Podcast appearances and mentions of Bill Porter

Send us a textHopeful.Determined.In a conversation with Renee Sattiewhite, the CEO of the African American Credit Union Coalition, she came across as both hopeful and determined.  And she believes there still is work to be done and she definitely is not giving up.  Definitely she knows the landscape in today's Washington DC is dramatically different but she does not see that as a call for waving the white flag of surrender.Along the way you'll hear mentions of some of the great heroes of AACUC such as Bill Porter and Bert Hash Jr. and Bill Bynum.  But you'll also hear the names of many very successful women.The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said you can't step into the same river twice, change is our constant. So it definitely is today and Renee Sattirewhite is determined to contribute her views on the kinds of changes we need to be making.Listen up.Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com  And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.  Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

Bill Porter is a translator and interpreter of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist poetry and texts, with books on Chinese Hermits and travel. His pen name is Red Pine. Learn more about Bill on his Wikipedia page, on cuke.com, and at redpinemovie.com. This podcast is an encore presentation of a talk with Bill Porter from August 8, 2020.

When we mention Zen practice these days, we usually mean sitting in Zen meditation, or zazen. It was not always so. In Bodhidharma's time, “practice” meant observing the Precepts in daily life, discerning to what degree our behavior is comporting to their admonitions. If memory serves, this is found in “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma” by Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine. Similarly, when we speak of studying the Dharma, we typically mean reading the written record. It was not always so. When Buddha was alive, the teachings were spoken. You literally had to go listen to live lectures and, later, memorized recitation, to hear the Dharma. This was apparently true of all teachings of all sects at that time; the oral tradition prevailed. It was some four centuries after the Buddha's death, when his utterances were first committed to written form. With the advent of the Internet we have many more opportunities to “hear the true dharma” — a Dogen coinage with a deeper meaning — as expounded by others in the form of podcasts such as UnMind, audiobooks and other modern marvels. But we have to call into question whether we are hearing the Dharma truly. Whether the meaning we extract from listening to the efforts of others to express this subtle and inconceivable teaching is anywhere near to the original meaning that the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, intended, or for that matter that of any of his many successors in India, China, Korea and Japan, and the other countries of origin. I am not suggesting that we engage in a scholarly examination of the provenance and evolution of the Three Baskets — or Tripitaka in Sanskrit. I propose that we are challenged to attempt to render the meaning in the modern idiom, which involves extracting them from their original cultural context, and embedding them in ours, as well as expressing them in the vernacular, including the language of modern science and philosophy. For one thing, this means divesting the ancient liturgical passages of jargon — primarily the obscure and seemingly mystical terms, mostly from Sanskrit — such as “samadhi” for example — that some contemporary writers seem prone to sprinkle liberally throughout their publications. The downside to this tendency is that it creates an impression that the author actually knows what these terms mean, whether you, dear listener,understand them or not. Another consideration is what is called the “theory-laden” aspect of the semantics of language, as well as our interpretation of direct perception. This conditions the impact that Zen masters' behavior, as well as that of their “turning words” — in Japanese, wato — can have on their students. This concept was introduced to me by George Wrisley georgewrisley.com, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Georgia, author of texts on Dogen and Zen, who generously made several technical contributions to my books, “The Original Frontier” and “The Razorblade of Zen.” Professor Wrisley pointed out that, in the now-famous records of Zen students' exchanges with their masters, including extreme gestures they resorted to, in trying to help the student wake up to the reality of Zen — shock tactics such as shouting, and sometimes striking with a fist or staff — each student's reaction to the abuse was entirely dependent upon their belief, or innate “theory,” that the teacher was enlightened, and so could “do no wrong,” to oversimplify the point. Ordinarily, if someone hits you with a stick, your reaction would not be one of profound insight, and undying gratitude for the “grandmotherly kindness” of your abuser. Today it would likely trigger a lawsuit. The ancient ancestors of Zen seem to have an intuitive grasp of the importance of language and its effect on our perception of reality, as indicated in lines from the early Ch'an poems, such as: Darkness merges refined and common wordsBrightness distinguishes clear and murky phrases And: Hearing the words understand the meaningDo not establish standards of your own In Zen, of course, experience comes first, expression a distant second. The interim state, and where we can get it wrong, consists in our interpretation of direct experience, both on the cushion and off. As another ancient Ch'an poem has it: The meaning does not reside in the wordsbut a pivotal moment brings it forth And yet another: Although it is not constructedit is not beyond words Hopefully we have, or will have in future, experienced this pivotal moment. Meanwhile, we are dependent upon words to parse this teaching, and to express it, both to ourselves as well as to others. We can use words to encourage all to go beyond language, and even ordinary perception, in direct experience in zazen. In the face of this design intent of the Dharma, the past efforts to translate it into various languages, and the present effort to paraphrase it into the modern idiom, seem worth the time and trouble. In this spirit, let me share with you my paraphrase of the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, or Great Heart of Wisdom Teaching, with which, hopefully, you are familiar. This is a work in progress, subject to revision. The typographical layout available on the UnMind podcast page is designed to facilitate scanning and reading the text while chanting it aloud, usually accompanied by drum and gongs. You might follow it with your eyes, while you follow my words with your ears. In this way, you will absorb a multi-sensory experience, which may be more revealing than hearing or reading alone. I will simply recite it here, a capella: ESSENTIAL TEACHING OF PERFECTING WISDOM When any and all Awakening Beingsdeeply and directly experience the process of perfecting wisdom,they clearly see that all five traditional components of sentienceare fundamentally free of permanence and separate self-existence;this insight relieves all unnecessary suffering. Respected seekers of the truth, know that:the apparent form of our world is not separate from its impermanence;impermanence is not separable from appearances;“form,” or particles of matter, is innately “emptiness,” or waves of energy;conversely, emptiness is innately form.All sensations, perceptions, and underlying mental formations,as well as consciousness itself, also manifest as complementary.All existent beings manifest elemental impermanence,imperfection, and insubstantiality:they neither arise nor cease, as they appear to do;they are neither defiled nor pure, but nondual in their nature;they neither increase nor decrease in value or merit.Therefore know that, given the relativity of the material and immaterial,there can be no fixity of form; no tangibility of sensation;no persistence of perception; no infallibility of mental formations;finally, there can be no absolute entity of consciousness.More immediately, the principle of complementarity entails that there can beno eyes, ears, nose, or tongue, as such; and thus, no body;likewise there can be no “mind,” as a separate substance;it follows that, in spite of appearances,there can be no independent functions ofseeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching;nor can there be unconstructed objects of the mind;no independent realm of sight, nor that of any other sense organ;nor any realm of mind-consciousness as a whole. This means that there can be neither ignorance in the absolute sense,nor any extinction of ignorance in the relative sense.Neither can there be sickness, old age and death as absolute states;Nor any extinction of sickness, old age and death as relative states.In light of the implications of this insight,suffering intentionally inflicted upon oneself and / or others can come to an end,stemming as it does from confusion as to root causes;while natural suffering such as aging, sickness, and death cannot end. Thus there can be no isolated “path” leading to cessation of suffering;there can be no essential “knowledge” to gain, in any conclusive sense;and no “attainment,” of any consequential kind. Since there is nothing to attain,all Awakening Beings rely totally on simply perfecting their wisdom;their body-mind drops away, functioning fully with no further hindrances; with no dualistic hindrances, no root of fear is to be found;far beyond confused worldviews,they abide in nondual spiritual liberation. All Awakening Ones of past, present, and futurerely on the perfecting of this deepest wisdom,thereby attaining unsurpassed, complete, insightand letting go of the attainment. Rest assured that perfecting wisdomis the most excellent method;the serene and illuminating discipline; the unsurpassable teaching;the incomparable means of mitigating all suffering;and that this claim is true, not false. We proclaim the transformational perfecting of wisdom: Gone, gone to the other shore; attained the other shore; altogether beyond the other shore, having never left; the other shore comes to us; wisdom perfected! I do not claim to have captured the essence of the original chant. The afore-mentioned Buddhist scholar and Ch'an translator Red Pine, in his modern translation “The Heart Sutra,” tells us that this condensed version of the larger sutra extolling the emptiness of all existence, including the Dharma, was published in China around 900 CE. This was done in order to counter a prevailing trend toward erudition as the indicator of enlightenment, a distortion of the true Dharma that has occurred more than once in history. Another famous example is that of Master Huineng, sixth ancestor in China, who publicly tore up copies of the sutras to make a similar point. Buddha-dharma is manifest in nondual reality as lived, not contained in writing as doctrine. In a future segment of UnMind, we will take up another of my hopeful efforts at paraphrasing the Dharma. Meanwhile I encourage you to try your own hand — or more precisely, your mouth and mind — at putting one of the historical teachings into your own words. You might want to compose your own version of the Precepts, for example. When and if you do so, it may force you to consider the true meaning of these teachings which — through the sheer repetition of chanting them repeatedly over time — begin to sink into our stubborn monkey minds. But the downside of repetition is that they may become rote recitation, in which their deeper meaning and direct relevance to our contemporary lives may be lost. Not to worry, however — combined with the nonverbal silence and deep stillness of zazen, where we can begin to experience the meaning of the expression — we cannot go far wrong.

In this session, Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho interview author, translator, and teacher Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, about the art and practice of translation and encountering living and deceased hermits in mountains and texts.

Did you know that translating poetry from one language to another is an art unto itself? In our latest episode of Mindful U podcast author, translator, and veteran, Bill Porter, who goes by the pen name Red Pine, takes us through the process of finding the true heart of poem that's hidden beneath words. Hear his journey of how he began translating thousand-year old Chinese poetry and Buddhist and Taoist texts, and how that has shone a light on the nature of language itself. As a translator, he sees language as an experience that cannot be replicated and perfectly transformed from one into another, but when we dance with the rhythm that's behind words themselves, and immerse ourselves in the world view of another we can find the true heart and meaning of an author. Special Guest: Bill Porter.

How do you navigate running a brick and morter pro shop in today's time where Amazon seems to run everything eCommerce? Bill Porter is the founder and owner of Performance Ski and Surf, located in Orlando, Florida. Being in the heart of the towed watersports scene, Bill's shop is the "go to" pro-shop for everything wake and watersports. Although his mom initially tried to get people to convince Bill to not open Performance, he did it anyways, and has had a profound influence on both pro riders and beginners alike. Herb O'Brien's influence, wakeboard tech, online operation vs. brick and mortar, customer service, the most important innovation wakeboarding has seen, selling snow gear, Nautique vs. Mastercraft, and the future of wakeboarding and Performance Ski and Surf. Hear all that and much more in Episode 60 of the Grab Matters Podcast!Follow Performance: https://www.instagram.com/perfski/Perfski: https://perfski.com/Thank you to our sponsors:Liquid Force: https://www.liquidforce.com/15% OFF Driftline use "grab15" at checkout: https://tinyurl.com/yvksusym$50 OFF Skiboatcovers use "grab50" at checkout: https://www.skiboatcovers.com/Chapters:00:00 - 1:20 Intro4:00 Intro to watersports7:20 Herb Obrien 10:00 Dealer territories 15:00 Waterskiing vs. Wakeboarding 22:30 Wakeboard tech24:25 More retro boards26:10 LF'n Wheel of Questions31:40 GOAT33:50 Online stores35:20 Customer service47:44 Driftline Deserves Some Love50:00 OWC x Perfski53:00 Industry shifts55:00 Gear talk1:03:20 Ski Boat Covers (Ad)1:07:20 Selling snow gear1:13:25 Question from Rusty Malinoski1:18:40 Grassroots1:31:10 Being a pro1:33:10 Nautique to MasterCraft1:41:30 Most influential 1:44:00 Future of wakeboarding 1:53:40 Future of PerfskiPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/GrabMattersPodcastWebsite: https://www.grabmatters.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@grabmatters/videosInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/grabmatters/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@grabmatterspodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/grabmatters

The Soundside team is on a break this week for the 4th of July holiday, so we're revisiting some of our favorite segments of the year. First up, when Seattle writer and illustrator Tessa Hulls started drafting the story of her grandmother's life, she wanted to take on the role of neutral narrator, but that didn't last long. We'll hear about her graphic novel, Feeding Ghosts, and the complicated family history she unraveled.  And then, we'll speak with the director of a documentary about renowned translator Bill Porter aka Red Pine. Guests: Tessa Hulls, author of Feeding Ghosts Ward Serrill, filmmaker behind Dancing with the Dead Bill Porter, translator and author Relevant Links KUOW: In 'Feeding Ghosts,' author, illustrator Tessa Hull recounts a healing journey across generations KUOW: A Port Townsend man went searching for hermits. Now he's a celebrity in China See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Owen and Randel interview author, translator Red Pine AKA Bill Porter author of "Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits". From his Counter Point Press bio: "Red Pine was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and attended graduate school at Columbia University. An acclaimed translator, his published works include four major Buddhist texts: The Lankavatara Sutra, The Platform Sutra, The Diamond Sutra, and The Heart Sutra. He is also the author of Zen Baggage and Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. He has lived in Taiwan and Hong Kong and has traveled extensively in China, visiting Zen temples and seeking out hermits." Bill Porter Website Copper Canyon Press Amazon

In today's podcast, Bill Porter, Head of Marketing at Privaini, shares insights on navigating data privacy challenges. With 20+ years of experience, Bill discusses Privaini's role in providing actionable insights to mitigate privacy risks for enterprises.  He emphasizes the importance of staying informed about evolving regulations and leveraging tools like Privaini to ensure compliance.  Tune in to discover how Privaini is empowering businesses to navigate the complex landscape of data privacy and maintain trust with customers.  

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Today we sit down with documentary filmmaker Ward Serrill and chat about his new film Dancing with the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation! The film follows Bill Porter through the art of Chinese translation and his quest to find hermits in the Zhongshan Mountains. It's a story about enlightenment through poetry! During our discussion we find out what got Ward into documentary filmmaking, the craft itself, why he makes the films he does and what it means to him as an artist! We had a great time chatting with him and we hope you enjoy listening! Ladies and Gents, Mr. Ward Serrill!

Paul E Nelson interviews Bill Porter on the film "Dancing With the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation as it screens Sunday, April 21 at SIFF Cinema Egyptian.

Soundside host Libby Denkmann talks with Bill Porter aka "Red Pine" and filmmaker Ward Serril about the new film "Dancing with the Dead."

The Message of Bill Porter about Sin and Redemption. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lantanachurch/message

As an American, Bill Porter discovered his spiritual haven in Chinese literature, especially poetry. Having translated over 2000 Chinese poems, he is the first American to publish an English version of a revered Chinese poetry anthology in the U.S., releasing the tome in 2003. Approaching his 80th year in 2023, Bill's enduring connection with China persists as he plans further journeys to explore the footsteps of his beloved poets.

The story of JP Morgan in 1907 // The psychology of bank runs // Interview with Bill Porter about what it feels like for a startup entrepreneur when Silicon Valley Bank failed // Jason gives you homework on trends to watch this week

Mattias Daly Talks to Bill Porter aka Red Pine, renown translator of Chinese poetry and religious texts. He delves into the philosophy of his translation methodology and the history and practice of Zen Buddhism. Mattias and Bill discuss Bill's personal story, practice, translation methodologies and travels as well as his forthcoming work, “Dancing with the Dead”, an anthology of Chinese poetry translations including Buddhist poets Cold Mountain (Hanshan) and Stonehouse (Shiwu), as well as Tang-dynasty luminaries Wei Yingwu and Liu Zongyuan.

In this episode, Julie Yoo, general partner, and Jay Rughani, investment partner at a16z Bio + Health, talk to Kate Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven; Amanda Rees, cofounder and CEO of Bold Health; and Bill Porter, VP and GM, International, of Butterfly Network, about their B2C2B go-to-market motion.This episode was originally recorded in late 2021, but it's still really relevant to builders, especially those exploring the B2C2B go-to-market motion. We talked about B2C2B in-depth in the second chapter of our Digital Health Builders Founder's Playbooks, also available at: https://a16z.com/digital-health-builders/And finally, our last chapter of the Founder's Playbooks is coming soon, so hit subscribe and stay tuned!

Jason Middleton sits in for Jennifer Jones Lee, who returns next week! ABC's Jay O'Brien shares information regarding President Biden's signing of the Omnibus Bill. Jim Ryan brings hope for Southwest Airlines as they aim to get 'back to normal' today. Bill Porter joins the show to talk about video streaming. And ABC's Jason Nathanson has the Entertainment Report, ranging from Babylon to Puss in Boots.

With Jennifer Jones Lee out for the remainder of the year, Jason Middleton sits in the host's chair for your Friday morning Wake Up Call. FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried has posted bail, recording the "largest pretrial bond ever." More states are preparing to boost their minimum wage - ABC's Jim Ryan has more. Bill Porter joins the show to talk all things video streaming, noting Google's new deal to have NFL Sunday Ticket for the next 7 years. And ABC's Jason Nathanson gives an Entertainment Report.

What's the key to translation, especially for translating ancient Chinese poems? An American seems to have found the answer. By coincidence, Bill Porter stepped into the ancient Chinese literary world in the 1970s and that changed everything. To many Chinese, he is known as Red Pine and the author of popular books on Chinese hermits and ancient poets. Why has Chinese culture been so inspiring to him? What has he learned from it? And what is Bill Porter's secret key to translation?

(My audio starts shaky, but gets better after 8 minutes) Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, calls the hermit life, "graduate school for the spiritually inclined." Bill Porter is a translator of Buddhist and Taoist mountain poets that uncross your third eye and waft the scent of a  fine scotch.  What can I say about Bill Porter that he won't say better about himself? I first stumbled on his book Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits while on retreat. His adventures and chitchats with hermits beckoned me to discover more about this hermit tradition and the man captivated by trekking into the mountains in search of monks living off the map. Bill is credited with an uptick of interest in the hermit life in China. Stateside Bill Porter is best known under his translator name of Red Pine, translating the work of Cold Mountain, Stonehouse, Lao Tzu and others over at the granddaddy of beautiful publishing Copper Canyon. We talk about this and more.  To visit Bill Porter, well if you bump into him in his hometown. To find his work online go his publisher Copper Canyon at coppercanyonpress.org.

I waited a very long time to have this discussion with Bill Porter, and it was well worth the wait. Bill is a prolific writer and adventurer, and also, under the pen name of Red Pine, a renowned translator of ancient Chinese works from Cold Mountain to Lao Tze. Bill has written and translated dozens of books over many decades, and his radio shows in China were tuned into by millions a day. Those shows featured the accounts of his ambitious adventures, including travelling the length of the Yellow River from its mouth to its source. Bill also sought out and found hermits living in the mountains of China, and his book, Road to Heaven, has sold over 2 million copies in China and is credited with helping to revive the Taoist hermit tradition there. We spend some time talking about not only Bill's adventure in finding hermits, but also hermit life, then and now. Bill continues to translate today, still as Red Pine and is nearing completion of a new book of poetry. We talk about how he acquired his name Red Pine and his inspiration for translating in the first place. Bill is a fascinating interviewee, having interviewed hundreds of guests himself on a radio show in China, and has lived a life of incredible cultural explorations and the subsequent sharing of their details. His storytelling is superb, and his material endless. I have no doubt that you will enjoy this episode of Pacific Rim College Radio with Bill Porter. Episode Links: Red Pine Facebook page Learning Links: School of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine at PRC Online Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine courses at PRCOnline Student Clinic at PRC

Bill Porter is the owner of Performance Ski & Surf out of Orlando, FL. He's been selling wakeboards since they were invented.  So much history and great stories coming from Bill.  Bill has also influenced the sport by sponsoring some of the best riders, to starting legendary wake contests, to even coming out with limited edition wakeboards sold exclusively in his shop.  Join us to learn more about Bill Porter.

"Karena setiap orang yang meminta, menerima dan setiap orang yang mencari, mendapat dan setiap orang yang mengetok, baginya pintu dibukakan." (Lukas 11:10) Renungan: Door to door adalah sebuah film yang menceritakan tentang sebuah kisah nyata dari seseorang yang bernama Bill Porter. Ia adalah seorang tokoh besar yang memulai bisnisnya dari nol. Sejak lahir Bill Porter terkenal memunyai penyakit cerebral palsy yaitu sebuah penyakit yang mengakibatkan gangguan pada fungsi tangan kanan, jalan terpincang, sulit bicara dan kadang meneteskan air liur saat berbicara. Meskipun demikian ia memiliki semangat hidup yang tinggi. Hal ini terlihat saat ia melamar kerja di The Watkins sebagai seorang salesman. Melihat kondisi Porter yang jauh dari kondisi normal, tentu saja pimpinan Watkins menolaknya. Namun Porter tidak menyerah begitu saja. Ia malah meminta ditempatkan di daerah yang tidak diinginkan salesman lainnya dan berkata, "Apa ruginya bagi anda jika memberi saya daerah yang tidak berpotensi?" Berkat kegigihan Porter, akhirnya ia diterima di The Watkins dan pada awalnya ia benar-benar di tempatkan di daerah yang tidak memiliki potensi sama sekali untuk menghasilkan penjualan. Bill Porter awalnya mengalami jalan buntu. Ia beberapa kali ditolak oleh para calon pembeli. Namun Ia terus berusaha dan terus berusaha. Akhirnya dengan bermodalkan semangat pantang menyerah dan ketekunan, Bill Porter tidak sia-sia. Sedikit demi sedikit ia mulai menghasilkan penjualan dan tidak hanya itu saja, pada akhirnya ia bahkan menerima penghargaan Best Salesman of The Year dari The Watkins. Bagaimana mungkin di industri yang membutuhkan keterampilan berbicara, seseorang yang jalannya pincang dan seringkali meneteskan air liur saat berbicara, justru dapat menjadi pemenang dan mengalahkan berpuluh-puluh orang normal lainnya? Hal itu karena semangat pantang menyerah dan kegigihan untuk menghasilkan yang terbaik. Bagaimana dengan kita? Ketika doa kita tidak kunjung dijawab Tuhan, ketika saat ini belum mendapatkan pekerjaan atau banyak penolakan yang kita terima bagaimanakah sikap kita? Apakah kita terlalu cepat menyerah sebelum mendapatkan apa yang kita inginkan? Firman tuhan mengingatkan kita untuk terus meminta, mencari dan mengetok. Itu bukanlah pekerjaan yang dilakukan hanya sekali atau dua kali tapi berkali-kali sampai mukjizat terjadi. Jadi, jangan berhenti mengetuk sampai pintu dibukakan bagi kita. Tuhan Yesus memberkati. Doa: Tuhan Yesus, terima kasih atas setiap berkat yang telah ku terima dan yang sedang Engkau siapkan untukku. Ajarilah aku untuk selalu bersyukur atas semuanya itu. Amin. (Dod).

An effort to create a regional grain supply chain for beer. Plus: masks are no longer required on public transit, Burlington bus cuts to be reversed, and remembering Bill Porter.

Committed advocate of the preservation of wilderness and an explorer of both the outer and inner wilderness, Brooke Williams is constantly looking to understand and experience the value of wild places and what that means for modern humans. Here we explore wildness for ideas, possibilities, and inspiration across the great divide in which we find ourselves as Americans. Brooke Williams is an advocate for the preservation of wilderness. He writes about evolution, consciousness, and his own adventures exploring both the inner and outer wilderness. He lives in Utah with his wife and partner, the writer and former New Dimensions guest, Terry Tempest Williams. He is the author of several books including Half-Lives: Reconciling Work and Wildness (Johnson Books 1999), Escalante: The Best Kind of Nothing (photos by Chris Noble) (University of Arizona Press 2006), Open Midnight: Where Ancestors and Wilderness Meet (Trinity University Press 2017 and Mary Jane Wild: Two Walks & A Rant (Homebound Publications 2021)Interview Date: 1/14/2022. Tags: Brooke Williams, Hilary Clinton, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mary Jane Wilderness, toxic masculinity, white male power, democracy, Coleman Barks, Rumi, field I'll meet you, awe, Carl Jung, dreams, biological evolution, climate change, climate collapse, extreme sports, wander, wandering, walking, Rebecca Solnit, Charles Darwin, Thoreau, sacred feminine, Terry Tempest Williams, David Hinton, indigenous art, Bill Porter, Red Pine, rock art, desert, wandering, walking, Milky Way, dark sky towns, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Social Change/Politics

(Talk 1 of a 5-part series on Bodhidharma) Red Pine’s translations have been honored with a number of awards, most... The post Principles & Practice: the Teaching of Bodhidharma – Red Pine : Bill Porter – 13 March 2022 (1st of a 5 part series on Bodhidharma) appeared first on Puget Sound Zen Center.

Speaker:Bill Porter, MA has 20 years of experience in providing counseling, support and advocacy to at-risk children, youth, and families. Bill joined the Gladney Family in 2013 and he spends most of his time leading his team in providing “best practices” to adoptees, birth families and adoptive families. Bill has been trained through the Trust-based Relational Intervention TBRI® at Texas Christian University and has provided clinical supervision and consultation in evidenced based programming. Bill received his Bachelors of Arts in Religion from Southern Nazarene University and his Masters of Education in Counseling from North Texas University. Safety:A child has to feel safe physically and emotionally. We underestimate fear and anxiety. If you are never available for your child as a safe base, then you're not doing your job as a parent. Connection:Find ways to engage with your child even though you might be rejected. One of the most important things to remember is that it's never your child's responsibility to find ways to connect with you. It's your responsibility to find ways to connect with your child. What does your child like? What does your child want to do?When you have your safety and your connect working, then you get to do the other parenting stuff like correcting. Resources:The Power of Showing Up, by Daniel J. Siegel MD, Tina Payne Bryson PhD, et al.Gladney UniversityThe Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connection, and Courage, by Brené Brown

In this episode, Michael Amidei and Clifford Brooks interview Clark Hagan. Clark Hagan (www.clarkhaganproductions.com) is a Grammy award-winning Producer/Engineer with a world-class resume and a legendary mastery of the recording arts. After graduating from the University of Colorado at Denver, Clark began to master his craft as a recording engineer while working with the legendary Bill Porter whose credits include artists such as Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers while at RCA from 1959 to 1964. After a short stint at Allen-Martin Productions in Louisville, Kentucky, Clark moved to Nashville where his trusted relationship with Porter provided the opportunity to work with the legendary Chet Atkins. In his time with Atkins, Clark engineered the Grammy Award Winning record in 1996 for best country instrumental and was nominated again in 1997 for a record with Atkins and Tommy Emmanuel in the same category on which he also played guitar. Clark's success with Atkins paid off and subsequently led to work with some of Nashville's top artists including Ray Stevens, Alison Krauss, Bryan White, and Jeffery Steele amongst others. In the highly competitive world of Nashville Clark continued to build relationships with such producers as Scott Litt, Tony Brown, Kyle Lehning, Billy Joe Walker Jr., Bill Schnee, and James William Guercio while also getting to work out of some elite studios such as Woodland Sound Studios, Quad, Omni, and Masterfonics. Clark has worked with other such national artists as Kenny Passarelli, Marty Haggard, and Eugene Moles along with Colorado artists such as Dave Preston, Oscar Ross, Wild Angels, Nick O'Connor, and Casey James Prestwood and the Burning Angels to name a few. Clark has also been working with the Caribou Ranch estate on the “Caribou Collection” project with artists Elton John, Billy Joel, and Chicago, and is also refurbished one of the original Caribou Ranch consoles “Olive”. Whether it be mixing, tracking, or producing, from rock to country, Clark brings his rich heritage and diverse experience to every project and is always looking for artists who share the same passion. to make great sounding records. Along with doing projects out of Macy Sound Studios, Clark is also an experienced technician and is also knowledgeable and competent tech and audio consultant.

Bill Porter is one of those people who came into the world to give everyone a great life lesson. The lesson of gratitude. Born with cerebral palsy, as a child he had to endue constant harassment. Bill lived his life as a door-to-door salesman in Portland Oregon. He had to overcome difficult daily life challenges just to survive. Everyday, he went out there with a perseverance and a grace that reveals the human spirit at its best. Rob tells this inspiring story, that give us all a moment to pause and reflect about our own life struggles and to recognize how precious and amazing it all is.

On today's podcast we talk about a man who really did define what it takes to succeed in sales. Even if you aren't in sales or business it's a story you will admire

 "Wu Wei, It means following the flow of the Dao, of the way, and you can see that in nature. Watch the birds and bees behave and let nature take its course. Now, in the case of human beings, for example, Western medicine interferes with drugs, chemicals, vaccines, and is yet to learn that the best defense against disease is a strong immune system. It's built into us". -Daniel Reid    There's something about the energy and spirit of Daniel Reid that makes you want to sit, listen and experience his wisdom. A bestselling author, leading expert on eastern philosophy and medicine, Reid has written several books and memoirs on Asian self-health, self-healing practices, Daoism, and his journey on this path. Living in Taiwan for 16 years studying and writing, Reid's international reputation stems from a deep understanding of traditional Chinese culture, Chinese medicine, and ancient Taoist health and longevity systems. In this conversation with Mason, Reid discusses how western medicine is failing society and will continue to as long as it tries to overcome nature. Contrastingly, he details the beauty and simplicity found in all aspects of the Daoist philosophy and spirituality, the way of respecting nature, and our innate ability to heal ourselves. Tune in for wisdom and healing.   Mason and Dan discuss:  Doaist thought. The Dao De Jing. Qigong and tea-gong. The Dao principle of Wu Wei. The three powers of Daoism. Following the flow of the Dao. Personality types of the five Daoist elements. The principle of Yin Yang and the five elements. Quantum physics, Daoism and energy. Drawing wisdom from essential nature. Daoism on facing mortality/immortality.   Who is Daniel Reid? Daniel Reid is a bestselling author and a leading expert on eastern philosophy and medicine. He has written numerous books and magazine articles on various aspects of Asian self-health, self-healing practices, and has established an international reputation for the practical efficacy of his traditional approach to modern health problems. Daniel Reid was born in 1948 in San Francisco and spent his childhood in East Africa. After completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, and a Masters of Arts degree in Chinese Language and Civilization at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in 1973, Reid moved to Taiwan, where he spent 16 years studying and writing about various aspects of traditional Chinese culture, focusing particularly on Chinese medicine and ancient Taoist longevity systems. In 1989, he relocated to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he continued his research and writing until 1998 when he immigrated with his wife Snow to the Byron Bay region of Australia. In 2017, they moved back to Chiang Mai, where they now make their home.   Resources: Dan Reid website Oolong Tea.org The Art and Alchemy of Chinese Tea - Daniel Reid The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity - Daniel Reid Shots From the Hip. Sex, Drugs, and The Tao - Daniel Reid Memoir  Energy, Light, and Luminous Space - Daniel Reid Memoir  Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Dan, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.   Dan Reid: (00:03) Thanks for inviting me.   Mason: (00:05) Absolute pleasure. My wife, who runs the company with me, when I first met her, the first book I noticed on her book shelf that I have was The Dao of Health, Sex and Longevity.   Dan Reid: (00:20) My flagship.   Mason: (00:22) Your flagship, and I just said to her, "I'm just jumping on with Dan now," and she was like, "Ah, that was the first book on Daoism I ever bought," and since then [crosstalk 00:00:30].   Dan Reid: (00:30) And also put the word "sex" on the cover.   Mason: (00:34) I mean, I kind of got to agree that that's definitely a draw.   Dan Reid: (00:41) You know when you see books and they're all well-thumbed in that section.   Mason: (00:46) It's a good trio. Health, Sex, and Longevity. That must be ... because that was '89. Is that right?   Dan Reid: (00:53) Actually, it was '87, I think.   Mason: (00:56) Oh, '87, and yeah, did it become a cult classic as it went along? I can't remember. I think you mentioned it in your biography.   Dan Reid: (01:09) It took off really quickly. First of all, it took two years to sell it. I had an agent in New York. He couldn't get anyone interested. He got all these wise guy rejection slips, so he took it to London and sold it immediately, and brought it back, and then of course New York took it, and then it took off pretty quickly, yeah.   Mason: (01:33) Yeah. I mean, I imagine back then ... because it must be interesting for you now to see Daoism and Daoist practises and Daoist sexual practises, and semen retention, and the concept of longevity become all trendy. I mean ...   Dan Reid: (01:47) Yeah. Nobody knew anything about it back then, and the editors didn't know why this might be important. They didn't even know how to pronounce the word Dao. Yeah. But I was sure it would take root, because I just know that's what people want. I mean, anyone who does any kind of practise wants to be healthy, everyone wants sex, and we don't want to die young.   Mason: (02:18) How do you relate now to ... because at that time, you were in Taiwan, right, and really you were immersed, and you'd gone to university and learnt ...   Dan Reid: (02:29) I spoke Chinese, I could read and write, so I could read first, original sources, and I had Daoist friends. I just gravitated toward them. It was nothing formal. I never went to a Chinese medical school or anything. I did do a few qigong classes, but mostly it was friends who were into various aspects, Chinese friends, of Daoism, and because I could speak Chinese, it became very easy to become friends. But most of the learning took place around the tea table. It was very informal, and the Chinese are very practical people, so that's the aspect of Daoism that I got into, that I got first introduced to. Later I started reading some of the classical texts and things that had the background theory.   Mason: (03:24) So you were in ... I think it must have been the original time, when there was a bridging of that classical Daoist and Chinese medical information coming over to the West. Were there some people before you that were maybe doing some other ground work I'm not really aware of? It seemed like that was the period, that mid-'80s to late '80s, when it was actually happening.   Dan Reid: (03:52) Yeah, it was. Of course there were some people. I read a lot of books by an English writer named John Blofeld, who lived in China for 18 years, and he was interested in Daoism, Buddhism, and all that, and he was in China from 1930 to '48, and I read most of his books, and then I finally met him. Actually, he was dying that year. I didn't know that, but it turned out he was living in Bangkok, so I flew down there to meet him, and he was in the middle of writing his memoirs, in Chinese.   Mason: (04:31) Wow. You covered that in your book, right, Shots From the Hip, your biography.   Dan Reid: (04:35) Yes. You read that?   Mason: (04:37) Yeah, yeah, I read that. I loved it. I don't love biographies a lot of the time. I think I was turned off by Kelly Slater's.   Dan Reid: (04:49) Oh, yeah. Kelly Slater's a real fan of the Dao of Sex, Health and Longevity.   Mason: (04:55) Is he? Awesome.   Dan Reid: (04:57) Oh, yeah. Always talks about it. But I can't get in touch with him. I wanted to thank him for all the promotion he's done.   Mason: (05:05) Well, that's interesting. Well, I'll see eventually if I can get him on. I know he likes mushrooms and tonics. If we can get him on to the Di Dao tonic herbs, I'll make sure I ...   Dan Reid: (05:14) Tell him you interviewed me. Yeah.   Mason: (05:16) Yeah.   Dan Reid: (05:17) What were we talking about there?   Mason: (05:20) Well, we were talking about the-   Dan Reid: (05:23) Oh, I was going to ask you about the memoir. Have you read just the first one or the second one?   Mason: (05:25) No. Is the second one Energy, Light and Luminous Space?   Dan Reid: (05:28) Yeah.   Mason: (05:28) Is that the ... No. I actually wanted to talk to you first. I don't know why I felt ... I finished Shots From the Hip, and then I was like, cool. Once I've spoken to you in an interview, I'll start Energy, Light and Luminous Space, so now I'll go and ... I've just got Shots From the Hip to my Kindle. I might do the same with the other one, so I don't have to wait now.   Dan Reid: (05:47) Yeah. I just gave it a final polish about two months ago, so it's good that you haven't read it.   Mason: (05:51) Oh, good. I knew there was a reason.   Dan Reid: (05:54) Yeah.   Mason: (05:56) How are you feeling, having been ... I see it. It was like you took the foundation of work that those that had done a lot of the translation and actually bridged it over to the West, so you did a lot of that bridging.   Dan Reid: (06:11) That's the place where it usually falls apart, because many translators or people who've studied Chinese medicine formally, they get too literal in the way they present it to the West, and it just doesn't make sense to people, and I think this is too esoteric, or maybe this isn't really well, and so I made an attempt, and apparently I have an ability to do that, to make it sensibile and enjoyable to Western readers, in a way that they'll keep reading, and I guess that's why my books stay in print. It's more than translation, it's interpretation.   Mason: (06:56) How do you communicate that to people? Obviously I think I agree. You've got obviously the knack because you can discuss poetry, you can discuss the character, and you can sit in that world and not try and explain that way of thinking as it being metaphoric, or ... You don't try and explain it with Western concepts, you just sit in and live within that way of thinking, which is from an Eastern philosophical standpoint.   Dan Reid: (07:27) Yeah, but I try to find aspects of Western culture, and particularly contemporary. I mean, I came from this, you read by book, the hippy age, and the new age, and all this stuff, so I tried to find ... and explaining things which I can understand from reading original Chinese texts, and from Chinese masters and all that, but then I try to find something in the Western world that links. Western science, maybe cutting edge medical science, nutritional science. It's not mainstream stuff, but it's getting more and more. Organic food, and food combining. There's links to all that in ancient Daoist thought and in what we're doing now in the West. It's just finding how to thread them together.   Mason: (08:20) Yeah, make it relevant in the Western way of thinking, right?   Dan Reid: (08:23) Yeah.   Mason: (08:23) Is that where you stand, that you're happy to bridge so that people can stay more so within their Western framework and-   Dan Reid: (08:32) Absolutely.   Mason: (08:33) ... integrate some of the wisdom, or is there a party that's like, you're going to have to step out of your way of thinking and start integrating with the Eastern way of looking at the world?   Dan Reid: (08:44) Oh, not at all. I consider myself internally Chinese. What do they call that? An egg. White on the outside and yellow on the inside. But there's really nothing new under the sun. The Dao is probably the most ancient integrated system of thought that makes sense, and it's focused on practical things. Western people are practical, so I am very content to be a bridge. It's interesting you use that word because my wife calls me a bridge. She's Chinese, and so I'm a bridge to her going the other way.   Mason: (09:29) Is your wife ... Is it Snow?   Dan Reid: (09:31) Yeah, Snow. She's from Taiwan. [crosstalk 00:09:34].   Mason: (09:34) How long have you guys been together?   Dan Reid: (09:35) She's Jo-Jo in the memoir.   Mason: (09:37) Jo-Jo. Oh, yeah. Of course. Okay. Okay. Jo-Jo. How long have you guys been together?   Dan Reid: (09:42) We've been married 30 years next year.   Mason: (09:47) Wow. Congratulations.   Dan Reid: (09:49) Talk about longevity.   Mason: (09:50) Yeah. I know there's elements of Daoism that's not ... The non-sexy kind of aspect of Daoism, which is the longevity, and being able to go along in your psychological development, and reflect upon yourself so that you don't project on others, and have a healthy relationship, or have healthy friendships. It's one of those things. It's I guess one of those kind of those under-themes. It's maybe there, maybe coming to the surface a little bit more, but not overt. What I wanted to ask, because there was a bit of a ... I can imagine that we didn't have long to talk about it in the book, like, where this sudden ability, in my eyes sudden, for you to put together these intensely complex dishes and meals together, but I think I remember there was a friend. You were with your friends in a castle. You were somewhere in America, in-   Dan Reid: (10:53) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cooking, you mean?   Mason: (10:55) Yeah, yeah, cooking.   Dan Reid: (11:01) The three things I like best are cooking ... writing first, cooking, and gardening, and they all fit together. I learnt to cook early on in my life from my aunt and my mother. They taught me things, and then my Chinese teachers started teaching me in California, when I was studying Chinese, how to cook Chinese food, and I started to see all the principles of the yin, the yang, and the five elements become the five flavours, and how everything works in balance and harmony. The basic Daoist principles run right through it, and so how am I able to do that? I think I was younger. I had a lot of energy, and I still cook. I still cook for my wife and myself. We don't have very many dinner guests here anymore, but yeah.   Mason: (11:55) It is a way to take it out of the theoretical and apply it. I mean, that's quite often ...   Dan Reid: (12:02) But that's the whole point. China, I mean, they are practical, earthly people. They're not really into so much ... The ones who really want to go full spiritual, they just leave society. They go into the mountains, and there's still Daoist hermits, men and women, up in the mountains, who don't even know who Mao Zedong was.   Mason: (12:27) Amazing. What a world.   Dan Reid: (12:28) Yeah. There's a guy named ... an old friend of mine from Taiwan named Bill Porter. His pen name is Red Pine, and Red Pine is probably the foremost translator now of classical Daoist and Buddhist texts, and he's still working, and he's 78 now, and I'm still in touch with him. He went to China. He's got a book called Road to Heaven, because he said, "Well, I want to see if I can find these Daoists," and this is when it was just after the culture revolution, you know, but he managed to get up to those mountains, and he met Daoist hermits.   Dan Reid: (13:12) Now, those are the ones who are really taking the spiritual side of it, the esoteric side of it, to the max. They live in caves or in cabins. They never come down off the mountain, but other than that, Chinese society uses Daoist principles, Daoist science, for medicine, Chinese medicine, cooking, sex, overall health practises, painting, the way they do their landscape paintings, the perfect balance of space and ink. It's the same principle applies, but for China, it's basically a Confucian society. They think that, well, okay, we're here on Earth. We have this life. Let's just focus on this, and we're going to find out what happens next anyway, so why focus in on that now? Confucius said, "Pay respects to all gods and demons, but stay clear of them all."   Mason: (14:23) I like it. It's an interesting thing, because in Daoism, and all through Chinese society, there are deities used to represent something in ... but never a real worshipping .   Dan Reid: (14:41) No, not like that. Exactly, because they're like ... Also Buddhism too, or Hinduism. No-one denies that there's gods. They just say there's not one almighty one above all the others. There's an almighty state, not an almighty god, but a state of mind, a state of spirit, which we look for. Where the Buddhists call it enlightenment, in China they just call it the Dao, the way, and you want to go that direction. You're not going into a religion that then you have to just take all these orders from God and from the clergy. Instead you want to cultivate that supreme state, which is beyond the human condition.   Mason: (15:34) From where you're sitting, and watching the world, and watching Daoist principles now roll out further and further, where are you at with ... Are you feeling like there's an authenticity and a grounding-ness in the way in which that philosophy is rolling out into the West, whether it's through businesses and just people integrating those practises? More and more, qigong starts to move out there, more and more Chinese medicine starts rolling out there. Are you kind of feeling like it's staying connected to the old way mostly?   Dan Reid: (16:11) As long as they are following the basic science and the basic philosophy of the Dao, the yin and the yang, the five elements. You have to be able to see how those principles apply to different aspects of life, but if they stick to those principles, then it's on course. I mean, there's also the nonsense, the commercialization, the Dao of Winnie the Pooh, and all these things. Okay. That's not what we're talking about, but the principles are solid. It's quantum physics also. I mean, the binary, yin and yang. Isn't that how computers work? There's this two, and then there's five, and then it goes on from there. It's all in the Dao De Jing, if you know how to read the Dao De Jing. It's all there.   Mason: (17:03) Yeah. Difficult one. I mean, I've got a few translations, and they're all so different [crosstalk 00:17:09].   Dan Reid: (17:09) I like Arthur Waley. He was an English translator of Chinese poetry, but he did one. He never went to China. He taught himself Chinese in the British Museum during World War II, and he's my favourite translator. He calls the Dao De Jing, his translation, The Way and Its Power, so if you find the way, then you get its power. Dao De Jing means, okay, Dao is the Dao, the way. First De means virtue, and Jing is a classic book, so the classic of the way and its power. If you follow the way, the way of nature, basically, because the biggest manifestation, the most obvious manifestation of the Dao on Earth, is nature.   Dan Reid: (18:06) Only humans go against nature. We have all kinds of weird things we do, that animals, and flowers and bees don't do. The underlying thing is we all eat, we all have sex for procreation and all that, and beyond that, humans take it. They try to conquer nature, and so by not following nature and trying to conquer it or twist it, as we can what's happening now in the world, with this whole viral thing, it doesn't end well that way.   Mason: (18:42) Yeah, I mean, there always seems to be something which I think the West isn't programmed for, which is a simplification versus coming up with complex solutions to something. So you're like, that's ... Is that just basically, from your perspective, and understanding the Dao ... I mean, like you've just talked about, first of all, not voiding yourself from nature. Is a simple solution which takes observation and ...   Dan Reid: (19:10) Yeah. Well, one of the things in the Daoist practice ... It's quite well known for people who follow Daoism and Dao De Jing, is the term wu wei. Wei means to do. Wu means no, not. Not doing. But not doing doesn't mean just kicking back, doing nothing, and smoking a joint, and being lazy. It means non-interference, really. It means following the flow of the Dao, of the way, and so you can see that in nature. Watch the birds and the bees behave, and let nature take its course. Now, in the case of the human being, for example, taking medicine as an example, Western medicine interferes, with drugs, chemicals, vaccines, and the best defence against disease is a strong immune system. It's built into us. It's built into our genetics, but how many people have a strong immune response anymore?   Dan Reid: (20:14) And so when you do need medicine, the Chinese principle first is use food. We all have to eat, and if that doesn't work or that's not good enough, or the problem is too great, then go to the herbs, the medicinal herbs, the mushrooms, and take it from there, but that all comes from still taking your lead from nature. Instead of trying to overcome it, I'm going to fix this by ... Because I got a new chemical that I made from petroleum, and I got a patent on it, and this is going to kill the virus or the bacteria, and then, in the process of doing that, it causes other problems.   Mason: (20:56) I think that's always my mind. I've got a nice Western mind as well, you know, so I quite often will constantly go looking up like, all right, what have I got to add in? What have ... But ultimately, I think ... There's a Chinese practitioner we've had who's talked about the colonisation of Chinese medicine on the podcast before, Rhonda Chang, and basically, quite often, if I say ... if I'm decolonizing my mind so I can come up with simple solutions, which is, one, it's ultimately simple. It's like, first of all, you're going to have to yield and come back into effortless effort, or at least I think that's-   Dan Reid: (21:35) Exactly. Wu wei, non-interference, but you want to understand the principle [crosstalk 00:21:40].   Mason: (21:40) That's it. The principle. Yeah. That's where I think it's one thing to try and add in Daoist practises, which have kind of, in a Western way, have been cut out of the entire philosophy and injected into Western world in order to act as a symptom, verse decolonizing in a sense of just coming back and understanding what that principle of wu wei is, and what the principle of yin yang is, so-   Dan Reid: (22:14) And the five elements. All the traditional cultures, basically, have these five elements. I call them the five elemental energies. They're really associated with the five elemental colours, and they all have a different vibrational rate on the electromagnetic spectrum, and it all comes down to very simple things, but then you have to see how, in a complex situation, how those simple principles can be applied to correct the problem, rather than try to come up with a even more complex solution. You know what I mean? Which is the Western medical approach, it's the Western scientific approach. Yeah. It gets way too complex, the technology.   Mason: (23:00) Okay, so a lot of people listening, they're constant ... because that's what I've tried to do with the business in order ... I kind of always talk about things like, I move my business in the direction so I can sleep at night, and one of the things that started coming up was I know that seasonal living is ultimately ... or observing the seasons is ultimately going to solve the problem in which a lot of people come to us for herbs in the first place, and so it's an unfair thing to be talking about herbs without talking about these fundamentals.   Mason: (23:36) But a lot of people listening are aware that they're still undergoing a process of just being able to comprehend that continuing to understand and implement what you're talking about as these basics is worth it, one. Isn't healing some symptom. It's a way of kind of almost re-educating the way, re-informing the way you build your own little family culture, so on and so forth, so just from that perspective, because I'm sure many people have heard it before, and you've probably said it many, many times, but just talking about these basic principles again, hearing it from you, in terms of living seasonally, understanding the principles of yin yang and the five principles, and how ... Can you just explain, for those people listening that are striving to be able to sink their teeth into and feel it so that they can move their family and themselves in that direction more, just maybe a few little pieces of how they can understand the principles further.   Dan Reid: (24:42) Well, you can use the principles to understand and adapt to weather, extreme weather conditions. Well, there's heat, and dampness, and then there's the combinations of heat and damp together, which can be very damaging to human health. Lots of rain and snow. There's the water element coming up. If you look into the traditional Daoist science of how the five elements relate, once cycle is that one, where they say conquers the next or suppresses the next, and then there's the other cycle where one element nurtures the next one, so water is good for earth and all that, but if you go the other way, fire will burn down wood, and all these things.   Dan Reid: (25:37) If you can learn the basic principles, why it's useful to understand the basic principles of Daoism, or I call it Daoist science, because it's not a religion. There is a Daoist religion, a popular religion with temples, and god, and all that, but we're not talking about that here. If you understand those basic principles, then in your daily life, in all aspects, you can find links, starting with yin and yang, positive and negative, male and female, or the five elements and their relations to flavours, salty, sweet, sour, pungent. There are some very obvious ways in daily life, and in your family life and in your living situation, where you can start to ... If you can start to see how it all comes down to a few basic principles, then you can apply it to more complicated things and more complicated situations, including the way people interact with each other.   Mason: (26:47) How would we get informed about the way that we interact with one [crosstalk 00:26:53].   Dan Reid: (26:52) Well, I mean, there's personality types. There's the fire. There is a whole Chinese ... what they call fortune telling or astrology, but it's much deeper than that. There's a science behind it. Personality types, which I don't know if it's genetic or if it's the way you're brought up or something, but there's the fire personality, the person who explodes and is impulsive, and then there's the really easy-going, flowing water element, then there's the very earthy type of person, and there are a lot of texts on all these aspects, and a lot of them have been translated. I don't think there's anything where these principles don't apply.   Mason: (27:45) Yeah. The personality one's always interesting, because I've been looking for ... I've found a few people saying that they've got little online questionnaires, but it doesn't seem ... I don't know if you've got one. It always seems to miss the mark just a little bit, based on ... Because sometimes you get where the deficiency is currently and maybe not tracked back to where your constitutional deficiency or constitutional element lies, and so sometimes I will be like, yep, I'm definitely fire, and now I'm definitely water. Nah, actually ... and I just go round and round.   Dan Reid: (28:25) I mean, you may have your basic personality type, but other things happen in life. Situations arise where you're reacting to another kind of person, either in a good way or an adversarial way, and then that person's energy is then starting to mould yours and change yours, and you're responding, and suddenly you're shifting to some other, from fire to water, or to earth or some other element. There are many factors involved there.   Dan Reid: (29:03) I think that our experience in life is more important than your genetic background, and there's a lot in DNA, obviously, but the idea of free choice is something that humans have, whereas animals and plants will basically just follow their genetic pattern, but humans have the choice to go against the grain sometime. We're seeing a lot of that now in the current situation. How many people are following the agenda that's being pushed now, and then there's a lot of people who aren't, and to do that, you have to sometimes just go against what you've been brought up with.   Mason: (29:58) This is an interesting conversation, because I think the thing with Daoism I like is you come to ... as you observe nature and you observe ... coming from a place of realities, let's say, yin yang, it seems to me like a reality, as is science. However, a lot of the time science doesn't have the foundations of guiding principles that are grounded in reality. Can run off on its own tangent.   Dan Reid: (30:25) Yes, indeed. There's no underlying thing in that, but some science that's coming out ... I mean, quantum physics is basically verifying that, ultimately, and the Daoists say this too, that there is no such thing as solid form. Everything is just energy, but it's slowed down. It's light that's slowed down so much, with our coarse sensory organs, we take it to be a solid form. In fact, it's not, because with modern technology, with electron microscopes, you keep going further and further down. Suddenly the atom just disappears and becomes a waveform, and those are the basic energies. Basic energies like that, and the thing that's interesting is that, in quantum physics, when something, an electron or subatomic particle just sort of disappears and then becomes a waveform, the observer, using intent, using intent, mind, can make it come back, or move somewhere else, or transform into something else. There's something about that. There's the physical level, there's the energetic level, and then there's the mind.   Mason: (31:52) Which are the principles in which Daoism is based on, understanding that reality.   Dan Reid: (31:59) Absolutely. Essence, energy, and spirit. Body, breath, and mind. There's all different ways, but my favourite ideogram, my favourite Chinese character, is the one for intent, and that consists ... On the top, there's the symbol for sound, also means vibration, and underneath that is heart. It's a vibration that comes from here, not here. Here we think. Thinking is very structured. We think in terms of words, and concepts, and all that, but your real intention, what you intend to do, what you want to do in life or in a particular situation, is always from here, which in Chinese we'd call spirit. That's spirit. Something above all the differences in form and in energy and all that. The different permutations can come in combinations, but you have one thing, is your intent is the strongest force.   Mason: (33:13) So many things swimming through my head there. I think what you've just talked about there is coming back to a reality. You mentioned not going off into the religious ... Religion quite often can come with gods, and let's create wrong and right through a set of rules, and once again, because it's easier to, I guess, spread, easier to commodify something that you write down in a book, and you just go, here's how you know right and wrong, verse here's a principle of living in a particular way, which I feel like the Dao and other ways of following these traditions of wisdom, which puts you in reality where you can feel and get informed of, say, morals, ethics, right and wrong, from a place of truth, not being driven by a dogma, and that's why what you're talking about is at some point coming down to a heart space, and not because the religion told you to, not because ...   Dan Reid: (34:17) Religion says you don't have it.   Mason: (34:20) Yeah.   Dan Reid: (34:20) They say you're a boring sinner and you're bad, and so you need god, a god, one of many. How can there be 10 different gods representing 10 different truths? There's only one truth, and then you need this intermediary, which is the guy in the robe, yeah? And that's it, otherwise you're doomed, and you got to sign up for one of these clubs called religions. I mean, religion I think in Latin sort of means something like reunite. You've been separated from the divine, but in Daoism and Buddhism, and the non-theistic, especially Tibetan Buddhism, we've got that. It's just that we don't know it, and even if we know it, we haven't found it.   Dan Reid: (35:15) Everybody has that, and spirituality and religion are totally different. In religion, you're going to obey a certain god and a set of rules, and then the clergy get involved in it, whereas in spirituality, you're just trying to discover a certain aspect of yourself. [inaudible 00:35:36]. Yeah, so you ... Yeah.   Mason: (35:41) Do you think all of Daoism is deriving to that ... Daoist thought. Is that driving to that reality, being present for the individual practising .   Dan Reid: (35:54) Oh yeah, because you got to be present no matter which aspect of the Dao you practise, including semen retention. If you're not present, you're going to go out of control, and it's all over. Cooking. If you don't pay attention, you're not present, you're not going to get the flavours just perfect, just right, and so, in the spiritual tradition of Daoism, you're just trying to be present in your basic nature, your basic state, which is not something you can really describe, but you can experience it.   Mason: (36:38) Which is then the, I guess, the leading intent behind, say, qigong practise or a tea ceremony. Is that correct?   Dan Reid: (36:47) Yes, yes. Okay, so there's three ... There's so many things that are done in trilogy or in trinity. The basic one ... I mean, and at this level, Buddhism and Daoism agree, okay? I think the most basic one is ... You've heard this translated as emptiness many times. Essential emptiness is simply the fact that there is no solid form. It's all empty, so everything that we take for solid is temporary, impermanence, and all that, so what you really want to know is to understand everything's essential nature, which is formless, and from that you can harvest something. Wisdom. Why get attached to impermanent things? How about following things which are eternal? So therefore, we're not so attached to all these little toys and things that we've got so much. Okay? So that's emptiness.   Dan Reid: (37:56) Then the next one. We hear this a lot too. Light. We're in the light. What's the light? Light's spirit, and the nature of spirit and the nature of light, it manifests unconditional love. They talk about unconditional love, compassion, and people get it a bit wrong. They think, oh, this is like this goody two shoes, love everybody, love your neighbour. It's not that. It's also what heals. A real healer is really using herbs and techniques, breathing things, but behind that is the intent, the light of love, which is ... Without that, the thing doesn't have any power.   Dan Reid: (38:45) And then the third level ... Okay, you've got your essential emptiness, you've got your natural light, your luminosity, you might call it. The next level is energy, just energy. The yin and the yang energy, the five elements, and millions of different kind of smaller energies, all of which are sort of refracted out from your clear light of your basic spirit, and if you use that energy in accord with the wisdom and the compassion of your other two aspects, the energy has power, creative power. You can create something, art. You can heal. You can do positive things. That energy doesn't have what we call power, the power to create, unless it's done in accord with the wisdom and the compassion of your other two aspects.   Dan Reid: (39:54) It's hard for people in daily life to keep in mind that, yeah, well, essentially we're formless, and we're just bundles of energy, and we've got this light, because you can't live in the world without an ego and without a house, and a roof over your head, and you got to wear clothes, so it's just a matter of the relative priorities that you give things. By having understanding of the basic nature, then other things become relative, only relatively important.   Mason: (40:24) Yeah, I mean, it's always an interesting process when you start reading about these concepts, and a book can sometimes blow people's minds, and it becomes fantastical. I think that's why a lot of the time, the spiritual communities of the world, and Byron Bay, where everyone's just discovering these principles for the first time, and it makes you very counterculture because it's hard to land in the grind of everyday life, yet most of the time, that's where you do end up, and having the discipline to walk between those two worlds, embody the chop wood, carry water.   Dan Reid: (40:59) Yeah. I mean, I like Byron Bay a lot. I Enjoyed living there. But some people, they take it too far the other way. Everyone's the healer because they had a workshop in Sydney 10 years ago for two weeks, and there it is, but they're not really living like a healer would or manifesting that kind of energy, and some people just don't want to do anything, so sleeping on the beach or stuff like that. It can go overboard that way. There has to be a balance always.   Dan Reid: (41:37) Again, going back to Daoism, the three powers. [inaudible 00:41:41]. What does that mean? Heaven, Earth, and humanity in between. Heaven, okay, the spiritual stuff, the ancient principles of the Dao. Earth, food, sex, shelter, and in between is the human, and the art of life is correctly balancing those two, and this is what the Chinese are so good at. Most people cannot go into a cave and sit there for 50 years and become enlightened, although some can. There was a teacher, a woman, female teacher, my Tibetan teacher, who spent 56 years in a dark retreat. Came out when she was 106, taught for one year, including my teacher, and then went back, and then achieved the rainbow body. You may have heard of that, but ...   Mason: (42:44) Yeah.   Dan Reid: (42:44) Not many people who can do that.   Mason: (42:45) No.   Dan Reid: (42:45) But you don't have to go out and run a gambling den either, or go way the other way too. There's a balance between. But as long as you stick to the basic principles, it's going to go all right. Going into wu wei simply means don't interfere with the basic ... not only with nature, but with the basic nature of things. Don't rub it against the wrong way, because then it's going to bite back.   Mason: (43:23) It seems to be the biggest thing, going against the grain. I can speak for within myself, is that there is a requiring of faith, and for me, having gone to Catholic school, and not to rip on Catholicism. I know there's a lot of people here who might still be ... not a lot, but maybe might be in that world, so it's not about ... But my experience was I was getting this ... it was this false faith jammed down my throat, and so even the concept of having faith got quite muddied up, and for me I'd say taken into the synthetic, verse where you talk about all these principles of flowing with the way, there is this organic faith that's an organic quality within myself.   Mason: (44:09) Because I was thinking about, what's the antidote for me of the fear that I have that I'm going to run out? You know, the greed that comes up. No, I'm not going to go down that path, because it seems like I'm going to have to give up too much. I might as well just work lots, and all that kind of reptilian kind of way, excessively in that earth energy of like, it's not good enough to just have my shelter.   Dan Reid: (44:35) I know what you mean, because I've spent my entire life, except for two years when I worked in a hotel in Taiwan, as a freelance writer, and there's a lot of thin times when you're a freelance writer. But if you're on the right path, in the sense of your basic way of life ... Again, there's that word again. Way. Dao. That's what Dao means. It means way or path. If you just follow it, and you do no harm to others and all those things, well, then, magic happens. Not miracles, magic. It's the magic of life, and I'm not talking about a magic show, but if you're present and you pay attention, you see opportunities happen everywhere, including in things that you might normally think is a real problem or there's adversity there, but if you just sit with it for a while and watch it develop, whoa. There's an opportunity.   Mason: (45:23) You're right. I mean, when I think of that ... That's my counter to that colonised part of myself, which I do love. It helps me stay in this world. When I feel that come up, and want more now rather than ... It's like you plant a tree and you want that tree to grow into something incredible. You're either going to be able to do that synthetically or make it look bigger or have it go along quicker and further than it actually is, and I know there's a Daoist adage in ... I can't remember which classic, but talking about the fact, like a tree, if you just be patient and let a tree grow in the way that it's meant to grow, eventually it will become a tree that the carpenters won't touch. It'll become iconic.   Dan Reid: (46:34) That's right.   Mason: (46:35) And actually have longevity, and actually become something beautiful.   Dan Reid: (46:38) Yeah, and it'll adjust to its environment, in a way that it will grow better than maybe you trying to make it grow in a particular way you want. Yeah.   Mason: (46:48) Patience is a virtue, I guess.   Dan Reid: (46:50) I'm impatient, basically. Well, I have been. I'm getting more patient now because there's nothing much I can do with my impatience anymore.   Mason: (47:05) Well, it's good medicine. I mean, already, I can feel my stress from the last two weeks clear as day right now in this conversation of whether it's how far along our house is, our new house, and getting our ... you know, the plans of what we're going to do as a family, where the business is at, blah, blah, blah. It's the impatience. I feel it stunting and moving into a non way of being. I can feel like the only way I'm going to take it, if I don't have this faith and patience, and I don't engage in flow, is I'm going to have to use synthetic means.   Dan Reid: (47:45) Yeah, I know. I know what you mean. It's letting things take their course, and if you want to accomplish a particular thing, you have to do it in harmony with the way nature is flowing. You have to make some adjustments. You cannot overcome nature. You can only work with it. It's the way. It's the way it works, and so if you go against the way it works because you think you've got technology, or you can throw money at it or something, something else is going to go out of whack.   Dan Reid: (48:23) I mean, look at the condition of the world today. Look at the oceans. Full of plastics, and the air is ... I mean, I don't need to harp on that. It's just all going ... and it doesn't have to be that way. There are natural ways of handling things which are slower. Slower. This thing about space travel, and maybe eventually you don't need a spaceship. You don't need to be Elon Musk or something. You can teleport yourself. I mean, I think that's how the aliens go around other universes, and dimensions, and solar systems. They teleport themselves. It's scientifically possible.   Mason: (49:10) Yeah, I agree with you there. I feel that one coming.   Dan Reid: (49:16) You become a vibrational breath, which then goes, through intent, to where you already had planned, and when you get there, then you re-materialise.   Mason: (49:29) Don't know if it's within the same conversation, or whether it just came to mind. In terms of one of the elements of Daoism being facing your mortality and then therefore immortality, and almost this presence being in preparation for death without there being an attachment to what happens on the other side, perhaps, or perhaps in certain Daoist traditions, they do have an intention, where do you sit with that, and the relevance of ...   Dan Reid: (50:00) I'm sitting a lot with that lately.   Mason: (50:02) Oh, really?   Dan Reid: (50:05) Yes. Yeah, I'm 72 now, and that guy, Arthur Waley, the translator of the Dao De Jing, who .. he's my favourite. He says one of the things he likes about the Dao is their lyrical acceptance of death. Almost a poetic acceptance, because all it really is is a matter of not being attached to something that's going down the tube. It's going down the drain. Why be attached to your bathwater? You've just had a bath. The water's dirty. You let it out. Right? Your body is the same thing. We get old. The water gets dirty, no matter what you do and no matter how well you eat, or how much qigong you do every day. It's going to expire, and so at that time, or later in life, it really is time to start focusing more on what doesn't disappear. It may not be visible, spirit or awareness, but it's eternal, and it's indestructible, and we all have it, and this idea of religions.   Dan Reid: (51:32) All right, well, if you behave yourself, and you come to church and everything, you'll get a ticket to Heaven, and the other one, you get a ticket to Hell, and this kind of thing. That's not what it's about. You create your own Heaven or Hell, and usually it's on Earth, in life. What you want to do is focus more on that which lasts, which is always there, and you may be back again in another body or even in another dimension, or whatever. But the basic core light of what you really are, the energy and the light, is always going to be there. I discuss this quite a bit in the last chapter of the second book, the second volume of my memoir. That thing, I had to write five times.   Mason: (52:29) Yeah. Yeah. I'm really feeling it right now. I really felt you slow down and sink in there, and ...   Dan Reid: (52:43) Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely true. Life rushes by very fast if you're living fast, and jumping around, and yet if you slow down, then it can be the same amount of time, the same number of years, but seem a lot longer.   Mason: (53:04) [inaudible 00:53:04] that's an element that really I got I feel a few years ago, and I started to get a bit fearful about life being short, which I felt was relevant. I was like, okay. Great. It's something [crosstalk 00:53:21].   Dan Reid: (53:20) Well, that's good that you feel that way, because life is short.   Mason: (53:24) Well, then as soon as I stopped resisting it ... Because I feel like that's, to be honest, why I got into the Daoist herbs, and then practises, and the concept of immortality, is from a place of fear of the inevitability of death, and because I was young enough and in my 20s, I could convince myself that, for a time, I could a bandaid of immortality over that fear, and then thankfully I think, for myself, and continuing to read, whether it's your books or just from other traditions, it was like, okay. Maybe I keep on going with that thought, and I finally started having the feeling of like, well, life's pretty long, at the same time, which that ... and that was probably the first time I'd experienced I guess an intellectual ... a real yin yang.   Mason: (54:26) It really created two magnetic poles, that first time I felt that, and started recalibrating myself and the way that I approach life, which was one of the most significant times I feel like I've gone, wow, that's ... and being in the perception of yin and yang really does all of a sudden creates these magnetic poles where I don't have to have the answer, but I can orient myself around them, and that's cool.   Dan Reid: (54:50) Yeah.   Mason: (54:50) It's just getting all of that. I'm aware we've been going for about an hour. I think, just in the tradition, the way it's gone, I read one of your biographies, and we jump on for a podcast. I think that would ... If you'd be up for coming back on.   Dan Reid: (55:07) You want to read the second volume, huh?   Mason: (55:10) Yeah, I'm going to go ... I know you said you just updated it, and I assume that'll be ...   Dan Reid: (55:14) Well, I can send it to you as a PDF file if you want.   Mason: (55:19) Yeah. That'll be cool. Let's do that.   Dan Reid: (55:21) I just sent the PDF to my guy at Amazon to upload into the text, but it's very readable, so I'll just send it to you.   Mason: (55:32) Perfect. We'll do that, and I think there's a ... I have got The Art and Alchemy of Chinese Tea as well, which is something I've found ... When I was reading your book, and I know I said we're going to finish up, but I might throw this out there, just as we-   Dan Reid: (55:52) That's okay. I got nothing but time now.   Mason: (55:55) Beautiful. Yeah. It's a long life. I'm sure there was struggle behind the scenes in terms of dedicating yourself to certain practises, to an extent, but your capacity for discipline ... I mean, it was like it's the way ... I guess I can see ... Your biography's name is Sex, Drugs and the Dao, and you do have that character which you throw yourself into the deep end.   Dan Reid: (56:33) Yeah. I think people should. That's okay to do when you're young.   Mason: (56:34) Yeah. But it meant that, off the back of the sex and the drugs, you threw yourself into qigong practise and the tea ceremony practise, and I think I read it at a time where I was-   Dan Reid: (56:47) Cooking. And cooking.   Mason: (56:50) Exactly, and I think I was reading the book at a time ... and it got me reflecting on ... I was exiting a phase of my life, especially with a young child and a business to run, where I wasn't able to get quite as immersive, and I actually remember getting a little bit nostalgic about that part of my life, and maybe you know what I mean.   Dan Reid: (57:16) I do.   Mason: (57:16) And possibly feeling a bit guilty or going down on myself. Getting down on myself. Going down on myself. That's a funny way to put it. Getting down on myself about it, but for you and the concept of discipline, where does it sit now in terms of the discipline around sexual practise, semen retention, qigong practise, tea ceremony, et cetera? How do you relate at this point in your life to the concept of your consistent practise, students-   Dan Reid: (57:53) I was doing some teaching in Byron. I had some qigong classes I did while I was there, and I had a small one going here, but now with the shut down and everything, I got no students here, so I'm not doing any teaching right now. I'd like to but I'm not. For me, personally, I find that it boils down to just the basic things that work best, because like I said, as you get older, you know your time is going to be up at the one point, so there's no more need to ...   Dan Reid: (58:28) You have the knowledge, you can hold an intelligent conversation with people on all sorts of things, but what do I do at home? I'm not asked that a lot. Qigong. I don't practise as much as I used to, but I always do some every day, because it works, and I don't feel comfortable if I don't. I feel my body's tight. I can feel my tendons behind my knees, and I can ... You know, my organs don't seem to be sitting in the right place, the spine isn't quite right, so the qigong works, and I'm getting older, and so it works in an important way. It makes my body work better, and now what I call tea-gong.   Mason: (59:14) Nice.   Dan Reid: (59:14) Which is what the tea is, the Chinese way of tea, and that particular tea, that high mountain oolong tea from Taiwan, is just unbelievable. Do you drink tea?   Mason: (59:27) Yeah. Not that much, though.   Dan Reid: (59:31) Well, you should go and see Snow's brother.   Mason: (59:34) Oh, cool.   Dan Reid: (59:35) He lives in Mullumbimby and-   Mason: (59:37) Oh, amazing.   Dan Reid: (59:38) Yeah, and he's got tea there, and teapots. I mean, you go and visit him and he'll make tea for you, and you'll see. He makes good tea, and you-   Mason: (59:46) Do you want me to give him a plug, or is it a private ... Is it a private thing or is he open to the public?   Dan Reid: (59:52) Absolutely, yeah, because we have a tea website, and it's run out of Taiwan, and it's one of Snow's sisters that mails it out and all that, but we have a lot of people in Byron who like the tea, and so she supplies him, and so he's always got some tea, and some teapots, and some cups available, so you don't have to order it online. You can just go buy it at his house.   Mason: (01:00:17) What's the easiest way to find him? Should we get contacts later from you and I can put it in the show notes? That's easy.   Dan Reid: (01:00:26) Let me see if I can ...   Mason: (01:00:29) Might as well give him a shout out, and what's the website as well?   Dan Reid: (01:00:34) Oolong-tea.org. Oolong, O-O-L-O-N-G, dash.   Mason: (01:00:45) Yep, got it.   Dan Reid: (01:00:46) Okay, now, his number is ... His English name is Dexter.   Mason: (01:00:53) Dexter. Yeah.   Dan Reid: (01:01:00) 0421502811.   Mason: (01:01:03) Awesome. I will reach out to him prior and make sure he's happy with me putting his number on a podcast.   Dan Reid: (01:01:10) I think he will be. I think he will be, because, I mean, people buy tea from him. That's part of what he does for a living, and he's got a food thing in the Mullum farmers' market on Friday.   Mason: (01:01:23) Oh, I probably went past him.   Dan Reid: (01:01:25) Yeah, his stuff always sells out by 10:00.   Mason: (01:01:28) Oh, cool. We'll make it 9:30 now.   Dan Reid: (01:01:33) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, back to what I do. Qigong and tea-gong. I mean, and the tea is the same thing. I love the taste of this tea. When you taste it, when he makes it for you, it's really good, but more than that, it really works for me, especially on my nervous system, my brain. It wakes me up, but not in a way like coffee races you a bit, and it just makes me feel good in a way that sometimes is hard to describe, and there's a whole organic feeling which goes very well with the tea, so I do the tea-gong and the qigong basically more or less at the same time. Speaking of which ...   Mason: (01:02:14) Oh, yeah. Nice mug as well.   Dan Reid: (01:02:19) So that. What else do I do? I still read books on spiritual subjects that I find of interest. Maybe I already know about them, but then I'm just reading a new book on the same subject, and when it comes to health problems, I go with nature. Organic, and same with food, but beyond that, I'm not writing anything right now. The place we live here is just too noisy for me to focus on writing, and I can't teach because I don't have any students here.   Mason: (01:03:06) Hopefully we can spark your online teaching career.   Dan Reid: (01:03:09) Yeah, that might work. That might work. That might work.   Mason: (01:03:14) Well, I mean, it's something ... is fascinating, having read your books for so many years, having read just how much has gone into your own self-education, and just reading about the kinds of conversations that you're having around different aspects of Daoism and Chinese culture and philosophy, just through your books. I can feel how much is simmering under the surface [crosstalk 01:03:46].   Dan Reid: (01:03:46) Yeah. For me, it always had to be something that you could actually go in and get your hands dirty, you know? To actually have contact with people who do those things, who know those things, Daoists or whatever. To do it all from academic sources just doesn't make sense to me. It really doesn't. I mean, I read books by academicians to get background information, but to understand how anything works, you got to try it.   Mason: (01:04:14) Yeah. I think the difference in what you ... what I like about you delivering and talking about the academic side of it, or the classics, is that I think lots of people are going to take ... whether it's yoga or Daoism, and teach it. They don't leave a track of where they've gotten the concepts for because then that leads to accountability and actually having to know your shit, whereas a lot of people don't want to be accountable to that.   Dan Reid: (01:04:41) That's right. Also you'll notice, in my writing, in my books, I don't put a lot of footnotes and references to ... I mean, because my readers trust me. Over time, they trust me, and I say I don't write for academicians. They want to know where I got this fact, or is this true. I say go fact check it if you want. I've never been challenged on anything. I've had editors who don't like some things I write, and I said, "Either you put that in or I'm not going to sign a contract," and I've never had a problem.   Mason: (01:05:16) Yeah. Principles.   Dan Reid: (01:05:17) I don't want to write something that's not true.   Mason: (01:05:21) Yeah. It's not good. I mean, you've definitely got longevity in your Daoist career, anyway, so that's saying something. I mean, and that's always proof in the pudding. There's those names. Yeah. It's really good to connect, because you're one of the names that constantly comes up. As we were chatting about just beforehand, I think, yeah, I came six years ago to Byron, and you'd just left, and it was interesting when I talked about what we did, and they were like, "What are you up to here?" And I was like, "Oh, I'm bringing my company up here, and we talk about Daoist herbalism [crosstalk 01:05:55]."   Dan Reid: (01:05:56) Who'd you talk to?   Mason: (01:05:57) Oh, I mean, it's like a number. I mean, I think maybe it was Si Mullum was the first [crosstalk 01:06:02].   Dan Reid: (01:06:02) Oh, yeah, Si Mullumbimby. He's one of my best friends. He's a didg player.   Mason: (01:06:07) Yeah, didg player, and, I mean, just the general conversation. Nick Cane, who's ... he works here and knew of you, and just your name pops up, and so it's really great to make the connection, and then read your books, and having had your books for over a decade. I look forward to reading the Shots From the Hip: Energy, Light and Luminous Space.   Dan Reid: (01:06:33) Okay.   Mason: (01:06:34) Thanks for sending that my way, and, I mean, yeah, just recommend everyone to go over to Dan Reid, R-E-I-D, .org. Your website's got lots of awesome info there.   Dan Reid: (01:06:46) Yeah.   Mason: (01:06:47) Is there anywhere else you'd like to send people?   Dan Reid: (01:06:49) The tea website.   Mason: (01:06:51) Again, tea website. Oolong-tea.org.   Dan Reid: (01:06:55) Yeah.   Mason: (01:06:55) And then also go in and see Dexter if you're up this way, if you're around Byron Shire.   Dan Reid: (01:07:02) Yeah, do that for sure. You'll get a good cup of tea.   Mason: (01:07:06) Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks so much for coming on and taking the time. Beautiful.   Dan Reid: (01:07:12) All right. Well, I liked doing this with you.   Mason: (01:07:16) Likewise.   Dan Reid: (01:07:17) So if you want to do more [crosstalk 01:07:21].   Mason: (01:07:21) Yeah, I think it'll be great to do ... Yeah, I mean, especially for yourself, if there's anywhere where you're particularly getting any new insights, or you think it's relevant for the current way that the world's working, we can either do that or we can just either come on and have another jam. Both ways work. We'll connect and see what's flowing.   Dan Reid: (01:07:44) Okay.

This week, J.D. is joined by Tom, the host of One Foot in the Podcast, to review the very first episode of 2point4 Children. Plus, Andrew Marshall reminisces about the making of the pilot and the casting process; including the actress originally in line to play Bill Porter! Please get in touch via email 2point4podcast@gmail.com. We are also on Instagram and Twitter under the username @2point4podcast. You can also find two Facebook pages dedicated to the show and the podcast; 2point4 Children DVD & Streaming Campaign Facebook page and Don't Slam Your Podcast: A 2point4 Children Podcast.

Bill Porter (literary name Red Pine) is one of the world’s leading translators and scholars of Chinese literary and religious...

Date: April 13, 1973 Speaker: Dana M Wegner Topic: Commodore “Dirty Bill” Porter - Chicago Civil War Round Table Monthly Meeting

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. 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 “Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson. (more…)

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. 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 “Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. This collection has all the Everlys’ recordings up to the end of 1962.  I would also recommend this recently-released box set containing expanded versions of their three last studio albums for Warners, including Roots, which I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   This week we’re going to look at the Everly Brothers’ first and biggest hit of the sixties, a song that established them as hit songwriters in their own right, which was more personal than anything they’d released earlier, and which was a big enough hit that it saved what was to become a major record label. We’re going to look at “Cathy’s Clown”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] When we left the Everly Brothers, six months ago, we had seen them have their first chart hits and record the classic album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, an album that prefigured by several years the later sixties folk music revival, and which is better than much of the music that came out of that later scene. Both artistically and commercially, they were as successful as any artists of the early rock era. But Don Everly, in particular, wanted them to have more artistic control themselves — and if they could move to a bigger label as well, that was all the better. But as it happens, they didn’t move to a bigger label, just a richer one. Warner Brothers Records had started in 1958, and had largely started because of changes in the film industry. In the late 1940s and early fifties, the film industry was being hit on all sides. Anti-trust legislation meant that the film studios had to get rid of the cinema chains they owned, losing a massive revenue stream (and also losing the opportunity to ensure that their films got shown no matter how poor their reputation). A series of lawsuits from actors had largely destroyed the star system on which the major studios relied, and then television became a huge factor in the entertainment industry, cutting further into the film studios’ profits. An aside about that — one of the big reasons for the growth of television as America’s dominant entertainment medium is racism. In the thirties and forties, there had been huge waves of black people moving from rural areas to the cities in search of work, and we’ve looked at that and the way that led to the creation of rhythm and blues in many of the previous episodes. After World War II there was a corresponding period of white flight, where white people moved en masse away from the big cities and into small towns and suburbs, to get away from black people. This is largely what led to America’s car culture and general lack of public transport, because low-population-density areas aren’t as easy to serve with reliable public transport. And in the same way it’s also uneconomical to run mass entertainment venues like theatres and cinemas in low-population-density areas, and going to the cinema becomes much less enticing if you have to drive twenty miles to get to one, rather than walking down the street. So white flight had essentially meant the start of a process by which entertainment in America moved from the public sphere to the private one. This is also a big reason for the boom in record sales in the middle decades of last century — records are private entertainment, as opposed to going out to a dance or a show. And this left the big film studios in dire straits. But while they were down on their luck when it came to films, Warners were doing very well in the music publishing business, where unlike their ownership of cinemas they didn’t have to get rid of their properties. Warners had always owned the songs used in their films, and indeed one of the reasons that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies existed in the first place was so that they could plug songs that Warners owned. When Tex Avery has Owl Jolson singing “I Love to Singa”: [Excerpt: “Owl Jolson”, “I Love to Singa”] That’s a song that had originally appeared in a Warners feature film a few months earlier, sung by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway: [Excerpt: Al Jolson and Cab Calloway, “I Love to Singa”] So Warners were making money from the music industry. But then they realised something. Tab Hunter, one of their film stars under contract to them, had started to have hit records. His record “Young Love” spent six weeks at number one: [Excerpt: Tab Hunter, “Young Love”] And whenever he was interviewed to promote a film, all the interviewers would ask about was his music career. That was bad enough — after all, he wasn’t signed to Warners as a singer, he was meant to be a film star — but what was worse was that the label Hunter was on, Dot Records, was owned by a rival film studio, Paramount. Warners would go to all the trouble of getting an interview set up for their star, and then all it would do was put money into Paramount’s pocket! They needed to get into the record business themselves, as a way to exploit their song catalogue if nothing else. At first they thought about just buying Imperial Records, but when that deal fell through they started their own label, and signed Hunter to it right at the point that his career nosedived. In the first two years that Warner Brothers Records existed, they only had two hit singles — “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”, a record based on the Warner-owned TV series 77 Sunset Strip and co-performed by one of that series’ stars, Edd Byrnes: [Excerpt: Edd Byrnes and Connie Stevens, “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”] And another record by Connie Stevens, who also sang on “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”, and was the star of a different Warners TV series, Hawaiian Eye: [Excerpt: Connie Stevens, “Sixteen Reasons”] Everything else they released flopped badly. After two years they had lost three million dollars, and would have closed down the label altogether, except the label was owed another two million, and they didn’t want to write that off. The main reason for these losses was that the label was mostly releasing stuff aimed at the easy listening adult album market, records by people like Henry Mancini, and at the time the singles market was where the money was, and the singles market was dominated by young people. They needed some records that would appeal to young people. They decided that they needed the Everly Brothers. At the beginning of 1960, the duo had released ten singles since May 1957, of which nine had charted, as had four of the B-sides. They’d topped the pop charts twice, the R&B charts twice, and the country charts four times. At a time when even the biggest stars would occasionally release the odd flop, they were as close to a guaranteed hit-making machine as existed in the music industry. And they were looking to get away from Cadence Records, for reasons that have never been made completely clear. It’s usually said that they had artistic differences with Cadence, but at the same time they always credited Archie Bleyer from Cadence with being the perfect arranger for them — he arranged their final Cadence single, “Let it Be Me”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Let it Be Me”] But for whatever reason, the Everlys *were* looking to find a new label, and Warner Brothers were desperate enough that they signed them up to the biggest contract ever signed in music business history up to that point. Remember that four years earlier, when Elvis had signed with RCA records, they’d paid a one-off fee of forty thousand dollars and *that* was reportedly the largest advance ever paid in the industry up until that point. Now, the Everlys were signing to Warners on a ten-year contract, with a guaranteed advance of one hundred thousand dollars a year for those ten years — the first million-dollar contract in music history. They were set up until 1970, and were sure to provide Warners with a string of hits that would last out the decade — or so it seemed at first. Their first recording for the label had an unusual melodic inspiration. Ferde Grofé was an arranger and orchestrator for Paul Whiteman’s jazz band in the 1920s and thirties. He’s particularly known these days for having been the original arranger of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” — Gershwin had written it for two pianos, and it was Grofé who had come up with the instrumental colouring that these days we think of as being so important to that piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman “Rhapsody in Blue (original 1924 recording)”] Grofé had written a piece in 1931 called the “Grand Canyon Suite”, and its third movement, “On the Trail” had become the most popular piece of music he ever wrote. Disney made an Oscar-winning short with the suite as its soundtrack in 1958, and you can still hear “On the Trail” to this day in the Grand Canyon section of the Disneyland Railroad. But “On the Trail” was best known as the music that Phillip Morris used in their radio and TV commercials from the thirties through to the sixties. Here’s a bit from the original Whiteman recording of the piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, “Grand Canyon Suite: On the Trail”] Don took that melodic inspiration, and combined it with two sources of lyrical inspiration — when his dad had been a child, he’d had a crush on a girl named Mary, who hadn’t been interested, and his schoolfriends had taunted him by singing “Mary had a little Ike” at him. The other key to the song came when Don started thinking about an old crush of his own, a girl from his school called Catherine Coe — though in later years he was at pains to point out that the song wasn’t actually about her. They took the resulting song into the studio with the normal members of the Nashville A-Team, and it became only their second hit single with an A-side written by one of the brothers, reaching number one on both the pop and R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] I say it’s written by Don — the original issue of the record credited the songwriting to both Don and Phil, but Phil signed an agreement in 1980 relinquishing his claim to the song, and his name was taken off all future copies. It sounds to me like Don’s writing style, and all the anecdotes about its writing talk about him without mentioning any input from Phil, so I’m assuming for these purposes that it’s a Don solo composition. Listening to the record, which was the first that the duo produced for themselves, as well as being their first for Warners, you can hear why Don was at times dissatisfied with the songs that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had written for the brothers. It’s a sophisticated piece of work in a number of different ways. For a start, there’s the way the music mirrors the lyric on the first line. That line is about separation — “Don’t want your love any more” — and the brothers start the line in unison, but Don’s voice slowly drops relative to Phil’s, so by the end of the line they’re a third apart. It’s like he’s stepping away: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] The song’s structure also seems unusual. Wikipedia says it has a chorus and a bridge but no verse, while the Library of Congress disagrees and says it has a verse and a bridge but no chorus. Personally, I’d say that it definitely does have a chorus — the repeated section with the same words and melody each time it’s repeated, with both brothers singing, and with the title of the song at the end, seems as definitively a chorus as one could possibly ask for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] If that’s not a chorus, I’m honestly not sure what is. The reason this comes into question is the other section. I would call that section a verse, and I think most people would, and the song’s structure is a straightforward A-B-A-B repetition which one would normally call verse/chorus. But it’s such a change of pace that it feels like the contrasting section that normally comes with a bridge or middle eight. Indeed the first time I properly learned what a middle eight was — in a column in Mojo magazine in the mid-nineties called Doctor Rock which explained some basic musicology — it was specifically cited as an example of one: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] Part of the reason that seems so different is that Don’s singing it solo, while the brothers are duetting on the choruses, and normally Don’s solo lines would be on a bridge or middle eight. Not always, but often enough that that’s what you expect if you’ve listened to a few of their records. But there’s also a change in rhythm. One of the things you’ll notice as we go further into the sixties is that, for a while in the early sixties, the groove in rock and roll — and also in soul — moved away from the swinging, shuffling rhythm you get in most of the fifties music we’ve looked at into a far more straightforward four-four rhythm. In roughly 1961 through 64 or so, you have things like the bam-bam-bam-bam four-on-the-floor beat of early Motown or Four Seasons records, or the chugga-chugga-chugga rhythm of surf guitar, rather than the looser, triplet-based grooves that you’d get in the fifties. And you can hear in “Cathy’s Clown” the shift in those rhythms happening in the song itself. The verses have an almost Latin feel, with lots of loose cymbal work from Buddy Harman: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] While the choruses have an almost martial feel to them, a boom-BAP rhythm, and sound like they have two drummers on them: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] While I say that sounds like there are two drummers, it’s still just Harman playing. The difference is that here the engineer, Bill Porter, who was the engineer on a lot of the Nashville recordings we’ve looked at, notably the Roy Orbison ones, had just obtained a new device — a tape loop. Now, I’ve seen some people misunderstand what it was that Porter did with this — thinking he looped the drums in the way one would loop things today, just playing the same recording over and over. It wasn’t that. Rather it was a way of doing what Sam Phillips had been doing with tape echo in Sun a few years earlier — there would be an endlessly circulating loop of tape, which had both record and playback heads. The drums would be recorded normally, but would also be recorded onto that tape loop, and then when it played back a few milliseconds later it would sound like a second drummer playing along with the first. It’s an almost inaudible delay, but it’s enough to give a totally different sound to the drums. Porter would physically switch this loop on and off while recording the track live — all the vocals and instruments were recorded live together, onto a three-track tape, and he would turn it on for the choruses and off for the verses. This is an early example of the kind of studio experimentation that would define the way records were made in the sixties. The rhythm that Harman played was also very influential — you can hear that it strongly influenced Paul McCartney if you listen to Beatles records like “What You’re Doing”, “Ticket to Ride”, and “Tomorrow Never Knows”, all of which have drum patterns which were suggested by McCartney, and all of which are strongly reminiscent of the “Cathy’s Clown” chorus. “Cathy’s Clown” topped the charts for five weeks, and sold two million copies. It was an immense success, and the Everlys seemed to be on top of the world. But it was precisely then that problems started for the duo. First, they moved from Nashville to LA. The main reason for that was that as well as being a record contract, their new contract with Warners would give them the opportunity to appear in films, too. So they spent six months taking acting lessons and doing screen tests, before concluding that neither of them could actually act or remember their lines, and wisely decided that they were going to stick to music. The one good thing they took from that six month period was that they rekindled their friendship with the Crickets, and Sonny Curtis wrote them a song called “Walk Right Back”, which made the top ten (and number one in the UK and New Zealand): [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Walk Right Back”] Curtis wrote that song while he was in basic training for the military, and when he got a pass for a few days he’d only written the first verse. He played the song to the brothers while he was out on his pass, and they said they liked it. He told them he’d write a second verse and send it to them, but by the time they received his letter with the lyrics for the second verse, they’d already recorded the song, just repeating the first verse. Curtis wasn’t the only one who had to go into basic military training. The brothers, too, knew they would be drafted sooner rather than later, and so they decided to do as several other acts we’ve discussed did, and sign up voluntarily for six months rather than be drafted for two years. Before they did so, they recorded another song, “Temptation”, an old standard from the thirties: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Temptation”] And that track marked the beginning of the end of the Everlys as a chart act. Because it was an old standard, the publishing was not owned by Acuff-Rose, and Wesley Rose was furious. He was both their manager and the owner of Acuff-Rose, the biggest publishing company in country music, and things between them had already become strained when the Everlys had moved to California while Rose had stayed in Nashville. Rose insisted that they only release Acuff-Rose songs as singles, and they refused, saying they wanted to put the single out. Rose retaliated in the most staggeringly petty manner imaginable. He stopped managing them, and he blocked them from being sent any new songs by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Because he knew they’d already recorded “Love Hurts”, a song written by the Bryants, as an album track, he got Roy Orbison, who he also managed, to record a version and put it out as a B-side, as a spoiler in case the Everlys tried to release their version as a single: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Love Hurts”] Worse than that, even, the Everlys were also signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, which meant that they were no longer allowed to record their own songs. For a while they tried writing under pseudonyms, but then Acuff-Rose found out about that and stopped them. For a while, even after basically taking a year away from music and being banned from recording their own songs, the brothers continued having hits. They also started another project — their own record label, Calliope, which would put out their outside projects. For Don, this was a mostly-instrumental adaptation of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”, which he recorded with an arrangement by Neal Hefti, under the name “Adrian Kimberly”: [Excerpt: Adrian Kimberly, “Pomp and Circumstance”] That made the lower reaches of the US charts, but was banned by the BBC in Britain, because it would offend British patriotic sentiment (for those who don’t know, “Pomp and Circumstance”, under the name “Land of Hope and Glory”, is something of a second national anthem over here). Phil’s side project was a comedy folk group, the Keestone Family Singers, who recorded a parody of the Kingston Trio’s “Raspberries, Strawberries”, written by Glen Hardin of the Crickets: [Excerpt: The Keestone Family Singers, “Cornbread and Chitlings”] The other two singers on that track were people we’re going to hear a lot from in later episodes — a songwriter called Carole King, who a few months later would co-write the Everlys hit “Crying in the Rain”, and a session guitarist named Glen Campbell. But neither of these ventures were particularly successful, and they concentrated on their own records. For a while, they continued having hits. But having no access to the Bryants’ songs, and being unable to record the songs they were writing themselves, they relied more and more on cover versions, right at the point the market was starting to change to being based entirely around artists who wrote their own material. And on top of that, there were personal problems — Don was going through a divorce, and before they were inducted into the Marines, both Don and Phil had started seeing a doctor who gave them what they were told were “vitamin shots” to help them keep their energy up, but were actually amphetamines. Both became addicted, and while Phil managed to kick his addiction quickly, Don became incapacitated by his, collapsing on a UK tour and being hospitalised with what was reported as “food poisoning”, as most overdoses by rock musicians were in the early sixties, leaving Phil to perform on his own while Don recuperated. Their fall in popularity after “Temptation” was precipitous. Between 1957 and early 1961 they had consistently had massive hits. After “Temptation” they had three more top thirty hits, “Don’t Blame Me”, “Crying in the Rain”, and “That’s Old Fashioned”. They continued having regular hits in the UK through 1965, but after “That’s Old Fashioned” in early 1962 their US chart positions went seventy-six, forty-eight, a hundred and seven, a hundred and one, didn’t chart at all, a hundred and thirty-three… you get the idea. They only had two more top forty hits in the US in the rest of their career — “Gone Gone Gone” in 1964, which made number thirty-one, and “Bowling Green” in 1967 which made number forty. Eventually they got the ability to record their own material again, and also to record songs by the Bryants, but the enforced period of several years of relying on cover versions and old standards had left them dead as a commercial act. But surprisingly, they weren’t artistically dead. They did have a slump around the time of Don’s troubles, with a series of weak albums, but by 1965 they’d started making some very strong tracks, covering a stylistic range from soul to country to baroque pop to an entire album, Two Yanks in England, of covers of British songs, backed by the Hollies (who wrote eight of the twelve songs) and a young keyboard player named Reg Dwight, who would later change his name to Elton John: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Somebody Help Me”] In the middle of this commercial slump came their second album-length masterpiece, “Roots”, an album that, like their earlier “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us”, looked back to the music they’d grown up on., while also looking forward to the future, mixing new songs by contemporary writers like Merle Haggard and Randy Newman with older folk and country songs: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Illinois”] It stands with the great marriages of Americana, orchestral pop, and psychedelia from around that time, like Randy Newman’s first album and Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, and has many of the same people involved, including producer Lenny Waronker and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. It’s conceived as a complete piece, with songs fading in and out to excerpts of the Everlys’ performances on the radio with their parents as children, and it’s quite, quite, lovely. And, like those other albums, it was a complete commercial flop. The brothers continued working together for several more years, recording a live album to finish off their ten-year Warners contract, and then switching to RCA, where they recorded a couple of albums of rootsy country-rock in the style of artists they had influenced like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But nothing happened for them commercially, and they were getting less and less happy with working together. The two men argued about literally everything, from who was their father’s real favourite to politics — Phil was an intensely conservative Republican while Don is a liberal Democrat. They ended up travelling separately on tour and staying in separate hotels. It all came to a head in early 1973, when Don announced that their shows at Knotts Berry Farm would be their last, as he was tired of being an Everly brother. For the first of the two shows they were booked for, Don turned up drunk. After a few songs, Phil walked off stage, smashing his guitar. For the second show, Don turned up alone, and when someone in the crowd shouted “Where’s Phil?” He replied “The Everly Brothers died ten years ago”. Both of them had attempts at solo careers for a decade, during which time the only time they saw each other was reportedly at their father’s funeral. They both had minor points of success — an appearance on a film soundtrack here, a backing vocal on a hit record there — but no chart success, until in 1983 Phil had a UK top ten hit with a duet with Cliff Richard, “She Means Nothing to Me”: [Excerpt: Phil Everly and Cliff Richard, “She Means Nothing to Me”] But by this point, the brothers had reconciled, at least to an extent. They would never be close, but they’d regained enough of a relationship to work together, and they came together for a reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall, with a great band led by the country guitarist Albert Lee. That show was followed by a new album, produced by Dave Edmunds and featuring a lead-off single written for the brothers by Paul McCartney, “On the Wings of a Nightingale”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “On the Wings of a Nightingale”] Over the next twenty-two years, the brothers would record a couple more studio albums, and would frequently guest on records by other people, including performing backing vocals on Paul Simon’s “Graceland”, from his massively successful album of the same name: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, “Graceland”] It was also Simon who enticed them into what turned out to be their final reunion, in 2004, after a period of a few years where once again the brothers hadn’t worked together. Simon had a similarly rocky relationship with his own duet partner Art Garfunkel, and when Simon and Garfunkel did their first tour together in over twenty years, they invited the Everly Brothers to tour with them as guests, doing a short slot by themselves and joining Simon and Garfunkel to perform “Bye Bye Love” together: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, “Bye Bye Love”] The year after that, they did what was to be their final tour, and I was lucky enough to see one of those shows myself. More than fifty years after they started performing together, they still sounded astonishing, and while they were apparently once again not on speaking terms offstage, you would never have known it from their effortless blend on stage, the kind of close harmony that you can only get when you know someone else’s voice as well as your own. After that tour, Phil Everly’s health put an end to the Everly Brothers — he died in 2014 from COPD, a lung disease brought on by his smoking, and for many years before that he had to use an oxygen tank at all times. That wasn’t an end to Everly infighting though — the most recent court date in the ongoing lawsuit between Phil’s estate and Don over the credit for “Cathy’s Clown” was only last month. But even though their relationship was fraught, they were still brothers, and Don has talked movingly of how he speaks every day to the portion of Phil’s ashes that he has in his house. The bonds that held them together were the same things that drove them apart, but Don knows that no matter how much longer he lives, he will always be one of the Everly Brothers.

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Cathy's Clown" by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. 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 "Poetry in Motion" by Johnny Tillotson.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there's a decent one in French, but I don't speak French well enough for that). Ike's Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it's been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. This collection has all the Everlys' recordings up to the end of 1962.  I would also recommend this recently-released box set containing expanded versions of their three last studio albums for Warners, including Roots, which I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   This week we're going to look at the Everly Brothers' first and biggest hit of the sixties, a song that established them as hit songwriters in their own right, which was more personal than anything they'd released earlier, and which was a big enough hit that it saved what was to become a major record label. We're going to look at "Cathy's Clown": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] When we left the Everly Brothers, six months ago, we had seen them have their first chart hits and record the classic album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, an album that prefigured by several years the later sixties folk music revival, and which is better than much of the music that came out of that later scene. Both artistically and commercially, they were as successful as any artists of the early rock era. But Don Everly, in particular, wanted them to have more artistic control themselves -- and if they could move to a bigger label as well, that was all the better. But as it happens, they didn't move to a bigger label, just a richer one. Warner Brothers Records had started in 1958, and had largely started because of changes in the film industry. In the late 1940s and early fifties, the film industry was being hit on all sides. Anti-trust legislation meant that the film studios had to get rid of the cinema chains they owned, losing a massive revenue stream (and also losing the opportunity to ensure that their films got shown no matter how poor their reputation). A series of lawsuits from actors had largely destroyed the star system on which the major studios relied, and then television became a huge factor in the entertainment industry, cutting further into the film studios' profits. An aside about that -- one of the big reasons for the growth of television as America's dominant entertainment medium is racism. In the thirties and forties, there had been huge waves of black people moving from rural areas to the cities in search of work, and we've looked at that and the way that led to the creation of rhythm and blues in many of the previous episodes. After World War II there was a corresponding period of white flight, where white people moved en masse away from the big cities and into small towns and suburbs, to get away from black people. This is largely what led to America's car culture and general lack of public transport, because low-population-density areas aren't as easy to serve with reliable public transport. And in the same way it's also uneconomical to run mass entertainment venues like theatres and cinemas in low-population-density areas, and going to the cinema becomes much less enticing if you have to drive twenty miles to get to one, rather than walking down the street. So white flight had essentially meant the start of a process by which entertainment in America moved from the public sphere to the private one. This is also a big reason for the boom in record sales in the middle decades of last century -- records are private entertainment, as opposed to going out to a dance or a show. And this left the big film studios in dire straits. But while they were down on their luck when it came to films, Warners were doing very well in the music publishing business, where unlike their ownership of cinemas they didn't have to get rid of their properties. Warners had always owned the songs used in their films, and indeed one of the reasons that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies existed in the first place was so that they could plug songs that Warners owned. When Tex Avery has Owl Jolson singing "I Love to Singa": [Excerpt: “Owl Jolson”, "I Love to Singa"] That's a song that had originally appeared in a Warners feature film a few months earlier, sung by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway: [Excerpt: Al Jolson and Cab Calloway, "I Love to Singa"] So Warners were making money from the music industry. But then they realised something. Tab Hunter, one of their film stars under contract to them, had started to have hit records. His record "Young Love" spent six weeks at number one: [Excerpt: Tab Hunter, "Young Love"] And whenever he was interviewed to promote a film, all the interviewers would ask about was his music career. That was bad enough -- after all, he wasn't signed to Warners as a singer, he was meant to be a film star -- but what was worse was that the label Hunter was on, Dot Records, was owned by a rival film studio, Paramount. Warners would go to all the trouble of getting an interview set up for their star, and then all it would do was put money into Paramount's pocket! They needed to get into the record business themselves, as a way to exploit their song catalogue if nothing else. At first they thought about just buying Imperial Records, but when that deal fell through they started their own label, and signed Hunter to it right at the point that his career nosedived. In the first two years that Warner Brothers Records existed, they only had two hit singles -- "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb", a record based on the Warner-owned TV series 77 Sunset Strip and co-performed by one of that series' stars, Edd Byrnes: [Excerpt: Edd Byrnes and Connie Stevens, "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb"] And another record by Connie Stevens, who also sang on "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb", and was the star of a different Warners TV series, Hawaiian Eye: [Excerpt: Connie Stevens, "Sixteen Reasons"] Everything else they released flopped badly. After two years they had lost three million dollars, and would have closed down the label altogether, except the label was owed another two million, and they didn't want to write that off. The main reason for these losses was that the label was mostly releasing stuff aimed at the easy listening adult album market, records by people like Henry Mancini, and at the time the singles market was where the money was, and the singles market was dominated by young people. They needed some records that would appeal to young people. They decided that they needed the Everly Brothers. At the beginning of 1960, the duo had released ten singles since May 1957, of which nine had charted, as had four of the B-sides. They'd topped the pop charts twice, the R&B charts twice, and the country charts four times. At a time when even the biggest stars would occasionally release the odd flop, they were as close to a guaranteed hit-making machine as existed in the music industry. And they were looking to get away from Cadence Records, for reasons that have never been made completely clear. It's usually said that they had artistic differences with Cadence, but at the same time they always credited Archie Bleyer from Cadence with being the perfect arranger for them -- he arranged their final Cadence single, "Let it Be Me": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Let it Be Me"] But for whatever reason, the Everlys *were* looking to find a new label, and Warner Brothers were desperate enough that they signed them up to the biggest contract ever signed in music business history up to that point. Remember that four years earlier, when Elvis had signed with RCA records, they'd paid a one-off fee of forty thousand dollars and *that* was reportedly the largest advance ever paid in the industry up until that point. Now, the Everlys were signing to Warners on a ten-year contract, with a guaranteed advance of one hundred thousand dollars a year for those ten years -- the first million-dollar contract in music history. They were set up until 1970, and were sure to provide Warners with a string of hits that would last out the decade -- or so it seemed at first. Their first recording for the label had an unusual melodic inspiration. Ferde Grofé was an arranger and orchestrator for Paul Whiteman's jazz band in the 1920s and thirties. He's particularly known these days for having been the original arranger of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" -- Gershwin had written it for two pianos, and it was Grofé who had come up with the instrumental colouring that these days we think of as being so important to that piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman "Rhapsody in Blue (original 1924 recording)"] Grofé had written a piece in 1931 called the "Grand Canyon Suite", and its third movement, "On the Trail" had become the most popular piece of music he ever wrote. Disney made an Oscar-winning short with the suite as its soundtrack in 1958, and you can still hear "On the Trail" to this day in the Grand Canyon section of the Disneyland Railroad. But "On the Trail" was best known as the music that Phillip Morris used in their radio and TV commercials from the thirties through to the sixties. Here's a bit from the original Whiteman recording of the piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Grand Canyon Suite: On the Trail"] Don took that melodic inspiration, and combined it with two sources of lyrical inspiration -- when his dad had been a child, he'd had a crush on a girl named Mary, who hadn't been interested, and his schoolfriends had taunted him by singing "Mary had a little Ike" at him. The other key to the song came when Don started thinking about an old crush of his own, a girl from his school called Catherine Coe -- though in later years he was at pains to point out that the song wasn't actually about her. They took the resulting song into the studio with the normal members of the Nashville A-Team, and it became only their second hit single with an A-side written by one of the brothers, reaching number one on both the pop and R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] I say it's written by Don -- the original issue of the record credited the songwriting to both Don and Phil, but Phil signed an agreement in 1980 relinquishing his claim to the song, and his name was taken off all future copies. It sounds to me like Don's writing style, and all the anecdotes about its writing talk about him without mentioning any input from Phil, so I'm assuming for these purposes that it's a Don solo composition. Listening to the record, which was the first that the duo produced for themselves, as well as being their first for Warners, you can hear why Don was at times dissatisfied with the songs that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had written for the brothers. It's a sophisticated piece of work in a number of different ways. For a start, there's the way the music mirrors the lyric on the first line. That line is about separation -- "Don't want your love any more" -- and the brothers start the line in unison, but Don's voice slowly drops relative to Phil's, so by the end of the line they're a third apart. It's like he's stepping away: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] The song's structure also seems unusual. Wikipedia says it has a chorus and a bridge but no verse, while the Library of Congress disagrees and says it has a verse and a bridge but no chorus. Personally, I'd say that it definitely does have a chorus -- the repeated section with the same words and melody each time it's repeated, with both brothers singing, and with the title of the song at the end, seems as definitively a chorus as one could possibly ask for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] If that's not a chorus, I'm honestly not sure what is. The reason this comes into question is the other section. I would call that section a verse, and I think most people would, and the song's structure is a straightforward A-B-A-B repetition which one would normally call verse/chorus. But it's such a change of pace that it feels like the contrasting section that normally comes with a bridge or middle eight. Indeed the first time I properly learned what a middle eight was -- in a column in Mojo magazine in the mid-nineties called Doctor Rock which explained some basic musicology -- it was specifically cited as an example of one: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] Part of the reason that seems so different is that Don's singing it solo, while the brothers are duetting on the choruses, and normally Don's solo lines would be on a bridge or middle eight. Not always, but often enough that that's what you expect if you've listened to a few of their records. But there's also a change in rhythm. One of the things you'll notice as we go further into the sixties is that, for a while in the early sixties, the groove in rock and roll -- and also in soul -- moved away from the swinging, shuffling rhythm you get in most of the fifties music we've looked at into a far more straightforward four-four rhythm. In roughly 1961 through 64 or so, you have things like the bam-bam-bam-bam four-on-the-floor beat of early Motown or Four Seasons records, or the chugga-chugga-chugga rhythm of surf guitar, rather than the looser, triplet-based grooves that you'd get in the fifties. And you can hear in "Cathy's Clown" the shift in those rhythms happening in the song itself. The verses have an almost Latin feel, with lots of loose cymbal work from Buddy Harman: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] While the choruses have an almost martial feel to them, a boom-BAP rhythm, and sound like they have two drummers on them: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] While I say that sounds like there are two drummers, it's still just Harman playing. The difference is that here the engineer, Bill Porter, who was the engineer on a lot of the Nashville recordings we've looked at, notably the Roy Orbison ones, had just obtained a new device -- a tape loop. Now, I've seen some people misunderstand what it was that Porter did with this -- thinking he looped the drums in the way one would loop things today, just playing the same recording over and over. It wasn't that. Rather it was a way of doing what Sam Phillips had been doing with tape echo in Sun a few years earlier -- there would be an endlessly circulating loop of tape, which had both record and playback heads. The drums would be recorded normally, but would also be recorded onto that tape loop, and then when it played back a few milliseconds later it would sound like a second drummer playing along with the first. It's an almost inaudible delay, but it's enough to give a totally different sound to the drums. Porter would physically switch this loop on and off while recording the track live -- all the vocals and instruments were recorded live together, onto a three-track tape, and he would turn it on for the choruses and off for the verses. This is an early example of the kind of studio experimentation that would define the way records were made in the sixties. The rhythm that Harman played was also very influential -- you can hear that it strongly influenced Paul McCartney if you listen to Beatles records like "What You're Doing", "Ticket to Ride", and "Tomorrow Never Knows", all of which have drum patterns which were suggested by McCartney, and all of which are strongly reminiscent of the "Cathy's Clown" chorus. "Cathy's Clown" topped the charts for five weeks, and sold two million copies. It was an immense success, and the Everlys seemed to be on top of the world. But it was precisely then that problems started for the duo. First, they moved from Nashville to LA. The main reason for that was that as well as being a record contract, their new contract with Warners would give them the opportunity to appear in films, too. So they spent six months taking acting lessons and doing screen tests, before concluding that neither of them could actually act or remember their lines, and wisely decided that they were going to stick to music. The one good thing they took from that six month period was that they rekindled their friendship with the Crickets, and Sonny Curtis wrote them a song called "Walk Right Back", which made the top ten (and number one in the UK and New Zealand): [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Walk Right Back"] Curtis wrote that song while he was in basic training for the military, and when he got a pass for a few days he'd only written the first verse. He played the song to the brothers while he was out on his pass, and they said they liked it. He told them he'd write a second verse and send it to them, but by the time they received his letter with the lyrics for the second verse, they'd already recorded the song, just repeating the first verse. Curtis wasn't the only one who had to go into basic military training. The brothers, too, knew they would be drafted sooner rather than later, and so they decided to do as several other acts we've discussed did, and sign up voluntarily for six months rather than be drafted for two years. Before they did so, they recorded another song, "Temptation", an old standard from the thirties: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Temptation"] And that track marked the beginning of the end of the Everlys as a chart act. Because it was an old standard, the publishing was not owned by Acuff-Rose, and Wesley Rose was furious. He was both their manager and the owner of Acuff-Rose, the biggest publishing company in country music, and things between them had already become strained when the Everlys had moved to California while Rose had stayed in Nashville. Rose insisted that they only release Acuff-Rose songs as singles, and they refused, saying they wanted to put the single out. Rose retaliated in the most staggeringly petty manner imaginable. He stopped managing them, and he blocked them from being sent any new songs by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Because he knew they'd already recorded "Love Hurts", a song written by the Bryants, as an album track, he got Roy Orbison, who he also managed, to record a version and put it out as a B-side, as a spoiler in case the Everlys tried to release their version as a single: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Love Hurts"] Worse than that, even, the Everlys were also signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, which meant that they were no longer allowed to record their own songs. For a while they tried writing under pseudonyms, but then Acuff-Rose found out about that and stopped them. For a while, even after basically taking a year away from music and being banned from recording their own songs, the brothers continued having hits. They also started another project -- their own record label, Calliope, which would put out their outside projects. For Don, this was a mostly-instrumental adaptation of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance", which he recorded with an arrangement by Neal Hefti, under the name "Adrian Kimberly": [Excerpt: Adrian Kimberly, "Pomp and Circumstance"] That made the lower reaches of the US charts, but was banned by the BBC in Britain, because it would offend British patriotic sentiment (for those who don't know, "Pomp and Circumstance", under the name "Land of Hope and Glory", is something of a second national anthem over here). Phil's side project was a comedy folk group, the Keestone Family Singers, who recorded a parody of the Kingston Trio's "Raspberries, Strawberries", written by Glen Hardin of the Crickets: [Excerpt: The Keestone Family Singers, "Cornbread and Chitlings"] The other two singers on that track were people we're going to hear a lot from in later episodes -- a songwriter called Carole King, who a few months later would co-write the Everlys hit "Crying in the Rain", and a session guitarist named Glen Campbell. But neither of these ventures were particularly successful, and they concentrated on their own records. For a while, they continued having hits. But having no access to the Bryants' songs, and being unable to record the songs they were writing themselves, they relied more and more on cover versions, right at the point the market was starting to change to being based entirely around artists who wrote their own material. And on top of that, there were personal problems -- Don was going through a divorce, and before they were inducted into the Marines, both Don and Phil had started seeing a doctor who gave them what they were told were "vitamin shots" to help them keep their energy up, but were actually amphetamines. Both became addicted, and while Phil managed to kick his addiction quickly, Don became incapacitated by his, collapsing on a UK tour and being hospitalised with what was reported as "food poisoning", as most overdoses by rock musicians were in the early sixties, leaving Phil to perform on his own while Don recuperated. Their fall in popularity after "Temptation" was precipitous. Between 1957 and early 1961 they had consistently had massive hits. After "Temptation" they had three more top thirty hits, "Don't Blame Me", "Crying in the Rain", and "That's Old Fashioned". They continued having regular hits in the UK through 1965, but after "That's Old Fashioned" in early 1962 their US chart positions went seventy-six, forty-eight, a hundred and seven, a hundred and one, didn't chart at all, a hundred and thirty-three... you get the idea. They only had two more top forty hits in the US in the rest of their career -- "Gone Gone Gone" in 1964, which made number thirty-one, and "Bowling Green" in 1967 which made number forty. Eventually they got the ability to record their own material again, and also to record songs by the Bryants, but the enforced period of several years of relying on cover versions and old standards had left them dead as a commercial act. But surprisingly, they weren't artistically dead. They did have a slump around the time of Don's troubles, with a series of weak albums, but by 1965 they'd started making some very strong tracks, covering a stylistic range from soul to country to baroque pop to an entire album, Two Yanks in England, of covers of British songs, backed by the Hollies (who wrote eight of the twelve songs) and a young keyboard player named Reg Dwight, who would later change his name to Elton John: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Somebody Help Me"] In the middle of this commercial slump came their second album-length masterpiece, "Roots", an album that, like their earlier "Songs Our Daddy Taught Us", looked back to the music they'd grown up on., while also looking forward to the future, mixing new songs by contemporary writers like Merle Haggard and Randy Newman with older folk and country songs: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Illinois"] It stands with the great marriages of Americana, orchestral pop, and psychedelia from around that time, like Randy Newman's first album and Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, and has many of the same people involved, including producer Lenny Waronker and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. It's conceived as a complete piece, with songs fading in and out to excerpts of the Everlys' performances on the radio with their parents as children, and it's quite, quite, lovely. And, like those other albums, it was a complete commercial flop. The brothers continued working together for several more years, recording a live album to finish off their ten-year Warners contract, and then switching to RCA, where they recorded a couple of albums of rootsy country-rock in the style of artists they had influenced like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But nothing happened for them commercially, and they were getting less and less happy with working together. The two men argued about literally everything, from who was their father's real favourite to politics -- Phil was an intensely conservative Republican while Don is a liberal Democrat. They ended up travelling separately on tour and staying in separate hotels. It all came to a head in early 1973, when Don announced that their shows at Knotts Berry Farm would be their last, as he was tired of being an Everly brother. For the first of the two shows they were booked for, Don turned up drunk. After a few songs, Phil walked off stage, smashing his guitar. For the second show, Don turned up alone, and when someone in the crowd shouted "Where's Phil?" He replied "The Everly Brothers died ten years ago". Both of them had attempts at solo careers for a decade, during which time the only time they saw each other was reportedly at their father's funeral. They both had minor points of success -- an appearance on a film soundtrack here, a backing vocal on a hit record there -- but no chart success, until in 1983 Phil had a UK top ten hit with a duet with Cliff Richard, "She Means Nothing to Me": [Excerpt: Phil Everly and Cliff Richard, "She Means Nothing to Me"] But by this point, the brothers had reconciled, at least to an extent. They would never be close, but they'd regained enough of a relationship to work together, and they came together for a reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall, with a great band led by the country guitarist Albert Lee. That show was followed by a new album, produced by Dave Edmunds and featuring a lead-off single written for the brothers by Paul McCartney, "On the Wings of a Nightingale": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "On the Wings of a Nightingale"] Over the next twenty-two years, the brothers would record a couple more studio albums, and would frequently guest on records by other people, including performing backing vocals on Paul Simon's "Graceland", from his massively successful album of the same name: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Graceland"] It was also Simon who enticed them into what turned out to be their final reunion, in 2004, after a period of a few years where once again the brothers hadn't worked together. Simon had a similarly rocky relationship with his own duet partner Art Garfunkel, and when Simon and Garfunkel did their first tour together in over twenty years, they invited the Everly Brothers to tour with them as guests, doing a short slot by themselves and joining Simon and Garfunkel to perform "Bye Bye Love" together: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, "Bye Bye Love"] The year after that, they did what was to be their final tour, and I was lucky enough to see one of those shows myself. More than fifty years after they started performing together, they still sounded astonishing, and while they were apparently once again not on speaking terms offstage, you would never have known it from their effortless blend on stage, the kind of close harmony that you can only get when you know someone else's voice as well as your own. After that tour, Phil Everly's health put an end to the Everly Brothers -- he died in 2014 from COPD, a lung disease brought on by his smoking, and for many years before that he had to use an oxygen tank at all times. That wasn't an end to Everly infighting though -- the most recent court date in the ongoing lawsuit between Phil's estate and Don over the credit for "Cathy's Clown" was only last month. But even though their relationship was fraught, they were still brothers, and Don has talked movingly of how he speaks every day to the portion of Phil's ashes that he has in his house. The bonds that held them together were the same things that drove them apart, but Don knows that no matter how much longer he lives, he will always be one of the Everly Brothers.

Aprenda gratuitamente 5 técnicas de vendas que vão fazer você vender mais e melhor mesmo na crise.Este é o quarto episódio da série #BóraVoar, apresentada por Diego Maia no YouTube e no Spotify.Assine o Canal do Diego Maia para receber dicas de vendas: http://abre.ai/assinarmeucanalConheça a Academia de Vendas: https://www.cdpv.com.br/academia-de-vendasFilme "De Porta em Porta", a fantástica história de Bill Porter: https://youtu.be/JqqQ_YVWvGA Inspiração do Dia: “Cliente bom é cliente feliz. É aquele que vê o vendedor como uma pessoa que agrega e não como alguém que quer tirar o dinheiro dele”. Diego Maia. Participação Especial neste episódio: Juscelino Junior | Nossa Distribuidora | ABAD.Baixe E-Books Gratuitamente: https://www.diegomaia.com.br/ferramentas-ebooks-planilhas-gratisSiga Diego Maia no Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/diegomaia_cdpv/Assine gratuitamente o podcast #BóraVoar no Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PM4EO18hbzpypHm7WM1rl?si=f7ANMuECRTOaU_EHXlj-sw______________________________________________________________________#BóraVoar é a nova série do Diego Maia distribuída no YouTube e no seu serviço de podcast favorito.Quer receber mais conteúdos grátis sobre técnicas de vendas e empreendedorismo? Assine este canal: http://abre.ai/assinarmeucanal______________________________________________________________________Diego Maia foi eleito o palestrante de vendas e motivação mais contratado do Brasil e é referência quando o assunto é treinamento de equipes de vendas.Autor de 5 livros e CEO do CDPV, a primeira escola de vendas do Brasil, é garantia de sucesso em sua convenção de vendas online ou presencial.#DiegoMaia #motivaçãoemvendas #dicasdevendas

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.  

Emily Morehead, LPC and Bill Porter, MA talk about neurobiologic stress. Our neurobiology is more than just our brain. Our neurons run through our body, our gut, our limbic system (emotions) and our mind. The stress we experience affects all the areas. It's not just in our brain. If left to it's own devices, our neurobiological responses usually become either over reactive or under reactive. And that's were we get into trouble. In many instances, our survival responses can be destructive to our relationships. Our overreaction or under reaction can affect our relationships with our kids, our spouses, our parents, our coworkers and on and on. Learn more by listening or watching today! Check out our Show Notes for additional information and resources.

We scraped the topic this week and decided to answer some questions we received from our loyal listeners. How do you get out of a horrible date? When are nudes appropriate? How do you feel about Bill Porter's outfit featured on the Sesame Street instagram page?IG:Awkwardtpodcast | Twitter: @Awkwardtpod | FB: Awkward'T PodcastSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/Awkwardtpodcast)

Season 1: Episode 5 reFRAMED Podcast host Emily Morehead, LPC, and guest Bill Porter, M.Ed. talk about reframing our children's brain development. Every time you provide physical care, instructional care, and emotional care for your child (no matter their age), you are writing yourself into your child's brain. "What fires together, wires together." ~ Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist known for his work in the field of associative learning. We are striving to make an impact in our world through creating conversations about topics that are important to you and yours. Check out the Show Notes for resources and contact information.

Bill Porter is the President of Porter Law Group, Inc.  Bill has been awarded the highest possible rating of “AV Preeminent” by America’s premier attorney rating service, Martindale-Hubbell, which has also designated Bill as a “Top Rated Lawyer” in the field of construction law.  Bill’s practice encompasses more than 30 years in private, state and federal construction claims before state and federal courts as well as in mediation and arbitration. Bill regularly represents contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, developers and owners in complex multi-party construction litigation. His areas of expertise include construction collections, mechanics’ liens, stop notices, bond claims, prompt payment remedies, construction contracts, competitive bidding, construction defects and construction-related labor and employment matters. He is an appointed El Dorado Superior Court Temporary Pro Tem Judge, a private mediator and arbitrator and has regularly contributed to legislation on behalf of the construction industry. Bill’s Websites:  Porter Law Group, Inc. Applied Legal Bill’s Restaurant Recommendations  Ella Dining Room & Bar El Papagayo  Highlights include:  How mugged and stabbed propelled Bill into legal practice  How to discourage illegitimate wrongful termination claims The origin of Applied Legal The common “legal” problem: people  How to be reasonable and have a backbone in contract negotiations  How to handle a mechanics lien  How subcontractors should approach contract negotiations in order to build relationships and secure good terms How good lawyers on both sides of the table help construction contract negotiations  How contractors can use the “squeaky wheel” strategy to secure payment The importance of diplomacy and “speaking softly, but carrying a big stick” Click this link to read the transcript

Hi Swallowerz, this week we cover: The new singing sensation Kylie Jenner, Atatiana Jefferson murdered by the hands on police in her own home, Pastor David Wilson got some ‘splanin but I see he’s eating well, Bill Porter is winning and y’all mad, Frank Ocean PrEP party full of straight and white folks and Azealia Banks told our dumb asses to stop taking PrEP... the person deserving of head this week is: Gabrielle Union. Topic of the day:  POC vs Black. Non-Black People of Color stay in your lane...

Translator of ancient Chinese poetry, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter), discusses and reads translations of the poetry of Hanshan. He also describes his trips to China in search of contemporary hermits. Listen to part one of this interview, here: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-105-red-pine-pt-1-stonehouse Visit our website: www.poetryspokenhere.com Like us on facebook: facebook.com/PoetrySpokenHere Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/poseyspokenhere (@poseyspokenhere) Send us an e-mail: poetryspokenhere@gmail.com

"Who the f**k is Catman!?" Another week, another convo! Welcome back to it! This week, the gang starts off nostalgic. Talking about catching the bus in Baltimore City and random high school stories. It stemmed from kids having apps for traveling everywhere now. Then we get into Sesame Street introducing its first addict Muppet. (38:00) And a Marijuana Breathalyzer test. (51:08) Bill Porter playing a Fair Godmother. The New Catwoman. Please Follow on Instagram: @thenourishmentpodcast @nourishment_fit @simplyshani89 @alljojoeverything Email: thenourishmentpodcast@gmail.com Peace and Blessings!

Translator of ancient Chinese poetry, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter), discusses the process of translation which he says is like a dance. He also reads from the work of Stonehouse, a poet he discovered. Listen to part two of this interview, here: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-106-red-pine-pt-2-hanshan-and-hermits Visit our website: www.poetryspokenhere.com Like us on facebook: facebook.com/PoetrySpokenHere Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/poseyspokenhere (@poseyspokenhere) Send us an e-mail: poetryspokenhere@gmail.com

Bio   Jeffrey Cole has been at the forefront of media and communication technology issues both in the United States and internationally for the past three decades. An expert in the field of technology and emerging media, Cole serves as an adviser to governments and leading companies around the world as they craft digital strategies.   In July 2004 Dr. Cole joined the USC Annenberg School for Communication as Director of the newly formed Center for the Digital Future and as a Research Professor. Prior to joining USC, Dr. Cole was a longtime member of the UCLA faculty and served as Director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, based in the Anderson Graduate School of Management. Cole founded and directs the World Internet Project, a long-term longitudinal look at the effects of computer and Internet technology, which is conducted in over 35 countries. At the announcement of the project in June 1999, Vice President Al Gore praised Cole as a “true visionary providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of media.”  Nineteen years into the project, the World Internet Project, through its unique data on Internet users around the world, is the leading, unrivaled international project examining the ways in which technology changes our lives.    Cole regularly presents trends and insights of the project to the White House, FCC, Congress, Department of Defense and heads of governments around the world. He has worked closely with the CEOs of GroupM, Ericsson, Telstra, Wesfarmers and others. On the advisory side, his long-term relationships have included Microsoft, Sony, Time Warner, AT&T, AARP, CBS, NBC, ABC, CPB, PBS, HP, Coca-Cola and many more as they learn to navigate the digital future. He also sits on Unilever’s (the world’s second largest advertiser) Global Digital Strategy Board.   In 2016 Cole was one of the founders of the Global Disruption Fund (GDF), a technology investment fund based in Australia (www.globaldisruptionfund.com.au). Cole is one of the members of the Investment Committee identifying innovative companies and those about to be disrupted, making investments based on his work. The Fund is now worth close to $1 billion and growing; it achieved a 40% return in its first year. Since 2017 he has written a popular and widely circulated column on disruption, media, technology and entertainment (www.digitalcenter.org/cole).   Under Cole’s leadership, the Center has conducted deep examinations of the entertainment, sports media, transportation and banking industries to identify where the next wave of disruption will occur. More than just identifying trends, the Center works closely with industry to create policies and make the concrete changes that will keep them competitive. That work includes all five (formerly six) motion picture studios, all four networks and now streaming companies, as well as sports networks, leagues, automotive companies and banks.   In the 1990s, Cole worked closely with the four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) dealing with television programming issues under an anti-trust waiver that allowed the networks to work together for the very first time. He issued annual reports to the television industry, Congress and the nation. Upon the release of the 1996 report, Cole held a joint press conference with President Bill Clinton, who referred to the Center for Communication Policy as “the premier educational institution setting trends in entertainment.” Nationwide there was unanimous praise for the quality of the reports and their contribution to the television content debate.    Cole has testified before Congress on television issues and has been a keynote speaker at more than 750 conferences on media and technology (many can be seen on YouTube). He has worked with the White House during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations on media and telecommunications issues. He regularly makes presentations across the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.   Cole was a member of the Executive Committee of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS) from 1997 to 2001 and was the founding governor of the ATAS Interactive Media Peer Group. At UCLA, Cole taught over 35,000 students. In 1987 he received UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award.          Resources   USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future     News Roundup Election security funding bill gets McConnell’s support  Mitch McConnell, whom Democrats had started to call “Moscow Mitch”, backed a $250 million spending bill last week to help states beef up election security. McConnell had previously blocked two bills that would have boosted security and required paper ballots. Facebook suspends thousands of apps following audit Facebook has suspended tens of thousands of apps after an internal audit revealed that they could either have be a threat or didn’t respond to Facebook’s requests for information. Facebook says the move comes after a review of millions of apps following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The FTC fined Facebook $5 billion over the summer for privacy violations. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in town meeting with members of Congress and President Trump at the White House, meetings which sources say were “constructive”.  Emmy’s awards feature little diversity Well, there’s not much else we can say about the 71st Emmy Awards other than the fact that this year’s awards offered shockingly little diversity. National Urban League CEO Marc Morial and FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel penned a joint Op-Ed in the Hill released prior to the awards discussing this year’s lack of nominees of color.  For example, not one woman of color was nominated for lead actress in a comedy. This year, just 26 nominees were people of color, compared to 38 last year. Just three people of color ended up winning—RuPaul Charles won for hosting RuPaul’s Drag Race, Jharrel Jerome won for When they See Us, and Bill Porter won for Pose.  When are we gonna stop begging these people to include us, fam? Seriously. FCC Open Meeting Agenda The FCC released its open meeting agenda. The meeting will take place at 10:30 at the FCC. A proposal for $950 million in funding for Puerto Rico’s communications infrastructure is first on the agenda. New York Times ends Spanish language coverage The New York Times is ending Spanish language coverage. “While the Español site did attract a new audience for our journalism and consistently produced coverage we are very proud of,” the Times said in a statement, “it did not prove financially successful”. New York Times in Español launched in response to President Trump’s hate speech against Mexicans. NBC/Universal has launched a new streaming service NBC/Universal has launched a new streaming service dubbed Peacock, which is slated for launch in April. NBC/Universal will join the long list of new Netflix streaming competitors including the likes of Disney, Apple, and HBO Max.

This week, the thing Jordan and guest host Bill Porter love about baseball is "the switch!" (Coach Dave and Nick Lerangis are off this week.) "The switch" is moment in August when we go from the doldrums of summer baseball to the excitement of the stretch before the playoffs. (Don't worry if you haven't heard of the switch before; Bill made it up.)We also talk about Derek Holland's noble and most likely misguided butthurtedness on Twitter, why PECOTA is always right and you should never be excited about anything, and the umpteenth rise of the Dark Knight, Matt Harvey.Our Other Baseball Podcast of the Week is The Ringer MLB Show! Michael Baumann hosts, and Zach Kram and Ben Lindbergh are his most frequent guests. It's a wonderful, insightful show and they're some of our favorite baseball people. Follow Michael, Zach, Ben, and the Ringer on Twitter, and subscribe!Thanks as always to the great @drawawalk for our artwork.(Btw, I said Billy Hamilton had 12 stolen bases this season; he actually had 18.)Stuff we talked about:Seong-Jin Cho performing a piece from Debussy's Children's Corner suiteFleabag on Amazon PrimeA great piece about Billy Hamilton for The AthleticLinks:Leadoff Grand Slam on TwitterLeadoff Grand Slam on Apple PodcastsLeadoff Grand Slam's Website(Recorded 8/18/19)

This week, the thing Jordan and Bill - who??? - love about baseball is first base chats!We also do MORE trade deadline check-in - because that's basically the only thing going on - we posit a theory about why there's such a big gap between Mike Minor's Baseball Reference WAR and his Fangraphs WAR, and we throw out a simple, harmless idea - maybe there should be ties in baseball? - that will surely see us burnt at the stake as witches. Oh also, "we" this week is Jordan and Bill Porter. Bill is our guest host for the week and an elite baseball knower. He also has a sexy deep voice.Our other baseball podcasts of the week is Three Swings, hosted by Rhea Butcher, one of our favorite comedians! It's funny and feministy and smarty and generally great. Follow Three Swings - and Rhea - on Twitter, and subscribe!Thanks as always to the great @drawawalk for our artwork.Stuff we talked about:Jeff Weiss' coverage of Drakeo the Ruler's murder trial for the Fader (and news of his acquittal)agadmator's Chess Channel on YouTubeCompetitive Tetris on YouTubeLinks:Leadoff Grand Slam on TwitterLeadoff Grand Slam on Apple PodcastsLeadoff Grand Slam's Website(Recorded 7/26/19)

  For historical perspective, Kilauea’s founding dates back to the 1800s and the growth of sugar plantations. The industry survived in the town for close to a century when, in 1971, the last plantation was shuttered.    Since then, the area has evolved and expanded in new ways. Up until the last decade, in fact, there was a scarcity of entertainment and shopping resources. That began to change in 2004 when Bill Porter, founder of E-Trade, moved to Kauai and purchased 500 acres on the Malka side of the island. A vision for creating a community for arts and education was the impetus for Bill’s decision, and he and his wife created ‘Anaina Hou,’ or a new gathering place. Along with this enormous undertaking, we’ve seen exponential development in other areas as well. Here are just a few of the many amenities and features Kilauea boasts (from 1:45 to 4:25 in the video, you can hear about them all in full detail): Kauai Miniature Golf and Botanical Garden The Porter Pavilion  A brand-new community playground Kilauea Lighthouse Village shopping center A 75-acre community farm  Kilauea Elementary School Let’s now turn our attention toward Kilauea real estate; it’s somewhat of a tale of two markets. The town itself is made up of residential lots and for-sale homes are few and far between. At the time of this recording, there are only three active listings on the market; demand is high and inventory is considerably low. The other half of the real estate market here is referred to as “Kilauea AG.” On this side of the market, real estate is comprised of agriculturally zoned land with scores of larger gentlemen estates. Though the land is considered agricultural, very few of the properties are used for farming purposes. As of this recording, there are 33 properties for sale, the least expensive of which is priced just under $1.2 million, while the most expensive is $22 million. The coupling of the beach views and the prestige of the addresses themselves puts these homes squarely in the high-end market. As such, they are priced commensurately.   No matter what you’re looking for, Kilauea might be the place for you. If you have any questions about this town situated on Kauai’s north shore, I’m here to answer them for you. I look forward to hearing from you! Aloha!

Ace Porter & Cochise are with the shits! discussing R Kelly, Dame Dash, Bill Porter, Story Time, Michael Jackson, Best Hood Classic Movies, and more. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this in-depth interview, Bill Porter, famously known as the translator Red Pine, reflects on his encounters with Chinese hermits and his long history with the great Taoist and Buddhist poets of China.

Episode 108 features one-on-one interviews with the 2018 Wakeboarding Hall of Fame inductees, including: Lee Elliott (who spoke on behalf of his father Chuck Morrow), Ronn Sidenglanz, Bill Porter, Randall “The Vandal” Harris, Sarah Cline, Cobe Mikacich and Parks Bonifay. Dano sits down with each legend to find out what they're up to and what the honor means to them. This episode was recorded live, following the 2018 Wakeboarding Hall of Fame induction ceremony inside the Alliance Wake booth at the Fall 2018 Surf Expo.    

Recorded live from the September 2018 Surf Expo, it's the induction ceremony from the Wakeboarding Hall of Fame. Dano hosts the stage as Chuck Morrow, Bill Porter, Ronn Seidenglanz, Sarah Cline, Cobe Mikacich, Parks Bonifay and Randall Harris are honored.    

We're back! Bill Porter, Interim County Administrator for James City County, joins the podcast this week to introduce himself and fill us in what's going on. Check it out and let us know what you think. Visit http://jamescitycountyva.gov/podcast to leave comments and listen to all of the episodes.

This special episode was recorded Thursday, April 27th in front of a live audience at Performance Ski & Surf. During registration for the 2017 Nautique Wake Open, presented by Rockstar Energy, six guests joined Dano for this epic podcast. Guests of honor include Cory Teunissen, Meagan Ethell, Glen Fletcher from O-Town Watersports, Jake Pelot, James Balzer and Brad Smeele. During the show, the Mano swagg'ed out the crowd Oprah-style with the help of Bill Porter (note: Perfski-money appeared under audience members seats). Dano also shelled out two Go Puck's, a ton of C4 Belts and a box-load of stuff from SeaDek. Get in on the action in episode 66! Also catch a bonus "audio montage” from Stop Two of the Performance Ski and Surf Gravel Tour.

Free mix training with Lij at MixMasterBundle.com Get yourself a T-shirt at: RSRockstars.com/Tshirt  My guest today is Meghan Gohil, a producer, engineer, musician, studio and record label owner in Hollywood CA. It was Meghan was who recorded my first college band in St Louis called Dr Seuss. He recorded many projects with me over the next couple of decades. Our first big release was for my band Enormous Richard, a twangy alt country band from St Louis. We recorded 30 songs live to cassette in a basement in Granite City IL and went on to sell and distribute several thousand copies, nearly landing a record deal in the process. Later we renamed ourselves Eleanor Roosevelt and made “Walker With His Head Down” with Meghan for his college audio program at Webster University where he studied under Barry Hufker, and Bill Porter who recorded Elvis, Roy Orbison, and The Everly Brothers. Meghan has recorded with many greats including: Cure co-founder Lol Tolhurst’s band, Levinhurst, Trey Anastasio of Phish, Jack Johnson with the Animal Liberation Orchestra, Phil Lesh & Joan Osbourne, Digable Planets, and Michael Frante to name a few. For 20 years Meghan has maintained a dual career in radio promotions, and career development & management working with many independant artists. He worked as the Project Manager at Contemporary Productions in St. Louis, SFX Entertainment, and Clear Channel Concerts.  And He’s also consulted for AEG Live and Emery Entertainment. Currently, he records from his home studio which you can check out at HollywoodRecordingStudio.com,  and works as a Strategy and Analytics Manager at Live Nation Entertainment’s Amphitheater division..  Get the full show notes at http://RSRockstars.com/65 Other records by Lij Shaw recorded by Meghan Gohil: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/crumbling-in-the-rain/id218367749 https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/water-bread-beer/id583731682 https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/walker-with-his-head-down/id269344447 https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hell-bent-insurgent-country/id5835023 You can also get a copy of the podcast theme song at: SkadooshMusic.com  

This episode is 3 time World Champion martial artist, Bill Porter! This week we talk about working on Tethered together, how he got into Martial Arts, competing for the world championship and his audition to become a POWER RANGER! Enjoy!

Very few people have been more helpful to Photographers than Bill Porter, Owner of Arlington Camera. If you don't know Bill and his staff, you're missing out on a TREMENDOUS resource to Photographers. If you haven't yet, today's PhotoTellers conversation is your chance to meet him! Bill kindly sat down at Texas School 2016 to talk a little about the School, his 18 years of involvement there, and the work that Arlington Camera is doing. Here are a few questions Bill answers: With the ease of online ordering, why patronize a local camera store? Why is Arlington Camera growing while so many other camera stores are dying? What makes Texas School unique? What can a first-timer expect? Why do Photographers wait an entire year to buy their new gear at Texas School? Learn more, and take advantage of the local camera store that can serve Photographers all over the United States, by CLICKING HERE. Or see what others are saying on FACEBOOK. And a very special thanks to today's sponsor! Click the logo to see what 1,000+ Photographers love about Texas School.

In this episode Dano catches up with members of Team Ronix during the 2016 product line launch for Performance Ski and Surf. Episode 30 is packed with insight from riders, factory reps and industry influencers. Featuring Parks Bonifay, Danny Harf, Shota Tezuka, Erik Ruck, Dominik Hernler, Massi Piffaretti, Dallas Friday, Mike Ferraro - the industry's hardest working man, Brett Hargrave - Ronix factory rep, Chad Sharpe, Adam Errington and Bill Porter - owner of Performance Ski and Surf. Soundtrack from Erik Ruck's old band, Braided Funk. Enjoy!

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Hermits and Zen: Solitary and Communal Practice in China Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, is one of the premier translators of traditional Chinese poetry and Buddhist writings and an expert on Buddhism in contemporary China. The search for spiritual fulfillment has been at the core of Chinese civilization ever since it began 5,000 years ago. Spending time alone or with a like-minded group, usually in the mountains, has been an essential part of all three of China’s major spiritual traditions from their very beginning, and it continues to be so today. In his visit to the University, Bill Porter will give a talk and slide presentation focusing on China’s hermit tradition and the tradition that has become known as Zen. Mr. Porter will be basing his talk on interviews and personal experiences as recorded in his books “Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits” and “Zen Baggage”, which have sold nearly 300,000 copies in their Chinese translations. Cosponsored by the China Committee of the Center for East Asian Studies.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Hermits and Zen: Solitary and Communal Practice in China Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, is one of the premier translators of traditional Chinese poetry and Buddhist writings and an expert on Buddhism in contemporary China. The search for spiritual fulfillment has been at the core of Chinese civilization ever since it began 5,000 years ago. Spending time alone or with a like-minded group, usually in the mountains, has been an essential part of all three of China’s major spiritual traditions from their very beginning, and it continues to be so today. In his visit to the University, Bill Porter will give a talk and slide presentation focusing on China’s hermit tradition and the tradition that has become known as Zen. Mr. Porter will be basing his talk on interviews and personal experiences as recorded in his books “Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits” and “Zen Baggage”, which have sold nearly 300,000 copies in their Chinese translations. Cosponsored by the China Committee of the Center for East Asian Studies.

Bill Porter with Suunto Joins us to talk answer questions about the new Suunto Ambit3, and I answer questions about sugar and stretching.