Podcasts about Bert Kaempfert

Dass Bernd Begemann jemand ist, an dessen Berufsbezeichnung “Sänger und Gitarrist” man noch den etwas angestaubten Begriff “Entertainer” ergänzen kann, spricht dafür, dass er ein Herz für die Vergangenheit der Popmusik hat. Geboren 1962 in Braunschweig und nur wenige Monate später von den Begemanns aus Bad Salzuflen adoptiert, waren seine ersten musikalischen Berührungspunkte vor allem Klassik und die “nicht-revolutionäre Popmusik” von Bert Kaempfert oder den Carpenters.Seine erste Punkband Vatikan gründet Begemann Ende der Siebziger, ungefähr zur gleichen Zeit lernt er über den Tontechniker Frank Werner den späteren Die Sterne-Frontmann Frank Spilker kennen. Noch vor dem zieht er 1984 nach Hamburg, wo er die Band Die Antwort gründet. Mit der wird er zu einem der wichtigsten Impulsgeber für die damals aufkeimende Hamburger Schule, indem er junge westfälische Musiker:innen wie Spilker, Jochen Distelmeyer oder seine heutige Frau Bernadette La Hengst in die Hansestadt holt.In den Neunzigern wird aus Die Antwort dann Begemanns neue Backing-Band Die Befreiung, mit denen er als Bernd Begemann & die Befreiung ab 1992 Soloplatten aufnimmt. Das aktuellste davon erschien im vergangenen Jahr unter dem Titel “Millieu”. 1993 gründet er sein eigenes Label Rothenburgsort Records, ab Mitte der Neunziger war er außerdem Host mehrerer Sendungen im NDR (unter anderem “Bernd im Bademantel”, gedreht in seiner damaligen Hamburger Privatwohnung) und spielte kleinere Filmrollen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

6 Fat Dutchmen [00:22] "Minniehaha" 6 Fat Dutchmen RCA Victor LPM-1769 1958 Ooooom-pah! New Ulm's very own 6 Fat Dutchmen blazing up that Midwestern polka scene. Why heck, they played the Nebraska State Fair for 26 straight years, don't ya know. This album has some top-notch cover art by none other than the great Jack Davis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Davis_(cartoonist)). Jo Stafford with Paul Weston and his Music from Hollywood, the Norman Luboff Choir, and the Starlighters [02:42] "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" Ski Trails Columbia CL 910 1956 Jo and co. take a fine pass at this Irving Berlin standard. --- [05:05] Nadja [05:46] "Jaguar" Sky Burial Latitudes GMT 0:22 V 2010 A translucent blue excursion into sonic etherealness. --- [24:42] Slapp Happy [25:04] "The Drum" Slapp Happy Virgin V 2014 1974 This album was originally recorded with Faust as a backing band (https://youtu.be/j2m4_KTg-VA?si=qaDjWw1MxOaPkjFl), but was rejected by their German label. After moving to London, the material was recorded with studio musicians. And of course, I came to this song by way of the excellent interpretation by Bongwater (https://youtu.be/7M8uzljiQcc?si=K1yXFGHRhSG7xkB8). Ambitious Lovers [28:25] "Admit It" Slaves of New York Virgin Movie Music 7 91229-1 1989 From a film that was very much of its time based on a collection of short stories by Tama Janowitz (https://youtu.be/YG-EEdHb6Vk?si=yCNAzeWjeu6_9eem), oddly enough a Merchant and Ivory production. of the same title. At least it introduced me to Arto Lindsay (https://youtu.be/yAVr-fP9Dbk?si=rDW4N2c9JRPLYwKt). Nomeansno [32:10] "Junk" Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed Alternative Tentacles VIRUS 63 1988 The third studio album from these Vancouverian musicians. Space junk perhaps? Jimi Hendrix [35:47] "Can You See Me" Smash Hits Reprise Records MS 2025 1969 Stereo Jimi vox on one of my favorite Experience tunes. ---- [38:21] King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band [39:24] "Dippermouth Blues" (1923) Lionel Hampton [41:43] "When Lights Are Low" (1939) Miles Davis Nonet [43:58] "Boplicity" (1949) Thelonious Monk Quintet [46:58] "Criss Cross" (1951) The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz Smithsonian Collection P6 11891 1973 blah --- [49:56] Music behind the DJ: "Swinging Safari" by Bert Kaempfert

"Es el secreto mejor guardado de la música estadounidense", dijo su gran admirador Jack White, "fue mi gran influencia para montar The White Stripes".Dexter Romweber falleció el pasado 16 de febrero a los 57 años de edad. Fundador de los Flat Duo Jets en 1983, duo de rock’n’roll cavernario con el que se mantuvo hasta el nuevo siglo, cuando, también en formato de dúo, fue ampliando su registro abarcando todos los estilos de raíces y el cancionero de la música popular estadounidense, saltando del rockabilly primitivo a la balada de crooner y pasando por el surf, el swing o el rhythm’n’blues más intimista.En 2023 Dex Romweber rompió un silencio discográfico de siete años con su disco “Good thing going’” (Propeller Sound Recordings), el cual se ha convertido en el último álbum de este rebelde del rock’n’roll. A modo de homenaje sobrevolamos ese disco de principio a fin, centrándonos en las variopintas versiones que siempre incluía en sus obras y que Dexter hacía completamente suyas.Playlist;(sintonía) DEX ROMWEBER “Andrieux boogie” (Good thing goin’, 2023)DEX ROMWEBER “Going down” (Good thing goin’, 2023)DEX ROMWEBER “Good thing goin’” (Good thing goin’, 2023)ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK “Good thing goin’” (1969)DEX ROMWEBER “If you love me” (Good thing goin’, 2023)EDITH PIAF “Hhymne a l’amour” (1950)DEX ROMWEBER “Coming home” (Good thing goin’, 2023)JOHNNY HORTON “Coming home” (1956)DEX ROMWEBER “For all we know” (Good thing goin’, 2023)HAL KEMP and HIS ORCHESTRA “For all we know” (1934)DEX ROMWEBER “Shape of things to come” (Good thing goin’, 2023)DEX ROMWEBER “Twine time” (Good thing goin’, 2023)ALVIN CASH and THE CRAWLERS “Twine time” (1964)DEX ROMWEBER “Tell Laura I love her” (Good thing goin’, 2023)RAY PETERSON “Tell Laura I love her” (1960)BERT KAEMPFERT “I found my love” (1974)DEX ROMWEBER “I found my love” (Good thing goin’, 2023)Escuchar audio

The Song "L O V E "Written by Milt Gabler & Bert Kaempfert 1964Producer Renee plays her rendition on Piano + GuitarSING &  DANCE ALONG  WITH THE MUSIC !Here are the lyrics:L is for the way you look at meO is for the only one I seeV is very very extraordinaryE is even more that anyone that you adore canLove is all that I can give to youLove is more than just a game for twoTwo in love can make itTake my heart and please don't break itLove was made for me and you (CHANGE KEY)L is for the way you look at meO is for the only one I seeV is very very extraordinaryE is even more that anyone that you adore canLove is all that I can give to youLove is more than just a game for twoTwo in love can make itTake my heart but please don't break itLove was made for me and you http://PinkieThePigPodcast.com

PINKIE SINGS  The Song "L O V E "Written by Milt Gabler & Bert Kaempfert 1964Producer Renee plays her rendition on Piano + GuitarProducer Renee: Vocals/ Piano/ Guitarhttp://PinkieThePigPodcast.com

Para este episodio te traemos un disco, Jazz in Fado, que fue idea del productor cubano Óscar Gómez. Se grabó entre Madrid y Lisboa, con con algunos de los mejores músicos cubanos residentes en Madrid, junto a algunas de las grandes voces del fado. Juntos interpretan algunos de los temas más inmortales del fado al ritmo de jazz latino. Un disco que te enamorará. Además tenemos la voz de Silvia Perez Cruz, la orquesta de Bert Kaempfert y la trompeta de Louis Amnstrong. Playlist: Silvia Pérez Cruz - Nombrar es imposible; Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra - Tudo Isto E Fado; Jazz in Fado 1 Carlos Do Carmo – “Lisboa, Menina E Moça”; 2 Hélder Moutinho – “Estranha Forma De Vida” ; 3 Carminho – “Escrevi Teu Nome No Vento” ; 4 António Zambujo – “Veio A Saudade” ; 5 Raquel Tavares – “Limão”; 6 Marco Rodrigues – “Solidão” ; 7 Ana Bacalhau – “Fado Português De Nós” ; 8 Cuca Roseta – “Coimbra” ; 9 Maria Berasarte – “A Nadie Se Lo Confieso”; 10 Joana Almeida – “Tudo Isto É Fado”; Louis Amstrong - April In Portugal.

Der Komponist Bert Kaempfert schrieb hunderte weltbekannte Songs. Außerdem entdeckte er Superstars wie die Beatles. Am 16.10.2023 wäre Bert Kaempfert 100 Jahre alt geworden.

Et blik fra en fremmed en januar nat, et kryds over vejen, eller en dans for mange år siden der aldrig gentog sig. Natsværmeren fabulerer frit over kærligheden til at soundtrack af Bert Kaempfert, Johnny Greenwood, Händel, Jade Vincent, Piazzolla, Reich, Chopin og Monk blandt andre svævende væsner. Vært: Minna Grooss. (Sendt første gang 4. juni).

Las grandes Orquestas del mundo en escena, gracias a su conductor Carlos Bautista

More musicians born in 1923.  Performers include: Bert Kaempfert, Jim Reeves, Dexter Gordan, Slim Whitman, Victoria de los Angeles, Barney Kessel, Fats Narvarro and Eddie Kendrick.  With a special shout out to Glynis Johns.

Roger Ashby goes behind the hits of your favourite songs from the 50s, 60s and 70s.  Listen to The Roger Ashby Oldies Show anytime on the iHeartRadio app.

Nueva entrega de este coleccionable dedicado a recordar grandes canciones de todo el abanico de estilos que dieron forma a la música pop de la primera mitad de los años 60. (Foto del podcast; The Shangri-Las, 1964) Playlist; (sintonía) THE SHADOWS “Walkin’” BUDDY HOLLY “Crying waiting hoping” THE BOBBY FULLER 4 “Let her dance” SAM COOKE “Another Saturday night” THE ROLLING STONES “If you need me” FATS DOMINO “It keeps raining” CLARENCE “FROGMAN” HENRY “(I don't know why) but I do” JOE BROWN and THE BRUVVERS “It only took a minute” THE VIBRATIONS “Watusi” OSCAR BROWN JR “The work song” THE CONTOURS “Do you love me” THE ROYAL SHOWBAND WATERFORD “The huckle buck” SHARON MARIE “Run around lover” BERT KAEMPFERT “Chicken talk” BOBBY RYDELL “I wanna thank you” THE SHANGRI-LAS “Leader of the pack” HELEN SHAPIRO “Not responsable” THE SHARADES “Dumb head” ROY ORBISON “In dreams” Escuchar audio

Y a las 22,05h tenemos Guateque en Onda Regional de Murcia(orm.es). Dijo Mel Tormé, "la Navidad es para los niños". Yo añadiría, para todo aquel que aún conserva un rastro de ilusión. Nos montamos en un trineo mágico para recorrer las mejores canciones de navidad con Frank Sinatra, Eartha Kitt, Booker T & The MG's, Nat King Cole, Julie Andrews, The Supremes, En A Christmas Gift For You, Spector jugó a ser el Frank Capra de la música popular. Escuchar ese pop es como ver ¡Qué bello es vivir! (cuenta la leyenda que el disco, "A christmas gift for you", fue un fracaso comercial al salir a la venta el mismo día que asesinaron a John F. Kennedy: The Ronettes, Darlene Love, The Beach Boys, Percy Faith, Ike & Tina Turner, Brenda Lee, Bing Crosby, Bert Kaempfert, Andy Williams.¡A disfrutar estas fiestas, háganme el favor!

Hay gente que odia las navidades, incluso cristianos que sienten una extraña complacencia en amargarnos las fiestas, recordándonos su origen pagano y fervor consumista. Por muy seculares que sean, a algunos nos encantan estos días de luz que iluminan los oscuros meses de invierno. Y no se nos ocurre una ciudad mejor para pensar en el sentido de la Encarnación que Nueva York, la ciudad que nunca duerme... Lo que algunos no soportan de la Navidad es lo que se suele llamar "el espíritu de la Navidad", ese edulcorado discurso lleno de palabras vacías y supuestos buenos deseos, que nos hacen creer que tenemos un corazón de oro. A José de Segovia "el cine que hace sentirse bien" no le entusiasma, pero tiene una particular pasión por películas que transcurren en Navidad, pero no son de Navidad. En este programa especial de "El sueño se ha acabado" habla de algunas de ellas. Las introduce con una versión jazzística de Dexter Gordon de "La canción de Navidad" (1944) de Mel Tormé, que se llama originalmente "Castañas tostándose en la chimenea" y José escucha cada Navidad en un disco con veinte versiones diferentes. Aunque la música de su infancia es el disco de la orquesta del alemán Bert Kaempfert, cuya "Blanca Navidad" (1942) del judío emigrado de Bielorrusia a finales del XIX, Irving Berling, escuchamos en su versión instrumental de 1963. A finales de los años 60 y principios de los 70, el padre de José estaba en Nueva York, donde había unas "blancas navidades", pero no nieva en la Gran Manzana en "Los tres días del Cóndor" (1975), aunque el frío se nota en cuanto sale a la calle, Robert Redford con las solapas subidas del abrigo. Escuchamos diálogos del principio de la película del director judío de origen ucraniano Sidney Pollack con los comentarios de José sobre la maravillosa música de Dave Grusin y el sonido de la banda del Ejército de Salvación en las calle, al final del film. Otro clásico del cancionero americano son las "Campananillas de plata" que popularizó Bing Crosby en 1950. Nos sirve para introducir la amarga historia de "El apartamento", que el director judío de origen polaco Billy Wilder filmó las navidades del 59 en Nueva York con Jack Lemmon. Su patético arbolito es tan triste como el espejo roto de Shirley MacLaine. Son los sueños rotos que hay detrás de las palabras que oímos con la banda sonora de Adolph Deutsch. Contrastan con las ilusiones adquiridas en la fiesta de fin de año en Nueva York de "Cuando Harry encontró a Sally"(1989). Aunque no lo parezca, muchos consideran "La jungla de cristal" (Die Hard 1988), una película de Navidad. No sólo porque transcurre en Navidad, sino porque es lo que ahora llaman "una historia de redención". Es la salvación de la familia de un policía de Nueva York, que convierte a Bruce Willis en una estrella del cine de acción de los 90. Todavía más navideña es "Family Man" (2000) que muestra a un extraño Nicolas Cage en un papel familiar, nada habitual en ese subgénero de películas que le han convertido en una "figura de culto". Es una curiosa versión del "Un cuento de Navidad" (1843) de Dickens, que comentamos con la música de Danny Elfman. La reflexión final es con el "Cuento de Nueva York" de The Pogues. Estas historias nos muestran la diferencia entre esa Navidad vacía de bonitas palabras, carentes de contenido, con la Buena Noticia del Dios humanado, cuyas manos traspasadas por nuestro desprecio e ignorancia, hacen que por Su amor, la Luz venza a la oscuridad.

Los Ángeles, Andy Williams, Los Tamara, Andrés Dobarro, Tony Dallara, Ornella Vanoni, Edoardo Vianello, Rita Pavone, Tony Jackson, Micky y Los Tony's, The Cascades, Les Surf, The Troggs, Annette Funicello, Bert Kaempfert and His Orchestra, Trini López, Fórmula V, Marta Baizán

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. 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/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

En este capìtulo culminamos con las sesiones de la DECCA. Comentaremos los primeros meses de 1962. Firma del contrato con Brian Epstein y la solicitud de la ruptura contractual con Bert Kaempfert. Helter Skelter se emite todos los domingos por 970 Universal 10 hrs Uruguay/Argentina/Brasil 970universal.com

Hoy hablamos del compositor de canciones tan famosas como "Extraños en la noche" y "Los ojos de la Española". Bert Kaempfert nace en 1923 en Hamburgo y además de componer, tocaba el trombón.

(My girlfriend Karen joins me on this episode) When it comes to love songs, one of the voices I often think of first is Nat King Cole. His effortless style, smooth voice and crystal clear lyrics have set the background for many romantic encounters over the years. So get ready to snuggle up to the one you love for Volume 59: Nat's L-O-V-E for Valentine's Day. Credits and copyrights: Nat King Cole – L-O-V-E Label: Capitol Records – T 2195 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Mono Released: 1965 Genre: Jazz Style: Easy Listening Three Little Words music by Harry Ruby and lyrics by Bert Kalmar, published in 1930 The Girl From Ipanema written in 1962 by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes Coquette 1928 fox trot jazz standard composed by Johnny Green and Carmen Lombardo, with lyrics by Gus Kahn. Ti Guarderò Nel Cuore (More) written by Riz Ortolani and Nino Oliviero for the 1962 Italian documentary film Mondo Cane How I'd Love To Love You Joe Bailey L-O-V-E composed by Bert Kaempfert with lyrics by Milt Gabler My Kind Of Girl 1961 song written by Leslie Bricusse I do not own the rights to this music. ASCAP, BMI licenses provided by third-party platforms for music that is not under Public Domain.

Little Dragon [00:20] "Klapp Klapp" Nabuma Rubberband Seven Four/Republic B0020210-01 2014 Little Dragon's fourth studio album and a fine one at that. Why, the even performed this track on Letterman (https://youtu.be/pKhmTNkIJ5o). 22 Sparkling Smiles [03:57] "Every Day" Nailed to the Stars Jealous Butcher Records JB-010 1996 Nice little 90s indie comp from the Portland label. KMFDM [06:44] "Naïve (Re-Mix by TKK)" Naïve/The Days of Swing + Roses Wax Trax! Records WAX 9160 1990 From the halcyon days of electro-industrial. Talking Heads [18:02] "(Nothing But) Flowers" Naked Sire 1-25654 1988 Just can't get enough of the high life sound. Great guitar interplay between guests Johnny Marr and Yves N'Djock. Talking Heads [23:17] "Pulled Up" The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads Sire 2SR 3590 1982 A double album of live Talking Heads. The first record is the talking heads in their original quartet form recorded between 1977 and 1979, heard here with this great rendition of "Pulled Up". The second record features the band as a 10 musician group recorded between 1980-81, with the addition of Adrian Belew on guitar, Nona Hendrix on backing vocals, Busta Jones on bass, Dolette McDonald on percussion, Steve Scales on congas, and the inimitable Bernie Worrell on keys. Nancy Sinatra [27:21] "Son of a Preacher Man" Nancy Reprise Records RS 6333 1969 Nancy and the Wrecking Crew keeping it downtempo with this version. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood [30:12] "Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman" Nancy & Lee Reprise Records RS 6273 1968 Kinda corny kinda fun take on this tune by the great Tom T. Hall. For those who want to learn more about Tom T. Hall, check out this episode of Cocaine & Rhinestones (https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/tom-t-hall-harper-valley-pta) (although really you should start with this episode (https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/shelby-singleton-harper-valley-pta) and make your way forward). Nancy Wilson with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet [34:48] "A Sleepin' Bee" Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley Capitol Records ST 1657 1962 A great pairing of talents doing a nice turn on this Truman Capote-penned number. Karen Black [37:23] "Memphis" Nashville Original Motion Picture Soundtrack ABC Records ABCD-893 1975 The voluptuous delight of Karen Black singing. Bob Dylan [39:31] "To Be Alone with You" Nashville Skyline Columbia KCS 9825 1969 Snappy number from Bob, with some great drum work by Kenny Buttrey. Silver Jews [41:37] "How to Rent a Room" The Natural Bridge Drag City DC101 1996 Track one, side one of the second Silver Jews album. The late great David Berman locks in the Silver Jews sound for good. Commodores [45:52] "Flying High" Natural High Motown M7-902R1 1978 What, you thought I was going to stick you with "Three Times a Lady"? This album made it to the top of the R&B Albums chart, and number three on the Top LPSs & Tapes chart. Jacques Brel [51:03] "Les Flamandes" Ne Me Quitte Pas Barclay 90 268 1972 (1978 reissue) The Flemish! Like Brel himself. Lead Belly [53:39] "John Henry" Negro Folk Songs for Young People Folkways Records FC 7533 1960 Master of the 12-string Lead Belly fills the kids in on John Henry. Neil [57:49] "Golf Girl" Neil's Heavy Concept Album WEA WX12 1984 The Young Ones' very own Neil aka Nigel Planer takes us on a very heavy golf trip with the help of Dawn French. In case you're curious about the orignal Caravan version of this song, dig their 1971 appearance on Beat-Club (https://youtu.be/ik8dE1-SQtg). Music behind the DJ: "A Swingin' Safari" by Bert Kaempfert

Er gehörte zu den größten Orchesterchefs des 20. Jahrhunderts.

"The World We Knew (Over and Over)" es una canción popular grabada por Frank Sinatra en 1967. Está basada en una composición de Bert Kaempfert,un músico y compositor alemán. La canción apareció por primera vez en el álbum de 1967 de Sinatra The World We Knew y fue lanzada como sencillo más tarde ese año. "The World We Knew (Over and Over)" alcanzó el puesto número treinta en la lista Billboard Hot 100 en septiembre de 1967. [1] En la lista de escucha fácil de Billboard, pasó cinco semanas en el número uno, y fue el sexto y último sencillo de Sinatra en encabezar esa lista. [2] Charles Aznavour adaptó la canción al francés para Paul Mauriat y Mireille Mathieu llamada "Un monde avec toi". [3] Fred Bongusto adaptó la canción al italiano llamada "Ore D'Amore". Josh Groban versionó la canción en su álbum "Harmony". --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/radioflowok/message

A German composer, arranger, and orchestra conductor of the Golden Days of Radio.

En este episodio nos rendimos ante la trompeta de Herb Alpert. Su estilo marcó una época con el característico sonido de su trompeta, imitada a la vez que inimitable. Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass definieron la música popular de los 60, y en los Estados Unidos tuvieron tanto o más éxito que los mismísimos Beatles. Evolucionó en los años 80 del siglo XX hacia el Smooth Jazz y, desde entonces, su carrera en solitario ha continuado hasta la actualidad. No podemos cubrir su enorme legado musical al frente de la compañía discográfica A&M. Herb Alpert es uno de los grandes de la musca popular contemporánea presente en la banda sonora de nuestras vidas. Comenzamos con una interpretación de Al Hirt de una composición de Bert Kaempfert. Seguimos con Sam Cooke en una composición de Alpert. Sobrevolamos los años 60 de Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, haciendo una parada en los 70s con The Carpenters, para llegar a los discos en solitario de los 80. Volvemos con Sergio Mendes a los 60 y cerramos el episodio con algunos de sus últimos trabajos acompañado de Lani Hall. Salud y larga vida, maestro.

Sumner welcomes the UK's most famous TV-presenting wine connoisseur, supercharged bon viveur Olly Smith (star of BBC One's mighty Saturday Kitchen) to Hard Agree. Sumner & Olly have a wide-ranging positivity-bomb conversation that covers Olly's relationship with music, playing the French Horn, meeting Mike Rutherford of Genesis, Bert Kaempfert, Barenaked Ladies, Iggy Pop's Post Pop Depression Tour, Tom Petty, the life-threatening brilliance of Condorman, the wonder of airports, lovely restaurants, fine architecture, the beauty of London, the ongoing success of Saturday Kitchen, Olly's relationship with co-presenter Matt Tebbutt, his friendship with James Bond legend Roger Moore, his epic celebrity-laden podcast A Glass With… and - of course – some fantastic wine recommendations. Check out Olly's website: https://www.ollysmith.com/ Listen to A Glass With… https://www.aglasswith.com/ Follow Olly on Social Media: https://twitter.com/jollyolly Follow Sumner on Social Media:http://twitter.com/sumnarr “Golden – The Hard Agree Theme” written and recorded for the podcast by DENIO Follow DENIO on Social Media:http://facebook.com/denioband/http://soundcloud.com/denioband/http://twitter.com/denioband/http://instagram.com/denioband/ Follow the Spoilerverse on Social Media:http://facebook.com/spoilercountry/http://twitter.com/spoiler_countryhttp://instagram.com/spoilercountry/ Kenric Regan:http://twitter.com/XKenricX John Horsley:http://twitter.com/y2clhttp://instagram.com/y2cl/http://y2cl.nethttp://eynesanthology.com Did you know the Spoilerverse has a YouTube channel?https://youtube.com/channel/UCstl1UHQVUC85DrCagF-wuQ Support the Spoilerverse on Patreon:http://patreon.com/spoilercountry

The best of Bert Kaempfert

Трек-лист: 1. Chassol – ‘Holiday For Reich’ 2. Ennio Morricone – ‘Tette E Antenne, Tetti E Gonne’ (From La Smagliatura) 3. Ray Conniff – ‘Midnight Blue’ 4. Kim Trio – ‘Goodbye To You’ 5. Thomas Dutronc – ‘La Dernière Séance’ (feat. Eddy Mitchell) 6. Ben E. King – ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ 7. Marvin Gaye – ‘Purple Snowflakes’ 8. Mark Lanegan – ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ 9. Calexico – ‘Glory’s Hope’ 10. Chet Baker – ‘Silent Night’ 11. Seal – ‘My Funny Valentine’ 12. Bee Gees – ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ (D0CT0RS0UL Valentine Re-Therapy) 13. George Michael – ‘December Song’ 14. Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra – ‘I’ll Get By’ (As Long As I Have You) 15. Richard Clayderman – ‘Something Stupid’

Трек-лист: 1. Chassol – ‘Holiday For Reich’ 2. Ennio Morricone – ‘Tette E Antenne, Tetti E Gonne’ (From La Smagliatura) 3. Ray Conniff – ‘Midnight Blue’ 4. Kim Trio – ‘Goodbye To You’ 5. Thomas Dutronc – ‘La Dernière Séance’ (feat. Eddy Mitchell) 6. Ben E. King – ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ 7. Marvin Gaye – ‘Purple Snowflakes’ 8. Mark Lanegan – ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ 9. Calexico – ‘Glory’s Hope’ 10. Chet Baker – ‘Silent Night’ 11. Seal – ‘My Funny Valentine’ 12. Bee Gees – ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ (D0CT0RS0UL Valentine Re-Therapy) 13. George Michael – ‘December Song’ 14. Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra – ‘I’ll Get By’ (As Long As I Have You) 15. Richard Clayderman – ‘Something Stupid’

Praktisch jeder auf der Welt kennt seine Hits, aber dass er ein Hamburger Jung war, weiß kaum einer. Von Bert Kaempfert ist die Rede. Er war Komponist. Arrangeur, Produzent und Bandleader. Ein Mann, der die Musikwelt mindestens genauso stark beeinflusst hat wie die Beatles, die Rolling Stones und Elvis Presley. "Die Gitarre und das Meer", "Wonderland by Night", "Spanish Eyes" - einige der Evergreens aus der Feder Kaempferts. Seinen allergrößten Erfolgshit nimmt er am 8. März 1966 für die LP "A Man Could Get Killed" auf: Der Titel "Strangers in the Night" wird einer der größten Hits von Frank Sinatra und macht auch Kaempfert weltberühmt. Von den Amerikanern wird er von da an nur noch "Mr. Hitmaker" genannt.

9pm - 10pm including music from Diana Krall with The Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, Woody Herman Orchestra with a Doors classic, Bert Kaempfert and so much more!

This week there are two episodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of “Love Me Do”. 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 “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. 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…)

This week there are two episodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of “Love Me Do”. 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 “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. 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…)

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of “Love Me Do”. 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 “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. 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 Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. While there are many books on the Beatles, and I have read dozens of them, only one needs to be mentioned as a reference for this episode (others will be used for others). All These Years Vol 1: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn is simply the *only* book worth reading on the Beatles’ career up to the end of 1962. It is the most detailed, most accurate, biography imaginable, and the gold standard by which all other biographies of musicians should be measured. I only wish volumes two and three were available already so I could not expect my future episodes on the Beatles to be obsolete when they do come out. There are two versions of the book — a nine-hundred page mass-market version and a 1700-page expanded edition. I recommend the latter. The information in this podcast is almost all from Lewisohn’s book, but I must emphasise that the opinions are mine, and so are any errors — Lewisohn’s book only has one error that I’m aware of (a joke attributed to the comedian Jasper Carrott in a footnote that has since been traced to an earlier radio show). I am only mortal, and so have doubtless misunderstood or oversimplified things and introduced errors where he had none.   The single version of “Love Me Do” can be found on Past Masters, a 2-CD compilation of the Beatles’ non-album tracks that includes the majority of their singles and B-sides. The version with Andy White playing on can be found on Please Please Me. The version with Pete Best, and many of the other early tracks used here, is on Anthology 1.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I pronounce the name of Lewisohn’s book as “All Those Years” instead of “All These Years”. I say ” The Jets hadn’t liked playing at Williams’ club” at one point. I meant “at Koschmider’s club”   Transcript   The Beatles came closer than most people realise to never making a record. Until the publication of Mark Lewisohn’s seminal biography All These Years vol 1: Tune In, in 2013 everyone thought they knew the true story — John met Paul at Woolton Village Fete in 1957, and Paul joined the Quarrymen, who later became the Beatles. They played Hamburg and made a demo, and after the Beatles’ demo was turned down by Decca, their manager Brian Epstein shopped it around every record label without success, until finally George Martin heard the potential in it and signed them to Parlophone, a label which was otherwise known for comedy records. Martin was, luckily, the one producer in the whole of the UK who could appreciate the Beatles’ music, and he signed them up, and the rest was history. The problem is, as Lewisohn showed, that’s not what happened. Today I’m going to tell, as best I can the story of how the Beatles actually became the band that they became, and how they got signed to EMI records. I’m going to tell you the story of “Love Me Do”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Love Me Do (single version)”] As I mentioned at the beginning, this episode owes a *huge* debt to Mark Lewisohn’s book. I like to acknowledge my sources, anyway, but I’ve actually had difficulty with this episode because Lewisohn’s book is *so* detailed, *so* full, and written *so* well that much of the effort in writing this episode came from paring down the information, rather than finding more, and from reworking things so I was not just paraphrasing bits of his writing. Normally I rely on many sources, and integrate the material myself, but Lewisohn has done all that work far better than any other biographer of any other musician. Were the Beatles not such an important part of music history, I would just skip this episode because there is nothing for me to add. As it is, I *obviously* have to cover this, but I almost feel like I’m cheating in doing so. If you find this episode interesting at all, please do yourself a favour and buy that book.  This episode is going to be a long one — much longer than normal. I won’t know the precise length until after I’ve recorded and edited it, of course, but I’m guessing it’s going to be about ninety minutes. This is the hundredth episode, the end of the second year of the podcast, the end of the second book based on the podcast, and the introduction of the single most important band in the whole story, so I’m going to stretch out a bit. I should also mention that there are a couple of discussions of sudden, traumatic, deaths in this episode. With all that said, settle in, this is going to take a while. Every British act we’ve looked at so far — and many of those we’re going to look at in the next year or two — was based in London. Either they grew up there, or they moved there before their musical career really took off. The Beatles, during the time we’re covering in this episode, were based in Liverpool. While they did eventually move to London, it wasn’t until after they’d started having hits. And what listeners from outside the UK might not realise is what that means in terms of attitudes and perceptions. Liverpool is a large city — it currently has a population of around half a million, and the wider Liverpool metropolitan area is closer to two million — but like all British cities other than London, it was regarded largely as a joke in the British media, and so in return the people of Liverpool had a healthy contempt for London. To give Americans some idea of how London dominates in Britain, and thus how it’s thought of outside London, imagine that New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles were all the same city — that the financial, media, and political centres of the country were all the same place. Now further imagine that Silicon Valley and all the Ivy League universities were half an hour’s drive from that city. Now, imagine how much worse the attitudes that that city would have about so-called “flyover states” would be, and imagine in return how people in large Midwestern cities like Detroit or Chicago would think about that big city.  In this analogy, Liverpool is Detroit, and like Detroit, it was very poor and had produced a few famous musicians, most notably Billy Fury, who was from an impoverished area of Liverpool called the Dingle: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, “Halfway to Paradise”] But Fury had, of course, moved to London to have his career. That’s what you did. But in general, Liverpool, if people in London thought of it at all, was thought of as a provincial backwater full of poor people, many of them Irish, and all of them talking with a ridiculous accent. Liverpool was ignored by London, and that meant that things could develop there out of sight. The story of the Beatles starts in the 1950s, with two young men in their mid-teens. John Winston Lennon was born in 1940, and had had a rather troubled childhood. His father had been a merchant seaman who had been away in the war, and his parents’ relationship had deteriorated for that and other reasons. As a result, Lennon had barely known his father, and when his mother met another man, Lennon’s aunt, Mary Smith, who he always called Mimi, had taken him in, believing that his mother “living in sin” would be a bad influence on the young boy. The Smith family were the kind of lower middle class family that seemed extremely rich to the impoverished families in Liverpool, but were not well off by any absolute standard. Mimi, in particular, was torn between two very different urges. On one hand, she had strongly bohemian, artistic, urges — as did all of her sisters. She was a voracious reader, and a lover of art history, and encouraged these tendencies in John. But at the same time, she was of that class which has a little status, but not much security, and so she was extremely wary of the need to appear respectable. This tension between respectability and rebellion was something that would appear in many of the people who Lennon later worked with, such as Brian Epstein and George Martin, and it was something that Lennon would always respond to — those people would be the only ones who Lennon would ever view as authority figures he could respect, though he would also resent them at times. And it might be that combination of rebellion and respectability that Lennon saw in Paul McCartney. McCartney was from a family who, in the Byzantine world of the British class system of the time, were a notch or so lower than the Smith family who raised Lennon, but he was academically bright, and his family had big plans for him — they thought that it might even be possible that he might become a teacher if he worked very hard at school. McCartney was a far less openly rebellious person than Lennon was, but he was still just as caught up in the music and fashions of the mid-fifties that his father associated with street gangs and hooliganism. Lennon, like many teenagers in Britain at the time, had had his life changed when he first heard Elvis Presley, and he had soon become a rock and roll obsessive — Elvis was always his absolute favourite, but he also loved Little Richard, who he thought was almost as good, and he admired Buddy Holly, who had a special place in Lennon’s heart as Holly wore glasses on stage, something that Lennon, who was extremely short-sighted, could never bring himself to do, but which at least showed him that it was a possibility. Lennon was, by his mid-teens, recreating a relationship with his mother, and one of the things they bonded over was music — she taught him how to play the banjo, and together they worked out the chords to “That’ll Be the Day”, and Lennon later switched to the guitar, playing banjo chords on five of the six strings.  Like many, many, teenagers of the time, Lennon also formed a skiffle group, which he called the Quarrymen, after a line in his school song. The group tended to have a rotating lineup, but Lennon was the unquestioned leader. The group had a repertoire consisting of the same Lonnie Donegan songs that every other skiffle group was playing, plus any Elvis and Buddy Holly songs that could sound reasonable with a lineup of guitars, teachest bass, and washboard. The moment that changed the history of the music, though, came on July the sixth, 1957, when Ivan Vaughan, a friend of Lennon’s, invited his friend Paul McCartney to go and see the Quarry Men perform at Woolton Village Fete. That day has gone down in history as “the day John met Paul”, although Mark Lewisohn has since discovered that Lennon and McCartney had briefly met once before. It is, though, the day on which Lennon and McCartney first impressed each other musically. McCartney talks about being particularly impressed that the Quarry Men’s lead singer was changing the lyrics to the songs he was performing, making up new words when he forgot the originals — he says in particular that he remembers Lennon singing “Come Go With Me” by the Del-Vikings: [Excerpt: The Del-Vikings, “Come Go With Me”] McCartney remembers Lennon as changing the lyrics to “come go with me, right down to the penitentiary”, and thinking that was clever. Astonishingly, some audio recording actually exists of the Quarry Men’s second performance that day — they did two sets, and this second one comes just after Lennon met McCartney rather than just before. The recording only seems to exist in a very fragmentary form, which has snatches of Lennon singing “Baby Let’s Play House” and Lonnie Donegan’s hit “Puttin’ on the Style”, which was number one on the charts at the time, but that even those fragments have survived, given how historic a day this was, is almost miraculous: [Excerpt: The Quarrymen, “Puttin’ on the Style”] After the first set, Lennon met McCartney, who was nearly two years younger, but a more accomplished musician — for a start, he knew how to tune the guitar with all six strings, and to proper guitar tuning, rather than tuning five strings like a banjo. Lennon and his friends were a little nonplussed by McCartney holding his guitar upside-down at first — McCartney is left-handed — but despite having an upside-down guitar with the wrong tuning, McCartney managed to bash out a version of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty-Flight Rock”, a song he would often perform in later decades when reminding people of this story: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty-Flight Rock”] This was impressive to Lennon for three reasons. The first was that McCartney was already a strong, confident performer — he perhaps seemed a little more confident than he really was, showing off in front of the bigger boys like this. The second was that “Twenty-Flight Rock” was a moderately obscure song — it hadn’t charted, but it *had* appeared in The Girl Can’t Help It, a film which every rock and roll lover in Britain had watched at the cinema over and over. Choosing that song rather than, say, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, was a way of announcing a kind of group affiliation — “I am one of you, I am a real rock and roll fan, not just a casual listener to what’s in the charts”. I stress that second point because it’s something that’s very important in the history of the Beatles generally — they were *music fans*, and often fans of relatively obscure records. That’s something that bound Lennon and McCartney, and later the other members, together from the start, and something they always noted about other musicians. They weren’t the kind of systematic scholars who track down rare pressings and memorise every session musician’s name, but they were constantly drawn to find the best new music, and to seek it out wherever they could. But the most impressive thing for Lennon — and one that seems a little calculated on McCartney’s part, though he’s never said that he thought about this that I’m aware of — was that this was an extremely wordy song, and McCartney *knew all the words*. Remember that McCartney had noticed Lennon forgetting the words to a song with lyrics as simple as “come, come, come, come, come into my heart/Tell me darling we will never part”, and here’s McCartney singing this fast-paced, almost patter song, and getting the words right.  From the beginning, McCartney was showing how he could complement Lennon — if Lennon could impress McCartney by improvising new lyrics when he forgot the old ones, then McCartney could impress Lennon by remembering the lyrics that Lennon couldn’t — and by writing them down for Lennon, sharing his knowledge freely. McCartney went on to show off more, and in particular impressed Lennon by going to a piano and showing off his Little Richard imitation. Little Richard was the only serious rival to Elvis in Lennon’s affections, and McCartney could do a very decent imitation of him. This was someone special, clearly. But this put Lennon in a quandary. McCartney was clearly far, far, better than any of the Quarry Men — at least Lennon’s equal, and light years ahead of the rest of them. Lennon had a choice — invite this young freak of nature into his band, and improve the band dramatically, but no longer be the unquestioned centre of the group, or remain in absolute control but not have someone in the group who *knew the words* and *knew how to tune a guitar*, and other such magical abilities that no mere mortals had. Those who only know of Lennon from his later reputation as a massive egoist would be surprised, but he decided fairly quickly that he had to make the group better at his own expense. He invited McCartney to join the group, and McCartney said yes. Over the next few months the membership of the Quarry Men changed. They’d been formed while they were all at Quarry Bank Grammar School, but that summer Lennon moved on to art school. I’m going to have to talk about the art school system, and the British education system of the fifties and early sixties a lot over the next few months, but here’s an extremely abbreviated and inaccurate version that’s good enough for now. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen, people in Britain — at least those without extremely rich parents, who had a different system — went to two kinds of school depending on the result of an exam they took aged eleven, which was based on some since-discredited eugenic research about children’s potential. If you passed the exam, you were considered academically apt, and went to a grammar school, which was designed to filter you through to university and the professions. If you failed the exam, you went to a secondary modern, which was designed to give you the skills to get a trade and make a living working with your hands. And for the most part, people followed the pipeline that was set up for them. You go to grammar school, go to university, become a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher. You go to secondary modern, leave school at fourteen, become a plumber or a builder or a factory worker. But there are always those people who don’t properly fit into the neat categories that the world tries to put them in. And for people in their late teens and early twenties, people who’d been through the school system but not been shaped properly by it, there was another option at this time. If you were bright and creative, but weren’t suited for university because you’d failed your exams, you could go to art school. The supposed purpose of the art schools was to teach people to do commercial art, and they would learn skills like lettering and basic draughtsmanship. But what the art schools really did was give creative people space to explore ideas, to find out about areas of art and culture that would otherwise have been closed to them. Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Ian Dury, Ray Davies, Bryan Ferry, Syd Barrett, and many more people we’ll be seeing over the course of this story went to art school, and as David Bowie would put it later, the joke at the time was that you went to art school to learn to play blues guitar. With Lennon and his friends all moving on from the school that had drawn them together, the group stabilised for a time on a lineup of Lennon, McCartney, Colin Hanton, Len Garry, and Eric Griffiths. But the first time this version of the group played live, while McCartney sang well, he totally fluffed his lead guitar lines on stage. While there were three guitarists in the band at this point, they needed someone who could play lead fluently and confidently on stage. Enter George Harrison, who had suddenly become a close friend of McCartney. Harrison went to the same school as McCartney — a grammar school called the Liverpool Institute, but was in the year below McCartney, and so the two had always been a bit distant. However, at the same time as Lennon was moving on to art school after failing his exams, McCartney was being kept back a year for failing Latin — which his father always thought was deliberate, so he wouldn’t have to go to university. Now he was in the same year at school as Harrison, and they started hanging out together. The two bonded strongly over music, and would do things like take a bus journey to another part of town, where someone lived who they heard owned a copy of “Searchin'” by the Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Searchin'”] The two knocked on this stranger’s door, asked if he’d play them this prized record, and he agreed — and then they stole it from him as they left his house. Another time they took the bus to another part of town again, because they’d heard that someone in that part of town knew how to play a B7 chord on his guitar, and sat there as he showed them. So now the Quarrymen needed a lead guitarist, McCartney volunteered his young mate. There are a couple of stories about how Harrison came to join the band — apparently he auditioned for Lennon at least twice, because Lennon was very unsure about having such a young kid in his band — but the story I like best is that Harrison took his guitar to a Quarry Men gig at Wilson Hall — he’d apparently often take his guitar to gigs and just see if he could sit in with the bands. On the bill with the Quarry Men was another group, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, who were generally regarded as the best skiffle band in Liverpool. Lennon told Harrison that he could join the band if he could play as well as Clayton, and Harrison took out his guitar and played “Raunchy”: [Excerpt: Bill Justis, “Raunchy”] I like this story rather than the other story that the members would tell later — that Harrison played “Raunchy” on a bus for Lennon — for one reason. The drummer in the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group was one Richy Starkey, and if it happened that way, the day that George joined the Quarry Men was also the day that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were all in the same place for the first time. George looked up to John and essentially idolised him, though Lennon thought of him as a little annoying at times — he’d follow John everywhere, and not take a hint when he wasn’t wanted sometimes, just eager to be with his big cool new mate. But despite this tiny bit of tension, John, Paul, and George quickly became a solid unit — helped by the fact that the school that Paul and George went to was part of the same complex of buildings as Lennon’s art college, so they’d all get the bus there and back together.  George was not only younger, he was a notch or two further down the social class ladder than John or Paul, and he spoke more slowly, which made him seem less intelligent. He came from Speke, which was a rougher area, and he would dress even more like a juvenile delinquent than the others. Meanwhile, Len Garry and Eric Griffiths left the group — Len Garry because he became ill and had to spend time in hospital, and anyway they didn’t really need a teachest bass. What they did need was an electric bass, and since they had four guitars now they tried to persuade Eric to get one, but he didn’t want to pay that much money, and he was always a little on the outside of the main three members, as he didn’t share their sense of humour. So the group got Nigel Walley, who was acting as the group’s manager, to fire him. The group was now John, Paul, and George all on guitars, and Colin Hanton on drums. Sometimes, if they played a venue that had a piano, they’d also bring along a schoolfriend of Paul’s, John “Duff” Lowe, to play piano. Meanwhile, the group were growing in other ways. Both John and Paul had started writing songs, together and apart. McCartney seems to have been the first, writing a song called “I Lost My Little Girl” which he would eventually record more than thirty years later: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “I Lost My Little Girl”] Lennon’s first song likewise sang about a little girl, this time being “Hello, Little Girl”. By the middle of 1958, this five-piece group was ready to cut their first record — at a local studio that would cut a single copy of a disc for you. They went into this studio at some time around July 1958, and recorded two songs. The first was their version of “That’ll Be the Day”: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, “That’ll be the Day”] The B-side was a song that McCartney had written, with a guitar solo that George had come up with, so the label credit read “McCartney/Harrison”. “In Spite of All the Danger” seems to have been inspired by Elvis’ “Trying to Get to You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trying to Get to You”] It’s a rough song, but a good attempt for a teenager who had only just started writing songs: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, “In Spite of All the Danger”] Apparently Lowe and Hanton hadn’t heard the song before they started playing, but they make a decent enough fist of it in the circumstances. Lennon took the lead even though it was McCartney’s song — he said later “I was such a bully in those days I didn’t even let Paul sing his own song.” That was about the last time that this lineup of Quarry Men played together. In July, the month that seems likely for the recording, Lowe finished at the Liverpool Institute, and so he drifted away from McCartney and Harrison. Meanwhile Hanton had a huge row with the others after a show, and they fell out and never spoke again. The Quarry Men were reduced to a trio of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. But — possibly the very day after that recording if an unreliable plaque at the studio where they recorded it is to be believed — something happened which was to have far more impact on the group than the drummer leaving. John Lennon’s mother, with whom he’d slowly been repairing his relationship, had called round to visit Mimi. She left the house, and bumped into Nigel Walley, who was calling round to see John. She told him he wasn’t there, and that he could walk with her to the bus stop. They walked a little while, then went off in different directions. Walley heard a thump and turned round — Julia Lennon had been hit by a car and killed instantly. As you can imagine, John’s mother dying caused him a huge amount of distress, but it also gave him a bond with McCartney, whose own mother had died of cancer shortly before they met. Neither really spoke about it to each other, and to the extent they did it was with ultra-cynical humour — but the two now shared something deeper than just the music, even though the music itself was deep enough. Lennon became a much harder, nastier, person after this, at least for a time, his natural wit taking on a dark edge, and he would often drink too much and get aggressive. But life still went on, and John, Paul, and George kept trying to perform — though the gigs dried up, and they didn’t have a drummer any more. They’d just say “the rhythm’s in the guitars” when asked why they didn’t have one. They were also no longer the Quarry Men — they didn’t have a name. At one point late in the year, they also only had two guitars between the three of them — Lennon seems to have smashed his in a fit of fury after his mother’s death. But he stole one backstage at a talent contest, and soon they were back to having three. That talent show was one run by Carroll Levis, who we talked about before in the episode on “Shakin’ All Over”. The three boys went on Levis’ show, this time performing as Johnny & The Moondogs —  in Manchester, at the Hippodrome in Ancoats, singing Buddy Holly’s “Think it Over”: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “Think it Over”] Lennon sang lead with his arms draped over the shoulders of Paul and George, who sang backing vocals and played guitar. They apparently did quite well, but had to leave before the show finished to get the last train back to Liverpool, and so never found out whether the audience would have made them the winner, with the possibility of a TV appearance. They did well enough, though, to impress a couple of other young lads on the bill, two Manchester singers named Allan Clarke and Graham Nash. But in general, the Japage Three, a portmanteau of their names that they settled on as their most usual group name at this point, played very little in 1959 — indeed, George spent much of the early part of the year moonlighting in the Les Stewart Quartet, another group, though he still thought of Lennon and McCartney as his musical soulmates; the Les Stewart Quartet were just a gig.  The three of them would spend much of their time at the Jacaranda, a coffee bar opened by a Liverpool entrepreneur, Allan Williams, in imitation of the 2is, which was owned by a friend of his. Lennon was also spending a lot of time with an older student at his art school, Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the few people in the world that Lennon himself looked up to. The Les Stewart Quartet would end up indirectly being key to the Beatles’ development, because after one of their shows at a local youth club they were approached by a woman named Mona Best. Mona’s son Pete liked to go to the youth club, but she was fairly protective of him, and also wanted him to have more friends — he was a quiet boy who didn’t make friends easily. So she’d hit upon a plan — she’d open her own club in her cellar, since the Best family were rich enough to have a big house. If there was a club *in Pete’s house* he’d definitely make lots of friends. They needed a band, and she asked the Les Stewart Quartet if they’d like to be the resident band at this new club, the Casbah, and also if they’d like to help decorate it.  They said yes, but then Paul and George went on a hitch-hiking holiday around Wales for a few days, and George didn’t get back in time to play a gig the quartet had booked. Ken Brown, the other guitarist, didn’t turn up either, and Les Stewart got into a rage and split the group. Suddenly, the Casbah had no group — George and Ken were willing to play, but neither was a lead singer — and no decorators either. So George roped in John and Paul, who helped decorate the place, and with the addition of Ken Brown, the group returned to the Quarry Men name for their regular Saturday night gig at the Casbah. The group had no bass player or drummer, and they all kept pestering everyone they knew to get a bass or a drum kit, but nobody would bite. But then Stuart Sutcliffe got half a painting in an exhibition put on by John Moores, the millionaire owner of Littlewoods, who was a big patron of the arts in Liverpool. I say he got half a painting in the exhibition, because the painting was done on two large boards — Stuart and his friends took the first half of the painting down to the gallery, went back to get the other half, and got distracted by the pub and never brought it. But Moores was impressed enough with the abstract painting that he bought it at the end of the exhibition’s run, for ninety pounds — about two thousand pounds in today’s money. And so Stuart’s friends gave him a choice — he could either buy a bass or a drum kit, either would be fine. He chose the bass. But the same week that Stuart joined, Ken Brown was out, and they lost their gig at the Casbah. John, Paul, George and Ken had turned up one Saturday, and Ken hadn’t felt well, so instead of performing he just worked on the door. At the end of the show, Mona Best insisted on giving Ken an equal share of the money, as agreed. John, Paul, and George wouldn’t stand for that, and so Ken was out of the group, and they were no longer playing for Mona Best. Stuart joining the group caused tensions — George was fine with him, thinking that a bass player who didn’t yet know how to play was better than no bass player at all, but Paul was much less keen. Partly this was because he thought the group needed to get better, which would be hard with someone who couldn’t play, but also he was getting jealous of Sutcliffe’s closeness to Lennon, especially when the two became flatmates. But John wanted him in the group, and what John wanted, he got. There are recordings of the group around this time that circulate — only one has been released officially, a McCartney instrumental called “Cayenne”, but the others are out there if you look: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, “Cayenne”] The gigs had dried up again, but they did have one new advantage — they now had a name they actually liked. John and Stuart had come up with it, inspired by Buddy Holly’s Crickets. They were going to be Beatles, with an a. Shortly after the Beatles’ first appearance under that name, at the art school student union, came the Liverpool gig which was to have had Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent headlining, before Cochran died. A lot of Liverpool groups were booked to play on the bill there, but not the Beatles — though Richy Starkey was going to play the gig, with his latest group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Allan Williams, the local promoter, added extra groups to fill out the bill, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, and suddenly everyone who loved rock and roll in Liverpool realised that there were others out there like them. Overnight, a scene had been born. And where there’s a scene, there’s money to be made. Larry Parnes, who had been the national promoter of the tour, was at the show and realised that there were a lot of quite proficient musicians in Liverpool. And it so happened that he needed backing bands for three of his artists who were going on tour, separately — two minor stars, Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle, and one big star, Billy Fury. And both Gentle and Fury were from Liverpool themselves. So Parnes asked Allan Williams to set up auditions with some of the local groups. Williams invited several groups, and one he asked along was the Beatles, largely because Lennon and Sutcliffe begged him. He also found them a drummer, Tommy Moore, who was a decade older than the rest of them — though Moore didn’t turn up to the audition because he had to work, and so Johnny “Hutch” Hutchinson of Cass and the Cassanovas sat in with them, much to Hutch’s disgust — he hated the Beatles, and especially Lennon.  Cass of the Cassanovas also insisted that “the Beatles” was a stupid name, and that the group needed to be Something and the Somethings, and he suggested Long John and the Silver Beatles, and that stuck for a couple of shows before they reverted to their proper name. The Beatles weren’t chosen for any of the main tours that were being booked, but then Parnes phoned Williams up — there were some extra dates on the Johnny Gentle tour that he hadn’t yet booked a group for. Could Williams find him a band who could be in Scotland that Friday night for a nine-day tour? Williams tried Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, but none of them could go on tour at such short notice. They all had gigs booked, or day jobs they had to book time off with. The Beatles had no gigs booked, and only George had a day job, and he didn’t mind just quitting that. They were off to Scotland. They were so inspired by being on tour with a Larry Parnes artist that most of them took on new names just like those big stars — George became Carl Harrison, after Carl Perkins, Stuart became Stuart de Staël, after his favourite painter, and Paul became Paul Ramon, which he thought sounded mysterious and French. There’s some question about whether John took on a new name — some sources have him becoming “Long John”, while others say he was “Johnny” Lennon rather than John. Tommy Moore, meanwhile, was just Thomas Moore. It was on this tour, of course, that Lennon helped Johnny Gentle write “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”, which we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Darren Young, “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”] The tour was apparently fairly miserable, with horrible accommodation, poor musicianship from the group, and everyone getting on everyone’s nerves — George and Stuart got into fistfights, John bullied Stuart a bit because of his poor playing, and John particularly didn’t get on well with Moore — a man who was a decade older, didn’t share their taste in music, and worked in a factory rather than having the intellectual aspirations of the group. The two hated each other by the end of the tour. But the tour did also give the group the experience of signing autographs, and of feeling like stars in at least a minor way. When they got back to Liverpool, George moved in with John and Stuart, to get away from his mum telling him to get a proper job, and they got a few more bookings thanks to Williams, but they soon became drummerless — they turned up to a gig one time to find that Tommy Moore wasn’t there. They went round to his house, and his wife shouted from an upstairs window, “Yez can piss off, he’s had enough of yez and gone back to work at the bottle factory”. The now four-piece group carried on, however, and recordings exist of them in this period, sounding much more professional than only a few months before, including performances of some of their own songs. The most entertaining of these is probably “You’ll Be Mine”, an Ink Spots parody with some absurd wordplay from Lennon: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “You’ll Be Mine”] Soon enough the group found another drummer, Norm Chapman, and carried on as before, getting regular bookings thanks to Williams. There was soon a temporary guest at the flat John, Stuart, and George shared with several other people — Royston Ellis, the Beat poet and friend of the Shadows, had turned up in Liverpool and latched on to the group, partly because he fancied George. He performed with them a couple of times, crashed at the flat, and provided them with two formative experiences — he gave them their first national press, talking in Record and Show Mirror about how he wanted them to be his full-time group, and he gave them their first drug experience, showing them how to get amphetamines out of inhalers. While the group’s first national press was positive, there was soon some very negative press indeed associated with them. A tabloid newspaper wanted to do a smear story about the dangerous Beatnik menace. The article talked about how “they revel in filth”, and how beatniks were “a dangerous menace to our young people… a corrupting influence of drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies”. And for some reason — it’s never been made clear exactly how — the beatnik “pad” they chose to photograph for this story was the one that John, Stuart, and George lived in, though they weren’t there at the time — several of their friends and associates are in the pictures though. They were all kicked out of their flat, and moved back in with their families, and around this time they lost Chapman from the group too — he was called up to do his National Service, one of the last people to be conscripted before conscription ended for good. They were back to a four-piece again, and for a while Paul was drumming. But then, as seems to have happened so often with this group, a bizarre coincidence happened. A while earlier, Allan Williams had travelled to Hamburg, with the idea of trying to get Liverpool groups booked there. He’d met up with Bruno Koschmider, the owner of a club called the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider had liked the idea, but nothing had come of it, partly because neither could speak the other’s language well. A little while later, Koschmider had remembered the idea and come over to the UK to find musicians. He didn’t remember where Williams was from, so of course he went to London, to the 2is, and there he found a group of musicians including Tony Sheridan, who we talked about back in the episode on “Brand New Cadillac”, the man who’d been Vince Taylor’s lead guitarist and had a minor solo career: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why?”] Sheridan was one of the most impressive musicians in Britain, but he also wanted to skip the country — he’d just bought a guitar on credit in someone else’s name, and he also had a wife and six-month-old baby he wanted rid of. He eagerly went off with Koschmider, and a scratch group called the Jets soon took up residence at the Kaiserkeller. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Derry and the Seniors were annoyed. Larry Parnes had booked them for a tour, but then he’d got annoyed at the unprofessionalism of the Liverpool bands he was booking and cancelled the booking, severing his relationship with Williams. The Seniors wanted to know what Williams was going to do about it.  There was no way to get them enough gigs in Liverpool, so Williams, being a thoroughly decent man who had a sense of obligation, offered to drive the group down to London to see if they could get work there. He took them to the 2is, and they were allowed to get up and play there, since Williams was a friend of the owner. And Bruno Koschmider was there. The Jets hadn’t liked playing at Williams’ club, and they’d scarpered to another one with better working conditions, which they helped get off the ground and renamed the Top Ten, after Vince Taylor’s club in London. So Bruno had come back to find another group, and there in the same club at the same time was the man who’d given him the idea in the first place, with a group. Koschmider immediately signed up Derry and the Seniors to play at the Kaiserkeller.  Meanwhile, the best gig the Beatles could get, also through Williams, was backing a stripper, where they played whatever instrumentals they knew, no matter how inappropriate, things like the theme from The Third Man: [Excerpt: Anton Karas, “Theme from The Third Man”] A tune guaranteed to get the audience into a sexy mood, I’m sure you’ll agree. But then Allan Williams got a call from Koschmider. Derry and the Seniors were doing great business, and he’d decided to convert another of his clubs to be a rock and roll club. Could Williams have a group for him by next Friday? Oh, and it needed to be five people. Williams tried Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They were busy. He tried Cass and the Cassanovas. They were busy. He tried Gerry and the Pacemakers. They were busy. Finally, he tried the Beatles. They weren’t busy, and said yes they could go to Hamburg that week. There were a few minor issues, like there not being five of them, none of them having passports, and them not having a drummer. The passports could be sorted quickly — there’s a passport office in Liverpool — but the lack of a fifth Beatle was more of a problem. In desperation, they turned eventually to Pete Best, Mrs. Best’s son, because they knew he had a drum kit. He agreed.  Allan Williams drove the group to Hamburg, and they started playing six-hour sets every night at the Indra, not finishing til three in the morning, at which point they’d make their way to their lodgings — the back of a filthy cinema.  By this time, the Beatles had already got good — Howie Casey, of Derry and the Seniors, who’d remembered the Beatles as being awful at the Johnny Gentle audition, came over to see them and make fun of them, but found that they were far better than they had been. But playing six hours a night got them *very* good *very* quickly — especially as they decided that they weren’t going to play the same song twice in a night, meaning they soon built up a vast repertoire. But right from the start, there was a disconnect between Pete Best and the other four — they socialised together, and he went off on his own. He was also a weak player — he was only just starting to learn — and so the rest of the group would stamp their feet to keep him in time. That, though, also gave them a bit more of a stage act than they might otherwise have had. There are lots of legendary stories about the group’s time in Hamburg, and it’s impossible to sort fact from fiction, and the bits we can sort out would get this podcast categorised as adult content, but they were teenagers, away from home for a long period for the first time, living in a squalid back room in the red light district of a city with a reputation for vice. I’m sure whatever you imagine is probably about right. After a relatively short time, they were moved from the Indra, which had to stop putting on rock and roll shows, to the Kaiserkeller, where they shared the bill with Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, up to that point considered Liverpool’s best band. There’s a live recording of the Hurricanes from 1960, which shows that they were certainly powerful: [Excerpt: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, “Brand New Cadillac”] That recording doesn’t have the Hurricanes’ normal drummer on, who was sick for that show. But compared to what the Beatles had become — a stomping powerhouse with John Lennon, whose sense of humour was both cruel and pointed, doing everything he could to get a rise out of the audience — they were left in the dust. A letter home that George Harrison wrote sums it up — “Rory Storm & the Hurricanes came out here the other week, and they are crumby. He does a bit of dancing around but it still doesn’t make up for his phoney group. The only person who is any good in the group is the drummer.” That drummer was Richy Starkey from the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, now performing as Ringo Starr. They struck up a friendship, and even performed together at least once — John, Paul, George, and Ringo acting as the backing group for Lu Walters of the Hurricanes on a demo, which is frustratingly missing and hasn’t been heard since. They were making other friends, too. There was Tony Sheridan, who they’d seen on TV, but who would now sometimes jam with them as equals. And there was a trio of arty bohemian types who had stumbled across the club, where they were very out of place — Astrid Kirscherr, Klaus Voormann, and Jurgen Vollmer. They all latched on to the Beatles, and especially to Stuart, who soon started dating Astrid, despite her speaking no English and him speaking no German. But relations between Koschmider and the Beatles had worsened, and he reported to the police that George, at only seventeen, was under-age. George got deported. The rest of the group decided to move over to the Top Ten Club, and as a parting gift, Paul and Pete nailed some condoms to their bedroom wall and set fire to them. Koschmider decided to report this to the police as attempted arson, and those two were deported as well. John followed a week later, while Stuart stayed in Hamburg for a while, to spend more time with Astrid, who he planned to marry. The other four regrouped, getting in a friend, Chas Newby, as a temporary bass player while Stuart was away. And on the twenty-seventh of December, 1960, when they played Litherland Town Hall, they changed the Liverpool music scene. They were like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the audience didn’t dance — they just rushed to the stage, to be as close to the performance as possible. The Beatles had become the best band in Liverpool. Mark Lewisohn goes further, and suggests that the three months of long nights playing different songs in Hamburg had turned them into the single most experienced rock band *in the world* — which seems vanishingly unlikely to me, but Lewisohn is not a man given to exaggeration. By this time, Mona Best had largely taken over the group’s bookings, and there were a lot of them, as well as a regular spot at the Casbah. Neil Aspinall, a friend of Pete’s, started driving them to gigs, while they also had a regular MC, Bob Wooler, who ran many local gigs, and who gave the Beatles their own theme music — he’d introduce them with the fanfare from Rossini’s William Tell Overture: [Excerpt: Rossini, “William Tell Overture”] Stuart came over from Hamburg in early January, and once again the Beatles were a five-piece — and by now, he could play quite well, well enough, at any rate, that it didn’t destroy the momentum the group had gathered. The group were getting more and more bookings, including the venue that would become synonymous with them, the Cavern, a tiny little warehouse cellar that had started as a jazz club, and that the Quarry Men had played once a couple of years earlier, but had been banned from for playing too much rock and roll. Now, the Beatles were getting bookings at the Cavern’s lunchtime sessions, and that meant more than it seemed. Most of the gigs they played otherwise were on the outskirts of the city, but the Cavern was in the city centre. And that meant that for the lunchtime sessions, commuters from outside the city were coming to see them — which meant that the group got fans from anywhere within commuting distance, fans who wanted them to play in their towns. Meanwhile, the group were branching out musically — they were particularly becoming fascinated by the new R&B, soul, and girl-group records that were coming out in the US. After already having loved “Money” by Barrett Strong, John was also obsessed with the Miracles, and would soon become a fervent fan of anything Motown, and the group were all big fans of the Shirelles. As they weren’t playing original material live, and as every group would soon learn every other group’s best songs, there was an arms race on to find the most exciting songs to cover. As well as Elvis and Buddy and Eddie, they were now covering the Shirelles and Ray Charles and Gary US Bonds. The group returned to Hamburg in April, Paul and Pete’s immigration status having been resolved and George now having turned eighteen, and started playing at the Top Ten club, where they played even longer sets, and more of them, than they had at the Kaiserkeller and the Indra. Tony Sheridan started regularly joining them on stage at this time, and Paul switched to piano while Sheridan added the third guitar. This was also when they started using Preludin, a stimulant related to amphetamines which was prescribed as a diet drug — Paul would take one pill a night, George a couple, and John would gobble them down. But Pete didn’t take them — one more way in which he was different from the others — and he started having occasional micro-sleeps in the middle of songs as the long nights got to him, much to the annoyance of the rest of the group. But despite Pete’s less than stellar playing they were good enough that Sheridan — the single most experienced musician in the British rock and roll scene — described them as the best R&B band he’d ever heard. Once they were there, they severed their relationship with Allan Williams, refusing to pay him his share of the money, and just cutting him out of their careers.  Meanwhile, Stuart was starting to get ill. He was having headaches all the time, and had to miss shows on occasion. He was also the only Beatle with a passion for anything else, and he managed to get a scholarship to study art with the famous sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who was now working in Hamburg. Paul subbed for Stuart on bass, and eventually Stuart left the group, though on good terms with everyone other than Paul. So it was John, Paul, George and Pete who ended up making the Beatles’ first records. Bert Kaempfert, the most important man in the German music industry, had been to see them all at the Top Ten and liked what he saw. Outside Germany, Kaempfert was probably best known for co-writing Elvis’ “Wooden Heart”, which the Beatles had in their sets at this time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Kaempfert had signed Tony Sheridan to a contract, and he wanted the Beatles to back him in the studio — and he was also interested in recording a couple of tracks with them on their own. The group eagerly agreed, and their first session started at eight in the morning on the twenty-second of June 1961, after they had finished playing all night at the club, and all of them but Pete were on Preludin for the session. Stuart came along for moral support, but didn’t play. Pete was a problem, though. He wasn’t keeping time properly, and Kaempfert eventually insisted on removing his bass drum and toms, leaving only a snare, hi-hat, and ride cymbal for Pete to play. They recorded seven songs at that session in total. Two of them were just by the Beatles. One was a version of “Ain’t She Sweet”, an old standard which Gene Vincent had recorded fairly recently, but the other was the only track ever credited to Lennon and Harrison as cowriters. On their first trip to Hamburg, they’d wanted to learn “Man of Mystery” by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Man of Mystery”] But there was a slight problem in that they didn’t have a copy of the record, and had never heard it — it came out in the UK while they were in Germany. So they asked Rory Storm to hum it for them. He hummed a few notes, and Lennon and Harrison wrote a parody of what Storm had sung, which they named “Beatle Bop” but by this point they’d renamed “Cry For a Shadow”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Cry For a Shadow”] The other five songs at the session were given over to Tony Sheridan, with the Beatles backing him, and the song that Kaempfert was most interested in recording was one the group had been performing on stage — a rocked-up version of the old folk song “My Bonnie”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, “My Bonnie”] That was the record chosen as the single, but it was released not as by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, but by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers — “Beatles”, to German ears, sounded a little like “piedels”, a childish slang term for penises. The Beatles had made their first record, but it wasn’t one they thought much of. They knew they could do better. The next week, the now four-piece Beatles returned to Liverpool, with much crying at Stuart staying behind — even Paul, now Stuart was no longer a threat for John’s attention, was contrite and tried to make amends to him.  On their return to Liverpool, they picked up where they had left off, playing almost every night, and spending the days trying to find new records — often listening to the latest releases at NEMS, a department store with an extensive record selection. Brian Epstein, the shop’s manager, prided himself on being able to get any record a customer wanted, and whenever anyone requested anything he’d buy a second copy for the shelves. As a result, you could find records there that you wouldn’t get anywhere else in Liverpool, and the Beatles were soon adding more songs by the Shirelles and Gary US Bonds to their sets, as well as more songs by the Coasters and Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me”. They were playing gigs further afield, and Neil Aspinall was now driving them everywhere. Aspinall was Pete Best’s closest friend — and was having an affair with Pete’s mother — but unlike Pete himself he also became close to the other Beatles, and would remain so for the rest of his life.  By this point, the group were so obviously the best band on the Liverpool scene that they were starting to get bored — there was no competition. And by this point it really was a proper scene — John’s old art school friend Bill Harry had started up a magazine, Mersey Beat, which may be the first magazine anywhere in the world to focus on one area’s local music scene. Brian Epstein from NEMS had a column, as did Bob Wooler, and often John’s humorous writing would appear as well. The Beatles were featured in most issues — although Paul McCartney’s name was misspelled almost every time it appeared — and not just because Lennon and Harry were friends. By this point there were the Beatles, and there were all the other groups in the area. For several months this continued — they learned new songs, they played almost every day, and they continued to be the best. They started to find it boring. The one big change that came at this point was when John and Paul went on holiday to Paris, saw Vince Taylor, bumped into their friend Jurgen from Hamburg, and got Jurgen to do their hair like his — the story we told in the episode on “Brand New Cadillac”. They now had the Beatles haircut, though they were still wearing leather. When they got back, George copied their new style straight away, but Pete decided to leave his hair in a quiff. There was nowhere else to go without a manager to look after them. They needed management — and they found it because of “My Bonnie”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, “My Bonnie”] “My Bonnie” was far from a great record, but it was what led to everything that followed. The Beatles had mentioned from the stage at the Cavern that they had a record out, and a young man named Raymond Jones walked into NEMS and asked for a copy of it. Brian Epstein couldn’t find it in the record company catalogues, and asked Jones for more information — Jones explained that they were a Liverpool group, but the record had come out in Germany. A couple of days later, two young girls came into the shop asking for the same record, and now Epstein was properly intrigued — in his view, if *two* people asked for a record, that probably meant a lot more than just two people wanted it. He decided to check these Beatles out for himself. Epstein was instantly struck by the group, and this has led to a lot of speculation over the years, because his tastes ran more to Sibelius than to Little Richard. As Epstein was also gay, many people have assumed that the attraction was purely physical. And it might well have been, at least in part, but the suggestion that everything that followed was just because of that seems unlikely — Epstein was also someone who had a long interest in the arts, and had trained as an actor at RADA, the most prestigious actors’ college in the UK, before taking up his job at the family store. Given that the Beatles were soon to become the most popular musicians in the history of the world, and were already the most popular musicians in the Liverpool area, the most reasonable assumption must be that Epstein was impressed by the same things that impressed roughly a billion other people over the next sixty years. Epstein started going to the Cavern regularly, to watch the Beatles and to make plans — the immaculately dressed, public-school-educated, older rich man stood out among the crowd, and the Beatles already knew his face from his record shop, and so they knew something was going on. By late November, Brian had managed to obtain a box of twenty-five copies of “My Bonnie”, and they’d sold out within hours. He set up a meeting with the Beatles, and even before he got them signed to a management contract he was using his contacts with the record industry in London to push the Beatles at record companies. Those companies listened to Brian, because NEMS was one of their biggest customers. December 1961, the month they signed with Brian Epstein, was also the month that they finally started including Lennon/McCartney songs in their sets.  And within a couple of weeks of becoming their manager, even before he’d signed them to a contract, Brian had managed to persuade Mike Smith, an A&R man from Decca, to come to the Cavern to see the group in person. He was impressed, and booked them in for a studio session. December 61 was also the first time that John, Paul, George, and Ringo played together in that lineup, without any other musicians, when on the twenty-seventh of December Pete called in sick for a show, and the others got in their friend to cover for him. It wouldn’t be the last time they would play together. On New Year’s Day 1962, the Beatles made the trek down to London to record fifteen songs at the Decca studios. The session was intended for two purposes — to see if they sounded as good on tape as they did in the Cavern, and if they did to produce their first single. Those recordings included the core of their Cavern repertoire, songs like “Money”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Money (Decca version)”] They also recorded three Lennon/McCartney songs, two by Paul — “Love of the Loved” and “Like Dreamers Do”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Like Dreamers Do”] And one by Lennon — “Hello Little Girl”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Hello Little Girl”] And they were Lennon/McCartney songs, even though they were written separately — the two agreed that they were going to split the credit on anything either of them wrote. The session didn’t go well — the group’s equipment wasn’t up to standard and they had to use studio amps, and they’re all audibly nervous — but Mike Smith was still fairly confident that they’d be releasing something through Decca — he just had to work out the details with his boss, Dick Rowe. Meanwhile, the group were making other changes. Brian suggested that they could get more money if they wore suits, and so they agreed — though they didn’t want just any suits, they wanted stylish mohair suits, like the black American groups they loved so much.  The Beatles were now a proper professional group — but unfortunately, Decca turned them down. Dick Rowe, Mike Smith’s boss, didn’t think that electric guitars were going to become a big thing — he was very tuned in to the American trends, and nothing with guitars was charting at the time. Smith was considering two groups — the Beatles, and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and wanted to sign both. Rowe told him that he could sign one, but only one, of them. The Tremeloes had been better in the studio, and they lived round the corner from Smith and were friendly with him. There was no contest — much as Smith wanted to sign both groups, the Tremeloes were the better prospect. Rowe did make an offer to Epstein: if Epstein would pay a hundred pounds (a *lot* of money in those days), Tony Meehan, formerly of the Shadows, would produce the group in another session, and Decca would release that. Brian wasn’t interested — if the Beatles were going to make a record, they were going to make it with people who they weren’t having to pay for the privilege. John, Paul, and George were devastated, but for their own reasons they didn’t bother to tell Pete they’d been turned down. But they did have a tape of themselves, at least — a professional-quality recording that they could use to attract other labels. And their career was going forward in other ways. The same day Brian had his second meeting with Decca, they had an audition with the BBC in Manchester, where they were accepted to perform on Teenager’s Turn, a radio programme hosted by the Northern Dance Orchestra. A few weeks later, on the seventh of March, they went to Manchester to record four songs in front of an audience, of which three would be broadcast: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Please Mr. Postman (Teenager’s Turn)”] That recording of John singing “Please Mr. Postman” is historic for another reason, which shows just how on the cutting edge of musical taste the Beatles actually were — it was the first time ever that a Motown song was played on the BBC. Now we get to the part of the story that, before Mark Lewisohn’s work in his book a few years back, had always been shrouded in mystery. What Lewisohn shows is that George Ma

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of "Love Me Do". 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 "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and the Deltones. 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 Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. While there are many books on the Beatles, and I have read dozens of them, only one needs to be mentioned as a reference for this episode (others will be used for others). All These Years Vol 1: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn is simply the *only* book worth reading on the Beatles' career up to the end of 1962. It is the most detailed, most accurate, biography imaginable, and the gold standard by which all other biographies of musicians should be measured. I only wish volumes two and three were available already so I could not expect my future episodes on the Beatles to be obsolete when they do come out. There are two versions of the book -- a nine-hundred page mass-market version and a 1700-page expanded edition. I recommend the latter. The information in this podcast is almost all from Lewisohn's book, but I must emphasise that the opinions are mine, and so are any errors -- Lewisohn's book only has one error that I'm aware of (a joke attributed to the comedian Jasper Carrott in a footnote that has since been traced to an earlier radio show). I am only mortal, and so have doubtless misunderstood or oversimplified things and introduced errors where he had none.   The single version of "Love Me Do" can be found on Past Masters, a 2-CD compilation of the Beatles' non-album tracks that includes the majority of their singles and B-sides. The version with Andy White playing on can be found on Please Please Me. The version with Pete Best, and many of the other early tracks used here, is on Anthology 1.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I pronounce the name of Lewisohn's book as "All Those Years" instead of "All These Years". I say " The Jets hadn't liked playing at Williams' club" at one point. I meant "at Koschmider's club"   Transcript   The Beatles came closer than most people realise to never making a record. Until the publication of Mark Lewisohn's seminal biography All These Years vol 1: Tune In, in 2013 everyone thought they knew the true story -- John met Paul at Woolton Village Fete in 1957, and Paul joined the Quarrymen, who later became the Beatles. They played Hamburg and made a demo, and after the Beatles' demo was turned down by Decca, their manager Brian Epstein shopped it around every record label without success, until finally George Martin heard the potential in it and signed them to Parlophone, a label which was otherwise known for comedy records. Martin was, luckily, the one producer in the whole of the UK who could appreciate the Beatles' music, and he signed them up, and the rest was history. The problem is, as Lewisohn showed, that's not what happened. Today I'm going to tell, as best I can the story of how the Beatles actually became the band that they became, and how they got signed to EMI records. I'm going to tell you the story of "Love Me Do": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love Me Do (single version)"] As I mentioned at the beginning, this episode owes a *huge* debt to Mark Lewisohn's book. I like to acknowledge my sources, anyway, but I've actually had difficulty with this episode because Lewisohn's book is *so* detailed, *so* full, and written *so* well that much of the effort in writing this episode came from paring down the information, rather than finding more, and from reworking things so I was not just paraphrasing bits of his writing. Normally I rely on many sources, and integrate the material myself, but Lewisohn has done all that work far better than any other biographer of any other musician. Were the Beatles not such an important part of music history, I would just skip this episode because there is nothing for me to add. As it is, I *obviously* have to cover this, but I almost feel like I'm cheating in doing so. If you find this episode interesting at all, please do yourself a favour and buy that book.  This episode is going to be a long one -- much longer than normal. I won't know the precise length until after I've recorded and edited it, of course, but I'm guessing it's going to be about ninety minutes. This is the hundredth episode, the end of the second year of the podcast, the end of the second book based on the podcast, and the introduction of the single most important band in the whole story, so I'm going to stretch out a bit. I should also mention that there are a couple of discussions of sudden, traumatic, deaths in this episode. With all that said, settle in, this is going to take a while. Every British act we've looked at so far -- and many of those we're going to look at in the next year or two -- was based in London. Either they grew up there, or they moved there before their musical career really took off. The Beatles, during the time we're covering in this episode, were based in Liverpool. While they did eventually move to London, it wasn't until after they'd started having hits. And what listeners from outside the UK might not realise is what that means in terms of attitudes and perceptions. Liverpool is a large city -- it currently has a population of around half a million, and the wider Liverpool metropolitan area is closer to two million -- but like all British cities other than London, it was regarded largely as a joke in the British media, and so in return the people of Liverpool had a healthy contempt for London. To give Americans some idea of how London dominates in Britain, and thus how it's thought of outside London, imagine that New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles were all the same city -- that the financial, media, and political centres of the country were all the same place. Now further imagine that Silicon Valley and all the Ivy League universities were half an hour's drive from that city. Now, imagine how much worse the attitudes that that city would have about so-called "flyover states" would be, and imagine in return how people in large Midwestern cities like Detroit or Chicago would think about that big city.  In this analogy, Liverpool is Detroit, and like Detroit, it was very poor and had produced a few famous musicians, most notably Billy Fury, who was from an impoverished area of Liverpool called the Dingle: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, "Halfway to Paradise"] But Fury had, of course, moved to London to have his career. That's what you did. But in general, Liverpool, if people in London thought of it at all, was thought of as a provincial backwater full of poor people, many of them Irish, and all of them talking with a ridiculous accent. Liverpool was ignored by London, and that meant that things could develop there out of sight. The story of the Beatles starts in the 1950s, with two young men in their mid-teens. John Winston Lennon was born in 1940, and had had a rather troubled childhood. His father had been a merchant seaman who had been away in the war, and his parents' relationship had deteriorated for that and other reasons. As a result, Lennon had barely known his father, and when his mother met another man, Lennon's aunt, Mary Smith, who he always called Mimi, had taken him in, believing that his mother "living in sin" would be a bad influence on the young boy. The Smith family were the kind of lower middle class family that seemed extremely rich to the impoverished families in Liverpool, but were not well off by any absolute standard. Mimi, in particular, was torn between two very different urges. On one hand, she had strongly bohemian, artistic, urges -- as did all of her sisters. She was a voracious reader, and a lover of art history, and encouraged these tendencies in John. But at the same time, she was of that class which has a little status, but not much security, and so she was extremely wary of the need to appear respectable. This tension between respectability and rebellion was something that would appear in many of the people who Lennon later worked with, such as Brian Epstein and George Martin, and it was something that Lennon would always respond to -- those people would be the only ones who Lennon would ever view as authority figures he could respect, though he would also resent them at times. And it might be that combination of rebellion and respectability that Lennon saw in Paul McCartney. McCartney was from a family who, in the Byzantine world of the British class system of the time, were a notch or so lower than the Smith family who raised Lennon, but he was academically bright, and his family had big plans for him -- they thought that it might even be possible that he might become a teacher if he worked very hard at school. McCartney was a far less openly rebellious person than Lennon was, but he was still just as caught up in the music and fashions of the mid-fifties that his father associated with street gangs and hooliganism. Lennon, like many teenagers in Britain at the time, had had his life changed when he first heard Elvis Presley, and he had soon become a rock and roll obsessive -- Elvis was always his absolute favourite, but he also loved Little Richard, who he thought was almost as good, and he admired Buddy Holly, who had a special place in Lennon's heart as Holly wore glasses on stage, something that Lennon, who was extremely short-sighted, could never bring himself to do, but which at least showed him that it was a possibility. Lennon was, by his mid-teens, recreating a relationship with his mother, and one of the things they bonded over was music -- she taught him how to play the banjo, and together they worked out the chords to "That'll Be the Day", and Lennon later switched to the guitar, playing banjo chords on five of the six strings.  Like many, many, teenagers of the time, Lennon also formed a skiffle group, which he called the Quarrymen, after a line in his school song. The group tended to have a rotating lineup, but Lennon was the unquestioned leader. The group had a repertoire consisting of the same Lonnie Donegan songs that every other skiffle group was playing, plus any Elvis and Buddy Holly songs that could sound reasonable with a lineup of guitars, teachest bass, and washboard. The moment that changed the history of the music, though, came on July the sixth, 1957, when Ivan Vaughan, a friend of Lennon's, invited his friend Paul McCartney to go and see the Quarry Men perform at Woolton Village Fete. That day has gone down in history as "the day John met Paul", although Mark Lewisohn has since discovered that Lennon and McCartney had briefly met once before. It is, though, the day on which Lennon and McCartney first impressed each other musically. McCartney talks about being particularly impressed that the Quarry Men's lead singer was changing the lyrics to the songs he was performing, making up new words when he forgot the originals -- he says in particular that he remembers Lennon singing "Come Go With Me" by the Del-Vikings: [Excerpt: The Del-Vikings, "Come Go With Me"] McCartney remembers Lennon as changing the lyrics to "come go with me, right down to the penitentiary", and thinking that was clever. Astonishingly, some audio recording actually exists of the Quarry Men's second performance that day -- they did two sets, and this second one comes just after Lennon met McCartney rather than just before. The recording only seems to exist in a very fragmentary form, which has snatches of Lennon singing "Baby Let's Play House" and Lonnie Donegan's hit "Puttin' on the Style", which was number one on the charts at the time, but that even those fragments have survived, given how historic a day this was, is almost miraculous: [Excerpt: The Quarrymen, "Puttin' on the Style"] After the first set, Lennon met McCartney, who was nearly two years younger, but a more accomplished musician -- for a start, he knew how to tune the guitar with all six strings, and to proper guitar tuning, rather than tuning five strings like a banjo. Lennon and his friends were a little nonplussed by McCartney holding his guitar upside-down at first -- McCartney is left-handed -- but despite having an upside-down guitar with the wrong tuning, McCartney managed to bash out a version of Eddie Cochran's "Twenty-Flight Rock", a song he would often perform in later decades when reminding people of this story: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Twenty-Flight Rock"] This was impressive to Lennon for three reasons. The first was that McCartney was already a strong, confident performer -- he perhaps seemed a little more confident than he really was, showing off in front of the bigger boys like this. The second was that "Twenty-Flight Rock" was a moderately obscure song -- it hadn't charted, but it *had* appeared in The Girl Can't Help It, a film which every rock and roll lover in Britain had watched at the cinema over and over. Choosing that song rather than, say, "Be-Bop-A-Lula", was a way of announcing a kind of group affiliation -- "I am one of you, I am a real rock and roll fan, not just a casual listener to what's in the charts". I stress that second point because it's something that's very important in the history of the Beatles generally -- they were *music fans*, and often fans of relatively obscure records. That's something that bound Lennon and McCartney, and later the other members, together from the start, and something they always noted about other musicians. They weren't the kind of systematic scholars who track down rare pressings and memorise every session musician's name, but they were constantly drawn to find the best new music, and to seek it out wherever they could. But the most impressive thing for Lennon -- and one that seems a little calculated on McCartney's part, though he's never said that he thought about this that I'm aware of -- was that this was an extremely wordy song, and McCartney *knew all the words*. Remember that McCartney had noticed Lennon forgetting the words to a song with lyrics as simple as "come, come, come, come, come into my heart/Tell me darling we will never part", and here's McCartney singing this fast-paced, almost patter song, and getting the words right.  From the beginning, McCartney was showing how he could complement Lennon -- if Lennon could impress McCartney by improvising new lyrics when he forgot the old ones, then McCartney could impress Lennon by remembering the lyrics that Lennon couldn't -- and by writing them down for Lennon, sharing his knowledge freely. McCartney went on to show off more, and in particular impressed Lennon by going to a piano and showing off his Little Richard imitation. Little Richard was the only serious rival to Elvis in Lennon's affections, and McCartney could do a very decent imitation of him. This was someone special, clearly. But this put Lennon in a quandary. McCartney was clearly far, far, better than any of the Quarry Men -- at least Lennon's equal, and light years ahead of the rest of them. Lennon had a choice -- invite this young freak of nature into his band, and improve the band dramatically, but no longer be the unquestioned centre of the group, or remain in absolute control but not have someone in the group who *knew the words* and *knew how to tune a guitar*, and other such magical abilities that no mere mortals had. Those who only know of Lennon from his later reputation as a massive egoist would be surprised, but he decided fairly quickly that he had to make the group better at his own expense. He invited McCartney to join the group, and McCartney said yes. Over the next few months the membership of the Quarry Men changed. They'd been formed while they were all at Quarry Bank Grammar School, but that summer Lennon moved on to art school. I'm going to have to talk about the art school system, and the British education system of the fifties and early sixties a lot over the next few months, but here's an extremely abbreviated and inaccurate version that's good enough for now. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen, people in Britain -- at least those without extremely rich parents, who had a different system -- went to two kinds of school depending on the result of an exam they took aged eleven, which was based on some since-discredited eugenic research about children's potential. If you passed the exam, you were considered academically apt, and went to a grammar school, which was designed to filter you through to university and the professions. If you failed the exam, you went to a secondary modern, which was designed to give you the skills to get a trade and make a living working with your hands. And for the most part, people followed the pipeline that was set up for them. You go to grammar school, go to university, become a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher. You go to secondary modern, leave school at fourteen, become a plumber or a builder or a factory worker. But there are always those people who don't properly fit into the neat categories that the world tries to put them in. And for people in their late teens and early twenties, people who'd been through the school system but not been shaped properly by it, there was another option at this time. If you were bright and creative, but weren't suited for university because you'd failed your exams, you could go to art school. The supposed purpose of the art schools was to teach people to do commercial art, and they would learn skills like lettering and basic draughtsmanship. But what the art schools really did was give creative people space to explore ideas, to find out about areas of art and culture that would otherwise have been closed to them. Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Ian Dury, Ray Davies, Bryan Ferry, Syd Barrett, and many more people we'll be seeing over the course of this story went to art school, and as David Bowie would put it later, the joke at the time was that you went to art school to learn to play blues guitar. With Lennon and his friends all moving on from the school that had drawn them together, the group stabilised for a time on a lineup of Lennon, McCartney, Colin Hanton, Len Garry, and Eric Griffiths. But the first time this version of the group played live, while McCartney sang well, he totally fluffed his lead guitar lines on stage. While there were three guitarists in the band at this point, they needed someone who could play lead fluently and confidently on stage. Enter George Harrison, who had suddenly become a close friend of McCartney. Harrison went to the same school as McCartney -- a grammar school called the Liverpool Institute, but was in the year below McCartney, and so the two had always been a bit distant. However, at the same time as Lennon was moving on to art school after failing his exams, McCartney was being kept back a year for failing Latin -- which his father always thought was deliberate, so he wouldn't have to go to university. Now he was in the same year at school as Harrison, and they started hanging out together. The two bonded strongly over music, and would do things like take a bus journey to another part of town, where someone lived who they heard owned a copy of "Searchin'" by the Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Searchin'"] The two knocked on this stranger's door, asked if he'd play them this prized record, and he agreed -- and then they stole it from him as they left his house. Another time they took the bus to another part of town again, because they'd heard that someone in that part of town knew how to play a B7 chord on his guitar, and sat there as he showed them. So now the Quarrymen needed a lead guitarist, McCartney volunteered his young mate. There are a couple of stories about how Harrison came to join the band -- apparently he auditioned for Lennon at least twice, because Lennon was very unsure about having such a young kid in his band -- but the story I like best is that Harrison took his guitar to a Quarry Men gig at Wilson Hall -- he'd apparently often take his guitar to gigs and just see if he could sit in with the bands. On the bill with the Quarry Men was another group, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, who were generally regarded as the best skiffle band in Liverpool. Lennon told Harrison that he could join the band if he could play as well as Clayton, and Harrison took out his guitar and played "Raunchy": [Excerpt: Bill Justis, "Raunchy"] I like this story rather than the other story that the members would tell later -- that Harrison played "Raunchy" on a bus for Lennon -- for one reason. The drummer in the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group was one Richy Starkey, and if it happened that way, the day that George joined the Quarry Men was also the day that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were all in the same place for the first time. George looked up to John and essentially idolised him, though Lennon thought of him as a little annoying at times -- he'd follow John everywhere, and not take a hint when he wasn't wanted sometimes, just eager to be with his big cool new mate. But despite this tiny bit of tension, John, Paul, and George quickly became a solid unit -- helped by the fact that the school that Paul and George went to was part of the same complex of buildings as Lennon's art college, so they'd all get the bus there and back together.  George was not only younger, he was a notch or two further down the social class ladder than John or Paul, and he spoke more slowly, which made him seem less intelligent. He came from Speke, which was a rougher area, and he would dress even more like a juvenile delinquent than the others. Meanwhile, Len Garry and Eric Griffiths left the group -- Len Garry because he became ill and had to spend time in hospital, and anyway they didn't really need a teachest bass. What they did need was an electric bass, and since they had four guitars now they tried to persuade Eric to get one, but he didn't want to pay that much money, and he was always a little on the outside of the main three members, as he didn't share their sense of humour. So the group got Nigel Walley, who was acting as the group's manager, to fire him. The group was now John, Paul, and George all on guitars, and Colin Hanton on drums. Sometimes, if they played a venue that had a piano, they'd also bring along a schoolfriend of Paul's, John "Duff" Lowe, to play piano. Meanwhile, the group were growing in other ways. Both John and Paul had started writing songs, together and apart. McCartney seems to have been the first, writing a song called "I Lost My Little Girl" which he would eventually record more than thirty years later: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "I Lost My Little Girl"] Lennon's first song likewise sang about a little girl, this time being "Hello, Little Girl". By the middle of 1958, this five-piece group was ready to cut their first record -- at a local studio that would cut a single copy of a disc for you. They went into this studio at some time around July 1958, and recorded two songs. The first was their version of "That'll Be the Day": [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, "That'll be the Day"] The B-side was a song that McCartney had written, with a guitar solo that George had come up with, so the label credit read "McCartney/Harrison". "In Spite of All the Danger" seems to have been inspired by Elvis' "Trying to Get to You": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Trying to Get to You"] It's a rough song, but a good attempt for a teenager who had only just started writing songs: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, "In Spite of All the Danger"] Apparently Lowe and Hanton hadn't heard the song before they started playing, but they make a decent enough fist of it in the circumstances. Lennon took the lead even though it was McCartney's song -- he said later "I was such a bully in those days I didn’t even let Paul sing his own song." That was about the last time that this lineup of Quarry Men played together. In July, the month that seems likely for the recording, Lowe finished at the Liverpool Institute, and so he drifted away from McCartney and Harrison. Meanwhile Hanton had a huge row with the others after a show, and they fell out and never spoke again. The Quarry Men were reduced to a trio of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. But -- possibly the very day after that recording if an unreliable plaque at the studio where they recorded it is to be believed -- something happened which was to have far more impact on the group than the drummer leaving. John Lennon's mother, with whom he'd slowly been repairing his relationship, had called round to visit Mimi. She left the house, and bumped into Nigel Walley, who was calling round to see John. She told him he wasn't there, and that he could walk with her to the bus stop. They walked a little while, then went off in different directions. Walley heard a thump and turned round -- Julia Lennon had been hit by a car and killed instantly. As you can imagine, John's mother dying caused him a huge amount of distress, but it also gave him a bond with McCartney, whose own mother had died of cancer shortly before they met. Neither really spoke about it to each other, and to the extent they did it was with ultra-cynical humour -- but the two now shared something deeper than just the music, even though the music itself was deep enough. Lennon became a much harder, nastier, person after this, at least for a time, his natural wit taking on a dark edge, and he would often drink too much and get aggressive. But life still went on, and John, Paul, and George kept trying to perform -- though the gigs dried up, and they didn't have a drummer any more. They'd just say "the rhythm's in the guitars" when asked why they didn't have one. They were also no longer the Quarry Men -- they didn't have a name. At one point late in the year, they also only had two guitars between the three of them -- Lennon seems to have smashed his in a fit of fury after his mother's death. But he stole one backstage at a talent contest, and soon they were back to having three. That talent show was one run by Carroll Levis, who we talked about before in the episode on "Shakin' All Over". The three boys went on Levis' show, this time performing as Johnny & The Moondogs --  in Manchester, at the Hippodrome in Ancoats, singing Buddy Holly's "Think it Over": [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Think it Over"] Lennon sang lead with his arms draped over the shoulders of Paul and George, who sang backing vocals and played guitar. They apparently did quite well, but had to leave before the show finished to get the last train back to Liverpool, and so never found out whether the audience would have made them the winner, with the possibility of a TV appearance. They did well enough, though, to impress a couple of other young lads on the bill, two Manchester singers named Allan Clarke and Graham Nash. But in general, the Japage Three, a portmanteau of their names that they settled on as their most usual group name at this point, played very little in 1959 -- indeed, George spent much of the early part of the year moonlighting in the Les Stewart Quartet, another group, though he still thought of Lennon and McCartney as his musical soulmates; the Les Stewart Quartet were just a gig.  The three of them would spend much of their time at the Jacaranda, a coffee bar opened by a Liverpool entrepreneur, Allan Williams, in imitation of the 2is, which was owned by a friend of his. Lennon was also spending a lot of time with an older student at his art school, Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the few people in the world that Lennon himself looked up to. The Les Stewart Quartet would end up indirectly being key to the Beatles' development, because after one of their shows at a local youth club they were approached by a woman named Mona Best. Mona's son Pete liked to go to the youth club, but she was fairly protective of him, and also wanted him to have more friends -- he was a quiet boy who didn't make friends easily. So she'd hit upon a plan -- she'd open her own club in her cellar, since the Best family were rich enough to have a big house. If there was a club *in Pete's house* he'd definitely make lots of friends. They needed a band, and she asked the Les Stewart Quartet if they'd like to be the resident band at this new club, the Casbah, and also if they'd like to help decorate it.  They said yes, but then Paul and George went on a hitch-hiking holiday around Wales for a few days, and George didn't get back in time to play a gig the quartet had booked. Ken Brown, the other guitarist, didn't turn up either, and Les Stewart got into a rage and split the group. Suddenly, the Casbah had no group -- George and Ken were willing to play, but neither was a lead singer -- and no decorators either. So George roped in John and Paul, who helped decorate the place, and with the addition of Ken Brown, the group returned to the Quarry Men name for their regular Saturday night gig at the Casbah. The group had no bass player or drummer, and they all kept pestering everyone they knew to get a bass or a drum kit, but nobody would bite. But then Stuart Sutcliffe got half a painting in an exhibition put on by John Moores, the millionaire owner of Littlewoods, who was a big patron of the arts in Liverpool. I say he got half a painting in the exhibition, because the painting was done on two large boards -- Stuart and his friends took the first half of the painting down to the gallery, went back to get the other half, and got distracted by the pub and never brought it. But Moores was impressed enough with the abstract painting that he bought it at the end of the exhibition's run, for ninety pounds -- about two thousand pounds in today's money. And so Stuart's friends gave him a choice -- he could either buy a bass or a drum kit, either would be fine. He chose the bass. But the same week that Stuart joined, Ken Brown was out, and they lost their gig at the Casbah. John, Paul, George and Ken had turned up one Saturday, and Ken hadn't felt well, so instead of performing he just worked on the door. At the end of the show, Mona Best insisted on giving Ken an equal share of the money, as agreed. John, Paul, and George wouldn't stand for that, and so Ken was out of the group, and they were no longer playing for Mona Best. Stuart joining the group caused tensions -- George was fine with him, thinking that a bass player who didn't yet know how to play was better than no bass player at all, but Paul was much less keen. Partly this was because he thought the group needed to get better, which would be hard with someone who couldn't play, but also he was getting jealous of Sutcliffe's closeness to Lennon, especially when the two became flatmates. But John wanted him in the group, and what John wanted, he got. There are recordings of the group around this time that circulate -- only one has been released officially, a McCartney instrumental called "Cayenne", but the others are out there if you look: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, "Cayenne"] The gigs had dried up again, but they did have one new advantage -- they now had a name they actually liked. John and Stuart had come up with it, inspired by Buddy Holly's Crickets. They were going to be Beatles, with an a. Shortly after the Beatles' first appearance under that name, at the art school student union, came the Liverpool gig which was to have had Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent headlining, before Cochran died. A lot of Liverpool groups were booked to play on the bill there, but not the Beatles -- though Richy Starkey was going to play the gig, with his latest group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Allan Williams, the local promoter, added extra groups to fill out the bill, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, and suddenly everyone who loved rock and roll in Liverpool realised that there were others out there like them. Overnight, a scene had been born. And where there's a scene, there's money to be made. Larry Parnes, who had been the national promoter of the tour, was at the show and realised that there were a lot of quite proficient musicians in Liverpool. And it so happened that he needed backing bands for three of his artists who were going on tour, separately -- two minor stars, Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle, and one big star, Billy Fury. And both Gentle and Fury were from Liverpool themselves. So Parnes asked Allan Williams to set up auditions with some of the local groups. Williams invited several groups, and one he asked along was the Beatles, largely because Lennon and Sutcliffe begged him. He also found them a drummer, Tommy Moore, who was a decade older than the rest of them -- though Moore didn't turn up to the audition because he had to work, and so Johnny "Hutch" Hutchinson of Cass and the Cassanovas sat in with them, much to Hutch's disgust -- he hated the Beatles, and especially Lennon.  Cass of the Cassanovas also insisted that "the Beatles" was a stupid name, and that the group needed to be Something and the Somethings, and he suggested Long John and the Silver Beatles, and that stuck for a couple of shows before they reverted to their proper name. The Beatles weren't chosen for any of the main tours that were being booked, but then Parnes phoned Williams up -- there were some extra dates on the Johnny Gentle tour that he hadn't yet booked a group for. Could Williams find him a band who could be in Scotland that Friday night for a nine-day tour? Williams tried Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, but none of them could go on tour at such short notice. They all had gigs booked, or day jobs they had to book time off with. The Beatles had no gigs booked, and only George had a day job, and he didn't mind just quitting that. They were off to Scotland. They were so inspired by being on tour with a Larry Parnes artist that most of them took on new names just like those big stars -- George became Carl Harrison, after Carl Perkins, Stuart became Stuart de Staël, after his favourite painter, and Paul became Paul Ramon, which he thought sounded mysterious and French. There's some question about whether John took on a new name -- some sources have him becoming "Long John", while others say he was "Johnny" Lennon rather than John. Tommy Moore, meanwhile, was just Thomas Moore. It was on this tour, of course, that Lennon helped Johnny Gentle write "I've Just Fallen For Someone", which we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Darren Young, "I've Just Fallen For Someone"] The tour was apparently fairly miserable, with horrible accommodation, poor musicianship from the group, and everyone getting on everyone's nerves -- George and Stuart got into fistfights, John bullied Stuart a bit because of his poor playing, and John particularly didn't get on well with Moore -- a man who was a decade older, didn't share their taste in music, and worked in a factory rather than having the intellectual aspirations of the group. The two hated each other by the end of the tour. But the tour did also give the group the experience of signing autographs, and of feeling like stars in at least a minor way. When they got back to Liverpool, George moved in with John and Stuart, to get away from his mum telling him to get a proper job, and they got a few more bookings thanks to Williams, but they soon became drummerless -- they turned up to a gig one time to find that Tommy Moore wasn't there. They went round to his house, and his wife shouted from an upstairs window, "Yez can piss off, he's had enough of yez and gone back to work at the bottle factory". The now four-piece group carried on, however, and recordings exist of them in this period, sounding much more professional than only a few months before, including performances of some of their own songs. The most entertaining of these is probably "You'll Be Mine", an Ink Spots parody with some absurd wordplay from Lennon: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You'll Be Mine"] Soon enough the group found another drummer, Norm Chapman, and carried on as before, getting regular bookings thanks to Williams. There was soon a temporary guest at the flat John, Stuart, and George shared with several other people -- Royston Ellis, the Beat poet and friend of the Shadows, had turned up in Liverpool and latched on to the group, partly because he fancied George. He performed with them a couple of times, crashed at the flat, and provided them with two formative experiences -- he gave them their first national press, talking in Record and Show Mirror about how he wanted them to be his full-time group, and he gave them their first drug experience, showing them how to get amphetamines out of inhalers. While the group's first national press was positive, there was soon some very negative press indeed associated with them. A tabloid newspaper wanted to do a smear story about the dangerous Beatnik menace. The article talked about how "they revel in filth", and how beatniks were "a dangerous menace to our young people… a corrupting influence of drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies". And for some reason -- it's never been made clear exactly how -- the beatnik "pad" they chose to photograph for this story was the one that John, Stuart, and George lived in, though they weren't there at the time -- several of their friends and associates are in the pictures though. They were all kicked out of their flat, and moved back in with their families, and around this time they lost Chapman from the group too -- he was called up to do his National Service, one of the last people to be conscripted before conscription ended for good. They were back to a four-piece again, and for a while Paul was drumming. But then, as seems to have happened so often with this group, a bizarre coincidence happened. A while earlier, Allan Williams had travelled to Hamburg, with the idea of trying to get Liverpool groups booked there. He'd met up with Bruno Koschmider, the owner of a club called the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider had liked the idea, but nothing had come of it, partly because neither could speak the other's language well. A little while later, Koschmider had remembered the idea and come over to the UK to find musicians. He didn't remember where Williams was from, so of course he went to London, to the 2is, and there he found a group of musicians including Tony Sheridan, who we talked about back in the episode on "Brand New Cadillac", the man who'd been Vince Taylor's lead guitarist and had a minor solo career: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, "Why?"] Sheridan was one of the most impressive musicians in Britain, but he also wanted to skip the country -- he'd just bought a guitar on credit in someone else's name, and he also had a wife and six-month-old baby he wanted rid of. He eagerly went off with Koschmider, and a scratch group called the Jets soon took up residence at the Kaiserkeller. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Derry and the Seniors were annoyed. Larry Parnes had booked them for a tour, but then he'd got annoyed at the unprofessionalism of the Liverpool bands he was booking and cancelled the booking, severing his relationship with Williams. The Seniors wanted to know what Williams was going to do about it.  There was no way to get them enough gigs in Liverpool, so Williams, being a thoroughly decent man who had a sense of obligation, offered to drive the group down to London to see if they could get work there. He took them to the 2is, and they were allowed to get up and play there, since Williams was a friend of the owner. And Bruno Koschmider was there. The Jets hadn't liked playing at Williams' club, and they'd scarpered to another one with better working conditions, which they helped get off the ground and renamed the Top Ten, after Vince Taylor's club in London. So Bruno had come back to find another group, and there in the same club at the same time was the man who'd given him the idea in the first place, with a group. Koschmider immediately signed up Derry and the Seniors to play at the Kaiserkeller.  Meanwhile, the best gig the Beatles could get, also through Williams, was backing a stripper, where they played whatever instrumentals they knew, no matter how inappropriate, things like the theme from The Third Man: [Excerpt: Anton Karas, "Theme from The Third Man"] A tune guaranteed to get the audience into a sexy mood, I'm sure you'll agree. But then Allan Williams got a call from Koschmider. Derry and the Seniors were doing great business, and he'd decided to convert another of his clubs to be a rock and roll club. Could Williams have a group for him by next Friday? Oh, and it needed to be five people. Williams tried Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They were busy. He tried Cass and the Cassanovas. They were busy. He tried Gerry and the Pacemakers. They were busy. Finally, he tried the Beatles. They weren't busy, and said yes they could go to Hamburg that week. There were a few minor issues, like there not being five of them, none of them having passports, and them not having a drummer. The passports could be sorted quickly -- there's a passport office in Liverpool -- but the lack of a fifth Beatle was more of a problem. In desperation, they turned eventually to Pete Best, Mrs. Best's son, because they knew he had a drum kit. He agreed.  Allan Williams drove the group to Hamburg, and they started playing six-hour sets every night at the Indra, not finishing til three in the morning, at which point they'd make their way to their lodgings -- the back of a filthy cinema.  By this time, the Beatles had already got good -- Howie Casey, of Derry and the Seniors, who'd remembered the Beatles as being awful at the Johnny Gentle audition, came over to see them and make fun of them, but found that they were far better than they had been. But playing six hours a night got them *very* good *very* quickly -- especially as they decided that they weren't going to play the same song twice in a night, meaning they soon built up a vast repertoire. But right from the start, there was a disconnect between Pete Best and the other four -- they socialised together, and he went off on his own. He was also a weak player -- he was only just starting to learn -- and so the rest of the group would stamp their feet to keep him in time. That, though, also gave them a bit more of a stage act than they might otherwise have had. There are lots of legendary stories about the group's time in Hamburg, and it's impossible to sort fact from fiction, and the bits we can sort out would get this podcast categorised as adult content, but they were teenagers, away from home for a long period for the first time, living in a squalid back room in the red light district of a city with a reputation for vice. I'm sure whatever you imagine is probably about right. After a relatively short time, they were moved from the Indra, which had to stop putting on rock and roll shows, to the Kaiserkeller, where they shared the bill with Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, up to that point considered Liverpool's best band. There's a live recording of the Hurricanes from 1960, which shows that they were certainly powerful: [Excerpt: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, "Brand New Cadillac"] That recording doesn't have the Hurricanes' normal drummer on, who was sick for that show. But compared to what the Beatles had become -- a stomping powerhouse with John Lennon, whose sense of humour was both cruel and pointed, doing everything he could to get a rise out of the audience -- they were left in the dust. A letter home that George Harrison wrote sums it up -- "Rory Storm & the Hurricanes came out here the other week, and they are crumby. He does a bit of dancing around but it still doesn’t make up for his phoney group. The only person who is any good in the group is the drummer." That drummer was Richy Starkey from the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, now performing as Ringo Starr. They struck up a friendship, and even performed together at least once -- John, Paul, George, and Ringo acting as the backing group for Lu Walters of the Hurricanes on a demo, which is frustratingly missing and hasn't been heard since. They were making other friends, too. There was Tony Sheridan, who they'd seen on TV, but who would now sometimes jam with them as equals. And there was a trio of arty bohemian types who had stumbled across the club, where they were very out of place -- Astrid Kirscherr, Klaus Voormann, and Jurgen Vollmer. They all latched on to the Beatles, and especially to Stuart, who soon started dating Astrid, despite her speaking no English and him speaking no German. But relations between Koschmider and the Beatles had worsened, and he reported to the police that George, at only seventeen, was under-age. George got deported. The rest of the group decided to move over to the Top Ten Club, and as a parting gift, Paul and Pete nailed some condoms to their bedroom wall and set fire to them. Koschmider decided to report this to the police as attempted arson, and those two were deported as well. John followed a week later, while Stuart stayed in Hamburg for a while, to spend more time with Astrid, who he planned to marry. The other four regrouped, getting in a friend, Chas Newby, as a temporary bass player while Stuart was away. And on the twenty-seventh of December, 1960, when they played Litherland Town Hall, they changed the Liverpool music scene. They were like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the audience didn't dance -- they just rushed to the stage, to be as close to the performance as possible. The Beatles had become the best band in Liverpool. Mark Lewisohn goes further, and suggests that the three months of long nights playing different songs in Hamburg had turned them into the single most experienced rock band *in the world* -- which seems vanishingly unlikely to me, but Lewisohn is not a man given to exaggeration. By this time, Mona Best had largely taken over the group's bookings, and there were a lot of them, as well as a regular spot at the Casbah. Neil Aspinall, a friend of Pete's, started driving them to gigs, while they also had a regular MC, Bob Wooler, who ran many local gigs, and who gave the Beatles their own theme music -- he'd introduce them with the fanfare from Rossini's William Tell Overture: [Excerpt: Rossini, "William Tell Overture"] Stuart came over from Hamburg in early January, and once again the Beatles were a five-piece -- and by now, he could play quite well, well enough, at any rate, that it didn't destroy the momentum the group had gathered. The group were getting more and more bookings, including the venue that would become synonymous with them, the Cavern, a tiny little warehouse cellar that had started as a jazz club, and that the Quarry Men had played once a couple of years earlier, but had been banned from for playing too much rock and roll. Now, the Beatles were getting bookings at the Cavern's lunchtime sessions, and that meant more than it seemed. Most of the gigs they played otherwise were on the outskirts of the city, but the Cavern was in the city centre. And that meant that for the lunchtime sessions, commuters from outside the city were coming to see them -- which meant that the group got fans from anywhere within commuting distance, fans who wanted them to play in their towns. Meanwhile, the group were branching out musically -- they were particularly becoming fascinated by the new R&B, soul, and girl-group records that were coming out in the US. After already having loved "Money" by Barrett Strong, John was also obsessed with the Miracles, and would soon become a fervent fan of anything Motown, and the group were all big fans of the Shirelles. As they weren't playing original material live, and as every group would soon learn every other group's best songs, there was an arms race on to find the most exciting songs to cover. As well as Elvis and Buddy and Eddie, they were now covering the Shirelles and Ray Charles and Gary US Bonds. The group returned to Hamburg in April, Paul and Pete's immigration status having been resolved and George now having turned eighteen, and started playing at the Top Ten club, where they played even longer sets, and more of them, than they had at the Kaiserkeller and the Indra. Tony Sheridan started regularly joining them on stage at this time, and Paul switched to piano while Sheridan added the third guitar. This was also when they started using Preludin, a stimulant related to amphetamines which was prescribed as a diet drug -- Paul would take one pill a night, George a couple, and John would gobble them down. But Pete didn't take them -- one more way in which he was different from the others -- and he started having occasional micro-sleeps in the middle of songs as the long nights got to him, much to the annoyance of the rest of the group. But despite Pete's less than stellar playing they were good enough that Sheridan -- the single most experienced musician in the British rock and roll scene -- described them as the best R&B band he'd ever heard. Once they were there, they severed their relationship with Allan Williams, refusing to pay him his share of the money, and just cutting him out of their careers.  Meanwhile, Stuart was starting to get ill. He was having headaches all the time, and had to miss shows on occasion. He was also the only Beatle with a passion for anything else, and he managed to get a scholarship to study art with the famous sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who was now working in Hamburg. Paul subbed for Stuart on bass, and eventually Stuart left the group, though on good terms with everyone other than Paul. So it was John, Paul, George and Pete who ended up making the Beatles' first records. Bert Kaempfert, the most important man in the German music industry, had been to see them all at the Top Ten and liked what he saw. Outside Germany, Kaempfert was probably best known for co-writing Elvis' "Wooden Heart", which the Beatles had in their sets at this time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Wooden Heart"] Kaempfert had signed Tony Sheridan to a contract, and he wanted the Beatles to back him in the studio -- and he was also interested in recording a couple of tracks with them on their own. The group eagerly agreed, and their first session started at eight in the morning on the twenty-second of June 1961, after they had finished playing all night at the club, and all of them but Pete were on Preludin for the session. Stuart came along for moral support, but didn't play. Pete was a problem, though. He wasn't keeping time properly, and Kaempfert eventually insisted on removing his bass drum and toms, leaving only a snare, hi-hat, and ride cymbal for Pete to play. They recorded seven songs at that session in total. Two of them were just by the Beatles. One was a version of "Ain't She Sweet", an old standard which Gene Vincent had recorded fairly recently, but the other was the only track ever credited to Lennon and Harrison as cowriters. On their first trip to Hamburg, they'd wanted to learn "Man of Mystery" by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] But there was a slight problem in that they didn't have a copy of the record, and had never heard it -- it came out in the UK while they were in Germany. So they asked Rory Storm to hum it for them. He hummed a few notes, and Lennon and Harrison wrote a parody of what Storm had sung, which they named "Beatle Bop" but by this point they'd renamed "Cry For a Shadow": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Cry For a Shadow"] The other five songs at the session were given over to Tony Sheridan, with the Beatles backing him, and the song that Kaempfert was most interested in recording was one the group had been performing on stage -- a rocked-up version of the old folk song "My Bonnie": [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, "My Bonnie"] That was the record chosen as the single, but it was released not as by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, but by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers -- "Beatles", to German ears, sounded a little like "piedels", a childish slang term for penises. The Beatles had made their first record, but it wasn't one they thought much of. They knew they could do better. The next week, the now four-piece Beatles returned to Liverpool, with much crying at Stuart staying behind -- even Paul, now Stuart was no longer a threat for John's attention, was contrite and tried to make amends to him.  On their return to Liverpool, they picked up where they had left off, playing almost every night, and spending the days trying to find new records -- often listening to the latest releases at NEMS, a department store with an extensive record selection. Brian Epstein, the shop's manager, prided himself on being able to get any record a customer wanted, and whenever anyone requested anything he'd buy a second copy for the shelves. As a result, you could find records there that you wouldn't get anywhere else in Liverpool, and the Beatles were soon adding more songs by the Shirelles and Gary US Bonds to their sets, as well as more songs by the Coasters and Ben E. King's "Stand By Me". They were playing gigs further afield, and Neil Aspinall was now driving them everywhere. Aspinall was Pete Best's closest friend -- and was having an affair with Pete's mother -- but unlike Pete himself he also became close to the other Beatles, and would remain so for the rest of his life.  By this point, the group were so obviously the best band on the Liverpool scene that they were starting to get bored -- there was no competition. And by this point it really was a proper scene -- John's old art school friend Bill Harry had started up a magazine, Mersey Beat, which may be the first magazine anywhere in the world to focus on one area's local music scene. Brian Epstein from NEMS had a column, as did Bob Wooler, and often John's humorous writing would appear as well. The Beatles were featured in most issues -- although Paul McCartney's name was misspelled almost every time it appeared -- and not just because Lennon and Harry were friends. By this point there were the Beatles, and there were all the other groups in the area. For several months this continued -- they learned new songs, they played almost every day, and they continued to be the best. They started to find it boring. The one big change that came at this point was when John and Paul went on holiday to Paris, saw Vince Taylor, bumped into their friend Jurgen from Hamburg, and got Jurgen to do their hair like his -- the story we told in the episode on "Brand New Cadillac". They now had the Beatles haircut, though they were still wearing leather. When they got back, George copied their new style straight away, but Pete decided to leave his hair in a quiff. There was nowhere else to go without a manager to look after them. They needed management -- and they found it because of "My Bonnie": [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, "My Bonnie"] "My Bonnie" was far from a great record, but it was what led to everything that followed. The Beatles had mentioned from the stage at the Cavern that they had a record out, and a young man named Raymond Jones walked into NEMS and asked for a copy of it. Brian Epstein couldn't find it in the record company catalogues, and asked Jones for more information -- Jones explained that they were a Liverpool group, but the record had come out in Germany. A couple of days later, two young girls came into the shop asking for the same record, and now Epstein was properly intrigued -- in his view, if *two* people asked for a record, that probably meant a lot more than just two people wanted it. He decided to check these Beatles out for himself. Epstein was instantly struck by the group, and this has led to a lot of speculation over the years, because his tastes ran more to Sibelius than to Little Richard. As Epstein was also gay, many people have assumed that the attraction was purely physical. And it might well have been, at least in part, but the suggestion that everything that followed was just because of that seems unlikely -- Epstein was also someone who had a long interest in the arts, and had trained as an actor at RADA, the most prestigious actors' college in the UK, before taking up his job at the family store. Given that the Beatles were soon to become the most popular musicians in the history of the world, and were already the most popular musicians in the Liverpool area, the most reasonable assumption must be that Epstein was impressed by the same things that impressed roughly a billion other people over the next sixty years. Epstein started going to the Cavern regularly, to watch the Beatles and to make plans -- the immaculately dressed, public-school-educated, older rich man stood out among the crowd, and the Beatles already knew his face from his record shop, and so they knew something was going on. By late November, Brian had managed to obtain a box of twenty-five copies of "My Bonnie", and they'd sold out within hours. He set up a meeting with the Beatles, and even before he got them signed to a management contract he was using his contacts with the record industry in London to push the Beatles at record companies. Those companies listened to Brian, because NEMS was one of their biggest customers. December 1961, the month they signed with Brian Epstein, was also the month that they finally started including Lennon/McCartney songs in their sets.  And within a couple of weeks of becoming their manager, even before he'd signed them to a contract, Brian had managed to persuade Mike Smith, an A&R man from Decca, to come to the Cavern to see the group in person. He was impressed, and booked them in for a studio session. December 61 was also the first time that John, Paul, George, and Ringo played together in that lineup, without any other musicians, when on the twenty-seventh of December Pete called in sick for a show, and the others got in their friend to cover for him. It wouldn't be the last time they would play together. On New Year's Day 1962, the Beatles made the trek down to London to record fifteen songs at the Decca studios. The session was intended for two purposes -- to see if they sounded as good on tape as they did in the Cavern, and if they did to produce their first single. Those recordings included the core of their Cavern repertoire, songs like "Money": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Money (Decca version)"] They also recorded three Lennon/McCartney songs, two by Paul -- "Love of the Loved" and "Like Dreamers Do": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Like Dreamers Do"] And one by Lennon -- "Hello Little Girl": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Little Girl"] And they were Lennon/McCartney songs, even though they were written separately -- the two agreed that they were going to split the credit on anything either of them wrote. The session didn't go well -- the group's equipment wasn't up to standard and they had to use studio amps, and they're all audibly nervous -- but Mike Smith was still fairly confident that they'd be releasing something through Decca -- he just had to work out the details with his boss, Dick Rowe. Meanwhile, the group were making other changes. Brian suggested that they could get more money if they wore suits, and so they agreed -- though they didn't want just any suits, they wanted stylish mohair suits, like the black American groups they loved so much.  The Beatles were now a proper professional group -- but unfortunately, Decca turned them down. Dick Rowe, Mike Smith's boss, didn't think that electric guitars were going to become a big thing -- he was very tuned in to the American trends, and nothing with guitars was charting at the time. Smith was considering two groups -- the Beatles, and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and wanted to sign both. Rowe told him that he could sign one, but only one, of them. The Tremeloes had been better in the studio, and they lived round the corner from Smith and were friendly with him. There was no contest -- much as Smith wanted to sign both groups, the Tremeloes were the better prospect. Rowe did make an offer to Epstein: if Epstein would pay a hundred pounds (a *lot* of money in those days), Tony Meehan, formerly of the Shadows, would produce the group in another session, and Decca would release that. Brian wasn't interested -- if the Beatles were going to make a record, they were going to make it with people who they weren't having to pay for the privilege. John, Paul, and George were devastated, but for their own reasons they didn't bother to tell Pete they'd been turned down. But they did have a tape of themselves, at least -- a professional-quality recording that they could use to attract other labels. And their career was going forward in other ways. The same day Brian had his second meeting with Decca, they had an audition with the BBC in Manchester, where they were accepted to perform on Teenager's Turn, a radio programme hosted by the Northern Dance Orchestra. A few weeks later, on the seventh of March, they went to Manchester to record four songs in front of an audience, of which three would be broadcast: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Please Mr. Postman (Teenager's Turn)"] That recording of John singing "Please Mr. Postman" is historic for another reason, which shows just how on the cutting edge of musical taste the Beatles actually were -- it was the first time ever that a Motown song was played on the BBC. Now we get to the part of the story that, before Mark Lewisohn's work in his book a few years back, had always been shrouded in mystery. What Lewisohn shows is that George Martin was in fact forced to sign the Beatles, against his will, and that this may have been as a punishment. The Beatles had already been turned down by Parlophone once, based on "My Bonnie", when Brian Epstein walked into the HMV store on Oxford Street in London in mid-February. HMV is now mostly known as a retail chain, Britain's biggest chain of physical media stores, but at the time it was owned by EMI, and was associated with their label of the same name -- HMV stood for "His Master's Voice", and its logo was the same one as America's RCA, with whom it had a mutual distribution deal for many years. As a record retailer, Epstein naturally had a professional interest in other record shops, and he had a friend at HMV, who suggested to him that they could use a disc-cutting machine that the shop had to turn his copy of the Decca tapes into acetate discs, which would be much more convenient for taking round and playing to record labels. That disc-cutter was actually in a studio that musicians used for making records for themselves, much as the Quarry Men had years earlier -- it was in fact the studio where Cliff Richard had cut *his* first private demo, the one he'd used to get signed to EMI.  Jim Foy, the man who worked the lathe cutter, liked what he heard, and he talked with Brian about the group. Brian mentioned that some of the songs were originals, and Foy told him that EMI also owned a publishing company, Ardmore & Beechwood, and the office was upstairs -- would Brian like to meet with them to discuss publishing? Brian said he would like that. Ardmore & Beechwood wanted the original songs on the demo. They were convinced that Lennon and McCartney had potential as songwriters, and that songs like "Like Dreamers Do" could become hits in the right hands. And Brian Epstein agreed with them -- but he also knew that the Beatles had no interest in becoming professional songwriters. They wanted to make records, not write songs for other people to record.  Brian took his new discs round to George Martin at EMI -- who wasn't very impressed, and basically said "Don't call us, we'll call you". Brian went back to Liverpool, and got on with the rest of the group's career, including setting up another Hamburg residency for them, this time at a new club called the Star Club. That Star Club residency, in April, would be devastating for the group -- on Tuesday the tenth of April, the same day John, Paul, and Pete got to Hamburg (George was ill and flew over the next day), Stuart Sutcliffe, who'd been having headaches and feeling ill for months, collapsed and died, aged only twenty-one. The group found out the next day -- they got to the airport to meet George, and bumped into Klaus and Astrid, who were there to meet Stuart's mother from the same flight. They asked where Stuart was, and heard the news from Astrid.  John basically went

The first man to produce The Beatles had a very successful career in his own right. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The first man to produce The Beatles had a very successful career in his own right.     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. 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 Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. 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 Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 "Muleskinner Blues" by the Fendermen. 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 Apologies for the delay this week -- I've been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don't worry, it's not anything serious...    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud's rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. It's not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it's still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis' sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis' continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It's well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn't record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn't record it for a few more days. Before I start this week's episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We've already covered his work of course, in episodes on "Tutti Frutti" and "Keep A Knockin'", and I don't really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don't think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don't think you can argue that those three weren't the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we're covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we've looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let's have a few moments' noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Ooh! My Soul!"] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we're going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we're entering the sixties, we're leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we're definitely leaving for now. Elvis' two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he'd been separated from everyone he knew, and he'd met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He'd recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years -- "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck", "Hard-Headed Woman", "One Night", "I Need Your Love Tonight", and "A Big Hunk O' Love". Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel's from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted -- his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn't due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don't want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn't have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland -- the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father's new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show -- he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis' early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis' last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session -- Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He'll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He'll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland -- the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis' last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well -- as well as having sung on Elvis' pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles -- Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all -- Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going -- the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves -- and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled "Make Me Know It" took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Make Me Know It"] Elvis' voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army -- he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman's "A Mess of Blues": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "A Mess of Blues"] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single -- a mediocre track called "Stuck on You": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Stuck on You"] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of "Stuck on You" backed with "Fame and Fortune" was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders -- they came out in sleeves that just read "Elvis' 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World", because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra -- The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he'd gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt's bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip -- that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he'd been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through "Fame and Fortune". He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, "Stuck on You", and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings "Love Me Tender" while Elvis sings Sinatra's "Witchcraft". Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock "Love Me Tender", but Elvis takes Sinatra's song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There's a passage in Umberto Eco's book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write "I love you madly". A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing "As Barbara Cartland might say, 'I love you madly'". This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco's view) can't. By this definition, Sinatra's performance is modernist -- he's just showing contempt for the material -- while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he's also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, "Love Me Tender/Witchcraft"] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of "Fever" that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Fever"] Then there was "Like a Baby", a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis' best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Like a Baby"] The next song was a huge departure from anything he'd done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin's 1950 hit "There's No Tomorrow": [Excerpt: Tony Martin, "There's No Tomorrow"] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he'd mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, "There's No Tomorrow" was based on the old song "O Sole Mio", which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became "It's Now or Never". Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he'd given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "It's Now Or Never"] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn't have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel's wife Marie's favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA's A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake -- because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn't see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis' repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that's almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from "King Creole", a cover version of "Such a Night", the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song "Reconsider Baby", the light Latin pop song "The Girl of My Best Friend", a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge -- in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks -- three singles and a twelve-track album -- and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it's very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called "GI Blues", intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn't going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were "business reasons" -- Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called "Wooden Heart", based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we'll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Wooden Heart"] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis' film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren't songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don't work as a poem. There's a habit even among Elvis' fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn't happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work -- he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it's clear that the time in the Army wasn't the problem -- it's just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did -- he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn't in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he'd been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis' role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There's quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis' acting in them, but there's no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis' own musical instincts yet -- he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he'd wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "His Hand in Mine"] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn't like, GI Blues, that was the big success -- and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies -- an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year -- a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like "Ito Eats": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Ito Eats"] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren't as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn't going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like "There's No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car". When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn't be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that "Elvis died when he went into the Army". We'll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Er gehörte zu den größten Orchesterchefs des 20. Jahrhunderts. NDR Plus stellt im Schlager ABC Bert Kaempfert vor.

This podcast is intended for ages 18+. This month on Fingering A Page, Morgan Danger will be reading stories by sex-obsessed-lesbian. sex-obsessed-lesbian is a kinkster, kink educator, content creator, and punster based in the Eastern US. Her primary kink is erotic hypnosis, though she enjoys tease and denial, power exchange, and a bunch of other stuff besides. sex-obsessed-lesbian loves words (hence the hypnosis kink) and is passionate about consent, comfort, and creativity in her play. Find her online: - https://twitter.com/sexobsessedlesb - https://sexobsessedlesbian.blogspot.com/ - https://mcstories.com/Authors/sex-obsessed-lesbian.html - https://sex-obsessed-lesbian.tumblr.com/ - https://soundgasm.net/u/sexobsessedlesbian — Corruption (1m43s) This story can be found at - https://sexobsessedlesbian.blogspot.com/2018/03/corruption.html CW:  Power dynamics, (oblique) abuse of (unspecified) power dynamics, hair pulling, seduction, helplessness, physical roughness, no genders specified. — Pleasure is Productive (shortened version) (6m7s) The abridged version can be found at https://tinyurl.com/u7nbr48 The full length version of this story can be found at https://mcstories.com/PleasureIsProductive/PleasureIsProductive.html CW: femsub, hypnokink, covert brainwashing, mantras, machine sex, penetration, massage, nonhuman/institutional top (capitalism top), fantasy brainwashing (i.e. this is not how hypnokink works.) — “Quiet Night In” (20m52s) Bunbunlittleone is a queer writer and kinkster and can be followed on tumblr and fetlife.  Bunbunlittleone will be reading sex-obsessed-lesbian’s piece, “Quiet Night In” using a modified hysterical literature method. The idea is to read a piece of writing aloud and have external stimuli happening at the same time causing much distraction and delight. They have used some sex toys during this recording.  CW: D/s, F/, pre-established D/s relationship, amnesia, some confusion/distress, denial/edging/orgasm control, cunnilingus (oblique), and realistic hypnokink. This file on Bunbunlittle one's tumblr. The original writing can be found here. https://sexobsessedlesbian.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-quiet-night-in_6.html You can learn more about hysterical literature (and see some great clips) at http://hystericalliterature.com. From the website, “Hysterical Literature is a video art series by NYC-based photographer and filmmaker Clayton Cubitt. It explores feminism, mind/body dualism, distraction portraiture, and the contrast between culture and sexuality. (It's also just really fun to watch.)”   — Stress Relief (29m) The next recording is a bit of an experiment and is best experienced sitting somewhere comfortable with headphones.  This story can be found at https://sexobsessedlesbian.blogspot.com/2019/07/stress-relief.html CW: Split recording (one voice in each ear), F/NB, friends-to-lovers, first time hypnosis, accidental pleasure, accidental kink, realistic hypnosis. — Closing credits (35m21s) Thank you for listening to Fingering A Page. Please follow us @FingeringAPage on twitter, https://fingeringapagepodcast.tumblr.com/ or if you have questions or suggestions for featured creators send email to FingeringAPage@gmail.com If you’d like to support this podcast further go to FingeringAPagePod.com to purchase a limited edition “FAP Dangerously” enamel pin! Big thanks go to sex-obsessed-lesbian for all her help and hot stories! Special thanks goes to Bunbunlittleone, Darryl, Jinx, Len, Psy, Dylan, and Hypno-sinner, along with any other of my favorite supporters.  Music this week was Afrikaan Beat, written by Bert Kaempfert. Artwork this month is by Jinx. Until next time, Fap Dangerously!

thanks to the artists , just for fun and not commercial

Deux étrangers dans la nuit vivent une rencontre spontanée, hors du temps, un amour naît en une nuit comme une évidence. L’histoire est simple et presque cliché mais élégante, à l’image de Strangers In The Night, une mélodie composée en 1966 par Bert Kaempfert. Ces quelques notes vous restent facilement en tête et on se surprend à esquisser un sourire mièvre en l’entendant. Elle semple facile, évidente et terriblement efficace. C’est Frank Sinatra qui a donné ses lettres de noblesse à cet air qui a été composé pour un film d’espionnage comique. Mais Sinatra détestait cette chanson, il répétait à qui voulait l’entendre que c’était « the worst fucking song » qu’il n’ait jamais entendu. Et pourtant il n’a jamais arrêté de la chanter.

Let us take you back to a time when orchestral pop songs could reach number one on the charts. When a significant portion of America could hear the score to a movie and think, "I'd like to hear this song without the images please." That's the kind of world in which Bert Kaempfert (and his orchestra!) became an international star. Also, we talk about the Beatles. You'll hear why.

A vida passa muito rápido. se você não prestar atenção, ela passa e você nem percebe. Neste filme, o conceito de carpe diem, de aproveitar o dia e viver o presente, é levado às últimas consequências. Nesta edição do Cineclube 80 nós vamos tirar um dia de folga pra falar de Curtindo A Vida Adoidado, de 1986! Participam dessa conversa: Shi, Carina G e Vanessa Maria.   Músicas que você ouve neste episódio:Danke Schoen, composição de Bert Kaempfert com letra em inglês de Milt Gabler. Oh, Yeah - Yello. Love Missile F1-11 - Sigue Sigue SputnikOn the Loose - George Axon.Também disponível via iTunes e TuneIn RadioFeed RSS: clique aquiWebsite: 80 WATTSEmail: programa80watts@gmail.com   Agradecimentos aos produtores virtuais pelo apoio:Fabiano F. M. Cordeiro José Paulo Neto Ricardo BunnymanApoie o 80 WATTS também via Patreon , Apoia.se ou Padrim!     Muito obrigado aos nossos patrocinadores: Fabiano Martins Cordeiro e José Paulo Neto

How about a truly twisted take on a much loved fairy tale? In our version, Geppetto has much to answer for…"Another Pinocchio" is a radio play from our live show, **The Master's Hand**, recorded 12/10/17 at The Slipper Room in NYC.Featured in the cast: David Linton as The Woodcutter Michael Pate as Salvatore Eirik Davey-Gislason as Geppetto Ali Silva as Pinocchio James Rieser as The Mayor Alain Laforest as Alonzo Mary Murphy as Bella Kacie Laforest as Lizabeta Gustavo Rodriguez as The FarmerThe song, “Wooden Heart” by Fred Wise, Ben Weisman, Kay Twomey and Bert Kaempfert, was performed by Susan O’Dea accompanied by Nico Sleator.Original story and radioplay by Brian WallaceDirected by Holly Payne-Strange Musical score improvised by Steve Blanco Sound Effects Designer and Engineer: Greg Russ Technical Director at The Slipper Room: Johnny Goddard Production coordinator: Brontis Shane Orengo Theme music by Jason GravesPodcast production by Ali Silva & Daniel Graves Post-production audio by Ali SilvaProduced by Gustavo Rodriguez, Ali Silva, Daniel Graves & Rebecca Graves for Fireside Mystery Productions Copyright 2018 Fireside Mystery Productions[firesidemysterytheatre.com](https://www.firesidemysterytheatre.com) @firesidemysterySnag some FMT swag from our [merch store](https://www.firesidemysterytheatre.com/merch)!#horror #macabre #mystery #thriller #suspense #audiodrama #radiodrama #radiotheatre #radiotheater #weird #radio #creepy #eerie #strange #pinocchio #carlocollodi #fairytales #geppetto #murder #childmurder #filicide #sculptor #predators #puppets #marionettes #fire #wood #woodwork #audiodramasunday #podernfamily

In this Episode, we take a look at how the Art of Exotica (Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Esquivel, Bert Kaempfert, Yma Sumac) influenced John Zorn in some of his most interesting groups, compositions and albums. Take a listen to Exotica through the Zorn filter!

Ian Hislop chooses 'A Swingin' Safari' performed by Bert Kaempfert & his Orchestra and 'Life Could Not Better Be' by Danny Kaye.

In part two of our Hamburg spectacular, we move up the Grosse Freiheit and look at their time in the Top Ten Club, the Star Club, and Gretel and Alfons.    Along the way, speed round returns and we investigate Ted "Kingsize" Taylor, his Grundig recorder, and the drunken Christmas tapes that have become history.

More Info: http://www.iriefm.de/music/x-mash-mixtape/ Zutaten: MashMike - Intro DJ Schmolli - Weihnachtszeit-Song (Sido vs Rolf Zuckowski & seine Freunde) Jimmy Klok - Can I Get Snow (Jay-z vs Dean Martin) MashMike - Stop The Hip Hop Cavalry (Jona Lewie vs Cypress Hill vs Run DMC) Cheekyboy - Give It To Me, Little Drummer Boy (Johnny Cash vs Fatman Scoop vs Fiddy) DJ Schmolli - Tommy's Royal Christmas (The Who vs Lorde) A plus D - Give Da Jew Girl Toys (Trio vs Sara Silverman) DJ McFly - Party Rockin Around the Christmas Tree (LMFAO vs Brenda Lee) Martinn - Christmas In The City (Brenda Lee vs Brenda Lee vs Bert Kaempfert vs Petula Clark) Pimpdaddysupreme - How KimYe Ruined Christmas (Kanye vs Patsy Cline with help from Jose Felciano vs Nat King Cole vs Eartha Kitt vs Nas vs De La Soul vs Paul McCartney vs Average White Band vs Run DMC vs Matt The PM) Sam Flanagan - Frosty DMC (The Holidays vs Run DMC) Corporal Blossom - White Christmas (Louie Armstrong vs Elvis Presley vs Bing Crosby vs Frank Sinatra vs Diana Ross & The Supremes) Bob Rivers - What If Eminem Did Jingle Bells? DJ Schmolli - Jingle Bells Pon De Floor (Major Lazer vs Soma vs Jars of Clay) King Of Pants - Alala Falala Hasselhoff (David Hasselhoff vs CSS vs Tiga & Digitalism vs Speed All Star) Dan Phillips - Jingles Are Jingles (Depeche Mode vs Dan Phillips) Dan Phillips - Holly Jolly Monday (New Order vs Burl Ives) Cheekyboy - Viva Home (Pet Shop Boys vs Coldplay vs It's A Wonderful Life) Voicedude - It's The Small Things (Blink 182 vs Transsiberian Orchestra) DJ BC - Imagine Santa (John Lennon vs The Jackson 5)

We take a break from our trip through the colours of the rainbow this week, dear listener, with a trip around (some of) the capitals of the world. We hope it proves to be as much of a journey of … Continue reading →

Continuing our seemingly obsessive interest in modes of transport – and to show that we do listen to you, dear listener – we present this week a selection of tunes on the subject of bus travel, a theme indirectly requested … Continue reading →

English sibling trio Kitty Daisy & Lewis talk their childhood inspiration from Bert Kaempfert's 'A Swingin Safari', working with The Clash's Mick Jones, why they built a studio in an Indian restaurant and making anti-concept albums. My Favorite Album is a podcast unpacking the great works of pop music. Each episode features a different songwriter or musician discussing their favorite album of all time - their history with it, the making of the album, individual songs and the album's influence on their own music.Jeremy Dylan is a filmmaker, journalist and photographer from Sydney, Australia who has worked in the music industry since 2007. He directed the the feature music documentary Jim Lauderdale: The King of Broken Hearts (out now!) and the feature film Benjamin Sniddlegrass and the Cauldron of Penguins, in addition to many commercials and music videos. If you've got any feedback or suggestions, drop us a line at myfavoritealbumpodcast@gmail.com.

It’s time to put your arm-rests down, stow your tray-table and make sure your seat back is upright as we prepare to take you on a journey into the stratosphere. We have a most stimulating program of in-flight entertainment planned … Continue reading →

By Brother Cinaedus #pride48, #MusicMemories

The Show Notes Elements Concert“Jam” and “Blues”IntroMilton’s Big EGO April 8thReligious Moron of the Week     - Dr. Stephen Kim from Bob WhitemanMortimer calls in again as before but this time more soAsk George     - Slowed down audio? from Chris in Williamsburg         - Liking a jerk’s work? from Paul in Abu DhabiThe Weekly Standard     - L-O-V-E  by Bert Kaempfert and Milt GablerThings People Love That Actually Suck     - FireworksFoxcatcherSHaBtCR book for US residentsSun Feb 8th: Jazz gig at Hotel B. Show close ................................... Mentioned in the Show Milton’s Big EGO link ................................... Geologic Podcast PatronageSubscribe and information on subscription levels. ................................... Sign up for the mailing list: Write to Geo! A reminder that the portal to the Geologic Universe is at GeorgeHrab.com. Score more data from the Geologic Universe! Get George's Non-Coloring Book at Lulu, both as and E-BOOK and PRINT editions. Check out Geo's wiki page thanks to Tim Farley. Have a comment on the show, a Religious Moron tip, or a question for Ask George? Drop George a line and write to Geo's Mom, too!  

When we were searching through the enormous Moonbase archive recently, we were shocked to discover that we’d not previously covered one of the most important topics to us, namely that of tea. So rather belatedly, here is our celebration of … Continue reading →

A particularly confusing edition of the show this week dear listener, the result of a throwaway comment made in PMB167. Yes we’ve (just about) managed to pull together a whole show themed around herbs, those friends of the kitchen gardener. … Continue reading →

It occurred to us recently that new-comers to the show might not have encountered one of our musical heroes, namely Mr Peter Herbolzheimer, German trombonist, band-leader and cravat-wearer. Back in the days when we were on the radio airwaves, we … Continue reading →

Paul once called You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) his favourite Beatles song. Was he already dead after all ? It is certainly a mcCartney-esque track, harking back to the good old days when his father played the piano in a band..... In the version of BDJ productions, no actual Beatles were harmed. In fact, all instrumental tracks are form 'others', who shal remain nameless. But they are not chosen at random: all tracks somehow link to the Beatles. Do you know who they are, and how they relate to Beatles ? Send your solutin to BDJ productions, and you might win a prize ! Members of the Beatles, Bert Kaempfert, the Modern Gusto Trio and Sean Connery are excluded from the competition.