POPULARITY
Radio International - The Ultimate Eurovision Experience is broadcast from Malta's Radio 105FM on Tuesday evenings from 2100 - 0059 hours CET. The show is broadcast live on Wednesday evenings from 1900 - 2300 hours CET on the Eurovision Radio International Mixcloud Channel as well as on the Facebook Page of Eurovision Radio International with an interactive chatroom. AT A GLANCE - ON THE SHOW THIS WEEK Meet the Eurostars 2025: ADONXS (Czechia 2025) done at the Malta Eurovision Song Contest 2025 Melodifestivalen 2025 Interviews: Björn Holmgren, Angelino and Greczula MelFstWknd 2025 Interview: Arwin (Melodifestivalen 2025 Eurovision Spotlight: Eurovision 2025 in Regions: The West with Dermot Manning (new series) Eurovision News with Nick van Lith from www.escXtra.com Eurovision Birthday File with David Mann Eurovision Cover Spot with David Mann Eurovision Calendar with Javier Leal New Music Releases by Eurovision Artists Your music requests The Eurovision Spotlight - The Eurovision 2025 Land in Regions: All countries have now selected their entry to the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 and with this marking the end of the National Final Season 2025 and the start of the Pre-Party Season where the artists promote their entries to the fans at e.g. Eurovision in Concert in Amsterdam, Madrid Pre-Party, London's Preview Event, MancHagen, The Nordic Eurovision PreParty and Eurovision Party SKG in Greece. 36 countries are taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 which will be taking place on 13 and 15 May 2024 for the two Semi Finals and the Grand Final on 17 May 2025. Radio International split theEurovision Land 2025 into geographical regions North, East, South, West, Central, etc and each week the Radio International Eurovision experts are selecting one region playing the 2025 Eurovision entries. Dermot Manning will be starting the new series looking at the Western Countries entries for this year. ADONXS (Czechia 2025) MEET THE EUROSTARS 2025 - Interview with ADONXS (Czechia 2025): Malta held their national selection process in the first week of Feb 2025 with two Semi Finals and a Grand Final selecting Miriana Conte to represent Malta at the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 with the controversial song "Kant". At the first Semi Final of the Malta Eurovision Song Contest 2025, ADONXS performed the entry "Kiss Kiss Goodbye" as Interval Act. ADONXS will represent Czechia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 in Semi Final 2 in the Second Half. The Radio International Interview Team took the chance to conduct an interview with the singer that originally is Slovak. Hear that in-depth interview on the show this week. Melodifestivalen 2025 - The Grand Final: "Sverige, vi har ett resultat" On Saturday, 08 Mar 2025 the Grnd Final of Melodifestivalen 2025 took place in the Strawberry Arena in Solna near Stockholm. At the end of the voting sequence Finnish trio KAJ were announced to be the winner of Melodifestivalen 2025 with the song "Bara Bada Bastu" and with this Sweden's representatives to the Eurovision Song Contest 2025. Winner of Melodifvestialen 2025 and Sweden's entry to the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 KAJ Melodifestivalen is the biggest National Final selection process in the world of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is the 65th edition and is produced by Swedish broadcaster SVT. 30 entries out of 2794 submitted songs made it to the shows. The 30 entries will take part in the competition across five heats. Each heat consists of six songs, with the top two songs directly qualifying for the final. Unlike in the previous edition, only the third-placing song will proceed to a final qualification round at the end of the fifth heat, which will now feature five songs instead of ten. Two songs in the final qualification will then progress to the final, which will comprise of 12 songs. The winner of the final will be determined by the usual 50/50 combination of votes from the public and an international jury. All shows were hosted by Edvin Törnblom and Kristina "Keyoo" Petrushina. Melodifestivalen 2025 Grand Final Scoreboard More details you can find over at our friends of wikipedia - click here. Melodifestivalen 2025 Grand Final Allstar Melodifestivalen 2025 Interviews: This week listen to interviews with Angelino, Bjoern Holmgren and Greczula done during Heat 3 of Melodifestivalen 2025 and from Heat 5 with Arwin done at the MelFstWknd 2025. Also JP will be joined by David Mann for the Eurovision Birthday File and Eurovision Coverspot. Nick will be presenting the Eurovision News courtesy of escXtra.com. There will be a lot of the great new releases of Eurovision artists on the show as well as great Eurovision Classics. Javier will be updating us on the upcoming Eurovision events in the Eurovision Calendar and and and.... Find out more details of how to tune in live - click here For full details of this week's Show Content and Play List - click here
At MelfestWKND, Kittens grabbed a chat with Arwin, who participated at Melodifestivalen 2025 with his song “This Dream of Mine” Did you attend Melfest WKND? What did you think of the show? As always, let us know what you think by commenting below. Also, be sure to follow ‘That Eurovision Site' on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Bluesky as we start […] The post TEP Interviews: Arwin at Melfest WKND 2025 appeared first on That Eurovision Site.
Yesterday, after much speculation, Sweden’s SVT released the full list of artists that will participate at next year’s Melodifestivalen; Sweden’s longstanding Eurovision selection, that will chose its entry for Basel. We were on the ground in Stockholm, and Tim had a chance to speak to some of this year’s acts; including Arwin, who will sing […] The post TEP Talks: Arwin (Melodifestivalen 2025) appeared first on That Eurovision Site.
Join Charlie, a non-binary sci-fi fantasy writer and practicing Druid, alongside their husband Brian, as they explore the concept of the Wind Horse from Shambala teachings. Delving into mindfulness, basic goodness, and the transformative power of the five poisons into the five powers, they draw parallels with Druidic practices and other spiritual traditions. This episode encourages a thought experiment on riding the Wind Horse, aiming to harness the intrinsic energy of the universe for personal and spiritual growth. Practical mindfulness exercises and an in-depth discussion on faith, effort, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom are included.Tips or Donations here: https://ko-fi.com/cedorsett patreon.com/cedorsett Substack: https://www.creationspaths.com/ For Educational Resource: https://wisdomscry.com For all of the things we are doing at The Seraphic Grove go to Creation's Paths https://www.creationspaths.com/ Social Connections: BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/creationspaths.com Threads https://www.threads.net/@creationspaths Instagram https://www.instagram.com/creationspaths/Transcript:[00:00:00] Charlie- New: When we were talking about what we wanted to do in this season of Lúnasa, We got to talking about the races. That used to happen. The chariot races, the horse races, the foot races. Brian asks, is there anyway, we can incorporate that into what we're talking about. My mind immediately went to an idea. From the Shambala teachings. The idea of the wind horse. Let's talk about that a little bit today. On Creation's Paths. Intro hello everyone. My name is Charlie. I'm a non-binary sci-fi fantasy writer. I'm also a practicing. Druid and priest a Bridget. I am joined today by my very silly husband, Brian. [00:00:51] Brian - New: Hello. [00:00:52] Charlie- New: Today we're going to be talking about the Lungta or the wind horse. I've really been trying to see if I could find a Celtic equivalent. Of this or something from the Irish or Welsh. Scottish. Myths that would. Fit, this kind of story. I'm struggling for that. So if you know of anything, do let me know. My experience with this idea comes from. Chögyam trungpa Rinpoche's Shambala. Of the ideas that are presented in that book. And so I don't have the strong cultural connection to it. That others would with this appearing on various net national flags. And whatnot. So I want to kind of say state this up front that from my practice of Shambala. That's where this is coming from. I mean, nothing but respect. To all of the communities that have a much deeper. Tied to this imagery. Then perhaps I do. In shambala. The Lungta or wind horse. Is defined as an expression of the basic goodness of the universe, the basic energy of the universe. In druidry it straddles the line between what we would call Arwin and Nwyfre. Between that creative breath. That is blowing through the world. And that energy that we can tap into. It might be right to say that the wind horse in the Shambala teachings is an expression of Nwyfre. It is an expression of how you connect to that basic goodness. And learn to ride it. And learn to harness it and. Bring that energy into your life. To help it to flow through all things and through practice. The wonderful magic that is discussed in the Shambala. System. We were told that. The element of wind. Reminds us of just how strong. And exuberant. This basic goodness of the world is. If you've not encountered this idea before you. It's also present in Buddhism. Stop for a minute. Unless you're driving. If you're driving, pull over to the side of the road or do this part of the exercise when you get home. Or to, to a parking lot somewhere , don't do this while driving. I want you to close your eyes for a minute. And just slowly. Breathe in. And breathe out. Breathe in. And breathe out. And just focus on your breathing anytime, a thought or feeling. Tries to distract you from. Your breath. Just. Go back to the breath. No struggle. No fight. Just go back to your breath. And then there was something happening inside of you. Yeah, this is the beginning of a mindfulness meditation. This is how we start learning mindfulness. But do you notice something else? There's an ease. There's a. Sensation that a lot of people feel. When they enter this mindful state. It might take you a bit to. Dig down into it. You might not be instant. Let's just breathe in. And breathe. Slowly at first until you. Been able to. Gather that focus on your breathing. Then let your breathing. Become more natural. Let it flow in and out. And you'll feel something. There are a lot of words for this. Basic joy. Basic calm basic goodness. All manner of words for you. Feeling. It's very. Present. That's the heart and the root of mindfulness. That's basic. Goodness. Now I, from a druidic perspective. Would tell you. That you were touching the very edges of. Oh, This is like when you're a kid in the car and you stick your fingers out. Not the full window, like the whole window hasn't opened the windows kind of cracked. You kind of stick your fingers out and feel the wind. Brushing against the tips of your fingers. Where you're standing by the edge of a stream and you just gonna dip your fingers in and you feel the water. Flowing by. That's what you're feeling. In this moment. That basic goodness. That gentle flow. Of the Awen. This isn't like when the wind hits us and we're raptured away into this creative. Fury. The other one isn't there just then. It's always there. Everyone has a different name for it. Everyone has a different way of talking about it. And here in the Buddhist and. Shambala tradition. It's basic goodness. Because everything's okay. That moment in meditation that you get to where you just feel everything's all right. Now. Imagine being able to. Ride that feeling. That's the image in Shambala. That's the image of the wind horse. It's been able to get into that. Place of basic goodness. And ride that current. To ride it forward. And to stay on it and to harness that. Intrinsic power of the universe. That basic goodness. For better. Is that a powerful image? Is that an image that moves you? It moves me. That's how. We can start getting into the Awen. That's how we can start getting into basic goodness. And that's. And what we mean when we say riding the wind horse in the title. Yeah. It comes from this basic image. What. Would it mean if we could actually do that? Let's just think about this for a minute. Let's have a thought experiment. The whole idea of the Shambala practices. We're trying to bring that realm of all the enlightened beings to Shambala here. To earth. The idea in Christianity is we're trying to bring the kingdom of God here. May your will be done on heaven. And on earth as it is in heaven. In. Kabbalah, You are. Restoring the world. So that it will be made perfect in the world to come. A lot of us have this. Idea. We're trying to perfect them. a, Bodhisattva takes the vow so that they will not enter their final Nirvana. They're very Nirvana. Until all beings are enlightenment. You're here for the long haul. They're going to be here until the end until this golden age. In the Shambala teachings. We're told that. Learning. This practice. I'll be able to ride that basic goodness. That's how we get there. Now in Druidry, we don't have that. Per se. We can talk about. tir na nog getting. The land of youth, the land of the living. That other world. It really is. Um, other world we're not trying to bring tir na nog here. I think you can experience. Glimpses. Of the other world here. We're not actually going to enter the other world until we enter the other world. We are trying to bring that inspiration. That Awen. Into the world. We're trying to find. The Mabin. The child of light. That's been stolen from the divine mother. So that. Life can be restored to the land. Then so doing the story. We travel around to the four oldest creatures trying to find. Where the Mabin has been hidden. Whereas the child. Where did you hide? Where's he hidden where. Where is it? But even that's not an eschatological idea, right? It's there's no end of the world. We don't know if there wasn't an end of the world. There so little that has survived of Irish Welsh. Scottish Manx Cornish. Mythology. We don't know if they ever had. An idealized state or. Uh, cyclical universe kind of like what happens after Ragnar rock, where. The old gods are dead. And the three gods, the three sons of. Oden survive and recreate the world. I don't know. We don't even know if that's how that story originally ended. It's the version that we have was written by a Christian. And they could have just Christianized. So we, we don't know. I like to think. When we look at the stories. We can see this. Balance. This ideal of balance. Between our world and the other world. The spirit in the material world. We're not always working for the, either the spiritual or the material work. Trying to bring the best of both together. That would involve writing the wind horse. [00:09:20] Brian - New: In addition to that, I'm thinking about writing. The wind horse. I found myself thinking about. The word. and how it breaks down. Too. Lung being space. Of the five elements. ta meaning horse. Horse being that transformation. Of purifying of taking something. Bad and making it. Good. After thinking about it for a while. It dawned on me that. In this practice. When I am riding the wind horse, when I'm actively doing this. It is the act of. Being mindful of the five poisons. Transforming them. Into the five powers. When I'm in a journey throughout my daily life, I tried to be mindful of. That. When I'm really engaging in that, I'm. Engaging in that transformative power. The five poisons. are doubt. Which we. Experience often. even right now, I'm facing doubt. laziness. Lisa, this is something that, you know, He constantly wrestled against it's okay to rest. But laziness is that overindulgence. heedlessness. Not paying attention to where you're going or what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Recklessly charging forth. Distraction. as one of the ADHD community members. Uh, Yeah, distraction. Definitely a poisoning challenge. And ignorance. Through lungta, through riding the wind horse, the exercise. I look towards faith. because faith removes doubt. [00:10:57] Charlie- New: The faith that we're talking about here in the Buddhist context. Is what I would consider true faith. And that's trust. It's I have faith in my friends. It's I have learned to rely on this, that this is reliable. It is an earned. Trust it is not necessarily wish fulfilling trust. No. The important thing is that it is built from one. You start with a, I'm going to test this and see if it works. But you only keep that faith. Once you've learned that it is trustworthy. [00:11:30] Brian - New: It's proving all things holding fast to that, which is true. It is also that trust. That comes from. The hope that. Things will happen. But knowing that it might not happen in the way that you expect it to, or the manner in which you expect it to. You do the effort along with that hope it's hope plus effort, which is the second power. Which is the second power. Energy. Energy and effort. Very, uh, very, uh, yeah. That effort. That's what controls laziness. When getting into the five powers, the five poisons you'll realize one tends to lead to the other. Effort. That'll control that laziness. So it's, okay to rest. We all need to take time to rest, to rejuvenate, to heal. Two. Build our energy, our power back up. But that is different from. Overindulging in. Too much, [00:12:26] Charlie- New: I would say it's differently. As somebody who has a lot of chronic pain. Issues. In my life. I don't like this idea of. Overindulgence being the phrasing there for me. I look at laziness as. This inattentive use of energy. It's a wild. The broken power line. That's just sparking around and not. Really doing anything. It's not allowing your energy to flow where it can flow. Whatever little bits of energy you may have. [00:12:59] Brian - New: Yeah. It can also be obstructed or poorly applied energy. Or poorly applied effort, which. Flows right into the next one. That heedlessness as the poison or mindfulness. as the power. in those moments, when you're being heedless, when you're your energy is just randomly zapping out. And you are. Electrocuting people around you. So to speak. that's when you want to give pause. And be mindful. Just being aware. Of where your energy is, how it is flowing. It is in a way that meditation, Charlie. Having us do earlier. Just a simple breathing. Is a mindfulness and an awareness that we're all on the wind horse. We're on it, no matter whether we want to or not, it's called the journey of life in its present moment. It's being in a present moment. Were there. Which. Then it leads us to the next power is concentration. Where the poison is distraction. When you're finding yourself in those moments of distraction. Mindfulness can help lead you back into concentration. So you take that pause. Like when I have that. Ooh, what's that? It's okay to take that moment, whatever, but I then have to be mindful and bring myself back. Into focus back into concentrating. On where my energy needs to be, what I am actually doing, choosing to do. Yep. Not reacting, but choosing to do. In that moment. Which leads us. To the fifth power that's wisdom. Which helps to control ignorance. [00:14:37] Charlie- New: I think ignorance is one of the most important things in the world right now. Because. I feel like so many of our problems. Our people refusing to admit what they're ignorant about. Very true, because we've turned ignorance into a vice ignorance is an advice it's a poison. And it's one that's in the water. It's all around us, all around us. It's in the water. It's in the air. We're all ignorant of so many things. We're ignorant to so many things. We have no idea how many things we're ignorant of. [00:15:03] Brian - New: The headlessness in distractions in our lives. This leads us to our ignorance. Yes. We're distracted by clicking on this and clicking on that and watching this, watching that and not being mindful and not. Concentrating. On what we need to know or knowing that we don't know a lot of what we need to know. [00:15:23] Charlie- New: Or thinking that we know a lot more than we actually do. Yeah. That. Really is. In so many ways, the opposite of wisdom, like with wisdom. Starts by knowing that you don't know. I forgot who said it but admitting that you don't know is the beginning of wisdom. It really is. You have to start from the place of, I don't know. [00:15:43] Brian - New: Yeah. This is where they flow back into each other. Because faith allows you to go, I don't know. But I know I have faith. That I could still do things. I could still be active in my life and in my community. And have the energy to move forward. And with mindfulness and concentration, I can get more wisdom. So that I can be wiser, but also at the same time have that faith that I can step out there and maybe be wrong. Which is okay. That's part of learning. That's part of gaining wisdom. In being wrong and then admitting and being aware that you are wrong. Once you're made aware. You can then learn and grow and gain that wisdom. [00:16:27] Charlie- New: We're going to be talking about the five powers a lot. Because. They are the engine. That spirituality runs off. It's important for us to have a very active understanding of how our spirituality works. All too often. We just pick up ideas and we put them down and we don't really know what we're doing with them. And this model of understanding. Really helps us to get to the root of it. We picked something up and that's faith. Does this work? Let's try this. When somebody tells you do mindfulness meditation, that'll help you out. Like I did earlier. In this episode. Well, if you have just a little bit of faith of, okay, I'll try it. So you put in the effort. Which will hopefully bring you mindfulness literally in this case. Well, you become aware of what is going on. Which allows you to concentrate and focus in. And then a little, little bit of wisdom. Oh, I did calm down. My mind did come down. I did get a small taste of that basic goodness, that basic reality. That is. Under all things. And that gives you trust. Which is faith. And the cycle continues again and again, and again. don't believe that you can lose your faith. I hear people say this a lot. It's a very common. Phrase in English. I lost my faith in, I lost my faith in. Uh, you can have your faith betrayed. You can. Realize you had never really had faith in something to begin with, but you can't really lose it. Unless trust is betrayed. It doesn't really go away. I know many institutions once had my faith and trust. And then betrayed my faith and trust, and I no longer have faith in those institutions. I didn't lose my faith in. Those institutions. That's that's internalizing that feeling way too much. Those institutions betrayed my faith. They betrayed my trust. And so they no longer have it. And have a lot that they would have to do to earn it back. These five powers. Which are the engine. That runs. All spirituality, whether people are Mo. Mindful of it or not. It really does. Help you get in touch with that basic good does. And learning to operate this machine. That is what riding the lungta is. It's something to operate this machine. It's learning. To tap into that basic. River that basic flow. Of goodness of life. Whatever you want to call it. Yep. That is running through all things. I hope that this episode has helped you out in some way. If nothing else, maybe give you something to think about. We are going to be talking about the five powers a lot. It comes up. And a lot of what I talk about and write. , I have an article up over on https://wisdomscry.com . And on https://www.creationspaths.com/ about the great work inviting people to join me. In that. And one of the. Sections of that is talking about how this actually functions. Within us and in our faith. And links out to other articles that I've written about the various aspects of the five. Power. So definitely go check that out. If this is something that interests you. And wherever you are, if you, if you've liked us at all, if. The app gives you the ability to like it. If you have followed or subscribed, do that. If. Yeah. Can leave a review. If you're listening to us on apple podcasts. Please leave a review of your life as it really does help out so much more than, you know, They don't actually take listens into effect that much. They do pay attention to. Number of reviews and number of stars and reviews. So it really does help out a lot. If you've got a few pennies that you can throw our way, if you go over to https://www.creationspaths.com/ . You can sign up and. We get a paid membership over there. And that helps us out a lot. Helps us keep these episodes coming to you. Helps us with all of the things that we're doing helps us pay for the basic necessities of life. And no. When we put the classes, you'll get first. Access to them. Thank you so much for listening. May you tap into that basic goodness and learn how to ride it. A better world. Amen. Amen. Get full access to Creation's Paths at www.creationspaths.com/subscribe
Weather is a significant factor in landscape photography, but predicting can be excruciatingly painful. If you've been shooting photos for long, you know how frustrating it can be to chase the best light. I spoke with photographer Arwin Levinson about predicting the weather in this episode. Arwin has been digging deep to predict the weather, and she has learned a lot along the way. In this episode, Arwin shares some excellent information surrounding weather and landscape photography.Links from this episode:Arwin's WebsiteArwin's InstagramArwin's XMySunsetThe Photographer's EphemerisSunsetWxWindyWeather.govIf you're serious about becoming better at photography, the fastest way to do so is by joining me for an in-person workshop. Check my current workshop listings here.Find FREE photography tutorials on my YouTube channel.
We're continuing the "Month of Merry" by getting snowed in at the Tipton Hotel with the Suite Life episode, "Christmas at the Tipton". Highlights include the return of Promo PowWow, Arwin losing his mind over firewood, a multitude of one-star Yelp reviews for the Tipton, and lots of content for the Carey Martin hive! ----- Follow The Time Mousechine: Instagram Twitter TikTok Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
I denne episoden av Skolelys har vi invitert Arwin, Isak og Celin, tre kloke og reflekterte elever fra Haugeåsen ungdomsskole i Fredrikstad. De forteller åpent og ærlig om hvordan de bruker KI, spesielt chatboter og ChatGPT, i sin skolehverdag. Og budskapet deres er ganske klart: Det ønsker at lærere også skal snakke åpent og ærlig med dem, om hva de kan og hva de gjør. Da vil læreren forstå eleven bedre og eleven vil vite mer om hva som er god og ikke god bruk av teknologien. Dessuten har de et tips eller to om hvordan du som lærer kan øke kompetansen sin. Denne episoden vil du, med andre ord, ikke gå glipp av
This is my conversation with avid traditional bowhunter Arwin Depue. We discuss whitetail deer behavior, hunting strategy, some huntin' stories, and more. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/james-dussias/support
What an amazing guest we have for you today!!! Coach Blu talks with Arwn Decker. Growing up she talks about what it was like to have an alcoholic step-father. What alcohol started to do in her life and getting sober one christmas holliday. That december 21 was the first weekend....of many....races she started to love and train for. Arwen is a Financial Adviser, National Speaker, Author of ‘She Handled It, So Can You!' and Co-Owner of Becker Retirement Group. After years of struggling to generate leads consistently, Arwen took over the marketing and seminars in their practice and directed their focus to reaching women. she has been the co-owner of Becker Retirement Group with her husband Randy.After meeting with thousands of women over the years, Arwen has taken a direct focus on changing the way women are financially educated by creating her training organization, LIFE with Arwen. She is a proud mom to three boys, and life-long athlete who loves to travel! If you really loved this odcast....and im sure you will.... follow Arwin on intagram https://www.instagram.com/arwenbecker/?hl=en Life with Arwin. Changing the world, one woman at a time
What an amazing guest we have for you today!!! Coach Blu talks with Arwn Decker. Growing up she talks about what it was like to have an alcoholic step-father. What alcohol started to do in her life and getting sober one christmas holliday. That december 21 was the first weekend....of many....races she started to love and train for. Arwen is a Financial Adviser, National Speaker, Author of ‘She Handled It, So Can You!' and Co-Owner of Becker Retirement Group. After years of struggling to generate leads consistently, Arwen took over the marketing and seminars in their practice and directed their focus to reaching women. she has been the co-owner of Becker Retirement Group with her husband Randy.After meeting with thousands of women over the years, Arwen has taken a direct focus on changing the way women are financially educated by creating her training organization, LIFE with Arwen. She is a proud mom to three boys, and life-long athlete who loves to travel! If you really loved this odcast....and im sure you will.... follow Arwin on intagram https://www.instagram.com/arwenbecker/?hl=en Life with Arwin. Changing the world, one woman at a time
We're taking a look at some of the pilots and concepts that fell to Disney Channel's cutting room floor over the years, including the infamous Arwin spinoff, the canceled Lizzie McGuire reboot, and concepts that were eventually reworked into Disney Channel classics. ----- Follow The Time Mousechine: Instagram Twitter TikTok Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chris is joined with Arwin to discuss the fallout from the Tank Davis vs Ryan Garcia fight. They breakdown Sergei Pavlovich's future in the heavyweight division and give their picks for upcoming UFC cards.
Arwin LevinsonEpisode 84: Show Notes.Today's guest was a software developer with a love of photography. When she discovered NFT art as a way for her to combine these two passions, she dove in head first. In this episode, we are joined by Arwin Levinson, known for creating dreamy yet realistic photographs of the American West under dramatic skies. Tuning in, you'll hear more about her NFT career, how she got into it, and what it took for her to start using a hardware wallet. You'll also learn more about her love of cats, her taste for decadent foods, and how she maintains a sense of serenity. Tune in today to hear about her upcoming projects, the talks she is presenting at the Black Box Festival at NFT NYC, and her advice for artists joining the NFT art space. Key Points From This Episode:• An introduction to Arwin Levinson, landscape photographer and NFT artist.• What it took for her to start using a hardware wallet.• How she fell in love with photography while working as a software developer.• Some of her other jobs before becoming a software developer.• Why Arwin would be a cat if she were an animal.• Hear about her love of decadent foods. • Why the prayer of serenity is the best advice she's ever been given. • Arwin's advice for artists joining the crypto art space.• Her desire to live in different places for various lengths of time.• An unusual question about NorCal Guy and how he likes his biscuits. • Learn about “Awe,” Arwin's upcoming project, as well as “Pillars of the Earth: Timeless”. • Information about her talk at the Black Box Festival at NFT NYC. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:Photography by Arwin Arwin Levinson on TwitterArwin Levinson Foundation"Awe" "Pillars of the Earth: Timeless" NorCal and Shill on Twitter
Welcome to the NFT Jungle is a podcast dedicated to NFTs as well as navigating the NFT space so that you can be equipped to make good decisions in this crazy world of NFTs! ❤️ Welcome To The NFT Jungle is the OFFICIAL podcast for “MetaJungle”. The MetaJungle team is developing platform tools to make your NFT experiences better. Join the MetaJungle Discord for free access to information, tools, and resources that will make your NFT collecting a success!
Arwin Levinson is a Las Vegas-based landscape photographer known to capture some very compelling photography that depicts nature in its most raw and ethereal form. She's devoted her time to capturing not only perfectly timed photos of our world but also the feeling of awe you get when you experience those moments of wonder in real-time. Arwin was born in Massachusetts and studied computer science at the University of Illinois before finding herself in Las Vegas. One day, on a road trip through the country to help her sister move to Los Angeles, Levinson found herself driving through the mountains in Colorado when she felt immediately inspired by nature and the views of the mountains. She picked up her first camera not long after, and found herself wandering around the landscapes trying to capture as much of the land surrounding the North West as she could. When she moved back to Illinois, she found herself in a city with very minimal landscape opportunities, but a work trip that took her all the way to India, where she got the chance to visit the Himalayas, would rekindle her passion for photography again. We discuss how she came to see the landscapes around her as old friends she can revisit many times over as well as her love for capturing the unusual and astronomical events that can be seen in the brother skies along with much much more! I hope you enjoy the show! You can find Arwin's work here: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ArwinL Website: https://www.photographybyarwin.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arwin.l/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LevinsonArwin Theme music: Liturgy Of The Street by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com #podcast #landscapephotography
I dag har vi fått med oss lege og influencer, Dr Arwin. Arwin har mye fokus på å hjelpe unge menn som sliter med psykisk helse. Sjekk ut Arwin på sosiale medier: @drarwin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We start season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs with an extra-long look at "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie, and at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the careers of the Mamas and the Papas and P.F. Sloan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Up, Up, and Away" by the 5th Dimension. 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/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Scott McKenzie's first album is available here. There are many compilations of the Mamas and the Papas' music, but sadly none that are in print in the UK have the original mono mixes. This set is about as good as you're going to find, though, for the stereo versions. Information on the Mamas and the Papas came from Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and the Papas by Matthew Greenwald, California Dreamin': The True Story Of The Mamas and Papas by Michelle Phillips, and Papa John by John Phillips and Jim Jerome. Information on P.F. Sloan came from PF - TRAVELLING BAREFOOT ON A ROCKY ROAD by Stephen McParland and What's Exactly the Matter With Me? by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg. The film of the Monterey Pop Festival is available on this Criterion Blu-Ray set. Sadly the CD of the performances seems to be deleted. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. It's good to be back. Before we start this episode, I just want to say one thing. I get a lot of credit at times for the way I don't shy away from dealing with the more unsavoury elements of the people being covered in my podcast -- particularly the more awful men. But as I said very early on, I only cover those aspects of their life when they're relevant to the music, because this is a music podcast and not a true crime podcast. But also I worry that in some cases this might mean I'm giving a false impression of some people. In the case of this episode, one of the central figures is John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Now, Phillips has posthumously been accused of some truly monstrous acts, the kind of thing that is truly unforgivable, and I believe those accusations. But those acts didn't take place during the time period covered by most of this episode, so I won't be covering them here -- but they're easily googlable if you want to know. I thought it best to get that out of the way at the start, so no-one's either anxiously waiting for the penny to drop or upset that I didn't acknowledge the elephant in the room. Separately, this episode will have some discussion of fatphobia and diet culture, and of a death that is at least in part attributable to those things. Those of you affected by that may want to skip this one or read the transcript. There are also some mentions of drug addiction and alcoholism. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things that causes problems with rock history is the tendency of people to have selective memories, and that's never more true than when it comes to the Summer of Love, summer of 1967. In the mythology that's built up around it, that was a golden time, the greatest time ever, a period of peace and love where everything was possible, and the world looked like it was going to just keep on getting better. But what that means, of course, is that the people remembering it that way do so because it was the best time of their lives. And what happens when the best time of your life is over in one summer? When you have one hit and never have a second, or when your band splits up after only eighteen months, and you have to cope with the reality that your best years are not only behind you, but they weren't even best years, but just best months? What stories would you tell about that time? Would you remember it as the eve of destruction, the last great moment before everything went to hell, or would you remember it as a golden summer, full of people with flowers in their hair? And would either really be true? [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco"] Other than the city in which they worked, there are a few things that seem to characterise almost all the important figures on the LA music scene in the middle part of the 1960s. They almost all seem to be incredibly ambitious, as one might imagine. There seem to be a huge number of fantasists among them -- people who will not only choose the legend over reality when it suits them, but who will choose the legend over reality even when it doesn't suit them. And they almost all seem to have a story about being turned down in a rude and arrogant manner by Lou Adler, usually more or less the same story. To give an example, I'm going to read out a bit of Ray Manzarek's autobiography here. Now, Manzarek uses a few words that I can't use on this podcast and keep a clean rating, so I'm just going to do slight pauses when I get to them, but I'll leave the words in the transcript for those who aren't offended by them: "Sometimes Jim and Dorothy and I went alone. The three of us tried Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was the head man. He was shrewd and he was hip. He had the Mamas and the Papas and a big single with Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction.' He was flush. We were ushered into his office. He looked cool. He was California casually disheveled and had the look of a stoner, but his eyes were as cold as a shark's. He took the twelve-inch acetate demo from me and we all sat down. He put the disc on his turntable and played each cut…for ten seconds. Ten seconds! You can't tell jack [shit] from ten seconds. At least listen to one of the songs all the way through. I wanted to rage at him. 'How dare you! We're the Doors! This is [fucking] Jim Morrison! He's going to be a [fucking] star! Can't you see that? Can't you see how [fucking] handsome he is? Can't you hear how groovy the music is? Don't you [fucking] get it? Listen to the words, man!' My brain was a boiling, lava-filled Jell-O mold of rage. I wanted to eviscerate that shark. The songs he so casually dismissed were 'Moonlight Drive,' 'Hello, I Love You,' 'Summer's Almost Gone,' 'End of the Night,' 'I Looked at You,' 'Go Insane.' He rejected the whole demo. Ten seconds on each song—maybe twenty seconds on 'Hello, I Love You' (I took that as an omen of potential airplay)—and we were dismissed out of hand. Just like that. He took the demo off the turntable and handed it back to me with an obsequious smile and said, 'Nothing here I can use.' We were shocked. We stood up, the three of us, and Jim, with a wry and knowing smile on his lips, cuttingly and coolly shot back at him, 'That's okay, man. We don't want to be *used*, anyway.'" Now, as you may have gathered from the episode on the Doors, Ray Manzarek was one of those print-the-legend types, and that's true of everyone who tells similar stories about Lou Alder. But... there are a *lot* of people who tell similar stories about Lou Adler. One of those was Phil Sloan. You can get an idea of Sloan's attitude to storytelling from a story he always used to tell. Shortly after he and his family moved to LA from New York, he got a job selling newspapers on a street corner on Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Schwab's Drug Store. One day James Dean drove up in his Porsche and made an unusual request. He wanted to buy every copy of the newspaper that Sloan had -- around a hundred and fifty copies in total. But he only wanted one article, something in the entertainment section. Sloan didn't remember what the article was, but he did remember that one of the headlines was on the final illness of Oliver Hardy, who died shortly afterwards, and thought it might have been something to do with that. Dean was going to just clip that article from every copy he bought, and then he was going to give all the newspapers back to Sloan to sell again, so Sloan ended up making a lot of extra money that day. There is one rather big problem with that story. Oliver Hardy died in August 1957, just after the Sloan family moved to LA. But James Dean died in September 1955, two years earlier. Sloan admitted that, and said he couldn't explain it, but he was insistent. He sold a hundred and fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after Dean's death. When not selling newspapers to dead celebrities, Sloan went to Fairfax High School, and developed an interest in music which was mostly oriented around the kind of white pop vocal groups that were popular at the time, groups like the Kingston Trio, the Four Lads, and the Four Aces. But the record that made Sloan decide he wanted to make music himself was "Just Goofed" by the Teen Queens: [Excerpt: The Teen Queens, "Just Goofed"] In 1959, when he was fourteen, he saw an advert for an open audition with Aladdin Records, a label he liked because of Thurston Harris. He went along to the audition, and was successful. His first single, released as by Flip Sloan -- Flip was a nickname, a corruption of "Philip" -- was produced by Bumps Blackwell and featured several of the musicians who played with Sam Cooke, plus Larry Knechtel on piano and Mike Deasey on guitar, but Aladdin shut down shortly after releasing it, and it may not even have had a general release, just promo copies. I've not been able to find a copy online anywhere. After that, he tried Arwin Records, the label that Jan and Arnie recorded for, which was owned by Marty Melcher (Doris Day's husband and Terry Melcher's stepfather). Melcher signed him, and put out a single, "She's My Girl", on Mart Records, a subsidiary of Arwin, on which Sloan was backed by a group of session players including Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston: [Excerpt: Philip Sloan, "She's My Girl"] That record didn't have any success, and Sloan was soon dropped by Mart Records. He went on to sign with Blue Bird Records, which was as far as can be ascertained essentially a scam organisation that would record demos for songwriters, but tell the performers that they were making a real record, so that they would record it for the royalties they would never get, rather than for a decent fee as a professional demo singer would get. But Steve Venet -- the brother of Nik Venet, and occasional songwriting collaborator with Tommy Boyce -- happened to come to Blue Bird one day, and hear one of Sloan's original songs. He thought Sloan would make a good songwriter, and took him to see Lou Adler at Columbia-Screen Gems music publishing. This was shortly after the merger between Columbia-Screen Gems and Aldon Music, and Adler was at this point the West Coast head of operations, subservient to Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, but largely left to do what he wanted. The way Sloan always told the story, Venet tried to get Adler to sign Sloan, but Adler said his songs stunk and had no commercial potential. But Sloan persisted in trying to get a contract there, and eventually Al Nevins happened to be in the office and overruled Adler, much to Adler's disgust. Sloan was signed to Columbia-Screen Gems as a songwriter, though he wasn't put on a salary like the Brill Building songwriters, just told that he could bring in songs and they would publish them. Shortly after this, Adler suggested to Sloan that he might want to form a writing team with another songwriter, Steve Barri, who had had a similar non-career non-trajectory, but was very slightly further ahead in his career, having done some work with Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears. Barri had co-written a couple of flop singles for Connors, before the two of them had formed a vocal group, the Storytellers, with Connors' sister. The Storytellers had released a single, "When Two People (Are in Love)" , which was put out on a local independent label and which Adler had licensed to be released on Dimension Records, the label associated with Aldon Music: [Excerpt: The Storytellers "When Two People (Are in Love)"] That record didn't sell, but it was enough to get Barri into the Columbia-Screen Gems circle, and Adler set him and Sloan up as a songwriting team -- although the way Sloan told it, it wasn't so much a songwriting team as Sloan writing songs while Barri was also there. Sloan would later claim "it was mostly a collaboration of spirit, and it seemed that I was writing most of the music and the lyric, but it couldn't possibly have ever happened unless both of us were present at the same time". One suspects that Barri might have a different recollection of how it went... Sloan and Barri's first collaboration was a song that Sloan had half-written before they met, called "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann", which was recorded by a West Coast Chubby Checker knockoff who went under the name Round Robin, and who had his own dance craze, the Slauson, which was much less successful than the Twist: [Excerpt: Round Robin, "Kick that Little Foot Sally Ann"] That track was produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche, and Nitzsche asked Sloan to be one of the rhythm guitarists on the track, apparently liking Sloan's feel. Sloan would end up playing rhythm guitar or singing backing vocals on many of the records made of songs he and Barri wrote together. "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann" only made number sixty-one nationally, but it was a regional hit, and it meant that Sloan and Barri soon became what Sloan later described as "the Goffin and King of the West Coast follow-ups." According to Sloan "We'd be given a list on Monday morning by Lou Adler with thirty names on it of the groups who needed follow-ups to their hit." They'd then write the songs to order, and they started to specialise in dance craze songs. For example, when the Swim looked like it might be the next big dance, they wrote "Swim Swim Swim", "She Only Wants to Swim", "Let's Swim Baby", "Big Boss Swimmer", "Swim Party" and "My Swimmin' Girl" (the last a collaboration with Jan Berry and Roger Christian). These songs were exactly as good as they needed to be, in order to provide album filler for mid-tier artists, and while Sloan and Barri weren't writing any massive hits, they were doing very well as mid-tier writers. According to Sloan's biographer Stephen McParland, there was a three-year period in the mid-sixties where at least one song written or co-written by Sloan was on the national charts at any given time. Most of these songs weren't for Columbia-Screen Gems though. In early 1964 Lou Adler had a falling out with Don Kirshner, and decided to start up his own company, Dunhill, which was equal parts production company, music publishers, and management -- doing for West Coast pop singers what Motown was doing for Detroit soul singers, and putting everything into one basket. Dunhill's early clients included Jan and Dean and the rockabilly singer Johnny Rivers, and Dunhill also signed Sloan and Barri as songwriters. Because of this connection, Sloan and Barri soon became an important part of Jan and Dean's hit-making process. The Matadors, the vocal group that had provided most of the backing vocals on the duo's hits, had started asking for more money than Jan Berry was willing to pay, and Jan and Dean couldn't do the vocals themselves -- as Bones Howe put it "As a singer, Dean is a wonderful graphic artist" -- and so Sloan and Barri stepped in, doing session vocals without payment in the hope that Jan and Dean would record a few of their songs. For example, on the big hit "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", Dean Torrence is not present at all on the record -- Jan Berry sings the lead vocal, with Sloan doubling him for much of it, Sloan sings "Dean"'s falsetto, with the engineer Bones Howe helping out, and the rest of the backing vocals are sung by Sloan, Barri, and Howe: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] For these recordings, Sloan and Barri were known as The Fantastic Baggys, a name which came from the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham and Mick Jagger, when the two were visiting California. Oldham had been commenting on baggys, the kind of shorts worn by surfers, and had asked Jagger what he thought of The Baggys as a group name. Jagger had replied "Fantastic!" and so the Fantastic Baggys had been born. As part of this, Sloan and Barri moved hard into surf and hot-rod music from the dance songs they had been writing previously. The Fantastic Baggys recorded their own album, Tell 'Em I'm Surfin', as a quickie album suggested by Adler: [Excerpt: The Fantastic Baggys, "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'"] And under the name The Rally Packs they recorded a version of Jan and Dean's "Move Out Little Mustang" which featured Berry's girlfriend Jill Gibson doing a spoken section: [Excerpt: The Rally Packs, "Move Out Little Mustang"] They also wrote several album tracks for Jan and Dean, and wrote "Summer Means Fun" for Bruce and Terry -- Bruce Johnston, later of the Beach Boys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] And they wrote the very surf-flavoured "Secret Agent Man" for fellow Dunhill artist Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But of course, when you're chasing trends, you're chasing trends, and soon the craze for twangy guitars and falsetto harmonies had ended, replaced by a craze for jangly twelve-string guitars and closer harmonies. According to Sloan, he was in at the very beginning of the folk-rock trend -- the way he told the story, he was involved in the mastering of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man". He later talked about Terry Melcher getting him to help out, saying "He had produced a record called 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and had sent it into the head office, and it had been rejected. He called me up and said 'I've got three more hours in the studio before I'm being kicked out of Columbia. Can you come over and help me with this new record?' I did. I went over there. It was under lock and key. There were two guards outside the door. Terry asked me something about 'Summer Means Fun'. "He said 'Do you remember the guitar that we worked on with that? How we put in that double reverb?' "And I said 'yes' "And he said 'What do you think if we did something like that with the Byrds?' "And I said 'That sounds good. Let's see what it sounds like.' So we patched into all the reverb centres in Columbia Music, and mastered the record in three hours." Whether Sloan really was there at the birth of folk rock, he and Barri jumped on the folk-rock craze just as they had the surf and hot-rod craze, and wrote a string of jangly hits including "You Baby" for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] and "I Found a Girl" for Jan and Dean: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "I Found a Girl"] That song was later included on Jan and Dean's Folk 'n' Roll album, which also included... a song I'm not even going to name, but long-time listeners will know the one I mean. It was also notable in that "I Found a Girl" was the first song on which Sloan was credited not as Phil Sloan, but as P.F. Sloan -- he didn't have a middle name beginning with F, but rather the F stood for his nickname "Flip". Sloan would later talk of Phil Sloan and P.F. Sloan as almost being two different people, with P.F. being a far more serious, intense, songwriter. Folk 'n' Roll also contained another Sloan song, this one credited solely to Sloan. And that song is the one for which he became best known. There are two very different stories about how "Eve of Destruction" came to be written. To tell Sloan's version, I'm going to read a few paragraphs from his autobiography: "By late 1964, I had already written ‘Eve Of Destruction,' ‘The Sins Of A Family,' ‘This Mornin',' ‘Ain't No Way I'm Gonna Change My Mind,' and ‘What's Exactly The Matter With Me?' They all arrived on one cataclysmic evening, and nearly at the same time, as I worked on the lyrics almost simultaneously. ‘Eve Of Destruction' came about from hearing a voice, perhaps an angel's. The voice instructed me to place five pieces of paper and spread them out on my bed. I obeyed the voice. The voice told me that the first song would be called ‘Eve Of Destruction,' so I wrote the title at the top of the page. For the next few hours, the voice came and went as I was writing the lyric, as if this spirit—or whatever it was—stood over me like a teacher: ‘No, no … not think of all the hate there is in Red Russia … Red China!' I didn't understand. I thought the Soviet Union was the mortal threat to America, but the voice went on to reveal to me the future of the world until 2024. I was told the Soviet Union would fall, and that Red China would continue to be communist far into the future, but that communism was not going to be allowed to take over this Divine Planet—therefore, think of all the hate there is in Red China. I argued and wrestled with the voice for hours, until I was exhausted but satisfied inside with my plea to God to either take me out of the world, as I could not live in such a hypocritical society, or to show me a way to make things better. When I was writing ‘Eve,' I was on my hands and knees, pleading for an answer." Lou Adler's story is that he gave Phil Sloan a copy of Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home album and told him to write a bunch of songs that sounded like that, and Sloan came back a week later as instructed with ten Dylan knock-offs. Adler said "It was a natural feel for him. He's a great mimic." As one other data point, both Steve Barri and Bones Howe, the engineer who worked on most of the sessions we're looking at today, have often talked in interviews about "Eve of Destruction" as being a Sloan/Barri collaboration, as if to them it's common knowledge that it wasn't written alone, although Sloan's is the only name on the credits. The song was given to a new signing to Dunhill Records, Barry McGuire. McGuire was someone who had been part of the folk scene for years, He'd been playing folk clubs in LA while also acting in a TV show from 1961. When the TV show had finished, he'd formed a duo, Barry and Barry, with Barry Kane, and they performed much the same repertoire as all the other early-sixties folkies: [Excerpt: Barry and Barry, "If I Had a Hammer"] After recording their one album, both Barrys joined the New Christy Minstrels. We've talked about the Christys before, but they were -- and are to this day -- an ultra-commercial folk group, led by Randy Sparks, with a revolving membership of usually eight or nine singers which included several other people who've come up in this podcast, like Gene Clark and Jerry Yester. McGuire became one of the principal lead singers of the Christys, singing lead on their version of the novelty cowboy song "Three Wheels on My Wagon", which was later released as a single in the UK and became a perennial children's favourite (though it has a problematic attitude towards Native Americans): [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Three Wheels on My Wagon"] And he also sang lead on their big hit "Green Green", which he co-wrote with Randy Sparks: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] But by 1965 McGuire had left the New Christy Minstrels. As he said later "I'd sung 'Green Green' a thousand times and I didn't want to sing it again. This is January of 1965. I went back to LA to meet some producers, and I was broke. Nobody had the time of day for me. I was walking down street one time to see Dr. Strangelove and I walked by the music store, and I heard "Green Green" comin' out of the store, ya know, on Hollywood Boulevard. And I heard my voice, and I thought, 'I got four dollars in my pocket!' I couldn't believe it, my voice is comin' out on Hollywood Boulevard, and I'm broke. And right at that moment, a car pulls up, and the radio is playing 'Chim Chim Cherie" also by the Minstrels. So I got my voice comin' at me in stereo, standin' on the sidewalk there, and I'm broke, and I can't get anyone to sign me!" But McGuire had a lot of friends who he'd met on the folk scene, some of whom were now in the new folk-rock scene that was just starting to spring up. One of them was Roger McGuinn, who told him that his band, the Byrds, were just about to put out a new single, "Mr. Tambourine Man", and that they were about to start a residency at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. McGuinn invited McGuire to the opening night of that residency, where a lot of other people from the scene were there to see the new group. Bob Dylan was there, as was Phil Sloan, and the actor Jack Nicholson, who was still at the time a minor bit-part player in low-budget films made by people like American International Pictures (the cinematographer on many of Nicholson's early films was Floyd Crosby, David Crosby's father, which may be why he was there). Someone else who was there was Lou Adler, who according to McGuire recognised him instantly. According to Adler, he actually asked Terry Melcher who the long-haired dancer wearing furs was, because "he looked like the leader of a movement", and Melcher told him that he was the former lead singer of the New Christy Minstrels. Either way, Adler approached McGuire and asked if he was currently signed -- Dunhill Records was just starting up, and getting someone like McGuire, who had a proven ability to sing lead on hit records, would be a good start for the label. As McGuire didn't have a contract, he was signed to Dunhill, and he was given some of Sloan's new songs to pick from, and chose "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?" as his single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?"] McGuire described what happened next: "It was like, a three-hour session. We did two songs, and then the third one wasn't turning out. We only had about a half hour left in the session, so I said 'Let's do this tune', and I pulled 'Eve of Destruction' out of my pocket, and it just had Phil's words scrawled on a piece of paper, all wrinkled up. Phil worked the chords out with the musicians, who were Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knechtel on bass." There were actually more musicians than that at the session -- apparently both Knechtel and Joe Osborn were there, so I'm not entirely sure who's playing bass -- Knechtel was a keyboard player as well as a bass player, but I don't hear any keyboards on the track. And Tommy Tedesco was playing lead guitar, and Steve Barri added percussion, along with Sloan on rhythm guitar and harmonica. The chords were apparently scribbled down for the musicians on bits of greasy paper that had been used to wrap some takeaway chicken, and they got through the track in a single take. According to McGuire "I'm reading the words off this piece of wrinkled paper, and I'm singing 'My blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'", that part that goes 'Ahhh you can't twist the truth', and the reason I'm going 'Ahhh' is because I lost my place on the page. People said 'Man, you really sounded frustrated when you were singing.' I was. I couldn't see the words!" [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] With a few overdubs -- the female backing singers in the chorus, and possibly the kettledrums, which I've seen differing claims about, with some saying that Hal Blaine played them during the basic track and others saying that Lou Adler suggested them as an overdub, the track was complete. McGuire wasn't happy with his vocal, and a session was scheduled for him to redo it, but then a record promoter working with Adler was DJing a birthday party for the head of programming at KFWB, the big top forty radio station in LA at the time, and he played a few acetates he'd picked up from Adler. Most went down OK with the crowd, but when he played "Eve of Destruction", the crowd went wild and insisted he play it three times in a row. The head of programming called Adler up and told him that "Eve of Destruction" was going to be put into rotation on the station from Monday, so he'd better get the record out. As McGuire was away for the weekend, Adler just released the track as it was, and what had been intended to be a B-side became Barry McGuire's first and only number one record: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] Sloan would later claim that that song was a major reason why the twenty-sixth amendment to the US Constitution was passed six years later, because the line "you're old enough to kill but not for votin'" shamed Congress into changing the constitution to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. If so, that would make "Eve of Destruction" arguably the single most impactful rock record in history, though Sloan is the only person I've ever seen saying that As well as going to number one in McGuire's version, the song was also covered by the other artists who regularly performed Sloan and Barri songs, like the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Eve of Destruction"] And Jan and Dean, whose version on Folk & Roll used the same backing track as McGuire, but had a few lyrical changes to make it fit with Jan Berry's right-wing politics, most notably changing "Selma, Alabama" to "Watts, California", thus changing a reference to peaceful civil rights protestors being brutally attacked and murdered by white supremacist state troopers to a reference to what was seen, in the popular imaginary, as Black people rioting for no reason: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Eve of Destruction"] According to Sloan, he worked on the Folk & Roll album as a favour to Berry, even though he thought Berry was being cynical and exploitative in making the record, but those changes caused a rift in their friendship. Sloan said in his autobiography "Where I was completely wrong was in helping him capitalize on something in which he didn't believe. Jan wanted the public to perceive him as a person who was deeply concerned and who embraced the values of the progressive politics of the day. But he wasn't that person. That's how I was being pulled. It was when he recorded my actual song ‘Eve Of Destruction' and changed a number of lines to reflect his own ideals that my principles demanded that I leave Folk City and never return." It's true that Sloan gave no more songs to Jan and Dean after that point -- but it's also true that the duo would record only one more album, the comedy concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman, before Jan's accident. Incidentally, the reference to Selma, Alabama in the lyric might help people decide on which story about the writing of "Eve of Destruction" they think is more plausible. Remember that Lou Adler said that it was written after Adler gave Sloan a copy of Bringing it All Back Home and told him to write a bunch of knock-offs, while Sloan said it was written after a supernatural force gave him access to all the events that would happen in the world for the next sixty years. Sloan claimed the song was written in late 1964. Selma, Alabama, became national news in late February and early March 1965. Bringing it All Back Home was released in late March 1965. So either Adler was telling the truth, or Sloan really *was* given a supernatural insight into the events of the future. Now, as it turned out, while "Eve of Destruction" went to number one, that would be McGuire's only hit as a solo artist. His next couple of singles would reach the very low end of the Hot One Hundred, and that would be it -- he'd release several more albums, before appearing in the Broadway musical Hair, most famous for its nude scenes, and getting a small part in the cinematic masterpiece Werewolves on Wheels: [Excerpt: Werewolves on Wheels trailer] P.F. Sloan would later tell various stories about why McGuire never had another hit. Sometimes he would say that Dunhill Records had received death threats because of "Eve of Destruction" and so deliberately tried to bury McGuire's career, other times he would say that Lou Adler had told him that Billboard had said they were never going to put McGuire's records on the charts no matter how well they sold, because "Eve of Destruction" had just been too powerful and upset the advertisers. But of course at this time Dunhill were still trying for a follow-up to "Eve of Destruction", and they thought they might have one when Barry McGuire brought in a few friends of his to sing backing vocals on his second album. Now, we've covered some of the history of the Mamas and the Papas already, because they were intimately tied up with other groups like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful, and with the folk scene that led to songs like "Hey Joe", so some of this will be more like a recap than a totally new story, but I'm going to recap those parts of the story anyway, so it's fresh in everyone's heads. John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, and Cass Elliot all grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few miles south of Washington DC. Elliot was a few years younger than Phillips and McKenzie, and so as is the way with young men they never really noticed her, and as McKenzie later said "She lived like a quarter of a mile from me and I never met her until New York". While they didn't know who Elliot was, though, she was aware who they were, as Phillips and McKenzie sang together in a vocal group called The Smoothies. The Smoothies were a modern jazz harmony group, influenced by groups like the Modernaires, the Hi-Los, and the Four Freshmen. John Phillips later said "We were drawn to jazz, because we were sort of beatniks, really, rather than hippies, or whatever, flower children. So we used to sing modern harmonies, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Dave Lambert did a lot of our arrangements for us as a matter of fact." Now, I've not seen any evidence other than Phillips' claim that Dave Lambert ever arranged for the Smoothies, but that does tell you a lot about the kind of music that they were doing. Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were a vocalese trio whose main star was Annie Ross, who had a career worthy of an episode in itself -- she sang with Paul Whiteman, appeared in a Little Rascals film when she was seven, had an affair with Lenny Bruce, dubbed Britt Ekland's voice in The Wicker Man, played the villain's sister in Superman III, and much more. Vocalese, you'll remember, was a style of jazz vocal where a singer would take a jazz instrumental, often an improvised one, and add lyrics which they would sing, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross' version of "Cloudburst": [Excerpt: Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, "Cloudburst"] Whether Dave Lambert ever really did arrange for the Smoothies or not, it's very clear that the trio had a huge influence on John Phillips' ideas about vocal arrangement, as you can hear on Mamas and Papas records like "Once Was a Time I Thought": [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Once Was a Time I Thought"] While the Smoothies thought of themselves as a jazz group, when they signed to Decca they started out making the standard teen pop of the era, with songs like "Softly": [Excerpt, The Smoothies, "Softly"] When the folk boom started, Phillips realised that this was music that he could do easily, because the level of musicianship among the pop-folk musicians was so much lower than in the jazz world. The Smoothies made some recordings in the style of the Kingston Trio, like "Ride Ride Ride": [Excerpt: The Smoothies, "Ride Ride Ride"] Then when the Smoothies split, Phillips and McKenzie formed a trio with a banjo player, Dick Weissman, who they met through Izzy Young's Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village after Phillips asked Young to name some musicians who could make a folk record with him. Weissman was often considered the best banjo player on the scene, and was a friend of Pete Seeger's, to whom Seeger sometimes turned for banjo tips. The trio, who called themselves the Journeymen, quickly established themselves on the folk scene. Weissman later said "we had this interesting balance. John had all of this charisma -- they didn't know about the writing thing yet -- John had the personality, Scott had the voice, and I could play. If you think about it, all of those bands like the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, nobody could really *sing* and nobody could really *play*, relatively speaking." This is the take that most people seemed to have about John Phillips, in any band he was ever in. Nobody thought he was a particularly good singer or instrumentalist -- he could sing on key and play adequate rhythm guitar, but nobody would actually pay money to listen to him do those things. Mark Volman of the Turtles, for example, said of him "John wasn't the kind of guy who was going to be able to go up on stage and sing his songs as a singer-songwriter. He had to put himself in the context of a group." But he was charismatic, he had presence, and he also had a great musical mind. He would surround himself with the best players and best singers he could, and then he would organise and arrange them in ways that made the most of their talents. He would work out the arrangements, in a manner that was far more professional than the quick head arrangements that other folk groups used, and he instigated a level of professionalism in his groups that was not at all common on the scene. Phillips' friend Jim Mason talked about the first time he saw the Journeymen -- "They were warming up backstage, and John had all of them doing vocal exercises; one thing in particular that's pretty famous called 'Seiber Syllables' -- it's a series of vocal exercises where you enunciate different vowel and consonant sounds. It had the effect of clearing your head, and it's something that really good operetta singers do." The group were soon signed by Frank Werber, the manager of the Kingston Trio, who signed them as an insurance policy. Dave Guard, the Kingston Trio's banjo player, was increasingly having trouble with the other members, and Werber knew it was only a matter of time before he left the group. Werber wanted the Journeymen as a sort of farm team -- he had the idea that when Guard left, Phillips would join the Kingston Trio in his place as the third singer. Weissman would become the Trio's accompanist on banjo, and Scott McKenzie, who everyone agreed had a remarkable voice, would be spun off as a solo artist. But until that happened, they might as well make records by themselves. The Journeymen signed to MGM records, but were dropped before they recorded anything. They instead signed to Capitol, for whom they recorded their first album: [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "500 Miles"] After recording that album, the Journeymen moved out to California, with Phillips' wife and children. But soon Phillips' marriage was to collapse, as he met and fell in love with Michelle Gilliam. Gilliam was nine years younger than him -- he was twenty-six and she was seventeen -- and she had the kind of appearance which meant that in every interview with an older heterosexual man who knew her, that man will spend half the interview talking about how attractive he found her. Phillips soon left his wife and children, but before he did, the group had a turntable hit with "River Come Down", the B-side to "500 Miles": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "River Come Down"] Around the same time, Dave Guard *did* leave the Kingston Trio, but the plan to split the Journeymen never happened. Instead Phillips' friend John Stewart replaced Guard -- and this soon became a new source of income for Phillips. Both Phillips and Stewart were aspiring songwriters, and they collaborated together on several songs for the Trio, including "Chilly Winds": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Chilly Winds"] Phillips became particularly good at writing songs that sounded like they could be old traditional folk songs, sometimes taking odd lines from older songs to jump-start new ones, as in "Oh Miss Mary", which he and Stewart wrote after hearing someone sing the first line of a song she couldn't remember the rest of: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Oh Miss Mary"] Phillips and Stewart became so close that Phillips actually suggested to Stewart that he quit the Kingston Trio and replace Dick Weissman in the Journeymen. Stewart did quit the Trio -- but then the next day Phillips suggested that maybe it was a bad idea and he should stay where he was. Stewart went back to the Trio, claimed he had only pretended to quit because he wanted a pay-rise, and got his raise, so everyone ended up happy. The Journeymen moved back to New York with Michelle in place of Phillips' first wife (and Michelle's sister Russell also coming along, as she was dating Scott McKenzie) and on New Year's Eve 1962 John and Michelle married -- so from this point on I will refer to them by their first names, because they both had the surname Phillips. The group continued having success through 1963, including making appearances on "Hootenanny": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "Stack O'Lee (live on Hootenanny)"] By the time of the Journeymen's third album, though, John and Scott McKenzie were on bad terms. Weissman said "They had been the closest of friends and now they were the worst of enemies. They talked through me like I was a medium. It got to the point where we'd be standing in the dressing room and John would say to me 'Tell Scott that his right sock doesn't match his left sock...' Things like that, when they were standing five feet away from each other." Eventually, the group split up. Weissman was always going to be able to find employment given his banjo ability, and he was about to get married and didn't need the hassle of dealing with the other two. McKenzie was planning on a solo career -- everyone was agreed that he had the vocal ability. But John was another matter. He needed to be in a group. And not only that, the Journeymen had bookings they needed to complete. He quickly pulled together a group he called the New Journeymen. The core of the lineup was himself, Michelle on vocals, and banjo player Marshall Brickman. Brickman had previously been a member of a folk group called the Tarriers, who had had a revolving lineup, and had played on most of their early-sixties recordings: [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Quinto (My Little Pony)"] We've met the Tarriers before in the podcast -- they had been formed by Erik Darling, who later replaced Pete Seeger in the Weavers after Seeger's socialist principles wouldn't let him do advertising, and Alan Arkin, later to go on to be a film star, and had had hits with "Cindy, O Cindy", with lead vocals from Vince Martin, who would later go on to be a major performer in the Greenwich Village scene, and with "The Banana Boat Song". By the time Brickman had joined, though, Darling, Arkin, and Martin had all left the group to go on to bigger things, and while he played with them for several years, it was after their commercial peak. Brickman would, though, also go on to a surprising amount of success, but as a writer rather than a musician -- he had a successful collaboration with Woody Allen in the 1970s, co-writing four of Allen's most highly regarded films -- Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery -- and with another collaborator he later co-wrote the books for the stage musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. Both John and Michelle were decent singers, and both have their admirers as vocalists -- P.F. Sloan always said that Michelle was the best singer in the group they eventually formed, and that it was her voice that gave the group its sound -- but for the most part they were not considered as particularly astonishing lead vocalists. Certainly, neither had a voice that stood out the way that Scott McKenzie's had. They needed a strong lead singer, and they found one in Denny Doherty. Now, we covered Denny Doherty's early career in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, because he was intimately involved in the formation of that group, so I won't go into too much detail here, but I'll give a very abbreviated version of what I said there. Doherty was a Canadian performer who had been a member of the Halifax Three with Zal Yanovsky: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Land"] After the Halifax Three had split up, Doherty and Yanovsky had performed as a duo for a while, before joining up with Cass Elliot and her husband Jim Hendricks, who both had previously been in the Big Three with Tim Rose: [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] Elliot, Hendricks, Yanovsky, and Doherty had formed The Mugwumps, sometimes joined by John Sebastian, and had tried to go in more of a rock direction after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They recorded one album together before splitting up: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] Part of the reason they split up was that interpersonal relationships within the group were put under some strain -- Elliot and Hendricks split up, though they would remain friends and remain married for several years even though they were living apart, and Elliot had an unrequited crush on Doherty. But since they'd split up, and Yanovsky and Sebastian had gone off to form the Lovin' Spoonful, that meant that Doherty was free, and he was regarded as possibly the best male lead vocalist on the circuit, so the group snapped him up. The only problem was that the Journeymen still had gigs booked that needed to be played, one of them was in just three days, and Doherty didn't know the repertoire. This was a problem with an easy solution for people in their twenties though -- they took a huge amount of amphetamines, and stayed awake for three days straight rehearsing. They made the gig, and Doherty was now the lead singer of the New Journeymen: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "The Last Thing on My Mind"] But the New Journeymen didn't last in that form for very long, because even before joining the group, Denny Doherty had been going in a more folk-rock direction with the Mugwumps. At the time, John Phillips thought rock and roll was kids' music, and he was far more interested in folk and jazz, but he was also very interested in making money, and he soon decided it was an idea to start listening to the Beatles. There's some dispute as to who first played the Beatles for John in early 1965 -- some claim it was Doherty, others claim it was Cass Elliot, but everyone agrees it was after Denny Doherty had introduced Phillips to something else -- he brought round some LSD for John and Michelle, and Michelle's sister Rusty, to try. And then he told them he'd invited round a friend. Michelle Phillips later remembered, "I remember saying to the guys "I don't know about you guys, but this drug does nothing for me." At that point there was a knock on the door, and as I opened the door and saw Cass, the acid hit me *over the head*. I saw her standing there in a pleated skirt, a pink Angora sweater with great big eyelashes on and her hair in a flip. And all of a sudden I thought 'This is really *quite* a drug!' It was an image I will have securely fixed in my brain for the rest of my life. I said 'Hi, I'm Michelle. We just took some LSD-25, do you wanna join us?' And she said 'Sure...'" Rusty Gilliam's description matches this -- "It was mind-boggling. She had on a white pleated skirt, false eyelashes. These were the kind of eyelashes that when you put them on you were supposed to trim them to an appropriate length, which she didn't, and when she blinked she looked like a cow, or those dolls you get when you're little and the eyes open and close. And we're on acid. Oh my God! It was a sight! And everything she was wearing were things that you weren't supposed to be wearing if you were heavy -- white pleated skirt, mohair sweater. You know, until she became famous, she suffered so much, and was poked fun at." This gets to an important point about Elliot, and one which sadly affected everything about her life. Elliot was *very* fat -- I've seen her weight listed at about three hundred pounds, and she was only five foot five tall -- and she also didn't have the kind of face that gets thought of as conventionally attractive. Her appearance would be cruelly mocked by pretty much everyone for the rest of her life, in ways that it's genuinely hurtful to read about, and which I will avoid discussing in detail in order to avoid hurting fat listeners. But the two *other* things that defined Elliot in the minds of those who knew her were her voice -- every single person who knew her talks about what a wonderful singer she was -- and her personality. I've read a lot of things about Cass Elliot, and I have never read a single negative word about her as a person, but have read many people going into raptures about what a charming, loving, friendly, understanding person she was. Michelle later said of her "From the time I left Los Angeles, I hadn't had a friend, a buddy. I was married, and John and I did not hang out with women, we just hung out with men, and especially not with women my age. John was nine years older than I was. And here was a fun-loving, intelligent woman. She captivated me. I was as close to in love with Cass as I could be to any woman in my life at that point. She also represented something to me: freedom. Everything she did was because she wanted to do it. She was completely independent and I admired her and was in awe of her. And later on, Cass would be the one to tell me not to let John run my life. And John hated her for that." Either Elliot had brought round Meet The Beatles, the Beatles' first Capitol album, for everyone to listen to, or Denny Doherty already had it, but either way Elliot and Doherty were by this time already Beatles fans. Michelle, being younger than the rest and not part of the folk scene until she met John, was much more interested in rock and roll than any of them, but because she'd been married to John for a couple of years and been part of his musical world she hadn't really encountered the Beatles music, though she had a vague memory that she might have heard a track or two on the radio. John was hesitant -- he didn't want to listen to any rock and roll, but eventually he was persuaded, and the record was put on while he was on his first acid trip: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"] Within a month, John Phillips had written thirty songs that he thought of as inspired by the Beatles. The New Journeymen were going to go rock and roll. By this time Marshall Brickman was out of the band, and instead John, Michelle, and Denny recruited a new lead guitarist, Eric Hord. Denny started playing bass, with John on rhythm guitar, and a violinist friend of theirs, Peter Pilafian, knew a bit of drums and took on that role. The new lineup of the group used the Journeymen's credit card, which hadn't been stopped even though the Journeymen were no more, to go down to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, along with Michelle's sister, John's daughter Mackenzie (from whose name Scott McKenzie had taken his stage name, as he was born Philip Blondheim), a pet dog, and sundry band members' girlfriends. They stayed there for several months, living in tents on the beach, taking acid, and rehearsing. While they were there, Michelle and Denny started an affair which would have important ramifications for the group later. They got a gig playing at a club called Duffy's, whose address was on Creeque Alley, and soon after they started playing there Cass Elliot travelled down as well -- she was in love with Denny, and wanted to be around him. She wasn't in the group, but she got a job working at Duffy's as a waitress, and she would often sing harmony with the group while waiting at tables. Depending on who was telling the story, either she didn't want to be in the group because she didn't want her appearance to be compared to Michelle's, or John wouldn't *let* her be in the group because she was so fat. Later a story would be made up to cover for this, saying that she hadn't been in the group at first because she couldn't sing the highest notes that were needed, until she got hit on the head with a metal pipe and discovered that it had increased her range by three notes, but that seems to be a lie. One of the songs the New Journeymen were performing at this time was "Mr. Tambourine Man". They'd heard that their old friend Roger McGuinn had recorded it with his new band, but they hadn't yet heard his version, and they'd come up with their own arrangement: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Denny later said "We were doing three-part harmony on 'Mr Tambourine Man', but a lot slower... like a polka or something! And I tell John, 'No John, we gotta slow it down and give it a backbeat.' Finally we get the Byrds 45 down here, and we put it on and turn it up to ten, and John says 'Oh, like that?' Well, as you can tell, it had already been done. So John goes 'Oh, ah... that's it...' a light went on. So we started doing Beatles stuff. We dropped 'Mr Tambourine Man' after hearing the Byrds version, because there was no point." Eventually they had to leave the island -- they had completely run out of money, and were down to fifty dollars. The credit card had been cut up, and the governor of the island had a personal vendetta against them because they gave his son acid, and they were likely to get arrested if they didn't leave the island. Elliot and her then-partner had round-trip tickets, so they just left, but the rest of them were in trouble. By this point they were unwashed, they were homeless, and they'd spent their last money on stage costumes. They got to the airport, and John Phillips tried to write a cheque for eight air fares back to the mainland, which the person at the check-in desk just laughed at. So they took their last fifty dollars and went to a casino. There Michelle played craps, and she rolled seventeen straight passes, something which should be statistically impossible. She turned their fifty dollars into six thousand dollars, which they scooped up, took to the airport, and paid for their flights out in cash. The New Journeymen arrived back in New York, but quickly decided that they were going to try their luck in California. They rented a car, using Scott McKenzie's credit card, and drove out to LA. There they met up with Hoyt Axton, who you may remember as the son of Mae Axton, the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel", and as the performer who had inspired Michael Nesmith to go into folk music: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] Axton knew the group, and fed them and put them up for a night, but they needed somewhere else to stay. They went to stay with one of Michelle's friends, but after one night their rented car was stolen, with all their possessions in it. They needed somewhere else to stay, so they went to ask Jim Hendricks if they could crash at his place -- and they were surprised to find that Cass Elliot was there already. Hendricks had another partner -- though he and Elliot wouldn't have their marriage annulled until 1968 and were still technically married -- but he'd happily invited her to stay with them. And now all her friends had turned up, he invited them to stay as well, taking apart the beds in his one-bedroom apartment so he could put down a load of mattresses in the space for everyone to sleep on. The next part becomes difficult, because pretty much everyone in the LA music scene of the sixties was a liar who liked to embellish their own roles in things, so it's quite difficult to unpick what actually happened. What seems to have happened though is that first this new rock-oriented version of the New Journeymen went to see Frank Werber, on the recommendation of John Stewart. Werber was the manager of the Kingston Trio, and had also managed the Journeymen. He, however, was not interested -- not because he didn't think they had talent, but because he had experience of working with John Phillips previously. When Phillips came into his office Werber picked up a tape that he'd been given of the group, and said "I have not had a chance to listen to this tape. I believe that you are a most talented individual, and that's why we took you on in the first place. But I also believe that you're also a drag to work with. A pain in the ass. So I'll tell you what, before whatever you have on here sways me, I'm gonna give it back to you and say that we're not interested." Meanwhile -- and this part of the story comes from Kim Fowley, who was never one to let the truth get in the way of him taking claim for everything, but parts of it at least are corroborated by other people -- Cass Elliot had called Fowley, and told him that her friends' new group sounded pretty good and he should sign them. Fowley was at that time working as a talent scout for a label, but according to him the label wouldn't give the group the money they wanted. So instead, Fowley got in touch with Nik Venet, who had just produced the Leaves' hit version of "Hey Joe" on Mira Records: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Fowley suggested to Venet that Venet should sign the group to Mira Records, and Fowley would sign them to a publishing contract, and they could both get rich. The trio went to audition for Venet, and Elliot drove them over -- and Venet thought the group had a great look as a quartet. He wanted to sign them to a record contract, but only if Elliot was in the group as well. They agreed, he gave them a one hundred and fifty dollar advance, and told them to come back the next day to see his boss at Mira. But Barry McGuire was also hanging round with Elliot and Hendricks, and decided that he wanted to have Lou Adler hear the four of them. He thought they might be useful both as backing vocalists on his second album and as a source of new songs. He got them to go and see Lou Adler, and according to McGuire Phillips didn't want Elliot to go with them, but as Elliot was the one who was friends with McGuire, Phillips worried that they'd lose the chance with Adler if she didn't. Adler was amazed, and decided to sign the group right then and there -- both Bones Howe and P.F. Sloan claimed to have been there when the group auditioned for him and have said "if you won't sign them, I will", though exactly what Sloan would have signed them to I'm not sure. Adler paid them three thousand dollars in cash and told them not to bother with Nik Venet, so they just didn't turn up for the Mira Records audition the next day. Instead, they went into the studio with McGuire and cut backing vocals on about half of his new album: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire with the Mamas and the Papas, "Hide Your Love Away"] While the group were excellent vocalists, there were two main reasons that Adler wanted to sign them. The first was that he found Michelle Phillips extremely attractive, and the second is a song that John and Michelle had written which he thought might be very suitable for McGuire's album. Most people who knew John Phillips think of "California Dreamin'" as a solo composition, and he would later claim that he gave Michelle fifty percent just for transcribing his lyric, saying he got inspired in the middle of the night, woke her up, and got her to write the song down as he came up with it. But Michelle, who is a credited co-writer on the song, has been very insistent that she wrote the lyrics to the second verse, and that it's about her own real experiences, saying that she would often go into churches and light candles even though she was "at best an agnostic, and possibly an atheist" in her words, and this would annoy John, who had also been raised Catholic, but who had become aggressively opposed to expressions of religion, rather than still having nostalgia for the aesthetics of the church as Michelle did. They were out walking on a particularly cold winter's day in 1963, and Michelle wanted to go into St Patrick's Cathedral and John very much did not want to. A couple of nights later, John woke her up, having written the first verse of the song, starting "All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey/I went for a walk on a winter's day", and insisting she collaborate with him. She liked the song, and came up with the lines "Stopped into a church, I passed along the way/I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray/The preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm going to stay", which John would later apparently dislike, but which stayed in the song. Most sources I've seen for the recording of "California Dreamin'" say that the lineup of musicians was the standard set of players who had played on McGuire's other records, with the addition of John Phillips on twelve-string guitar -- P.F. Sloan on guitar and harmonica, Joe Osborn on bass, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, and Hal Blaine on drums, but for some reason Stephen McParland's book on Sloan has Bones Howe down as playing drums on the track while engineering -- a detail so weird, and from such a respectable researcher, that I have to wonder if it might be true. In his autobiography, Sloan claims to have rewritten the chord sequence to "California Dreamin'". He says "Barry Mann had unintentionally showed me a suspended chord back at Screen Gems. I was so impressed by this beautiful, simple chord that I called Brian Wilson and played it for him over the phone. The next thing I knew, Brian had written ‘Don't Worry Baby,' which had within it a number suspended chords. And then the chord heard 'round the world, two months later, was the opening suspended chord of ‘A Hard Day's Night.' I used these chords throughout ‘California Dreamin',' and more specifically as a bridge to get back and forth from the verse to the chorus." Now, nobody else corroborates this story, and both Brian Wilson and John Phillips had the kind of background in modern harmony that means they would have been very aware of suspended chords before either ever encountered Sloan, but I thought I should mention it. Rather more plausible is Sloan's other claim, that he came up with the intro to the song. According to Sloan, he was inspired by "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "Walk Don't Run"] And you can easily see how this: [plays "Walk Don't Run"] Can lead to this: [plays "California Dreamin'"] And I'm fairly certain that if that was the inspiration, it was Sloan who was the one who thought it up. John Phillips had been paying no attention to the world of surf music when "Walk Don't Run" had been a hit -- that had been at the point when he was very firmly in the folk world, while Sloan of course had been recording "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'", and it had been his job to know surf music intimately. So Sloan's intro became the start of what was intended to be Barry McGuire's next single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] Sloan also provided the harmonica solo on the track: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] The Mamas and the Papas -- the new name that was now given to the former New Journeymen, now they were a quartet -- were also signed to Dunhill as an act on their own, and recorded their own first single, "Go Where You Wanna Go", a song apparently written by John about Michelle, in late 1963, after she had briefly left him to have an affair with Russ Titelman, the record producer and songwriter, before coming back to him: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] But while that was put out, they quickly decided to scrap it and go with another song. The "Go Where You Wanna Go" single was pulled after only selling a handful of copies, though its commercial potential was later proved when in 1967 a new vocal group, the 5th Dimension, released a soundalike version as their second single. The track was produced by Lou Adler's client Johnny Rivers, and used the exact same musicians as the Mamas and the Papas version, with the exception of Phillips. It became their first hit, reaching number sixteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The 5th Dimension, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] The reason the Mamas and the Papas version of "Go Where You Wanna Go" was pulled was because everyone became convinced that their first single should instead be their own version of "California Dreamin'". This is the exact same track as McGuire's track, with just two changes. The first is that McGuire's lead vocal was replaced with Denny Doherty: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Though if you listen to the stereo mix of the song and isolate the left channel, you can hear McGuire singing the lead on the first line, and occasional leakage from him elsewhere on the backing vocal track: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] The other change made was to replace Sloan's harmonica solo with an alto flute solo by Bud Shank, a jazz musician who we heard about in the episode on "Light My Fire", when he collaborated with Ravi Shankar on "Improvisations on the Theme From Pather Panchali": [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] Shank was working on another session in Western Studios, where they were recording the Mamas and Papas track, and Bones Howe approached him while he was packing his instrument and asked if he'd be interested in doing another session. Shank agreed, though the track caused problems for him. According to Shank "What had happened was that whe
Exclusive Interview in Farsi with Mohammad Khodabandelou (Gol Gohar Sirjan) and Arwin Javad (Roda JC Kerkrade), who recently participated in the 2022 AFC U23 Asian Cup in Uzbekistan. We spoke about the matches against Qatar, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - which Team Melli Omid got two points from, Mehdi Mahdavikia, Youth Football Development in Iran, Lack of Friendlies and Preparation, Transfers and Much More! در این قسمت مصاحبه اختصاصی با محمد خدابندهلو (گل گهر سیرجان) و اروین جواد (رودا جیسی کرکراد) که در جام ملتهای زیر 23 سال آسیا 2022 در ازبکستان شرکت کرده است. درباره بازی های مقابل قطر، ترکمنستان و ازبکستان - که تیم ملی امید از آنها دو امتیاز گرفت، مهدی مهدویکیا، توسعه فوتبال جوانان ایران، از بازی های دوستانه، نقل و انتقالات و خیلی چیزهای دیگر Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:46 - Interview: Mohammad Khodabandelou & Arwin Javad 02:15 - Reaction to 2022 AFC U23 Asian Cup 04:19 - What should we do to qualify for the Olympics? 05:42 - More players going to Europe? 07:26 - Mohammad Khodabandelou vs Son Heung-min 10:11 - Lack of Friendlies 17:39 - Arwin Javad transfer? Iranian footballers in the Netherlands 19:49 - Lack of playing time to young players in Iran 31:31 - Mehdi Mahdavikia 34:18 - Alireza Jahanbakhsh 35:08 - Mohammad Khodabandelou transfer? 35:40 - Grassroots football in Iran 40:43 - VAR 43:23 - Fan Questions 46:37 - Final Words 48:31 - Outro Follow us on social media @GolBezan, leave a like/review & subscribe on the platform you watch/listen on - YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Amazon, Castbox. Hosts: Arya Allahverdi & Sahand Salari Guests: Mohammad Khodabandelou & Arwin Javad Editor: Samson Tamijani Graphic: Mahdi Javanbakhsh Intro Music: CASPIAN by ASADI instagram.com/dannyasadi smarturl.it/CASPIAN Outro Music: K!DMO instagram.com/kidmo.foreal Mohammad - instagram.com/mohamad.khodabandeloo Arwin - instagram.com/arwinjvd Arya - twitter.com/Arya_Allahverdi Sahand - twitter.com/salari_sahand Samson - twitter.com/713Samson Mahdi - twitter.com/mativsh twitter.com/GolBezan twitter.com/GolBezanFarsi instagram.com/GolBezan facebook.com/GolBezanPodcast patreon.com/GolBezan
“Que es la que hay PR”. Conversamos con Arwin Carrucini del Taller Toca Plena, el mismo nos cuenta la importancia del taller de plena y de como surguio. Esta iniciativa se encarga de promover la cultura puertorriqueña atravez de la música, educación y la práctica. Para mas información nos consigues por: FB / IG: CC2 pr YouTube: CC2 pr Spotify / Anchor : Que es la que hay PR https://www.cc2creativepr.com/talleres-emprendedores@cc2pr #emprender #emprendimiento #photooftheday #photographer #color #lowlights #model #profesional #2creative #business #businessman #accountant #writer #filmaker #video #editor #creators #photographer #photooftheday #puertorico #cc2pr #model #style #te #creative #2creative #puertorico #photography #quality #modamujer #moda #picofday #podcat --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cc2-llc/support
Arwin Levinson joins The Landscape Photography Show to discuss her journey in photography, how her obsession with the night sky began, and much more!
Nog steeds praten we over een telefoonnummer draaien, terwijl we al jaren op toetsen drukken. Nauwkeuriger en sneller, maar niet direct sympathieker. De kiesschijf blijft dan ook z'n charme houden. Arwin verzamelt deze draaischijftoestellen voor de heb of als opknappertje. Wij, eh, belden met hem en maakte er een nieuwe aflevering van. Leuk als je luistert!
Last, but certainly not least, we present a compelling discussion with one of our prominent speakers from this year's MHA Union Conference. Dr. Arwin Smallwood is Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. His research primarily focuses on the relationships between African-American, Native-American, and Europeans in Eastern North Carolina during the Colonial and early Antebellum period. Wrapping up our second podcast season, in this final episode, Dr. Smallwood and I go into detail on the interrelation between European, African, and Indigenous people. Or to those who attend the this year's virtual MHA Conference, the interrelation between the Lost Colony of Roanoke, the Tuscarora people, and the Melungeon people. Presented by The Melungeon Heritage Association Hosted by Heather Andolina Produced by Lis Malone
Het afgelopen anderhalf jaar is de horeca een van de meest besproken sectoren. De deuren moesten dicht, de deuren konden weer open, de deuren moesten weer dicht, ga zo maar door. Voor mijn podcast sprak ik met horecaondernemer Arwin Versteyne. Hij is bestuurslid BIZ Koemarkt en bestuurslid van de Purmerendse en Beemsterse afdeling van Koninklijke Horeca Nederland.
The drone strike that the Pentagon claimed killed an ISIS-K suicide bomber in Kabul actually targeted an aid worker who had filled his car with water jugs, rather than explosives, according to a shocking new report. Zemari Ahmadi, 43, was driving the 1996 Toyota Corolla that was destroyed in the August 29 drone strike, killing him and nine family members, including seven children, according to a New York Times investigation. According to the Times, killed in the drone strike were Ahmadi and three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi's cousin Naser, 30; three of Ahmadi's nephews, Arwin, seven, Benyamin, six, and Hayat, two; and two three-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya. The drone strike in Kabul came as US forces were on high alert following an ISIS-K suicide blast on August 26 that killed 13 US troops and scores of Afghans on August 26. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/global-reportage/support
本集主題:「雅聞峇里海岸觀光工廠」介紹 訪問:郭美足 理事長、蘇裕智 監事 雲林縣觀光工廠協會: 雲林縣政府輔導與觀光工廠業者們積極配合,終於110年4月13日成立「雲林縣觀光工廠協會」。 未來雲林縣政府會持續輔導雲林縣觀光工廠發展及永續經營,持續輔導協會各方面的合作,相互扶持,觀摩交流成長,支持協會,共同推廣行銷雲林縣觀光工廠之優良服務品質、體驗產業文化教育、顧客高滿意度等,將具有整合產業、文化、教育、銷售、觀光、製造工廠之特徵,以不同面向推廣觀光工廠品牌知名度,進而帶動雲林縣觀光工廠振興產業、產能及經濟效益。 雅聞峇里海岸觀光工廠: 雅聞生技創辦人是紀敏吉先生,1982年因為太太的敏感性膚質,而自己投入保養品的開發,而慢慢發現成ARWIN這個品牌,出貨給沙龍通路,後來因為沙龍業者也慢慢走下坡,出貨當然也跟著下滑,當時讓紀總思考產業的轉型,於是在2006年先將自己的楊梅工廠轉型成 雅聞魅力博覽館,讓消費者可以直接接觸、體驗這些保養品,獲得很大的成效,於是又再度成立 雅聞香草植物工廠、第3家是 雅聞峇里海岸,也就是這次主要的節目介紹內容,第4家則是 雅聞七里香玫瑰森林。 雅聞峇里海岸佔地五公頃,這次派出斗六分公司的蘇裕智經理來介紹,該景點假日觀光人數達上萬人,已經是雲林熱門的景點。座落於斗六石榴班百年火車站附近,為國內最大的南洋景觀的工廠,園區內擁有大規模的南洋茅草屋群、人造海岸貝殼沙灘、茅草涼亭、棕欖樹、迎賓瀑布、鏡面水池、藝廊空間,打造出的休閒兼具美學、紓壓、藝術、知性的觀光工廠,歡迎大家,免費入園、自由的享受峇里島風情。 粉絲頁:雲林縣觀光工廠協會 粉絲頁:雅聞峇里海岸 粉絲頁: 朝露魚舖觀光工廠 01. 丸莊醬油觀光工廠: https://www.wuanchuang.com/ 02. 福祿壽觀光酒廠:http://museum.fortunebrewery.com.tw/ 03. 興隆毛巾觀光工廠: https://www.sltowel.com.tw/ 04. 大同醬油黑金釀造館: https://www.tatungcan.com.tw/ 05. 朝露魚舖觀光工廠: https://www.chaolou.com.tw/ 06. 源順芝麻觀光油廠:https://www.god-bene.com.tw/ 07. 台灣鯛生態創意園區: https://kf-fish.qdm.tw/ 08. 良作工場農業文創館: https://www.nextland.com.tw/ 09. 塔吉特千層蛋糕大使館:https://www.touched.com.tw/ 10. 雅聞峇里海岸觀光工廠: https://www.arwin.com/store-detail/130 #李基銘#fb新鮮事#生活有意思#快樂玩童軍 #漢聲廣播電台 YouTube頻道,可以收看 https://goo.gl/IQXvzd podcast平台,可以收聽 SoundOn https://bit.ly/3oXSlmF Spotify https://spoti.fi/2TXxH7V Apple https://apple.co/2I7NYVc Google https://bit.ly/2GykvmH KKBOX https://bit.ly/2JlI3wC Firstory https://bit.ly/3lCHDPi 請支持六個粉絲頁 李基銘主持人粉絲頁:https://www.facebook.com/voh.lee 李基銘的影音頻道粉絲頁:https://www.facebook.com/voh.video Fb新鮮事新聞報粉絲頁:https://www.facebook.com/voh.fbnews 漢聲廣播電台「fb新鮮事」節目粉絲頁:https://www.facebook.com/voh.vhbn 漢聲廣播電台「快樂玩童軍」節目粉絲頁:https://www.facebook.com/voh.scout 漢聲廣播電台「生活有意思」節目粉絲頁:https://www.facebook.com/voh.life
This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. In today's main episode, we look at the most prominent surf and hot-rod duo of the early sixties. So in this bonus we're going to look at another duo who came from the same scene... or were they a trio, or a quartet, or a different duo? Or were there six of them? We're going to look at the Rip Chords, and at their big hit "Hey Little Cobra": [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Hey Little Cobra"] The Rip Chords started out as a duo, Phil Stewart and Ernie Bringas, from Inglewood, California, the next town over from Hawthorne where the Beach Boys grew up. Stewart and Bringas originally called themselves The Opposites, because they regarded their occupations as the opposite of each other -- Stewart was a private detective, while Bringas was studying to become a priest. They noticed that Jan and Arnie had started out on Arwin Records but then moved to another label, and so they tried to sell themselves to Arwin as a replacement for them -- indeed, since Stewart's middle name was Jan, for a while they were going to be billed as Jan and Ernie. That never happened, but they ended up getting signed as songwriters to Arwin's publishing arm, Daywin, and so coming to the attention of Terry Melcher. Melcher signed Stewart and Bringas to a deal with Columbia, but changed their group name to The Rip Chords. Their first single was actually by the duo -- "Here I Stand" was a cover of a minor R&B hit by Wade Flemons, and featured Bringas on lead, and the two Rip Chords overdubbed all the vocals themselves: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Here I Stand"] The musicians on that track were all members of the session collective later known as the Wrecking Crew, including keyboard player Leon Russell, guitarist Glen Campbell, and drummer Earl Palmer. The arrangement on that, and on many of the Rip Chords' future recordings, was by Jack Nitzsche, who also did Phil Spector's arrangements. Nitzsche's wife Gracia was also involved in the second Rip Chords single. She was a session singer who was a member of the Blossoms for a while, and the Blossoms added vocals on "Gone", and Gracia did the spoken intro: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Gone"] The man singing “Yeah she's gone, woah she's gone” there wasn't either of Stewart or Bringas, but Terry Melcher's regular collaborator Bruce Johnston. We've seen Johnston turn up a few times in the main podcast, but at the time he'd just started making surf records, in an attempt to jump on the latest bandwagon: [Excerpt: Bruce Johnston, "Do The Surfer's Stomp"] Johnston came in to thicken the vocals on "Gone", but he would soon be an essential part of the Rip Chords. As the group were touring regularly, they'd got in another couple of musicians, Rich Rotkin and Arnie Marcus, to back them on stage. Rotkin and Marcus didn't take part in the recordings, but Johnston and Melcher added additional voices. But then Bringas, the lead singer, had quit the live lineup of the group because he couldn't perform live and keep up with his studies for the ministry, but he stayed in the studio. So the live lineup of the band was Stewart, Rotkin, and Marcus, while the studio lineup was Stewart, Bringas, Johnston, and Melcher. Their third single, "Hey Little Cobra" was written by Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears, who had started her own solo career a couple of years earlier, with "My Diary": [Excerpt: Carol Connors, "My Diary"] Connors spent much of the early sixties collaborating with people like Roger Christian and Gary Usher on beach party songs, but "Hey Little Cobra" was her first solo composition, though both Usher and Melcher have claimed to have helped her with it. While all four studio Rip Chords are apparently on the record, the only vocalists who can be easily distinguished are Melcher and Johnston, who were never credited on the records as anything other than producers -- according to the liner notes of the Rip Chords' original albums, the vocals were all by the official group members. "Hey Little Cobra", with Melcher on lead, ended up making number four on the charts: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Hey Little Cobra"] The follow-up, "Three-Window Coupe" was a cover version of a Jan and Dean album track, written by Jan Berry and Roger Christian, and made the top thirty: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Three-Window Coupe"] By this time, Johnston and Melcher were also recording as a duo under the name "Bruce and Terry", making records like "Summer Means Fun", a minor hit for them in 1964: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] But the age of the studio surf and hot rod group only lasted about eighteen months, and the Rip Chords' fourth single only made number ninety-eight, while the fifth didn't chart at all. After that, the group split up. Bruce and Terry continued recording as a duo until 1966, and some of their records were truly excellent, like the majestic "Girl It's All Right Now": [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Girl It's All Right Now"] By the time that came out, though, both men had gone on to the work that would be what they were remembered for in later decades -- Johnston joined the Beach Boys, and we'll be hearing much more about him throughout the sixties and seventies, and Terry Melcher was producing acts like the Byrds, and we'll hear more of him too. The Rip Chords remained largely a footnote to their work, to the extent that much of the time when people talk about the Rip Chords they don't even know that there was a real band at all. Stewart, Rotkin, and Marcus reformed the Rip Chords and have sometimes toured under the name in recent decades, and put out an album of rerecorded versions of the hits a few years back, while Melcher and Johnston briefly revived the name for recordings to fill out a compilation cassette of hit rerecordings, mostly by Mike Love of the Beach Boys and Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean, released only in Radio Shack stores in the eighties. Ernie Bringas now teaches theology, and also seems to be the primary author of the group's Wikipedia page, which is largely devoted to making very clear that Bringas really sang on the records his group put out.
Guest Mr. Arwin Abatayo of YoungCTO Rafi Quisumbing A skilled seasoned digital strategist with in-depth technical knowledge, who has worked with big brands such as Publicis Jimenez, Globe, NuWorks, Jollibee and other big names digital agencies in the Philippines. A creative with a combination of both innovation and technical know-how. LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arwinabat... Arwin is very outspoken, independent, and has a very positive outlook on life. He's a people-person and you can trust him to adjust and get along with people easily. When it comes to technical matters, you can depend on Arwin to get the job done. Moreover, he's dedicated and motivated to try new things and to accept any challenge thrown at him If you want to be a guest here, please reach out to me anywhere. Kahit mag comment lang oks na.
Check in to the height of luxury in this episode. We've got the suite life, do you? Join us for a comedic discussion on one of Disney Channel's most popular shows, 2000's sitcoms and Aha Sparkling Water!SUBSCRIBE to our PODCAST FEED, and leave us a REVIEW!INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/mostxtremepod/TWITTER - https://twitter.com/mostxtremepodEMAIL - mostxtremepodcast@gmail.comWEBSITE - https://mostxtremepodcast.simplecast.com/
In this episode, Emma chats to Nicole, a US Marine who was on active duty in Japan with her husband when she became pregnant with their first child. The discovery of a large ovarian cyst meant that their son Arwin had to be delivered by emergency C-section at an army bas hospital, at just 25 weeks. Devised & Presented by Emma McGrane Music by Mike Edwards Produced by Ian Worsley Follow us on Twitter @sensingnicu email: sensingnicu@gmail.com My blog: headofdramatalesofteddy.wordpress.com Spoons Charity: spoons.org.uk
The post The Lens of Arwin – Land, Sea & Sky appeared first on Capturing & Sharing Stories | Inspire, Explore & Create.
Episode 107 of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at “Surf City” and the career of Jan and Dean, including a Pop Symphony, accidental conspiracy to kidnap, and a career that both started and ended with attempts to get out of being drafted. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Hey Little Cobra” by the Rip Chords. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources No Mixcloud this week, due to the number of songs by Jan and Dean. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes. The Grand High Potentates of California Rock: Jan and Dean “In Perspective” 1958-1968 is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks I also used Dead Man’s Curve and Back: The Jan and Dean Story by Mark Thomas Passmore, and Dean Torrence’s autobiography Surf City. The original mono versions of the Liberty singles are only available on an out-of-print CD that goes for over £400, and many compilations have later rerecordings (often by Dean without Jan) but this has the proper recordings, albeit in stereo mixes. This compilation contains their pre-Liberty singles, including the Jan & Arnie material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A warning about this episode — it features some discussion of a car crash and resulting disability and recovery, which may be upsetting to some people. Today we’re going to look at one of the most successful duos in rock and roll history, but one who have been relegated to a footnote because of their collaboration with a far more successful band, who had a similar sound to them. We’re going to look at Jan and Dean, and at “Surf City”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Surf City”] The story of Jan and Dean begins with Jan and Arnie, and with the Barons. We discussed the Barons briefly in the episode on “LSD-25”, a few months ago, but only in passing, so to recap — the Barons were a singing group that formed at University High School in LA in the late fifties, centred around Jan Berry. Various people involved in the group’s formation went on to be important parts of the LA music scene in the sixties, but by 1958 they were down to Berry and his friends Arnie Ginsburg — not the DJ we talked about last episode, Dean Torrence, and Don Altfeld. The group members all had a love for R&B, and hung around with various of the Black groups of the time — Don Altfeld has talked about him and Berry being present, but not participating, for Richard Berry’s recording of “Louie Louie”, though his memories of the time seem confused in the interviews I’ve read. And Jan Berry in particular was a real music obsessive, and had what may have been the biggest R&B and rock and roll record collection in LA — which he obtained by scamming record companies, which seems to be very in character for him. He got a letterhead made up for a fake radio station, KJAN, and wrote to every record company he could find asking for promo copies. He ended up getting six copies of every new release “to play on the radio”, and would give some of the extra copies to his friends — and others he would use as frisbees. According to Torrence, Berry would often receive two hundred new records a day, all free. Berry had a reel-to-reel tape recorder belonging to his father — his father, William Berry, was important in the Howard Hughes organisation, and had been in charge of the Spruce Goose project, even flying in the famous plane with Hughes, and Hughes had given him the tape recorder, which unlike almost all recording equipment available in the fifties had a primitive reverb function built in. With that and a microphone stolen from the school auditorium, Berry started recording himself and his friends, and he’d wanted to play one of the tapes he’d made at a party, so he’d taken it to a studio to be cut as an acetate, where it had been heard by Joe Lubin of Arwin Records, who took the tape and got session musicians to overdub it: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, “Jennie Lee”] That record was released as by Jan and Arnie, rather than the Barons — Dean Torrence was off doing six months in the army, to get out of being conscripted later. Torrence has always said that he could hear himself on the recording, and that it was one the Barons had done together, but everyone else involved has claimed that while the Barons did record a version of that song, the finished version only features Jan and Arnie’s vocals. Don Altfeld didn’t sing on it, because he was never allowed to sing in the Barons — he was forced to just mouth along, which given that both Jan and Dean were known for regularly singing flat must say something about just how bad a singer he is — though he did apparently hit a metal chair leg as percussion on the record. “Jennie Lee” went to number three on the Cashbox chart — number eight on Billboard — and was a big enough hit that it set a precedent for how all the records Jan Berry would be involved in for the next few years would be made — he would record vocals and piano in his garage, with a ton of reverb, and then the backing track would be recorded to that, usually by the same group of musicians that played on records by people like Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, and other late-fifties LA singers — a group centred around Ernie Freeman on piano and organ, Rene Hall on guitar, and Earl Palmer on drums. This was a completely backwards way of recording — normally you’d have the musicians play the backing track first and then overdub the vocals on it — but it was how they would carry on doing things for several years. Jan and Arnie’s follow-up, “Gas Money”, written by Berry, Ginsburg, and Altfeld, did less well, only making number eighty-one in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, “Gas Money”] And their third single didn’t chart at all. By this point, Arnie Ginsburg was getting thoroughly sick of working with Jan Berry — pretty much without exception everyone who knew Berry in the fifties and early sixties says two things about him — that he was the single most intelligent person they ever met, and that he was a domineering egomaniac who used anyone he could remorselessly. Jan and Arnie split up, and Arwin Records seems to have decided to stick with Arnie, rather than Jan — though this might have been because Arnie seemed *less* likely to have hits, as Dean Torrence has later claimed that Arwin was a tax dodge — it was owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day’s husband, and seems to have been used as much to get out of paying as much tax on the family’s vast wealth as it was a real record label. Whatever the reason, though, Arnie made one more single, as The Rituals, backed by many of the people who had played with The Barons — Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, and Dave Shostac, plus their regular collaborators Mike Deasy, Richie Polodor and Harper Cosby. It didn’t chart: [Excerpt: The Rituals, “Girl in Zanzibar”] Dean Torrence, who had by now left the Army, saw his chance, and soon Jan and Arnie had become Jan and Dean — after a brief phase in which it looked like they might persuade Dean to change his name in order to avoid losing the group name. They hooked up with a new management and production team, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, who had both been working at Keen Records with Sam Cooke. Kim Fowley later said that it was him who persuaded Adler to sign the duo, but Kim Fowley said a lot of things, very few of them true. Adler and Alpert got the new duo signed to Doré Records, a small label based in LA, and their first release on the label was a cover version of a record originally by a group called the Laurels: [Excerpt: The Laurels, “Baby Talk”] Herb Alpert brought that song to the duo, and their version became a top ten hit, with Jan singing the low parts and Dean singing the lead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Baby Talk”] The hit was big enough that budget labels released soundalike cover versions of it, one of which was by a duo called Tom and Jerry, who had been one hit wonders a year earlier: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, “Baby Talk”] That cover version was unsuccessful, something Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were probably very grateful for when they reinvented themselves as sensitive folkies a couple of years later. Around this time, Jan got his girlfriend pregnant. In order not to spoil their son’s promising career — as well as being a singer, he was also at university and planned to become a doctor — Jan’s parents adopted his son and raised the boy as their own son. The duo went on a tour with Little Willie John, Bobby Day, and Little Richard’s old backing band The Upsetters, playing to mainly Black audiences — a tour they were booked on because almost all West Coast doo-wop at that time was from Black singers. Once the mistake was realised, a decision was made to promote the new duo’s image more — lots of photos of the very blonde, very white, duo started to be released, as a way to reassure the white audience. The duo’s film-star good looks assured them of regular coverage in the teen magazines, but they didn’t have any more hits on Doré — of the seven singles they released in the two years after “Baby Talk”, none of them got to better than number fifty-three on the charts. Eventually the duo left Doré, and Jan released one solo single, “Tomorrow’s Teardrops”: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, “Tomorrow’s Teardrops”] That was actually released as by Jan Barry, rather than Jan Berry, at a point when the duo had actually split up — Dean was getting tired of not having any further hit records, and wanted to concentrate on his college work, while Berry was one of those people who needs to be doing several things simultaneously. Berry’s new girlfriend Jill Gibson added backing vocals — by this time he’d dumped the one he’d got pregnant — and the song was written by Berry and Altfeld. Jan actually started his own label, Ripple Records — named after the brand of cheap wine — to release it, and Dean created the logo for him — the first of many he would create over the years. However, the duo soon reunited, and came up with a plan which would have them only touring during the summer break, and doing local performances in the LA area on those weekends when neither had any homework. Now they needed to get signed to a major label. The one they wanted was Liberty, the label that Eddie Cochran had been on, and whose owner, Si Waronker, was actually the cousin of the owners of Doré. And they had recorded a track that they were sure would get them signed to Liberty. The Marcels had recently had a hit with their doo-wop revival of the old standard “Blue Moon”: [Excerpt: The Marcels, “Blue Moon”] Jan had decided to make a soundalike arrangement of another song from the same period, using the same chord changes — the old Hoagy Carmichael song “Heart and Soul”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Heart and Soul”] They were sure that would be a hit. But Herb Alpert wasn’t — he thought it was a dreadful record, He hated it so much, in fact, that he broke up his partnership with Lou Adler. The division of the partnership’s assets was straightforward — they owned Jan and Dean’s contract, and they owned a tape recorder. Alpert got the tape recorder, and Adler got Jan and Dean. Alpert went on to have a string of hit records as a trumpet player, starting with “The Lonely Bull” in 1962: [Excerpt: Herb Alpert, “The Lonely Bull”] He later formed his own record label, A&M, and never seems to have regretted losing Jan & Dean. Jan and Dean took their tape of “Heart and Soul” to Liberty Records, who said that they did want to sign Jan and Dean, but they didn’t want to release a record like that — they told them to take it somewhere else, and then when the single was a flop, they could come back to Liberty and make some proper records. So the duo got a two-record deal with the small label Challenge Records, on the understanding that after those two singles they would move on to Liberty. And “Heart and Soul” turned out to be a big hit, making number twenty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Heart and Soul”] Their second single on Challenge only made number one hundred and four, but by this time they knew the drill — they’d release their first single on a new label, it would be a big hit, then everything after that would be a flop. But they were going to a new label anyway, and they were sure their first single on Liberty Records would be a huge hit, just like every time they changed labels. The first record they put out on Liberty was a cover of another oldie, “A Sunday Kind of Love”, suggested by Si Waronker’s son Lenny, who we’ll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes. By this point Lou Adler was working for Aldon Music as their West Coast representative, and so the track was credited as “produced by Lou Adler for Nevins-Kirshner”, but Jan was given a separate arrangement credit on the record. But despite their predictions that the single would be a hit because it was a new label, it only made number ninety-four on the charts. The follow-up, “Tennessee”, was a song which had been more or less forced on them — it was originally one of the recordings that Phil Spector produced during his short-lived contract with Liberty, for a group called the Ducanes, but when the Ducanes had made a hash of it, Liberty forced the song on Jan & Dean instead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Tennessee”] By this time, while Ernie Freeman was still the studio leader of the session musicians, Jan was requesting a rather larger group of musicians, and they’d started recording the backing tracks first. The musicians on “Tennessee” included Tommy Allsup and Jerry Allison of the Crickets, Earl Palmer on drums, and Glen Campbell on guitar, but even these proven hit-makers couldn’t bring the song to more than number sixty-nine on the charts. And even that was better than their next two singles, neither of which even made the Hot One Hundred — though the fact that by this point they were reduced to recording versions of “Frosty The Snowman”, and attempting to recapture their first hit with a sequel called “She’s Still Talking Baby Talk” shows how desperately they were casting around for something, anything that could be a hit. Eventually they found something that worked. A group called the Regents had recently had a hit with “Barbara Ann”: [Excerpt: The Regents, “Barbara Ann”] The duo had cut a cover version of that for their most recent album, and they thought it had worked well, and so they wanted something else that would allow Dean to sing a falsetto lead, over a bass vocal by Jan, with a girl’s name in the title. They eventually hit on an old standard from the 1940s, originally written as a favour for the songwriter’s lawyer, Lee Eastman, about his then one-year-old daughter Linda (who we’ll be hearing more about later in this series). Their version of “Linda” finally gave them another hit after five flops in a row, reaching number twenty-eight in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Linda”] Their career was on an upswing again, and then everything changed for them when they played a gig with support from a local band who had just started having hits, the Beach Boys. The story goes that the Beach Boys were booked to do their own support slot and then to back Jan and Dean on their set. The show went down well with the audience, and they wanted an encore, but Jan and Dean had run out of rehearsed songs. So they suggested that the Beach Boys play their own two singles again, and Jan and Dean would sing with them. The group were flattered that two big stars like Jan and Dean would want to perform their songs, and eagerly joined in. Suddenly, Jan and Dean had an idea — their next album was going to be called Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin’, but as yet they hadn’t recorded any surf songs. They invited the Beach Boys to come into the studio and record new versions of their two singles for Jan & Dean’s album, with Jan and Dean singing the leads: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] The Beach Boys weren’t credited for that session, as they were signed to another label, but it started a long collaboration between the two groups. In particular, the Beach Boys’ leader Brian Wilson became a close collaborator with Berry. And at that same session, Wilson gave Jan and Dean what would become their biggest hit. After the recording, Jan and Dean asked Wilson if he had any new songs they might be able to do. The first one he played them, “Surfin’ USA”, he told them they couldn’t do anything with as he wanted that for the Beach Boys themselves. But then he played them two others. The one that Jan and Dean saw most potential in was a song he’d completed, “Gonna Hustle You”: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, “Gonna Hustle You”] The duo wanted that as their next single, but Liberty Records flat out refused to put out something that sounded so dirty as “Gonna Hustle You”. They tried rewriting it as “Get a Chance With You”, but even that was too much. They put the song aside, though they’d return to it later as “The New Girl In School”, which would become a minor hit for them. Instead, they worked on a half-completed song that Wilson had started, very much in the same mould as the first two Beach Boys singles, with the provisional title “Goodie Connie Won’t You Please Come Home”. This song would become the first of many Jan and Dean songs for which the songwriting credit is disputed. No-one argues with the fact that the basic idea of the song was Brian Wilson’s, but Jan Berry’s process was to get a lot of people to throw ideas in, sometimes working in a group, sometimes working separately and not even knowing that other people had been involved. The song is officially credited to Wilson and Berry, but Don Altfeld has also claimed he contributed to it, Dean Torrence says that he wrote about a quarter of the lyrics, and it’s also been suggested that Roger Christian wrote the lyrics to the first verse. Christian was an LA-area DJ who was obsessed with cars, and had come to Wilson’s attention after he’d said on the air that the Beach Boys’ “409” was a great song about a bad car. He’d started writing songs with Wilson, and he would also collaborate with both Jan Berry and Wilson’s friend Gary Usher (who was a big part of this scene but hardly ever worked with Jan and Dean because he hated Jan). Almost every car song from this period, by the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, or any number of studio groups, was co-written by Christian, and we’ll be hearing more about him in a future episode. This group of people — Jan and Dean, Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, and Don Altfeld — would write together in various combinations, and write a lot of hits, but a lot of the credits were assigned more or less randomly — though Jan Berry was almost always credited, and Dean Torrence almost never was. The completed song, titled “Surf City”, was recorded with members of the Wrecking Crew — the studio musicians who usually worked with Phil Spector — performing the backing track. In this case, these were Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, Earl Palmer, Bill Pitman, Ray Pohlman and Billy Strange — there were two drummers because Berry liked a big drum sound. Brian Wilson was at the session, and soon after this he started using some of those musicians himself. While it was released as a Jan and Dean record, Dean doesn’t sing on it at all — the vocals featured Jan, three singers from another Liberty Records group called the Gents, and Brian Wilson, with Wilson and Tony Minichello of the Gents singing the falsetto parts that Dean would sing live: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Surf City”] That went to number one, becoming Jan and Dean’s only number one, and Brian Wilson’s first — much to the fury of Wilson’s father Murry, who thought that Wilson’s hits should only be going to the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson may well have been more bothered by the fact that the publishing for the song went to Columbia/Screen Gems, to whom Jan was signed, rather than to Sea of Tunes, the company that published Wilson’s other songs, and which was owned by Murry himself. Murry started calling Jan a “pirate”, which prompted Berry to turn up to a Beach Boys session wearing a full pirate costume to taunt Murry. From “Linda” on, Jan and Dean had ten top forty hits with ten singles — one of the B-sides also charted, but they did miss with “Here They Come From All Over The World”, the theme tune for the TAMI Show, a classic rock concert film on which Jan and Dean appeared both as singers and as the hosts. That was by far their weakest single from this period, being as it is just a list of the musicians in the show, some of them described incorrectly — the song talks about “The Rolling Stones from Liverpool” and James Brown being “the King of the Blues”. All of these hits were made by the same team. The Wrecking Crew would play the instruments, the Gents — now renamed the Matadors, and sometimes the Blossoms would provide backing vocals on the earlier singles. The later ones would feature the Fantastic Baggies instead of the Matadors — two young songwriters, Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who were also making their own surf records. The lead would be sung by Jan, the falsetto by some combination of Brian Wilson, Dean Torrence, Tony Minichello and P.F. Sloan — often Dean wouldn’t appear at all. The singles would be written by some combination of Wilson, Berry, Altfeld and Christian, and the songs would be about the same subjects as the Beach Boys’ records — surf, cars, girls, or some combination of the three. Sometimes the records would be just repetitions of the formula, like “Drag City”, which was an attempt at a second “Surf City”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Drag City”] But often there would be a self-parodic element that wasn’t present in the Beach Boys’ singles, as in “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena”, a car song written by Berry, Christian, and Altfeld, based on a series of Dodge commercials featuring a car-racing old lady: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena”] And the grotesque “Dead Man’s Curve”, equal parts a serious attempt at a teen tragedy song and a parody of the genre, which took on a new meaning a few years after it was a hit: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Dead Man’s Curve”] But while 1963 and 64 saw the duo rack up an incredible run of hits, they were making enemies. Jan was so unpleasant to people by this point that even the teen mags would call him out, with Teen Scene in March 1964 running an article which read, in part, “Blast of the month goes to half of a certain group whose initials are J&D. Reason for the blast: his personality, which makes enemies faster than Carter makes pills… (It’s the Jan Half)… Acting like Mr. Big Britches gets you nowhere, and your poor partner, who is one of the nicest guys on earth, shouldn’t be forced to go around making apologies for your actions.” And while Torrence may have been “one of the nicest guys on Earth”, not all of his friends were. In fact, in December 1963, his closest friend, Barry Keenan, was the ringleader in the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. Keenan told Torrence about the plan in advance, and Torrence had lent Keenan a great deal of money, which Keenan used to finance the kidnapping. Torrence was accused of being a major part of the plot, though he was let off after testifying against the people who were actually involved — he’s always claimed that he thought that his friend’s talking about his plan for the perfect crime was just talk, not a serious plan. Torrence had even offered suggestions, jokingly, which Keenan had incorporated — and Keenan had left a bag containing fifty thousand dollars at Torrence’s home, Torrence’s share of the ransom money, which Torrence refused to keep. However, Sinatra Sr was annoyed enough at Torrence that a lot of plans for Jan and Dean TV shows and film appearances suddenly dried up. The lack of TV and film appearances was a particular problem as the music industry was changing under them, and surf and hot rod records weren’t the in thing any more — and Brian Wilson seems to have been less interested in working with them as well, as the Beach Boys overtook Jan and Dean in popularity. 1965 saw them trying to figure out the new, more serious, music scene, with experiments like Pop Symphony Number 1, an album of orchestral arrangements of the duo’s hits by Berry (who minored in music at UCLA) and George Tipton: [Excerpt: The Bel-Aire Pops Orchestra, “Surf City”] The duo also tried going folk-rock, releasing an album called Folk ‘n’ Roll, which featured another variation on the “Surf City” and “Drag City” theme — this one “Folk City”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Folk City”] That album didn’t do well at all, not least because the lead-off single was a pro-war protest song, released as a Jan Berry solo single. Berry had become incensed by Buffy Saint-Marie’s song “The Universal Soldier”, and had written a right-wing response, “The Universal Coward”: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, “The Universal Coward”] As you can imagine, that was not popular with the folk-rock crowd, especially coming as it did from someone who was still managing to avoid the draft by studying medicine, even as he was also a pop star. Torrence became so irritated with Berry, and with the music they were making, during the recording of that album that he ended up going down the hall to another studio, where the Beach Boys were recording their unplugged Party! album, and sitting in with them. He suggested they do a new recording of “Barbara Ann”, and he sang lead on it, uncredited: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Barbara Ann”] That went to number two on the charts, becoming the biggest hit record that Torrence ever sang on. Torrence was happier with the next project, though, an album spoofing the popular TV show Batman, with several comedy sketches, along with songs about the characters from the TV show: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Batman”] But by this point, in 1966, Jan and Dean’s singles were doing absolutely nothing in the charts. In March, Liberty Records dropped them. And then on April the twelfth, 1966, something happened that would end their chances of another comeback. Jan Berry had been in numerous accidents over the previous few years — he was a thrill-seeker, and would often end up crashing cars or breaking bones. On April the twelfth, he had an appointment at the draft board, at which he was given bad news — depending on which account you read, he was either told that his draft deferment was coming to an end and he was going to Vietnam straight away, or that he was going to Vietnam as soon as he graduated from medical school at the end of the school year. He was furious, and he got into his car. What happened next has been the subject of some debate. Some people say that a wheel came off his car — and some have hinted that this was the result of some of Sinatra’s friends getting revenge on Jan and Dean. Others just say he was driving carelessly, which he often did. Some have suggested that he was trying to deliberately get into a minor accident to avoid being drafted. Whatever happened, he was involved in a major accident, in which he, though luckily no-one else, was severely injured. He spent a month in a coma, and came out of it severely brain damaged. He had to relearn to read and speak, and for the rest of his life would have problems with his memory, his physical co-ordination, and his speech. Liberty kept releasing old Jan and Dean tracks, and even got them a final top twenty hit with “Popsicle”, a song from a few years earlier. Dean made a Jan and Dean album, Save For a Rainy Day, without Jan, while Jan was still recovering, as a way of trying to keep their career options open if Jan ever got better. Dean put it out on the duo’s own new label, J&D, and there were plans for Columbia to pick it up and give it a wider release, but Jan refused to sign the contracts — he was furious that Dean had made a Jan and Dean record without him, and would have nothing to do with it. Torrence tried to have a music career anyway — he put out a cover of the Beach Boys song “Vegetables” under the name The Laughing Gravy: [Excerpt: The Laughing Gravy, “Vegetables”] But he soon gave up, and became an artist, designing covers and logos for people like Harry Nilsson, Canned Heat, the Turtles, and the Beach Boys. Jan tried making his own Jan and Dean album without Dean, even though he was unable to sing again or write yet. With a lot of help from Roger Christian, he pulled together some old half-finished songs and finished them, got in some soundalike session singers and famous friends like Glen Campbell and Davy Jones of the Monkees and put together Carnival of Sound, an album that didn’t get released until 2010: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Girl You’re Blowing My Mind”] In the mid-seventies, Jan and Dean got back together and started touring the nostalgia circuit, spurred by a TV movie, Dead Man’s Curve, based on their lives. There seemed to be a love-hate relationship between them in later years — they would split up and get back together, and their roles had reversed, with Dean now taking most of the leads on the shows — Dean had to look after Jan a lot of the time, and some reports said that Jan had to relearn the words to the three songs he sang lead on every night. But with the aid of some excellent backing musicians, and with some love and tolerance from the audience for Jan’s ongoing problems, they managed to regularly please crowds of thousands until a few weeks before Jan’s death in 2004. Since then, Dean has mostly performed with the Surf City All-Stars, a band that sometimes also features Al Jardine and David Marks of the Beach Boys, playing a few shows a year. He released an autobiography in 2016 — it came out at the same time as the autobiographies of Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, ensuring that even at this late date, he would be overshadowed by his more famous colleagues.
Episode 107 of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at "Surf City" and the career of Jan and Dean, including a Pop Symphony, accidental conspiracy to kidnap, and a career that both started and ended with attempts to get out of being drafted. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Hey Little Cobra" by the Rip Chords. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixcloud this week, due to the number of songs by Jan and Dean. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes. The Grand High Potentates of California Rock: Jan and Dean "In Perspective" 1958-1968 is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks I also used Dead Man's Curve and Back: The Jan and Dean Story by Mark Thomas Passmore, and Dean Torrence's autobiography Surf City. The original mono versions of the Liberty singles are only available on an out-of-print CD that goes for over £400, and many compilations have later rerecordings (often by Dean without Jan) but this has the proper recordings, albeit in stereo mixes. This compilation contains their pre-Liberty singles, including the Jan & Arnie material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A warning about this episode -- it features some discussion of a car crash and resulting disability and recovery, which may be upsetting to some people. Today we're going to look at one of the most successful duos in rock and roll history, but one who have been relegated to a footnote because of their collaboration with a far more successful band, who had a similar sound to them. We're going to look at Jan and Dean, and at "Surf City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Surf City"] The story of Jan and Dean begins with Jan and Arnie, and with the Barons. We discussed the Barons briefly in the episode on "LSD-25", a few months ago, but only in passing, so to recap -- the Barons were a singing group that formed at University High School in LA in the late fifties, centred around Jan Berry. Various people involved in the group's formation went on to be important parts of the LA music scene in the sixties, but by 1958 they were down to Berry and his friends Arnie Ginsburg -- not the DJ we talked about last episode, Dean Torrence, and Don Altfeld. The group members all had a love for R&B, and hung around with various of the Black groups of the time -- Don Altfeld has talked about him and Berry being present, but not participating, for Richard Berry's recording of "Louie Louie", though his memories of the time seem confused in the interviews I've read. And Jan Berry in particular was a real music obsessive, and had what may have been the biggest R&B and rock and roll record collection in LA -- which he obtained by scamming record companies, which seems to be very in character for him. He got a letterhead made up for a fake radio station, KJAN, and wrote to every record company he could find asking for promo copies. He ended up getting six copies of every new release "to play on the radio", and would give some of the extra copies to his friends -- and others he would use as frisbees. According to Torrence, Berry would often receive two hundred new records a day, all free. Berry had a reel-to-reel tape recorder belonging to his father -- his father, William Berry, was important in the Howard Hughes organisation, and had been in charge of the Spruce Goose project, even flying in the famous plane with Hughes, and Hughes had given him the tape recorder, which unlike almost all recording equipment available in the fifties had a primitive reverb function built in. With that and a microphone stolen from the school auditorium, Berry started recording himself and his friends, and he'd wanted to play one of the tapes he'd made at a party, so he'd taken it to a studio to be cut as an acetate, where it had been heard by Joe Lubin of Arwin Records, who took the tape and got session musicians to overdub it: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Jennie Lee"] That record was released as by Jan and Arnie, rather than the Barons -- Dean Torrence was off doing six months in the army, to get out of being conscripted later. Torrence has always said that he could hear himself on the recording, and that it was one the Barons had done together, but everyone else involved has claimed that while the Barons did record a version of that song, the finished version only features Jan and Arnie's vocals. Don Altfeld didn't sing on it, because he was never allowed to sing in the Barons -- he was forced to just mouth along, which given that both Jan and Dean were known for regularly singing flat must say something about just how bad a singer he is -- though he did apparently hit a metal chair leg as percussion on the record. "Jennie Lee" went to number three on the Cashbox chart -- number eight on Billboard -- and was a big enough hit that it set a precedent for how all the records Jan Berry would be involved in for the next few years would be made -- he would record vocals and piano in his garage, with a ton of reverb, and then the backing track would be recorded to that, usually by the same group of musicians that played on records by people like Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, and other late-fifties LA singers -- a group centred around Ernie Freeman on piano and organ, Rene Hall on guitar, and Earl Palmer on drums. This was a completely backwards way of recording -- normally you'd have the musicians play the backing track first and then overdub the vocals on it -- but it was how they would carry on doing things for several years. Jan and Arnie's follow-up, "Gas Money", written by Berry, Ginsburg, and Altfeld, did less well, only making number eighty-one in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Gas Money"] And their third single didn't chart at all. By this point, Arnie Ginsburg was getting thoroughly sick of working with Jan Berry -- pretty much without exception everyone who knew Berry in the fifties and early sixties says two things about him -- that he was the single most intelligent person they ever met, and that he was a domineering egomaniac who used anyone he could remorselessly. Jan and Arnie split up, and Arwin Records seems to have decided to stick with Arnie, rather than Jan -- though this might have been because Arnie seemed *less* likely to have hits, as Dean Torrence has later claimed that Arwin was a tax dodge -- it was owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day's husband, and seems to have been used as much to get out of paying as much tax on the family's vast wealth as it was a real record label. Whatever the reason, though, Arnie made one more single, as The Rituals, backed by many of the people who had played with The Barons -- Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, and Dave Shostac, plus their regular collaborators Mike Deasy, Richie Polodor and Harper Cosby. It didn't chart: [Excerpt: The Rituals, "Girl in Zanzibar"] Dean Torrence, who had by now left the Army, saw his chance, and soon Jan and Arnie had become Jan and Dean -- after a brief phase in which it looked like they might persuade Dean to change his name in order to avoid losing the group name. They hooked up with a new management and production team, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, who had both been working at Keen Records with Sam Cooke. Kim Fowley later said that it was him who persuaded Adler to sign the duo, but Kim Fowley said a lot of things, very few of them true. Adler and Alpert got the new duo signed to Doré Records, a small label based in LA, and their first release on the label was a cover version of a record originally by a group called the Laurels: [Excerpt: The Laurels, "Baby Talk"] Herb Alpert brought that song to the duo, and their version became a top ten hit, with Jan singing the low parts and Dean singing the lead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Baby Talk"] The hit was big enough that budget labels released soundalike cover versions of it, one of which was by a duo called Tom and Jerry, who had been one hit wonders a year earlier: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Baby Talk"] That cover version was unsuccessful, something Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were probably very grateful for when they reinvented themselves as sensitive folkies a couple of years later. Around this time, Jan got his girlfriend pregnant. In order not to spoil their son's promising career -- as well as being a singer, he was also at university and planned to become a doctor -- Jan's parents adopted his son and raised the boy as their own son. The duo went on a tour with Little Willie John, Bobby Day, and Little Richard's old backing band The Upsetters, playing to mainly Black audiences -- a tour they were booked on because almost all West Coast doo-wop at that time was from Black singers. Once the mistake was realised, a decision was made to promote the new duo's image more -- lots of photos of the very blonde, very white, duo started to be released, as a way to reassure the white audience. The duo's film-star good looks assured them of regular coverage in the teen magazines, but they didn't have any more hits on Doré -- of the seven singles they released in the two years after "Baby Talk", none of them got to better than number fifty-three on the charts. Eventually the duo left Doré, and Jan released one solo single, "Tomorrow's Teardrops": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "Tomorrow's Teardrops"] That was actually released as by Jan Barry, rather than Jan Berry, at a point when the duo had actually split up -- Dean was getting tired of not having any further hit records, and wanted to concentrate on his college work, while Berry was one of those people who needs to be doing several things simultaneously. Berry's new girlfriend Jill Gibson added backing vocals -- by this time he'd dumped the one he'd got pregnant -- and the song was written by Berry and Altfeld. Jan actually started his own label, Ripple Records -- named after the brand of cheap wine -- to release it, and Dean created the logo for him -- the first of many he would create over the years. However, the duo soon reunited, and came up with a plan which would have them only touring during the summer break, and doing local performances in the LA area on those weekends when neither had any homework. Now they needed to get signed to a major label. The one they wanted was Liberty, the label that Eddie Cochran had been on, and whose owner, Si Waronker, was actually the cousin of the owners of Doré. And they had recorded a track that they were sure would get them signed to Liberty. The Marcels had recently had a hit with their doo-wop revival of the old standard "Blue Moon": [Excerpt: The Marcels, "Blue Moon"] Jan had decided to make a soundalike arrangement of another song from the same period, using the same chord changes -- the old Hoagy Carmichael song "Heart and Soul": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Heart and Soul"] They were sure that would be a hit. But Herb Alpert wasn't -- he thought it was a dreadful record, He hated it so much, in fact, that he broke up his partnership with Lou Adler. The division of the partnership's assets was straightforward -- they owned Jan and Dean's contract, and they owned a tape recorder. Alpert got the tape recorder, and Adler got Jan and Dean. Alpert went on to have a string of hit records as a trumpet player, starting with "The Lonely Bull" in 1962: [Excerpt: Herb Alpert, "The Lonely Bull"] He later formed his own record label, A&M, and never seems to have regretted losing Jan & Dean. Jan and Dean took their tape of "Heart and Soul" to Liberty Records, who said that they did want to sign Jan and Dean, but they didn't want to release a record like that -- they told them to take it somewhere else, and then when the single was a flop, they could come back to Liberty and make some proper records. So the duo got a two-record deal with the small label Challenge Records, on the understanding that after those two singles they would move on to Liberty. And "Heart and Soul" turned out to be a big hit, making number twenty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Heart and Soul"] Their second single on Challenge only made number one hundred and four, but by this time they knew the drill -- they'd release their first single on a new label, it would be a big hit, then everything after that would be a flop. But they were going to a new label anyway, and they were sure their first single on Liberty Records would be a huge hit, just like every time they changed labels. The first record they put out on Liberty was a cover of another oldie, "A Sunday Kind of Love", suggested by Si Waronker's son Lenny, who we'll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes. By this point Lou Adler was working for Aldon Music as their West Coast representative, and so the track was credited as "produced by Lou Adler for Nevins-Kirshner", but Jan was given a separate arrangement credit on the record. But despite their predictions that the single would be a hit because it was a new label, it only made number ninety-four on the charts. The follow-up, "Tennessee", was a song which had been more or less forced on them -- it was originally one of the recordings that Phil Spector produced during his short-lived contract with Liberty, for a group called the Ducanes, but when the Ducanes had made a hash of it, Liberty forced the song on Jan & Dean instead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Tennessee"] By this time, while Ernie Freeman was still the studio leader of the session musicians, Jan was requesting a rather larger group of musicians, and they'd started recording the backing tracks first. The musicians on "Tennessee" included Tommy Allsup and Jerry Allison of the Crickets, Earl Palmer on drums, and Glen Campbell on guitar, but even these proven hit-makers couldn't bring the song to more than number sixty-nine on the charts. And even that was better than their next two singles, neither of which even made the Hot One Hundred -- though the fact that by this point they were reduced to recording versions of "Frosty The Snowman", and attempting to recapture their first hit with a sequel called "She's Still Talking Baby Talk" shows how desperately they were casting around for something, anything that could be a hit. Eventually they found something that worked. A group called the Regents had recently had a hit with "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: The Regents, "Barbara Ann"] The duo had cut a cover version of that for their most recent album, and they thought it had worked well, and so they wanted something else that would allow Dean to sing a falsetto lead, over a bass vocal by Jan, with a girl's name in the title. They eventually hit on an old standard from the 1940s, originally written as a favour for the songwriter's lawyer, Lee Eastman, about his then one-year-old daughter Linda (who we'll be hearing more about later in this series). Their version of "Linda" finally gave them another hit after five flops in a row, reaching number twenty-eight in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Linda"] Their career was on an upswing again, and then everything changed for them when they played a gig with support from a local band who had just started having hits, the Beach Boys. The story goes that the Beach Boys were booked to do their own support slot and then to back Jan and Dean on their set. The show went down well with the audience, and they wanted an encore, but Jan and Dean had run out of rehearsed songs. So they suggested that the Beach Boys play their own two singles again, and Jan and Dean would sing with them. The group were flattered that two big stars like Jan and Dean would want to perform their songs, and eagerly joined in. Suddenly, Jan and Dean had an idea -- their next album was going to be called Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin', but as yet they hadn't recorded any surf songs. They invited the Beach Boys to come into the studio and record new versions of their two singles for Jan & Dean's album, with Jan and Dean singing the leads: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] The Beach Boys weren't credited for that session, as they were signed to another label, but it started a long collaboration between the two groups. In particular, the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson became a close collaborator with Berry. And at that same session, Wilson gave Jan and Dean what would become their biggest hit. After the recording, Jan and Dean asked Wilson if he had any new songs they might be able to do. The first one he played them, "Surfin' USA", he told them they couldn't do anything with as he wanted that for the Beach Boys themselves. But then he played them two others. The one that Jan and Dean saw most potential in was a song he'd completed, "Gonna Hustle You": [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Gonna Hustle You"] The duo wanted that as their next single, but Liberty Records flat out refused to put out something that sounded so dirty as "Gonna Hustle You". They tried rewriting it as "Get a Chance With You", but even that was too much. They put the song aside, though they'd return to it later as "The New Girl In School", which would become a minor hit for them. Instead, they worked on a half-completed song that Wilson had started, very much in the same mould as the first two Beach Boys singles, with the provisional title "Goodie Connie Won't You Please Come Home". This song would become the first of many Jan and Dean songs for which the songwriting credit is disputed. No-one argues with the fact that the basic idea of the song was Brian Wilson's, but Jan Berry's process was to get a lot of people to throw ideas in, sometimes working in a group, sometimes working separately and not even knowing that other people had been involved. The song is officially credited to Wilson and Berry, but Don Altfeld has also claimed he contributed to it, Dean Torrence says that he wrote about a quarter of the lyrics, and it's also been suggested that Roger Christian wrote the lyrics to the first verse. Christian was an LA-area DJ who was obsessed with cars, and had come to Wilson's attention after he'd said on the air that the Beach Boys' "409" was a great song about a bad car. He'd started writing songs with Wilson, and he would also collaborate with both Jan Berry and Wilson's friend Gary Usher (who was a big part of this scene but hardly ever worked with Jan and Dean because he hated Jan). Almost every car song from this period, by the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, or any number of studio groups, was co-written by Christian, and we'll be hearing more about him in a future episode. This group of people -- Jan and Dean, Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, and Don Altfeld -- would write together in various combinations, and write a lot of hits, but a lot of the credits were assigned more or less randomly -- though Jan Berry was almost always credited, and Dean Torrence almost never was. The completed song, titled "Surf City", was recorded with members of the Wrecking Crew -- the studio musicians who usually worked with Phil Spector -- performing the backing track. In this case, these were Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, Earl Palmer, Bill Pitman, Ray Pohlman and Billy Strange -- there were two drummers because Berry liked a big drum sound. Brian Wilson was at the session, and soon after this he started using some of those musicians himself. While it was released as a Jan and Dean record, Dean doesn't sing on it at all -- the vocals featured Jan, three singers from another Liberty Records group called the Gents, and Brian Wilson, with Wilson and Tony Minichello of the Gents singing the falsetto parts that Dean would sing live: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Surf City"] That went to number one, becoming Jan and Dean's only number one, and Brian Wilson's first -- much to the fury of Wilson's father Murry, who thought that Wilson's hits should only be going to the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson may well have been more bothered by the fact that the publishing for the song went to Columbia/Screen Gems, to whom Jan was signed, rather than to Sea of Tunes, the company that published Wilson's other songs, and which was owned by Murry himself. Murry started calling Jan a "pirate", which prompted Berry to turn up to a Beach Boys session wearing a full pirate costume to taunt Murry. From "Linda" on, Jan and Dean had ten top forty hits with ten singles -- one of the B-sides also charted, but they did miss with "Here They Come From All Over The World", the theme tune for the TAMI Show, a classic rock concert film on which Jan and Dean appeared both as singers and as the hosts. That was by far their weakest single from this period, being as it is just a list of the musicians in the show, some of them described incorrectly -- the song talks about "The Rolling Stones from Liverpool" and James Brown being "the King of the Blues". All of these hits were made by the same team. The Wrecking Crew would play the instruments, the Gents -- now renamed the Matadors, and sometimes the Blossoms would provide backing vocals on the earlier singles. The later ones would feature the Fantastic Baggies instead of the Matadors -- two young songwriters, Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who were also making their own surf records. The lead would be sung by Jan, the falsetto by some combination of Brian Wilson, Dean Torrence, Tony Minichello and P.F. Sloan -- often Dean wouldn't appear at all. The singles would be written by some combination of Wilson, Berry, Altfeld and Christian, and the songs would be about the same subjects as the Beach Boys' records -- surf, cars, girls, or some combination of the three. Sometimes the records would be just repetitions of the formula, like "Drag City", which was an attempt at a second "Surf City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Drag City"] But often there would be a self-parodic element that wasn't present in the Beach Boys' singles, as in "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", a car song written by Berry, Christian, and Altfeld, based on a series of Dodge commercials featuring a car-racing old lady: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] And the grotesque "Dead Man's Curve", equal parts a serious attempt at a teen tragedy song and a parody of the genre, which took on a new meaning a few years after it was a hit: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Dead Man's Curve"] But while 1963 and 64 saw the duo rack up an incredible run of hits, they were making enemies. Jan was so unpleasant to people by this point that even the teen mags would call him out, with Teen Scene in March 1964 running an article which read, in part, "Blast of the month goes to half of a certain group whose initials are J&D. Reason for the blast: his personality, which makes enemies faster than Carter makes pills... (It's the Jan Half)... Acting like Mr. Big Britches gets you nowhere, and your poor partner, who is one of the nicest guys on earth, shouldn't be forced to go around making apologies for your actions." And while Torrence may have been "one of the nicest guys on Earth", not all of his friends were. In fact, in December 1963, his closest friend, Barry Keenan, was the ringleader in the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. Keenan told Torrence about the plan in advance, and Torrence had lent Keenan a great deal of money, which Keenan used to finance the kidnapping. Torrence was accused of being a major part of the plot, though he was let off after testifying against the people who were actually involved -- he's always claimed that he thought that his friend's talking about his plan for the perfect crime was just talk, not a serious plan. Torrence had even offered suggestions, jokingly, which Keenan had incorporated -- and Keenan had left a bag containing fifty thousand dollars at Torrence's home, Torrence's share of the ransom money, which Torrence refused to keep. However, Sinatra Sr was annoyed enough at Torrence that a lot of plans for Jan and Dean TV shows and film appearances suddenly dried up. The lack of TV and film appearances was a particular problem as the music industry was changing under them, and surf and hot rod records weren't the in thing any more -- and Brian Wilson seems to have been less interested in working with them as well, as the Beach Boys overtook Jan and Dean in popularity. 1965 saw them trying to figure out the new, more serious, music scene, with experiments like Pop Symphony Number 1, an album of orchestral arrangements of the duo's hits by Berry (who minored in music at UCLA) and George Tipton: [Excerpt: The Bel-Aire Pops Orchestra, "Surf City"] The duo also tried going folk-rock, releasing an album called Folk 'n' Roll, which featured another variation on the "Surf City" and "Drag City" theme -- this one "Folk City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Folk City"] That album didn't do well at all, not least because the lead-off single was a pro-war protest song, released as a Jan Berry solo single. Berry had become incensed by Buffy Saint-Marie's song "The Universal Soldier", and had written a right-wing response, "The Universal Coward": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] As you can imagine, that was not popular with the folk-rock crowd, especially coming as it did from someone who was still managing to avoid the draft by studying medicine, even as he was also a pop star. Torrence became so irritated with Berry, and with the music they were making, during the recording of that album that he ended up going down the hall to another studio, where the Beach Boys were recording their unplugged Party! album, and sitting in with them. He suggested they do a new recording of "Barbara Ann", and he sang lead on it, uncredited: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann"] That went to number two on the charts, becoming the biggest hit record that Torrence ever sang on. Torrence was happier with the next project, though, an album spoofing the popular TV show Batman, with several comedy sketches, along with songs about the characters from the TV show: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Batman"] But by this point, in 1966, Jan and Dean's singles were doing absolutely nothing in the charts. In March, Liberty Records dropped them. And then on April the twelfth, 1966, something happened that would end their chances of another comeback. Jan Berry had been in numerous accidents over the previous few years -- he was a thrill-seeker, and would often end up crashing cars or breaking bones. On April the twelfth, he had an appointment at the draft board, at which he was given bad news -- depending on which account you read, he was either told that his draft deferment was coming to an end and he was going to Vietnam straight away, or that he was going to Vietnam as soon as he graduated from medical school at the end of the school year. He was furious, and he got into his car. What happened next has been the subject of some debate. Some people say that a wheel came off his car -- and some have hinted that this was the result of some of Sinatra's friends getting revenge on Jan and Dean. Others just say he was driving carelessly, which he often did. Some have suggested that he was trying to deliberately get into a minor accident to avoid being drafted. Whatever happened, he was involved in a major accident, in which he, though luckily no-one else, was severely injured. He spent a month in a coma, and came out of it severely brain damaged. He had to relearn to read and speak, and for the rest of his life would have problems with his memory, his physical co-ordination, and his speech. Liberty kept releasing old Jan and Dean tracks, and even got them a final top twenty hit with "Popsicle", a song from a few years earlier. Dean made a Jan and Dean album, Save For a Rainy Day, without Jan, while Jan was still recovering, as a way of trying to keep their career options open if Jan ever got better. Dean put it out on the duo's own new label, J&D, and there were plans for Columbia to pick it up and give it a wider release, but Jan refused to sign the contracts -- he was furious that Dean had made a Jan and Dean record without him, and would have nothing to do with it. Torrence tried to have a music career anyway -- he put out a cover of the Beach Boys song "Vegetables" under the name The Laughing Gravy: [Excerpt: The Laughing Gravy, "Vegetables"] But he soon gave up, and became an artist, designing covers and logos for people like Harry Nilsson, Canned Heat, the Turtles, and the Beach Boys. Jan tried making his own Jan and Dean album without Dean, even though he was unable to sing again or write yet. With a lot of help from Roger Christian, he pulled together some old half-finished songs and finished them, got in some soundalike session singers and famous friends like Glen Campbell and Davy Jones of the Monkees and put together Carnival of Sound, an album that didn't get released until 2010: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Girl You're Blowing My Mind"] In the mid-seventies, Jan and Dean got back together and started touring the nostalgia circuit, spurred by a TV movie, Dead Man's Curve, based on their lives. There seemed to be a love-hate relationship between them in later years -- they would split up and get back together, and their roles had reversed, with Dean now taking most of the leads on the shows -- Dean had to look after Jan a lot of the time, and some reports said that Jan had to relearn the words to the three songs he sang lead on every night. But with the aid of some excellent backing musicians, and with some love and tolerance from the audience for Jan's ongoing problems, they managed to regularly please crowds of thousands until a few weeks before Jan's death in 2004. Since then, Dean has mostly performed with the Surf City All-Stars, a band that sometimes also features Al Jardine and David Marks of the Beach Boys, playing a few shows a year. He released an autobiography in 2016 -- it came out at the same time as the autobiographies of Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, ensuring that even at this late date, he would be overshadowed by his more famous colleagues.
Malaysian paranormal researcher, Arwin John joined Bel and JD on #TheLITEBreakfast this morning.He explained concepts of the paranormal and why people believe in them.
In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, political unrest, & fire tornados, how are you adjusting to the new normal? Today, Sissi and Arwin share what life has been like in the wake of COVID-19 and everything beyond. Hear how the effects of the spread and the subsequent government response in California has changed their lives. They dive into how they’re prioritizing health and fitness and adjusting to working from home. Find out what’s surprised them the most about this experience as they talk about essential supplies, being prepared and staying considerate in spite of the circumstances. They share their predictions about what lies ahead and more on this episode of the Fight 2 Finish podcast. Sign Up for NordVPN: https://go.nordvpn.net/SH2ui Sissi's Etsy Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/WarriorStickers Connect: Find | The Fight 2 Finish Podcast On Instagram: @f2fpodcast On Apple Podcasts On Stitcher On Spotify Find | Sissi G & Arwin On Instagram: @gisforwarrior @milsimjunkie
Arwin D. Smallwood is Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. He is the author of several books including The Atlas of African American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times and Bertie County: An Eastern North Carolina History. His research focuses on the relationships between African-Americans, Native-Americans and Europeans in Eastern North Carolina. He has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, held the American Philosophical Society’s, Library Resident Research Fellowship and the recipient of their Franklin Research Grant, a Fellow for the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, an Archie K. Davis Fellow of the North Caroliniana Society, a Joel Williamson Visiting Scholar of the Southern Historical Collection and a Gilder Lehrman Fellow. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, August 20, 2020.
Succeeding in anything is not an easy thing. It calls for persistence, sacrifice, and determination. Sometimes, you may lose a close friend, death of a loved one, or a spouse leading to negative energy, but you must keep moving until you realize your goal. Stephen Detoma is a good example of how you can convert a negative emotion and persist until you succeed. In this episode of Fight to Finish podcast, we host Stephen Detoma. Detoma will share his experience in the GORUCK community and how he dealt with the loss of a close friend. Also, he will be sharing the background of his Gauntlet endurance cult and lessons learned from the body modification industry. Listen to this inspiring episode and learn essential ideas on fighting to finish! Episode Timeline: [00:00] Intro [01:35] Getting to know Detoma and his involvement in the GORUCK community events. [04:35] How Detoma met with us (Sissi and Arwin) [06:29] The memories of Nord Cal event and Detoma's advice during our wedding plan. [10:21] How Detoma got to GORUCK [17:17] Dealing with a loss through channeling the negative energy into a positive way. [26:44] Why having a balance in life matters [30:11] Detoma's experience on the first GORUCK event [34:56] What motivates Detoma to attend various GORUCK events [44:46] What a dream team would be like for Detoma [46:34] Going back to the Veterans Day and the 12 miles ruck encounter [53:02] the leadership/life skills lessons from the 12-mile ruck event. [57:15] How Detoma developed the rock clubs [60:54] Detoma's experience in the body modification industry. [63:32] The origin of the name Gauntlet endurance and application of experience from the body modification industry. [69:38] How one can join Gauntlet Endurance [78:18] What advice would Detoma give to his younger self. [80:21] What Detoma would tell his future self [84:36] How COVID impacted Detoma's 2020 plans [89:32] Having a positive perspective amid the current crisis [93:18] Connect with Detoma Relevant Links: Website: http://www.f2fpodcast.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/f2fpodcast/ Gauntlet Endurance Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gauntletendurance/?hl=en Website: http://www.gauntletendurance.com/about.html Connect: On Instagram: @Gauntletendurance, @f2fpodcast On Facebook: @GauntletEndurance
In 2005, the Disney Channel blessed the planet with the gift of "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody", a show about twin siblings living at a luxury hotel with their single mother. With a premise like that, of course antics will ensue. Listen as Shawn and Tyler watch and recap each and every episode of this show while giving their thoughts and jokes as they re-experience one of the longest running Disney Channel shows to date. In this episode, Shawn and Tyler watch "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Hotel", but this time we're joined by a guest, Sara! This time, the twins find evidence of hidden treasure in the Tipton. As the race for the treasure becomes more crowded, the Twins turn on each other. Will Yozora's simping stop him from achieving victory? Will Jugghead's alliance with Arwin win him the day? Find out when we cover episode twelve of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Thanks for listening! Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast feed! Follow Sara on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sseabock Follow us on Anchor at https://anchor.fm/troubleatthetipton Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TroubleAtTipton Follow Shawn on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Shawn_AFK Follow Tyler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TylerTylerims
Many people living with kidney disease are not bold enough to share their stories with the rest of the world, which is understandable. It takes a courageous man like Oliver Mondina to help us understand what it is like to live with the disease. Oliver is the perfect definition of a dream chaser. He chases his dreams no matter what. In this episode of the Fight to Finish Podcast, we have Oliver joining us. Oliver will be sharing with us about GORUCK, his experience in the nursing field, and what it is like to live with kidney disease. Are you ready for an inspiring episode? Listen in! Episode Timeline: [00:00]Intro [01:36] How did Oliver get to know us (Sissi and Arwin) [03:58] How Oliver got into GORUCK [12:42] What's an elephant walk? [19:54] Oliver's takeaways from the welcome party [25:35] Digging deeper into Nor Cal event [28:02] Oliver's kidney disease [35:28] Effects of Kidney disease on Oliver [46:14] Oliver's experience in the nursing school [48:58]How Oliver's kidney disease has helped him remain focused on his nursing career [52:09] How has Covid changed the environment, especially for Oliver, with his current conditioner? [56:45] What extra caution is Oliver taking with the Covid pandemic? [57:10] Having worked in different departments, which department has Oliver enjoyed most? [61:59]How can people donate kidneys? [64:32] Oliver's advice to his younger self [66:18]What would Oliver want to know from his future self? [72:38]Connect with us Relevant Links: Website: http://www.f2fpodcast.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/f2fpodcast/ Donate a kidney: https://ucdonor.org/#_ Connect: Follow Oliver @meatheadrunner On Instagram - @f2fpodcast
Episode eighty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "LSD-25" by the Gamblers, the first rock song ever to namecheck acid, and a song by a band so obscure no photos exist of them. (The photo here is of the touring lineup of the Hollywood Argyles. Derry Weaver, the Gamblers' lead guitarist, is top left). Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Papa Oom Mow Mow" by the Rivingtons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This episode, more than most, required tiny bits of information from dozens of sources. Among those I used were the one existing interview with Derry Weaver I have been able to find, Dean Torrence's autobiography , a book about John Dolphin by his son, and He's A Rebel, a biography of Phil Spector by Mark Ribkowsky. But more than anything else, I used the self-published books by Stephen McParland, who is the premier expert on surf music, and which you can buy in PDF form here. The ones I used the most were The Beach Boys: Inception and Conception, California Confidential, and Surf & Hot-Rod Music Chronicles: Bull Sessions With the Big Daddy. "LSD-25" is on numerous various-artists compilations of surf music, of which this two-CD set looks like the best value for the casual listener. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the sixteenth of April, 1943, Albert Hoffman, a research scientist in Zurich, had a curious experience after accidentally touching a tiny speck of the chemical he was experimenting with at the pharmaceutical lab in which he worked, and felt funny afterwards. Three days later, he decided to experiment on himself, and took a tiny dose of the chemical, to see if anything happened. He felt fine at first, but asked a colleague to escort him as he rode home on his bicycle. By the time he got home, he was convinced that his neighbour was a witch and that he had been poisoned. But a few hours later, he felt a little better, though still unusual. As he would later report, "Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux". The chemical he had taken was a derivative of ergotamine that had been discovered about five years earlier and mostly ignored up until that time, a chemical called D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. Sandoz, the company he worked for, were delighted with this unusual chemical and its effects. They came up with some variants of the molecule without those effects, but which still affected the brain, and marketed those as migraine treatments. The chemical itself, they decided to make available as an experimental drug for psychiatrists and psychologists who wanted to investigate unusual states of consciousness. It found some uptake, among experimenters who wished to experience psychotic symptoms in a controlled environment in order to get a better understanding of their patients, or who wanted to investigate neurochemistry, and it had some promise as a treatment for alcoholism and various other psychiatric illnesses, and throughout the 1950s it was the subject of much medical research, under the trade name Sandoz came up with for it, Delysid. But in the sixties, it became better known as LSD-25: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "LSD-25"] There are some records that one can look back at retrospectively and see that while they seemed unimportant at the time, they signalled a huge change in the musical culture. The single "Moon Dawg", backed by "LSD-25", by the Gamblers, is one of those records. Unfortunately, everything about the Gamblers is shrouded in mystery. The story I am going to tell here is the one that I've been able to piece together from stray fragments of recollection from the main participants over the years, but it could very well be wrong. Put it this way, on the record, there are two guitarists, bass, drums, and keyboards. I have seen fifteen people credited as having been members of the group that recorded the track. Obviously, those credits can't all be true, so I'm going to go here with the stories of the people who are most commonly credited, but with the caveat that the people I'm talking about could very easily not have been the people on the record. I have also made mistakes about this single before -- there are a couple of errors in the piece on it in my book California Dreaming. Part of the problem is that almost everyone who has laid claim to being involved in the record is -- or was, as many of them have died -- a well-known credit thief, someone who will happily place themselves at the centre of the story, happily put their name on copyright forms for music with which they had no involvement, and then bitterly complain that they were the real unsung geniuses behind other records, but that some evil credit thief stole all their work. The other people involved -- those who haven't said that everything was them and they did everything -- were for the most part jobbing musicians who, when asked about the record, would not even be sure if they'd played on it, because they played on so many records, and weren't asked about them for decades later. Just as one example, Nik Venet, who is generally credited as the producer of this record, said for years that Derry Weaver, the credited co-composer of the song and the person who is generally considered to have played lead guitar on it, was a pseudonym for himself. Later, when confronted with evidence that Derry Weaver was a real person, he admitted that Weaver *had* been a real person, but claimed that it was still a pseudonym for himself. Venet claimed that Weaver had died in a car crash years earlier, and that as a result he had been able to use his social security number on forms to claim himself extra money he wasn't entitled to as a staff producer. The only problem with that story is that Venet died in 1998, while the real Derry Weaver died in 2013, but Weaver only ever did one interview I've been able to track down, in 2001, so Venet's lies went unchallenged, and many books still claim that Weaver never existed. So today, I'm going to tell the story of a music scene, and use a few people as a focus, with the understanding that they may not be the people on the record we're talking about. I'm going to look at the birth of the surf and hot-rod studio scene in LA, and at Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley, Derry Weaver, Nik Venet, Sandy Nelson, Elliot Ingber, Larry Taylor, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer, some or all of whom may or may not have been the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] Possibly the best place to start the story is at University High School, Los Angeles, in the late 1950s. University High had always had more than its fair share of star students over the years -- Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor had all attended in previous years, and over the succeeding decades members of Sonic Youth, the Doors, Black Flag, the Foo Fighters and the Partridge Family would all attend the school, among many others. But during the period in the late fifties, it had a huge number of students who would go on to define the California lifestyle in the pop culture of the next few years. There was Sandra Dee, who starred in Gidget, the first Beach Party film; Anette Funicello, who starred in most of the other Beach Party films; Randy Newman, who would document another side of California life a few years later; and Nancy Sinatra, who was then just her famous father's daughter, but who would go on to make a series of magnificent records in the sixties with Lee Hazelwood. And there was a vocal group at the school called the Barons, one of the few interracial vocal groups around at the time. They had a black lead singer, Chuck Steele, a Japanese tenor, Wally Yagi, two Jewish boys, Arnie Ginsburg and John Saligman, and two white kids, Jan Berry -- who was the leader of the group, and Dean Torrence, his friend who could sing a little falsetto. As they were all singers, they were backed by three instrumentalists who also went to the school -- Berry's neighbour Bruce Johnston on piano, Torrence's neighbour Sandy Nelson on drums, and Nelson's friend Dave Shostac on saxophone. This group played several gigs together, but slowly split apart as people's mothers wanted them to concentrate on school, or they got cars that they wanted to fix up. In Sandy Nelson's case he was sacked by Berry for playing his drums so loud -- as he packed up his kit for the last time, he told Berry, "You'll see, I'm going to have a hit record that's *only* drums". Slowly they were whittled down to three people -- Berry, Torrence, and Ginsburg, with occasional help from Berry's friend Don Altfeld. The Barons cut a demo tape of a song about a prominent local stripper, named Jennie Lee, but then Torrence decided to sign up with the Army. He'd discovered that if he did six months' basic training and joined the Army Reserves, he would be able to avoid being drafted a short while later. He thought that six months sounded a lot better than two years, so signed up, and he was on basic training when he heard a very familiar sounding record on the radio: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Jennie Lee"] He was surprised to hear it, and also surprised to hear it credited to "Jan and Arnie" rather than "the Barons". He called Berry, who told him that no, it was a completely new recording -- though Torrence was absolutely certain that he could hear his own voice on there as well. What had happened, according to Jan, was that there'd been a problem with the tape, and he and Arnie had decided to rerecord it. He'd then gone into a professional studio to get the tape cut into an acetate, so he could play it at parties, and someone in the next room had happened to hear it -- and that someone happened to be Joe Lubin. Lubin was the Vice President of Arwin Records, a label owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day's husband. He told Berry that he would make Jan and Arnie bigger than the Everly Brothers, but Jan didn't believe him, though he let him have a copy of the disc. Jan took his copy to play at a friend's party, where it went down well. That friend was Craig Bruderlin, who later changed his name to James Brolin and became a major film star. Presumably Bruderlin's best friend Ryan O'Neal, who also went to University High, was there as well. I told you, University High School had a lot of future stars. And Jan and Arnie became two more of those stars. Joe Lubin overdubbed extra instruments on the track and released it. He didn't quite make them bigger than the Everly Brothers, but for a while they were almost as big -- at one point, the Everly Brothers were at number one in the charts, number two was Sheb Wooley with "The Purple People Eater", and number three was Jan and Arnie with "Jennie Lee". And Dean Torrence was off in the Army, regretting his choices. We'll be picking up on what happened with those three in a few months' time... But what of the other Barons? The instrumentalists, Bruce Johnston, Dave Shostac, and Sandy Nelson, formed their own band, the Sleepwalkers, with various guitarists sitting in, often a young blues player called Henry Vestine, who had already started taking LSD at this time, though none of the other band members indulged. They would often play parties organised by another University High student, Kim Fowley. Now, Fowley is the person who spoke most about this time on the record, but he was also possibly the least honest person involved in this episode (and, if the accusations made about him since his death are true, also one of the most despicable people in this episode, which is quite a high bar...), so take this with a grain of salt. But Fowley claimed in later years that these parties were his major source of income -- that he would hire sex workers to take fellow University High students who had big houses off to a motel to have sex with them. While the students were otherwise occupied, Fowley would break into their house and move all the furniture, so people could dance, he'd get the band in, and he'd invite everyone to come to the party. Then dope dealers would sell dope to the partygoers, giving Fowley a cut, and meanwhile friends of Fowley's would be outside breaking into the partygoers' cars and stealing their stuff. But then Fowley got arrested -- according to him, for stealing wine from a liquor store owned by a girlfriend who was twice his age, and selling it to other students at the school. He was given a choice of joining the Army or going to prison, and he chose the Army, on the same deal as Dean Torrence, who he ended up going through some of his training with. Meanwhile, Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson were trying to get signed as a band. They went to see John Dolphin on February the first, 1958. We've talked about Dolphin before, in the episodes on Gene and Eunice and the Penguins. Dolphin owned Dolphin's of Hollywood, the biggest black-owned record store in the LA area, and was responsible for a large part of the success of many of the records we've covered, through getting them played on radio shows broadcast from his station. He also owned a series of small labels which would put out one or two singles by an artist before the artist was snapped up by a bigger label. For example, he owned Cash Records, which had put out "Walkin' Stick Boogie", by Jerry Capehart and Eddie and Hank Cochran: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, "Walkin' Stick Boogie"] He also owned a publishing company, which owned the publishing on "Buzz Buzz Buzz" by the Hollywood Flames: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, "Buzz Buzz Buzz"] Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson hoped that maybe they could get signed to one of Dolphin's labels, but they chose the worst possible day to do it. While they were waiting to see Dolphin, they got talking to an older man, Percy Ivy, who started to tell them that Dolphin couldn't be trusted and that he owed Ivy a lot of money. They were used to hearing this kind of thing about people in the music business, and decided they'd go in to see Dolphin anyway. When they did, Ivy came in with them. What happened next is told differently by different people. What's definitely the case is that Ivy and Dolphin got into a heated row. Ivy claimed that Dolphin pulled a knife on him. Witness statements seem confused on the matter, but most say that all that Dolphin had in his hand was a cigar. Ivy pulled out a gun and shot Dolphin -- one shot also hit Shostac in the leg. Sandy Nelson ran out of the room to get help. Johnston comforted the dying Dolphin, but by the time Nelson got back, he was busily negotiating with Ivy, talking about how they were going to make a record together when Ivy got out of jail. One presumes he was trying to humour Ivy, to make sure nobody else got shot. Obviously, with John Dolphin having died, he wasn't going to be running a record company any more. The shop part of his business was, from then on, managed by his assistant, a failed singer called Rudy Ray Moore who later went on to become famous playing the comedy character Dolemite. Then the Sleepwalkers got a call from another acquaintance. Kip Tyler had a band called the Flips who had had some moderate success with rockabilly records produced by Milt Gabler. And this is one of the points where the conflicting narratives become most confusing. According to every one of the few articles I can find about Tyler, before forming the Flips he was the lead singer of the Sleepwalkers, the toughest rock and roll band in the school, when he was at Union High School. According to those same articles, he was born in 1929. So either there were two bands at Union High School, a decade apart, called the Sleepwalkers, one of which was a rock and roll band before the term had been coined; or Tyler was still at high school aged twenty-eight; or someone is deeply mistaken somewhere. Kip and the Flips didn't have much recording success, and kept moving to smaller and smaller labels, but they were considered a hot band in LA -- in particular, they were the house band at Art Laboe's regular shows at El Monte stadium -- the shows which would later be immortalised by the Penguins in "Memories of El Monte". [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Memories of El Monte"] But then the group's piano player, Larry Knechtel, saxophone player, Steve Douglas, and drummer, Mike Bermani, all left to join Duane Eddy's group. Kim Fowley was by this point a roadie and general hanger-on for the Flips, and he happened to know a piano player, a saxophone player, and a drummer who were looking for a gig, and so the Sleepwalkers joined Kip Tyler and guitarist Mike Deasy in the Flips, and took over that role performing at El Monte, performing themselves but also backing other musicians, like Ritchie Valens, who played at these shows. Sandy Nelson didn't stay long in the Flips, though -- he was replaced by another drummer, Jim Troxel, and it was this lineup, with extra sax from Duane Eddy's sax player Jim Horn, that recorded "Rumble Rock": [Excerpt: Kip Tyler, "Rumble Rock"] Nelson's departure from the group coincided with him starting to get a great deal of session work from people who had seen him play live. One of those people was a young man named Harvey Philip Spector, who went by his middle name. Spector went to Fairfax High, a school which had a strong rivalry with University High and produced a similarly ludicrous list of famous people, and he'd got his own little clique of people around him with whom he was making music. These included his best friend Marshall Leib, and sometimes also Leib's girlfriend's younger brother Russ Titelman. Spector and Leib had formed a vocal group, the Teddy Bears, with a girl they knew who then went by a different name but is now called Carol Connors. Their first single was called "To Know Him Is To Love Him", inspired by the epitaph on Spector's father's grave: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, "To Know Him is to Love Him"] Sandy Nelson played the drums on that, and the track went to number one. I've also seen some credits say that Bruce Johnston played the bass on it, but at the time Johnston wasn't a bass player, so this seems unlikely. Even though Nelson's playing on the track is absolutely rudimentary, it gave him the cachet to get other gigs, for example playing on Gene Vincent's "Crazy Times" LP: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "She She Little Sheila"] Another record Nelson played on reunited him with Bruce Johnston. Kim Fowley was by this point doing some work for American International Pictures, and was asked to come up with an instrumental for a film called Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, a film about a drag-racing club that have a Halloween party inside a deserted mansion but then discover a real monster has shown up. It's not as fun as it sounds. A songwriter friend of Fowley's named Nik Venet is credited with writing "Geronimo", although Richie Polodor, the guitarist and bass player on the session says he came up with it. Polodor said "There are three guys in the business who really have no scruples whatsoever. They are Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley and Sandy Nelson. And I was Mr. Scruples... I wrote both Geronimo and Charge, but they were taken away from me. It was all my stuff, but between Nik Venet, Kim Fowley and Bruce Johnston I had no chance. It was cut in my studio. I did all the guitars. I wrote it all and Nik Venet walked away with the credit." Venet did the howls on the track, Johnston played piano, Nelson drums, Polodor guitar and bass, and Fowley produced: [Excerpt: The Renegades, "Geronimo"] Meanwhile, Phil Spector had become disenchanted with being in the Teddy Bears, and had put together a solo instrumental single, under the name Phil Harvey: [Excerpt: Phil Harvey, "Bumbershoot"] Spector wanted a band to play a gig to promote that single, and he put together the Phil Harvey band from the members of another band that Marshall Leib had been in before joining the Teddy Bears. The Moon Dogs had consisted of a singer called Jett Power, guitarists Derry Weaver and Elliot Ingber, and bass player Larry Taylor, along with Leib. Taylor and Ingber joined the Phil Harvey band, along with keyboard player Howard Hirsch, and drummer Rod Schaffer. The Phil Harvey band only played one gig -- the band's concept was apparently a mix of Duane Eddy style rock guitar instrumentals and complex jazz, with the group all dressed as mobsters -- but Kim Fowley happened to be there and liked what he saw, and made a note of some of those musicians as people to work with. Spector, meanwhile, had decided to use his connection with Lester Sill to go and work with Leiber and Stoller, and we'll be picking up that story in a couple of months. Meanwhile, Derry Weaver from the Moon Dogs had started to date Mary Jo Sheeley, the sister of Sharon Sheeley, and Sharon started to take an interest in her little sister's boyfriend and his friends. She suggested that Jett Power change his name to P.J. Proby, and she would regularly have him sing on the demos of her songs in the sixties: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "The Other Side of Town"] And she introduced Weaver to Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart. Cochran taught Weaver several of the guitar licks he used, and Capehart produced a session for Weaver with Cochran on guitar, Jim Stivers on piano, Guybo Smith on bass and Gene Riggio on drums: [Excerpt: Derry Weaver, "Bad Baby Doll"] That track was not released until decades later, but several other songs by Weaver, with no Cochran involvement, were released on Capehart's own label (under the misspelled name Darry Weaver), and Capehart was Weaver's manager for a little while. Weaver was actually living at the Sheeley residence when they received the phone call saying that Eddie had died and Sharon was in hospital, and it haunted him deeply for the rest of his life. Another record on which Guybo Smith played at this time was one by Sandy Nelson. The Flips had split up by this point -- Mike Deasy had gone on to join Eddie Cochran's backing band, and Bruce Johnston was playing on random sessions, so he was here for what was going to be Nelson's "single that was only drums". It wasn't quite only drums -- as well as Nelson on drums, there was Smith on bass, Johnston on piano, and Polodor on guitar. The musicians on the record have said they all deserved songwriting credit for it, but the writing credit went to Art Laboe and Nelson: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, "Teen Beat"] "Teen Beat" went to number four on the charts, and Nelson had a handful of other hits under his own name, including "Let There Be Drums". Less successful was a ballad released under the name "Bruce and Jerry", released on Arwin records after the owner's son, Terry Melcher, had remembered seeing the Sleepwalkers, and was desperate for some more rock and roll success on the label like Jan and Arnie, even though Melcher was a student at Beverly High and, like Fairfax, everyone at Beverly hated people at University High. "Take This Pearl" was sung by Johnston and Jerry Cooper, with backing by Johnston, Shostac, Deasy, Nelson, and bass player Harper Cosby, who would later play for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Bruce and Jerry, "Take This Pearl"] "Take This Pearl" by Bruce and Jerry did nothing, but Terry Melcher did think that name sounded good, except maybe it should be Terry instead of Jerry... Meanwhile, Nik Venet had got a production role at World Pacific Records, and he wanted to put together yet another studio group. And this is where some of the confusion comes in. Because this record was important, and everyone later wanted a piece of the credit. According to Nik Venet, the Gamblers were originally going to be called Nik and the Gamblers, and consisted of himself, Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, Larry Taylor, and the great guitarist James Burton, with Richie Polodor engineering, and Kim Fowley involved somehow. Meanwhile, Fowley says he was not involved at all -- and given that this is about the only record in the history of the world that Fowley ever said he *wasn't* on, I tend to believe him. Elliot Ingber said that the group was Ingber, Taylor, Derry Weaver, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer. Bruce Johnston says he has no memory of the record. I don't know if anyone's ever asked James Burton about it, but it doesn't sound like him playing. Given that the A-side is called "Moon Dawg", that Weaver and Taylor were in a band called The Moondogs that used to play a song called "Moon Dog", and that Weaver is credited as the writer, I think we can assume that the lead guitar is Derry Weaver, and that Elliot Ingber's list of credits is mostly correct. But on the other hand, one of the voices singing the wordless harmonies sounds *very* much like Bruce Johnston to me, and he has a very distinctive voice that I know extremely well. so my guess is that the Gamblers on this occasion were Derry Weaver, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Bruce Johnston, and either Rod Schaffer or Sandy Nelson -- probably Schaffer, since no-one other than Venet has credited Nelson with being there. I suspect Ingber is understandably misremembering Howard Hirsch being there because Hirsch *did* play on the second Gamblers single. The B-side of the record is credited as written by Weaver and Taylor: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "LSD-25"] That song is called "LSD-25", and while we have said over and over that there is no first anything in rock music, this is an exception -- that is, without any doubt whatsoever, the first rock and roll record to mention LSD, and so in its way a distant ancestor of psychedelic music. Weaver and Taylor have said in later years that neither of them knew anything about the drug (and it's very clear that Johnston, who takes a very hardline anti-drugs stance, never indulged) -- they've said they read a magazine article about acid and liked the name. On the other hand, Henry Vestine was part of the same circle and he was apparently already taking acid by then, though details are vague (every single article I can find about it uses the same phrasing that Wikipedia does, talking of having taken it with "a close musician friend" -- who might have been one of the Gamblers, but who might not). So the B-side was a milestone in rock music history, and in a different way so was the A-side, just written by Weaver: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] "Moon Dawg" was a local hit, but sold nothing anywhere outside Southern California, and there were a couple of follow-ups by different lineups of Gamblers, featuring some but never all of the same musicians, along with other people we've mentioned like Fowley. The Gamblers stopped being a thing, and Derry Weaver went off to join another group. Kim Fowley and his friend Gary Paxton had put together a novelty record, "Alley Oop", under the name The Hollywood Argyles, which featured Gaynel Hodge on piano and Sandy Nelson banging a bin lid: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Argyles, "Alley Oop"] That became a hit, and they had to put together a band to tour as the Hollywood Argyles, and Weaver became one of them, as did Marshall Leib. After that Weaver hooked up again with Nik Venet, who started getting him regular session work, as Venet had taken a job at Capitol Records. And Venet doing that suddenly meant that "Moon Dawg" became very important indeed. Even though it had been only a minor success, because Venet owned the rights to the master tape, and also the publishing rights, he got "Moon Dawg" stuck on a various-artists compilation album put out on Capitol, Golden Gassers, which featured big acts like Sam Cooke and the Four Preps, and which exposed the song to a wider audience. Cover versions of it started to sprout up, by people like the Ventures, the Surfaris, and the Beach Boys -- Larry Taylor's brother Mel was the drummer for the Ventures, which might have helped bring the track to their attention, while Nik Venet was the Beach Boys' producer. Indeed, some have claimed that Derry Weaver played on the Beach Boys' version -- he's credited on the session sheets, but nobody involved with the session has ever said if it was actually him, or whether that was just Venet putting down a friend's name to claim some extra money: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Moon Dawg"] While there had been twangy guitar instrumentals before "Moon Dawg", and as I said, there's never a first anything, historians of the surf music genre now generally point to it as the first surf music record ever, and it's as good a choice as any. We won't be seeing anything more from Derry Weaver, who fell into obscurity after a few years of session work, but Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Henry Vestine, Nik Venet, Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, Jan Berry, Terry Melcher, and Dean Torrence will be turning up throughout the sixties, and in some cases later. The records we looked at today were the start of a California music scene that would define American pop music in the sixties. As a final note, I mentioned Gaynel Hodge as the piano player on "Alley Oop". As I was in the middle of writing this episode, I received word that Hodge had died earlier this week. As people who've listened to earlier episodes of this podcast will know, Gaynel Hodge was one of the most important people in the fifties LA vocal group scene, and without him there would have been no Platters, Penguins, or Jesse Belvin. He was also one of the few links between that fifties world of black R&B musicians and the white-dominated sixties LA pop music scene of surf, hot rods, folk rock, and sunshine. He's unlikely to turn up again in more than minor roles in future episodes, but I've made this week's Patreon episode be on another classic record he played on. As well as being an important musician in his own right, Hodge was someone without whom almost none of the music made in LA in the fifties or sixties would have happened. He'll be missed.
Episode eighty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “LSD-25” by the Gamblers, the first rock song ever to namecheck acid, and a song by a band so obscure no photos exist of them. (The photo here is of the touring lineup of the Hollywood Argyles. Derry Weaver, the Gamblers’ lead guitarist, is top left). Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Papa Oom Mow Mow” by the Rivingtons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This episode, more than most, required tiny bits of information from dozens of sources. Among those I used were the one existing interview with Derry Weaver I have been able to find, Dean Torrence’s autobiography , a book about John Dolphin by his son, and He’s A Rebel, a biography of Phil Spector by Mark Ribkowsky. But more than anything else, I used the self-published books by Stephen McParland, who is the premier expert on surf music, and which you can buy in PDF form here. The ones I used the most were The Beach Boys: Inception and Conception, California Confidential, and Surf & Hot-Rod Music Chronicles: Bull Sessions With the Big Daddy. “LSD-25” is on numerous various-artists compilations of surf music, of which this two-CD set looks like the best value for the casual listener. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the sixteenth of April, 1943, Albert Hoffman, a research scientist in Zurich, had a curious experience after accidentally touching a tiny speck of the chemical he was experimenting with at the pharmaceutical lab in which he worked, and felt funny afterwards. Three days later, he decided to experiment on himself, and took a tiny dose of the chemical, to see if anything happened. He felt fine at first, but asked a colleague to escort him as he rode home on his bicycle. By the time he got home, he was convinced that his neighbour was a witch and that he had been poisoned. But a few hours later, he felt a little better, though still unusual. As he would later report, “Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux”. The chemical he had taken was a derivative of ergotamine that had been discovered about five years earlier and mostly ignored up until that time, a chemical called D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. Sandoz, the company he worked for, were delighted with this unusual chemical and its effects. They came up with some variants of the molecule without those effects, but which still affected the brain, and marketed those as migraine treatments. The chemical itself, they decided to make available as an experimental drug for psychiatrists and psychologists who wanted to investigate unusual states of consciousness. It found some uptake, among experimenters who wished to experience psychotic symptoms in a controlled environment in order to get a better understanding of their patients, or who wanted to investigate neurochemistry, and it had some promise as a treatment for alcoholism and various other psychiatric illnesses, and throughout the 1950s it was the subject of much medical research, under the trade name Sandoz came up with for it, Delysid. But in the sixties, it became better known as LSD-25: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “LSD-25”] There are some records that one can look back at retrospectively and see that while they seemed unimportant at the time, they signalled a huge change in the musical culture. The single “Moon Dawg”, backed by “LSD-25”, by the Gamblers, is one of those records. Unfortunately, everything about the Gamblers is shrouded in mystery. The story I am going to tell here is the one that I’ve been able to piece together from stray fragments of recollection from the main participants over the years, but it could very well be wrong. Put it this way, on the record, there are two guitarists, bass, drums, and keyboards. I have seen fifteen people credited as having been members of the group that recorded the track. Obviously, those credits can’t all be true, so I’m going to go here with the stories of the people who are most commonly credited, but with the caveat that the people I’m talking about could very easily not have been the people on the record. I have also made mistakes about this single before — there are a couple of errors in the piece on it in my book California Dreaming. Part of the problem is that almost everyone who has laid claim to being involved in the record is — or was, as many of them have died — a well-known credit thief, someone who will happily place themselves at the centre of the story, happily put their name on copyright forms for music with which they had no involvement, and then bitterly complain that they were the real unsung geniuses behind other records, but that some evil credit thief stole all their work. The other people involved — those who haven’t said that everything was them and they did everything — were for the most part jobbing musicians who, when asked about the record, would not even be sure if they’d played on it, because they played on so many records, and weren’t asked about them for decades later. Just as one example, Nik Venet, who is generally credited as the producer of this record, said for years that Derry Weaver, the credited co-composer of the song and the person who is generally considered to have played lead guitar on it, was a pseudonym for himself. Later, when confronted with evidence that Derry Weaver was a real person, he admitted that Weaver *had* been a real person, but claimed that it was still a pseudonym for himself. Venet claimed that Weaver had died in a car crash years earlier, and that as a result he had been able to use his social security number on forms to claim himself extra money he wasn’t entitled to as a staff producer. The only problem with that story is that Venet died in 1998, while the real Derry Weaver died in 2013, but Weaver only ever did one interview I’ve been able to track down, in 2001, so Venet’s lies went unchallenged, and many books still claim that Weaver never existed. So today, I’m going to tell the story of a music scene, and use a few people as a focus, with the understanding that they may not be the people on the record we’re talking about. I’m going to look at the birth of the surf and hot-rod studio scene in LA, and at Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley, Derry Weaver, Nik Venet, Sandy Nelson, Elliot Ingber, Larry Taylor, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer, some or all of whom may or may not have been the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “Moon Dawg”] Possibly the best place to start the story is at University High School, Los Angeles, in the late 1950s. University High had always had more than its fair share of star students over the years — Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor had all attended in previous years, and over the succeeding decades members of Sonic Youth, the Doors, Black Flag, the Foo Fighters and the Partridge Family would all attend the school, among many others. But during the period in the late fifties, it had a huge number of students who would go on to define the California lifestyle in the pop culture of the next few years. There was Sandra Dee, who starred in Gidget, the first Beach Party film; Anette Funicello, who starred in most of the other Beach Party films; Randy Newman, who would document another side of California life a few years later; and Nancy Sinatra, who was then just her famous father’s daughter, but who would go on to make a series of magnificent records in the sixties with Lee Hazelwood. And there was a vocal group at the school called the Barons, one of the few interracial vocal groups around at the time. They had a black lead singer, Chuck Steele, a Japanese tenor, Wally Yagi, two Jewish boys, Arnie Ginsburg and John Saligman, and two white kids, Jan Berry — who was the leader of the group, and Dean Torrence, his friend who could sing a little falsetto. As they were all singers, they were backed by three instrumentalists who also went to the school — Berry’s neighbour Bruce Johnston on piano, Torrence’s neighbour Sandy Nelson on drums, and Nelson’s friend Dave Shostac on saxophone. This group played several gigs together, but slowly split apart as people’s mothers wanted them to concentrate on school, or they got cars that they wanted to fix up. In Sandy Nelson’s case he was sacked by Berry for playing his drums so loud — as he packed up his kit for the last time, he told Berry, “You’ll see, I’m going to have a hit record that’s *only* drums”. Slowly they were whittled down to three people — Berry, Torrence, and Ginsburg, with occasional help from Berry’s friend Don Altfeld. The Barons cut a demo tape of a song about a prominent local stripper, named Jennie Lee, but then Torrence decided to sign up with the Army. He’d discovered that if he did six months’ basic training and joined the Army Reserves, he would be able to avoid being drafted a short while later. He thought that six months sounded a lot better than two years, so signed up, and he was on basic training when he heard a very familiar sounding record on the radio: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, “Jennie Lee”] He was surprised to hear it, and also surprised to hear it credited to “Jan and Arnie” rather than “the Barons”. He called Berry, who told him that no, it was a completely new recording — though Torrence was absolutely certain that he could hear his own voice on there as well. What had happened, according to Jan, was that there’d been a problem with the tape, and he and Arnie had decided to rerecord it. He’d then gone into a professional studio to get the tape cut into an acetate, so he could play it at parties, and someone in the next room had happened to hear it — and that someone happened to be Joe Lubin. Lubin was the Vice President of Arwin Records, a label owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day’s husband. He told Berry that he would make Jan and Arnie bigger than the Everly Brothers, but Jan didn’t believe him, though he let him have a copy of the disc. Jan took his copy to play at a friend’s party, where it went down well. That friend was Craig Bruderlin, who later changed his name to James Brolin and became a major film star. Presumably Bruderlin’s best friend Ryan O’Neal, who also went to University High, was there as well. I told you, University High School had a lot of future stars. And Jan and Arnie became two more of those stars. Joe Lubin overdubbed extra instruments on the track and released it. He didn’t quite make them bigger than the Everly Brothers, but for a while they were almost as big — at one point, the Everly Brothers were at number one in the charts, number two was Sheb Wooley with “The Purple People Eater”, and number three was Jan and Arnie with “Jennie Lee”. And Dean Torrence was off in the Army, regretting his choices. We’ll be picking up on what happened with those three in a few months’ time… But what of the other Barons? The instrumentalists, Bruce Johnston, Dave Shostac, and Sandy Nelson, formed their own band, the Sleepwalkers, with various guitarists sitting in, often a young blues player called Henry Vestine, who had already started taking LSD at this time, though none of the other band members indulged. They would often play parties organised by another University High student, Kim Fowley. Now, Fowley is the person who spoke most about this time on the record, but he was also possibly the least honest person involved in this episode (and, if the accusations made about him since his death are true, also one of the most despicable people in this episode, which is quite a high bar…), so take this with a grain of salt. But Fowley claimed in later years that these parties were his major source of income — that he would hire sex workers to take fellow University High students who had big houses off to a motel to have sex with them. While the students were otherwise occupied, Fowley would break into their house and move all the furniture, so people could dance, he’d get the band in, and he’d invite everyone to come to the party. Then dope dealers would sell dope to the partygoers, giving Fowley a cut, and meanwhile friends of Fowley’s would be outside breaking into the partygoers’ cars and stealing their stuff. But then Fowley got arrested — according to him, for stealing wine from a liquor store owned by a girlfriend who was twice his age, and selling it to other students at the school. He was given a choice of joining the Army or going to prison, and he chose the Army, on the same deal as Dean Torrence, who he ended up going through some of his training with. Meanwhile, Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson were trying to get signed as a band. They went to see John Dolphin on February the first, 1958. We’ve talked about Dolphin before, in the episodes on Gene and Eunice and the Penguins. Dolphin owned Dolphin’s of Hollywood, the biggest black-owned record store in the LA area, and was responsible for a large part of the success of many of the records we’ve covered, through getting them played on radio shows broadcast from his station. He also owned a series of small labels which would put out one or two singles by an artist before the artist was snapped up by a bigger label. For example, he owned Cash Records, which had put out “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”, by Jerry Capehart and Eddie and Hank Cochran: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”] He also owned a publishing company, which owned the publishing on “Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Hollywood Flames: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, “Buzz Buzz Buzz”] Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson hoped that maybe they could get signed to one of Dolphin’s labels, but they chose the worst possible day to do it. While they were waiting to see Dolphin, they got talking to an older man, Percy Ivy, who started to tell them that Dolphin couldn’t be trusted and that he owed Ivy a lot of money. They were used to hearing this kind of thing about people in the music business, and decided they’d go in to see Dolphin anyway. When they did, Ivy came in with them. What happened next is told differently by different people. What’s definitely the case is that Ivy and Dolphin got into a heated row. Ivy claimed that Dolphin pulled a knife on him. Witness statements seem confused on the matter, but most say that all that Dolphin had in his hand was a cigar. Ivy pulled out a gun and shot Dolphin — one shot also hit Shostac in the leg. Sandy Nelson ran out of the room to get help. Johnston comforted the dying Dolphin, but by the time Nelson got back, he was busily negotiating with Ivy, talking about how they were going to make a record together when Ivy got out of jail. One presumes he was trying to humour Ivy, to make sure nobody else got shot. Obviously, with John Dolphin having died, he wasn’t going to be running a record company any more. The shop part of his business was, from then on, managed by his assistant, a failed singer called Rudy Ray Moore who later went on to become famous playing the comedy character Dolemite. Then the Sleepwalkers got a call from another acquaintance. Kip Tyler had a band called the Flips who had had some moderate success with rockabilly records produced by Milt Gabler. And this is one of the points where the conflicting narratives become most confusing. According to every one of the few articles I can find about Tyler, before forming the Flips he was the lead singer of the Sleepwalkers, the toughest rock and roll band in the school, when he was at Union High School. According to those same articles, he was born in 1929. So either there were two bands at Union High School, a decade apart, called the Sleepwalkers, one of which was a rock and roll band before the term had been coined; or Tyler was still at high school aged twenty-eight; or someone is deeply mistaken somewhere. Kip and the Flips didn’t have much recording success, and kept moving to smaller and smaller labels, but they were considered a hot band in LA — in particular, they were the house band at Art Laboe’s regular shows at El Monte stadium — the shows which would later be immortalised by the Penguins in “Memories of El Monte”. [Excerpt: The Penguins, “Memories of El Monte”] But then the group’s piano player, Larry Knechtel, saxophone player, Steve Douglas, and drummer, Mike Bermani, all left to join Duane Eddy’s group. Kim Fowley was by this point a roadie and general hanger-on for the Flips, and he happened to know a piano player, a saxophone player, and a drummer who were looking for a gig, and so the Sleepwalkers joined Kip Tyler and guitarist Mike Deasy in the Flips, and took over that role performing at El Monte, performing themselves but also backing other musicians, like Ritchie Valens, who played at these shows. Sandy Nelson didn’t stay long in the Flips, though — he was replaced by another drummer, Jim Troxel, and it was this lineup, with extra sax from Duane Eddy’s sax player Jim Horn, that recorded “Rumble Rock”: [Excerpt: Kip Tyler, “Rumble Rock”] Nelson’s departure from the group coincided with him starting to get a great deal of session work from people who had seen him play live. One of those people was a young man named Harvey Philip Spector, who went by his middle name. Spector went to Fairfax High, a school which had a strong rivalry with University High and produced a similarly ludicrous list of famous people, and he’d got his own little clique of people around him with whom he was making music. These included his best friend Marshall Leib, and sometimes also Leib’s girlfriend’s younger brother Russ Titelman. Spector and Leib had formed a vocal group, the Teddy Bears, with a girl they knew who then went by a different name but is now called Carol Connors. Their first single was called “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, inspired by the epitaph on Spector’s father’s grave: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, “To Know Him is to Love Him”] Sandy Nelson played the drums on that, and the track went to number one. I’ve also seen some credits say that Bruce Johnston played the bass on it, but at the time Johnston wasn’t a bass player, so this seems unlikely. Even though Nelson’s playing on the track is absolutely rudimentary, it gave him the cachet to get other gigs, for example playing on Gene Vincent’s “Crazy Times” LP: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “She She Little Sheila”] Another record Nelson played on reunited him with Bruce Johnston. Kim Fowley was by this point doing some work for American International Pictures, and was asked to come up with an instrumental for a film called Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, a film about a drag-racing club that have a Halloween party inside a deserted mansion but then discover a real monster has shown up. It’s not as fun as it sounds. A songwriter friend of Fowley’s named Nik Venet is credited with writing “Geronimo”, although Richie Polodor, the guitarist and bass player on the session says he came up with it. Polodor said “There are three guys in the business who really have no scruples whatsoever. They are Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley and Sandy Nelson. And I was Mr. Scruples… I wrote both Geronimo and Charge, but they were taken away from me. It was all my stuff, but between Nik Venet, Kim Fowley and Bruce Johnston I had no chance. It was cut in my studio. I did all the guitars. I wrote it all and Nik Venet walked away with the credit.” Venet did the howls on the track, Johnston played piano, Nelson drums, Polodor guitar and bass, and Fowley produced: [Excerpt: The Renegades, “Geronimo”] Meanwhile, Phil Spector had become disenchanted with being in the Teddy Bears, and had put together a solo instrumental single, under the name Phil Harvey: [Excerpt: Phil Harvey, “Bumbershoot”] Spector wanted a band to play a gig to promote that single, and he put together the Phil Harvey band from the members of another band that Marshall Leib had been in before joining the Teddy Bears. The Moon Dogs had consisted of a singer called Jett Power, guitarists Derry Weaver and Elliot Ingber, and bass player Larry Taylor, along with Leib. Taylor and Ingber joined the Phil Harvey band, along with keyboard player Howard Hirsch, and drummer Rod Schaffer. The Phil Harvey band only played one gig — the band’s concept was apparently a mix of Duane Eddy style rock guitar instrumentals and complex jazz, with the group all dressed as mobsters — but Kim Fowley happened to be there and liked what he saw, and made a note of some of those musicians as people to work with. Spector, meanwhile, had decided to use his connection with Lester Sill to go and work with Leiber and Stoller, and we’ll be picking up that story in a couple of months. Meanwhile, Derry Weaver from the Moon Dogs had started to date Mary Jo Sheeley, the sister of Sharon Sheeley, and Sharon started to take an interest in her little sister’s boyfriend and his friends. She suggested that Jett Power change his name to P.J. Proby, and she would regularly have him sing on the demos of her songs in the sixties: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, “The Other Side of Town”] And she introduced Weaver to Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart. Cochran taught Weaver several of the guitar licks he used, and Capehart produced a session for Weaver with Cochran on guitar, Jim Stivers on piano, Guybo Smith on bass and Gene Riggio on drums: [Excerpt: Derry Weaver, “Bad Baby Doll”] That track was not released until decades later, but several other songs by Weaver, with no Cochran involvement, were released on Capehart’s own label (under the misspelled name Darry Weaver), and Capehart was Weaver’s manager for a little while. Weaver was actually living at the Sheeley residence when they received the phone call saying that Eddie had died and Sharon was in hospital, and it haunted him deeply for the rest of his life. Another record on which Guybo Smith played at this time was one by Sandy Nelson. The Flips had split up by this point — Mike Deasy had gone on to join Eddie Cochran’s backing band, and Bruce Johnston was playing on random sessions, so he was here for what was going to be Nelson’s “single that was only drums”. It wasn’t quite only drums — as well as Nelson on drums, there was Smith on bass, Johnston on piano, and Polodor on guitar. The musicians on the record have said they all deserved songwriting credit for it, but the writing credit went to Art Laboe and Nelson: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, “Teen Beat”] “Teen Beat” went to number four on the charts, and Nelson had a handful of other hits under his own name, including “Let There Be Drums”. Less successful was a ballad released under the name “Bruce and Jerry”, released on Arwin records after the owner’s son, Terry Melcher, had remembered seeing the Sleepwalkers, and was desperate for some more rock and roll success on the label like Jan and Arnie, even though Melcher was a student at Beverly High and, like Fairfax, everyone at Beverly hated people at University High. “Take This Pearl” was sung by Johnston and Jerry Cooper, with backing by Johnston, Shostac, Deasy, Nelson, and bass player Harper Cosby, who would later play for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Bruce and Jerry, “Take This Pearl”] “Take This Pearl” by Bruce and Jerry did nothing, but Terry Melcher did think that name sounded good, except maybe it should be Terry instead of Jerry… Meanwhile, Nik Venet had got a production role at World Pacific Records, and he wanted to put together yet another studio group. And this is where some of the confusion comes in. Because this record was important, and everyone later wanted a piece of the credit. According to Nik Venet, the Gamblers were originally going to be called Nik and the Gamblers, and consisted of himself, Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, Larry Taylor, and the great guitarist James Burton, with Richie Polodor engineering, and Kim Fowley involved somehow. Meanwhile, Fowley says he was not involved at all — and given that this is about the only record in the history of the world that Fowley ever said he *wasn’t* on, I tend to believe him. Elliot Ingber said that the group was Ingber, Taylor, Derry Weaver, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer. Bruce Johnston says he has no memory of the record. I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked James Burton about it, but it doesn’t sound like him playing. Given that the A-side is called “Moon Dawg”, that Weaver and Taylor were in a band called The Moondogs that used to play a song called “Moon Dog”, and that Weaver is credited as the writer, I think we can assume that the lead guitar is Derry Weaver, and that Elliot Ingber’s list of credits is mostly correct. But on the other hand, one of the voices singing the wordless harmonies sounds *very* much like Bruce Johnston to me, and he has a very distinctive voice that I know extremely well. so my guess is that the Gamblers on this occasion were Derry Weaver, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Bruce Johnston, and either Rod Schaffer or Sandy Nelson — probably Schaffer, since no-one other than Venet has credited Nelson with being there. I suspect Ingber is understandably misremembering Howard Hirsch being there because Hirsch *did* play on the second Gamblers single. The B-side of the record is credited as written by Weaver and Taylor: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “LSD-25”] That song is called “LSD-25”, and while we have said over and over that there is no first anything in rock music, this is an exception — that is, without any doubt whatsoever, the first rock and roll record to mention LSD, and so in its way a distant ancestor of psychedelic music. Weaver and Taylor have said in later years that neither of them knew anything about the drug (and it’s very clear that Johnston, who takes a very hardline anti-drugs stance, never indulged) — they’ve said they read a magazine article about acid and liked the name. On the other hand, Henry Vestine was part of the same circle and he was apparently already taking acid by then, though details are vague (every single article I can find about it uses the same phrasing that Wikipedia does, talking of having taken it with “a close musician friend” — who might have been one of the Gamblers, but who might not). So the B-side was a milestone in rock music history, and in a different way so was the A-side, just written by Weaver: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “Moon Dawg”] “Moon Dawg” was a local hit, but sold nothing anywhere outside Southern California, and there were a couple of follow-ups by different lineups of Gamblers, featuring some but never all of the same musicians, along with other people we’ve mentioned like Fowley. The Gamblers stopped being a thing, and Derry Weaver went off to join another group. Kim Fowley and his friend Gary Paxton had put together a novelty record, “Alley Oop”, under the name The Hollywood Argyles, which featured Gaynel Hodge on piano and Sandy Nelson banging a bin lid: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Argyles, “Alley Oop”] That became a hit, and they had to put together a band to tour as the Hollywood Argyles, and Weaver became one of them, as did Marshall Leib. After that Weaver hooked up again with Nik Venet, who started getting him regular session work, as Venet had taken a job at Capitol Records. And Venet doing that suddenly meant that “Moon Dawg” became very important indeed. Even though it had been only a minor success, because Venet owned the rights to the master tape, and also the publishing rights, he got “Moon Dawg” stuck on a various-artists compilation album put out on Capitol, Golden Gassers, which featured big acts like Sam Cooke and the Four Preps, and which exposed the song to a wider audience. Cover versions of it started to sprout up, by people like the Ventures, the Surfaris, and the Beach Boys — Larry Taylor’s brother Mel was the drummer for the Ventures, which might have helped bring the track to their attention, while Nik Venet was the Beach Boys’ producer. Indeed, some have claimed that Derry Weaver played on the Beach Boys’ version — he’s credited on the session sheets, but nobody involved with the session has ever said if it was actually him, or whether that was just Venet putting down a friend’s name to claim some extra money: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Moon Dawg”] While there had been twangy guitar instrumentals before “Moon Dawg”, and as I said, there’s never a first anything, historians of the surf music genre now generally point to it as the first surf music record ever, and it’s as good a choice as any. We won’t be seeing anything more from Derry Weaver, who fell into obscurity after a few years of session work, but Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Henry Vestine, Nik Venet, Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, Jan Berry, Terry Melcher, and Dean Torrence will be turning up throughout the sixties, and in some cases later. The records we looked at today were the start of a California music scene that would define American pop music in the sixties. As a final note, I mentioned Gaynel Hodge as the piano player on “Alley Oop”. As I was in the middle of writing this episode, I received word that Hodge had died earlier this week. As people who’ve listened to earlier episodes of this podcast will know, Gaynel Hodge was one of the most important people in the fifties LA vocal group scene, and without him there would have been no Platters, Penguins, or Jesse Belvin. He was also one of the few links between that fifties world of black R&B musicians and the white-dominated sixties LA pop music scene of surf, hot rods, folk rock, and sunshine. He’s unlikely to turn up again in more than minor roles in future episodes, but I’ve made this week’s Patreon episode be on another classic record he played on. As well as being an important musician in his own right, Hodge was someone without whom almost none of the music made in LA in the fifties or sixties would have happened. He’ll be missed.
Listen in as former Army Paratrooper Greg Wong relates how he combined his passion for video games and airsoft into a thriving personal brand. Arwin and Greg have been friends for a number of years. Both got into YouTube during the “golden age” of airsoft content creators on the video-sharing platform. The two swap stories and hard-hitting experiences that helped them to mature as social media influencers. Known as spartan117gw on Instagram and YouTube, Greg shares his best practices for navigating the world of social media through the lens of an airsoft enthusiast, hardcore gamer, “carsplayer”, and occasional Hollywood actor. Episode Timeline: [00:00] Intro [01:20] Meet Greg Wong [03:59] A brief history of airsoft YouTubers [11:17] How Greg contributes to various Hollywood productions with his airsoft expertise [14:00] Juggling multiple passions [21:40] Greg’s foray into the acting world [24:11] The importance of expanding—and keeping in touch with—your network [28:55] Your responsibility as an influencer [30:41] Dealing with haters [34:02] Greg’s advice for aspiring social media influencers [38:02] Keep YouTube burnout at bay by diversifying your revenue streams [42:48] How to stay motivated as a content creator [45:01] Arwin and Greg’s early years together as airsoft YouTubers [53:01] What advice would Greg give to his past self? [56:39] What would Greg like his future self to tell him? [59:46] Greg’s closing remarks [1:03:16] Outro Standout Quotes “Don’t get into [YouTube] looking to get sponsorships. Do it because you love it. Build a brand and create content that people like, and all that stuff will naturally fall into place. So many people like to jump the gun, like, ‘I have a 100 followers. Sponsor me.’ That’s not how it works. The key for everybody is return on investment.” ~Greg Wong [43:00] “Look to add value to someone’s life. Don’t [become an influencer] because you want to add value to your own life.” ~Arwin [43:48] “We live in an interesting time. While we’re really lucky to be living in this day and age, we still shouldn’t take what’s available to us for granted because things can go south overnight. The COVID-19 pandemic is demonstrating this. Gun rights and basic necessities? It’s only now that people really appreciate their necessity. Don’t prepare for when the birds are singing and the sun’s out; prepare for when shit hits the fan.” ~Greg Wong [59:46]
In 2005, the Disney Channel blessed the planet with the gift of "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody", a show about twin siblings living at a luxury hotel with their single mother. With a premise like that, of course antics will ensue. Listen as Shawn and Tyler watch and recap each and every episode of this show while giving their thoughts and jokes as they re-experience one of the longest running Disney Channel shows to date. In this episode, Shawn and Tyler watch "Hotel Inspector". Zack and Cody get Mr. Moseby fired when the Hotel Inspector comes to visit. Will they be able to get him back? Will Muriel rob the Martins' blind? Where's Arwin? How will Yozora and Jughead set things right this time? Find out when we cover episode four of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Thanks for listening! Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast feed! Follow us on Anchor at https://anchor.fm/troubleatthetipton Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TroubleAtTipton Follow Shawn on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Shawn_AFK Follow Tyler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TylerTylerims
Sean Fender grew up testing the limits in Southern California. At the time, he didn't realize he was developing a foundation of athleticism that he would call on later in his career as a CrossFit coach and volunteer firefighter. Today, Coach Sean sits down to talk CrossFit, Olympic lifting and more with Arwin and Sissi (who he still coaches!). Find out what got him started in the sport that would turn into his career and learn about his plans for a future as a first responder. As both a professional CrossFit coach and volunteer firefighter, Sean also offers valuable insights into maximizing safety and fitness during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Episode Timeline: [00:01] Intro [00:48] Meet Coach Sean Fender [01:33] Growing up in California and getting into competitive fitness [03:27] What led him to become a CrossFit coach [04:59] His first client experiences [06:22] Sissi's growth as a coach [08:32] Olympic lifting and technique [12:00] Pet peeves and bad habits in clients [14:36] Sissi and Arwin’s wedding [16:46] How much athletics in his youth influenced his career today [20:11] Advice for people who want to try CrossFit [22:45] What standards he strives for as a coach [26:09] The difference between those who quit and those who persevere [29:36] Volunteer firefighting and other emergency responder professions [33:59] Pursuing firefighting [36:05] The most challenging part of the journey [38:11] What surprised him about becoming a volunteer firefighter [42:35] Advice for staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic [47:01] His first CrossFit open workout [48:57] Shrooms and the Jaws of life [51:47] What it takes to become a top athlete [55:10] Mat Fraser and thoughts on the CrossFit Games [58:11] Adjusting to life during the Coronavirus pandemic [1:00:18] Fight 2 Finish Youtube & Candy bars [1:03:17] What advice Sean Fender would give his past self [1:04:27] What he'd want to know from his future self [1:05:41] Where to find Sean Fender [1:08:41] Outro Resources Mentioned: Team Exos Crossfit West Santa Cruz Standout Quotes: “For me, CrossFit and training, there was a time when it was a lot about trying to be competitive and go in that direction but now for me, it's more just about being ready for whatever comes my way.” -Sean Fender [35:42] “The biggest thing is it takes time. It takes a level of commitment and discipline and being okay with skipping some other things... You just gotta know what you're getting yourself into and realize that's what it takes.” -Sean Fender [52:36] Connect: Find | The Fight 2 Finish Podcast On Instagram: @f2fpodcast On TikTok: @f2fpodcast On Apple Podcasts On Stitcher On Spotify Find | Sean Fender On Instagram: @fenderlebender Find | Sissi G & Arwin On Instagram: @gisforwarrior @mat_marauder
Chase Knight does it all. He’s a CrossFit coach, firefighter, husband, and father based in Kansas City. His most recent adventure, as a coach to visually impaired athlete Brooke Pernice, has left lasting impressions on his approach to training and life. Sitting down with Sissi and Arwin today, Chase talks about his CrossFit journey, how he balanced coaching and pursuing a fulfilling career in service all while managing family life. He shares his experiences working for certification in CrossFit levels 1, 2 and 3 and his biggest takeaways from them all. Also, find out what he says are the foundational differences between coaching someone who is visually impaired and why he says athletes like Brooke give the rest of us little room to complain. Episode Timeline: [00:01] Intro [00:27] Meet Chase Knight [02:14] His fitness journey and becoming a high-level fitness trainer [04:10] Getting into CrossFit [07:54] Sissi's CrossFit development [09:00] Balancing all his roles and family life [15:31] Firefighting education and having to shift priorities [17:48] Meeting Brooke and learning about visually impaired [21:43] Apraching CrossFit coaching with for the visually impaired [35:12] Developing a translatable foundation [42:27] Lessons learned from Brooke [49:27] How CFL1 compares to CFL2 [58:47] Moving into level 3 [1:02:31] The importance of failure [1:04:42] Responding to coronavirus [1:12:53] What advice Chase Knight would give his past self [1:18:57] Where to find Coach Chase [1:21:01] Outro Resources Mentioned: Brave Enough Crossfit Standout Quotes: “I believe that people are intelligent enough to learn. Maybe they might struggle a little bit but I think the beauty of teaching is in the details.” -Chase Knight[25:04] “The value doesn't come from the certification, the value comes from the knowledge and experience you gain from studying for it.” -Chase Knight [1:02:16] “The thing to keep in mind is, the whole idea of CrossFit is to prevent chronic disease... prevent obesity and chronic disease and it's like, who do you think this Coronavirus affects the most?” -Chase Knight [1:08:00] Connect: Find | The Fight 2 Finish Podcast On Instagram: @f2fpodcast On TikTok: @f2fpodcast On Apple Podcasts On Stitcher On Spotify Find | Chase Knight On Instagram: @coach_chase_cfl2 On Youtube: @Chase Knight Facebook: Find| SissiG&Arwin On Instagram: @gisforwarrior @mat_marauder
When Cody Nault decided to pack up and move from Portland, Oregon to Silicon Valley in pursuit of his dreams with nothing to his name but his coding expertise, a car and a few essentials— he never anticipated the thousands of social media followers he’d inspire along the way. Today, Cody sits down for a conversation with Arwin and Sissi. He shares his past experiences with homelessness and the story of how he used his talents in tech to build his first company and escape poverty by the age of 20. His choice to live minimalistically out of his car is something he says, that has pushed him to grow in ways that will surprise you. Listen in to hear the motivations behind his jump into the unknown and how he’s navigating startup life on the streets of Silicon Valley. Find out how he’s meeting friends and potential business partners, staying safe. He shares why most of us are looking at homelessness all wrong and the key to consistent progress. The secret? Never getting too comfortable. Episode Timeline: [00:00] Intro [00:42] Meet Coder Cody Nault [01:34] Why moved to Silicon Valley with no job or place to live [05:52] Sharing the journey on video and gaining a following [08:02] Being confident enough to take a leap of faith [10:00] Experiencing homelessness as a teen and needing challenges to grow [14:37] Using meetup.com, networking and making friends for survival [21:29] Meeting interesting people and potential partners [23:07] Embracing the Silicon Valley garage dream [25:46] The experience of living out of his car and his take on homeless stereotypes [36:51] Discipline and setting yourself up to be accountable [41:08] Creating a lifestyle of progress [44:37] What advice Cody would give his past self [47:12] What he wants to know from his future self [48:42] Contacting & working with Cody [51:50] Outro Resources Mentioned: Udemy.com Meetup.com Standout Quotes: “We're taught growing up that stability is key. If you can work a job long term, that's like the most important thing but with people working in technology, a lot of times we kind of see this situation where if somebody sits in the same job for more than five or six years, they start getting stale. They stop learning. Yeah. They get really narrow minded and, and I really didn't want to become that person.” - Cody Nault [02:35] “I've done this before, I've moved to an area and I did it from absolute poverty. But there was no proof, all you have is my story. And so, I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna do this again. But I am going to do it from middle class going up instead of poverty going up. You know, I want to do this again. But this time, I'm going to document it.” -Cody Nault [11:22] “So I realized that even when things were really bad, and like, I had less money than I had now. And I was living in my car, not by choice, like, I could still build a life for myself.” -Cody Nault [12:16] “It's like the more stuff and the more comfort we create, yeah, the less we want to push ourselves. Because there's always that safety, there's that spot where we can just chill and turn off.” -Cody Nault [40:04] Connect: Find | The Fight 2 Finish Podcast On Instagram: @f2fpodcast On Apple Podcasts On Stitcher On Spotify Find | Cody Nault On Tik Tok: @codythecoder On Instagram: @cody.the.coder Find | Arwin & Sissi G On Instagram: @mat_marauder @gisforwarrior
De horeca is inmiddels twee weken dicht en morgen wordt bekend gemaakt hoelang de maatregelen verlengt worden en of ze nog verder aangescherpt worden. Goed moment om vandaag in gesprek te gaan met enkele van mijn collega's.
If you took a look into engineer Zach Pereyo’s Silicon Valley garage on any given week, you won't find him hunched over behind a screen. Instead, you’d find him pulling loaves of natural bread out of ovens for his passion startup, Briarwood Bakery. As a Google engineer, a 17-time endurance event participant, father, and partner— Zach has seemingly always been good at multitasking. Now, with orders lining up, he can officially add the title of bread master to his resume. In today’s episode, Arwin and Sissi join Zach and his partner Amanda in their home, to hear the story behind Briarwood Bakery. Listen in to find out how discovering a passion for baking helped him to work through major loss while injecting more meaning into his life. Episode Timeline: [00:00] Intro [01:21] The story behind Fight 2 Finish [04:15] Meet Zach and his passion for bread [09:27] Briarwood Bakery and a lesson in bread history [18:20] Health benefits of eating real bread [19:31] How important is it to feed your soul? [29:40] GORUCK events and meeting his partner Amanda [25:22] A challenging backpack event pre 1000 [37:44] Deciding to retire from endurance events [41:08] Being your own worst critic [49:10] How Bread making parallels life [52:21] Knowing how to tell real bread from fake [59:38] Building the business and looking to the future [01:06:00] Where to find Briarwood Bakery [68:56] Outro Resources Mentioned: GORUCK Events Standout Quotes: “It does not pay the bills as well as being an engineer but sure, it gives my life a lot more meaning and a lot more passion” -Zach [7:04] “I think that really is important to kind of just feed the beast and feed your own curiosity because you never know what you're gonna unlock.” -Arwin [23:03] “there's a point at which you feel like you're gonna die and the demons are telling you to quit and then you get the light you know, the morning light comes and you just feel new again.” -Zach [36:25] “Sometimes the failures are just as important as successes, right? To help guide you to where you need to go, right? It's a path that you don't need to take anymore. Because you went down that already. But now you know.” -Zach [48:59] Connect: Find | The Fight 2 Finish Podcast On Instagram: @f2fpodcast On Apple Podcasts On Stitcher On Spotify Find | Briarwood Bakery On Instagram: @briarwood_bakery Find | Arwin & Sissi G On Instagram: @mat_marauder @gisforwarrior
Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Arwin about competition and fighting Jiu Jitsu tournaments. Arwin was raised to do his best in life but his parents didn't make everything about competition and winning. So when Arwin met his wife he found that she had a different edge - she is competitive and a force to be second with. When Arwin began training in Jiu Jitsu it was his wife that encouraged and motivated him to start competing. This was scary. Arwin didn't grow up a fighter or with the urge to compete but here he was now entered to fight in a Jiu Jitsu tournament. As Arwin will teach us… “Action kills fear”. In todays amazing story Arwin takes us on his adventure of fear and fighting. Website: http://www.f2fpodcast.com https://www.instagram.com/f2fpodcast/ Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/014-health-fitness-and-relationships/id1488245669?i=1000465596949
Arwin and Sissi sit down and talk with Craig Robinson. He and a group of 7 people swam over 500miles continuously for 10 days in a relay to break a 40 years old Guinness record. Craig talks about what led up to attempting the record and some of the logistics that are involved in organizing such a feet. Listen in as we take a deep dive into world records. Useful Links: https://googleswimrecord.com/ https://www.usms.org/ https://www.challengedathletes.org/ Instagram - @f2fpodcastWebsite - http://f2fpodcast.com
Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Arwin about competition and fighting Jiu Jitsu tournaments. Arwin was raised to do his best in life but his parents didn’t make everything about competition and winning. So when Arwin met his wife he found that she had a different edge - she is competitive and a force to be second with. When Arwin began training in Jiu Jitsu it was his wife that encouraged and motivated him to start competing. This was scary. Arwin didn’t grow up a fighter or with the urge to compete but here he was now entered to fight in a Jiu Jitsu tournament. As Arwin will teach us… “Action kills fear”. In todays amazing story Arwin takes us on his adventure of fear and fighting. Website: http://www.f2fpodcast.com https://www.instagram.com/f2fpodcast/ Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/014-health-fitness-and-relationships/id1488245669?i=1000465596949
What happens when your significant other isn't into the same things you are in? Is it a recipe for disaster or can your relationship last despite the difference in passions? Sissi and Arwin sit down and talk about their relationship and past relationships. Both are into their respective fitness spaces and how that bond them together. Instagram - @f2fpodcast Website - http://f2fpodcast.com RSS - https://fight2finish.libsyn.com/rss
Have you ever thought about participating in a competition or tournament? Whether it's in crossfit or in combat sports like jiu-jitsu we believe it is important to self assess your results. Good, bad and even the ugly you can always learn. Holding yourself accountable for your performance is important. In this episode, Arwin and Sissi sit down and talk about their AAR (after action report) on their most recent competitions and how it has helped shaped them moving forward. Useful Books: AMRAP Mentality by Jason Khalipa Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins Mentioned in this Episode David Goggins Jason Khalipa Jocko Willinck Instagram - @f2fpodcast Website - http://fight2finish.libsyn.com/website
We catch up with Arwin and see if he enjoyed the rest of the book. Who ended up being his favorite character(s)? Will he continue on to New Moon, will he not? Twilight fans might enjoy this funny account of a new reader. Useful Links: http://www.audible.com Website - http://fight2finish.libsyn.com/website RSS - https://fight2finish.libsyn.com/rss
Happy New Year! In this episode both Arwin and Sissi discuss new years resolutions and why might they not subscribe to the yearly tradition. 2019 was a year of many firsts and 2020 is chalked full of potential. Instagram - @f2fpodcast Website - http://fight2finish.libsyn.com/website RSS - https://fight2finish.libsyn.com/rss
Fight 2 Finish Podcast | Ep. #08 - Arwin is Listening to Twilight As an avid Audible subscriber, Arwin has amassed hours of listening time to many books. Arwin sits down and talks about his first initial impressions of Twilight a book recommended to him by Sissi. Do you agree with his sentiments?
Hanasaka philosophy, music, nomads & 15 years commemorating the tsunami in aceh
What happens when a group of ALPHABET (parent company to Google) employee's want to smash a 40 years old record? We talk about our first-hand experience volunteering to help these group of young men and women break the Guinness Book of World Records relay distance record. It was a great experience and we wish them the best of luck as they go for it! Links: http://www.googleswimrecord.com [0:00:40] - Introduction [0:01:30] - how we became a part of this Guinness Book of Records attempt [0:03:30] - Swimmers don’t use their legs when swimming for distance? [0:05:00] - Swimming around the clock while still keeping your day job [0:07:20] - The record they are trying to break [0:08:20] - The ugly truth about Guinness book of Records [0:12:00] - Difference between a lifelong swimmer vs. a swimmer who started swimming later in years [0:14:50] - Our takeaways from our experience [0:19:00] - Sissi’s theory about Arwin [0:2100] - Closing remarks Instagram - @f2fpodcast Website - http://fight2finish.libsyn.com/website RSS - https://fight2finish.libsyn.com/rss
Arwin en ik werden beroofd door 2 tieners. We weigerde ons geld te geven
In this episode, I interview the refreshingly honest, wonderfully humble and lovingly humorous Lucy Mountain, AKA The Fashion Fitness Foodie. As well as working full-time in marketing, Lucy has also qualified as a personal trainer, nutrition coach and is a self-proclaimed ‘Instagram person’ (note: not ’influencer’ - she’s not on that word). You’ll love listening to her honest approach to life, nutrition, body image and the unpredictability of being a successful and intelligent business woman. We pick apart language, discuss what it means to be a feminist, have balance and be Positively Selfish. We also discuss Lucy’s own very supportive community: team NOBS (including Arwin - famous NOB MAN), money with it’s taboo attachment and that significant rectangular piece of technology that we hold in our hands: you can actually put it down! Check Lucy out: Website: https://www.thefashionfitnessfoodie.com Instagram: @thefashionfitnessfoodie AND @thefffeed YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjwZRU_NaG0bMEwXhc68izQ Facebook: We Are Team NOBS
Since Johnny's out of town, Alex and guest-host Chadwick Hubbard talk episode 6 of season 2 of "Game of Thrones," "The Old Gods and the New," and the corresponding chapters in A Clash of Kings. MUCH in the way of plot happens this episode - Jon meets Ygritte and one of the most accurate phrases in history is born. At Harrenhal, Arwin keeps reminding us all why they should have been shipped WAY harder, in Kings Landing the Hound rescues Sansa from almost rape, and Tyrion pimpslaps Joffrey for causing a riot. And finally, in the horror aisle, that bald drag queen magician steals Dany's dragons, and we finally get to see the look on someone's face as they're beheaded. Thanks, Theon. RIP, Roderik Cassel. You were a true knight. Time Codes if you don't care about how Chadwick and Alex know each other or their thoughts on Vegas: 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:05 Theon/Winterfell 00:20:20 Jon/North of the Wall 00:37:00 Robb/Talisa/Catelyn/Westerlands 00:47:10 Sansa/Tyrion/Kings Landing 01:02:28 Arya/Petyr/Tywin/Harrenhal 01:16:36 Danerys/Qarth If you're reading along with us, here's a handy guide to help you follow along, since season 2 doesn't follow ACOC quite as neatly as season 1 followed GoT. Joining us late? Just want to listen us without getting emotionally gutted a second time by re-experiencing the Red Wedding? We recap the episode play-by-play in the podcast, but you can find chapter summaries here if you want to enjoy our book-to-show comparisons more. For the most up to date news and information regarding the podcast, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!
Steve Cooper talks with actor Brian Stepanek. Brian may be best known for his role as Arwin in The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and The Suite Life on Deck but his resume reaches beyond that. He has appeared on TV shows such as The Crazy Ones, The West Wing, NYPD Blue, JAG, Six Feet Under, CSI: Miami, Mike & Molly, Two and a Half Men Major Crimes and has been seen in movies such as The Island, Pain & Gain, Transformers and Kissing Jessica Stein. He has also lent his voice to many projects including Kick Buttkowski: Suburban Daredevil, Father of the Pride, Phineas and Ferb, Kim Possible, Charlotte's Web and Over the Hedge and has been in numerous national commercials.
Athens came into the studio and we pretended we were in the mountains of New Mexico. We had a fun night of songs and laughter.On January 18th Athens and fellow CAU Alumni, Arwin are playing at The Note 1516 N. Milwaukee Ave. This is a double bill not to be missed. I will most definately be there. Come see these guys, they are a blast....Check out some pics from the show.
Arwin is an indie-pop band from Chicago that draws comparisons to Rilo Kiley, The Flaming Lips, and Nada surf. Perhaps the most amazing and enjoyable five piece band we have recorded. As you will tell from the show, we had a blast with these people. their harmonies and rhythmic twists and turns are awesome.So, kick back, open a drink of your choice and enjoy Arwin.Team Arwin websiteArwin on Myspace