Podcasts about bluesbreakers

By 1975, Fleetwood Mac had already had many iterations and lineups. Started by veterans of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, early Fleetwood Mac were a blues based band with limited success on the US Billboard chart. By 1975, they had lost their main singer, lead guitarist and main songwriter in Bob Welch and remaining members Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood were on the search for a spark. While working at Sunset Studios, they heard the debut album from a duo that was also a couple, Buckingham Nicks. Though at first they were interested in hiring on Lindsey Buckingham as their singer and guitarist, they soon found out that he would only join if they took his singer/songwriter girlfriend Stevie Nicks as well. The rest is pop/rock history as the 1975 product of the five piece, Fleetwood Mac, would go on to sell over 7 million copies in the US alone. Now with three lead singers/songwriters in the band, they could choose the best of the best for inclusion on the record. While the choices for singles didn't always make sense (Warm Ways was the 1st UK single, World Turning wasn't released as a single), the chemistry did and the world heard harmonies that were unknown before. While Christine McVie held her own with lilting love songs (Warm Ways, Over My Head, Say You Love Me), Lindsey Buckingham offered more upbeat rockers like Monday Morning and the brooding So Afraid. However, the real star in the making was Stevie Nicks who turned the album's and the band's fortunes with her all-time classic Rhiannon. It really introduced the world to Stevie Nicks and the power she possessed in her voice and songwriting. She also offered the sweet Landslide, another track on this album that would go on to be a rock radio staple and part of their live show. The success of Fleetwood Mac gave them the opportunity to release Rumours in 1977, an album that would sell over 40 million copies worldwide. But this album laid the groundwork for Rumours and all the future success for the band for the next 50 years. Check out our new website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ugly American Werewolf in London Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Threads⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LInkTree⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.pantheonpodcasts.com⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's Blues is the Truth is a celebration of deep grooves, killer guitar work, and soulful storytelling, with your host Ian McHugh guiding the journey as always. There's no shortage of legends and modern heroes on the playlist – from the powerhouse energy of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to the unmistakable swagger of Freddie King and BB King. You'll hear soul-drenched cuts from Chad Strentz, Bobby Rush, and Esther Phillips, while the grit and fire come courtesy of Joanna Connor, Johnny Lang, and Matt Schofield. There's a killer collaboration between Joe Louis Walker, Bruce Katz and Giles Robson, some high-octane blues from Mondo Cortez and the Chicago Blues Angels, and tight grooves from Micke Bjorklof and Blue Strip. Robert Hokum brings the local flavour, while Howlin' Wolf, The Kinsey Report and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers represent the deep blues roots. Also featured this week are Tad Robinson, Eugene Hideaway Bridges, Philipp Fankhauser, the Lachey Doley Group, Leeroy Parnell, The Too Bad Jims, Plas Johnson, and a standout track from rising star D.K. Harrell. It's a full-on ride through blues past, present, and future—don't miss a moment.

It seems as though the 12 bar blues structure is an immovable object, an obelisk of sacred, ritualistic, totemic authority. But the form contains multitudes of variety. Here are two examples of the plasticity of that container, which holds the magic blues elixir and can pour it smoothly, or have it gush out, uncontrollably, like a tidal wave. So, be careful when you put your lips to the chalice … the edges can be sharp, and the liquid it delivers may be too intoxicating! Up first, we have Harvey Mandel, the “Snake”- a guitar wizard, brandishing and slashing his ax-cutlass like a pirate, as he boards equilibrium's frigate docked inside your ear canal, with his own composition, 4pm; then, JB Hutto and the Hawks stagger through “Too Much Alcohol” like drunkards in search of another, much needed pint of medicine - with his razor sharp slide work JB illustrates those sensations perfectly, with an insistent, whimpering pulse.HARVEY MANDELIn 1967, Samuel Charters, for Vanguard records, in an early effort to reveal and showcase the second generation of Chicago's blues scene,  produced harmonica master, Charley Musselwhite's first album STAND BACK! HERE COMES CHARLEY MUSSELWHITE'S SOUTHSIDE BAND, and caused a literal big bang in the hearts and minds of American youth. This was Harvey Mandel's first recording, and launched the notable guitar slinger for hire's 60 year career, going on to join Canned Heat, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, recording many solo efforts, and landing one step away from becoming a Rolling Stone.   Known as “the King of Sustain,” our track, 4pm, showcases the longest sustained electric guitar note at age 21, a feat copied by Jimi Hendrix two years later. Harvey's inventive style is trademarked, and you can hear those clarion notes ringing out like a buzz saw, transitioning from one amazing improvisation to the next. JB HUTTO AND THE HAWKSThe next cut, TOO MUCH ALCOHOL, also on the Vanguard label - featured on 1966's Chicago / Blues / Today! Sounds almost like it could have been recorded in the previous century, when, fresh off the farm, players were captured in their first big city outings on lo-fi recordings - it's that raw and spiky. And, yet, both Mandel and Hutto were breathing the same mid-60s Chicago air. JB's slide style was influenced by Elmore James, of DUST MY BROOM acclaim, and he carried that torch forward. The son of a preacher from South Carolina, Hutto made his way to Chicago after his father's death in the early 50s, but ended up working as a janitor for 11 years, until, in the mid 60s, he was discovered and unleashed on the world by Vanguard. 

Mit "Still Got The Blues" hat Gary Moore einen echten Stilwechsel hingelegt – weg vom Hard Rock, hin zum Blues Rock. "Still Got The Blues" erschien 1990 als Gary Moores achtes Solo-Studioalbum und war ursprünglich nur als Nebenprojekt gedacht. Doch mit dem dazugehörigen Titelsong überzeugte Moore seine Plattenfirma Virgin Records, die daraufhin sogar Blues-Legende Albert King einfliegen ließ, um bei dem Song "Pretty Woman" mitzuspielen. Ich glaube, was die Plattenfirma überzeugt hat, war, dass Garry Moore so 100% hinter diesem Projekt stand, das war so ein richtiges Herzensprojekt. Das Album ist ein Meilenstein, weil es für viele Menschen der Einstieg in eine neue Musikrichtung war, mit der sie vorher wenig zu tun hatten. Gary Moore lebt die Musik und vermittelt über seine Gitarre mehr Emotionen als über seine Stimme, wie SWR1 Musikredakteur Nils Berkfeld findet. Von Hard Rock zum Blues – Gary Moores Neuanfang mit "Still Got The Blues (For You)" Mit "Still Got The Blues (For You)" schlug Gary Moore eine neue musikalische Richtung ein – weg vom Hard Rock, hin zum Blues. Der ganze "Rockstar-Zirkus" mit riesigen Bühnenaufbauten und Pyrotechnik langweilte ihn, er wollte zurück zur Essenz der Musik. Zur gleichen Zeit rollte eine neue Blues-Welle aus den USA heran, angeführt von Künstlern wie Jeff Healey, Robert Cray und Bonnie Raitt. Inspiriert von seinen Jugendhelden Eric Clapton, Peter Green und den Bluesbreakers, begann Moore, hinter den Kulissen alte Blues-Stücke zu spielen, und entdeckte seine Liebe zur Musik neu. Besonders Albert King war ein großes Idol für ihn – ein Einfluss, der auf "Still Got The Blues" deutlich zu hören ist. Entstehung des Albums "Still Got The Blues" Gary Moore war ein großer Fan von Eric Clapton und dessen einzigartigem Sound. Deshalb entschied er sich, eine eigene Version eines Clapton-Stücks für "Still Got The Blues (For You)" aufzunehmen. Das sollte nur der Anfang eines größeren Projekts werden. Anfangs zögerte Moore, doch während der ersten Sessions erkannte er, dass er auch eigene Blues-Songs schreiben konnte. Er stellte eine neue Band zusammen, bestehend aus Andy Pyle (Bass), Graham Walker (Schlagzeug) und Mick Weaver (Keyboards). Die Aufnahmen fanden in den Sarm West Studios in London statt, wobei die meisten Songs live und in nur ein bis zwei Takes eingespielt wurden, was für Blues-Aufnahmen dieser Zeit typisch war. Moore stand hinter einer Plexiglasscheibe, während die Band im Aufnahmeraum spielte – eine Methode, die auch von Künstlern wie den Rolling Stones verwendet wurde. "Still Got The Blues" wurde schließlich auch eine Hommage an seine Idole. Das Album enthält sowohl Coverversionen als auch Eigenkompositionen – darunter "King Of The Blues", ein Tribut an B.B. King. Zudem wirkte George Harrison an "That Kind Of Woman" mit. Die CD-Version des Albums widmete er seinem großen Vorbild Peter Green, obwohl nur ein Song von ihm enthalten ist. Später veröffentlichte Moore ein ganzes Album zu Ehren von Green. "Still Got The Blues" – Ein Meilenstein der Musikgeschichte Was hat George Harrison mit "Still Got The Blues" zu tun? Wie liefen die Aufnahmen mit Blues-Legende Albert King ab? Und wie erfüllte sich der lautstarke und manchmal eigensinnige Gary Moore mit diesem Album einen Kindheitstraum? Das und mehr, erfahrt ihr im Meilensteine Podcast zu "Still Got The Blues". So wurde "Still Got The Blues" nicht nur ein persönliches Projekt für Gary Moore, sondern auch eine Hommage an die Blues-Giganten, die ihn inspirierten. __________ Über diese Songs vom Album "Still Got The Blues" wird im Podcast gesprochen (03:49) – "Texas Strut"(16:02) – "Still Got The Blues (For You)"(35:57) – "Moving On"(41:07) – "Oh, Pretty Woman "(49:42) – "King Of The Blues"(1:04:03) – "That Kind Of Woman"__________ Über diese Songs wird außerdem im Podcast gesprochen (09:49) – "All Your Love" von Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton(28:11) – "Dana" von Roland Kovac(29:14) – "Nordrach" von Jud's Gallery(34:44) – "Still In Love With You" von Thin Lizzy(41:08) – "Pretty Woman" von Roy Orbison(41:45) – "Oh, Pretty Woman" von Albert King  (53:57) – "Broken Heart" von B.B. King __________ Alle Shownotes und weiterführenden Links zur Folge: https://1.ard.de/gary-moore-still-got-the-blues __________ Ihr wollt mehr Podcasts wie diesen? Abonniert die SWR1 Meilensteine! Fragen, Kritik, Anregungen? Meldet euch gerne per WhatsApp-Sprachnachricht an die (06131) 92 93 94 95 oder schreibt uns an meilensteine@swr.de

Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 3ú lá de mí an Mhárta, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1965 tháinig Cairdinéal Conway abhaile le fáiltiú achrannach a thosaigh I mBaile Átha Cliath agus chríochnaigh sé in Ard Mhacha. I 2004 thug Mary McAleese agus Bertie Ahern ómós chuig Cormac McAnallen a fuair bás go tobann ag aois 24. I 2002 chonaic daoine pór den fhia-chat Albanach I mBéal Átha Gabhann. Tháinig sé amach gur chonaic a lán daoine an cat. Rinne siad fiosrúchán air agus dúirt siad go raibh sé fia-chat a d'fhorbair chuig cat tí. I 2016 tar éis an toghchán bhí daoine nua I gceannas ar an chontae. Bhí Jackie Cahill, Mattie McGrath, Seamus Healy, Alan Kelly agus Michael Lowry sa Dáil don chontae. Sin 99 Red Balloons ó Nena – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo I 1984. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1965, chan Eric Clapton don uair dheireanach leis The Yardbirds. D'fhág sé an ghrúpa chun dul le grúpa eile darbh ainm Bluesbreakers. Thug Clapton moladh chuig an ghrúpa chun Jimmy Page a fháil, ach dhiúltaigh Jimmy Page leo. I 1999 d'aontaigh le Oasis chun airgead a thabhairt chuig Tony McCarroll – iar-drumadóir den bhanna ceoil. D'íoc siad 550,000 punt tar éis a thug sé cás chuig an bhanna ceoil le milliún nár íoc siad I rith a am leis an bhanna ceoil. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh aisteoir Jessica Biel I Meiriceá ar an lá seo I 1982 agus rugadh amhránaí Ronan Keating I mBaile Átha Cliath ar an lá seo I 1977 agus seo chuid de a amhrán. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo.

Support our Show and get the word out by wearin' our gear18. Champion Jack Dupree (Scoobydoobydoo) / Grandma (You're a Bit too Slow (horns, New Orleans shuffle) 19. Ron Wood / Far East Man (George Harrison / Dark Horse album 1974) Wood released first- claims co-write with Harrison20. Keith Richards / I Could Have Stood You Up 21. Jack Bruce Band / Keep It Down (live on the Old Grey Whistle Test 1975) 22. Alvin Lee & Mick Taylor / I'm Going Home 23. Debbie Davis' (Key to Love) / Hard Road (Peter Green, Coco Montoya, Mick Taylor, Eric Clapton) 24. Bob Dylan / Jokerman (Infidels with Taylor, Mark Knopfler, Sly & Robbie)25. John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers feat Mick Taylor, Eric Clapton, Chris Barber / Talk to Your Daughter26. Rolling Stones / Time Waits for No One 27. Rolling Stones / Fingerprint File28. Jeff Lang / Sweet Virginia 29. The Black Crowes / Rocks Off 

Pacific Street Blues & Americana Mick Taylor Spotlight Show 1. Rolling Stones / Can't You Hear Me Knocking2. Rolling Stones / Country Honk3. Rolling Stones / Honky Tony Women 4. John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers feat Eric Clapton / All My Love (Beano cover)5. John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers feat Mick Taylor / Snowy White6. John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers feat Mick Taylor / I Can't Quit You Baby7. Rolling Stones / Live with Me 8. Carla Olson & Mick Taylor / Sway9. Lucky Peterson / Ventilator Blues 10. Mick Taylor / This is Hip (John Lee Hooker: From Clarksdale to Heaven) 11. The Rolling Stones / You Gotta Move12. Mississippi Fred McDowell / You Got to Move13. The Rolling Stones / Plunder My Soul (Exile on Main St - archival cut)  14. The Rolling Stones / Waiting on a Friend 15. The Rolling Stones / Criss Cross Man (Goats Head Soup - archival cut) Working with Lowell George (Little Feat) 16. Little Feat (Waiting for Columbus) / Apolitical Blues 17. Mick Taylor & Lowell George (Little Feat) / Giddy Up Support our Show and get the word out by wearin' our gear 

I dette afsnit af 'Rockhistorier' kigges der, traditionen tro, tilbage på 20 af de største kunstnere, der forlod os i det forgangne år. Henrik Queitsch og Klaus Lynggaard har samlet en divers playliste, med alt fra funkinspirerede intromelodier fra Quincy Jones til Françoise Hardys tårefremkaldende ballader. Værter: Klaus Lynggaard og Henrik QueitschKlip: Kristian VestergaardPlayliste: Quincy Jones: “Theme from ‘Ironside'” (1971) John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton: “All Your Love” (Bluesbreakers, 1966)  Kris Kristofferson: ”Casey's Last Ride” (1970)Duane Eddy: “Rebel-‘Rouser” (1958)Phil Lesh/Grateful Dead: “Unbroken Chain” (1974)Sérgio Mendes & Brazil '66: “Batucada” (1968)Preben Devantier/Steppeulvene: “Dunhammeraften” (1967)Christian Sievert: ”Fantasia por seguiriyas” (1976)Françoise Hardy: ”Ma jeunesse fout le camp” (1967) Frankie Beverly/Maze: ”Color Blind” (1977)Melanie: “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” (1970)Mary Weiss/The Shangri-La's: “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” (1964)Wayne Kramer & Dennis Thompson/MC5: “Tonight” (1970)Eric Carmen/Raspberries: “Go All the Way” (1972) Johnny Madsen: “Aldrig mere” (2015)Steve Harley/Cockney Rebel: “Tumbling Down” (1974)James Chance & the Contortions: “Contort Yourself” (1979)Karl Wallinger/World Party: “It Is Like Today?” (1993)Steve Albini (født 1962)/Big Black: “Kerosene” (1985)Laura Illeborg (født 1969): ”God vagt” (2007)

Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 3ú lá de mí an Mhárta, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1965 tháinig Cairdinéal Conway abhaile le fáiltiú achrannach a thosaigh I mBaile Átha Cliath agus chríochnaigh sé in Ard Mhacha. I 2004 thug Mary McAleese agus Bertie Ahern ómós chuig Cormac McAnallen a fuair bás go tobann ag aois 24. I 1984 tharla robáil armtha ag an Bank of Ireland san Tulach. Bhí na Gardaí ag labhairt le seisear sa bhaile. I 2004 mharaíodh an tAthair John Hannon in An Chéinia. Rugadh é I Nemarket on Fergus. Sin 99 Red Balloons ó Nena – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo I 1984. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1965, chan Eric Clapton don uair dheireanach leis The Yardbirds. D'fhág sé an ghrúpa chun dul le grúpa eile darbh ainm Bluesbreakers. Thug Clapton moladh chuig an ghrúpa chun Jimmy Page a fháil, ach dhiúltaigh Jimmy Page leo. I 1999 d'aontaigh le Oasis chun airgead a thabhairt chuig Tony McCarroll – iar-drumadóir den bhanna ceoil. D'íoc siad 550,000 punt tar éis a thug sé cás chuig an bhanna ceoil le milliún nár íoc siad I rith a am leis an bhanna ceoil. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh aisteoir Jessica Biel I Meiriceá ar an lá seo I 1982 agus rugadh amhránaí Ronan Keating I mBaile Átha Cliath ar an lá seo I 1977 agus seo chuid de a amhrán. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo.

The latest episode of Blues is the Truth is here, hosted by the brilliant Ian McHugh, bringing you the finest mix of blues from legends and rising stars. Dive into an incredible lineup featuring Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Jontavious Willis, Kai Strauss, Joe Bonamassa, and Kilborn Alley. Explore timeless classics from John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins, and Lionel Hampton with Dinah Washington, alongside fresh tracks from contemporary icons like Giles Robson, John Primer, and The Terraplanes Blues Band. This week's episode also highlights unique collaborations such as Ian Siegal meeting Johnny Mastro and Giles Robson teaming up with John Primer. You'll hear soulful melodies from Marcus Trummer and Fried Okra Deluxe, powerful grooves from Leavin' Trunk, Jason Ellmore and Hoodoo Witch, and masterful musicianship from Martin MacNeil and Robert Hokum. And of course, no episode would be complete without a nod to the greats, with tracks from Mud Morganfield, Kim Wilson, and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Regular features include the electrifying Blues Driver, the lyrical exploration of Title Track Tango, and the familiar favorites of The Song Remains the Same. Don't miss a moment of this jam-packed episode! Remember to share the blues love—subscribe to the podcast, rate it, and leave a review. Your support helps keep the blues alive and thriving!

HPR All Things Considered host Dave Lawrence honored blues legend John Mayall with an interview feature including highlights from five conversations, going back 21 years, following the Bluesbreakers founder's passing last July at home in California. He was 90. Now, for our End of Year celebration, we're celebrating his life and the life of some of our beloved guests who we lost this year!

In this episode of ALPS In Brief, our Risk Manager Mark Bassingthwaighte sits down with University of Montana Professor Jeff Brandt to talk about synthesizers, AI, and his class on the history of rock and roll. — Transcript:  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the Risk Manager here at ALPS, and welcome to ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful Downtown Missoula, Montana. As many of you know, I have been in Florida now for a number of years, but I'm back at the home office here, and we have a special event every two years where we bring in a lot of our bar associates from various bar associations around the country. Then we have some special speakers that come in and talk about all kinds of things.  I have just finished attending a presentation given by Jeff Brandt, who is a professor here at the university and does a course on the history of music. I got to say, in all honesty, folks, I wish you could all have been here. This was one of the most fun, creative presentations I've seen in a long, long time. Jeff, it's a pleasure to have you here. Before we get started, can I ask you to take just a little bit of time and tell us about who you are?  Jeff Brandt:  Okay, so I was born in Sitka, Alaska, which is a tiny, well, it's a big island actually, but a tiny town on a big island in Southeast Alaska. Average rainfall there is about 96 inches per year, so it's a Pacific Coast rainforest.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  I went to college in Tacoma, Washington at Pacific Lutheran University. Taught private percussion lessons after that for about 20 years. Somewhere in the middle or somewhere in there, I got my graduate teaching degree. Then we ended up in Missoula, Montana as a result. Then by happenstance, the History of Rock & Roll as a course fell into my lap.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  That was an established course before you got here?  Jeff Brandt:  It was.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay.  Jeff Brandt:  Yeah. There were a lot of people that have taught it prior to me, but when I was given the opportunity to run with it, it was one of the first online courses developed at the University of Montana, and that's really when I dug in because I knew that teaching it in an online setting, I was going to have to be more aware of the points I was trying to get across and how they were delivered. I dug deeper and deeper into the historical aspect of the course, and then I just started creating these different slide programs. Now I'm on my third set of slides and I think it's my final because they're so good now I don't want to mess with them, but that's my brief history.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  I didn't realize this is online. Could anybody get online and just take this course?  Jeff Brandt:  Anybody can take it online. I'll give my spiel about online education, to be honest here, is I think online education is good if you have time to do it. I think in-person education, generally speaking, is better.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  I would agree with you.  Jeff Brandt:  There are so many different resources now for people to learn. Just with YouTube alone, you can go down an endless pit of stuff on one member of one obscure band, it seems.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Yeah. Mine is one of the many resources out there.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  You're welcome to share. Folks, I'm telling you, if you have any interest at all in the history of rock and roll and want to have some awesome fun, this is a course I would encourage you to take and see. I didn't realize. How might folks find this?  Jeff Brandt:  Well, you go to the University of Montana. I believe you have to register as a student.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay.  Jeff Brandt:  You think that I would know all the hoops you have you have to jump through.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  No, that's fine.  Jeff Brandt:  You have to jump through several hoops and then you can take online classes. I do encourage people who are not working 40 hours a week and who are interested in really digging in, to take it in-person because there's so much more interaction with the way the clips are played and the way the slides are presented. Get on the University of Montana website and search it, and you can join the online course or the face-to-face.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  You clearly have a passion. It just seems like listening to you, you're having just a ton of fun too, and I love that. Folks, I can also share this course is I think the number one or the number two top.  Jeff Brandt:  It's one or two or three. It depends on the year.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah. Why do you do this?  Jeff Brandt:  Well, honestly, the first time it fell in my lap. I was just kind of given the opportunity to sub for somebody and subbing for somebody in a college course is, it's a lot to take on because you jump into it usually with all of their materials because that's usually the unwritten rule is, "I'll let you use my stuff." I mean, back then, I mean, it makes me sound like a dinosaur, but the person that gave me the stuff had overheads, and so I was using overhead.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Wow. Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Maybe it was a year later that I was using slides, but they gave me their overheads. I jump in, I'm starting to do this, and honestly, I was scared because I guess when you're, I can speak as a male when you're 23, 24, 25, you think you know a lot of stuff. I just cracked open the first of two textbooks that this prof was using, and I was like, "Oh, boy, do I know nothing and I'm teaching it in three weeks."  Then fast-forward, I end up digging in reading resources, listening to a lot of albums. I'll be honest with you, I hadn't really dug into the Beatles that much prior because there were so many other acts that I was interested in. Then I started listening to their catalog and the Rolling Stones, and again, that's a tiny scratch on the surface that doesn't include the other British bands like The Animals and The Who and Led Zeppelin and then John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and all these other in-depth things you can go in. That's just the British blues scene.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  What I realized was in order to make this work and why I continued to want to do it, is what I would need to do is have what I would call kind of a surfacey understanding of about 300 to 400 acts in the entertainment business. Gradually bit by bit, the department would buy my recordings. I would go and dig in and listen to everything from Blind Lemon Jefferson to the Spice Girls. I would just year-by-year chip away. When you get into a subject like counted cross-stitch or skiing or building doors, you get better at it and you realize ways to enjoy it more.  I got to a point where I created my final, what I call my final set of slides, and I really, really carefully planned out the layout of the slides, how the format of the class was going to move and how I was going to justify only featuring certain artists as opposed to leaving out bands, like the one I always pick on is AC/DC because they're not really a part of the course. That's why I do it and why I like to do it, because it's like anything else where you get into it, then you kind of become addicted once you have a little taste.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah, yeah, I get that. Year after year, how do I want to say this? Let me do it this way. What do you hope students get out of your class?  Jeff Brandt:  Well, there are these objectives that we write in the syllabus that you're supposed to abide by, et cetera, et cetera, and I do, but what I really want people to get out of the course is I want them to understand a general approach, or I guess have a general understanding of the social history that rock and roll highlights in America. That's one thing.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay.  Jeff Brandt:  I want them to understand that rock and roll is not white, it's not Elvis Presley, it's not AC/DC, it's not, even though I love them, it's not Metallica. It is something that came about quite by accident and through a lot of pain. That part is kind of an inconvenient truth that some students don't like. I have to warn people in the beginning, "I'm not going to sugar coat this, I'm going to bring it directly to you. Some of the things are inconvenient truths that you may not have faced prior. Depending on how invested you are in learning as a person, it may buck your understanding of how this thing has worked."  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Just for example, the inconvenient truth, like I was mentioning today that Elvis Presley is a cover artist. Bill Haley is a cover artist.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Mm-hmm.  Jeff Brandt:  They're not original rock and roll artists.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  The original rock and roll artists are people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Bo Diddley and all of the artists on Chess Records. Those are the original rock and roll artists, but because of the unfortunate existence of so much racism in our country, a lot of those people were shoved aside because it was easier to market people with light skin.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  So interesting.  Jeff Brandt:  That's another thing I wanted to go with and maybe if I'm going to highlight a third thing I want them to go away with, is an understanding that you can listen to more than one subgenre within rock and roll. You get people that are "metalheads" and people that are into techno pop or house or people that seventies rock, or here's another category I have, people that love the sixties. They have blinders on. If it's between '64 and '69, it's in, and if it's '70 and on, it's out. The understanding that if you listen to pick your artist, like name a person, let's just pick like Katy Perry. If you listen to Katy Perry and you put hours into it, you will grow to like that artist. If you listen to Destiny's Child, you will grow, if you listen to Frank Zappa, you will grow to like it. I want express in that third point that it takes time to do that, and it's an investment and it's a willing investment.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  It's very interesting. I appreciate what you're sharing, and again, after hearing what you had to say here just a few moments ago, it has changed how I look at certain things. What I liked about it, it helps understand the culture, understand music in general, where it comes from. I mean, I have a greater sensitivity. Yeah, I just thought it was very good.  Jeff Brandt:  Well, it's almost like one thing along those lines, it's almost like with Louis Armstrong.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Louis Armstrong was this one of several trumpet or cornet players as they were originally, in the early jazz era that was a soloist and gained a following from the general public, the general population in the United States. Now, Louis was seen as a performer on stage, but at the same time, he couldn't stay in the same hotels, he couldn't eat in the same restaurants.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  He could walk on stage in a club, but not eat at the restaurant in the club.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah. Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  He would've to be fed backstage and those kind of inconvenient truths to uncover that for people in a day when I think it's easy to brush that aside and highlight that he was an ambassador to the world in the 1970s. Yeah, in the seventies he was, but for the majority of his time as a performer, he was only respected as a performer, not as a human being.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Wow. I agree with you, that is a great message I think. God bless. These are important things.  Jeff Brandt:  I mean, I think that, and another thing that's along those lines too, it's a little bit of a stretch as a parallel, but it is a parallel, is that performers in rock and roll, many times are actors.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay.  Jeff Brandt:  If you're in a heavy metal band and you're acting all angry on stage and chugging it away on your guitar up there and singing these lyrics that are full of vitriol, that doesn't necessarily define who you were at breakfast at 10 o'clock that morning or who you are when you're off tour with your wife and kids or with your partner at the winery or whatever. That's a different thing. There are a lot of people that can't get past that. They see name your hard rock artist, "That's an evil person." That person puts on sweatpants, watches reruns of shows that we all like on Netflix, enjoys a donut every now and again, and takes a walk with dog.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  They're just real people, right?  Jeff Brandt:  They're real people. That part is also misunderstood about rock and roll in the same way that people can't or don't want to unveil the truth about black artists.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right. Right. One of the things, we talked a little bit last night, and again, you were sharing this in your presentation, one of the things that really sort of struck me was your comments about synthesizers. I'm a guy that likes that sound, but I didn't fully appreciate its impact and the evolution and how that impacted the artists of the day. I guess I'd have to honestly say I'm still not sure where you come out on synthesizing. Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I'd be curious, what's your thought about?  Jeff Brandt:  Okay. Well, I mean, I own a synthesizer. Every band I've played in has used a synthesizer.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay.  Jeff Brandt:  I'm not against synthesizers. I also don't dislike house music. I don't dislike techno pop. I don't dislike the synth revolution that happened in the late, let's call it the late seventies to the early eighties where it exploded, where everybody had to have a Yamaha DX7. I don't dislike that. What I think is problematic, is the idea that this machine is everything.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  I think the other part that's problematic is that, and this is going to make me sound like I'm super old because my instrument, my main instrument is drum set. People will ask me, "Well, why haven't you dug into this or this or this about the history of rock and roll?" I say, "Well, I also practice instruments and I have a passion for playing them." To me, it's not just about reading and regurgitating facts, it's about keeping up my musical skills. What happens when you get into the world of synth is to some degree, you lose the world of any sort of musical technique because the machine can do so much of it for you.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay. Right.  Jeff Brandt:  I think that the bad side of synth is highlighted like groups like Human League, because if you look at a group like Human League and they're early stuff, it sounds like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, it's very robotic and synthesized, as we should say, in the sense that everything is exactly placed on the exact moment of the exact quarter of the beat. That there is no doubt in your mind exactly where the center of the beat is. You can press a button and the synthesizer can do that. Whereas on piano, you have to go to make the same da-da-da-da-da-da, you have to go like fingers, 4, 3, 2, 1, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da over and over again to make that same key do that. To some degree, whenever electronics jump to the next level, we lose a tiny bit of our ability to perform on those instruments.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay. Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Like with synth, you lose a little bit of ability to perform on a general keyboard. With electric guitar, you lose a little bit of ability to perform on an acoustic guitar. With electric drums, you lose a little bit of ability to play an acoustic drum set. I mean, imagine if there was an electric French horn, for example. French horn is one of the most difficult instruments to play, right?  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right, of course.  Jeff Brandt:  Period. I mean, it's like a French horn. Missing notes on a French horn is a Monday, that's normal. You can't avoid it. Imagine if there were a way to synthesize so that it would know that your note was going to be missed by your embouchure, and it would bring the correct note out. We would lose some of the, maybe the desire to practice and get it to where we are. That's where I feel it's the bad side of synth. But in general, I'm with you. I like the sound of the synthesizer. I like the ideas you can get from the synthesizer. I even like the drum ideas that you get from a synthesizer. I think that we were talking about last night, it's like you can go too far with something, where you need to think about reining it back in. It's like alcohol. It's like collecting cars.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah. Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  It's like colors of carpet in your home. At what point in time do you say enough is enough.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah. Yeah. Well, my interest in this, it's my understanding again, that when this technology, as it sort of evolved and really became mainstream, there were a lot of responses. One of which was this is going to put people out of work because it was the Moody Blues, you could go and see the orchestra.  Jeff Brandt:  Didn't need the spring place.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  It changes. I hear you can lose some skill sets because the machine is doing it for you, but it also brings about, I think, some creativity. It seems to me once the revolution happened, the music industry didn't go away, but how it works changed.  Jeff Brandt:  Yes.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  We're at a point where I think, and even involved where, we're having all kinds of discussions and reactions with the evolution of generative AI.  Jeff Brandt:  Mm-hmm.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  There are people saying, "This is going to take jobs away from all kinds of people," not just musicians with the synth, but I also can see that this could bring about some incredible creativity opportunities, allowing just the exploration of music to go far further in directions we've made never even think of right now.  Jeff Brandt:  Right. Right.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Could you do all sorts of things with tones, vocal tones, and I don't know.  Jeff Brandt:  Yes.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  What is your thought? Do you see this as a game changer? Is this much ado about nothing?  Jeff Brandt:  Well, first of all, I think that it's inevitable.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay.  Jeff Brandt:  You could use the Pandora's box example. Once Pandora's box is open, then it's open and you can't shut it again. Well, the synthesizer was going to be developed, I'll tell you why, is because it comes from the pipe organ.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Oh, really?  Jeff Brandt:  The pipe organ is the first synthesizer. The pipe organ has stops that create different sounds. If you study the pipe organ going way back, you look at real pipe organs, they have sounds on them where you pull stops out and make it sound like a flute and make it sound like a trumpet.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  I never thought about it that way, but you're right. Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  It has a pedal system because pipe organ players have to read three staves. They read treble, they read bass, and then they read sub bass, as I'll call it. I honestly don't know the exact term, but another bass clef for their feet. They're basically playing, no pun intended, a synthesizer with their feet, while they're playing two synths with their hands. That's the original synth. People that think that this came about in like '64, it's been around since Bach, and guess what? It's not going away.  I think the part about the synthesizer and change, is that it is inevitable that AI along with that new technologies will enter where new possibilities will come up. I think that the good side, is some things are a little bit easier for us to do. For example, Pro Tools is a program where you can click into the program and cut right in, and it both takes the ambient sounds from before and the ambient sounds after and blends it together so you can't tell the person was clicked in at that moment. That's amazing. That makes it simpler.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  It saves money for people that own Pro, it saves time, and humans are generally speaking all about that. I mean, if there's a cherry tree here and there's a bigger cherry tree across the river and you're like, "I'm going to stay with this cherry tree right here because I don't want to cross the river." That's what we would literally call the lowest hanging fruit.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  With a synthesizer, if there is an option to make something a little bit simpler, people are going to use it. Again, there's the when is when part, when is enough enough? When is too much, too much, is what I mean. I think with AI, it's going to inevitably bring up other options that we haven't thought of, and it's inevitably going to bring about sounds or feelings or grooves or patterns that will catch people's ears that you cannot create with guitar rhythm guitar standard acoustic bass, or electric acoustic bass and drums, and we like that change.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Speaking personally, is your, I guess, conclusion or do you see the rise of AI, generative AI then, as a positive development? Are you optimistic looking forward to see what the music industry does with this? Or is it cautious optimism?  Jeff Brandt:  I'd say it's cautious optimism because it is true, for example, let's just go with trucks, there are trucks now that can be self-driven.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  I don't necessarily think that's a good thing. First of all, I think that we can put things on trains, and I know I sound like a total socialist here, but you can put things on trains and all of those cars are "self-driven" by the one engineer up there, and it's very efficient. Trucks that are self-driven will become a problem at some point because you can hack into that.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yes.  Jeff Brandt:  You can't hack into a human's mind nearly as easy, so there's that.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  I think that it's good to have the humans operating things.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  At the same time with the music business and recording, if you go back to the sixties and then the seventies, you had tons of studios that were busy hour by hour, day by day, week by week. You'd have to book into that studio six months in advance to get a four-hour space.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  Now, there are studios that are completely abandoned because they've moved into people's homes because of the laptop, because of microphones like the one we're using right here, and because of the synthesizer. Is it good or is it worse? It's change.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  That's what it is.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Is it going to affect having lots and lots of people play a string track versus using a synthesizer to simply overdub things? Yes, it's going to affect that. Is it going to affect it to the point where somebody goes to a symphony orchestra or a jazz concert and they see 18 mannequins on stage holding up instruments, and all of it comes from a synthesizer? I doubt it because we like to watch artists perform.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Like with hip-hop, almost all of the time in the hip-hop genre or any sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of hip-hop, you have people that are using synthesizers to create the entire track other than the vocals. They're even manipulating the vocals using the synth. When they go on tour, now, increasingly there are people that are using instrumentalists on tour because it's more interesting to look at.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  That makes sense, yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  You don't want just two turntables and a microphone back there because that's all it is.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah. Yeah. Why pay all the money to go?  Jeff Brandt:  When you go on tour, it's convenient for artists like Mariah Carey to just take the synths and go out there, but she knows that when she can afford to hire the string players, it looks cool.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah. Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  I think it's a case of are you going to see the glass as half full or half empty? It's here. It's been here since the pipe organ. It's going to stay. It's a question of when do you say enough is enough, and how do you look at it from your perspective as a musician? I guess I'd add one more thing. If you're afraid of the synthesizer, learn to use one. Right there.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I really, really appreciate and love everything that you've shared. Folks, one of the reasons I wanted to do this, as you well are aware, our profession is struggling. There's a lot of people that are very much embracing the AI evolution and a lot of others very, very concerned about will they have a job. A lot of legal staff are concerned, "Will I have a job in a couple more years?" I'm using AI myself to do a lot of writing, and it's saving me tons of time, and it elevates my game. It really does. I still am the one that policy, it's an idea generator for me.  Getting back to this, I'm hoping that it is helpful to you who are listening, as we think about the challenges, the concerns, work through this, it's easier to hear and get some thoughts about how we should be responding or what do we do with all this, when we talk about it in the context of something else. Discussing this as it relates to music, I think is very eye-opening. I love the comment, you are absolutely right this synthesizer.  Jeff Brandt:  It's hard to say.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  I always get tongue-twisted.  Jeff Brandt:  It's really tough to say.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  It's been around since Bach.  Jeff Brandt:  It's been around since the organ.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  I never really understood that. I think some similar things can be said about AI. It's been here a lot longer than we realize. Not in the same way, generative AI is certainly very, very new. I am cautiously optimistic about it. I would encourage you folks to just take a realistic look, take some opportunities, if you're threatened by it, pick up the instrument and learn it, and it can help your practice. I just think it's a positive thing overall. We got to be careful going too far. I can keep rambling on about this stuff for a long time. I have so many planes in my head up right now.  Jeff Brandt:  Well, there's one more thing that's worth adding.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Please, please.  Jeff Brandt:  There's a drummer in LA named Greg Bissonette.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yes.  Jeff Brandt:  He's a studio drummer. He went to University of North Texas. He's played with lots of different artists. Greg Bissonette has always made his living playing drums.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Okay.  Jeff Brandt:  Now, when he first entered the studio scene in Los Angeles, as far as I know, he was going to studios and recording. You'd get your drums carted over to the studio by a carting service. You'd show up, you'd play the gig, which was a recording gig, and then you would pack your stuff up or the carting service would pack your stuff up. You'd go home and you'd be waiting for your next booked gig. Now, Greg has a microphone set up in his home. People send him a file. He listens to the file. There's maybe a click track on it, or maybe not, maybe he has to create his note. I mean, I don't know him personally, but if you need a reference for Greg Bissonette, he played all of the in-between clips on the Friends show.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Oh, seriously?  Jeff Brandt:  He's that guy and he's done a lot more than that. Understand that the convenience of somebody emailing you a file or dropping a file in a box and you download this file and then go ahead and say, "Okay, I'm going to add drums to this track," and you do it from your home studio. There are some good things about this. Number one, he's not driving a car in LA traffic to a studio, which means he gets to spend more time at home and more time with his family. That's better for the environment. Electric car or not, it's better.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Agreed.  Jeff Brandt:  Okay. It doesn't have the same in-person work environment that you had say in the sixties when the Fab Four or the Rolling Stones are right there together, hashing it out like, "What does this mean?" That's different. The truth of the matter is, I don't think anybody who's listening to something Greg Bissonette has recorded probably would go, "Oh, well, this obviously is something this guy did at his home studio with the downloaded file." In that way, it doesn't matter. Again, it's a choice of how do you want to do the track? Is it a jazz band? You probably need to come together and play. Is it a digital track and they want live drums on it?  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  Send it, who cares?  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  Again, this idea of change is the only constant. I mean, maybe I'll be eating my own words and I'll be replaced by a robot that has all of the personality of a human being and knows every single history of rock and roll fact. Sure. Maybe that'll happen. I doubt it. People like Greg Bissonette are still out there finding a creative way to make a living simply because they went, "Oh, now I need the studio at home. Oh, now I need this technology so that the files can be sent to me. I need my microphones, everything tuned up."  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  You still find a way to do it, and I think that we will. I've never bought that line about AI and knock on wood, that it's going to come together and destroy the human race. I think that's silly.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah, I do too.  Jeff Brandt:  I think what it's going to do is it's going to be one of those things where we just have to be careful how we use it.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Mm-hmm. Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  I think you could say we have to be careful. We have to be careful about how we drive Hummers.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah.  Jeff Brandt:  We have to be careful about not making buildings too tall.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Right.  Jeff Brandt:  We have to be careful about not making wave machines so powerful that kids get knocked over when they're going to a wave machine at a water park to have fun. It's pretty simple stuff.  Mark Bassingthwaighte:  Yeah. I want to thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk. You have said so eloquently, things that I have trouble saying. I can't put it into words in the same way you do. All I can say is, folks, Jeff, the insights here, what I'm trying to get across, I hope it's self-evident now, you're summarizing all this just perfectly. That's it. I appreciate your coming. I'll let all of you get back to work. If you have any thoughts, questions, concerns on risk management, ethics, insurance, etc, remember, I'm not the Risk Manager of Alps, I'm hired by Alps to be your Risk Manager. Feel free to reach out anytime. It's MBass@Alpsinsurance.com. Good talking to you all. Take care. Bye-bye.   

Segunda entrega de esta miniserie dedicada a rescatar singles de las valijas de Immediate Records, el sello fundado por Andrew Loog Oldham -manager de los Rolling Stones- en 1965.(Foto del podcast por Gered Mankowitz; PP Arnold)Playlist;(sintonía) CHARLES DICKENS “Our soul brother TH”CHARLES DICKENS “So much in love”CHRIS FARLOWE “The fool”CHRIS FARLOW “Think”VAN LENTON “You don’t care”THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN “The monkey time”THE STRANGELOVES “Cara-Lin”THE STRANGELOVES “(Roll on) Mississippi”THE McCOYS “Hang on Sloopy”THE McCOYS “Fever”BARBARA LYNN “You can’t buy my love”P.P. ARNOLD “Everything’s gonna be alright”LES FLEUR DE LYS “So come on”LES FLEUR DE LYS “Circles”THE POETS “Baby don’t you do it”JOHN MAYALL and THE BLUESBREAKERS “I’m your witchdoctor”TONY RIVERS and THE CASTAWAYS “The girl from Salt Lake City”APOSTOLIC INTERVENTION “(Tell me) have you ever seen me”P.P. ARNOLD “Life is but nothing”Escuchar audio

Join Ian McHugh, your dedicated host, for another thrilling episode of *Blues is the Truth*! This week's show brings you an incredible lineup of artists, featuring some of the biggest legends and freshest voices in blues. You'll hear tracks from *Eric Clapton*, *Ronnie Baker Brooks*, *Roy Milton*, *John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers*, *Little Feat*, and *Jontavious Willis*. But that's not all — there's also music from *Cecilia and the Candy Kings*, *Neil Saddler*, *Junior Wells*, *Magic Sam*, *J Geils Band*, *Colin James*, *Taj Mahal*, *Chickenshack*, *Bruce Mississippi Johnson*, *Mississippi Fred McDowell*, *Shemekia Copeland*, *Vaneese Thomas*, *Susan Tedeschi*, *Duke Robillard*, *Eddie Cotton*, and *Connolly Hayes*. With two hours of exceptional music, Ian McHugh will also bring you beloved features like “Blues Driver,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “Title Track Tango,” guiding you through the very best of blues past and present. Whether you're a die-hard blues lover or discovering these timeless sounds for the first time, this episode has something for everyone! Tune in now to enjoy an unforgettable journey through the heart of the blues!

Coco Montoya is a celebrated American blues guitarist and vocalist, recognized for his passionate performances and mastery of the blues genre. Born in Santa Monica, California, Montoya began his musical journey as a drummer, and his career took a pivotal turn when he met the legendary Albert Collins in the 1970s. Albert Collins became his mentor, teaching him the fundamentals of the blues and urging him to transition to guitar. Coco Montoya's left-handed, upside-down playing style and emotional phrasing became his signature, blending fiery intensity with heartfelt soul. In the 1980s, Montoya joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, a band that had launched the careers of iconic guitarists like Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor. During his decade with John Mayall, Coco Montoya refined his craft, gaining widespread recognition as a formidable blues guitarist. His work with the Bluesbreakers helped solidify his reputation and set the stage for his solo career. Coco Montoya's solo debut, Gotta Mind to Travel (1995), marked the beginning of a string of successful albums that showcased his gritty, emotive guitar playing and powerful vocals. Notable releases include Ya Think I'd Know Better (1996), Suspicion (2000), and Hard Truth (2017). His music, rooted in traditional blues but with a contemporary edge, earned critical acclaim and a loyal fanbase. Touring extensively, CocoMontoya is known for his dynamic live performances, where his combination of technical prowess and raw emotion leave audiences spellbound. His contributions to the blues genre have earned him awards and accolades, including the Blues Music Award for Best New Blues Artist in 1996. Montoya remains a vital force in the modern blues scene, with his playing often compared to legends like Albert Collins and B.B. King, ensuring his enduring influence on future generations of blues musicians. Coco Montoya joins us this week to share his story. For more information about him, check out his website https://www.cocomontoyaband.com/ and don't forget, if you'd like to request a guest, send me a message through my website https://www.abreathoffreshair.com.au

***This show is brought to you by DistroKid. Go to http://distrokid.com/vip/the500 for 30% off your first year!*** John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers served as a rite of passage for guitar players who would go on to be a part of other major bands. Eric Clapton was one of those legendary members who passed through the band. Joe Bonamassa and Wayne Federman join this week's episode, discuss “Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, " and geek out over guitars.  Follow Joe on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joebonamassa Follow Joe on Twitter/X https://x.com/JBONAMASSA Joe Bonamassa Facebook https://www.facebook.com/JoeBonamassa/ Follow Wayne on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/djmortycoyle Follow Wayne on Twitter: https://www.instagram.com/instafederman Follow Josh on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshadammeyers/ Follow Josh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshAdamMeyers Follow Josh on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joshameyers Follow The 500 on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the500podcast/ Follow The 500 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/the500podcast Follow The 500 on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The500PodcastWithJAM/ Email the show: 500podcast@gmail.com Check the show's website: http://the500podcast.com DistroKid Artist Of The Week: Walter Trout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38S8UI_dV9E Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comienza el curso 24/25 con esta Wurlitzer dedicada a Sir John Mayall. El que fuera considerado el padrino del blues británico trascendió gracias a una asombrosa capacidad para innovar, introduciendo en su música tanto el jazz y rock, pero sin dejar de ser fiel a la tradición de los doce compases. Con los Bluesbreakers, en estudio o en directo, al cobijo de los grises cielos de la pérfida Albión o bañado por el sol y la música de la costa oeste norteamericana, da igual donde se hallasen sus teclas, sus cuerdas o su armónica, su voz resonó con tal fuerza que marcó continuamente a sus compañeros de profesión y a las generaciones venideras gracias a un legado infinito. Sonará en este audio: John Mayall - Sitting On The Outside John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - Crawling Up a Hill John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - I Need Your Love John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - I'm Your Witchdoctor John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - Have Your Head John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - Parchman Farm John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - A Hard Road John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - The Super-Natural John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - The Death Of J. B. Lenoir John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - Tears In My Eyes John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - I'm A Stranger John Mayall - California John Mayall - Room To Move John Mayall - The Bear John Mayall - Fly Tomorrow John Mayall - Country Road John Mayall - Exercise in C Major For Harmonica John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - Out Of Reach Gracias por escuchar con cariño y dejar tu corazón en el audio, aunque no lo parezca, esta chorradita es importante. Apoya este proyecto desde 1,49€ al mes. Tan solo tienes que pulsar el botón azul que tienes en la cabecera de este canal Y gracias infinitas, ya que tu aportación nos permite mejorar cada programa. Este programa, como siempre, está dedicado especialmente a nuestros patrocinadores: Iñaki Del Olmo, Mechimariani, L Ibiricu Traba, Nachoigs, David, Alfonso Ladrón, Yago Llopis, Nacho Ruíz, Javier Carmona, Ana López, El Carabasser, Raúl Espinosa, La Última Frontera Radio, Gustavo, Ruth, Carmen Neke, Manuel García, Rebeca Tatiana, Michel y nuestros queridos anónimos.

Número Especial de La Ruleta Rusa que dedicamos a celebrar la memoria musical del gran John Mayall, más de cuatro horas de maravilloso Blues, centradas principalmente en el periodo inicial de Mayall, desde mediados de los 60 con los primeros álbumes junto a los Bluesbreakers y también la parte inicial de la década de los 70, tiempo en el que escribió obras maestras como A Hard Road, Bare Wires, Blues For Laurel Canyon, Empty Rooms, The Turning Point, USA Union o Back To The Roots, por nombrar algunos de sus mejores trabajos. Leer Más La Ruleta Rusa. Entrega 31.2024. Especial John Mayall. at La Ruleta Rusa Radio Rock.

Voces pediram! Mega episódio do mais errático e caótico podcast do minúsculo mundinho do surfe. João Valente ausente após ficar sem voz de tanto gritar depois daquela onda do Medina, Bruno Bocayuva e Júlio Adler tiveram o grande privilégio de receber o Unicórnio da bola de espuma, Daniel Rangel para debater o dia mais impressionante da história do surfe profissional - até a semana que vem. Na trilha, Slippery People dos Talking Heads interpretado pelos Staple Singers, The Noise of Carpet com Stereolab e por fim, John Mayall (que nos deixou aos 90 anos!)com os seus Bluesbreakers

HPR All Things Considered host Dave Lawrence honors blues legend John Mayall with an interview feature including highlights from five conversations, going back 21 years. The Bluesbreakers founder died last week at 90 at home in California.

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Eric Clapton & Chris Barber et al - John Mayall & The Blues Breakers  | Hideaway  | 70th Birthday Concert  | Eric Clapton & John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers  | Tribute to Elmore  | The Early Years  |   | John Mayall With Buddy Whittington  | Sen-Say-Shun  | Blues From The Lost Days  | Walter Trout  | Mayall's Piano Boogie (Instrumental)  | The Blues Came Callin'  | Blues Breakers  | All Your Love/ Hideaway  | Blues Breakers. John Mayall with Eric Clapton  | John Mayall's Bluesbreakers  | Bye Bye Bird  | Live In 1967 Vol. II  |   | John Mayall & The Blues Breakers And Friends, Mayall, Clapton & Barber  | Please Mr Lofton  | 70th Birthday Concert  | John Mayall & Duster Bennett  | My Babe [John Mayall & Friends, Live At The Palais Des Sport  | Live In France [Disc 1]  | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee  | God And Man  | Sonny & Brownie  |   | James Oliver  | Peter Gun  | Less Is More  |   | Stompin' Dave's Rockin' Outfit  | Great Balls Of Fire  | Stompin' Dave's Rockin' Outfit  | John Mayall's Bluesbreakers w Peter Green, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood | Stormy Monday  | Live In 1967 Vol. II  | 

Passing the baton of discourse on the rock and roll racetrack, our Olympian hosts sprint in the following direction … … watching Toumani Diabaté play in the pitch-black Malian night. … Laurel Canyon, the Brain Damage Club and the great fire of ‘79. … the Kinks in Fortis Green Road, the Beatles in Chiswick House and other alternative London rock landmarks. … is Cerrone's Supernature nicked from the Days Of Pearly Spencer? … lower-level graduates from the John Mayall Academy – Jon Hiseman, Keef Hartley, Larry Taylor, Aynsley Dunbar – and how being sacked from the Bluesbreakers was a badge of honour. … why do songwriters value suffering over joy? … “the more seriously someone takes musical taste, the more you should disregard them”. … what connects Bob Dylan and the Life of Brian? … a blueser from Preston in a Sioux headdress and one from Macclesfield pretending to hop a freight train.   … and why “song and dance man” Leadbelly had to play “complaining songs”. Plus Birthday guest Gianluca Tramontana. The Beatles at Chiswick House:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvvVNaU_qa8Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Passing the baton of discourse on the rock and roll racetrack, our Olympian hosts sprint in the following direction … … watching Toumani Diabaté play in the pitch-black Malian night. … Laurel Canyon, the Brain Damage Club and the great fire of ‘79. … the Kinks in Fortis Green Road, the Beatles in Chiswick House and other alternative London rock landmarks. … is Cerrone's Supernature nicked from the Days Of Pearly Spencer? … lower-level graduates from the John Mayall Academy – Jon Hiseman, Keef Hartley, Larry Taylor, Aynsley Dunbar – and how being sacked from the Bluesbreakers was a badge of honour. … why do songwriters value suffering over joy? … “the more seriously someone takes musical taste, the more you should disregard them”. … what connects Bob Dylan and the Life of Brian? … a blueser from Preston in a Sioux headdress and one from Macclesfield pretending to hop a freight train.   … and why “song and dance man” Leadbelly had to play “complaining songs”. Plus Birthday guest Gianluca Tramontana. The Beatles at Chiswick House:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvvVNaU_qa8Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Passing the baton of discourse on the rock and roll racetrack, our Olympian hosts sprint in the following direction … … watching Toumani Diabaté play in the pitch-black Malian night. … Laurel Canyon, the Brain Damage Club and the great fire of ‘79. … the Kinks in Fortis Green Road, the Beatles in Chiswick House and other alternative London rock landmarks. … is Cerrone's Supernature nicked from the Days Of Pearly Spencer? … lower-level graduates from the John Mayall Academy – Jon Hiseman, Keef Hartley, Larry Taylor, Aynsley Dunbar – and how being sacked from the Bluesbreakers was a badge of honour. … why do songwriters value suffering over joy? … “the more seriously someone takes musical taste, the more you should disregard them”. … what connects Bob Dylan and the Life of Brian? … a blueser from Preston in a Sioux headdress and one from Macclesfield pretending to hop a freight train.   … and why “song and dance man” Leadbelly had to play “complaining songs”. Plus Birthday guest Gianluca Tramontana. The Beatles at Chiswick House:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvvVNaU_qa8Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We lost one of the important English Blues figures this past week. This is a tribute to the late John Mayall. He was influential in bringing three prominent guitarists in the public eye. At different points on his band The Bluesbreakers, he featured Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor. They supported Mayall's musical vision of bringing authentic Blues to England, and in doing so, influenced other bands like The Rolling Stones, Cream, Savoy Brown and others. This is a tribute to his legacy.Alvin Lee and Ten Years After are profiled on the second half of this episode. Please have a look at these special interest sites.If you would, please make a donation of love and hope to St. Jude Children's HospitalMake an impact on the lives of St. Jude kids - St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (stjude.org)Get your Vegan Collagen Gummies from Earth & Elle, available thru Amazon at this link.Amazon.com: Earth & Elle Vegan Collagen Gummies - Non-GMO Biotin Gummies, Vitamin A, E, C - Plant Based Collagen Supplements for Healthier Hair, Skin, Nails - 60 Chews of Orange Flavored Gummies, Made in USA : Health & HouseholdKathy Bushnell Website for Emily Muff bandHome | Kathy Bushnell | Em & MooListen to previous shows at the main webpage at:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1329053Pamela Des Barres Home page for books, autographs, clothing and online writing classes.Pamela Des Barres | The Official Website of the Legendary Groupie and Author (pameladesbarresofficial.com)Listen to more music by Laurie Larson at:Home | Shashké Music and Art (laurielarson.net)View the most amazing paintings by Marijke Koger-Dunham (Formally of the 1960's artists collective, "The Fool").Psychedelic, Visionary and Fantasy Art by Marijke Koger (marijkekogerart.com)For unique Candles have a look at Stardust Lady's Etsy shopWhere art and armor become one where gods are by TwistedByStardust (etsy.com)For your astrological chart reading, contact Astrologer Tisch Aitken at:https://www.facebook.com/AstrologerTisch/Tarot card readings by Kalinda available atThe Mythical Muse | FacebookFor booking Children's parties and character parties in the Los Angeles area contact Kalinda Gray at:https://www.facebook.com/wishingwellparties/I'm listed in Feedspot's "Top 10 Psychedelic Podcasts You Must Follow". https://blog.feedspot.com/psychedelic_podcasts/Please feel free to donate or Tip Jar the show at my Venmo account@jessie-DelgadoII

July 24 2024  Hour 3: Influential musician, Jon Mayall, whose band the Bluesbreakers played leading role in 60s blues revival, died at home in California. Nearly half of all Californians blame the state's gas tax for why California's gasoline prices are so high, with only around a third saying that price gouging is to blame.  The Ray Appleton Show   Weekdays 11-2PM Pacific on News/Talk 580 & 105.9 KMJ  Follow on facebook/  Listen to past episodes at kmjnow.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Show #1047 Ramblin' (Man) On My Mind Spinner plays mostly new music and pays tribute to Dicket Betts who passed away on April 18. 01. The Allman Brothers Band - Jessica (7:03) (Brothers And Sisters, Capricorn Records, 1973) 02. John Mayall with Eric Clapton - Ramblin' On My Mind (3:09) (Bluesbreakers, Decca Records, 1966) 03. Big Harp George - Awkward Me (3:43) (Cooking With Gas, Blues Mountain Records, 2024) 04. Misty Blues - Shake These Blues (4:28) (Silver Lining, Guitar One Records, 2024) 05. Guy Verlinde - My Little Girl (3:48) (Single, R&S Music, 2024) 06. Bad Boy Leroy - Cast A Spell (2:50) (Single, Barbed Wire Music, 2024) 07. Alastair Greene - Am I To Blame? (3:42) (Standing Out Loud, Ruf Records, 2024) 08. Vintage Dutch - Mister People (3:48) (Single, self-release, 2024) 09. Jeff Slate - Movin' On (3:03) (The Last Day Of Summer, Schnitzel Records, 2024) 10. Gary Cain - I Don't Care What You Say (3:20) (Outside The Lines, self-release, 2024) 11. Deb Ryder - Guilty As Sin (5:21) (Live And Havin' Fun, VizzTone Records, 2024) 12. The Reverend Shawn Amos - Cicles (3:22) (Soul Brother No. 1, Immediate Family Records, 2024) 13. Altered Five Blues Band - Whiskey Got Me Married (3:53) (Testifyin', Blind Pig Records, 2024) 14. The Commoners - See You Again (4:43) (Single, Gypsy Soul Records, 2024) 15. Krissy Matthews - Mr. Brown's Blues (6:20) (Krissy Matthews & Friends, Ruf Records, 2024) 16. Lady Adrena - Beautiful Disaster (4:02) (Single, Sweet Success Records, 2024) 17. Left Lane Cruiser - Big Momma Shake (3:08) (Bayport BBQ Blues, Alive Naturalsound Records, 2024) 18. Paul Steward - You Can Dance to My Blues (3:38) (Single, 2XG Records, 2024) 19. Beau Gris Gris & the Apocalypse - Middle Of The Night (3:20) (Hot Nostalgia Radio, Grow Vision Music & Records, 2024) 20. Bywater Call - Roll (4:33) (Shepherd, Gypsy Soul Records, 2024) 21. John Akapo - Ramblin' On My Mind (3:24) (Paradise Blues, Mensch House Records, 2018) 22. The Allman Brothers Band - Pegasus (7:32) (Enlightened Rogues, Capricorn Records, 1979) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

On this first edition of Viral Music History, we begin with the early beginnings of Fleetwood Mac! This episode covers how Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood met each other through John Mayall's Bluesbreakers group, where their blues roots are inspired from, the impact of the single Black Magic Woman, their first two album releases and more!

Hoy en La Gran Travesía, con motivo del cumpleaños de Eric Clapton (30 de marzo 1945) recuperamos su primera época en la década de los años 60, desde 1964 hasta 1971 (Yardbirds, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos...). Por otro lado aquí os dejamos el enlace a la venta de entradas de la 2ª Edición de la Podcast Party, organizada por La Gran Travesía en el Auditorio del Batel y Palacio de Congresos de Cartagena, el próximo 28 de septiembre. Será con motivo del Día Internacional del Podcast y del 20º aniversario de su nacimiento. Aquí tenéis el enlace para las entradas https://auditorioelbatel.es/evento/podcast-party-2a-edicion-el-batel-cartagena/?sd=1727524800&;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;ed=1727557200 ▶️ Y ya sabéis, si os gusta el programa y os apetece, podéis apoyarnos y colaborar con nosotros por el simple precio de una cerveza al mes, desde el botón azul de iVoox, y así, además acceder a todo el archivo histórico exclusivo. Muchas gracias también a todos los mecenas y patrocinadores por vuestro apoyo: Daropa, Pilar Escudero Blanco, Iñaki Zúñiga, Leticia, Jarebua, Piri, Noni, Norberto Esteban, Arturo Soriano, Gemma Codina, Santi Oliva, Raquel Jiménez, Juan Carlos Ramírez, Leticia, Nicolás SDLRF, Eva Granado, Peiper, Javifer, Francisco Quintana, Pdr_Rmn, Sgd, José Luis Orive, Utxi73, Patri Lb, Raul Andrés, Jbasabe, Iñako GB, Tomás Pérez Martínez, Eugeni, Pablo Pineda, Quim Goday, Enfermerator, María Arán, Joaquín, Edgar Xavier Sandoval, Hörns Üp, Víctor Bravo, Juan Carlos González, Francisco González, Vicente DC, Ángel Hernández, Marcos París, Dani, Vlado74, Daniel A, Redneckman, Elliott SF, Guillermo Gutiérrez, Sementalex, Jesús Miguel, Miguel Ángel Torres, Suibne, Mati, Dora, José Diego … y a los mecenas anónimos.

Texas Scratch is a fiery Texas Blues and Blues Rock band formed by Jim Suhler, longtime member of George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and Bud Whittington, who played with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers for 15 years. Together they have captured Texas blues with their new album Texas Scratch.My featured song is “Annie And Leni” from my album Bobby M and the Paisley Parade. Spotify link. ---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's first album, was recorded in 1994 but was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------‘THE SINGLES PROJECT” is Robert's new EP, featuring five of his new songs. The songs speak to the ups and downs of life. From the blissful, joyous “Saturday Morning” to the darker commentary of “Like Never Before” and “The Ship”. “This is Robert at his most vulnerable” (Pop Icon Magazine)Reviews: “Amazing!” (Top Buzz Magazine)“Magical…A Sonic Tour De Force!” (IndiePulse Music)“Fabulously Enticing!” (Pop Icon Magazine)“A Home Run!” (Hollywood Digest)Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Texas Scratch:https://blues.quartovalleyrecords.com/texas-scratch/ Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comPGS Store - www.thePGSstore.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

On this episode of Stories with Brisco and Bradshaw, our hall of famers Gerald Brisco and John Bradshaw Layfield welcome rock legends Jim Suhler (George Thorogood and the Destroyers)and Bud Whittington (John Mayall's Bluesbreakers) to talk about their latest album, Texas Scratch. The guys will also share stories of their incredible careers travel up and down the road all around the world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of Stories with Brisco and Bradshaw, our hall of famers Gerald Brisco and John Bradshaw Layfield welcome rock legends Jim Suhler (George Thorogood and the Destroyers)and Bud Whittington (John Mayall's Bluesbreakers) to talk about their latest album, Texas Scratch. The guys will also share stories of their incredible careers travel up and down the road all around the world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This 2-hour episode contains great music from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, JJ Grey & Mofro, Tinsley Ellis, Chris Beard and many others.   Enjoy! Biggdaddy Ray Hansen

The early 1970s were full of triumph and tragedy for Eric Clapton. The Guitar God who had bounced from band to band - The Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith - finally went solo with mixed results. However, in 1971 Clapton struck gold on both sides of the Atlantic with Layla and his buddies in Derek & the Dominos. However, friend and guitarist Duane Allman died tragically in a car accident in late 1971 and while Clapton mourned his friend and longed for the love of his good buddy George Harrison's wife Patti, Clapton slipped deep into a heroin addiction. Once Eric came out of his fog, he knew he needed to get back to making music and needed a hit or else he might be written off as an over the hill (at 29) junkie. So he gathered some of his buddies from the Layla sessions, took up residence at a certain address in Miami and put together a million selling record with a #1 US hit with I Shot The Sheriff. You see the many faces of Clapton on here from the blues (I Can't Hold Out), to reggae (I Shot The Sheriff), to gospel (Give Me Strength). Opener Motherless Children is a tour de force with the slide guitar and the closer, Mainline Florida, features Clapton showing off his skills with the talk box. If this album hadn't sold so well, who knows what may have become of Eric and if we'd have been treated to all the amazing music he's given us over the last 50 years. Ugly American Werewolf in London Website Ugly American Werewolf in London Store - Get your Wolf merch and use code 10OFF2023 to save 10% during the holidays! Visit our sponsor RareVinyl.com and use the code UGLY to save 10%! Twitter Threads Instagram YouTube LInkTree www.pantheonpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The early 1970s were full of triumph and tragedy for Eric Clapton. The Guitar God who had bounced from band to band - The Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith - finally went solo with mixed results. However, in 1971 Clapton struck gold on both sides of the Atlantic with Layla and his buddies in Derek & the Dominos. However, friend and guitarist Duane Allman died tragically in a car accident in late 1971 and while Clapton mourned his friend and longed for the love of his good buddy George Harrison's wife Patti, Clapton slipped deep into a heroin addiction. Once Eric came out of his fog, he knew he needed to get back to making music and needed a hit or else he might be written off as an over the hill (at 29) junkie. So he gathered some of his buddies from the Layla sessions, took up residence at a certain address in Miami and put together a million selling record with a #1 US hit with I Shot The Sheriff. You see the many faces of Clapton on here from the blues (I Can't Hold Out), to reggae (I Shot The Sheriff), to gospel (Give Me Strength). Opener Motherless Children is a tour de force with the slide guitar and the closer, Mainline Florida, features Clapton showing off his skills with the talk box. If this album hadn't sold so well, who knows what may have become of Eric and if we'd have been treated to all the amazing music he's given us over the last 50 years. Ugly American Werewolf in London Website Ugly American Werewolf in London Store - Get your Wolf merch and use code 10OFF2023 to save 10% during the holidays! Visit our sponsor RareVinyl.com and use the code UGLY to save 10%! Twitter Threads Instagram YouTube LInkTree www.pantheonpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deuxième Partie: The Cream. PLAYLIST  The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"  The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"  The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"  Winston G, "Please Don't Say"   Graham Bond organisation, "Baby Can it Be True ?"  The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"  John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"  Jimmy Page et Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"  John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"  Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"  Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"  Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"  Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"  John Mayall et Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"  John Mayall avec Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"  John Mayall avec Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"  The Who, "Substitute"  The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"  The Hollies avec Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"  The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"  Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"  Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"  Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"  The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"  John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"  Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"  Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"  Cream, "NSU"  Cream, "Wrapping Paper"  The Merseys, "Sorrow"  The Who, "I'm a Boy"  Jimi Hendrix, "Killing Floor"  The Cream, "I Feel Free"  Billy J Kramer - 'Town of Tuxley Toymaker ".  The Bee Gees, "New York Mining Disaster 1941"  The Youngbloods, "Get Together"  Cream, "Strange Brew"  Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love"  Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love"  Crazy Blue, "Stone Crazy"  Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I Am to You"  The Mothers of Invention, "Are You Hung Up ?"  Cream, "Crossroads"  Cream, "Crossroads"  Bob Dylan and the Band, "The Mighty Quinn"  Bob Dylan and the Band, "This Wheel's on Fire"  The Band, "The Weight"  Cream, "Anyone For Tennis"  Cream, "White Room"  Cream, "Badge"  Cream, "Sittin' on Top of the World (live Albert Hall)"

Nous allons ouvrir un gros dossier :  "Crossroad blues ». Cet épisode va nous permettre de parler du morceau mythique et fondateur « Crossroad» ou crossroad blues et l'histoire des début discographique du blues, De Cream le premier supergroupe de l'histoire du rock, et pour finir  du mythe de Robert Johnson et du ramassis de conneries qui l'accompagnent. Cet épisode sera donc en 3 parties…. PLAYLIST The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites ?" "One O' Them Things" The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues" Ciro's Club Coon Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues" Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues", Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues" Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues" Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer" Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues" Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues" Blind Blake, "Southern Rag" Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues" Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love" Son House, Mississippi County Farm Blues" Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues" Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" Charlie Patton, "Poor Me" The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World" Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues" The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" Robert Johnson, "Crossroads" Willie Brown, "M&O Blues" Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin' Charlie Patton, "34 Blues" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right" Alexis Korner et Davey Graham, "3/4 AD" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)" Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)" " At the Jazz Band Ball" The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission" Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There" The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)" The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty" Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm" Bande Annonce : Gonks Go Beat !

Iconic blues guitarist Jim Suhler makes his debut on the show as he talks about playing with George Thorogood and the Destroyers for the past 20-plus years as well as his band Texas Scratch and their debut album which is available now. Quarto Valley recording artist Texas Scratch is a blues band consisting of Texas guitar slingers' Jim Suhler (George Thorogood and the Destroyers) and Buddy Whittington (John Mayall's Bluesbreakers) and the driving drum beat of Jeff Simon (George Thorogood and the Destroyers) with the help of their friends - Texas guitarist Vince Converse, drummer Roger Earl (Foghat/Savoy Brown) and bassists' Nathaniel Peterson and Kirk Yano.  

Walter Trout is an American blues guitarist, singer and songwriter and probably the best performer I have ever seen play live. Walter's backstory is a page-turner you won't want to put down. Five decades in the making; it is equal parts thriller, romance, suspense and horror. There are musical fireworks, critical acclaim and fists-aloft triumph, offset by years in the wilderness and massive narcotic binges. He has been a gunslinger in bands from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers to Canned Heat, and is now enjoying a solo career that's taking him to new heights. New Jersey born, Walter emerged as a luminary in the blues music landscape early on when his fascination with the guitar was sparked at a tender age. He showcased remarkable talent, performing in local bands before moving to Los Angeles in pursuit of a thriving music career. Walter's breakthrough came when he joined the iconic blues-rock band Canned Heat in the '80s, propelling him into the limelight. Subsequently, his solo career skyrocketed, marked by the release of his debut album "Life in the Jungle" in 1990. Known for his fiery guitar solos and soul-stirring performances, Trout's discography boasts numerous chart-topping albums, including "Blues for the Modern Daze" and "Battle Scars," showcasing his prowess and deep connection with blues music. Beyond musical success, Walter faced life-threatening health issues, culminating in a liver transplant. His triumphant return to music inspired fans worldwide, symbolising his resilience and unwavering spirit. Throughout his journey, Walter Trout's influence on blues music remains profound. His electrifying live shows and dedication to preserving the essence of blues have solidified his legacy as a guitar virtuoso and a living legend. His enduring impact continues to inspire musicians and captivate audiences globally, and his story has to been heard to be believed. Walter Trout joins us this week on A Breath of Fresh Air to share that story and some of his incredible music. To learn more about Walter, head for his website https://www.waltertrout.com/ With comments, feedback or suggestions for future guests, send me a message through my website https://www.abreathoffreshair.com.au I hope you enjoy Walter Trout's life story.

Drummer SIMON KIRKE kept the beat for two of the '70s most popular bluesy hard rockers: Free and Bad Company. Born in London, Simon developed an interest in music at a young age and joined a local band called the Maniacs to play drums and sing. He negotiated a deal with his parents after graduating high school, that if he couldn't make it as a drummer in a band within a two-year period, he would then start a college career. Just a few months before the self-imposed deadline, Kirke landed a gig with a group called the Black Cat Bones. He befriended the group's guitarist, Paul Kossoff, who convinced him to start a new band with singer Paul Rodgers and ex-John Mayall's Bluesbreakers bassist Andy Fraser. This band became Free in 1968. The group would prove to be successful particularly on the strength of their classic 1970 release Fire and Water, and its anthemic hit single "All Right Now." However drugs and infighting began to dessimate the members' relationship and they broke up in 1973. Paul Kossoff passed away just three years later. From the ashes of Free rose Bad Company. Simon and Paul Rodgers were joined by ex-King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell and ex-Mott the Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs. The band became one of the first groups signed to Led Zeppelin's record label, Swan Song and their debut album, 1974's Bad Company, went on to become one of hard rock's all-time classics. Bad Company enjoyed several years of huge success before splitting up in 1982 (the group did reunite later in the decade without Rodgers, and again in the '90s when Rodgers rejoined). Simon Kirke has always been super busy. As well as his work with Bad Company, he guested on a long list of recordings by other artists including albums by Wilson Pickett, Jim Capaldi, Ringo Starr and Ron Wood, among countless others.He was often drumming live on tour with acts like Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Ringo Starr & His All-Star Band. In 2003, Simon went out on his very first solo tour and released his debut solo album. Since then there have been more solo albums, the latest of which is 2017's All Because of You. Simon shares his incredible stories of success as well as his multiple personal and professional challenges with us this week. For more information on Simon Kirke head to his website https://www.officialsimonkirke.com/ To get in touch with me with feedback, comments or suggestions for future guests - please contact me through the website https://www.abreathofrreshair.com.au

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

Ya en el episodio 20 de este año 2023, que comenzamos con nuestra portada, el recuerdo al 50 aniversario -time flies!!- del portentoso Live at Pompeii de Pink Floyd. Seguiremos con la estupenda música de los inclasficables Boss Keloid, de los que escucharemos Family the Smiling Thrush, publicado en 2021. Después disfrutaremos con el rock progresivo de los italianos Ad Maiora, a los que escucharemos de nuevo en La Ruleta Rusa con Repetita Iuvant, de 2016. Continue reading La Ruleta Rusa 20.2023. Pink Floyd. Boss Keloid. Ad Maiora. John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers. Nephila. at La Ruleta Rusa Radio Rock.

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

Número 13 de este año 2023 de La Ruleta Rusa que abrimos con el estupendo progresivo de los norteamericanos Bubblemath, de los que escuchamos su nuevo álbum, Turf Ascension, publicado en 2022. Después lo último hasta la fecha de The Sheepdogs, este EP que nos quedaba aún por disfrutar aquí, publicado en 2021, No Simple Thing, lleno de buenísimo Blues, Country Rock y Southern Rock. También un poco de alternativo con otras muchas hierbas musicales de la mano de los sorprendentes Wand, de los que escuchamos su trabajo del 2019, Laughing Matter, mientras abrimos apetito para su nuevo álbum que escucharemos en nada en La Ruleta Rusa Y nuestra pincelada de rock clásico, esta vez de Blues Clásico, con John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, en este directo de 1972, Jumpin’ (Live Gothenburg ’72). Continue reading La Ruleta Rusa 13.2023. Bubblemath. The Sheepdogs. Wand. John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers at La Ruleta Rusa Radio Rock.

It was a pleasure to interview the last remaining members of the band, Savoy Brown, bassist Patrick DaSalvo and drummer Garnet Grimm.Visit Savoybrown.com to order their latest album and more  The History of Savoy Brown Defining the British Blues Boom music scene in London in the mid ‘60'sThe British R ‘n‘ B boom of the early 1960's led directly to the British Blues Explosion in 1968.The London  R n B boom led by, for example, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, The Pretty Things and to some extent the Beatles quickly moved into mainstream pop and left a vacuum in the London clubs.This vacuum, in London, was filled in the mid 60's by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers featuring Eric Clapton and Savoy Brown's Blues Band featuring Kim Simmonds.Both these bands became headliners at major London clubs such as The Marquee establishing a “blues night” amongst the mainstream soul and popular music in the charts at that time. As headlining pioneers of the new blues movement Savoy Brown gave a platform to emerging bands in other areas of the U.K.  Ten Years After and Jethro Tull both were opening acts to Savoy Brown on blues night at the Marquee.Chicken Shack from Birmingham also came to London and along with the early Fleetwood Mac established themselves on the scene.John Mayall, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and Ten Years After became the “big six” blues bands at that time.In fact a 45 single was released by The Liverpool Scene called “I've Got These Fleetwood Mac Chicken Shack John Mayall Can't Fail Blues”  and the second chorus has Savoy Brown and Jethro Tull to round off the full song story.Hits soon followed for these bands (Savoy Brown cracking the USA in 1969) and the blues movement quickly gave way to the heavy rock of Black Sabbath, themselves a blues band when they started.The British Blues Boom was a phenomena never to be repeated again and remains one of the foremost U.K. music movements of all time.. So grateful for all the listeners! Check the links below from charities, subscriptions, merch, reading list, and more. Love the show?You can now support the show with a subscription! Click here for all the details.**Want to write a review? Click here for details.** Donate Dachshund Rescue of Houston hereBlog https://tstakaishi.wixsite.com/musicInsta @creative_peacemeal_podcastFB @creativepeacemealpodBonfire Merch https://www.bonfire.com/store/creative-peacemeal/Redbubble Merch CPPodcast.redbubble.comCreative Peacemeal READING list hereInterested in Corrie Legge's content planner? Click here to order!

There are so many stories inside The Story Of Fleetwood Mac! The Imbalanced Brothers tell the tale of how they broke out of The Bluesbreakers to find their own way, taking a long, winding path to become the band that dominated in every way! Learn about Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Bob Welch and the whole cast of characters! Dig into the turn in the road that brings in Lindsey and Stevie, and everything that comes after that! It's our first look into a band whose story is more than could fit into one episode. For now, enjoy The Mac, And The Fury! This is a really fun episode for Markus and Ray, and they hope you have fun, too! We love our sponsors!!! Please visit their web sites, and support them because they make this crazy show go: Boldfoot Socks  https://boldfoot.com Crooked Eye Brewery  https://crookedeyebrewery.com/ Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are so many stories inside The Story Of Fleetwood Mac! The Imbalanced Brothers tell the tale of how they broke out of The Bluesbreakers to find their own way, taking a long, winding path to become the band that dominated in every way! Learn about Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Bob Welch and the whole cast of characters! Dig into the turn in the road that brings in Lindsey and Stevie, and everything that comes after that! It's our first look into a band whose story is more than could fit into one episode. For now, enjoy The Mac, And The Fury! This is a really fun episode for Markus and Ray, and they hope you have fun, too! We love our sponsors!!! Please visit their web sites, and support them because they make this crazy show go: Boldfoot Socks  https://boldfoot.com Crooked Eye Brewery  https://crookedeyebrewery.com/ Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saber perder es complicado, pero es mucho más difícil saber ganar. Y los hay que no saben hacer ni una cosa ni otra. La mala educación aflora en los momentos de euforia, pero existía, ya estaba ahí, esperando el momento para manifestarse en todo su deleznable esplendor. Y a algunos les hace mucha gracia, cuando no lo jalean o alientan, pero siempre dependiendo de quién se trate, que no todos son iguales ni reciben el mismo trato. Ser faltón y grosero está bien, bailar es provocar. Min. 01 Seg. 46 - Intro Min. 09 Seg. 40 - Imposible apoyarles Min. 14 Seg. 31 - En la misma línea de siempre Min. 18 Seg. 16 - Los lamedores de ortos Min. 24 Seg. 21 - Y en Barcelona era peor Min. 29 Seg. 16 - Le va la marcha Min. 32 Seg. 38 - Un arbitraje orgásmico Min. 37 Seg. 58 - Goles, no importa cómo Min. 44 Seg. 20 - Un entrenador inexperto Min. 48 Seg. 41 - La túnica ceremonial Min. 52 Seg. 35 - Qatar, ese paraíso Min. 60 Seg. 02 - Despedida Bad Company (New York 13-12-1992) Shooting Star Good Lovin' Gone Bad Here Comes Trouble If You Needed Somebody Take This Town Rock And Roll Fantasy How About That Feel Like Making Love Holy Water Movin' On Bad Company John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers with Gary Moore - So Many Roads (Montreux 07/07/2008)

Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "The First Cut is the Deepest" by P.P. Arnold. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one and part two. I've used quite a few books in this episode. The Small Faces & Other Stories by Uli Twelker and Roland Schmit is definitely a fan-work with all that that implies, but has some useful quotes. Two books claim to be the authorised biography of Steve Marriott, and I've referred to both -- All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier, and All Or Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence also wrote an excellent book on Immediate Records, which I referred to. Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan both wrote very readable autobiographies. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, co-written by Spence, though be warned that it casually uses slurs. P.P. Arnold's autobiography is a sometimes distressing read covering her whole life, including her time at Immediate. There are many, many, collections of the Small Faces' work, ranging from cheap budget CDs full of outtakes to hundred-pound-plus box sets, also full of outtakes. This three-CD budget collection contains all the essential tracks, and is endorsed by Kenney Jones, the band's one surviving member. And if you're intrigued by the section on Immediate Records, this two-CD set contains a good selection of their releases. ERRATUM-ISH: I say Jimmy Winston was “a couple” of years older than the rest of the band. This does not mean exactly two, but is used in the vague vernacular sense equivalent to “a few”. Different sources I've seen put Winston as either two or four years older than his bandmates, though two seems to be the most commonly cited figure. Transcript For once there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organised crime, arson, and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste which may upset some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter who lived in a communal house-share which at various times was also inhabited by people like Shirley Eaton, the woman who is painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Davey Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the fifties and early sixties. Bart and Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock with the Caveman"] and then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like "Living Doll" for Britain's *biggest* rock and roll star, Cliff Richard: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Living Doll"] But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars, and not even his talent-spotting -- it was Bart who got Steele signed by Larry Parnes, and he also pointed Parnes in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde -- but the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver!, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist, was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver! was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it -- he sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-sixties for a tiny sum in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time Oliver! had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music -- all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver! were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently -- child labour laws meant that multiple kids had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood hit. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production -- Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who we'll be seeing again in a few episodes' time -- and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Artful Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960, though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Consider Yourself"] Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature, and jaundiced, and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital, the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood -- he never grew to be taller than five foot five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair uncombed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was ten, and graduated to guitar when he was twelve, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott, and would wear a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was twelve, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver! The show had been running for three months at the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast -- every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang "Who's Sorry Now?", the recent Connie Francis hit: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Who's Sorry Now?"] And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy!" [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Oh Boy!"] His musical ability and attitude impressed the show's producers, and he was given a job which suited him perfectly -- rather than being cast in a single role, he would be swapped around, playing different small parts, in the chorus, and occasionally taking the larger role of the Artful Dodger. Steve Marriott was never able to do the same thing over and over, and got bored very quickly, but because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodger's role on the cast album when that was recorded: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and Joyce Blair, "I'd Do Anything"] And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor -- though there were other reasons for that, too. He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver! cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class, for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn-up bits of paper under the floorboards. After a couple of months of this he then dropped a lit match in, which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His schoolfriend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later, saying "I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down." Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was, but it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School; the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended. Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees -- they said they'd get him work, and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees. And over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist -- he was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr. Pastry's Progress, an episode of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the agony aunt Marje Proops on her radio show. Almost all of this early acting work wa s utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above!, a mistaken-identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a Black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes, in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and antiracist sixty years ago invariably do, but has a sparkling cast, with Sellers, Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roy Kinnear, Irene Handl, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period: [Excerpt: Heavens Above!] Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely, as he was a fan of the Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably *slightly* inaccurate -- Sellers played the banjolele, a banjo-style instrument which is played like a ukulele. As Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjoes. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up!, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who *would* find fame as drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller, non-drumming, roles. He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws, and Gene Vincent, but he does mime playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation: [Excerpt: Heinz Burt, "Don't You Understand"] That film was successful enough that two years later, in 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel, Be My Guest, with The Niteshades, the Nashville Teens, and Jerry Lee Lewis, this time with music produced by Shel Talmy rather than Meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up!, Marriott had largely retired from acting, because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Laurence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He *had* got the job, but he'd decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretended he hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver! had got him a contract with Decca Records, and he'd recorded a Buddy Holly knock-off, "Give Her My Regards", written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Give Her My Regards"] That record wasn't a hit, but Marriott wasn't put off. He formed a band who were at first called the Moonlights, and then the Frantiks, and they got a management deal with Tony Calder, Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company. Calder got former Shadow Tony Meehan to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richard's hit "Move It", which was shopped round the record labels with no success (and which sadly appears no longer to survive). The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous "Teachest Tapes" which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the Moments, and added in the guitarist John Weider, who was one of those people who seem to have been in every band ever either just before or just after they became famous -- at various times he was in Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Family, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the band that became Crabby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and the Moments, "Good Morning Blues"] One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't lead to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his "Andrew Oldham Orchestra" sessions, to play on a track titled "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)"] Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decca, a cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me", which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the Moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howes booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J Kramer, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, and other major acts, and the band members were earning about thirty pounds a week each -- a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Tuck. But as they weren't making records, the band's lineup started changing, with members coming and going. They did manage to get one record released -- a soundalike version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band were starting to get billed as Steve Marriott and the Moments rather than just The Moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones -- not the one who had also appeared in Oliver!, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Mannish Boys, and both men were well known on the Mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they call themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called the Outcasts who played the same circuit as the Moments: [Excerpt: The Outcasts, "Before You Accuse Me"] Lane worked in a sound equipment shop and Marriott in a musical instrument shop, and both were customers of the other as well as friends -- at least until Marriott came into the shop where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke, and got sacked. Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an Outcasts gig in a pub, and was asked to sit in. He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer Kenney Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane, and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages -- he was a known Face on the mod scene, with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group and their equipment for ten percent of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat -- he moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter -- he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest. And this way the group had the same lineup as one of Marriott's current favourites, Booker T and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan, he was now, like the rest of the Mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band, the Lower Third, which counted Stuart Tuck, the writer of the Moments fanzine, among its members. But he was unsuccessful in the audition -- instead his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] A few months after that, Davy Jones and the Lower Third changed their name to David Bowie and the Lower Third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now... Marriott, Lane, Jones, and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows, if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane -- the two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon/McCartney style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But "You Need Loving" was... heavily inspired... by "You Need Love", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott/Lane song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] They did make some changes though, notably to the end of the song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said "You've all got such small faces!" The name stuck, because it had a double meaning -- as we've seen in the episode on "My Generation", "Face" was Mod slang for someone who was cool and respected on the Mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short -- the tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way -- on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as "Small Faces", with no "The" in front, but all the band members referred to the group in interviews as "The Small Faces", and they've been credited that way on some reissues and foreign-market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com but all the posts on the website refer to them as "Small Faces" with no "the". The use  of the word "the" or not at the start of a group's name at this time was something of a shibboleth -- for example both The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records -- and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as "The Small Faces" rather than "Small Faces" because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the North of England, where they got a mixed reception -- they went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working-man's club, and reports differ about their performance at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing, some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse, and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London that they really started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenney Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise, drummer, but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, "Every number swung like Hanratty" (James Hanratty was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging). Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary -- whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing, the Starlight Rooms, to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned the club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before -- he would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that -- but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word on to her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who we'll be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent, and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens, who had had hits with tracks like "Tobacco Road": [Excerpt: The Nashville Teens, "Tobacco Road"] Arden was also something of a gangster -- as many people in the music industry were at the time, but he was worse than most of his contemporaries, and delighted in his nickname "the Al Capone of pop". The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings -- though they never actually received that percentage -- twenty pounds a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby St boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later "Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed." Arden got the group signed to Decca, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham had pioneered with the Stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Rowe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as "the man who turned down the Beatles", and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake again. By this point Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together -- though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply "Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there I wouldn't do half of it. He keeps me going." -- but for their first single Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Berns (and has Bern's fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears): [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song -- the people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write "Rhinestone Cowboy", and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richard's Drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including "Move It", and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] That version, though was deemed too raucous, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] At first the single didn't do much on the charts, but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the charts for the NME. Eventually it made number fourteen, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras focussed on him rather than on Marriott. Which wouldn't have been too bad had Winston been a great musician, but he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star, rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, "I've Got Mine". To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and crime caper not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these, but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, and got them signed to Decca too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, "Sorry She's Mine", to no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, "Sorry She's Mine"] Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fumbs, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from showbusiness to run a business renting out sound equipment, and died in 2020. The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard him play. Ian McLagan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadows soundalike band called the Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the Muleskinners, and then after hearing "Green Onions", McLagan had switched to playing Hammond organ. The Muleskinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of "Back Door Man", a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf: [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "Back Door Man"] The Muleskinners had split up as most of the group had day jobs, and McLagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit, and who also toured backing Kenny Lynch while McLagan was in the band. Boz and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film "Carry on Screaming", released just as by "Boz": [Excerpt: Boz, "Carry on Screaming"] By that time, McLagan had left the group -- Boz Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company. McLagan left the Boz People in something of a strop, and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the Small Faces, because he looked like them, and McLagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously -- he'd love to be in the Small Faces, but they *had* a keyboard player. The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLagan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining -- in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted. But he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had praised his playing with the Boz People, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his height -- he said later "Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at 5 ft 6 ins, and Kenney Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at 5 ft 5 1/2 ins" -- and he was a great player, and shared a sense of humour with them. McLagan had told Arden he'd been earning twenty pounds a week with the Boz People -- he'd actually been on five -- and so Arden agreed to give him thirty pounds a week during his probationary month, which was more than the twenty the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McLagan insisted on getting a pay cut so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon Marriott, Lane, and McLagan were all living in a house rented for them by Arden -- Jones decided to stay living with his parents -- and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with "I've Got Mine" had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden brought in Mort Shuman, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pomus and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Sweets For My Sweet", and "Viva Las Vegas" together, and Kenny Lynch, and the two of them wrote "Sha-La-La-La-Lee", and Lynch added backing vocals to the record: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Sha-La-La-La-Lee"] None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly the group had a huge fanbase of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teenybopper fanbase and trying to escape from it to fit their own self-image. They followed "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" with "Hey Girl", a Marriott/Lane song, but one written to order -- they were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A-side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" had been, and they managed to come up with a second top-ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album, which had their first two hits on it -- "Hey Girl" wasn't included, and nor was the flop "I've Got Mine" -- plus a bunch of semi-originals like "You Need Loving", a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cooke's "Shake". The album went to number three on the album charts, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots, and it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood enquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house, with Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, and brought them some slices of orange -- which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, "All or Nothing". "All or Nothing" was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time, and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance, a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart. Rylance and Stewart later reconciled, but would break up again and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "All or Nothing"] "All or Nothing" became the group's first and only number one record -- and according to the version of the charts used on Top of the Pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A-side of "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby", both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why their kids -- none of whom were yet twenty-one, the legal age of majority at the time -- were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid twenty pounds a week when their group was getting a thousand pounds a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin -- which was very far from the truth, the band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working -- and the next thing they knew, Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape, "My Mind's Eye", which had only been intended as a demo, as a single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "My Mind's Eye"] That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flakey, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures, and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them on to an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, but according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966 Arden demanded the highest advance in British history -- twenty-five thousand pounds -- directly from Oldham. In cash. In a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, Immediate Records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said "On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion, and their tastes. And many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies why didn't I do something about it.  I have! On the twentieth of this month the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched." That first batch of three records contained one big hit, "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, which Immediate licensed from Bert Berns' new record label BANG in the US: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as "Little Jimmy" to distinguish him from "Big" Jim Sullivan, the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who was now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", which Page produced and played guitar on, for a group called The Fifth Avenue: [Excerpt: The Fifth Avenue, "The Bells of Rhymney"] And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones', Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied -- at different times the production has been credited to Jones, Page, and Oldham -- but it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'"] While "Hang on Sloopy" was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and The Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's Factory, and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill Building, of Phil Spector, and of big US independents like Motown and Stax. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they'd produce the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing -- and they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties, and that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK. Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gomelsky and Shel Talmy both produced tracks for the label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage-name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent -- and Immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success -- the only ones to do well on the charts in the first few months of the label's existence were "Hang on Sloopy" and an EP by Chris Farlowe. It was Farlowe who provided Immediate Records with its first home-grown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other Immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlowe and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said "Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlowe couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it, where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time, stitching it all together. He must have done it in pieces." But however hard it was to make, "Out of Time" was a success: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Out of Time"] Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top forty in the US for a week, but then it hit a snag -- it had charted without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Oldham's new business manager Allen Klein had been asked to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he'd bribed to hype the record into the charts had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record *did* come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam. But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so Immediate Records was back on track, and Oldham wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hit-makers. Immediate signed the Small Faces, and even started paying them royalties -- though that wouldn't last long, as Immediate went bankrupt in 1970 and its successors in interest stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlowe single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song "My Way of Giving", and played on the session along with Farlowe's backing band the Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the work: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "My Way of Giving"] Sadly, that didn't make the top forty. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at Immediate. But because of contractual entanglements, "I Can't Make It" was recorded at Immediate but released by Decca. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number twenty-six on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves The Little People in homage to the Small Faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to Immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?": [Excerpt: The Apostolic Intervention, "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?"] When they signed to Immediate, The Little People had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves The Nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name The Apostolic Intervention. And then a few weeks later he signed another group and changed *their* name to The Nice. "The Nice" was also a phrase used in the Small Faces' first single for Immediate proper. "Here Come the Nice" was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, "The Nazz", which also gave a name to Todd Rundgren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "The Nazz"] "Here Come the Nice" was very blatantly about a drug dealer, and somehow managed to reach number twelve despite that: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Here Come the Nice"] It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decca released a single, "Patterns", from material they had in the vault. And in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out. One of them was a collection from Decca of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From The Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces -- just like their first Decca album had been. To make matters worse, From The Beginning contained the group's demos of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", while the group's first Immediate album contained a new recording of  "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", and a version of "My Way of Giving" with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decca collection. From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Decca and, after the group split, from Immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with Small Faces reaching number twelve and From The Beginning reaching number sixteen, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the Immediate album, especially, being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott/Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenney Jones later said "During the Decca period most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until Immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first Immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting." It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair, but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead -- we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption -- then Jones' fifty-fifty estimate seems about right. Of the fourteen songs on the album, McLagan sings one, which is also his own composition, "Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire". There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott/Lane single was mostly a Lane song. "Itchycoo Park" started with a verse lyric from Lane -- "Over bridge of sighs/To rest my eyes in shades of green/Under dreaming spires/To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been". The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before -- the melody of "My Mind's Eye" had been borrowed in part from the Christmas carol "Gloria in Excelsis Deo", and here they took inspiration from the old hymn "God Be in My Head": [Excerpt: The Choir of King's College Cambridge, "God Be in My Head"] As Marriott told the story: "We were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song. Ronnie had the first verse already written down but he had no melody line, so what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of 'God Be In My Head' with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin airport and I thought of the middle eight... We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself." [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song, but Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Marriott's contribution, and later said "It wasn't me that came up with 'I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun/They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun'. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was." But that part became the most memorable part of the record, not so much because of the writing or performance but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chkiantz (and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong), who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double tracking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of synch with each other. The phasing on "Itchycoo Park" , though, was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on, say, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] It was effective enough that Jimi Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis: Bold as Love, requested that Chkiantz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect, which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record, because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice who "is always there when I need some speed" was a drug dealer was a little suspicious about whether "we'll get high" and "we'll touch the sky" might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought, and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? [Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”] No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree. The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on Top of the Pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer, and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they had done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a "two-faced", and then a four-letter word beginning with c which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed, the producer wasn't leaving the show, and the group were barred from it for a while. "Itchycoo Park" also made the top twenty in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal Immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America, but those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McLagan was arrested for possession of hashish, and instead the group toured France, with support from a group called the Herd: [Excerpt: The Herd, "From the Underworld"] Marriott became very friendly with the Herd's guitarist, Peter Frampton, and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted "face of '68" and developed a similar teenage following to the one the Small Faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. "Tin Soldier" was inspired by the Hans Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time. But Arnold was *so* impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"] It's hard to show the appeal of "Tin Soldier" in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics, and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track, and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart, and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As "Itchycoo Park" had made number one in Australia, the group were sent over there on tour to promote it, as support act for the Who. But the group hadn't been playing live much recently, and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile, and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence, obviously that would fix their problems. But the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in. Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest of friends and collaborators, but on the tour, both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together. Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townshend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Meher Baba, who Townshend followed. Lane, too, became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while their bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts though. Marriott, Lane, and McLagan all moved in together again like old times, but this time in a cottage -- something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase "getting our heads together in the country" became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how, before moving in to the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music -- he'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Cilla Black, who lived in the same building and who he'd assumed would understand the pop star lifestyle, had complained more than anyone. It had started as as fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies, who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the East End of London? Well, no, Marriott decided, there wasn't, and so he decided to sing it in a Cockney accent. And so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing round a piano in a pub: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"] Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the band's disgust, and it went to number two on the charts, and along with "Itchycoo Park" meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces' long tradition of twisted religious references, like their songs based on hymns and their song "Here Come the Nice", which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer, the print ads for the album read: Small Faces Which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name Thy music come Thy songs be sung On this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d Lead us into the record stores And deliver us Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake For nice is the music The sleeve and the story For ever and ever, Immediate The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut-Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, a reference to how after smoking enough dope your nut, or head, would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope-smoking habits are very different. In America a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant -- or "weed" -- and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way, so having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope smokers in the UK in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out they chose Professor Stanley Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost-English language, Unwinese: [Excerpt: Stanley Unwin, "The Populode of the Musicolly"] They gave Unwin a script, telling the story that linked side two of the album, in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all -- they'd been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was OK. Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwinese, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like "cool it" and "what's been your hang-up?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces and Professor Stanley Unwin, "Mad John"] The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud, but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stanley Unwin to perform the whole of side two of the album with live vocals but miming to instrumental backing tracks, they only performed two songs from the album live, "Rollin' Over" and "Song of a Baker", otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said "We had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had not been improved since the previous year. Meanwhile our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear Ogden's played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stanley Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death." The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded "The Universal" as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdubbed percussion, horns, and electric guitars: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Universal"] Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on “Seamus” by Pink Floyd. "The Universal" confused listeners, and only made number sixteen on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done. But the band were starting to splinter. McLagan isn't on "The Universal", having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling-out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like "The Autumn Stone", is genuinely lovely: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Autumn Stone"] But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. A year earlier Hallyday had recorded a version of "My Way of Giving", under the title "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé": [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé"] Now he got in touch with Glyn Johns to see if the Small Faces had any other material for him, and if they'd maybe back him on a few tracks on a new album. Johns and the Small Faces flew to France... as did Peter Frampton, who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band. They recorded three tracks for the album, with Frampton on extra guitar: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Reclamation"] These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on their next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve 1968, Marriott finally had enough. He stormed off stage mid-set, and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album Johns had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for Immediate. Side one had just finished when Marriott phoned. Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said of course he could, then put the phone down and listened to side two of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on Immediate. According to Oldham, "Tony Calder said to me one day 'Pick a straw'. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three Faces -- Kenney, Ronnie, and Mac -- wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man". Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together -- two houses on the same piece of land -- and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying "You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote," and enclosing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott/Lane