Podcast appearances and mentions of Andy White

The CAT Club presents a long playing vinyl record . . .BE-BOP DELUXE – SUNBURST FINISHwith special guestJOHN LECKIESunburst Finish, from 1976, is often described as the finest hour for both Be-Bop Deluxe & Bill Nelson.Before making his debut as a producer on this classic album, John Leckie worked as a tape operator and engineer with such artists as George Harrison, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney & Wings, Mott The Hoople, Soft Machine, John Lennon, Derek & The Dominos, Steve Harley and Kevin Ayers.His role as a producer has seen John working alongside The Fall, Simple Minds, Stone Roses, XTC, Radiohead, Magazine, The Verve, Suede, Los Lobos, The Levellers, Human League, The La's, Andy White, The Coral, Muse Cowboy Junkies, Roy Harper, Dr John, Robyn Hitchcock, New Order and many, many others.It's an engaging and fascinating gathering with the true story being revealed what really happened in 1975 during the recording of Pink Floyd's ‘Wish You Were Here,' concerning a certain former member of the band.In the interviewer's chair was JASON BARNARD from The Strange Brew Podcasts..This event took place on 25th September 2025 in the Pigeon Loft at The Robin Hood, Pontefract, West Yorkshire.This podcast has been edited for content and for copyright reasons.To find out more about the CAT Club please visit: www.thecatclub.co.ukHappy Trails.

Adam: You may have heard me talking here a couple of weeks ago about the Quarrelmen Beatles miniseries I'm doing. It's my birthday so I'm birthing it everywhere you get your podcasts plus I'm putting the first episode here too to tempt you into subscribing. You're not gonna be able to resist after hearing this episode that we did at none other than Abbey Road Studios when my band Stones n Roses was on tour there back in 2021. I told the other We Will Rank You hosts I'd have all the Beatles albums ranked within a year. Four years later, I've only recorded about half of them but here they come!  You're not going to see any more episodes here until the one where all four OG hosts ranked- Well I'm not telling you which one. You'll have to wait and see and if you want to hear Jim and I rank an album in Liverpool, you'll just have to figure out how to spell Quarrelmen and go subscribe, won't you? WON'T you? We're on Facebook, Instagram and Threads too so do the thing. Breaking up the band to start a solo career? Nah but, for now, here's the Fab Four…. THE QUARRELMEN PODCAST #1Please Please Me ranked at Abbey RoadWhat's your most loved and least favorite song on the first Beatles album?! One, two, three, FAH! The Quarrelmen Beatles podcast miniseries kicks off with England's own Richard Merrett (Airhead/the Wilsons) and his young sons Frank and George Merrett ranking Please Please Me in the most famous studio in the world.  Recorded back in 2021 at the end of the last Stones n' Roses UK tour, the California band recorded a version of "Revolution 9" with 1960s microphones used by "the boys" and Beatles Anthology, Rock Band and Love engineer Chris Bolster with Joe Wyatt (now Giles Martin's assistant). After a quick photoshoot of the band walking across THE street, singer Adam Gimbel welcomed the Merretts into the cozy Gatehouse studio to record the very first episode of the Quarrelmen. He had no idea it would be four busy, crazy years before the world would hear it. The kids are now senior citizens. The results are, quite simply, the most endearing Beatles podcast episode ever immortalized at Abbey Road....or anywhere else. Decades of fandom and childlike wonder collide with memories and a ranking of least and most favorites on the 1963 classic debut. Listen at QuarrelmenPod.com, Apple, Spotify and...a place.Follow us and weigh in with your favorites on Facebook, Instagram & Threads @quarrelmenpod.SPOILERS/FILE UNDER:Abbey Road, Airhead, Arthur Alexander, Anna (Go to Him), Ask Me Why, Baby It's You, Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, Chris Bolster, Boys, Cavern Club, Chains, coffee, the Cookies, debut, Do You Want to Know a Secret, EMI, England, Adam Gimbel, harmonica, George Harrison, I Saw Her Standing There, Isley Brothers, Carol King, John Lennon, Liverpool, London, Love Me Do, George Martin, Paul McCartney, Frank Merrett, George Merrett, Richard Merrett, Misery, Nirvana, Roy Orbison, piano, Please Please Me, Pretty Green, P.S. I Love You, Revolution 9, Ride, sha la la la la, The Shirelles, Ringo Starr, Stones n Roses, A Taste of Honey, There's a Place, Twist and Shout, Andy White, the Wilsons, Joe Wyatt, zoos, 1963.US: http://www.QuarrelmenPod.comhttp://www.WeWillRankYouPod.com wewillrankyoupod@gmail.comNEW! Host tips: Venmo @wewillrankyoupodhttp://www.facebook.com/QuarrelmenPodhttp://www.instagram.com/QuarrelmenPodhttps://www.threads.net/@QuarrelmenPodhttp://www.StonesnRoses.comhttp://www.AbbeyRoad.com

Andy White, senior vice president of Energy and Environment International for Amentum, talks about his background and the work Amentum is doing in the UK and across Europe in the nuclear sector.Among the topics covered:* The change of attitudes which means that the future decommissioning process is included in the planning stages for new nuclear (and how that should reduce the number of 'surprises' when decommissioning plants)* The company's work on new nuclear in the UK at Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C and SMRs and operations in Poland, France, the Czech Republic as well as Norway and the Netherlands* The benefits of bringing in technology, skills and people from other sectors (and countries) to help with what looks like being a forthcoming rapid expansion of new nuclear. * Plus Amentum's nuclear fusion work, including at ITER, and the general outlook for nuclear, and how financing and regulation can help industry meet the demand for new capacityWe also bring you Claire Maden's conversation with Nima Ashkeboussi, vice president government relations and communications at Global Laser Enrichment, earlier this year at the World Nuclear Fuel Cycle conference in Canada.In it he talks about the company's laser enrichment technology, explaining how it works and the big plans the company has - including 30-years' worth of work relating to the US Department of Energy's 200,000+ tonnes of depleted uranium. GLE's plan is to re-enrich this, so cleaning up a stranded asset and in the process providing a new source of fresh fuel.GLE began a large-scale enrichment demonstration programme in May, and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted for review the company's licensing application for a new facility to be built at Paducah, Kentucky earlier this month.Key links to find out more:World Nuclear NewsAmentumGLEGLE submits full application for laser enrichment facility licenceAmentum, Multiconsult to assess Norway's nuclear optionsAmentum awarded Sizewell C project management contractEmail newsletter:Sign up to the World Nuclear News daily or weekly news round-upsContact info:alex.hunt@world-nuclear.orgEpisode credit:  Presenter Alex Hunt. Co-produced and mixed by Pixelkisser Production

Tyler and Will Hour #2 with Start Bench Cut and a visit from Andy White at Ted Russell Ford! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour #2 with Start Bench Cut and a visit from Andy White at Ted Russell Ford! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour #2 with Start Bench Cut and a visit from Andy White at Ted Russell Ford! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour #2 with Start Bench Cut and a visit from Andy White at Ted Russell Ford! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 30ú lá de mí Bealtaine, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1964 bhí an dul chun cinn mall de na cainteanna sa Bhruiséil. I 1975 bhí an rialtas cúisithe an oíche roimhe go raibh siad ag tabhairt neamhaird ar 52 míle daltaí a bhí chun an scoil a chríochnú. I 1998 tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh an bhóthair ó nDurlas chuig Ros Cré an bhóthair is measa sa tír a dúirt Noel Coonan. Rinne Coonan moladh chuig an chomhairle chun litir a scríobh chuig an Aire Timpeallacht chun airgead a thabhairt dóibh chun an bhóthair a dheisiú. I 2000 bhí Joan Kennedy ó Doladh ar a slí chuig Meicsiceo. Bhí sí mar imreoir liathróid raicéid agus bhí sí ar an fhoireann a bhí I gcraobh an domhain. Bhí sí san fhoireann a bhí sa craobhchomórtais na hEorpa I 1988. Sin B*Witched le C'Est La Vie – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo I 1998 Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1964 chuaigh The Beatles chuig uimhir a haon sna cairteacha I Meiriceá lena amhrán Love Me Do. Bhí sé a cheathrú uimhir a haon I cúig mhí. An leagan a tháinig amach I Meiriceá bhí Andy White ag seinm na druma agus bhí Ringo ar an tambóirín agus an leagan a tháinig amach sa Bhreatain bhí Ringo Starr ag seinm na druma. I 1996 chuaigh Alan Whitaker ó Penzance ar Mastermind agus bhí a ábhar speisialta The Sex Pistols. Chuaigh sé chuig an bhabhta leathcheannais de bharr gur d'fhreagair sé 18 gceist cheart. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh Tom Morello I Meiriceá I 1964 agus rugadh amhránaí agus aisteoir Idina Menzel I Meiriceá ar an lá seo I 1971 agus seo chuid de amhrán. Beidh mé ar ais libh an tseachtain seo chugainn le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 30th of May, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh 1964: the council of ministers made slow progress in brussels talks. 1975: the gov was accused last night of turning its back on next months 52,000 school leavers. 1998 - The main Thurles to Roscrea road is "the worst in Ireland", Councillor Noel Coonan told the Council.Councillor Coonan proposed that the Council write to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Noel Dempsey calling on him to immediately make available funds to improve the condition of the road.  2000 - Joan Kennedy from Dolla was off to Mexico. The extremely talented racquetball player has been selected on the Irish team to compete in the World championships. Joan represented Ireland in the European championships in 1988  That was B*witched with C'Est La Vie – the biggest song on this day in 1998 Onto music news on this day In 1964 The Beatles went to No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Love Me Do', the group's fourth US No.1 in five months. The version released in America had Andy White playing drums while Ringo played the tambourine. The British single was a take on which Ringo Starr played the drums. 1996 Alan Whitaker from Penzance appeared on the UK TV quiz show Mastermind, his specialist subject being the Sex Pistols. He won a place in the semi-final of the show answering all but one of the 18 questions correctly And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – Tom Morello was born in America in 1964 and singer Idina Menzel was born in America on this day in 1971 and this is one of her songs. I'll be back with you next week with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.

Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 30ú lá de mí Bealtaine, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1964 bhí an dul chun cinn mall de na cainteanna sa Bhruiséil. I 1975 bhí an rialtas cúisithe an oíche roimhe go raibh siad ag tabhairt neamhaird ar 52 míle daltaí a bhí chun an scoil a chríochnú. I 1964 d'oscail an tAire Oideachas Páirc Charbhán Ryan's I gCill Chaoi an tseachtain sin. I 1975 bhí an lán ceoltóirí in Inis an tseachtain sin ó gach áit in Éirinn agus daoine a raibh grá acu do cheol Éireannach. Sin B*Witched le C'Est La Vie – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo I 1998 Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1964 chuaigh The Beatles chuig uimhir a haon sna cairteacha I Meiriceá lena amhrán Love Me Do. Bhí sé a cheathrú uimhir a haon I cúig mhí. An leagan a tháinig amach I Meiriceá bhí Andy White ag seinm na druma agus bhí Ringo ar an tambóirín agus an leagan a tháinig amach sa Bhreatain bhí Ringo Starr ag seinm na druma. I 1996 chuaigh Alan Whitaker ó Penzance ar Mastermind agus bhí a ábhar speisialta The Sex Pistols. Chuaigh sé chuig an bhabhta leathcheannais de bharr gur d'fhreagair sé 18 gceist cheart. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh Tom Morello I Meiriceá I 1964 agus rugadh amhránaí agus aisteoir Idina Menzel I Meiriceá ar an lá seo I 1971 agus seo chuid de amhrán. Beidh mé ar ais libh an tseachtain seo chugainn le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 30th of May, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh 1964: the council of ministers made slow progress in brussels talks. 1975: the gov was accused last night of turning its back on next months 52,000 school leavers. 1964: Ryans caravan park in kilkee was officially opened by the minister of Education on thursday evening. 1975: ennis played host to most of irelands musicians and all those who loved irish music over the previous weekend. That was B*witched with C'Est La Vie – the biggest song on this day in 1998 Onto music news on this day In 1964 The Beatles went to No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Love Me Do', the group's fourth US No.1 in five months. The version released in America had Andy White playing drums while Ringo played the tambourine. The British single was a take on which Ringo Starr played the drums. 1996 Alan Whitaker from Penzance appeared on the UK TV quiz show Mastermind, his specialist subject being the Sex Pistols. He won a place in the semi-final of the show answering all but one of the 18 questions correctly And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – Tom Morello was born in America in 1964 and singer Idina Menzel was born in America on this day in 1971 and this is one of her songs. I'll be back with you next week with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.

Tyler and Will Hour #1 with the return of Andy White, Start Bench Cut, and Ridin' with Ivens!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour #1 with the return of Andy White, Start Bench Cut, and Ridin' with Ivens!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour #1 with the return of Andy White, Start Bench Cut, and Ridin' with Ivens!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour #1 with the return of Andy White, Start Bench Cut, and Ridin' with Ivens!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When a phishing scam nearly cost him his life savings, Andy White turned that wake-up call into Closinglock, a cybersecurity platform now protecting billions in real estate closings. Dive in as he shares how title agents can fight back against wire fraud, seller impersonation, and deepfake threats using tools like KYC, MFA, and secure workflows. If you're still relying on email and outdated wire systems, this conversation is your signal to upgrade before it's too late.   What you'll learn from this episode How Andy's wife's real estate story sparked the birth of Closinglock The role of AI and deepfakes in modern cybersecurity risks Innovations in identity verification, KYC, and payment automation Common misconceptions about security and simplicity Actionable steps to reduce wire fraud exposure today   Resources mentioned in this episode Otter.ai Chick-fil-A Wells Fargo Keller Williams FedNow ChatGPT Fedwire Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell | Paperback, Hardcover, and Kindle   About Andy WhiteAndy is the CEO and Co-founder of ClosingLock. In 2017 my wife and I founded ClosingLock to help protect title companies, lenders, and property buyers/sellers from wire fraud. Prior to that, I worked as a computer engineer for various tech companies – from a startup that raised over $100M to the globally-recognized tech giant Samsung. Prior to that, I completed a BS, MS, and PhD in Computer and Electrical Engineering at Auburn University.   Connect with Andy Website: Closinglock LinkedIn: Andy White, Ph.D.   Connect With UsLove what you're hearing? Don't miss an episode! Follow us on our social media channels and stay connected. Explore more on our website: www.alltechnational.com/podcast Stay updated with our newsletter: www.mochoumil.com Follow Mo on LinkedIn: Mo Choumil Stop waiting on underwriter emails or callbacks—TitleGPT.ai gives you instant, reliable answers to your title questions. Whether it's underwriting, compliance, or tricky closings, the information you need is just a click away. No more delays—work smarter, close faster. Try it now at www.TitleGPT.ai. Closing more deals starts with more appointments. At Alltech National Title, our inside sales team works behind the scenes to fill your pipeline, so you can focus on building relationships and closing business. No more cold calling—just real opportunities. Get started at AlltechNationalTitle.com. Extra hands without extra overhead—that's Safi Virtual. Our trained virtual assistants specialize in the title industry, handling admin work, client communication, and data entry so you can stay focused on closing deals. Scale smarter and work faster at SafiVirtual.com.

In this episode, Amir Bormand sits down with Andy White, CEO of ClosingLock, to talk through his journey from PhD engineer to startup founder. Andy shares the aha moment that launched ClosingLock, a cybersecurity-focused platform protecting real estate transactions, and offers a transparent look at the early struggles of building trust in a skeptical industry. From pitching title companies with Chick-fil-A to learning an entirely new domain from scratch, this is a story about execution, humility, and listening harder than you pitch.

What would you do if you almost wired your entire life savings to a scammer? For Andy White, Ph.D., that near-disaster didn't just spark outrage—it inspired a groundbreaking fintech company.In this episode of Conversations with Cohen, Gregg Cohen sits down with Andy White, Founder and CEO of Closinglock, to explore how an email spoof almost cost him everything and why that moment of vulnerability led to building one of the most trusted platforms in real estate fraud prevention.Andy's journey is anything but typical. With a Ph.D. in computer engineering and early experience in machine learning before it became mainstream, Andy shares how he transitioned from working at a startup and Samsung Research to founding Closinglock on nights and weekends—all while navigating the challenges of a young family and financial uncertainty. He discusses the grit it takes to bootstrap a business in a highly traditional industry, where moving millions of dollars still depends on outdated systems like email and wire transfers.In this conversation, you'll learn:The real-life origin story behind Closinglock and how a personal encounter with wire fraud exposed deep vulnerabilities in the real estate transaction process.Why disrupting the centuries-old real estate industry was like turning an oil tanker, and how Andy overcame resistance from title companies wary of change.The power of relationship-building and trust in early-stage sales, and how Andy and his wife won over their first customers—often armed with just lunch and a lot of persistence.The emotional toll and personal sacrifices behind the scenes: cashing out savings, dealing with financial stress, and navigating self-doubt in the face of entrepreneurial risk.How Andy approached hiring the right team (after some painful missteps), bringing on a COO who helped elevate the company's sales strategy and scale Closinglock beyond its initial limitations.The decision to take outside investment and how Andy balanced investor expectations with the personal drive to grow Closinglock on his own terms.This episode offers an honest, unfiltered look at what it really takes to build a fintech startup from the ground up—especially when you're tackling one of the most sensitive pain points in real estate: protecting people's life savings.Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, fintech enthusiast, real estate professional, or just love hearing the story behind the story, this conversation is filled with insights on resilience, leadership, and the evolving intersection of technology and trust.

Presented by 6D Racing Our friend Andy White is always fun to chat with and with FXR Racing's big leap into the world of sponsoring a factory race team, we thought it was the perfect time to bombard him with all of our questions about designing, developing, producing, and marketing motocross apparel. The factory Triumph Racing team made a big splash with Jordon Smith earning the marque its first-ever Supercross win a few weeks ago, and he certainly looked good while doing it!

FXR's Andy White talks about getting that first win for FXR with Triumph, dealing with Phil, FTA and what that is, Canadian moto, the brands evolution and more.

Andy White and Andrew Stolte visit with Tom and Jason as Platinum sponsors of the 2024 Row Crop Short Course.  Find out more at  https://agriculture.basf.us/crop-protection/products/seeds/stoneville.html For more episodes from the Crop Doctors, visit our website at http://extension.msstate.edu/shows/mississippi-crop-situation #mscrops #MSUext

What if the secret to transforming your sales team lies within the art of the one-on-one meeting? Join me, Matt Benelli, and our special guest, Andy White, VP of Sales at Trivy, as we debunk myths and uncover these meetings' critical role in building trust and alignment in modern sales teams. We dive into the heart of creating coaching cultures and learn why remote and hybrid work environments make these interactions more indispensable than ever. Andy shares his expertise aligning team and company goals while fostering accountability and connection through structured, meaningful conversations.This enlightening discussion reveals a powerful framework for one-on-one meetings that can propel your team's performance to new heights. With categories focusing on personal, professional, and future-facing topics, we explore how leaders can effectively navigate hiring challenges and compensation expectations. Andy sheds light on crafting an operating guide for leaders that enhances communication and accountability, making even the most challenging conversations manageable while nurturing a supportive and growth-focused environment.Prepare to rethink leadership strategies as we examine the transition from frontline management to executive roles, highlighting the importance of consistency, problem-solving, and AI tools that revolutionize sales efficiency. You'll hear about innovative solutions like Zinnia and cost-effective platforms that boost productivity and improve customer experiences. As we close, discover how Trivie's approach to corporate training through gamification and personalization can bridge knowledge gaps, ultimately driving sales success. Whether you're looking to refine your leadership skills or explore the intersection of AI and sales, this episode promises a wealth of valuable insights.Chapters:(00:00) - Building Sales Leadership Trust and Alignment(10:14) - Effective Framework for Productive One-on-Ones(15:30) - Building Trust Through Effective One-on-Ones(20:33) - Effective Communication in Leadership Accountability(31:51) - Leveraging Consistency and Problem-Solving Skills(38:12) - Leveraging AI Tools for Sales Efficiency(44:33) - Coaching Impact and FundamentalsKey Takeaways:The One-on-One Meeting is Not Dead, But It is Often Ineffective - Many sales leaders neglect or mismanage one-on-ones, reducing them to deal reviews instead of meaningful coaching conversations.Trust is the Foundation of Effective Coaching - Sales representatives need to feel supported and valued before they will fully engage in coaching and performance discussions.A Structured One-on-One Framework Drives Better Outcomes - Breaking meetings into personal check-ins, professional development, and future planning ensures that they remain productive and aligned with long-term growth.Managers Must Focus on Skill Development, Not Just Deal Status - Coaching should prioritize behaviors and competencies that lead to better sales results rather than simply tracking pipeline updates.Asking Sales Reps for Feedback Strengthens Leadership - Inviting feedback on management effectiveness fosters a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.Accountability is Essential for Driving Consistent Performance - Managers should document key action items from each meeting and follow up to ensure that coaching translates into tangible progress.Alignment is Crucial for Sales Success - When company goals, compensation structures, and sales objectives are misaligned, quota attainment suffers, and disengagement increases.Sales Leaders Must Be Problem-Solvers, Not Just Problem Identifiers - Senior leadership values managers who present solutions alongside challenges rather than simply escalating issues.AI Can Enhance Coaching and Improve Sales Effectiveness - Tools like CoachEm provide managers with data-driven insights, helping them conduct more impactful coaching sessions without adding to their workload.Companies That Prioritize Coaching Build More Resilient Sales Teams - Investing in structured coaching processes leads to higher quota attainment, lower turnover, and a stronger sales culture.Ways to Tune In:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Yb1wPzUxyrfR0Dx35ym1A Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coach2scale-how-modern-leaders-build-a-coaching-culture/id1699901434 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL2NvYWNoMnNjYWxlLWhvdy1tb2Rlcm4tbGVhZGVycy1idWlsZC1hLWNvYWNoaW5nLWN1bHR1cmU Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/fd188af6-7c17-4b2e-a0b2-196ecd6fdf77 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/coach2scale-how-modern-leaders-5419703 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Coach2Scale CoachEm™ is the first Coaching Execution Platform that integrates deep learning technology to proactively analyze patterns, highlight the "why" behind the data with root causes, and identify the actions that will ultimately improve business results going forward.  These practical coaching recommendations for managers will help their teams drive more deals, bigger deals, faster deals and loyal customers. Built with decades of go-to-market experience, world-renowned data scientists and advanced causal AI/ML technology, CoachEm™ leverages your existing tech stack to increase rep productivity, increase retention, and replicate best practices across your team.Learn more at coachem.io

This week we talk heart to heart with Cardiologist Paul Kudelko and Andy White with Easter Seals of Tn.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 with Andy White hanging out for Start Bench Cut this afternoon...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 with Andy White hanging out for Start Bench Cut this afternoon...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 with Andy White hanging out for Start Bench Cut this afternoon...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 with Andy White joining Tyler for Start Bench CutSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andy White joins Tyler for Start Bench Cut in the first hour...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 with Andy White joining Tyler for Start Bench CutSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andy White joins Tyler for Start Bench Cut in the first hour...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 with Andy White joining Tyler for Start Bench CutSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andy White joins Tyler for Start Bench Cut in the first hour...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 2 with Dave Hooker and Andy White with Start Bench Cut this hour..See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 2 with Dave Hooker and Andy White with Start Bench Cut this hour..See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 2 with Dave Hooker and Andy White with Start Bench Cut this hour..See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 2 with Dave Hooker and Andy White with Start Bench Cut this hour..See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our reporter Laura Whelan spoke to Andy White of Valencia GAA club and Una Harty from Limerick who currently lives in Valencia. Journalist Eugene Costello updates on the current situation in Spain.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 as Tyler holding down solo with Andy White and they get into Start, Bench, Cut this hour...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 as Tyler holding down solo with Andy White and they get into Start, Bench, Cut this hour...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 as Tyler holding down solo with Andy White and they get into Start, Bench, Cut this hour...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tyler and Will Hour 1 as Tyler holding down solo with Andy White and they get into Start, Bench, Cut this hour...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2003, the ACGME, the accrediting body for residencies, created limits on how much residents could be required to work. 80 hours a week, a maximum of 28 hours of continuous duty per shift, at least 8 hours off between shifts, and a mandatory 4 days off a month.When you say it out loud, it's kind of insane that these were the limits, right.  How much more could you work?We're now 20 years out from the duty-hour policy. Our guest for this episode is Andy White, my former pediatric residency program director at Washington University in St Louis and the current chair of pediatrics at Saint Louis University.Click here to read the article published by friend of the show, Jess Adkins Murphy***********If you have any feedback, show/interview recommendations, or want to collaborate on the show, please reach out!Email: Tama.TheMDM@gmail.comInstagram: TheMDM.podcastTwitter: theMDMpodcast***********Host: Tama Thé | Pediatric Emergency MedicineProducer: Melissa Puffenbarger | Pediatric Emergency MedicineCommunications Director: Katrianna Urrea | MD Candidate

Welcome to Episode 112 of the Reel Turf Techs Podcast! Today, we're diving into the world of turf management with Andy White, Equipment Manager at Bluemound Golf and Country Club in Wauwatosa, WI.Bluemound, a private 18-hole gem, serves as Andy's playground, where he operates as the lone tech in the shop, occasionally joined by the crew for some extra hands.Andy's journey is a unique one, blending his long-time background as a carpenter and logistics expert at FedEx into the dynamic realm of the golf shop. But don't let the seeming disparity fool you – Andy's early days spent tinkering with his dad and teeing off with his brothers set the stage for his seamless transition into the world of golf course mechanics. And hey, his welding skills didn't hurt either!In this episode, discover the tools that Andy always has by his side, explore his diverse taste in guitar playing, and unravel the challenges he faced during his swift rise from assistant technician to Equipment Manager in just four months. Plus, get the inside scoop on Andy's role in hosting the Wisconsin EM meeting at his shop this month. Tweet us @ReelTurfTechs and @MTrentManning Email us at ReelTurfTechs@gmail.com Check out our YouTube Channel

Steve Nichols and Andy White visit with Drs. Tom Allen and Jason Bond in Starkville as Platinum sponsors of the 2023 Row Crop Short Course.  Find out more at https://agriculture.basf.us/crop-protection/products/seeds/stoneville.html.

Is it possible - merely possible - that Ringo Starr's 1973 album, “Ringo” is the best solo Beatles album of that incredible year of classic solo Beatles albums? And while we're at it, does Ringo's 1978 entry “Bad Boy” still run circles - from a sheer rock & roll perspective - around the flaccid, weak-ass “Some Girls”? To be discussed on our final episode, stay tuned! Because, today's episode is dedicated to 50 years of the closest thing to a Beatles reunion album this side of the Threetles, and maybe even The Ladders. Tony and T.J., with a little help from our friends, Producer Casey and P3Z-Nutz, deep dish Side 1 of the greatest album (sorry, Liverpool 8) from the greatest drummer (sorry, Andy White) of the greatest band (sorry, Korn) of all time. And they also find (Morris Day and the) time to ask:

Billy Sinkford, Vice President of Echos Communications, discusses the genesis of the MADE show and its impact on the handmade bike community. He shares his experience as a former bike messenger and how it led him to work in the urban cycling industry. Billy also highlights the importance of brand representation and storytelling in the cycling industry. He provides insights into the success of the first MADE show and gives a preview of what to expect in the upcoming shows in Portland and Melbourne. Don't miss this exciting conversation about the future of the handmade bike community. Episode Sponsor: AG1 MADE Bicycle Show  Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. [00:00:29] Craig Dalton (host): This week on the show. I welcome Billy. Sinford from the maid bicycle show in Portland, Oregon. You may recall if you're a listener from last year that I attended the show. In 2023 and had dozens of interviews with fantastic frame builders from around the country. I super enjoyed the show, the experience, the overall vibe of the show. So I was thrilled to get some communication from echos communications that the show is on. Again for 2024, I wanted to get a little bit of the backstory and inspiration for the show. And learn some secrets about the upcoming show in 2024. Little did I know at the end of this episode, I was going to learn about yet another exciting new development. I'll leave you with that. And we'll wait till the end, until we find out that secret from Billy. But before we get started, I do need to thank this week. Sponsor a G one. Taking care of your health. Isn't always easy, but it should at least be simple. That's why for me, for the last decade, I've been drinking age one every day, no exceptions. It's just one scoop mixed in water once a day, every day. And it makes me feel energized and ready to take on the day. That's because each serving of AIG one delivers my daily dose of vitamins minerals and pre and probiotics and more, it's a powerful, healthy habit that also is powerfully simple. Okay, let me go back a decade and explain why. became an essential part of my daily routine. I come to recognize that nutritionally, I just wasn't covering my bases with my diets. I was often cutting corners and just not getting the nutrients and vitamins I was looking for. I started thinking about taking a multivitamin or multiple multivitamins. And that didn't drive with me as well. I knew I wasn't going to be able to maintain consistency. Without something simple in my life. But with ag one, I discovered that it's a simple powder that's mixed with water. Can do it very quickly. And it has everything and more than I was looking for. So I introduced into my life and I haven't gone back. Over a decade, which is pretty incredible for a product like this. So if there's one product I had to recommend to elevate your health that's ag one. And that's why I've partnered with them for so long. I think they've been part of the show for over three years now. So, if you want to take ownership of your health, start with a G one. Tri AIG one and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D plus K2. And five free AIG one travel packs with your first purchase. Exclusively at drink, AIG one.com/the gravel ride. That's drink AIG one.com/the gravel ride to check it out today. Without behind us, let's jump right into my conversation with Billy. [00:03:24] Craig Dalton (host): Billy, welcome to the show. [00:03:25] Billy Sinkford: Thank you for having me, Craig. It's a pleasure to be here. [00:03:29] Craig Dalton (host): I know it's a busy week for you guys at MADE, so I appreciate you making the time and I'm excited to kind of just talk about the show. I did a bunch of episodes and Certainly had a bunch of conversations with frame builders during my visit to made in 2023. So I'm excited to just talk about the plans for 2024, but to set the stage for the conversation, we always like to kind of roll back a little bit and just understand, how did you develop a passion for the bike? Did you grow up riding? So why don't you start off by just letting us know where you grew up and how you discovered the bike and how that journey ultimately took you to kind of being in the industry as a professional. [00:04:10] Billy Sinkford: Well, first off, thanks for coming to MAID in 2023. It was awesome to have you and love the videos that you put out surrounding it. And we're stoked for 2024. We'll get, we'll get there though. I was a bike messenger in Boston in the late 90s and early 2000s. Uh, that was my first job working on the bike, uh, all day, uh, rain or snow, uh, in Boston, and did that, uh, for quite some time. Eventually ended up moving to San Francisco, uh, where I also was a, a bike messenger after a brief stint, uh, in divinity school, uh, which I decided was not, not for me. And from there, I started working with chrome industries and started working in kind of the urban cycling field of things. And, you know, for lack of a better term, I weaseled and worked my way into a job at chrome and. Um, my, the director of marketing at Chrome, Rob Reedy, who is my business partner at Echos. He's the CEO of Echos and I'm the VP, uh, gave me a chance and gave me a job and we worked together for years over at Chrome and eventually, uh, founded Echos Communications, which is a PR and marketing firm for, Active outdoors, uh, with a huge focus on cycling and I am fortunate enough to be the vice president of that and manage, uh, manage our cycling stuff that echoes communications. So that, that's [00:05:47] Craig Dalton (host): how I got there. I'm curious if, if you go back to those days as a courier, my experience with the courier community there, there were certainly some couriers who were bike racers, bike lovers, lovers of all things, bikes, and they discovered curry being a courier as a vocation that allowed them to, you know, work on their bike and stay fit. I've also heard from many of those same. Bike racer couriers that it's a horrible way to train because it's so hard on your body. So I'm just curious, were you, you know, part of that courier culture and the bike was a work mechanism and you fell in love with that, you know, the fixie kind of culture, or was there another thread of your passion for the bike that was mountain biking or road racing at the time? [00:06:35] Billy Sinkford: When I was in Boston, it was definitely about the culture and community, and the bike was just the tool that allowed for all of that to happen. When I moved out to San Francisco, the company that I worked for, Godspeed Courier, we had a race team. I was partially in charge of all the sponsorships and helped out a lot of the company. Definitely, uh, started wearing spandex and shaving our legs and going and doing local crits. And at that time road races, it was all road, uh, for me back then in the San Francisco Bay area and competed at all kinds of road races, uh, underneath the Godspeed courier banner. But I was, uh, I was a heavy dude. I still am a, I'm a big guy and I never, uh, I went out and just. Beat the crap out of everybody for the first 20 miles and then basically did an 80 mile bike ride by myself after the rest of the race, but I absolutely loved it. And it was a different kind of community and that definitely carried over. And, you know, I certainly by no means of. Kept up with it or pinned a number in a long time. I did last year for a minute, but, uh, definitely still enjoy being sometimes at the pointy end of the spear. Um, but yeah, messengering definitely brought me into that race culture. And then that carried over into my time in the industry, without a doubt. [00:07:55] Craig Dalton (host): Yeah, obviously like Chrome had its parts of his origin from that culture and that vibe, that commuter, worker, the, you know, the well constructed bags and later the shoes and clothing that they brought into the mix as you kind of represented them and were kind of earning your chops on the business side of the bike industry. What were you learning in that time that you kind of took forward about how brands need to be represented to cyclists in order to grow and be relevant? [00:08:28] Billy Sinkford: Working in the urban cycling side of things first was, was really interesting and I think it relates to stuff in the handmade market. I think it relates to cycling as a whole because we, and sometimes think of ourselves as this huge entity, right? In reality, cycling is a niche sport and a niche hobby. Uh, so looking at it through that lens and then knowing that urban cycling was a niche within. That niche, uh, we called it don't Timbuktu it back in the day Timbuktu started stopping selling messenger bags and started selling travel luggage and briefcases for a, for a brief minute. And at Chrome, we just made sure we didn't Timbuktu it. And we were trying to stay. With the core sponsoring messenger races, making sure that we're not only sponsored them, but we're actively present at the races and engaging with the community and bringing a cool vibe and having a good time. And that I think has carried over into everything that we've done at echoes and hopefully what we've brought to, uh, the cycling community at large. And that's the present. Be there and and be a part of the community. [00:09:42] Craig Dalton (host): Yeah, I think there's so much to obviously the storytelling of these brands that is so critical and how they resonate with fans and consumers of these products [00:09:55] Billy Sinkford: and it's really easy to lose it quite quickly. So, you know, having a good mission statement, understanding what your brand is, and actually standing by that and standing behind it, standing behind the community that you're, you're making products for, and hopefully. An active part of that community. Do those, you're, you're going to be on the side of right. Yeah, you [00:10:17] Craig Dalton (host): mentioned some of the work you do at echoes and just to set the stage for when we later talk about the maid show. Can you talk about some of the clients you've had the privilege of working with over the years? And then we'll get into what was the genesis behind the idea for [00:10:34] Billy Sinkford: made? Sure. We have had the privilege and pleasure and honest. I'd say honor of working with a lot of really amazing brands and folks within those brands. We started definitely on the urban cycling tip, but with that, we also, you know, feedback sports and, and mission workshop where our two first clients as an agency. Uh, we launched and ran the Levi's Commuter Program, uh, for the first three years of doing that and did all of the global or national events rather, uh, bike shops and community building stuff around that. And that was super fun and and rad to, to work along the Levi's, uh, Levi's crew and their team. Blackburn. Uh, we've worked with Greg Lamond. Uh, currently we've got an awesome, I guess, what's most relevant to the handmade community. Mosaic cycles, Argonaut cycles, Lowe, uh, we're currently, uh, and have been for quite some time working with Moots, Paul Components, Paul's a dear friend of mine, and we worked with him for several years, Abby Bike Tools, so everything, uh, we brought together. Bosch to market here in the United States a couple months before Shimano got got into the e bike game here Uh worked with a ton of e bike brands So companies large and small we are just started working with Campagnolo, uh, which is phenomenal and we're really thrilled about that we've had the pleasure of working with over 100 bike brands and i've gotten to Floyd's of Leadville and Floyd Landis, dear friend, and we managed all of the, uh, PR and some of the marketing for all of his CBD stuff and, uh, and his Floyd's 5 cannabis as well. So, gotten to work alongside people that I idolized when I was a messenger and had them become not only business associates, but folks that I call friends. Um, so it's been, it's been a wild journey and, uh, and we're still, we're still, I think, just getting started. [00:12:36] Craig Dalton (host): Amazing. We were talking a little bit offline about the North American Handmade Bike Show, and it sounds like you've had a relationship, understandably so, with the brands you tended to represent with that show for, for many years. Can you just talk about kind of your memories of that show and the place it kind of held in the industry [00:12:56] Billy Sinkford: for you? Oh, I loved nabs. Absolutely loved it. Uh, used to go just as a, you know, marketing and PR guy for the brands that we worked with. Uh, so always had 5 or 6 builders or brands, uh, on the show floor that we were working with. Uh, we did, uh, for a brief period of time for a little under 2 years, actually manage all the PR for the show itself when it was in Salt Lake City. Uh, obviously the show is not around anymore and, uh, Don and I. I've had a tumultuous relationship throughout the last, uh, 15 years for sure. Um, but. What Don did on the North American Handmade Bike Show, I think was phenomenal for the builder community and nothing that we're doing, I think, would be possible without the groundwork that went into that. Both from Don, so kudos to him, and then also the builder community for showing up and being present. You know, being willing to put their energy and effort into something that has turned out to be really, really great or for the builder community. So I think the show was great. It was sad to see it go, but it also gave us the opportunity to start made, which is something that 10. I mean, it's been 10 years plus, since we've been kind of talking about potentially. Helping put together a different version of a handmade bike show, a more modern version of it. And with Navs no longer taking place, the builder community asked us if we would step up to the plate and make it happen. We were fortunate enough to be able to. To, to do that, so it's been, it's been pretty cool. [00:14:39] Craig Dalton (host): Yeah, you know, obviously, like, with NABS going away, there was this pent up demand and enthusiasm for the builders to get together. To your point, NABS was just such a great gathering of such a diverse group of artisan frame builders that was so different than any other bicycle show that was around at the time. When you started to see, like, NABS is not there. We are seeing this opportunity. We're going to take this mantle. It seems like it would be a daunting challenge to go from that idea to actually producing made. What was the decision making process? What did that look like for you? Or did you ask yourself what? If we can just get 20 brands to commit early, I feel like there's enough momentum that we can do this. I'm just curious to get into your, your mind and your colleagues minds about when was the go, no go decision and what was that process like? [00:15:38] Billy Sinkford: Well, COVID, we had wanted to do this before COVID. Luckily, we did not pull the trigger on, uh, any form of trade show prior to that, because that would have definitely changed things. Uh, You know, nobody could travel. Nobody would have been able to show up. Uh, the community support, uh, my partner, Rob and I, uh, spoke to a bunch of builders, spoke to a bunch of brands, uh, brands that support the builder community. So Chris Kang specifically being 1 of them who we also we do, uh, manage their PR and everybody. One after one, people said, yes, please do this. And yes, we'll help support it. And there weren't any nose and we just kept hearing. Yes. So we started looking at it from a logistic standpoint and realize that that we could pull this off and that it could be awesome. Originally, it was supposed to be entirely outside because of the pandemic. And we didn't know. What that was going to look like and we kind of wanted to safeguard the show and there's a very, very brief window in Portland where the weather is fantastic. Uh, and we, we've got it right now or made it was. Wildly unseasonably hot during the, uh, the first year of the show, but, uh, the venue that we found is phenomenal, uh, and old abandoned shipyard, uh, I mean, you, you saw it yourself. It's, it's perfect for the handmade, uh, market probably wouldn't work for. A bike show where track and specialized and giant wanted to show up and do their things. But for those that are actually working with their hands and, you know, making metal more metal, uh, super cool environment, uh, for them to be in and the venue lined up and after that, you know, that's it. I won't say that all the pieces magically fell together. There was a lot of hard work from the entire team that made behind the scenes, but, uh, it came together and it, you know, hard work and then the support of the builder community, uh, really brought it all together and year one was fantastic. I mean, I know you didn't get to go for the consumer days, but we very purposefully had time so that you were able to be there and spend time creating content and talking with builders and the. The builder community hadn't been together in, in years because of the pandemic and the lack of nabs even before that. So we carved out a little bit of extra time for that and that was super fun and got to take 200 builders, media and industry people and my favorite ride through Forest Park, uh, which was phenomenal. So it wasn't just a show itself. I think it was the entire experience of being in Portland together and it was really cool. [00:18:25] Craig Dalton (host): Yeah, absolutely. We got the food trucks in the back parking lot. Everything was just a lot of fun and I totally agree. It was, you know, nobody had to feel awkward about the style of booth they created or what they were bringing because it wasn't this super polished, super dome of convention centers or anything like that that we saw at Interbike. It was really, it felt very native to the handmade bicycle community for [00:18:51] Billy Sinkford: sure. And I think this year, you know, a lot of the, I would say 90 percent of the exhibitors, you know, we made a few videos, we, folks understood what they were walking into, to an extent. But it's one thing to see it online and read about it. It's another thing to actually be in the venue. And now, most of the exhibitors are coming back for, for year two, and they all know what things look like. So I think it'll be really cool to see how people take the space. And make their little, their portion of it their own and work with it. So, I think year one was rad and there were some folks that had some killer, killer booth designs that you would never, ever in your wildest dreams see at Eurobike or Interbike or Sea Otter. Um, and I think it worked out great that we weren't entirely outside because looking at some Consumer facing shows, which are all awesome, but it's a sea of 10 by 10 and 10 by 20 pop up tents, and we encourage people to bring tents so they've got their branding, but some of the cooler booths were, you know, handmade from wood that people brought with them, and it was super neat to see not only the folks showing, It's amazing work that they're doing, uh, but then also, you know, building a booth out that reflects that was, was [00:20:04] Craig Dalton (host): really unique. A hundred percent. It's just sort of, you know, everybody in the handmade community is so creative and just to allow them to have that freedom to develop their own displays. Super cool to see. And super fun for me to see some of the frame builders that I hadn't seen in a while, but also like a whole, probably 30 percent of them I'd never heard of before. And it was just great. Having that opportunity to get their point of view to see their manufacturing techniques to see how, you know, they're taking, you know, in the instance of maybe frameworks taking aerospace tooling and machines that aren't always available to other artisans and using that because they have access to it to create just kind of a unique. Process for creating a bike. Super fascinating to talk to guys like that. There [00:20:53] Billy Sinkford: were, I have been, because we've been extremely deep and the handmade community for a long time, and I'm fortunate to call a lot of these folks, my friends, and prior to putting on made, I really thought that I had a pretty good grasp of what was going on in the handmade community and who was who. And one of the biggest things that we did with the show was offering subsidized space. Making sure that bike flights was helping with discounted shipping, uh, there was not like a large host hotel that people felt they needed to stay at. So the show became really accessible and a lot of the younger builders and builders that did not show up at nabs came and exhibited, uh, made. Also, some of the, the legends, my generation, not, not to totally date myself, but they're not spring chickens anymore. And some of them are hanging up the torch, uh, and, or don't want to stand on their feet for, for three days. Um, they've, they've passed that. So having a lot of the younger builders and new builders at the show and not having the new builder row be In the absolute back of the hall, like it was at NABs, I made sure we were dispersing, you know. That you, a new builder was directly next to an established builder, and unless you're super deep in the industry, there was no way to tell the difference. You walked up to pretty much anybody exhibiting, and you were there to hear their story and not, uh, I don't know. It was really, it was cool. And I had to not, I did not spend a lot of time looking at the bikes during the show, which was really, really hard. I love taking photographs. I spent a lot of time. Documenting bikes in my free time, and I purposefully didn't bring a camera to the show and tried not to ogle the work during the show. Late, late at night after everybody had gone home, that's when I did it. But, uh, it was just phenomenal craftsmanship throughout the entire haul. It was awesome. [00:23:04] Craig Dalton (host): I was there for obviously the media day and partway into the, the consumer day started, I think, around noon on the Friday and I was there till about two. So I just started to get the first wave of consumers. What was that like, you know, midday Saturday or whenever peak traffic was, if you were there as a consumer, [00:23:25] Billy Sinkford: there were a couple of minutes where we were, we were pushing the limits of what that all could do for sure. Uh, we have far more people than we expected. Uh, It was awesome. I mean, just so full, uh, unfortunately, extremely hot, and we had fans running like crazy and, uh, ran out to get every little bit of water that we could. Unfortunately, there were forest fires, uh, in other parts of Oregon and Washington, and all the water trucks and everything that we had kind of helped get together was unavailable. Um, but we made it work. Uh, there were A couple thousand consumers in that hall on Saturday. We had over 5, 000 people come through between when it opened to the public on Friday and when we closed the doors for tear down, uh, on Sunday. So for year one, that was unbelievable, but the energy was super high and people were there. They were talking with builders, looking at bikes. Uh, it was, it was really cool to watch. It was fun to have a quiet moment where. Media industry folks, we all got to kind of hug and high five and, and then it was when we opened the gates on Friday, it was, uh, it's a whole, whole nother, it was almost two shows in one, [00:24:39] Craig Dalton (host): quite frankly. Yeah, certainly a three day grind for those builders to. Talk to everybody and keep their energy high. [00:24:49] Billy Sinkford: And we're, we're actually changing the format of the show this year. So we had a full day and a half that was for media and industry to kind of catch up and we did a poll of all the builders and brands after the show, and it was honestly split about 50 50 as to whether or not people wanted that extra time. Or we would do just a half day of media hours before we opened to the public. For the second year of the show, we're going to. Give it a shot the other way and do, uh, Friday morning will be just media and industry and then again, we'll open to the public and do Saturday and Sunday, but that will make the show shorter and for a lot of these builders, regardless of what size or scale operation they are every day that they're not. At the shop, that's a bike that's not going out to the customer, and this is not a large frame, a large bicycle company, for that matter, where it's happening, no matter whether the director of marketing is on the floor, like you're there talking to the builder, and that person is not making a frame for a customer, so we're trying to be cognizant. Excuse me, cognizant of that and do everything that we're going to do, but keep it a little bit shorter so that they can get back to the shop and make sure that they're doing what they need to do for their customers. [00:26:06] Craig Dalton (host): Yeah. Do you have a sense on the consumer side in terms of where people were traveling in from if they were obviously Portland's host to such a great community? I'm sure there was tons of Portland locals who could drive in and enjoy the show. It was a first year show, but did you get a sense that people were flying in to [00:26:24] Billy Sinkford: experience this? From the moment we announced that we had folks from all over the world that said that they were coming. There were people from Japan, Australia, uh, Europe coming from all over a lot of folks from the East Coast. I think. California, Portland, I mean, we're dominant without a doubt because it's very easy for them to travel or much easier for them to travel to the show. But some of the first emails that we got after announcing the show were from fans of custom bikes and people that own custom bikes that wanted to come and they were going to make this their vacation from Japan, Australia. And it was. Really rad to have this be a global show, not only reflected in the builders that were there because we also had builders from all over the world. This was not just Portland and California builders. We had folks from the east coast and uh, from all over the place. And this year for 2024, uh, the roster of builders and brands that are attending reflects that even more deeply. Folks all coming back and then new folks coming from Australia and we've got folks coming from the west or east coast rather, that came in. Kind of peep the show a little bit to make sure that it was something that they wanted to come to and now, uh, now they're, they're coming out for year two and, and are going to be part of the show. [00:27:42] Craig Dalton (host): That's a good segue into anything you'd want to highlight for year two. Any changes? Are there going to be more, more booths, more people? What, what can we expect in 2024? [00:27:53] Billy Sinkford: Uh, more explosions, more people, hopefully no explosions. Uh, uh, I think we've got certainly more builders, more brands. We had to extend the floor plan. So there's going to be an outdoor area as well as the indoor area this year. More food carts, more coffee. We'll still have the beer garden over there. And we're going to make sure to pop a little shade on top of that so that people can sit out there, even if it is a little bit hot. Uh, but I think there just are gonna be a variety of builders from even farther, uh, across the world. And I'm, the coolest thing that I've seen is we made it a big point to have subsidized space and to invite builders from all over the place and to make sure that if they needed help financially. That we could still have them at the show. We wanted to make sure that the builder community was represented as a whole. And there are builders that showed up and took those subsidized spaces that are now getting 10 by 20s at the show. Uh, that are saying that it was so amazing that they want to come back and have an even larger presence. So that to me was the coolest part is the show and the model works there. You know. That, that really warmed my heart quite a bit to see that happen in several instances. [00:29:12] Craig Dalton (host): Yeah, that says a lot. Tell us the dates of the Portland, Oregon show and where people can find out more information about it. [00:29:20] Billy Sinkford: Uh, yeah. Made. bike is our website. You don't need a dot com. We've got dot bike. So just made. bike and we will. Uh, make a lot of noise when we start selling, uh, consumer facing tickets for the show. Uh, the floor plan is ostensibly sold out and I still have a bit more of the wait list, uh, to work through. So, uh, if you're interested in, uh, being a part of the show, definitely get in touch sooner rather than later so we can see what we can do. Uh, but it'll be this summer, uh, August 23rd through 25th in Portland, Oregon at Zydell Yards, which is right on the Portland waterfront just outside of downtown. Uh, and you can find us on Instagram at made. bike as well. And is [00:30:06] Craig Dalton (host): there a risk that consumer tickets may sell out? Do people need to get on a mailing list or become aware pretty early in your [00:30:13] Billy Sinkford: process? Uh, it certainly can't hurt. Uh, we do have fire marshal limits that we're working within, uh, but I think we can very easily accommodate double the number of, uh, consumers that we have, uh, last year or so. We're hoping that people buy them in advance one because then it's less paper. It's a lot easier and we're able to get people through quicker, but we have not announced when we're going to start selling tickets to the public yet. We'll wait a little bit. Probably as the snow and rains start to start to thaw and stop falling here. We'll start thinking about it. [00:30:47] Craig Dalton (host): That makes sense. Well, everybody go over to made that bike and definitely get it on your radar for next year is a phenomenal fun show. So many beautiful bikes out there. And for those of you in an entirely different part of the world. I think we've got some breaking news. We can talk about now. Billy about another [00:31:05] Billy Sinkford: made show. Yeah, so this year MADE is expanding our footprint a little bit, and we are headed to Australia. Actually, we're headed to Australia before the main MADE show here in the United States. And it's going to be held in Melbourne. We've got a wonderful director of show, Andy White from Fixo, who is a longstanding friend of mine personally and of the agency as a whole. We've worked with him on a number of projects throughout the year, and he is extremely dedicated to documenting and being a part of the handmade culture in Australia. And we've already got commitments from an interest from Bomb Prova, Partington Wheels, the Lost Workshop, Delo Craft, and many, many more. And that is gonna be taking place June 28th and 29th, uh, at, uh, Darin, uh, verum, uh, just outside of Melbourne. And that also is coinciding with, uh, Andy's, uh, LAR. He has a large event called the the Melbourne. Uh, which takes place on the cobblestones, uh, in, in Melbourne, which I've never personally got a chance to, to witness. I've only witnessed it, uh, via the magic of the internet and I'm looking forward to going over and being a part of that event and then, uh, being present, uh, checking out the builder community in Australia. [00:32:33] Craig Dalton (host): Yeah, that's super exciting. I'll be curious to see if it's drawing builders from other parts of Asia, um, into that show and what a fascinating view you'll have to kind of go over and see that community and how it differs and how it's similar to what we have here in North America. [00:32:54] Billy Sinkford: I think there's some things that are universal to a degree, but. Every country is different. Uh, every builder is doing things differently. So, we're really looking forward to going over and hearing all the stories and seeing the work. I do think that there will be a larger draw. I think that. The USA show will always be the largest made show, uh, just because we're able to draw from, I think that we've got an awful lot of media here. We've got a really captive audience, uh, but Australia is quite far away as I am soon to find out on that plane ride. I've heard from people. Uh, so I think there are a lot of, a lot of builders that, you know, having a maid in Australia will give them a chance to get global exposure and connect with media and consumers in a way. Uh, That they haven't before and maybe there are some builders here from the United States that in 2025 decide that they're going to do both or maybe a builder here in the United States has already got great relationships with their customer base and the shops that they work with, uh, here and they want to go dip their toes into another country and see what's going on over there. And I think this will, this will give builders an opportunity to get even more exposure for [00:34:10] Craig Dalton (host): the work that they're doing. Yeah, it's super exciting and congratulations on the launch of that event. I can't wait to hear all about it. I can't wait to see you in Portland again this summer. Definitely one of my favorite shows that I attended as a podcaster and just overall enthusiast. So thanks for all your energy, Billy, you put into the industry as a whole and into the made show. [00:34:33] Billy Sinkford: It is my pleasure. Uh, we're really looking forward to MADE this year, uh, beyond looking forward to it. We're, we're thrilled. So it's hard to, hard to keep the excitement contained some days. I get to talk with so many cool people all the time. And it's going to be a rad year for MADE and a rad year for the handmade world as a whole. And thank you for taking the time to, to chat with me, Craig. Of course. My [00:34:55] Craig Dalton (host): pleasure. Cheers. Cheers. That's going to do it for this week's edition of the gravel ride podcast. Big, thanks to Billy for coming onto the show. Super excited about made 20, 24 in Portland and super excited for those of you down under in Australia. Perhaps my cousin Teebo to enjoy the made Australia experience in 2024. Also big, thanks to our friends at AIG one. Remember, check out, drink Agee. Dot com slash the gravel ride for those free travel packs and free supply of vitamin D plus K2. I hope you're doing well in 2024. And until next time. Here's to finding some dirt under your wheels. ​    

In this part 2 on public schools (see episode 34 for part 1), my guest Andy White explains seven things Christian parents can and should be doing to know what's going on in their child's school and classroom. In the second hour, Andy answers a dozen questions from listeners.MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:Gateways https://gogateways.org/Rise Up Christian Educators https://riseupchristianeducators.com/Prepare the Way https://www.preparetheway.us/ Association of Christian Schools International https://www.acsi.org/ Christopher Rufo https://christopherrufo.com/ Daily Signal from the Heritage Foundation https://www.dailysignal.com/ Critical Dilemma by Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Dilemma-Theories-Justice-Ideology_Implications/dp/073698870X/ 

This is the third part of my series on educational choices for Christian families. In today's episode, I interview Andy White, a Christian who has been a public high school principal for the last 19 years. Our purpose is NOT to tell every Christian parent to leave public schools; we know that every family has different considerations and opportunities. Rather, our purpose is to educate Christian parents who do continue to have their kids in public schools on what concerns they should watch out for. A subsequent episode will address what parents can do in response.

Andy has released 20 albums since 1986, touring with just him and his acoustic guitar. We discuss "The Happiness Index" from AT (2023), his second collaboration with Tim Finn; the title track from The Guilty and the Innocent (2017); and "Speechless" from Out There (1992). End song: "Italian Girls on Mopeds" from Boy 40 (2003). Intro: "Vision of You" from Rave On (1986). More at andywhite.com. Hear more Nakedly Examined Music. Like our Facebook page. Sponsor: Visit FactorMeals.com/nem50 (code improv50) to get 50% off America's #1 Ready-To-Eat Meal Kit.

Talking Luft is back, and I'm chatting with my friend Andy White aka FYXO, to put him through the full Talking Luft treatment! Last week on Life in the Peloton I sat down with FYXO to talk about a whole range of fascinating things, from what it's like to work as a bike messenger, to the underground subculture of alley-cat racing, and all things fixed gear riding - plus a whole lot more. It was a super fun episode and I loved getting to know more about one of the more niche ‘pelotons' out there. If you haven't listened to it, head over and check it out. But today, we're on the Talking Luft program! You know the drill by now – I put FYXO through his paces with a little quiz, I tried to squeeze some extra fixie knowledge out of him, and he's a bit of a style guru so it was a great chance to get a bit of a glimpse into what's cool in the world of fixed gear bikes and alley cat racing. I won't spoil it for you but get ready to hear about FYXO's love of the history and nostalgia of retro 90's cycling– he's a fan of the full Indurain casquette style, he loves a beanie, and he's been known to be partial to a skin suit. I hope you have as much fun listening along as I had putting this one together! Cheers, Mitch  

Life in the Peloton is proudly brought to you by Rapha We've finally got him on the pod – a spot that in his own words, he was born ready for, and I couldn't be more excited to chat with my friend FYXO (aka Andy White), to take a deep dive into the fixie world. It morphs nicely into the trajectory that Life in the Peloton has taken this year, where I've been talking a lot about uncovering all the different pelotons out there, and this is one of the most niche pelotons of them all. Andy and I go way back to our days racing the club scene in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, where he used to race on an old vintage steel bike. He spent time as a bike courier in London, where he worked during the ‘heyday' of the profession – where businesses would courier documents around the city in the same way we now send an email. It was a bit of an unexpectedly cool, cult profession at the time, that came with a bit of street cred. It was also from within the world of bike couriers that alley cat racing kicked off – which is an underground subculture of unstructured night races around the city, usually starting from the pub after a few pints. He has dabbled in all aspects of fixie riding since settling back in Melbourne, most notably setting up his brand FYXO, which was all about bringing fixed gear bikes into the country during the boom in fixie riding that happened a few years back and documenting his adventures around the world riding alley cat races. It's fascinating to hear about how Andy became immersed in this world and raced the alley cats in the cities of London and New York, before eventually bringing alley cat racing Down Under, and typically in his own unique way - in a style that he calls alley cats for the masses. The largest of these is the Melburn - Roobaix, which is now in its 16th year and has become synonymous with fixed-gear riding in Melbourne. It combines many of the different subcultures of cycling and the result is a fun, epic day of cycling, and something that I love being part of. I hope you enjoy listening and learning more about the intriguing world of fixie riding! Cheers, Mitch

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --