Podcast appearances and mentions of andrew thrasher

A well-diversified portfolio is vital to any investor's success. As an individual investor, you need to make sure your asset allocation best conforms to your personal investment goals and risk tolerance. Schedule your complimentary Next Steps meeting today! www.yourlifeafterwork.com 800-928-4001 Resources – “How A Portfolio Manager Handles Volatile Markets”, article by Andrew Thrasher, CMT How A Portfolio Manager Handles Volatile Markets - The Financial Enhancement Group (yourlifeafterwork.com)   Connect with Financial Enhancement Group: Visit our Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/FinancialEnhancementGroup Join our Facebook Group at www.yourlifeafterwork.com/FinancialTidbits Visit our website at www.yourlifeafterwork.com   We would love to answer your questions on air! Give us a call at 800-928-4001 or send them to TalkToFEG@yourlifeafterwork.com

Simplify's Michael Green and Harley Bassman are joined by Chartered Market Technician, Andrew Thrasher, to discuss market technicals and volatility as it pertains to practitioners. For more information, visit http://www.simplify.us.

Show Notes:1. Tweet from Ryan Detrick -https://twitter.com/RyanDetrick/status/15049123547981865012. Tweet from Andrew Thrasher - https://twitter.com/AndrewThrasher/status/15040856787491102783. Article written by JC Parets -https://allstarcharts.com/cash-levels-near-multi-decade-highs/4. Tweet by Callie Cox -https://twitter.com/callieabost/status/1503826930466009096?s=11Social Media:Facebook/Linkedin @JessupWealth ManagementInstagram/Twitter @JessupWealth

Investors, the Federal Reserve, and businesses continuously monitor and worry about the level of inflation. Rising inflation can be harmful: input prices are higher, consumers may lose purchasing power unless their incomes rise, and monetary policy measures to contain inflation can damage growth and employment. Join us with our special guest, Andrew Thrasher, as we talk about inflation and the stock market. Schedule your complimentary Next Steps meeting today! www.yourlifeafterwork.com 800-928-4001 Resources - Inflation: Don't Forget It & How To Plan For It - The Financial Enhancement Group (yourlifeafterwork.com)   Connect with Financial Enhancement Group: Visit our Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/FinancialEnhancementGroup Join our Facebook Group at www.yourlifeafterwork.com/FinancialTidbits Visit our website at www.yourlifeafterwork.com   We would love to answer your questions on air! Give us a call at 800-928-4001 or send them to TalkToFEG@yourlifeafterwork.com

Investors, the Federal Reserve, and businesses continuously monitor and worry about the level of inflation. Rising inflation can be harmful: input prices are higher, consumers may lose purchasing power unless their incomes rise, and monetary policy measures to contain inflation can damage growth and employment. Join us with our special guest, Andrew Thrasher, as we talk about inflation and the stock market. Schedule your complimentary Next Steps meeting today! www.yourlifeafterwork.com 800-928-4001   Connect with Financial Enhancement Group: Visit our Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/FinancialEnhancementGroup Join our Facebook Group at www.yourlifeafterwork.com/FinancialTidbits Visit our website at www.yourlifeafterwork.com   We would love to answer your questions on air! Give us a call at 800-928-4001 or send them to TalkToFEG@yourlifeafterwork.com

Many people go into investing with an idea of how much they are going to make, but what happens when there is a drawdown in the market and you don't have a plan to protect yourself? We will discuss diversification, volatility, drawdowns, and more on this episode! Resources "Drawdown Protection" Consider This Program with Joe Clark, CFP and Adam Harter, CFA Drawdown Protection - The Financial Enhancement Group (yourlifeafterwork.com) "Preparing for Volatility" Consider This Program with Joe Clark, CFP and Grant Soliven, AIF. Preparing For Volatility - Episode 1077 - The Financial Enhancement Group (yourlifeafterwork.com) "Knowing the differences between Risk and Volatility" article by Joe Clark, CFP Knowing the Differences Between Risk and Volatility - The Financial Enhancement Group (yourlifeafterwork.com) "How A Portfolio Manager Handles Volatile Markets" article from Andrew Thrasher, CMT How A Portfolio Manager Handles Volatile Markets - The Financial Enhancement Group (yourlifeafterwork.com)   Connect with Financial Enhancement Group: Visit our Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/FinancialEnhancementGroup Join our Facebook Group at www.yourlifeafterwork.com/FinancialTidbits Visit our website at www.yourlifeafterwork.com   We would love to answer your questions on air! Give us a call at 800-928-4001 or send them to TalkToFEG@yourlifeafterwork.com

In this episode we take a deep dive into technical analysis with Andrew Thrasher, founder of Thrasher Analytics and portfolio manager at the Financial Enhancement Group. We look at the major tools that technicians use and the methods they utilize to apply them. We go through a real world example using the S&P 500 to see how these tools are put into practice. We also cover his excellent paper "Forecasting Volatility Tsunamis" and discuss the conditions that he found were typically present prior to significant spikes in market volatility. We hope you enjoy the discussion. ABOUT THE PODCAST Excess Returns is an investing podcast hosted by Jack Forehand (@practicalquant) and Justin Carbonneau (@jjcarbonneau), partners at Validea. Justin and Jack discuss a wide range of investing topics including factor investing, value investing, momentum investing, multi-factor investing, trend following, market valuation and more with the goal of helping those who watch and listen become better long term investors. SEE LATEST EPISODES https://www.validea.com/excess-returns-podcast FIND OUT MORE ABOUT VALIDEA https://www.validea.com FOLLOW OUR BLOG https://blog.validea.com FIND OUT MORE ABOUT VALIDEA CAPITAL https://www.valideacapital.com FOLLOW JACK Twitter: https://twitter.com/practicalquant LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-forehand-8015094 FOLLOW JUSTIN Twitter: https://twitter.com/jjcarbonneau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcarbonneau

1. Tweet from Jeff Levine - https://twitter.com/CPAPlanner/status/14537083009193984032. Tweet from Andrew Thrasher - https://twitter.com/AndrewThrasher/status/14505089016365301793. Blog post by Sam Ro - https://www.tker.co/p/stock-market-historical-facts4. Tweet by Samantha Russell - https://twitter.com/samanthatwenty/status/1454073210258042890?s=115. Tweet by Michael Batnick - https://twitter.com/michaelbatnick/status/1453724182236176385?s=116. Tweet by FactSet - https://twitter.com/factset/status/1452789327038136325?s=117. Article written by Christine Benz - https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1002654/can-you-save-too-much-in-a-health-savings-account@JessupWealth on Instagram and Twitter@JessupWealthManagement on Facebook and LinkedIn

I'm Ed Gotham, your host today and I have the pleasure of introducing Andrew Thrasher. Andrew Thrasher is the portfolio manager for the Financial Enhancement Group an Indiana-based asset management firm. He's also the founder of Thrasher Analytics, a research & analysis service for financial advisors and investment institutions. We dig into the current market downturn and what to expect moving forward, we touch on the US election as well as sector rotation strategies, risk management, and planning for retirement.Enjoy. Follow Andrew @AndrewThrasher on twitter and http://www.athrasher.com/ Want further Opto insights? Check out our daily newsletter: https://www.cmcmarkets.com/en-gb/opto/newsletter

JC Parets · Happy Hour w/ Traders: The Breadth Debate feat. Thrasher, Strazza, Hurley & Delwiche This podcast episode comes directly from our Youtube Channel. On this Happy Hour with Traders Video, I brought together some of the best minds when it comes to stock market breadth. You see all the breadth charts on twitter and you always hear debate about whether market breadth is weakening or improving. I think this round table discussion clears up a lot of misconceptions about the subject. I think it also gave each of us new ideas about how to approach the market from a weight-of-the-evidence perspective. I know I definitely got some new ideas that I want to start to do some more work on. This is why we have these conversions. I'm fortunate to have really smart friends around the world that all view markets in their own unique ways. So I'm going to try my best to show them off so you can learn from them too! Here's the latest Happy Hour with special guests Andrew Thrasher, Willie Delwiche, Mike Hurley and Steve Strazza. Enjoy! Click here return to the episode page

This podcast episode comes directly from our Youtube Channel. On this Happy Hour with Traders Video, I brought together some of the best minds when it comes to stock market breadth. You see all the breadth charts on twitter and you always hear debate about whether market breadth is weakening or improving. I think this round table discussion clears up a lot of misconceptions about the subject. I think it also gave each of us new ideas about how to approach the market from a weight-of-the-evidence perspective. I know I definitely got some new ideas that I want to start to do some more work on. This is why we have these conversions. I'm fortunate to have really smart friends around the world that all view markets in their own unique ways. So I'm going to try my best to show them off so you can learn from them too! Here's the latest Happy Hour with special guests Andrew Thrasher, Willie Delwiche, Mike Hurley and Steve Strazza. Enjoy!

Today on Consider This Program we talk about what to do with an old insurance policy, Technical Trading with Andrew Thrasher, and what is Bracket Bumping?

Andrew Thrasher, a Portfolio Manager at Financial Enhancement Group and Founder of Thrasher Analytics, discusses trading through the current volatile landscape seen across equity and FX markets. How can risk management be best achieved during volatile markets? And, what are the best instruments to gauge volatility in markets? Find out the answer to these questions and more on this episode of Trading Global Markets Decoded.

The videos of all the presentations are now up and you can go to ChartSummit.com and stream them for FREE! As we always like to do here after Chart Summit, Steve Strazza and I sat down to discuss what we just witnessed. This was one of the most amazing list of speakers I've ever seen at a Financial Conference. I can't even believe we were able to pull this off! Plus, we raised over $50,000 in donations, on the first day alone, to help fight coronavirus. Thank you to everyone who attended and donated! Also, big shoutout to Traders4ACause for helping us choose the organizations we're donating to and collecting all the money. We could not have done this without you! In this episode, we talk about the best presentations, the best charts and the common themes among the presenters. I think it always adds value to think back at what was discussed and reiterate a few of the important points that were being made by the best in the business. From Brian Shannon, Ari Wald, Craig Johnson, Gina Martin Adams, Andrew Thrasher, Frank Cappelleri, Paul Ciana, the list goes on and on....We discussed the current environment for the US and Global Stocks, Interest rates around the world, Gold and other metals, US Dollar and other currencies around the globe. There was so much value. This was my favorite Financial Conference of all time. Easily. I hope you enjoy our discussion, and make sure to check out all the presentations at ChartSummit.com!

Chart Summit 2020 is officially in the books. What an amazing time we had. Wow!  The videos of all the presentations are now up and you can go to ChartSummit.com and stream them for FREE! As we always like to do here after Chart Summit, Steve Strazza and I sat down to discuss what we just witnessed. This was one of the most amazing list of speakers I've ever seen at a Financial Conference. I can't even believe we were able to pull this off! Plus, we raised over $50,000 in donations, on the first day alone, to help fight coronavirus. Thank you to everyone who attended and donated! Also, big shoutout to Traders4ACause for helping us choose the organizations we're donating to and collecting all the money. We could not have done this without you! In this episode, we talk about the best presentations, the best charts and the common themes among the presenters. I think it always adds value to think back at what was discussed and reiterate a few of the important points that were being made by the best in the business. From Brian Shannon, Ari Wald, Craig Johnson, Gina Martin Adams, Andrew Thrasher, Frank Cappelleri, Paul Ciana, the list goes on and on....We discussed the current environment for the US and Global Stocks, Interest rates around the world, Gold and other metals, US Dollar and other currencies around the globe. There was so much value. This was my favorite Financial Conference of all time. Easily. I hope you enjoy our discussion, and make sure to check out all the presentations at ChartSummit.com!

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. 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 “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy 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—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I’m not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen.  My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.  Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we’ll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can’t find a single compilation of the Drifters’ recordings that doesn’t have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I’ve used multiple sources for the recordings I’m excerpting here, and in most cases I’m pretty sure that the tracks I’m excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren’t familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story… [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] It’s been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I’ll quickly bring you up to speed — if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on “Money Honey”, gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits — “Money Honey” and “Such a Night”, both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Such a Night”] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group’s manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we’ll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they’d been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who’d written “Money Honey” and many other early rock and roll hits, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”. But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They’d come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall In Love”. Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the “original” Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He’d formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, “My Only Desire”: [Excerpt: the Flyers, “My Only Desire”] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney’s replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up — Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore’s place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, “After the Hop”] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of “Moonlight Bay”. Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group’s members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters “Moonlight Bay”] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”, and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people — Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week’s worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week’s residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua’s version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together — Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn’t use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, “I Could Have Told You”] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, “Chew Tobacco Rag”] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, “My Picture”] But the reason they couldn’t call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers — Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles’ valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released “You’re My Inspiration” in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You’re My Inspiration”] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers’ strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records — they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with “You Could Be My Love”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Could Be My Love”] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn’t get another singer in to replace him at first — Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, “You Came To Me”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Came to Me”] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner’s labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn’t sung professionally before joining the group — he’d been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label… or at least, it was sort of a record label. We’ve talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap — Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send for the Doctor”] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn’t understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing “Young Blood”, which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn’t written anything successful in quite some time. He’d recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week — “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus’ wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife’s money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc’s suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company’s president, while Mort was going to be the company’s shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about “the Brill Building”, though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company’s office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they’d need to do this because R&B Records wasn’t going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort’s actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman’s wife phoned up, they could tell her that he’d just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn’t find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn’t realise that R&B Records wasn’t a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York — people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus — to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, “Kiss and Make Up”] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But “Kiss and Make Up” had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns — or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts — at one show they nearly killed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing “I Put A Spell on You”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn’t realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way — Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn’t. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn’t open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn’t opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour — Ben E. King wrote a song called “There Goes My Baby”, which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don’t remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it’s that “bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom” rhythm. We’ve always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters’ music they always follow Stoller’s lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that’s what we’ll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before — this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and taken inspiration from it — Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for “There Goes My Baby”, and his single hit the top forty the same week that “There Goes My Baby” was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn’t get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he’d written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem — the drummer they booked didn’t know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You’ve wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he’d allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he’d only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn’t going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King’s parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We’ll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller’s apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. 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 “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy 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—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I’m not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen.  My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.  Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we’ll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can’t find a single compilation of the Drifters’ recordings that doesn’t have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I’ve used multiple sources for the recordings I’m excerpting here, and in most cases I’m pretty sure that the tracks I’m excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren’t familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story… [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] It’s been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I’ll quickly bring you up to speed — if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on “Money Honey”, gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits — “Money Honey” and “Such a Night”, both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Such a Night”] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group’s manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we’ll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they’d been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who’d written “Money Honey” and many other early rock and roll hits, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”. But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They’d come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall In Love”. Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the “original” Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He’d formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, “My Only Desire”: [Excerpt: the Flyers, “My Only Desire”] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney’s replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up — Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore’s place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, “After the Hop”] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of “Moonlight Bay”. Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group’s members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters “Moonlight Bay”] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”, and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people — Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week’s worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week’s residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua’s version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together — Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn’t use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, “I Could Have Told You”] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, “Chew Tobacco Rag”] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, “My Picture”] But the reason they couldn’t call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers — Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles’ valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released “You’re My Inspiration” in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You’re My Inspiration”] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers’ strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records — they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with “You Could Be My Love”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Could Be My Love”] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn’t get another singer in to replace him at first — Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, “You Came To Me”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Came to Me”] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner’s labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn’t sung professionally before joining the group — he’d been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label… or at least, it was sort of a record label. We’ve talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap — Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send for the Doctor”] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn’t understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing “Young Blood”, which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn’t written anything successful in quite some time. He’d recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week — “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus’ wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife’s money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc’s suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company’s president, while Mort was going to be the company’s shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about “the Brill Building”, though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company’s office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they’d need to do this because R&B Records wasn’t going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort’s actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman’s wife phoned up, they could tell her that he’d just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn’t find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn’t realise that R&B Records wasn’t a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York — people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus — to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, “Kiss and Make Up”] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But “Kiss and Make Up” had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns — or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts — at one show they nearly killed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing “I Put A Spell on You”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn’t realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way — Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn’t. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn’t open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn’t opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour — Ben E. King wrote a song called “There Goes My Baby”, which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don’t remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it’s that “bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom” rhythm. We’ve always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters’ music they always follow Stoller’s lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that’s what we’ll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before — this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and taken inspiration from it — Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for “There Goes My Baby”, and his single hit the top forty the same week that “There Goes My Baby” was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn’t get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he’d written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem — the drummer they booked didn’t know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You’ve wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he’d allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he’d only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn’t going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King’s parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We’ll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller’s apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "There Goes My Baby" by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn't play led to a genre-defining hit. 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 "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy 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---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I'm not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen.  My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg's website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney's later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.  Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. And Bill Millar's book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we'll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can't find a single compilation of the Drifters' recordings that doesn't have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I've used multiple sources for the recordings I'm excerpting here, and in most cases I'm pretty sure that the tracks I'm excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren't familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story... [Excerpt: The Drifters, "There Goes My Baby"] It's been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I'll quickly bring you up to speed -- if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on "Money Honey", gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits -- "Money Honey" and "Such a Night", both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Such a Night"] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group's manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we'll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they'd been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who'd written "Money Honey" and many other early rock and roll hits, like "Shake, Rattle, and Roll". But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They'd come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including "Ruby Baby" and "Fools Fall In Love". Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall In Love"] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the "original" Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He'd formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, "My Only Desire": [Excerpt: the Flyers, "My Only Desire"] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney's replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up -- Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore's place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, "After the Hop"] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of "Moonlight Bay". Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group's members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters "Moonlight Bay"] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, "Itchy Twitchy Feeling", and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, "Itchy Twitchy Feeling"] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people -- Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week's worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week's residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua's version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together -- Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn't use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, "I Could Have Told You"] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, "Chew Tobacco Rag"] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, "My Picture"] But the reason they couldn't call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers -- Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles' valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released "You're My Inspiration" in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You're My Inspiration"] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers' strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records -- they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with "You Could Be My Love": [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You Could Be My Love"] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn't get another singer in to replace him at first -- Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, "You Came To Me": [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You Came to Me"] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner's labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn't sung professionally before joining the group -- he'd been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label... or at least, it was sort of a record label. We've talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap -- Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, "Send for the Doctor"] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn't understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing "Young Blood", which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn't written anything successful in quite some time. He'd recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week -- "Teenager in Love" by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, "Teenager in Love"] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus' wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife's money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc's suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company's president, while Mort was going to be the company's shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about "the Brill Building", though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company's office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they'd need to do this because R&B Records wasn't going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort's actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman's wife phoned up, they could tell her that he'd just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn't find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn't realise that R&B Records wasn't a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York -- people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus -- to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, "Kiss and Make Up"] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But "Kiss and Make Up" had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns -- or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts -- at one show they nearly killed Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing "I Put A Spell on You": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You"] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn't realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way -- Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn't. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn't open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn't opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour -- Ben E. King wrote a song called "There Goes My Baby", which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don't remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it's that "bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom" rhythm. We've always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters' music they always follow Stoller's lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that's what we'll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before -- this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard "It Doesn't Matter Any More" and taken inspiration from it -- Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for "There Goes My Baby", and his single hit the top forty the same week that "There Goes My Baby" was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn't get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he'd written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem -- the drummer they booked didn't know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "There Goes My Baby"] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You've wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he'd allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he'd only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn't going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King's parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, "If You Cry True Love, True Love": [Excerpt: The Drifters, "If You Cry True Love, True Love"] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We'll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller's apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.

Andrew Thrasher is the person I turn to whenever I have questions about Volatility and the $VIX. I know he tracks the data much more closely that I do and he does a good job of simplifying what may seem like complicated concepts. With the current market environment pricing in very low volatility moving forward, one can argue there is too much "complacency" towards stocks. Historically, corrections are sparked from this sort of setup. Who better to bring on to the podcast for this special Volatility Episode than Andrew Thrasher, winner of the 2017 Dow Award for his paper on Forecasting a Volatility Tsunami. In this conversation we talk about the current volatility regime, the VIX curve looking out into early 2020 and how he incorporates breadth data to supplement his volatility analysis. I really enjoyed this conversation and it seems like the perfect time to talk about Volatility! Click here return to the episode page

Andrew Thrasher is the person I turn to whenever I have questions about Volatility and the $VIX. I know he tracks the data much more closely that I do and he does a good job of simplifying what may seem like complicated concepts. With the current market environment pricing in very low volatility moving forward, one can argue there is too much "complacency" towards stocks. Historically, corrections are sparked from this sort of setup. Who better to bring on to the podcast for this special Volatility Episode than Andrew Thrasher, winner of the 2017 Dow Award for his paper on Forecasting a Volatility Tsunami. In this conversation we talk about the current volatility regime, the VIX curve looking out into early 2020 and how he incorporates breadth data to supplement his volatility analysis. I really enjoyed this conversation and it seems like the perfect time to talk about Volatility!

“Student debt has negatively impacted many American’s lives, but it’s not a crisis that I believe warrants an expansion of the government balance sheet to the tune of multiple trillions of dollars. Like anytime the government puts their thumb on the proverbial scale, actions have repercussions and should be carefully weighted ahead of time.”Andrew Thrasher (@andrewthrasher) blogs at Thrasher Analytics is an active participant on Financial Twitter. Tadas got Andrew on the phone to talk about a recent post of his entitled “Student Loans Are Not a National Crisis” where he writes about the many issues surrounding recent talk about modifying or outright cancelling student loan debt in America.You can read more at Anrew’s blog Thrasher Analytics: http://www.athrasher.com/student-loans-are-not-a-national-crisis/1-click play or subscribe on your favorite podcast app Subscribe to the mini podcast on iTunes or Spotify Enable our Alexa skill here - "Alexa, play the Compound show!" Talk to us about your portfolio or financial plan here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/ Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice just for you or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Please see this 3,000 word terms & conditions disclaimer: https://thereformedbroker.com/terms-and-conditions/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is a mashup of 3 live conversations I had with market experts at the CMT Symposium last month. Andrew Thrasher joins us to talk about market breadth. David Keller and I discuss how hard it is for people, especially market participants, to say "I don't know". And Rob Koyfman, the founder of Koyfin Charts, explains how investors all over the world are using his groundbreaking data analytics tools. Click here to return to the episode page https://allstarcharts.com/podcast/jc-parets/cmtsym-mashup/

This is a mashup of 3 live conversations I had with market experts at the CMT Symposium last month. Andrew Thrasher joins us to talk about market breadth. David Keller and I discuss how hard it is for people, especially market participants, to say "I don't know". And Rob Koyfman, the founder of Koyfin Charts, explains how investors all over the world are using his groundbreaking data analytics tools.

Today at the Compound - an all new episode of Talk Your Book with Downtown Josh Brown and Barry Ritholtz talking to Andrew Thrasher, a technical analyst and portfolio manager at a large Midwestern RIA called the Financial Enhancement Group. Andrew's work look at the structural behavior of prices and volatility in the stock and bond market. In this discussion, Josh and Barry quiz him on the way his firm explains their investment philosophy to clients, the difficulty of marrying technical analysis with fundamental analysis and tons of other stuff. You can find more of Andrew's writing here:http://www.athrasher.com/ Enable our Alexa skill here - "Alexa, play the Compound show!"https://www.amazon.com/Ritholtz-Wealth-Management-LLC-Compound/dp/B07P777QBZTalk to us about your portfolio or financial plan here:http://ritholtzwealth.com/Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice just for you or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Please see this 3,000 word terms & conditions disclaimer:https://thereformedbroker.com/terms-and-conditions/ Subscribe to the mini podcast on iTunes or SpotifyEnable our Alexa skill here - "Alexa, play the Compound show!" See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this show, we talked about timing the market, key indicators to keep in mind and how to think about broad based indexes with Andrew Thrasher, CMT, Portfolio Manager at The Financial Enhancement Group and Founder of Thrasher Analytics.  Listen to learn how you can get started developing your knowledge base and process for successful investing! For the Difference Making Tip, scan ahead to 18:57. You can learn more about Andrew at AThrasher.com, Twitter and LinkedIn. Please subscribe to the show however you’re listening, leave a review and share it with someone who appreciates good ideas. You can learn more about the show at GeorgeGrombacher.com, or contact George by clicking here.

Guest: Andrew Thrasher Portfolio Manager for Financial Enhancement Group and Founder of Thrasher Analytics Record Date:  12/11/18 Listen on —> iTunes Listen on —> SoundCloud Topics: Favorite Technical Tools & Settings Defining Your Edge Analyzing Your Trade Journal Trade Example Trading Volatile Markets Forecasting a Volatility Tsunami Rapid Fire: Q. What Trader has influenced your life the […]

Guest: Andrew Thrasher Portfolio Manager for Financial Enhancement Group and Founder of Thrasher Analytics Record Date:  12/11/18 Listen on —> iTunes Listen on —> SoundCloud Topics: Favorite Technical Tools & Settings Defining Your Edge Analyzing Your Trade Journal Trade Example Trading Volatile Markets Forecasting a Volatility Tsunami Rapid Fire: Q. What Trader has influenced your life the […]

Andrew Thrasher is the perfect guest to have on the podcast this month. His expertise in Volatility made him the 2017 Charles Dow Award winner, ironically the year that the US Stock market saw the lowest volatility on record. Today, Andrew is an Indianapolis-based Portfolio Manager at The Financial Enhancement group and we're thrilled to have him on. In this episode, Andrew walks us through the Volatility spike in early February, some of the things that accelerated the move and what we should expect moving forward. We discuss his thoughts on market breadth, internals and sector rotation. This is a timely conversation with one of the smart ones! Learn more about Andrew Thrasher Click here to see all of the Charts mentioned in this episode  

Andrew Thrasher is the perfect guest to have on the podcast this month. His expertise in Volatility made him the 2017 Charles Dow Award winner, ironically the year that the US Stock market saw the lowest volatility on record. Today, Andrew is an Indianapolis-based Portfolio Manager at The Financial Enhancement group and we're thrilled to have him on. In this episode, Andrew walks us through the Volatility spike in early February, some of the things that accelerated the move and what we should expect moving forward. We discuss his thoughts on market breadth, internals and sector rotation. This is a timely conversation with one of the smart ones!

The sixth episode of All About Your Benjamins The Podcast is a special edition, and I’m joined by my friend Andrew Thrasher to discuss the recent volatility in the market and what that means to the average investor. We’ll discuss what volatility and the VIX are, how he uses it in his job, how the average investor should react to… Continue Reading→ The post Volatility And The VIX With Andrew Thrasher (006) appeared first on All About Your Benjamins™.

In this podcast episode we’re going to be talking about something that can have a huge impact on the markets and on trading strategies. It’s something that can happen very quickly and cause a lot of damage, and that is spikes in volatility. And our special guest to discuss volatility spikes today is Andrew Thrasher, who published a research paper called ‘Forecasting a Volatility Tsunami’, which won the Charles Dow award in 2017. Whenever the VIX is at low levels we here all about in the mainstream media, with the implication that it’s about to rise, however a low level in the VIX alone doesn’t necessarily mean volatility is going to increase, and in our chat today Andrew is going to explain why and he’s also going to share his research and the 3 key factors that can actually improve predictions of volatility spikes. In our chat today you’ll here: How volatility is usually interpreted and why this common approach is unreliable and missing a key part of the picture, Why a low VIX reading alone is not a good predictor that volatility will rise, 3 key factors that can improve predictions of volatility spikes, Plus much more.