this episode go and check out Darby's website where you can learn more about him and check out some snippets from his album: https://www.darbytodd.com And after you've listened to Darby's Fantastival Podcast go deeper and check out our short Spotify Playlist featuring tracks put forward by him featuring all the acts in his Fantasy Festival: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Vh0Mux3phtDGCcuehmx34?si=wpFnlYTXRE60auy5FRJcVw If you've enjoyed the Fantastival Podcast please give us a follow on Twitter @FantastivalP and remember to check for our new episodes which are released every Sunday at 9am. Spread the word... and the word is Fantastival! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-fantastival-podcast/message

دا، آلن پرایس افسر سیاسی امریکا در ایران (۱۹۶۸-۱۹۷۱)، مامور عملیات سازمان سیا (۱۹۷۱-۱۹۷۴) مصاحبه کننده: ویلیام بر سانفرانسیسکو ژوئیه ۱۹۸۸

The WHEEL humbly welcomes Connor Ratliff (The George Lucas Talk Show, Orange is the New Black, Mrs. Maisel, Search Party, Kimmy Schmidt). Connor talks about the intricacies of Lucas fans, getting his stuff out of UCB during quarantine, and the weird appeal of Randy to the comedian community. TICKLE ME? TICKLE ME???? Dan tends to hide under a veil of cynicism when looking at the Randylogue, but Connor breaks him out of his shell and pleads his case that "Tickle Me" is a sincere, sweet love song. Will Dan surrender to a moment of vulnerability? Or will this be just like with The Girls in My Life a few weeks ago? Then the WHEEL gives us some Faust, and we finish with an Alan Price cover. The radio plays nothing but news, but Connor gives us a very entertaining podcast. Thanks Connor!

By Davy Crockett Episode 75 introduced the Fort Meade 100 held in Maryland from 1978-1989. Lost in the Fort Meade history of the late 1970s was the fact that it also attracted Centurion racewalkers who attempted to walk 100 miles in less than 24-hours. It was reported, “Some participants were walkers engaged in an odd-looking sport of walking heel-to-toe as fast as possible. It’s a small sport, there’s a lot of camaraderie in it, with only about 600 people participating nationwide.” Alan Price, an African American racewalker, was a fixture at Fort Meade 100 each year. He was an incredible athlete who became perhaps the greatest American ultra-distance racewalker ever. Price was truly an ultrarunning legend. Also covered in this episode is a division of the ultrarunning sport that most Americans have never heard about before. It is The Long Distance Walkers Association (LDWA) in England that started holding 100-mile walking events during the 1970s that attracted the general public and some 100-mile runners. The events set the stage for many of the modern 100-mile trail events. Please help support this podcast. I can offer a 25% discount on Ultrarunning Magazine subscriptions and renewals. Some proceeds help fund this website. Visit https://ultrarunninghistory.com/mag  Subscribe or renew today with this link. Alan Price – 100-mile walker Alan Eugene Price (1947-2015) was an African America walker from Washington D.C. who sold herbs and health products. He took up the ultra-walking sport in 1974, and explained, “I had been running the 880-yard run for a club called the Travelers. The trouble was that I never seemed to finish better than last. There was this one meet where I finished my usual last. Then I heard the announcer make the first call for a two-mile race-walk. I looked around and saw that only one person had responded. Since there were three trophies being given out for the event, I decided to give it a try. I accidently took third place.”  At that time, marathon fields consisted of hundreds of runners, while racewalking fields included only about a dozen walkers. This helped him decide to stick with racewalking because of the better chance to win a trophy. It took Price some time to get the walking technique down. He said, "There can be a thin line between walking and running. It all depends on how the judges view it. When I first started out, I was guilty of things like not having both feet on the ground at all times. That made me more careful than anything else. It's no fun to go out for five or six miles and then have someone disqualify you." Bennicker Junior High School As a black American, Price was a pioneer in the sport. He became a member of the Potomac Valley Seniors track club and said he felt funny practicing his walking in the daylight in Washington D.C., so he would train in the darkness of night at the track at Bennicker Junior High School.  He said, “People who don’t do this, think it’s easy. That’s because they haven’t tried it yet.” Just as today, the ultra-walking sport back in the late 1970s wasn’t well understood by the public.  Price would be the object of taunts and laughter. "People saw the switching of the behind and arms flailing, and they seemed to get a big kick out of it. But after seeing for a while, they begin to realize that there must be some difficulty in it. People who saw me train in Malcolm X Park over the years respected what I was doing." Larry O'Neil Price first walked for personal satisfaction. He said, “It was something that I felt natural doing.” Then in 1976, he went to a meet at Niagara Falls, New York, where the top racewalkers in America were trying out for the Olympics. The top three finishers qualified, and he was only one minute behind. He said, “I was surprised, and it was at that point that I knew I could hang with the big boys.” Episode 63 introduced “Centurions,” a brotherhood of walkers who had reached 100 miles ...

Ahead of the launch of the "Rams Wall", take 20mins to listen to Club President Alan Price talk about the work done so far and the action taken. What we can do next to invest in the future of our club. How could you buy a brick? How could you raise some funds for the club, listen in to find out more.

All rights remain with Alan Price and the original creators of 'The Plague Dogs'.

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Memphis" by Johnny Rivers. 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/ ----more---- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands' surname as Land. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks  by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn't actually their complete recordings -- for that you'd also need to buy the Decca recordings -- but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan's first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we're going to look at a song that, more than any other song we've looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We're going to look at "House of the Rising Sun", and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you're not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it's a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there's a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities -- Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it's another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain's culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you're in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on "Louie, Louie" -- a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we're talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn't be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon's tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that's often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is "Roll 'Em Pete", the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Roll 'em Pete"] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn't like Price either as a person or for his taste in music -- both Burdon and Steel regarded Price's tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn't that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel's tastes intersected -- musicians they've cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn't turn up to a gig -- he'd been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats -- not the same band who backed Marty Wilde -- and had even recorded an album with them, though I've been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities -- Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, "Pretty Thing"] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn't* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner's band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn't make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Wade in the Water"] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he'd heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they'd been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones' old venues. A trade was agreed -- the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo's normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds'. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek's footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, "Whole Lotta Woman"] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he'd had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, "Johnny B Goode"] He'd returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group's blues purism and Most's pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded "Don't Tear My Clothes": [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, "Don't Tear My Clothes"] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as "Mama Let Me Lay It On You" in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, "Mama Let Me Lay it On You"] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, "Baby, Let Me Lay It On You"] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as "Baby Let Me Follow You Down": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He'd heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand" and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land's version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands' track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns' other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan's version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it's quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals' version, and that they'd just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands' version. They cut out Lands' intro, and restored a lot of Dylan's lyric, but musically it's Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different -- compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending -- Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let me Hold Your Hand"] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] So whatever Valentine's later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it's still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals' second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan's first album. "House of the Rising Sun" has been argued by some, though I think it's a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard"] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it's that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name "Rising Sun Blues", by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, "Rising Sun Blues"] The song has been described as about several things -- about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling -- depending on the precise version. It's often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women's Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk's version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, "Rising Sun Blues"] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner's in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, "House of the Rising Sun"] Van Ronk took Wood's version of Turner's version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is "a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers". It's actually something you'd get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that's used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward -- everything from "Sunny Afternoon" by the Kinks to "Go Now" by the Moody Blues to "Forever" by the Beach Boys -- but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, "House of the Rising Sun"] "House of the Rising Sun" soon became the highlight of van Ronk's live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk's arrangement, but he wasn't as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk's bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It's simpler, but it's all from van Ronk's arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk's version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun"] As van Ronk later told the story (though I'm going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): "One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea." van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan's performance "it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby." van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to "play that Dylan song". The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out -- and it instantly became the highlight of their act.  The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan's rearrangement of van Ronk's rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord -- the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song "Talking 'Bout You", to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o'clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night's show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not "Talking 'Bout You", should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn't ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn't last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn't play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger -- which when you're recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group's manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had "explained" to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun (US edit)"] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals' version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan's new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of "House of the Rising Sun" from the sessions from Dylan's first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)"] That wasn't released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we'll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he'd stolen it from the Animals. The Animals' next single, "I'm Crying", was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards -- they just didn't like each other by this point. The record after that, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] The Animals' version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone's original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don't think it does. It's a great record, and it's deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone's version, it's lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals' recording, which they didn't understand given that she hadn't written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel's version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren't "so bad for a bunch of white boys", but that doesn't sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn't... "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke's "Bring it on Home to Me", which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn't in the flat, and Chandler wouldn't see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price's first royalty cheque for arranging "House of the Rising Sun" had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn't going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of "I Put A Spell On You", in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, "I Put A Spell On You"] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals' first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they'd decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann's piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann's was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever -- though one suspects that's partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband's single -- but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing "Oh girl, now you're young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you'll just grow old before your time" to "Now my girl, you're so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you'll be dead before your time is due", and making subtler changes like changing "if it's the last thing that we do" to "if it's the last thing we ever do", improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept -- and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge -- Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley's low voice and Bobby Hatfield's high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song's momentum -- it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] The Animals' version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It's one of the few times I've wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] From a creators' rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn't have messed with her song. But from a listener's point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" was followed by another lesser but listenable single, "It's My Life", which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company -- the group were getting sick of Most's attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan's sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, "Inside -- Looking Out", a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn't even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, "All Night Long"] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off -- there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We'll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you'll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as "The Animals and Friends", with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I've seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show -- though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, "That's not Eric Clapton!", before starting to sing along happily... And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon's Animals after quitting Steel's, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. 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/ —-more—- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands’ surname as Land. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks  by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn’t actually their complete recordings — for that you’d also need to buy the Decca recordings — but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan’s first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we’re going to look at a song that, more than any other song we’ve looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We’re going to look at “House of the Rising Sun”, and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you’re not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it’s a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there’s a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it’s another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain’s culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you’re in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on “Louie, Louie” — a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we’re talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn’t be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon’s tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that’s often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is “Roll ‘Em Pete”, the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Roll ’em Pete”] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn’t like Price either as a person or for his taste in music — both Burdon and Steel regarded Price’s tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn’t that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel’s tastes intersected — musicians they’ve cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn’t turn up to a gig — he’d been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats — not the same band who backed Marty Wilde — and had even recorded an album with them, though I’ve been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities — Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, “Pretty Thing”] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn’t* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner’s band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn’t make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, “Wade in the Water”] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he’d heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they’d been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones’ old venues. A trade was agreed — the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo’s normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds’. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek’s footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, “Whole Lotta Woman”] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he’d had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, “Johnny B Goode”] He’d returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group’s blues purism and Most’s pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded “Don’t Tear My Clothes”: [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, “Don’t Tear My Clothes”] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as “Mama Let Me Lay It On You” in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, “Mama Let Me Lay it On You”] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Baby, Let Me Lay It On You”] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He’d heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand” and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land’s version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands’ track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns’ other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan’s version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it’s quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals’ version, and that they’d just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands’ version. They cut out Lands’ intro, and restored a lot of Dylan’s lyric, but musically it’s Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different — compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending — Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let me Hold Your Hand”] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] So whatever Valentine’s later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it’s still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals’ second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan’s first album. “House of the Rising Sun” has been argued by some, though I think it’s a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it’s that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name “Rising Sun Blues”, by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, “Rising Sun Blues”] The song has been described as about several things — about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling — depending on the precise version. It’s often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women’s Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk’s version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, “Rising Sun Blues”] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner’s in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, “House of the Rising Sun”] Van Ronk took Wood’s version of Turner’s version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is “a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers”. It’s actually something you’d get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that’s used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward — everything from “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks to “Go Now” by the Moody Blues to “Forever” by the Beach Boys — but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, “House of the Rising Sun”] “House of the Rising Sun” soon became the highlight of van Ronk’s live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk’s arrangement, but he wasn’t as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk’s bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It’s simpler, but it’s all from van Ronk’s arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk’s version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun”] As van Ronk later told the story (though I’m going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): “One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea.” van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan’s performance “it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby.” van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to “play that Dylan song”. The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out — and it instantly became the highlight of their act.  The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan’s rearrangement of van Ronk’s rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord — the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song “Talking ‘Bout You”, to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o’clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night’s show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not “Talking ‘Bout You”, should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn’t ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn’t last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn’t play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger — which when you’re recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group’s manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had “explained” to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun (US edit)”] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals’ version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan’s new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of “House of the Rising Sun” from the sessions from Dylan’s first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)”] That wasn’t released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we’ll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he’d stolen it from the Animals. The Animals’ next single, “I’m Crying”, was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards — they just didn’t like each other by this point. The record after that, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] The Animals’ version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone’s original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don’t think it does. It’s a great record, and it’s deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone’s version, it’s lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals’ recording, which they didn’t understand given that she hadn’t written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel’s version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren’t “so bad for a bunch of white boys”, but that doesn’t sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn’t… “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring it on Home to Me”, which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn’t in the flat, and Chandler wouldn’t see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price’s first royalty cheque for arranging “House of the Rising Sun” had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn’t going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of “I Put A Spell On You”, in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put A Spell On You”] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals’ first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they’d decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann’s piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann’s was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever — though one suspects that’s partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband’s single — but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing “Oh girl, now you’re young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you’ll just grow old before your time” to “Now my girl, you’re so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you’ll be dead before your time is due”, and making subtler changes like changing “if it’s the last thing that we do” to “if it’s the last thing we ever do”, improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept — and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge — Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley’s low voice and Bobby Hatfield’s high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song’s momentum — it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] The Animals’ version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It’s one of the few times I’ve wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] From a creators’ rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn’t have messed with her song. But from a listener’s point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” was followed by another lesser but listenable single, “It’s My Life”, which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company — the group were getting sick of Most’s attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan’s sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, “Inside — Looking Out”, a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn’t even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, “All Night Long”] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off — there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We’ll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you’ll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as “The Animals and Friends”, with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I’ve seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show — though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, “That’s not Eric Clapton!”, before starting to sing along happily… And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon’s Animals after quitting Steel’s, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. 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/ (more…)

Sunday, February 7, 2021 - A Prisoner of Fear - Bro. Alan Price

This week we talk to Dr Alan Price about some of his research around FASD and trauma, the prevalence of FASD in the UK and his PHD on FASD and Trauma. With Clare Devanney Glynn and Jessica Rutherford.

Dans un ancien hôpital, qui fait penser à la Grande-Bretagne dans son aspect le plus désorganisé, le personnel menace de se mettre en grève. Des manifestants entourent l'hôpital, un reporter fouineur de la BBC poursuit un professeur anxieux, pendant qu'une visite royale dégénère en une pagaille monstre...Et tout ceci avec la musique d'Alan Price.Avec : Leonard Rossiter, Brian Pettifer, John Moffatt, Fulton MacKay, Vivian Pickles, Barbara Hicks, Graham Crowden, Jill Bennett, Malcolm McDowellBonus DVD :Deux courts métrages de Lindsay Anderson : O'Dreamland (1953) et Everyday Except Christmas (1957).Deux films phares du FREE CINEMA, mouvement fondateur du cinéma anglais d'après-guerre.Versions : Originale, Française - Sous-titres : FrançaisStéréo - Format 16/9

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es, 00,00h). Hilton Valentine, que fundó The Animals a principios de los años 60 en compañía de Eric Burdon, Chas Chandler, Alan Price y John Steel, fue el autor de ese arpegio famoso en ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Este finde nefasto para la música también se ha llevado a SOPHIE, una de las productoras fundamentales del siglo XXI. Pasó de nuevo con Glastonbury y ha vuelto a pasar con Coachella. El festival californiano, que tenía que acontecer en Indio Valley en dos fines de semana de abril de este 2021, se ha cancelado tal y como sucedió hace un año a causa de la pandemia. El alabado último trabajo de The Killers, Imploding The Mirage, ha recibido un tratamiento Deluxe. La colección Deluxe contiene versiones desnudas o live de temas tan queridos como “Blowback” y “Caution,” además de la nueva canción, “C’est La Vie”. Brighton 64 publican nuevo single, “Debo marchar”,aparece en la cara B, quedó fuera del álbum anterior por falta de espacio y lo han querido recuperar en esta ocasión. Maika Makovski ha regresado , tras cinco años de ausencia, con el estreno de un nuevo single titulado Reaching out to you, de ritmo frenético. Clap your hands say yeah estrenan, arropados por cuerdas, "cyhsy, 2005", otro adelanto de New fragility, su nuevo disco, Khruangbin estrenan vídeo para la relajante "dearest alfred", de su último disco Mordechai, y estrenan masajeante remezcla que Knwledge ha hecho para el mismo tema. The Feels firmaron una de las mejores canciones de 2020, "She's probably not thinkin' of me". Christian Migliorese es un orfebre del Power Pop, de la melodía, de la canción perfecta y este single es una prueba de ello. No teníamos noticias de Octubre Banda Octubre desde que en 2015 publicaran el sensacional “Mouseland”, Pero, por fin, podemos escuchar un adelanto de su nuevo EP, que provocará la admiración de los seguidores de Teenage Fanclub y el sonido Rickembacker. Love of Lesbian publicarán el próximo 16 de abril ‘V.E.H.N.’, un nuevo disco que responde también al nombre de ‘Viaje épico hacia la nada’. El tercer sencillo que se acaba de dar a conocer resulta el más interesante. ‘El mundo’ es además uno de los virales del momento en Youtube España. En " MARGARITA QUEBRADA (live)" están incluidos los tres temas que el trío valenciano interpretaron en directo en el concierto emitido en el Festival internacional virtual Luna Negra el pasado 19 de diciembre de 2020, junto a "Mis ojos", una nueva canción grabada en estudio. Celeste lanza su álbum de debut ‘NOT YOUR MUSE’. El lanzamiento de su primer álbum viene a completar un año relevante para una artista de éxito en 2020, ganadora del BBC Sound y del premio Rising Star en los BRITS. La banda británica Clean Bandit presenta su nuevo single 'Higher' junto al rapero Iann dior. Sidecars publican “Galaxia”, una canción sobre el miedo y el instinto de supervivencia con unos versos que calan rápido («Júrame que no hay ciencia cierta / Solo ciencia ficción»), que se encuentra dentro de su último álbum “Ruido de Fondo”. Santiago Campillo y Paula Molina Garcia-Mora Paula Molina nos presentan su proyecto SONORA, de auténtico rock sureño, del que estrenamos un par de canciones.

12-23-20Dear Home Base Nation,This second season of our show has come to an end, and so has 2020. Even though the country and world look ahead to a continued difficult situation in 2021, there is always something hopeful about a new year, along with the natural reflection that we all can use now.Personally, I’ve learned a lot from our guests both military and civilian, especially in that with challenge, comes opportunity to build back and overcome. Resilience is somewhere in all of us and learning to adapt to change and adversity might happen over months to years, or as quickly as days to weeks. Thanks to the HBN team - Brendan McCaffrey, Charlotte Luckey, Steve Monaco, Karianne Kraus, Moe Roderick, Dan Berg, Natalie Bonelli, and DeeDee Kearney, who join weekly with one goal of bringing new episodes that we are proud of, and hope you continue to enjoy. Season 2 included conversations and stories with amazing people who in their own unique way, continue to serve those who’ve served.HBN military guests: Army Veteran and Director of the JFK Library in Boston, Alan Price taught us about JFK’s obstacles and support of the Green Berets and Peace Corps. Green Beret Kevin Flike told his own story of resiliency post trauma, while inspiring us to push forward. Airforce Veteran Bonnie Carroll moved us with her stories and new ways to look at life after loss. Army Colonel David King told us about operating in the trauma trenches, at home in his own city, during the Boston Marathon Bombing. Lieutenant General Mike Linnington inspired us to carry our brothers and sisters on our backs both in and out of a pandemic. Navy Veteran Abby Malchow and Marine Veteran Beau Higgins educated us about the transition to work from battlefield to Amazon Warrior. British Navy Veteran and Chef Robert Irvine taught us about balance of selfcare in and out of the kitchen. Marine Veteran Alisa Johnson, Founder of Dogs on Deployment inspired us to follow our passions at all times.HBN civilian guests: Home Base COO Michael Allard, Drs. Jeannette Ives Erickson and Giles Boland, along with Brigadier General Jack Hammond told the story of the COVD-19 field hospital, Boston Hope that treated more than 700 people during the Spring surge. Dr. Emily Silverman, writer and hospitalist at UCSF gave perspectives on all of our narratives, especially on the frontlines of a COVID unit. Ken Fisher taught us about how a family business built much more than buildings for thousands of military families both in US and abroad. Jake Tapper took us back to The Outpost in Afghanistan to tell the story of not only a battle but about the lives of 9 men who we lost. ICU Nurse Ericka Coutts taught us about a marathon of a pandemic in and of itself. And David “Big Papi” Ortiz showed us how he learned to run the bases again after fighting his own trauma.To close out 2020, you'll hear Home Base’s Executive Director, Brigadier General Jack Hammond talk about this unprecedented year, while looking ahead at hope, collaboration, and taking care of our own body-mind-and-soul, so that we can best take care of each other. The Home Base team has done the pivot, and will continue to deliver the specialized care for those with TBI and PTS, build the Special Operations programming led by Drs. Ross Zafonte and Alexis Iaccarino / Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, and promote resilience and wellness for not only our veterans, but their military families who all serve. Thank you all for tuning in, for sharing part of your day with us and for all your support of our veterans and military families. I look forward to seeing you back in 2021 for a new year and new season of HBN, with many more inspirational conversations coming your way.Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year,RonTo learn more and connect with us at Home Base:www.homebase.org/homebasenationTwitter,Facebook,Instagram,LinkedInHome Base Nation Team: Steve Monaco, Marine Veteran Brendan McCaffrey, Maureen Roderick, Charlotte Luckey, Karianne Kraus, Dan Berg, DeeDee Kearney, Natalie BonelliProducer and Host: Dr. Ron HirschbergMusic: Darden Smith Home Base Media Lab Chairman: Peter SmythHome Base Nation is the official podcast of Home Base Program for Veterans and Military Families, a partnership of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Red Sox Foundation.The views expressed by guests to the Home Base Nation podcast are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by guests are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Home Base, the Red Sox Foundation or any of its officials.

Laurence Myers - talking David Bowie, music & his new book Hunky Dory with David Eastaugh  Laurence Myers is a Theatre and Film Producer. He was formerly a Music Executive, owning and running record and artist management companies. First coming to prominence as a Financial Advisor/ Accountant to The Rolling Stones and other leading artists in the 1960s, Laurence entered the music business full-time in 1970, signing then unproven David Bowie to his record label ‘Gem’. In an impressive career in the music world spanning decades, Laurence’s companies represented artists including The Animals, Herman’s Hermits, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Donovan, Lionel Bart, Heatwave, The New Seekers, Alan Price, The Tremeloes, The Sweet, Donna Summer, Scott Walker and Billy Ocean, as well as advising The Beatles on their Apple Corp venture.

The Pointer Sisters, Shocking Blue, The Rubettes, Billy Paul, Alan Price, Bananarama, Queen, Belinda Carlilse, Bob Marley and The Upsetters and of course more Classic Tracks

Sunday, November 22, 2020 - God Does Not Substitute For His Word - Bro. Alan Price

Elections that Shaped the American Presidency To learn more and to register, please visit: www.mountvernon.org/gwsymposium As our nation approaches its next presidential election, the 2020 George Washington Symposium focuses on several pivotal contests throughout American history that shaped and defined the election process and the American Presidency. Each day at noon during the week of October 26-30, we will feature a LIVE conversation with an eminent scholar to explore elections during Washington's lifetime and key elections that followed, including those from the Civil War era, the depths of the Great Depression, and the volatile mid-twentieth century. Monday: Running for Office before the Revolution: George Washington's First Elections with David O. Stewart Tuesday: America's First Presidential Elections, from Washington to Jefferson with Jeffrey L. Pasley Wednesday: Lincoln's Two Elections and the American Civil War with Elizabeth R. Varon Thursday: The Election of 1932: Washington's Bicentennial and FDR's Triumph with Donald Ritchie Friday: The Election of 1960 and the Birth of the Modern Campaign with Alan Price

In this episode, we interview Russell Gilbrook, a UK Drummer, who started learning the drums when he was only four, he was depping West End shows at the age of 12 and touring Europe with Alan Price (of the Animals) when he was only 18. He performed on pop recordings with the likes of John Farnham, 5 Star, Boy Meets Girl, before joining “Chris Barber's Jazz and Blues Band". But he's best known for his hard hitting, high energy Rock drumming, and has been the drummer in legendary British rock band "Uriah Heep" since 2007. Special thanks to Russell Gilbrook for being our guest in this episode. If you'd like to find out more about Russ then please check out his social links below:Follow Russ on FacebookFollow Russ on InstagramUriah Heep's Website : http://www.uriah-heep.comTalk to the Band Social LinksFollow Talk to the Band on FacebookFollow Talk to the Band on TwitterFollow Talk to the Band on InstagramDisclaimer: There are affiliate links within this post through which we may receive a commission at no extra cost to you and this is how we keep our site and podcasts free for you. So we really do appreciate it when you purchase via our links.#RussellGilbrook #UriahHeep #AlanPrice #TheAnimals #JohnFarnham #5Star #BoyMeetsGirl #ChrisBarber #ChrisBarbersJazzandBluesBand #drummerSupport the Show.

Saturday September 19, 2020 - Perpetual Redemption - Bro. Alan Price

This episode follows our conversation with Staff Sgt. Kevin Flike, a Green Beret, and Alan Price, an Army Veteran and the current JFK Library and Museum Director, released on 8-24-20.Staff Sergeant Kevin Flike is a true role model for so many in any culture, and for both service members and civilians. He continues to educate us through public speaking, his work with the Green Beret Foundation, and through academic leadership that began at the Sloan school at MIT and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Make sure to check out Kevin’s 2019 documentary Wounded by War for an incredible view of his story of injury and resilience. The US Army Special Forces is the special operations force established in 1952. Throughout the 1950s the Green Beret was worn as an unofficial part of the SF uniform, until 1961 when President JFK authorized the GB as the official head gear. JFK called the green beret "a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom."Many thanks to the JFK Presidential Library and Museum for hosting the Home Base team for this conversation, Leslie Feinberg our government relations director, and Army Veteran Pat Smith, Home Base’s Special Operation’s liaison. Thank you Staff Sergeant Flike for your service both before and after 2011, and thank you to Kimberlee Flike and your family for their service over these trying years. To learn more and connect with us:www.homebase.org/homebasenationTwitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedInHome Base Nation Team:Steve Monaco, US Marine Corps Brendan McCaffrey, Maureen Roderick, Charlotte Luckey, Karianne Kraus, Chuck Clough, DeeDee Kearney, Natalie BonelliProducer and Host:Ron Hirschberg Thank you to:Photography - Joe Wallace for photographyOn location recording - Chuck Clough of Above The Basement  Introduction scene and "Taliban Fight" score - David G. Moore Home Base Media Lab Chairman:Peter Smyth The views expressed by guests to the Home Base Nation podcast are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by guests are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Home Base, the Red Sox Foundation or any of its officials.

The US Army Special Forces is the special operations force established in 1952. Throughout the 1950s the Green Beret was worn as an unofficial part of the SF uniform, until 1961 when President JFK authorized the GB as the official head gear. JFK called the green beret "a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom." To learn more and connect with us:www.homebase.org/homebasenationTwitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedInHome Base Nation Team:Steve Monaco, US Marine Corps Brendan McCaffrey, Maureen Roderick, Charlotte Luckey, Karianne Kraus, Chuck Clough, DeeDee Kearney, Natalie BonelliProducer and Host:Ron Hirschberg Special thanks to Joe Wallace for photography, and to Chuck Clough at Above The Basement Home Base Media Lab Chairman:Peter Smyth The views expressed by guests to the Home Base Nation podcast are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by guests are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Home Base, the Red Sox Foundation or any of its officials.

In an episode first aired July 20, 2020: DJ Andrew Sandoval explores every incarnation of the Animals from 1963-1968. Highlighting their psych pop sides, as well as solo forays by Danny McCulloch & Hilton Valentine, the show features vintage interviews, live sessions and so much more. Also of note are the fabulous productions of Tom Wilson, Mickie Most and Vic Briggs + a cameo from Alan Price for the show's breathtaking finale.

Paul Eynon meets with Harlow Rugby Club & Essex RFU President Alan Price. We talk about being locked out, being locked in and is he really Cardiff born, Cardiff Bred?

Jon talks to BrightHR's Alan Price about the Government's furlough scheme and other support for businesses large and small. Find out more about Alan here ; https://www.peninsulagrouplimited.com/sco/author/alanprice/

3:47:49 – Frank in New Jersey, plus the Other Side. Topics include: Canadian water goddesses, class of 1985, new years 2021 on the waterfront, day 112 of the crisis, Skidoo (1968), hippie theory, 209, Harry Nilsson, 209, Hasami Porcelain – Natural Mug – Tall, Quaquaversal Satellite on Skidoo, 1423, Fonnjo Foon, Van Dyke Parks, Alan Price, The [&hellip

In a show first aired on May 24, 2020: DJ Andrew Sandoval explores the songwriting talents of Bob Dylan, who set the standard for singer-songwriters & set off the trend of folk-rock. Andrew presents more than forty interpretations from the Dylan songbook including The Beau Brummels; Nashville Teens; Manfred Mann; Boz; Dion & The Wanderers; Eddie Hodges; David Jones; The Bows & Arrows; The Lords; Dino, Desi & Billy; The Byrds; Glen Garrison; Rick Nelson; Olivia Newton-John; Tom Northcott; The Arbors; Linda Gayle; Gordon Waller; Them; Fairport Convention; The Grass Roots; T.J. Black; Christopher & The Chaps; George Harrison; Cher; Alan Price; The Band; The Vacels; The Floor; Country Fever; West; David Fisher and more.

Dr. Drew Byrnes is not the original owner of Park Smiles Dentistry. He took over the practice and chose to revamp it over the past several years. In this week's episode Jordan sits down with Dr. Drew to discuss how he took over the practice, some of the challenges he faced in making it his own, and the work he's done to grow since he came in. Park Smiles Dentistry office has been serving the Winter Park area for over 80 years. Since Dr. Wilbur Jennings opened the doors in 1939, the office has been giving people a reason to smile. From Dr. Jennings to Dr. Alan Price and now to Dr. Drew Byrnes, they have been providing quality dental care to their outstanding patients. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/letsgetuptobusiness/message

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Put a Spell on You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Since I Met You Baby" by Ivory Joe Hunter ----more----   Erratum I only noticed while doing the final edit for this episode that I used the words "legitimate" and "illegitimate" to describe children, and that this usage could quite possibly be considered offensive, something I hadn't realised when writing or recording it. I apologise if anyone does take offence. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as the episode is so heavy on Hawkins that it would violate Mixcloud's terms and conditions. I tried to put together a Spotify playlist instead, but a few of the recordings I use here aren't on Spotify. As I mention in the episode, I leaned very heavily on one book here, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins by Steve Bergsman. There are many compilations of Hawkins' work. This double-CD set containing all his work up to 1962 is as good as any and ridiculously cheap. Finally, you should also listen to this short audio documentary on the search for Jay's kids, as it features interviews with a couple of them. They deserve to have their voices heard.    Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, an acknowledgment. I like to acknowledge in the podcast when I've relied heavily on one source, and in this case the source I'm relying on most is Steve Bergsman's book "I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins". That book only came out this year, so it deserves the acknowledgment even more than normal. If you like this episode, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman's book, which has a lot more information. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there's a Sam And The Womp or Simon Park Orchestra. But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell On You"] It's hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin' Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months. According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you hear here is provisional. What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his mother. He was, depending on which version of the story you believe, the youngest of four or seven children, all from different fathers, and he, unlike his older siblings, was fostered from an early age. He resented his mother because of this, but does not seem to have been particularly bothered by the fact that his own prodigious fathering of children by multiple women, all of whom he abandoned, will have put those children in the same position. He variously claimed to have between fifty-seven and seventy-five children. Thirty-three have been traced, so this seems to be one of those rare occasions where he was telling the truth. So this is another of the all too many episodes where I have to warn listeners that we are dealing with someone who behaved appallingly towards women. I am not going to go into too many details here, but suffice to say that Hawkins was not an admirable man. Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. This is, you will be shocked to hear, not true -- not least because there was not, in fact, an Ohio Conservatory of Music for him to train at. Instead, he learned his trade as a musician in the armed forces, where he was not, in fact, sent into Japan in a combat role aged fourteen. Instead, he joined the Special Services, the people who put on shows for the rest of the military, and learned the saxophone. As well as his stories about being a prisoner of war, he also used to claim on a regular basis that the reason he'd loved being in the military so much was because you were allowed to kill people and wouldn't get punished for it. History does not record exactly how many people his saxophone playing killed. After his discharge from the military in 1952, he abandoned his first wife and children -- telling them he was popping to the shop and then not seeing them again for two years. Around this time he hooked up with Tiny Grimes, who is yet another person who often gets credited as the creator of the "first rock and roll record", this one a 1946 song called "Tiny's Boogie": [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes, "Tiny's Boogie"] Tiny Grimes was a strange figure who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B, and who had played with great jazz figures like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum as an instrumentalist, but who as a singer was firmly in the rock and roll world. He had seen his greatest success with a rock and roll version of the old Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond" [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes "Loch Lomond"] As a result of that, he'd started performing in a kilt, and calling himself Tiny "Mac" Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders. Grimes first met Hawkins backstage at the Moondog Coronation Ball -- a legendary gig put on by Alan Freed in 1952, which was the first big sign to Freed of just how successful rock and roll was going to become. At that show, so many more people tried to get in than the venue had capacity for -- thanks, largely, to forged tickets being sold -- that the show became dangerously overcrowded, and had to be cancelled after a single song from the first artist on the bill. So Grimes didn't get to play that day, but Jalacey Hawkins, as he was still then known, managed to get himself backstage and meet Grimes. Hawkins did this through Freed, who Hawkins had got to know shortly after his discharge from the military. When he'd got back to Cleveland, he'd heard Freed on the radio and been amazed that they let a black man have his own show, so he'd gone down to the radio station to meet him, and been even more amazed to find out that the man who sounded black, and was playing black music, was in fact white. For decades afterwards, Hawkins would describe Freed as one of the very few white people in the world who actually cared about black people and black music. The two had struck up a friendship, and Hawkins had managed to get backstage at Freed's show. When he did, he just went up to Grimes and asked for a job. Grimes gave him a job as a combination road manager and musician -- Hawkins would play piano and saxophone, sing occasionally, and was also (according to Hawkins) Grimes' valet and dog walker. Working with Grimes is where Hawkins first started performing outrageously on stage. Grimes' band already dressed in Scottish clothing, and put on quite a bit of a show, but Hawkins pushed things a little further. He would, for example, come out on stage in his kilt and with tins of Carnation evaporated milk hanging on his chest as if they were breasts. He would then sing Ruth Brown's hit "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean". [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" According to Hawkins, Ruth Brown came to see the show at one point, and said of him "This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me". That doesn't sound especially like Brown, it has to be said. Hawkins started recording with Grimes, and started to be billed as "Screamin' Jay Hawkins" -- a stage name which, again, he gave varying origins for. The most likely seems to be the one he gave in a documentary, in which he said that he couldn't sing, but had to take lead vocals, so he decided to just scream everything, because at least that would be different. Quite how that tallies with his ability to sing better than Ruth Brown, it's best not to wonder. Either way, his early recordings show him trying to fit into the standard R&B vocal styles of the time, rather than screaming. On his first record, with Grimes, he's not the blues shouter that he had a reputation of being, and nor is he the screamer he would later become -- instead he sounds like he's imitating Clyde McPhatter's singing on "The Bells" by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, but in a bass register somewhat reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Compare Hawkins here: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes with Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Why Did You Waste My Time?"] With McPhatter on the Billy Ward record: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and His Dominoes, "The Bells"] You can hear the resemblance there, I'm sure. At this point Hawkins had a certain amount of potential, but was just one of a million smooth blues singers, who relied more on stage gimmicks than on singing ability. But those stage gimmicks were making him a breakout star in Grimes' band, and so at a recording session for Grimes, it was agreed that Hawkins could record a single of his own at the end of the session, if there was time. Hawkins' attitude quickly caused problems for him, though. During the recording of "Screamin' Blues", which would have been his first single, he got into an argument with Ahmet Ertegun, who kept telling him to sing the song more smoothly, like Fats Domino. Accounts of what happened next vary -- Hawkins' most frequent version was that he ended up punching Ertegun, though other people just say that the two got into a screaming row. Either way, the session was abandoned, and Hawkins soon ended up out of Grimes' band. He worked with a few different bands, before getting a big break as Fats Domino's opening act. He only lasted a few weeks in that role -- depending on who you asked, Domino either fired Hawkins for being vulgar on stage and screaming, as Domino claimed, or because he was jealous of Hawkins' great leopardskin suit, as Hawkins would sometimes claim. Wynonie Harris saw something in Hawkins, and helped him get his first solo shows in New York, and on the back of these he made his first records as a solo artist, for the tiny label Timely Records, under his birth name, Jalacey Hawkins, and featuring Mickey Baker, who would play on most of his fifties sessions, on guitar: [Excerpt: Jalacey Hawkins, "Baptize Me in Wine"] But unfortunately, after two of these singles, Timely Records folded, and Hawkins had to find another label. He moved on to Grand Records, and started recording as Screamin' Jay Hawkins. By this time, he had started using some of the gimmicks he would use in his stage show, though for the most part his act was still fairly tame by modern standards. He was also still, at least in the recording studio, making fairly standard jump blues records, like this one, the first he recorded as a solo artist under his stage name: [Excerpt, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Take Me Back"] That was the only single that saw release from his time with Grand Records, and it's not even certain that it was released until a year or so later -- reports seem to vary about this. But it was while he was recording for Grand Records that he wrote the song that would bring him worldwide fame. It came about, as so much of Hawkins' life did, from his mistreatment of a woman. He was playing a residency in Atlantic City, and he had a live-in girlfriend from Philadelphia. But, as was always the case with Hawkins, he was cheating on her with multiple other women. Eventually she figured this out, and walked into the bar in the middle of one of his sets, threw his keys onto the stage, and walked out, blowing him a kiss. He didn't realise what had happened until he was talking to the barmaid later, and she explained to him that no, that meant his girlfriend was definitely leaving. He brooded over this for a day, and then had another conversation with the barmaid, and told her he was planning to go to Philadelphia to get the girl back. She said "so you think she'll come back to you, do you?" and he replied "yes, I'll get her back, even if I have to put a spell on her -- that's it! I'll write a song about putting a spell on her, and she'll realise how much I love her and come back!" Hawkins would later claim that when, two years later, the song was finally released, she did come back -- not because of "I Put A Spell On You", but because she loved the B-side, a song called "Little Demon". As Hawkins told the story, she came back to him, they stayed together for four months, and then he dumped her. He hadn't wanted her back because he loved her, he'd wanted her back so that he could be the one to do the dumping, not her. Whatever the truth of that last part, he recorded "I Put A Spell on You" some time around late 1954, but that version wouldn't be released until decades later: [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell on You (unreleased version)"] It's a decent record, but there's something missing, and for whatever reason, it never came out. Instead, he signed to yet another label, Mercury, which was at the time somewhere between a large independent label and a small major, and started putting out singles just as "Jay Hawkins". By this time, he'd found a regular team of people to work with -- Leroy Kirkland was the arranger, and Mickey Baker would play guitar, Sam "the Man" Taylor and Al Sears were on saxophone, and Panama Francis was on drums. That core team would work on everything he did for the next couple of years. It was while he was at Mercury that he hit on the style he would use from that point on, with a B-side called "(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)", a song about voodoo and threatening to murder a woman who'd cast a spell on him that, in retrospect, has all the elements of Hawkins' later hit in place, just with the wrong song: [Excerpt: Jay Hawkins, "(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)"] That was Hawkins' first truly great record, but it was hidden away on a B-side and did nothing. After a couple more singles, Hawkins was once again dropped by his label -- but once again, he moved on to a slightly bigger label, this time to OKeh, which was a subsidiary of Columbia, one of the biggest labels in the country. And in September 1956, he went into the studio to record his first single for them, which was to be a new version of "I Put a Spell on You". But Arnold Maxim, the producer at the session, wanted something a bit different from Hawkins. He thought that everyone sounded a little too staid, a little too uptight, and he asked why they couldn't sound in the studio like they did when they were having fun on stage and really cutting loose. Hawkins replied that when they were on stage everyone was usually so drunk they couldn't *remember* what it was they'd been doing. So Maxim decided to order in some crates of beer and fried chicken, and told them "this isn't a recording session, it's a party. Have fun." When they were drunk enough, he started recording, and the result was this: [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell On You"] Now, in later years, Hawkins would try to claim that he had been tricked into that performance, and that he'd had to relearn the song from the record after the fact, because he couldn't remember what it was he'd been doing. In truth, though, it's not that different from a record like "(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)", and it seems more than likely that this is yet more of Hawkins' exaggeration. The record didn't chart, because many radio stations refused to play it, but it nonetheless became a classic and reportedly sold over a million copies. This was in part due to the efforts of Alan Freed. Hawkins was already starting to play up his stage persona even more -- wearing capes and bones through his nose, and trying to portray a voodoo image. But when he was booked as the headline act on a Christmas show Freed put together in 1956, Freed surprised him by telling him he'd had a great idea for the show -- he'd got hold of a coffin, and Hawkins could start his performance by rising out of the coffin like a vampire or zombie. Hawkins was horrified. He told Freed that there was only one time a black man was ever getting into a coffin, and that was when he was never getting out again. Freed insisted, and eventually ended up paying Hawkins a large bonus -- which Hawkins would later claim was multiple thousands of dollars, but which actually seems to have been about three hundred dollars, itself a lot of money in 1956. Hawkins eventually agreed, though he kept a finger between the coffin and the lid, so it couldn't close completely on him. This was the start of Hawkins' career as a shock-rocker, and he became known as "the black Vincent Price" for his stage shows which would include not only the coffin but also a skull on a stick with smoke coming out of it (the skull was named Henry) and a giant rubber snake. Many horror-themed rock acts of the future, such as Alice Cooper or the Cramps, would later use elements of Hawkins' stage shows -- and he would increasingly make music to match the show, so that he later recorded a song called "Constipation Blues", which he would perform while sitting on a toilet on stage. But in 1957, neither he nor the record label seemed quite sure what they should do to follow up "I Put a Spell on You". That record had traded heavily on its shock value, to the extent that OKeh's trade ads contained the line "DJs be brave -- if you get fired, we'll get you a job!" however, only one DJ did get fired for playing it, one Bob Friesen. He contacted OKeh, but they didn't get him a job -- and eventually someone working for the company told Billboard this, Billboard publicised the story, and another station hired Friesen for the publicity that would get them. OKeh actually edited the single shortly after release, to get rid of some of the grunts at the end, which people variously described as "orgiastic" and "cannibalistic", but it didn't make the record any more palatable to the professionally outraged. But the next record went completely the other way -- a cover version of the old standard "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do it)": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)"] I can see why they thought that was a good idea before recording it -- Fats Domino had just had a massive hit with "Blueberry Hill", another old standard done in a similar arrangement to the one on Hawkins' record, but still... The next couple of records were more in the style one might expect from Hawkins, a track called "Frenzy", and a great Leiber and Stoller swamp-rocker called "Alligator Wine": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Alligator Wine"] But neither of those was a success either -- partly because Hawkins went too far in the other direction. He had the opportunity to appear in Alan Freed's film "Mister Rock and Roll" to promote "Frenzy", but while every other act in the film performed in suits or were similarly well-dressed, Hawkins insisted on performing naked apart from a loincloth, with his hair sticking up, white face-paint, and carrying a spear and a shield -- his idea of what a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya looked like (the Mau Mau fighters did not look like this). Or at least that was his later description of what he was wearing. Others who've seen the footage suggest it wasn't quite that extreme, but still involved him being half-naked and looking like a "native". Hawkins had already been getting a certain amount of criticism from the NAACP and other civil rights groups because they believed that he was making black people look bad by associating them with voodoo and cannibalism. Paramount Pictures decided that they didn't particularly want to have their film picketed, and so removed Hawkins' section from the film. Hawkins' attitude to the NAACP was that as far as he was concerned the only thing they were doing for black people was trying to stop him earning a living, and he wanted nothing to do with them. (This was not a common attitude among black people at the time, as you might imagine.) And so, once again, things went to the other extreme. Hawkins put out his first album. It was called "At Home With Screamin' Jay Hawkins", had a cheery photo of Hawkins in a Santa hat on the cover, and mixed in his recent singles, a couple of new originals (including one called "Hong Kong" which is mostly just Hawkins making racist "ching chong" sounds) and... versions of "I Love Paris in the Springtime", "Ol' Man River", and other extremely non-voodoo-shock-rock songs. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a success. He was dropped by OKeh and moved to a tiny label, where he started recording more idiosyncratic material like "Armpit #6": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Armpit #6"] But any chance of a comeback was pretty much destroyed when he was arrested in 1958 for possession of cannabis and statutory rape, after having had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. After he got out of prison, he moved to Hawaii for a while, and became a performer again, although there was a temporary hiccup in his career when his girlfriend and singing partner stabbed him after she found out he'd married someone else without telling her. She presumably also didn't know that he was still married to his first wife at the time. Hawkins' career remained in the doldrums until 1965, when two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Nina Simone recorded a cover version of "I Put a Spell on You", which made the top thirty in the US charts: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "I Put a Spell on You"] The second was that Hawkins got rediscovered in the UK, in quite a big way. There was a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, which was legendary in soul and R&B circles -- to the extent that when I saw P.P. Arnold in its successor venue Night People two weeks ago, she kept referring to it as the Twisted Wheel, even though the original club closed down in 1971, because she had such strong memories of the original venue. And among the regular attendees of that club were a group of people who loved the few Screamin' Jay Hawkins records they'd been able to get hold of. Hawkins had been popular enough that a British act, Screamin' Lord Sutch and the Savages, had stolen his act wholesale, cape, coffin, and all: [Excerpt: Screamin' Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Jack the Ripper"] Screamin' Lord Sutch would later go on to form the Monster Raving Loony Party, a political party intended as a joke that still continues to field candidates at every election twenty years after Sutch's death. But while people like Sutch had admired him, Hawkins was mostly a legend in British blues circles, someone about whom almost nothing was known. But then some of the Twisted Wheel people went to see Little Richard at the Oasis club, another famous Manchester venue, and got chatting to Don "Sugarcane" Harris, from the support act Don and Dewey. He mentioned that he'd recently seen Hawkins, and he was still doing the same show, and so the British blues and soul fans tracked him down and persuaded the promoter Don Arden to put on a tour of the UK, with Hawkins using the Twisted Wheel as his base. The tour wasn't a commercial success, but it built Hawkins' reputation in Britain to the point that it seemed like *every* beat group wanted to record "I Put a Spell on You". Between 1965 and 1968, it was recorded by Manfred Mann, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Animals, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and Alan Price, who made the top ten in the UK with his version: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, "I Put a Spell on You"] Hawkins even got to record a second album, finally, in Abbey Road studios, and he started to tour Europe successfully and build up a major fanbase. But Hawkins' self-destructive -- and other-people-destructive -- tendencies kicked in. The next few decades would follow a recurring pattern -- Hawkins would get some big break, like opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or recording an album with Keith Richards guesting, or finally getting to appear in a film. Every time, he would let his addictions to alcohol or codeine overtake him, or he would rip a friend off for a trifling sum of money, or he would just get married bigamously again. Much of the time, he was living in one-room apartments, sometimes with no electricity. He married six times in total, and was abusive towards at least some of his wives. Screamin' Jay Hawkins died in 2000 after emergency surgery for an aneurysm. His fifth wife, one of the two who seem to have been actually important to him in some way, has dropped strong hints that he was killed by his sixth wife, who he had been claiming was poisoning him, though there's no evidence for that other than that she was strongly disliked by many of the people around Hawkins. When he died, he was seventy, and his current wife was thirty-one. Many people claimed that they had visitations from Hawkins' ghost in the days after his death, but the thing that seems to sum him up in the afterlife the most is his legacy to his family. He sold the rights to "I Put a Spell on You" shortly before his death, for twenty-five thousand dollars, which means his estate gets no songwriting royalties from his one big hit. He hadn't made a will since the 1970s, and that will left most of his money to his second wife, Ginny, who most people seem to agree deserved it if anyone did -- she was with him for sixteen years, and tolerated the worst of his behaviour. He also left an amount to a niece of his. As for his kids? Well, none of the seventy or however many illegitimate children he had saw a penny from his will. His three legitimate children, he left a dollar each. At least one of them, his daughter Sookie, didn't get her dollar -- it went to her cousin, who didn't pass it on to her. And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman's biography. "My father thought he was all that, but not to me. Screamin' Jay Hawkins didn't treat people right. He was a performer, but he didn't treat people right."

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Since I Met You Baby” by Ivory Joe Hunter —-more—-   Erratum I only noticed while doing the final edit for this episode that I used the words “legitimate” and “illegitimate” to describe children, and that this usage could quite possibly be considered offensive, something I hadn’t realised when writing or recording it. I apologise if anyone does take offence. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as the episode is so heavy on Hawkins that it would violate Mixcloud’s terms and conditions. I tried to put together a Spotify playlist instead, but a few of the recordings I use here aren’t on Spotify. As I mention in the episode, I leaned very heavily on one book here, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins by Steve Bergsman. There are many compilations of Hawkins’ work. This double-CD set containing all his work up to 1962 is as good as any and ridiculously cheap. Finally, you should also listen to this short audio documentary on the search for Jay’s kids, as it features interviews with a couple of them. They deserve to have their voices heard.    Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, an acknowledgment. I like to acknowledge in the podcast when I’ve relied heavily on one source, and in this case the source I’m relying on most is Steve Bergsman’s book “I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”. That book only came out this year, so it deserves the acknowledgment even more than normal. If you like this episode, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman’s book, which has a lot more information. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there’s a Sam And The Womp or Simon Park Orchestra. But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] It’s hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months. According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you hear here is provisional. What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his mother. He was, depending on which version of the story you believe, the youngest of four or seven children, all from different fathers, and he, unlike his older siblings, was fostered from an early age. He resented his mother because of this, but does not seem to have been particularly bothered by the fact that his own prodigious fathering of children by multiple women, all of whom he abandoned, will have put those children in the same position. He variously claimed to have between fifty-seven and seventy-five children. Thirty-three have been traced, so this seems to be one of those rare occasions where he was telling the truth. So this is another of the all too many episodes where I have to warn listeners that we are dealing with someone who behaved appallingly towards women. I am not going to go into too many details here, but suffice to say that Hawkins was not an admirable man. Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. This is, you will be shocked to hear, not true — not least because there was not, in fact, an Ohio Conservatory of Music for him to train at. Instead, he learned his trade as a musician in the armed forces, where he was not, in fact, sent into Japan in a combat role aged fourteen. Instead, he joined the Special Services, the people who put on shows for the rest of the military, and learned the saxophone. As well as his stories about being a prisoner of war, he also used to claim on a regular basis that the reason he’d loved being in the military so much was because you were allowed to kill people and wouldn’t get punished for it. History does not record exactly how many people his saxophone playing killed. After his discharge from the military in 1952, he abandoned his first wife and children — telling them he was popping to the shop and then not seeing them again for two years. Around this time he hooked up with Tiny Grimes, who is yet another person who often gets credited as the creator of the “first rock and roll record”, this one a 1946 song called “Tiny’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes, “Tiny’s Boogie”] Tiny Grimes was a strange figure who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B, and who had played with great jazz figures like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum as an instrumentalist, but who as a singer was firmly in the rock and roll world. He had seen his greatest success with a rock and roll version of the old Scottish folk song “Loch Lomond” [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes “Loch Lomond”] As a result of that, he’d started performing in a kilt, and calling himself Tiny “Mac” Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders. Grimes first met Hawkins backstage at the Moondog Coronation Ball — a legendary gig put on by Alan Freed in 1952, which was the first big sign to Freed of just how successful rock and roll was going to become. At that show, so many more people tried to get in than the venue had capacity for — thanks, largely, to forged tickets being sold — that the show became dangerously overcrowded, and had to be cancelled after a single song from the first artist on the bill. So Grimes didn’t get to play that day, but Jalacey Hawkins, as he was still then known, managed to get himself backstage and meet Grimes. Hawkins did this through Freed, who Hawkins had got to know shortly after his discharge from the military. When he’d got back to Cleveland, he’d heard Freed on the radio and been amazed that they let a black man have his own show, so he’d gone down to the radio station to meet him, and been even more amazed to find out that the man who sounded black, and was playing black music, was in fact white. For decades afterwards, Hawkins would describe Freed as one of the very few white people in the world who actually cared about black people and black music. The two had struck up a friendship, and Hawkins had managed to get backstage at Freed’s show. When he did, he just went up to Grimes and asked for a job. Grimes gave him a job as a combination road manager and musician — Hawkins would play piano and saxophone, sing occasionally, and was also (according to Hawkins) Grimes’ valet and dog walker. Working with Grimes is where Hawkins first started performing outrageously on stage. Grimes’ band already dressed in Scottish clothing, and put on quite a bit of a show, but Hawkins pushed things a little further. He would, for example, come out on stage in his kilt and with tins of Carnation evaporated milk hanging on his chest as if they were breasts. He would then sing Ruth Brown’s hit “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”. [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” According to Hawkins, Ruth Brown came to see the show at one point, and said of him “This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me”. That doesn’t sound especially like Brown, it has to be said. Hawkins started recording with Grimes, and started to be billed as “Screamin’ Jay Hawkins” — a stage name which, again, he gave varying origins for. The most likely seems to be the one he gave in a documentary, in which he said that he couldn’t sing, but had to take lead vocals, so he decided to just scream everything, because at least that would be different. Quite how that tallies with his ability to sing better than Ruth Brown, it’s best not to wonder. Either way, his early recordings show him trying to fit into the standard R&B vocal styles of the time, rather than screaming. On his first record, with Grimes, he’s not the blues shouter that he had a reputation of being, and nor is he the screamer he would later become — instead he sounds like he’s imitating Clyde McPhatter’s singing on “The Bells” by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, but in a bass register somewhat reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Compare Hawkins here: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Why Did You Waste My Time?”] With McPhatter on the Billy Ward record: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and His Dominoes, “The Bells”] You can hear the resemblance there, I’m sure. At this point Hawkins had a certain amount of potential, but was just one of a million smooth blues singers, who relied more on stage gimmicks than on singing ability. But those stage gimmicks were making him a breakout star in Grimes’ band, and so at a recording session for Grimes, it was agreed that Hawkins could record a single of his own at the end of the session, if there was time. Hawkins’ attitude quickly caused problems for him, though. During the recording of “Screamin’ Blues”, which would have been his first single, he got into an argument with Ahmet Ertegun, who kept telling him to sing the song more smoothly, like Fats Domino. Accounts of what happened next vary — Hawkins’ most frequent version was that he ended up punching Ertegun, though other people just say that the two got into a screaming row. Either way, the session was abandoned, and Hawkins soon ended up out of Grimes’ band. He worked with a few different bands, before getting a big break as Fats Domino’s opening act. He only lasted a few weeks in that role — depending on who you asked, Domino either fired Hawkins for being vulgar on stage and screaming, as Domino claimed, or because he was jealous of Hawkins’ great leopardskin suit, as Hawkins would sometimes claim. Wynonie Harris saw something in Hawkins, and helped him get his first solo shows in New York, and on the back of these he made his first records as a solo artist, for the tiny label Timely Records, under his birth name, Jalacey Hawkins, and featuring Mickey Baker, who would play on most of his fifties sessions, on guitar: [Excerpt: Jalacey Hawkins, “Baptize Me in Wine”] But unfortunately, after two of these singles, Timely Records folded, and Hawkins had to find another label. He moved on to Grand Records, and started recording as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. By this time, he had started using some of the gimmicks he would use in his stage show, though for the most part his act was still fairly tame by modern standards. He was also still, at least in the recording studio, making fairly standard jump blues records, like this one, the first he recorded as a solo artist under his stage name: [Excerpt, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Take Me Back”] That was the only single that saw release from his time with Grand Records, and it’s not even certain that it was released until a year or so later — reports seem to vary about this. But it was while he was recording for Grand Records that he wrote the song that would bring him worldwide fame. It came about, as so much of Hawkins’ life did, from his mistreatment of a woman. He was playing a residency in Atlantic City, and he had a live-in girlfriend from Philadelphia. But, as was always the case with Hawkins, he was cheating on her with multiple other women. Eventually she figured this out, and walked into the bar in the middle of one of his sets, threw his keys onto the stage, and walked out, blowing him a kiss. He didn’t realise what had happened until he was talking to the barmaid later, and she explained to him that no, that meant his girlfriend was definitely leaving. He brooded over this for a day, and then had another conversation with the barmaid, and told her he was planning to go to Philadelphia to get the girl back. She said “so you think she’ll come back to you, do you?” and he replied “yes, I’ll get her back, even if I have to put a spell on her — that’s it! I’ll write a song about putting a spell on her, and she’ll realise how much I love her and come back!” Hawkins would later claim that when, two years later, the song was finally released, she did come back — not because of “I Put A Spell On You”, but because she loved the B-side, a song called “Little Demon”. As Hawkins told the story, she came back to him, they stayed together for four months, and then he dumped her. He hadn’t wanted her back because he loved her, he’d wanted her back so that he could be the one to do the dumping, not her. Whatever the truth of that last part, he recorded “I Put A Spell on You” some time around late 1954, but that version wouldn’t be released until decades later: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell on You (unreleased version)”] It’s a decent record, but there’s something missing, and for whatever reason, it never came out. Instead, he signed to yet another label, Mercury, which was at the time somewhere between a large independent label and a small major, and started putting out singles just as “Jay Hawkins”. By this time, he’d found a regular team of people to work with — Leroy Kirkland was the arranger, and Mickey Baker would play guitar, Sam “the Man” Taylor and Al Sears were on saxophone, and Panama Francis was on drums. That core team would work on everything he did for the next couple of years. It was while he was at Mercury that he hit on the style he would use from that point on, with a B-side called “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”, a song about voodoo and threatening to murder a woman who’d cast a spell on him that, in retrospect, has all the elements of Hawkins’ later hit in place, just with the wrong song: [Excerpt: Jay Hawkins, “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”] That was Hawkins’ first truly great record, but it was hidden away on a B-side and did nothing. After a couple more singles, Hawkins was once again dropped by his label — but once again, he moved on to a slightly bigger label, this time to OKeh, which was a subsidiary of Columbia, one of the biggest labels in the country. And in September 1956, he went into the studio to record his first single for them, which was to be a new version of “I Put a Spell on You”. But Arnold Maxim, the producer at the session, wanted something a bit different from Hawkins. He thought that everyone sounded a little too staid, a little too uptight, and he asked why they couldn’t sound in the studio like they did when they were having fun on stage and really cutting loose. Hawkins replied that when they were on stage everyone was usually so drunk they couldn’t *remember* what it was they’d been doing. So Maxim decided to order in some crates of beer and fried chicken, and told them “this isn’t a recording session, it’s a party. Have fun.” When they were drunk enough, he started recording, and the result was this: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] Now, in later years, Hawkins would try to claim that he had been tricked into that performance, and that he’d had to relearn the song from the record after the fact, because he couldn’t remember what it was he’d been doing. In truth, though, it’s not that different from a record like “(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)”, and it seems more than likely that this is yet more of Hawkins’ exaggeration. The record didn’t chart, because many radio stations refused to play it, but it nonetheless became a classic and reportedly sold over a million copies. This was in part due to the efforts of Alan Freed. Hawkins was already starting to play up his stage persona even more — wearing capes and bones through his nose, and trying to portray a voodoo image. But when he was booked as the headline act on a Christmas show Freed put together in 1956, Freed surprised him by telling him he’d had a great idea for the show — he’d got hold of a coffin, and Hawkins could start his performance by rising out of the coffin like a vampire or zombie. Hawkins was horrified. He told Freed that there was only one time a black man was ever getting into a coffin, and that was when he was never getting out again. Freed insisted, and eventually ended up paying Hawkins a large bonus — which Hawkins would later claim was multiple thousands of dollars, but which actually seems to have been about three hundred dollars, itself a lot of money in 1956. Hawkins eventually agreed, though he kept a finger between the coffin and the lid, so it couldn’t close completely on him. This was the start of Hawkins’ career as a shock-rocker, and he became known as “the black Vincent Price” for his stage shows which would include not only the coffin but also a skull on a stick with smoke coming out of it (the skull was named Henry) and a giant rubber snake. Many horror-themed rock acts of the future, such as Alice Cooper or the Cramps, would later use elements of Hawkins’ stage shows — and he would increasingly make music to match the show, so that he later recorded a song called “Constipation Blues”, which he would perform while sitting on a toilet on stage. But in 1957, neither he nor the record label seemed quite sure what they should do to follow up “I Put a Spell on You”. That record had traded heavily on its shock value, to the extent that OKeh’s trade ads contained the line “DJs be brave — if you get fired, we’ll get you a job!” however, only one DJ did get fired for playing it, one Bob Friesen. He contacted OKeh, but they didn’t get him a job — and eventually someone working for the company told Billboard this, Billboard publicised the story, and another station hired Friesen for the publicity that would get them. OKeh actually edited the single shortly after release, to get rid of some of the grunts at the end, which people variously described as “orgiastic” and “cannibalistic”, but it didn’t make the record any more palatable to the professionally outraged. But the next record went completely the other way — a cover version of the old standard “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do it)”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)”] I can see why they thought that was a good idea before recording it — Fats Domino had just had a massive hit with “Blueberry Hill”, another old standard done in a similar arrangement to the one on Hawkins’ record, but still… The next couple of records were more in the style one might expect from Hawkins, a track called “Frenzy”, and a great Leiber and Stoller swamp-rocker called “Alligator Wine”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Alligator Wine”] But neither of those was a success either — partly because Hawkins went too far in the other direction. He had the opportunity to appear in Alan Freed’s film “Mister Rock and Roll” to promote “Frenzy”, but while every other act in the film performed in suits or were similarly well-dressed, Hawkins insisted on performing naked apart from a loincloth, with his hair sticking up, white face-paint, and carrying a spear and a shield — his idea of what a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya looked like (the Mau Mau fighters did not look like this). Or at least that was his later description of what he was wearing. Others who’ve seen the footage suggest it wasn’t quite that extreme, but still involved him being half-naked and looking like a “native”. Hawkins had already been getting a certain amount of criticism from the NAACP and other civil rights groups because they believed that he was making black people look bad by associating them with voodoo and cannibalism. Paramount Pictures decided that they didn’t particularly want to have their film picketed, and so removed Hawkins’ section from the film. Hawkins’ attitude to the NAACP was that as far as he was concerned the only thing they were doing for black people was trying to stop him earning a living, and he wanted nothing to do with them. (This was not a common attitude among black people at the time, as you might imagine.) And so, once again, things went to the other extreme. Hawkins put out his first album. It was called “At Home With Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”, had a cheery photo of Hawkins in a Santa hat on the cover, and mixed in his recent singles, a couple of new originals (including one called “Hong Kong” which is mostly just Hawkins making racist “ching chong” sounds) and… versions of “I Love Paris in the Springtime”, “Ol’ Man River”, and other extremely non-voodoo-shock-rock songs. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a success. He was dropped by OKeh and moved to a tiny label, where he started recording more idiosyncratic material like “Armpit #6”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Armpit #6”] But any chance of a comeback was pretty much destroyed when he was arrested in 1958 for possession of cannabis and statutory rape, after having had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. After he got out of prison, he moved to Hawaii for a while, and became a performer again, although there was a temporary hiccup in his career when his girlfriend and singing partner stabbed him after she found out he’d married someone else without telling her. She presumably also didn’t know that he was still married to his first wife at the time. Hawkins’ career remained in the doldrums until 1965, when two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Nina Simone recorded a cover version of “I Put a Spell on You”, which made the top thirty in the US charts: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “I Put a Spell on You”] The second was that Hawkins got rediscovered in the UK, in quite a big way. There was a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, which was legendary in soul and R&B circles — to the extent that when I saw P.P. Arnold in its successor venue Night People two weeks ago, she kept referring to it as the Twisted Wheel, even though the original club closed down in 1971, because she had such strong memories of the original venue. And among the regular attendees of that club were a group of people who loved the few Screamin’ Jay Hawkins records they’d been able to get hold of. Hawkins had been popular enough that a British act, Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, had stolen his act wholesale, cape, coffin, and all: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Jack the Ripper”] Screamin’ Lord Sutch would later go on to form the Monster Raving Loony Party, a political party intended as a joke that still continues to field candidates at every election twenty years after Sutch’s death. But while people like Sutch had admired him, Hawkins was mostly a legend in British blues circles, someone about whom almost nothing was known. But then some of the Twisted Wheel people went to see Little Richard at the Oasis club, another famous Manchester venue, and got chatting to Don “Sugarcane” Harris, from the support act Don and Dewey. He mentioned that he’d recently seen Hawkins, and he was still doing the same show, and so the British blues and soul fans tracked him down and persuaded the promoter Don Arden to put on a tour of the UK, with Hawkins using the Twisted Wheel as his base. The tour wasn’t a commercial success, but it built Hawkins’ reputation in Britain to the point that it seemed like *every* beat group wanted to record “I Put a Spell on You”. Between 1965 and 1968, it was recorded by Manfred Mann, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Animals, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and Alan Price, who made the top ten in the UK with his version: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put a Spell on You”] Hawkins even got to record a second album, finally, in Abbey Road studios, and he started to tour Europe successfully and build up a major fanbase. But Hawkins’ self-destructive — and other-people-destructive — tendencies kicked in. The next few decades would follow a recurring pattern — Hawkins would get some big break, like opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or recording an album with Keith Richards guesting, or finally getting to appear in a film. Every time, he would let his addictions to alcohol or codeine overtake him, or he would rip a friend off for a trifling sum of money, or he would just get married bigamously again. Much of the time, he was living in one-room apartments, sometimes with no electricity. He married six times in total, and was abusive towards at least some of his wives. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins died in 2000 after emergency surgery for an aneurysm. His fifth wife, one of the two who seem to have been actually important to him in some way, has dropped strong hints that he was killed by his sixth wife, who he had been claiming was poisoning him, though there’s no evidence for that other than that she was strongly disliked by many of the people around Hawkins. When he died, he was seventy, and his current wife was thirty-one. Many people claimed that they had visitations from Hawkins’ ghost in the days after his death, but the thing that seems to sum him up in the afterlife the most is his legacy to his family. He sold the rights to “I Put a Spell on You” shortly before his death, for twenty-five thousand dollars, which means his estate gets no songwriting royalties from his one big hit. He hadn’t made a will since the 1970s, and that will left most of his money to his second wife, Ginny, who most people seem to agree deserved it if anyone did — she was with him for sixteen years, and tolerated the worst of his behaviour. He also left an amount to a niece of his. As for his kids? Well, none of the seventy or however many illegitimate children he had saw a penny from his will. His three legitimate children, he left a dollar each. At least one of them, his daughter Sookie, didn’t get her dollar — it went to her cousin, who didn’t pass it on to her. And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman’s biography. “My father thought he was all that, but not to me. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins didn’t treat people right. He was a performer, but he didn’t treat people right.”

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Since I Met You Baby” by Ivory Joe Hunter —-more—-   Erratum I only noticed while doing the final edit for this episode that I used the words “legitimate” and “illegitimate” to describe children, and that this usage could quite possibly be considered offensive, something I hadn’t realised when writing or recording it. I apologise if anyone does take offence. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as the episode is so heavy on Hawkins that it would violate Mixcloud’s terms and conditions. I tried to put together a Spotify playlist instead, but a few of the recordings I use here aren’t on Spotify. As I mention in the episode, I leaned very heavily on one book here, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins by Steve Bergsman. There are many compilations of Hawkins’ work. This double-CD set containing all his work up to 1962 is as good as any and ridiculously cheap. Finally, you should also listen to this short audio documentary on the search for Jay’s kids, as it features interviews with a couple of them. They deserve to have their voices heard.    Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, an acknowledgment. I like to acknowledge in the podcast when I’ve relied heavily on one source, and in this case the source I’m relying on most is Steve Bergsman’s book “I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”. That book only came out this year, so it deserves the acknowledgment even more than normal. If you like this episode, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman’s book, which has a lot more information. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there’s a Sam And The Womp or Simon Park Orchestra. But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] It’s hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months. According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you hear here is provisional. What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his mother. He was, depending on which version of the story you believe, the youngest of four or seven children, all from different fathers, and he, unlike his older siblings, was fostered from an early age. He resented his mother because of this, but does not seem to have been particularly bothered by the fact that his own prodigious fathering of children by multiple women, all of whom he abandoned, will have put those children in the same position. He variously claimed to have between fifty-seven and seventy-five children. Thirty-three have been traced, so this seems to be one of those rare occasions where he was telling the truth. So this is another of the all too many episodes where I have to warn listeners that we are dealing with someone who behaved appallingly towards women. I am not going to go into too many details here, but suffice to say that Hawkins was not an admirable man. Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. This is, you will be shocked to hear, not true — not least because there was not, in fact, an Ohio Conservatory of Music for him to train at. Instead, he learned his trade as a musician in the armed forces, where he was not, in fact, sent into Japan in a combat role aged fourteen. Instead, he joined the Special Services, the people who put on shows for the rest of the military, and learned the saxophone. As well as his stories about being a prisoner of war, he also used to claim on a regular basis that the reason he’d loved being in the military so much was because you were allowed to kill people and wouldn’t get punished for it. History does not record exactly how many people his saxophone playing killed. After his discharge from the military in 1952, he abandoned his first wife and children — telling them he was popping to the shop and then not seeing them again for two years. Around this time he hooked up with Tiny Grimes, who is yet another person who often gets credited as the creator of the “first rock and roll record”, this one a 1946 song called “Tiny’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes, “Tiny’s Boogie”] Tiny Grimes was a strange figure who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B, and who had played with great jazz figures like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum as an instrumentalist, but who as a singer was firmly in the rock and roll world. He had seen his greatest success with a rock and roll version of the old Scottish folk song “Loch Lomond” [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes “Loch Lomond”] As a result of that, he’d started performing in a kilt, and calling himself Tiny “Mac” Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders. Grimes first met Hawkins backstage at the Moondog Coronation Ball — a legendary gig put on by Alan Freed in 1952, which was the first big sign to Freed of just how successful rock and roll was going to become. At that show, so many more people tried to get in than the venue had capacity for — thanks, largely, to forged tickets being sold — that the show became dangerously overcrowded, and had to be cancelled after a single song from the first artist on the bill. So Grimes didn’t get to play that day, but Jalacey Hawkins, as he was still then known, managed to get himself backstage and meet Grimes. Hawkins did this through Freed, who Hawkins had got to know shortly after his discharge from the military. When he’d got back to Cleveland, he’d heard Freed on the radio and been amazed that they let a black man have his own show, so he’d gone down to the radio station to meet him, and been even more amazed to find out that the man who sounded black, and was playing black music, was in fact white. For decades afterwards, Hawkins would describe Freed as one of the very few white people in the world who actually cared about black people and black music. The two had struck up a friendship, and Hawkins had managed to get backstage at Freed’s show. When he did, he just went up to Grimes and asked for a job. Grimes gave him a job as a combination road manager and musician — Hawkins would play piano and saxophone, sing occasionally, and was also (according to Hawkins) Grimes’ valet and dog walker. Working with Grimes is where Hawkins first started performing outrageously on stage. Grimes’ band already dressed in Scottish clothing, and put on quite a bit of a show, but Hawkins pushed things a little further. He would, for example, come out on stage in his kilt and with tins of Carnation evaporated milk hanging on his chest as if they were breasts. He would then sing Ruth Brown’s hit “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”. [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” According to Hawkins, Ruth Brown came to see the show at one point, and said of him “This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me”. That doesn’t sound especially like Brown, it has to be said. Hawkins started recording with Grimes, and started to be billed as “Screamin’ Jay Hawkins” — a stage name which, again, he gave varying origins for. The most likely seems to be the one he gave in a documentary, in which he said that he couldn’t sing, but had to take lead vocals, so he decided to just scream everything, because at least that would be different. Quite how that tallies with his ability to sing better than Ruth Brown, it’s best not to wonder. Either way, his early recordings show him trying to fit into the standard R&B vocal styles of the time, rather than screaming. On his first record, with Grimes, he’s not the blues shouter that he had a reputation of being, and nor is he the screamer he would later become — instead he sounds like he’s imitating Clyde McPhatter’s singing on “The Bells” by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, but in a bass register somewhat reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Compare Hawkins here: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Why Did You Waste My Time?”] With McPhatter on the Billy Ward record: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and His Dominoes, “The Bells”] You can hear the resemblance there, I’m sure. At this point Hawkins had a certain amount of potential, but was just one of a million smooth blues singers, who relied more on stage gimmicks than on singing ability. But those stage gimmicks were making him a breakout star in Grimes’ band, and so at a recording session for Grimes, it was agreed that Hawkins could record a single of his own at the end of the session, if there was time. Hawkins’ attitude quickly caused problems for him, though. During the recording of “Screamin’ Blues”, which would have been his first single, he got into an argument with Ahmet Ertegun, who kept telling him to sing the song more smoothly, like Fats Domino. Accounts of what happened next vary — Hawkins’ most frequent version was that he ended up punching Ertegun, though other people just say that the two got into a screaming row. Either way, the session was abandoned, and Hawkins soon ended up out of Grimes’ band. He worked with a few different bands, before getting a big break as Fats Domino’s opening act. He only lasted a few weeks in that role — depending on who you asked, Domino either fired Hawkins for being vulgar on stage and screaming, as Domino claimed, or because he was jealous of Hawkins’ great leopardskin suit, as Hawkins would sometimes claim. Wynonie Harris saw something in Hawkins, and helped him get his first solo shows in New York, and on the back of these he made his first records as a solo artist, for the tiny label Timely Records, under his birth name, Jalacey Hawkins, and featuring Mickey Baker, who would play on most of his fifties sessions, on guitar: [Excerpt: Jalacey Hawkins, “Baptize Me in Wine”] But unfortunately, after two of these singles, Timely Records folded, and Hawkins had to find another label. He moved on to Grand Records, and started recording as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. By this time, he had started using some of the gimmicks he would use in his stage show, though for the most part his act was still fairly tame by modern standards. He was also still, at least in the recording studio, making fairly standard jump blues records, like this one, the first he recorded as a solo artist under his stage name: [Excerpt, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Take Me Back”] That was the only single that saw release from his time with Grand Records, and it’s not even certain that it was released until a year or so later — reports seem to vary about this. But it was while he was recording for Grand Records that he wrote the song that would bring him worldwide fame. It came about, as so much of Hawkins’ life did, from his mistreatment of a woman. He was playing a residency in Atlantic City, and he had a live-in girlfriend from Philadelphia. But, as was always the case with Hawkins, he was cheating on her with multiple other women. Eventually she figured this out, and walked into the bar in the middle of one of his sets, threw his keys onto the stage, and walked out, blowing him a kiss. He didn’t realise what had happened until he was talking to the barmaid later, and she explained to him that no, that meant his girlfriend was definitely leaving. He brooded over this for a day, and then had another conversation with the barmaid, and told her he was planning to go to Philadelphia to get the girl back. She said “so you think she’ll come back to you, do you?” and he replied “yes, I’ll get her back, even if I have to put a spell on her — that’s it! I’ll write a song about putting a spell on her, and she’ll realise how much I love her and come back!” Hawkins would later claim that when, two years later, the song was finally released, she did come back — not because of “I Put A Spell On You”, but because she loved the B-side, a song called “Little Demon”. As Hawkins told the story, she came back to him, they stayed together for four months, and then he dumped her. He hadn’t wanted her back because he loved her, he’d wanted her back so that he could be the one to do the dumping, not her. Whatever the truth of that last part, he recorded “I Put A Spell on You” some time around late 1954, but that version wouldn’t be released until decades later: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell on You (unreleased version)”] It’s a decent record, but there’s something missing, and for whatever reason, it never came out. Instead, he signed to yet another label, Mercury, which was at the time somewhere between a large independent label and a small major, and started putting out singles just as “Jay Hawkins”. By this time, he’d found a regular team of people to work with — Leroy Kirkland was the arranger, and Mickey Baker would play guitar, Sam “the Man” Taylor and Al Sears were on saxophone, and Panama Francis was on drums. That core team would work on everything he did for the next couple of years. It was while he was at Mercury that he hit on the style he would use from that point on, with a B-side called “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”, a song about voodoo and threatening to murder a woman who’d cast a spell on him that, in retrospect, has all the elements of Hawkins’ later hit in place, just with the wrong song: [Excerpt: Jay Hawkins, “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”] That was Hawkins’ first truly great record, but it was hidden away on a B-side and did nothing. After a couple more singles, Hawkins was once again dropped by his label — but once again, he moved on to a slightly bigger label, this time to OKeh, which was a subsidiary of Columbia, one of the biggest labels in the country. And in September 1956, he went into the studio to record his first single for them, which was to be a new version of “I Put a Spell on You”. But Arnold Maxim, the producer at the session, wanted something a bit different from Hawkins. He thought that everyone sounded a little too staid, a little too uptight, and he asked why they couldn’t sound in the studio like they did when they were having fun on stage and really cutting loose. Hawkins replied that when they were on stage everyone was usually so drunk they couldn’t *remember* what it was they’d been doing. So Maxim decided to order in some crates of beer and fried chicken, and told them “this isn’t a recording session, it’s a party. Have fun.” When they were drunk enough, he started recording, and the result was this: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] Now, in later years, Hawkins would try to claim that he had been tricked into that performance, and that he’d had to relearn the song from the record after the fact, because he couldn’t remember what it was he’d been doing. In truth, though, it’s not that different from a record like “(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)”, and it seems more than likely that this is yet more of Hawkins’ exaggeration. The record didn’t chart, because many radio stations refused to play it, but it nonetheless became a classic and reportedly sold over a million copies. This was in part due to the efforts of Alan Freed. Hawkins was already starting to play up his stage persona even more — wearing capes and bones through his nose, and trying to portray a voodoo image. But when he was booked as the headline act on a Christmas show Freed put together in 1956, Freed surprised him by telling him he’d had a great idea for the show — he’d got hold of a coffin, and Hawkins could start his performance by rising out of the coffin like a vampire or zombie. Hawkins was horrified. He told Freed that there was only one time a black man was ever getting into a coffin, and that was when he was never getting out again. Freed insisted, and eventually ended up paying Hawkins a large bonus — which Hawkins would later claim was multiple thousands of dollars, but which actually seems to have been about three hundred dollars, itself a lot of money in 1956. Hawkins eventually agreed, though he kept a finger between the coffin and the lid, so it couldn’t close completely on him. This was the start of Hawkins’ career as a shock-rocker, and he became known as “the black Vincent Price” for his stage shows which would include not only the coffin but also a skull on a stick with smoke coming out of it (the skull was named Henry) and a giant rubber snake. Many horror-themed rock acts of the future, such as Alice Cooper or the Cramps, would later use elements of Hawkins’ stage shows — and he would increasingly make music to match the show, so that he later recorded a song called “Constipation Blues”, which he would perform while sitting on a toilet on stage. But in 1957, neither he nor the record label seemed quite sure what they should do to follow up “I Put a Spell on You”. That record had traded heavily on its shock value, to the extent that OKeh’s trade ads contained the line “DJs be brave — if you get fired, we’ll get you a job!” however, only one DJ did get fired for playing it, one Bob Friesen. He contacted OKeh, but they didn’t get him a job — and eventually someone working for the company told Billboard this, Billboard publicised the story, and another station hired Friesen for the publicity that would get them. OKeh actually edited the single shortly after release, to get rid of some of the grunts at the end, which people variously described as “orgiastic” and “cannibalistic”, but it didn’t make the record any more palatable to the professionally outraged. But the next record went completely the other way — a cover version of the old standard “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do it)”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)”] I can see why they thought that was a good idea before recording it — Fats Domino had just had a massive hit with “Blueberry Hill”, another old standard done in a similar arrangement to the one on Hawkins’ record, but still… The next couple of records were more in the style one might expect from Hawkins, a track called “Frenzy”, and a great Leiber and Stoller swamp-rocker called “Alligator Wine”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Alligator Wine”] But neither of those was a success either — partly because Hawkins went too far in the other direction. He had the opportunity to appear in Alan Freed’s film “Mister Rock and Roll” to promote “Frenzy”, but while every other act in the film performed in suits or were similarly well-dressed, Hawkins insisted on performing naked apart from a loincloth, with his hair sticking up, white face-paint, and carrying a spear and a shield — his idea of what a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya looked like (the Mau Mau fighters did not look like this). Or at least that was his later description of what he was wearing. Others who’ve seen the footage suggest it wasn’t quite that extreme, but still involved him being half-naked and looking like a “native”. Hawkins had already been getting a certain amount of criticism from the NAACP and other civil rights groups because they believed that he was making black people look bad by associating them with voodoo and cannibalism. Paramount Pictures decided that they didn’t particularly want to have their film picketed, and so removed Hawkins’ section from the film. Hawkins’ attitude to the NAACP was that as far as he was concerned the only thing they were doing for black people was trying to stop him earning a living, and he wanted nothing to do with them. (This was not a common attitude among black people at the time, as you might imagine.) And so, once again, things went to the other extreme. Hawkins put out his first album. It was called “At Home With Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”, had a cheery photo of Hawkins in a Santa hat on the cover, and mixed in his recent singles, a couple of new originals (including one called “Hong Kong” which is mostly just Hawkins making racist “ching chong” sounds) and… versions of “I Love Paris in the Springtime”, “Ol’ Man River”, and other extremely non-voodoo-shock-rock songs. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a success. He was dropped by OKeh and moved to a tiny label, where he started recording more idiosyncratic material like “Armpit #6”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Armpit #6”] But any chance of a comeback was pretty much destroyed when he was arrested in 1958 for possession of cannabis and statutory rape, after having had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. After he got out of prison, he moved to Hawaii for a while, and became a performer again, although there was a temporary hiccup in his career when his girlfriend and singing partner stabbed him after she found out he’d married someone else without telling her. She presumably also didn’t know that he was still married to his first wife at the time. Hawkins’ career remained in the doldrums until 1965, when two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Nina Simone recorded a cover version of “I Put a Spell on You”, which made the top thirty in the US charts: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “I Put a Spell on You”] The second was that Hawkins got rediscovered in the UK, in quite a big way. There was a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, which was legendary in soul and R&B circles — to the extent that when I saw P.P. Arnold in its successor venue Night People two weeks ago, she kept referring to it as the Twisted Wheel, even though the original club closed down in 1971, because she had such strong memories of the original venue. And among the regular attendees of that club were a group of people who loved the few Screamin’ Jay Hawkins records they’d been able to get hold of. Hawkins had been popular enough that a British act, Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, had stolen his act wholesale, cape, coffin, and all: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Jack the Ripper”] Screamin’ Lord Sutch would later go on to form the Monster Raving Loony Party, a political party intended as a joke that still continues to field candidates at every election twenty years after Sutch’s death. But while people like Sutch had admired him, Hawkins was mostly a legend in British blues circles, someone about whom almost nothing was known. But then some of the Twisted Wheel people went to see Little Richard at the Oasis club, another famous Manchester venue, and got chatting to Don “Sugarcane” Harris, from the support act Don and Dewey. He mentioned that he’d recently seen Hawkins, and he was still doing the same show, and so the British blues and soul fans tracked him down and persuaded the promoter Don Arden to put on a tour of the UK, with Hawkins using the Twisted Wheel as his base. The tour wasn’t a commercial success, but it built Hawkins’ reputation in Britain to the point that it seemed like *every* beat group wanted to record “I Put a Spell on You”. Between 1965 and 1968, it was recorded by Manfred Mann, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Animals, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and Alan Price, who made the top ten in the UK with his version: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put a Spell on You”] Hawkins even got to record a second album, finally, in Abbey Road studios, and he started to tour Europe successfully and build up a major fanbase. But Hawkins’ self-destructive — and other-people-destructive — tendencies kicked in. The next few decades would follow a recurring pattern — Hawkins would get some big break, like opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or recording an album with Keith Richards guesting, or finally getting to appear in a film. Every time, he would let his addictions to alcohol or codeine overtake him, or he would rip a friend off for a trifling sum of money, or he would just get married bigamously again. Much of the time, he was living in one-room apartments, sometimes with no electricity. He married six times in total, and was abusive towards at least some of his wives. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins died in 2000 after emergency surgery for an aneurysm. His fifth wife, one of the two who seem to have been actually important to him in some way, has dropped strong hints that he was killed by his sixth wife, who he had been claiming was poisoning him, though there’s no evidence for that other than that she was strongly disliked by many of the people around Hawkins. When he died, he was seventy, and his current wife was thirty-one. Many people claimed that they had visitations from Hawkins’ ghost in the days after his death, but the thing that seems to sum him up in the afterlife the most is his legacy to his family. He sold the rights to “I Put a Spell on You” shortly before his death, for twenty-five thousand dollars, which means his estate gets no songwriting royalties from his one big hit. He hadn’t made a will since the 1970s, and that will left most of his money to his second wife, Ginny, who most people seem to agree deserved it if anyone did — she was with him for sixteen years, and tolerated the worst of his behaviour. He also left an amount to a niece of his. As for his kids? Well, none of the seventy or however many illegitimate children he had saw a penny from his will. His three legitimate children, he left a dollar each. At least one of them, his daughter Sookie, didn’t get her dollar — it went to her cousin, who didn’t pass it on to her. And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman’s biography. “My father thought he was all that, but not to me. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins didn’t treat people right. He was a performer, but he didn’t treat people right.”

In an episode first aired on August 6, 2019: DJ Andrew Sandoval spins an incredible selection of rare 1960's 45's by Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, Sounds Bob Rogers, Alan Price, The Cherokees, Boo Boo And Bunky, Mike Furber And The Bowery Boys, The Poets, The Symbols, The Concinnators, Winston G., Hograth, Normie Rowe, Forever And Ever, The Changing Image, The Avengers, The Illusive Dream, The Arbors, The Cats, The Fool and The Tea Company. In part two, he turns the Sunshine spotlight onto The Staccatos and their offshoot, Five Man Electrical Band for some outstanding sides spanning 1965-1968.

Alan Price, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum welcomed guests to JFK Space Fest 2019 and introduced a video greeting from NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch aboard the International Space Station (ISS).  Following this welcome and greeting, Dr. Franklin Chang Díaz, founder and CEO of the Ad Astra Rocket Company, discussed his research and career, including 25 years’ service as a NASA astronaut and a veteran of seven space shuttle flights. He is the author of Dream’s Journey and To Mars and Beyond, FAST! You can watch a video of this event via the JFK Library's website.

Hamilton Bohannon [00:33] a side: "South African Man (Pt. 1)" b side: "Have a Good Day" Dakar Records DK 4539 1974 Some fabulous funk and some innnnteresting ez groovin from the man known as Bohannon. Freakwater [08:09] a side: "South of Cincinnati" b side: "Count Me Out" Thrill Jockey thrill 027 1995 A mighty fine cover of Dwight Yoakam from these Louisville Gal on the great Thrill Jockey label. The b-side is their bandmate David Wayne Gay Fun fact: Did you know there is a K-Tel compilation called "Alt.Country Exposed Roots". It's true. Do you remember Usenet? I remember Usenet. Shonen Knife [17:36] a side: "Space Christmas" b side: "Christmas Message '91" Rockville Records ROCK6075-7 1991 Christmas in July?! Your Old Pal Will is insane... for Shonen Knife. Featuring the originals Naoko and Atsuko Yamano and Michie Nakatani. Thou [25:20] a side: "Spin the Black Circle" b side: "No Excuses" Sisters in Christ SIC001 2015 A very grungy 2015 Record Store Day release from Louisiana's own Thou. The Police [34:32] a side: "Spirits in the Material World" b side: "Flexible Strategies" A&M Records 2390-S 1981 If you want a glimpse into the world of conflict that is The Police, Mssr le Sting wrote this song on a Casio and wanted to keep it entirely synth based but eventually let Andy Summers play guitar along with the synth. Compromise! And the b-side is, well, very jamtastic. Classics IV [41:21] a side: "Spooky" b side: "Poor People" Imperial Records 66259 1967 That is one cool spooky groove. Fine cover versions can also be heard by Dusty Springfield (https://youtu.be/Fola80rQop4), Jazz Butcher (https://youtu.be/wFielGAVxUk), and Daniel Ash (https://youtu.be/5NYQ34Zf7Lo). The b-side "Poor People" is a bit more sunshine-y, though in my mind pales in comparison of Alan Price's completely unrelated song "Poor People". And that's... my two-cents. The Alarm [48:26] a side: "The Stand" b side: "Reason 41" IRS Records IR-9922 1983 From the land of the red dragon, The Alarm dropped this IRS single in 1983 and while if failed to chart in the US, it did receive plenty of rotation on good ol' MTV. Pavement [54:22] a side: "Stereo" b side: "Birds in the Majic Industry" Domino Records RUG51 1997 Well, how did it get so high (https://youtu.be/GrJyTeuQCzo)? Music behind the DJ: "A Shot in the Dark" by Jimmy Haskell.

Alan Price, who joined the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum as its 6th director in 2018, tells us why he took the job and what he hopes to do as the Library’s latest steward. Plus, learn more about what the roles of Presidential Libraries are and why they’re important.

Hazel, Dandelion, Blackberry and Clover? No, we’re not making a salad, instead we’re discussing the 1978 animated retelling of the Richard Adam’s novel Watership Down. Join us in episode #17 as we heed Fiver’s warnings and search for our new warren. SHOWNOTES Watership Down - Criterion Director - Martin Rosen    The Plague Dogs (1982)       Theme Song - “Time and Tide”  by Alan Price (original keyboardist for The Animals)          The House of the Rising Sun          Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood Hazel - John Hurt (Died Jan 25, 2017)  (207 acting credits)    Alien (1979)    The Elephant Man (1980)    The Plague Dogs as Snitter (1982)    Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)    Hellboy (2004)    V for Vendetta (2005)    Melancholia (2011)    Doctor Who as The War Doctor in 3 episodes (2013)    Watership Down mini-series as General Woundwort (1999 -2000) Fiver - Richard Briers (Died Feb 17, 2013 Bigwig - Michael Graham Cox (Died Apr 30, 1995) Captain Holly - John Bennett (April 11, 2005) Chief Rabbit - Ralph Richardson (Died Oct 10, 1983) Blackberry - Simon Cadell (Died March 6, 1996) Silver - Terence Rigby (Died August 10, 2008) Pipkin - Roy Kinnear (Died September 20, 1988) Dandelion - Richard O’Callaghan (Still Alive?) Cat - Lynn Farleigh (Still Alive?) General Woundwort - Harry Andrews (Died March 6, 1989) Cowslip - Denholm Elliott    Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) Clover - Mary Maddox Kehaar (Bird) - Zero Mostel (comedian) The only black man (Clifton Jones) plays a character named “Blackavar” Watership Down references in the TV Show “Lost” Movies with similar stories / plots include Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Secret of NIMH Other movies mentioned:    Raiders of The Lost Ark    The Dark Crystal    Floyd Norman - An Animated Life    The Inbetweeners

In the last few years packaging has got ridiculous....even small items like batteries require a Swiss army knife to get through the packaging....even food like biscuits are another example....the plastic packaging is only thin but unless you are Arnold Swartzenager you cannot open it without scissors.....even buying stuff online leaves you with a mountain of cardboard....aren't we supposed to be saving the environment?....speaking of which I am about to tax my car...£315 for a year !!!!!!....a friend of mine has a Mini Cooper and she pays £20 a year....apparently it's all about the emissions....what the hell that's got to do with ROAD tax is beyond me...another way to rip us off. 2.Us oldies go on about modern songs not being "as good as the ones from our generation"....I recently heard "Rosetta are you better" by Alan Price and Georgie Fame which has to be one of the worst songs of all time....I was unfortunate enough to see them both live in Liverpool....all they did was fool around on stage with total disrespect for the audience....this reminded me of some other bad hits....The Jarrow Lads was as bad as it gets.....others that spring to mind are Tell Laura I Love Her by Ricky Valance......I won't even mention Love Me Do.........and I notice the BBC are playing Cliff Richard's latest record....I wonder if that was part of the settlement deal?........and it was nice to see The Fonz get a long deserved Emmy Award...I was a big fan of Henry Winkler back in the day and was really jealous when one of my mates was mistaken for him on holiday....he even signed an autograph....I never forgave him. 3.I have to announce I have now completely lost interest in Brexit and have no idea what it is all about....it has lost me....all I see when it constantly comes up on the news is a load of politicians arguing over whether we should stay or go when all they are ACTUALLY doing is worrying about their overpaid jobs....I now couldn't care less one way or another....all the political parties should join together and form one big one called "The I'm Alright Jack Party"....the problem I have with politics is the total lack of charisma amongst the characters.....some politician will come on and go on about one thing or another....totally biassed...and bore us all to death.....what is required is someone like John Cleese to get the point over....then people would listen. 4.Talking of which I thought the Monty Python lot were so far ahead of their time.....when you watch The Life of Brian and look beneath the comedy the messages put across are sheer genius....the film shows the gullibility and stupidity of the human race with scenes like "what have the Romans done for us?"......and everyone following the wrong messiah.....and what is classic so many people missed the point....especially the Yanks who saw it as anti religious which it wasn't.....it is definitely my favourite film of all time.....nothing can be more original than three kings following the star and going to the wrong house......priceless. 5.The song this week is one I co-wrote with a very talented lady friend of mine called Patricia Knapton who writes wonderful poetry ....the song is called "The Colour of Time" and observes a painter seeing the world as a perfect place via his painting....and says if only we could see the world through his eyes......the answer is in the last line of the song

In the last few years packaging has got ridiculous....even small items like batteries require a Swiss army knife to get through the packaging....even food like biscuits are another example....the plastic packaging is only thin but unless you are Arnold Swartzenager you cannot open it without scissors.....even buying stuff online leaves you with a mountain of cardboard....aren't we supposed to be saving the environment?....speaking of which I am about to tax my car...£315 for a year !!!!!!....a friend of mine has a Mini Cooper and she pays £20 a year....apparently it's all about the emissions....what the hell that's got to do with ROAD tax is beyond me...another way to rip us off. 2.Us oldies go on about modern songs not being "as good as the ones from our generation"....I recently heard "Rosetta are you better" by Alan Price and Georgie Fame which has to be one of the worst songs of all time....I was unfortunate enough to see them both live in Liverpool....all they did was fool around on stage with total disrespect for the audience....this reminded me of some other bad hits....The Jarrow Lads was as bad as it gets.....others that spring to mind are Tell Laura I Love Her by Ricky Valance......I won't even mention Love Me Do.........and I notice the BBC are playing Cliff Richard's latest record....I wonder if that was part of the settlement deal?........and it was nice to see The Fonz get a long deserved Emmy Award...I was a big fan of Henry Winkler back in the day and was really jealous when one of my mates was mistaken for him on holiday....he even signed an autograph....I never forgave him. 3.I have to announce I have now completely lost interest in Brexit and have no idea what it is all about....it has lost me....all I see when it constantly comes up on the news is a load of politicians arguing over whether we should stay or go when all they are ACTUALLY doing is worrying about their overpaid jobs....I now couldn't care less one way or another....all the political parties should join together and form one big one called "The I'm Alright Jack Party"....the problem I have with politics is the total lack of charisma amongst the characters.....some politician will come on and go on about one thing or another....totally biassed...and bore us all to death.....what is required is someone like John Cleese to get the point over....then people would listen. 4.Talking of which I thought the Monty Python lot were so far ahead of their time.....when you watch The Life of Brian and look beneath the comedy the messages put across are sheer genius....the film shows the gullibility and stupidity of the human race with scenes like "what have the Romans done for us?"......and everyone following the wrong messiah.....and what is classic so many people missed the point....especially the Yanks who saw it as anti religious which it wasn't.....it is definitely my favourite film of all time.....nothing can be more original than three kings following the star and going to the wrong house......priceless. 5.The song this week is one I co-wrote with a very talented lady friend of mine called Patricia Knapton who writes wonderful poetry ....the song is called "The Colour of Time" and observes a painter seeing the world as a perfect place via his painting....and says if only we could see the world through his eyes......the answer is in the last line of the song

Movie Meltdown - Episode 425 This is an episode years in the making... we sit down for not only a group discussion of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!, but we also talk with the star of the movie – MALCOLM McDOWELL! We get his thoughts on this often over-looked film as well as his role in creating the project and his relationship with the director. Plus we feature a bonus segment with one of the co-stars of the film Jeremy Bulloch (aka Boba Fett). And as we finally come to terms with just how you lose the spirit of life, we also mention... Ladybird, The Florida Project, Easy, Mother!, Judex, The Boxtrolls, If…, Alan Price, Greta Gerwig, Whiplash, the aspect ratio set wrong, If…, movies should be more like American short stories, Patton Oswalt, Holy Mountain, it’s a wonder my wife hasn’t murdered me, Brooklyn, trash on the streets, majestic feel… picaresque quality, trying to interpret a dream, the word spiffy…, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, after we won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Robert McKee, it’s creating this unnatural look, Jerry Maguire kicked you right out, so personal and so dense, Putney Swope, Ghost World, fictional brothers, a city of zero waste people, Voltaire's Candide… Heaven is my Destination by Thornton Wilder and Kafka's Amerika, I Heart Huckabees, I feel like he ruined a whole generation of screenwriters, it’s a spectrum of guys, it’s sort of that first short story everybody writes, the It Follows toothpaste, Willem Dafoe, people used to say my name with three syllables, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, taking on different aspects of things he’s shoved into, Peter Greenaway, just a voyeur, The President's Analyst, a blunt-faced British guy… with wry expressions, Terry Gilliam, stylistic for the sake of it, Philip Stone, the role of you, Mike Birbiglia did that one time at a La Quinta hotel, he was teaching ballroom dance to dwarf inner city kids, you’re not lost in the dream of it, Monty Python films, this weird hierarchy of society based on the color hat you wear… and cheese tasting, it’s almost like too much my kind of thing… for me, he’s like the human sloth, Ramsay Bolton, a passive observer, a half-human half-pig… dinosaur, the old American hobo symbol for crazy kids, encoded meaning, our day-to-day lives are just filled with absurdity, Warren Clarke, I had lots of strange things going through my mind, seeing a different perception, Don’t Look Back, it’s a document of the process of making a movie, Ken Russell, what a weird world, you can have tea but you’ve gotta pay me for the biscuits, the gold shiny suit and post-apocalyptic world, after my break-up with the movies, getting performances out of non-actors, his voice always reminds me of wearing a shirt that’s just slightly too small, Never Apologize, a totem for you to react through, are pigs just fleshy dinosaurs, we are very fortunate, detritus, Brechtian artifice and alternate egos. Spoiler Alert: Full spoilers for the 1973 film O Lucky Man!, so watch it before you listen. “…that scene, that and a couple of others, you just stop and you’re like - ‘What the hell am I watching? Like this is… so bizarre.' "