American singer-songwriter
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2 episodes with bobby gentry
4 episodes with bobby gentry
2 episodes with bobby gentry
2 episodes with bobby gentry
2 episodes with bobby gentry
3 episodes with bobby gentry
2 episodes with bobby gentry
2 episodes with bobby gentry
2 episodes with bobby gentry
Another month, another pod. Welcome to Episode 53 of This is Not Happening (TINH), an Album of the Month (AOTM) Podcast. In Part 1 we deep dive into an Album that one of us has chosen and in Part 2 we play 'Spin it or Bin it'. This is where we pick a theme and each select a song that represents that theme. We judge each others selections by asking the question 'Spin It or Bin It'?This month, in Part 1, Guy hosts an interesting discussion on Father John Misty's (FJM) latest album, Mahashmashana. 50% of the Pod love FJM, 50% don't!In Part 2, Spin It or Bin It, our theme this month is 'Location, Location, Location', or 'songs about places' and it's a belter!Part 1 | Father John Misty | MahashmashanaWe often review artists that we all love. This month this is not the case. 2 of us love FJM, one of us gets very angry when listening to FJM and one of us doesn't really have an opinion. Can this album keep the fans happy and win over the angry and the non-plussed?Given the above, this is a surprisingly well mannered and coherent conversation about FJMs latest album. There's only 8 tracks but they're all pretty long. We discuss songwriting, song length and album themes like ageing and the associated ego deaths that accompany it.Listen to the album ... HEREWatch some of the videos for the tracks discussed ... HEREWatch the World Cafe interview that we reference on the pod ... HEREWatch a live performance of lead single 'She Cleans Up' ... HEREPart 2 | Spin It or Bin It | 'Location, Location, Location'Songs about places are really common. It's a theme explored by many (most?) artists at some point in their songwriting. This was a great chat and 4 great track selections.Guy chose Paris by Friendly Fires feat. Au Revioire Simone.Nolan chose New York State of Mind by Nas.Joey chose Welcome to Jamrock by Damien Marley.David chose Tobacco Road by Bobby Gentry.Here is a 16 track playlist where we all contribute 4 Location, Location, Location themed tracks to an extended playlist.Chapters: 00:00:00 - Intro00:02:10 - Album of the Month00:06:26 - What Do You Expect and What Did You Get?00:18:40 - Album style and themes00:27:30 - The 'character' Father John Misty00:38:56 - We've been writing the blog for years come and have a look - https://thisisnothappening.net/
Bass After Dark — inch for inch and pound for pound, the best show in fishing — is back for another lively, and LIVE, episode. Don't miss Ken Duke, Brian the Carpenter, and our three mystery panelists (spoiler alert: it's Joey Walton, Bobby Gentry, and Dante Piraino) as we tackle the big question: How can you catch the smallmouth bass of your lifetime in 2025? More Bass After Dark: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BassAfterDark Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bass-after-dark/id1716082782 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3yMvtb7iKPlblLxqlLbOmz Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/BassAfterDark Instagram: https://instagram.com/bassafterdarkshow Facebook: https://facebook.com/bassafterdark Stock media provided by Sounder_Music / Pond5 Stock media provided by lovemushroom / Pond5 Stock music provided by Sineius / Pond5
“GONE” - JOEY HEATHERTON (MGM, 1972)It all started with a friendly competition. We had just done an episode about my early crush Bobby Gentry and her iconic “Ode to Billy Joe”. Rich does a counterpunch here with a tribute to his own teen heartthrob, the pulchritudinous Joey Heatherton, daughter of Ray “The Merry Mailman” - a host of one of our after-school staples of kid's programming. When Rich is passionate about something I just have to stand back and let him rhapsodize, and here his eloquence is in top form. Later, as the story turns to a darker hue, he reveals that he actually had met his teen idol - his once forbidden love (because of her support for the Viet Nam war, which he opposed) - that had now come full circle, and could be expressed openly.
In this week's episode, we chat with folk artist and herbalist, Sarah Jane Scouten.Sarah Jane shares her philosophy on how musicians can achieve career longevity by prioritizing their health and discusses the benefits of using various herbs to help alleviate the mental and physical pressures of being on the road. She also provides tips and recommendations for what a touring musician's herbal toolkit should include.Additionally, Sarah Jane talks about her experience as a mentor for the FMO Developing Artist Program and her newly released record, ‘Turn to Gold.'Buy / Listen to ‘Turn to Gold'Watch "Willie's Diamond Joe" performed and recorded live at the Folk Music Ontario Conference featuring Jessie Gosling & Nicholas Campbell, who were participants in the Developing Artist Program, as well as their mentor throughout the program Sarah Jane Scouten.Find Sarah Jane Scouten online:FacebookInstagramWebsiteAbout Sarah Jane ScoutenSarah Jane Scouten is a Canadian folk and Americana songwriter. Her songs pay their respects to 60s and 70s country songwriters Willie Nelson, John Prine, Bobby Gentry and weave in British folk revival elements with a continuous thread leading back to her roots in bluegrass and old time music. After a transformative four years, training as a herbalist in southwest Scotland, Sarah Jane has released her fifth album Turned to Gold (Light Organ Records). Sarah Jane offers a new depth and solidity as a songwriter. With producer Johnny Payne's (The Shilohs) gift for modern vintage arrangement, this is destined to be your next favourite road trip album.______________This episode is brought to you by Bandzoogle. Bandzoogle makes it easy to build a stunning website and online store for your music in minutes. Our podcast listeners can go to Bandzoogle.com to try it free for 30 days, and use the promo code “refolkus” to get 15% off the first year of any subscription.Tune in to the latest episodes of the ReFolkUs Podcast, featuring the latest releases from Folk Music Ontario members as well as some of our special guests, now broadcasting on CKCU FM 93.1. Presented by Folk Music OntarioHosted by Rosalyn DennettProduced by Kayla Nezon and Rosalyn DennettMixed by Jordan Moore of The Pod CabinTheme music “Amsterdam” by King CardiacArtwork by Jaymie Karn
Recomendados de la semana en iVoox.com Semana del 5 al 11 de julio del 2021
Bienvenidos a una nueva entrega de Código country! Comenzamos con Rainbow Girls y su canción "I Can’t Believe We Were Ever Strangers", del álbum "Give the People What They Want". Una reflexión sobre la conexión y el asombro de encontrar a alguien especial en nuestras vidas. Desde California, Estados Unidos, nos llega este grupo con su encantadora mezcla de folk y armonías vocales. Allisson Russell nos lleva a un viaje de amor y liberación con "Persephone", del álbum "Outside Child". Una balada emotiva que nos lleva a la devastación más absoluta de una relación paternal abusiva. Originaria de Montreal, Canadá, Russell cautiva con su voz única y su profunda expresión emocional. Aaron Burdett nos presentará a "Arlo" un personaje singular. Desde la melancolía y el amor no correspondido, nos encontramos con "A New England" de Billy Bragg, del álbum "Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy". Una canción que captura la esencia de la juventud y la búsqueda de significado en un mundo cambiante. Desde Essex, Inglaterra, Bragg nos invita a reflexionar sobre el amor y la pérdida con su estilo distintivo. Bobby Gentry nos ofrece una experiencia musical única con "Okolona River Bottom Band", del álbum "Fancy". Una canción que nos sumerge en la atmósfera del sur de Estados Unidos con su mezcla de country y soul. A continuación nos deleitará con una tortura a las criaturillas de la americana pues nos enseñará formas de matar a nuestros bichejos predilectos en “Bugs” Originaria de Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Gentry nos cautiva con su voz seductora y su habilidad para contar historias. Nos encontramos con "Never on the Map" de Maya di Vitri, del álbum "Speak". Una canción que nos invita a reflexionar sobre cómo nos cambia una gira y cómo no somos los mismos que nos fuimos. Joan Shelley nos transporta a través de las vastas llanuras del oeste con "The Spur", del álbum "Joan Shelley". Una canción que captura la esencia de la libertad y la aventura. Desde Kentucky, Estados Unidos, Shelley nos invita a dejar atrás nuestras preocupaciones y seguir el llamado del horizonte. Melissa Harper intentará no perder el recuerdo de esa persona especial en "Hanging on to You" Maya de Vitri nos cautiva una vez más con "Stacy, In Her Wedding Gown", del álbum "The Year of the Rat". Una canción que celebra la belleza y la fuerza de una mujer en su día especial. Con su habilidad para capturar la esencia de la vida cotidiana, di Vitri nos invita a apreciar los pequeños momentos desingularidad para abrazarlos con ternura.. Despedimos esta entrega con Vanessa Peters y su canción "Better", del álbum "The Burden of Unshakeable Proof". Una oda a la autoaceptación y la búsqueda de la felicidad interior. Desde Texas, Estados Unidos, Peters nos recuerda que siempre hay tiempo para librarnos de la necesidad de búsqueda de la afirmación externa y no dejarnos influir por los prejuicios sociales. Gracias por acompañarnos en este viaje musical lleno de emociones y experiencias. ¡Hasta la próxima entrega! Rainbow Girls -“I Can’t Believe We Were Ever Strangers” - Allison Russell - Persephone Aaron burdett - Arlo Billy Bragg - New England Bobby Gentry - Okolona River Bottom Band Bobby Gentry - Bugs Maya de Vitry - Never on the Map Eliza Gilkyson - Promises To Keep Sad Daddy - Arkansas Bound Joan Shelley -The Spur Melissa Carper - Hanging on to You Maya de Vitry - Stacy, In Her Wedding Gown Vanessa Peters - Better
Aujourd'hui gros dossier : "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" de James Brown, et sur la façon dont Brown est passé du statut d'artiste doo-wop mineur à celui de pionnier du funk. INTRO APPOLO James Brown, "Night Train" (version Live at the Apollo). The Ravens, "Rock Me All Night Long" The Fabulous Flames, "Do You Remember ?" Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the)" Mashed Potatoes". James Brown, "Hold It" James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think !" Les "5" Royales, "Think" James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think" Sugar Pie DeSanto, "Soulful Dress" James Brown et Bea Ford, "You Got the Power" Joe Tex, "You Keep Her" Yvonne Fair, "I Found You" James Brown, "Night Flying" The Valentinos, "Lookin' For a Love" Yvonne Fair, "You Can Make it if You Try" Freddie King, "I'm on My Way to Atlanta" Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me" James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Night Train" (version Live at the Apollo) James Brown & his orchestra, "Out of Sight" James Brown et son orchestre, "Caldonia" James Brown, "Out of Sight (TAMI show live)" The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl ?" Jan & Dean, "Here They Come From All Over The World" Chuck Berry & Gerry and the Pacemakers : "Maybellene" James Brown, "Out of Sight" (TAMI Show) The Rolling Stones, "Around and Around" Jimmy Wilson, "Tin Pan Alley" Monte Easter, "Blues in the Evening" Jimmy Nolen, "After Hours" Jimmy Nolen, "Jimmy's Jive" Johnny Otis, "Casting My Spell" Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive" Bobby Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe" James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (parts 1, 2, and 3)" James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"
Présentée par Starchild. Pour ce septième numéro de Country Connection, Starchild met à l'honneur les reines de la country américaine. Le premier volume de cette rétrospective vous permettra de découvrir, voire de redécouvrir 25 destins de chanteuses, souvent féministes avant l'heure : Lynn Anderson, Maybelle Carter, June Carter Cash, Rosanne Cash, Patsy Cline, Skeeter Davis, Ann Fargo, Crystal Gale, Bobby Gentry, Emmylou Harris, The Judds, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, Barbara Mandrell, Lorrie Morgan, Ann Murray, Olivia Newton-John, KT Oslin, Dolly Parton, Jeannie C.Riley, Linda Rondstadt, Connie Smith, Kitty Wells, Dottie West et Tammy Wynette
De ROBERT FISHER, ANDY WARHOL, FELLINI y ANGEL NIETO a JUAN XXIII, MAFALDA, TWIGGY o el lanzamiento de BARBIE De QUEEN, MAROON 5 y POLICE a BOYZ II MEN, PROCOL HARUM, los TEEN TOPS, FOUR SEASONS y la ORQUESTA ARAGON De DONNA SUMMER a BOBBY GENTRY, OLGA GUILLOT y LULU De DAVID BOWIE y BILLIE JOEL a BOBBY VINTON, CHAYANE y JUAN GABRIEL De “LOS DUKES DEL PELIGRO” al “INVESTIGADOR SUBMARINO” --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/genteenambiente/support
Crime novelist Cathi Unsworth turned Goth in her teens in rural Norfolk fired by a cocktail of Dennis Wheatley, the Damned on the Peel show and the dark arts of the York Festival “Gothtopia” bill in 1984. She devoted long hours to trying to construct Robert Smith's “tarantula hair” and acquiring black lace garmentry. Something about its music and folklore chimed with a life marooned in the middle of an East Anglian beanfield pondering tales of Shuck, the fabled fire-eyed ghostly hound alleged to roam the neighbourhood at night. We talked to her about her marvellous ‘Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth' for a live podcast recorded at London's 21Soho on 25 September, a very funny and wide-ranging exchange that included … … why Goth is like no other tribe: you never make a full recovery – or ever want to. … the part played in its family tree by Aleister Crowley, Aubrey Beardsley, the Brontes, Joy Division, Magazine, the Cramps, Jim Morrison and Bobby Gentry. … why Leeds became one of Goth's key spiritual centres. … the shocking spectacle of Dave Vanian in full Stygian rig in broad daylight. … “the three Goth Ians” - Astbury, Curtis, McCulloch. … the significance of Cabaret and A Clockwork Orange.... why Goths feel obliged to dress the part. … the romantic allure of Robert Smith against that of Nick Cave. … the curious link between Siouxsie and Margaret Thatcher. … and how Goth keeps finding new recruits. Order ‘Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth' here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Season-Witch-Book-Cathi-Unsworth/dp/1788706242Tickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21 Soho on October 30th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ysY3FvyFaeSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Crime novelist Cathi Unsworth turned Goth in her teens in rural Norfolk fired by a cocktail of Dennis Wheatley, the Damned on the Peel show and the dark arts of the York Festival “Gothtopia” bill in 1984. She devoted long hours to trying to construct Robert Smith's “tarantula hair” and acquiring black lace garmentry. Something about its music and folklore chimed with a life marooned in the middle of an East Anglian beanfield pondering tales of Shuck, the fabled fire-eyed ghostly hound alleged to roam the neighbourhood at night. We talked to her about her marvellous ‘Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth' for a live podcast recorded at London's 21Soho on 25 September, a very funny and wide-ranging exchange that included … … why Goth is like no other tribe: you never make a full recovery – or ever want to. … the part played in its family tree by Aleister Crowley, Aubrey Beardsley, the Brontes, Joy Division, Magazine, the Cramps, Jim Morrison and Bobby Gentry. … why Leeds became one of Goth's key spiritual centres. … the shocking spectacle of Dave Vanian in full Stygian rig in broad daylight. … “the three Goth Ians” - Astbury, Curtis, McCulloch. … the significance of Cabaret and A Clockwork Orange.... why Goths feel obliged to dress the part. … the romantic allure of Robert Smith against that of Nick Cave. … the curious link between Siouxsie and Margaret Thatcher. … and how Goth keeps finding new recruits. Order ‘Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth' here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Season-Witch-Book-Cathi-Unsworth/dp/1788706242Tickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21 Soho on October 30th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ysY3FvyFaeSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Crime novelist Cathi Unsworth turned Goth in her teens in rural Norfolk fired by a cocktail of Dennis Wheatley, the Damned on the Peel show and the dark arts of the York Festival “Gothtopia” bill in 1984. She devoted long hours to trying to construct Robert Smith's “tarantula hair” and acquiring black lace garmentry. Something about its music and folklore chimed with a life marooned in the middle of an East Anglian beanfield pondering tales of Shuck, the fabled fire-eyed ghostly hound alleged to roam the neighbourhood at night. We talked to her about her marvellous ‘Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth' for a live podcast recorded at London's 21Soho on 25 September, a very funny and wide-ranging exchange that included … … why Goth is like no other tribe: you never make a full recovery – or ever want to. … the part played in its family tree by Aleister Crowley, Aubrey Beardsley, the Brontes, Joy Division, Magazine, the Cramps, Jim Morrison and Bobby Gentry. … why Leeds became one of Goth's key spiritual centres. … the shocking spectacle of Dave Vanian in full Stygian rig in broad daylight. … “the three Goth Ians” - Astbury, Curtis, McCulloch. … the significance of Cabaret and A Clockwork Orange.... why Goths feel obliged to dress the part. … the romantic allure of Robert Smith against that of Nick Cave. … the curious link between Siouxsie and Margaret Thatcher. … and how Goth keeps finding new recruits. Order ‘Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth' here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Season-Witch-Book-Cathi-Unsworth/dp/1788706242Tickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21 Soho on October 30th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ysY3FvyFaeSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Here is our second episode, and we talk about "Ode To Billie Joe"with author Tara Murtha. This really set the tone for what we wanted to do with this podcast, so have a listen to the backstory of one of the all-time great songs and Bobbi Gentry, the woman behind this masterpiece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
WHY DID BOBBY GENTRY STOP SINGING?https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/17/bobbie-gentry-trailblazing-queen-of-countryThe 60s star – who didn't just write her own songs but had her own TV show, made her own clothes and painted her own album art – could count Elvis and, later, Taylor Swift as fans. So why did she retire from public view in 1981?The first time I heard Ode to Billie Joe was on a 1967 Radio 1 special. Amid ornate psychedelic pop sounding a little like Strawberry Fields Forever, this tale of suicide, loneliness and familial breakdown was unlike any record I had ever heard. The place names – Tallahatchee, Carroll County, Choctaw Ridge – were cinematic, the singer's voice was husky, the string arrangement was minimal and eerie. What I heard was thick mud, damp moss, a barely moving river, dead air. The song was an inescapable fug. You couldn't move. You had to listen...A recently released eight-disc box set, The Girl from Chickasaw County, covers the bulk of her recording career: seven albums crammed into a brief period of intense fame between 1967 and 1971. Gentry's stock has risen over the last decade as she been name-checked by country stars such as Nikki Lane and Kacey Musgraves. Taylor Swift has been coy about the subject of her 2012 song The Lucky One, but it is almost certainly Gentry: “They still tell the legend of how you disappeared, how you took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out.” Gentry effectively retired from the studio in 1971, from the stage in 1981 and hasn't done an interview in 30-odd years. It was an almost impossible disappearing act, the kind many would love to pull off. She seems a very modern figure, a pioneer for women in pop, and her unavailability has only enhanced her mystique.
Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. 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 "Omaha" by Moby Grape. 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/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.
Meðal tónlistarflytjenda: Kikk, Dúkkulísur, Bobby Gentry og Feist.
Meðal tónlistarflytjenda: Kikk, Dúkkulísur, Bobby Gentry og Feist.
durée : 00:57:40 - « Ode to Billie Joe » de Bobbie Gentry (1967) - par : Laurent Valero - "Un hit de 1967, écrite et composée par la chanteuse folk Bobby Gentry, cette chanson connût dès sa sortie un immense succès, raflant 3 Grammy pour sa compositrice et un pour l'arrangeur Jimmie Haskell. Bobby Gentry, la première chanteuse folk à faire carrière avec son répertoire ! " Laurent Valéro - réalisé par : Patrick Lérisset
durée : 00:57:40 - « Ode to Billie Joe » de Bobbie Gentry (1967) - par : Laurent Valero - "Un hit de 1967, écrite et composée par la chanteuse folk Bobby Gentry, cette chanson connût dès sa sortie un immense succès, raflant 3 Grammy pour sa compositrice et un pour l'arrangeur Jimmie Haskell. Bobby Gentry, la première chanteuse folk à faire carrière avec son répertoire ! " Laurent Valéro - réalisé par : Patrick Lérisset
We talk about UK's scrimmage, Monopoly pieces, Vickie Lawrence; Reba; and Bobby Gentry, plus much more. The 2010-present sitcoms leg of our Colossal Castoff.
scotch, pop culture 1942, bobby gentry, maya rudolph, bill engvall, bugs bunny, gary gygax, air bags, jerry van dyke, julian mcmahon, neil diamond, john lennon. atlanta olympics bombing, korean war ends, 12th amendment
Nugget, Episode 1.459, 24.07.2022: Mädchen aus der Provinz. Philosophiestudentin. Songschreiberin. Produzentin. Las Vegas-Entertainerin. Pionierin der Americana. Musikradio360 befasst sich diese Woche mit einer der faszinierendsten Persönlichkeiten der Rock'n'Roll Geschichte: Bobbie Gentry.
On this week's show, we're going to speak with Chef Travis Peters of the Delta Bar & Grill, which is going to be opening soon in Downtown Tucson. We're going to find out about this young man's travels from self-taught chef to Spain to Guy's Grocery Games, and then back to Downtown Tucson. Today is December 19th, my name is Tom Heath and you're listening to "Life Along the Streetcar". Each and every Sunday our focus is on Social, Cultural and Economic impacts in Tucson's Urban Core and we shed light on hidden gems everyone should know about. From A Mountain to UArizona and all stops in between. You get the inside track- right here on 99.1 FM, streaming on DowntownRadio.org- we're also available on your iPhone or Android using our very own Downtown Radio app. Reach us by email contact@lifealongthestreetcar.org -- interact with us on Facebook @Life Along the Streetcar and follow us on Twitter @StreetcarLife--- And check out our past episodes on www.lifeAlongTheStreetcar.org, Spotify, iTunes or asking your smart speaker to play our podcast Our intro music is by Ryanhood and we exit with music from Bobby Gentry, "Mississippi Delta."
Episode one hundred and thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown, and at how Brown went from a minor doo-wop artist to the pioneer of funk. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm a Fool" by Dino, Desi, and Billy. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB an early version of this was uploaded, in which I said "episode 136" rather than 137 and "flattened ninth" at one point rather than "ninth". I've fixed that in a new upload, which is otherwise unchanged. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I relied mostly on fur books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many. Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. Black and Proud: The Life of James Brown by Geoff Brown is a more traditional objective biography. And Douglas Wolk's 33 1/3 book on Live at the Apollo is a fascinating, detailed, look at that album. This box set is the best collection of Brown's work there is, but is out of print. This two-CD set has all the essential hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Introduction, the opening of Live at the Apollo. "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? [Audience cheers, and gives out another cheer with each musical sting sting] Thank you, and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you in this particular time, national and international known as the hardest working man in showbusiness, Man that sing "I'll Go Crazy"! [sting] "Try Me" [sting] "You've Got the Power" [sting] "Think" [sting], "If You Want Me" [sting] "I Don't Mind" [sting] "Bewildered" [sting] million-dollar seller "Lost Someone" [sting], the very latest release, "Night Train" [sting] Let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy" [sting] Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames"] In 1951, the composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room that's been completely soundproofed, so no sound can get in from the outside world, and in which the walls, floor, and ceiling are designed to absorb any sounds that are made. It's as close as a human being can get to experiencing total silence. When Cage entered it, he expected that to be what he heard -- just total silence. Instead, he heard two noises, a high-pitched one and a low one. Cage was confused by this -- why hadn't he heard the silence? The engineer in charge of the chamber explained to him that what he was hearing was himself -- the high-pitched noise was Cage's nervous system, and the low-pitched one was his circulatory system. Cage later said about this, "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The experience inspired him to write his most famous piece, 4'33, in which a performer attempts not to make any sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is usually described as being four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but it actually isn't -- the whole point is that there is no silence, and that the audience is meant to listen to the ambient noise and appreciate that noise as music. Here is where I would normally excerpt the piece, but of course for 4'33 to have its full effect, one has to listen to the whole thing. But I can excerpt another piece Cage wrote. Because on October the twenty-fourth 1962 he wrote a sequel to 4'33, a piece he titled 0'00, but which is sometimes credited as "4'33 no. 2". He later reworked the piece, but the original score, which is dedicated to two avant-garde Japanese composers, Toshi Ichiyanagi and his estranged wife Yoko Ono, reads as follows: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." Now, as it happens, we have a recording of someone else performing Cage's piece, as written, on the day it was written, though neither performer nor composer were aware that that was what was happening. But I'm sure everyone can agree that this recording from October the 24th, 1962, is a disciplined action performed with maximum amplification and no feedback: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] When we left James Brown, almost a hundred episodes ago, he had just had his first R&B number one, with "Try Me", and had performed for the first time at the venue with which he would become most associated, the Harlem Apollo, and had reconnected with the mother he hadn't seen since he was a small child. But at that point, in 1958, he was still just the lead singer of a doo-wop group, one of many, and there was nothing in his shows or his records to indicate that he was going to become anything more than that, nothing to distinguish him from King Records labelmates like Hank Ballard, who made great records, put on a great live show, and are still remembered more than sixty years later, but mostly as a footnote. Today we're going to look at the process that led James Brown from being a peer of Ballard or Little Willie John to being arguably the single most influential musician of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of that influence is outside rock music, narrowly defined, but the records we're going to look at this time and in the next episode on Brown are records without which the entire sonic landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would be unimaginably different. And that process started in 1958, shortly after the release of "Try Me" in October that year, with two big changes to Brown's organisation. The first was that this was -- at least according to Brown -- when he first started working with Universal Attractions, a booking agency run by a man named Ben Bart, who before starting his own company had spent much of the 1940s working for Moe Gale, the owner of the Savoy Ballroom and manager of the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and many of the other acts we looked at in the very first episodes of this podcast. Bart had started his own agency in 1945, and had taken the Ink Spots with him, though they'd returned to Gale a few years later, and he'd been responsible for managing the career of the Ravens, one of the first bird groups: [Excerpt: The Ravens, "Rock Me All Night Long"] In the fifties, Bart had become closely associated with King Records, the label to which Brown and the Famous Flames were signed. A quick aside here -- Brown's early records were released on Federal Records, and later they switched to being released on King, but Federal was a subsidiary label for King, and in the same way that I don't distinguish between Checker and Chess, Tamla and Motown, or Phillips and Sun, I'll just refer to King throughout. Bart and Universal Attractions handled bookings for almost every big R&B act signed by King, including Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John, the "5" Royales, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. According to some sources, the Famous Flames signed with Universal Attractions at the same time they signed with King Records, and Bart's family even say it was Bart who discovered them and got them signed to King in the first place. Other sources say they didn't sign with Universal until after they'd proved themselves on the charts. But everyone seems agreed that 1958 was when Bart started making Brown a priority and taking an active interest in his career. Within a few years, Bart would have left Universal, handing the company over to his son and a business partner, to devote himself full-time to managing Brown, with whom he developed an almost father-son relationship. With Bart behind them, the Famous Flames started getting better gigs, and a much higher profile on the chitlin circuit. But around this time there was another change that would have an even more profound effect. Up to this point, the Famous Flames had been like almost every other vocal group playing the chitlin' circuit, in that they hadn't had their own backing musicians. There were exceptions, but in general vocal groups would perform with the same backing band as every other act on a bill -- either a single backing band playing for a whole package tour, or a house band at the venue they were playing at who would perform with every act that played that venue. There would often be a single instrumentalist with the group, usually a guitarist or piano player, who would act as musical director to make sure that the random assortment of musicians they were going to perform with knew the material. This was, for the most part, how the Famous Flames had always performed, though they had on occasion also performed their own backing in the early days. But now they got their own backing band, centred on J.C. Davis as sax player and bandleader, Bobby Roach on guitar, Nat Kendrick on drums, and Bernard Odum on bass. Musicians would come and go, but this was the core original lineup of what became the James Brown Band. Other musicians who played with them in the late fifties were horn players Alfred Corley and Roscoe Patrick, guitarist Les Buie, and bass player Hubert Perry, while keyboard duties would be taken on by Fats Gonder, although James Brown and Bobby Byrd would both sometimes play keyboards on stage. At this point, as well, the lineup of the Famous Flames became more or less stable. As we discussed in the previous episode on Brown, the original lineup of the Famous Flames had left en masse when it became clear that they were going to be promoted as James Brown and the Famous Flames, with Brown getting more money, rather than as a group. Brown had taken on another vocal group, who had previously been Little Richard's backing vocalists, but shortly after "Try Me" had come out, but before they'd seen any money from it, that group had got into an argument with Brown over money he owed them. He dropped them, and they went off to record unsuccessfully as the Fabulous Flames on a tiny label, though the records they made, like "Do You Remember", are quite good examples of their type: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Flames, "Do You Remember?"] Brown pulled together a new lineup of Famous Flames, featuring two of the originals. Johnny Terry had already returned to the group earlier, and stayed when Brown sacked the rest of the second lineup of Flames, and they added Lloyd Bennett and Bobby Stallworth. And making his second return to the group was Bobby Byrd, who had left with the other original members, joined again briefly, and then left again. Oddly, the first commercial success that Brown had after these lineup changes was not with the Famous Flames, or even under his own name. Rather, it was under the name of his drummer, Nat Kendrick. Brown had always seen himself, not primarily as a singer, but as a band leader and arranger. He was always a jazz fan first and foremost, and he'd grown up in the era of the big bands, and musicians he'd admired growing up like Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan had always recorded instrumentals as well as vocal selections, and Brown saw himself very much in that tradition. Even though he couldn't read music, he could play several instruments, and he could communicate his arrangement ideas, and he wanted to show off the fact that he was one of the few R&B musicians with his own tight band. The story goes that Syd Nathan, the owner of King Records, didn't like the idea, because he thought that the R&B audience at this point only wanted vocal tracks, and also because Brown's band had previously released an instrumental which hadn't sold. Now, this is a definite pattern in the story of James Brown -- it seems that at every point in Brown's career for the first decade, Brown would come up with an idea that would have immense commercial value, Nathan would say it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, Brown would do it anyway, and Nathan would later admit that he was wrong. This is such a pattern -- it apparently happened with "Please Please Please", Brown's first hit, *and* "Try Me", Brown's first R&B number one, and we'll see it happen again later in this episode -- that one tends to suspect that maybe these stories were sometimes made up after the fact, especially since Syd Nathan somehow managed to run a successful record label for over twenty years, putting out some of the best R&B and country records from everyone from Moon Mullican to Wynonie Harris, the Stanley Brothers to Little Willie John, while if these stories are to be believed he was consistently making the most boneheaded, egregious, uncommercial decisions imaginable. But in this case, it seems to be at least mostly true, as rather than being released on King Records as by James Brown, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" was released on Dade Records as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, with the DJ Carlton Coleman shouting vocals over Brown's so it wouldn't be obvious Brown was breaking his contract: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the)" Mashed Potatoes"] That made the R&B top ten, and I've seen reports that Brown and his band even toured briefly as Nat Kendrick and the Swans, before Syd Nathan realised his mistake, and started allowing instrumentals to be released under the name "James Brown presents HIS BAND", starting with a cover of Bill Doggett's "Hold It": [Excerpt: James Brown Presents HIS BAND, "Hold It"] After the Nat Kendrick record gave Brown's band an instrumental success, the Famous Flames also came back from another mini dry spell for hits, with the first top twenty R&B hit for the new lineup, "I'll Go Crazy", which was followed shortly afterwards by their first pop top forty hit, "Think!": [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think!"] The success of "Think!" is at least in part down to Bobby Byrd, who would from this point on be Brown's major collaborator and (often uncredited) co-writer and co-producer until the mid-seventies. After leaving the Flames, and before rejoining them, Byrd had toured for a while with his own group, but had then gone to work for King Records at the request of Brown. King Records' pressing plant had equipment that sometimes produced less-than-ideal pressings of records, and Brown had asked Byrd to take a job there performing quality control, making sure that Brown's records didn't skip. While working there, Byrd also worked as a song doctor. His job was to take songs that had been sent in as demos, and rework them in the style of some of the label's popular artists, to make them more suitable, changing a song so it might fit the style of the "5" Royales or Little Willie John or whoever, and Byrd had done this for "Think", which had originally been recorded by the "5" Royales, whose leader, Lowman Pauling, had written it: [Excerpt: The "5" Royales, "Think"] Byrd had reworked the song to fit Brown's style and persona. It's notable for example that the Royales sing "How much of all your happiness have I really claimed?/How many tears have you cried for which I was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember which was my fault/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” But in Brown's version this becomes “How much of your happiness can I really claim?/How many tears have you shed for which you was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember just what is wrong/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think"] In Brown's version, nothing is his fault, he's trying to persuade an unreasonable woman who has some problem he doesn't even understand, but she needs to think about it and she'll see that he's right, while in the Royales' version they're acknowledging that they're at fault, that they've done wrong, but they didn't *only* do wrong and maybe she should think about that too. It's only a couple of words' difference, but it changes the whole tenor of the song. "Think" would become the Famous Flames' first top forty hit on the pop charts, reaching number thirty-three. It went top ten on the R&B charts, and between 1959 and 1963 Brown and the Flames would have fifteen top-thirty R&B hits, going from being a minor doo-wop group that had had a few big hits to being consistent hit-makers, who were not yet household names, but who had a consistent sound that could be guaranteed to make the R&B charts, and who put on what was regarded as the best live show of any R&B band in the world. This was partly down to the type of discipline that Brown imposed on his band. Many band-leaders in the R&B world would impose fines on their band members, and Johnny Terry suggested that Brown do the same thing. As Bobby Byrd put it, "Many band leaders do it but it was Johnny's idea to start it with us and we were all for it ‘cos we didn't want to miss nothing. We wanted to be immaculate, clothes-wise, routine-wise and everything. Originally, the fines was only between James and us, The Famous Flames, but then James carried it over into the whole troupe. It was still a good idea because anybody joining The James Brown Revue had to know that they couldn't be messing up, and anyway, all the fines went into a pot for the parties we had." But Brown went much further with these fines than any other band leader, and would also impose them arbitrarily, and it became part of his reputation that he was the strictest disciplinarian in rhythm and blues music. One thing that became legendary among musicians was the way that he would impose fines while on stage. If a band member missed a note, or a dance step, or missed a cue, or had improperly polished shoes, Brown would, while looking at them, briefly make a flashing gesture with his hand, spreading his fingers out for a fraction of a second. To the audience, it looked like just part of Brown's dance routine, but the musician knew he had just been fined five dollars. Multiple flashes meant multiples of five dollars fined. Brown also developed a whole series of other signals to the band, which they had to learn, To quote Bobby Byrd again: "James didn't want anybody else to know what we was doing, so he had numbers and certain screams and spins. There was a certain spin he'd do and if he didn't do the complete spin you'd know it was time to go over here. Certain screams would instigate chord changes, but mostly it was numbers. James would call out football numbers, that's where we got that from. Thirty-nine — Sixteen —Fourteen — Two — Five — Three — Ninety-eight, that kind of thing. Number thirty-nine was always the change into ‘Please, Please, Please'. Sixteen is into a scream and an immediate change, not bam-bam but straight into something else. If he spins around and calls thirty-six, that means we're going back to the top again. And the forty-two, OK, we're going to do this verse and then bow out, we're leaving now. It was amazing." This, or something like this, is a fairly standard technique among more autocratic band leaders, a way of allowing the band as a whole to become a live compositional or improvisational tool for their leader, and Frank Zappa, for example, had a similar system. It requires the players to subordinate themselves utterly to the whim of the band leader, but also requires a band leader who knows the precise strengths and weaknesses of every band member and how they are likely to respond to a cue. When it works well, it can be devastatingly effective, and it was for Brown's live show. The Famous Flames shows soon became a full-on revue, with other artists joining the bill and performing with Brown's band. From the late 1950s on, Brown would always include a female singer. The first of these was Sugar Pie DeSanto, a blues singer who had been discovered (and given her stage name) by Johnny Otis, but DeSanto soon left Brown's band and went on to solo success on Chess records, with hits like "Soulful Dress": [Excerpt: Sugar Pie DeSanto, "Soulful Dress"] After DeSanto left, she was replaced by Bea Ford, the former wife of the soul singer Joe Tex, with whom Brown had an aggressive rivalry and mutual loathing. Ford and Brown recorded together, cutting tracks like "You Got the Power": [Excerpt: James Brown and Bea Ford, "You Got the Power"] However, Brown and Ford soon fell out, and Brown actually wrote to Tex asking if he wanted his wife back. Tex's response was to record this: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "You Keep Her"] Ford's replacement was Yvonne Fair, who had briefly replaced Jackie Landry in the Chantels for touring purposes when Landry had quit touring to have a baby. Fair would stay with Brown for a couple of years, and would release a number of singles written and produced for her by Brown, including one which Brown would later rerecord himself with some success: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "I Found You"] Fair would eventually leave the band after getting pregnant with a child by Brown, who tended to sleep with the female singers in his band. The last shows she played with him were the shows that would catapult Brown into the next level of stardom. Brown had been convinced for a long time that his live shows had an energy that his records didn't, and that people would buy a record of one of them. Syd Nathan, as usual, disagreed. In his view the market for R&B albums was small, and only consisted of people who wanted collections of hit singles they could play in one place. Nobody would buy a James Brown live album. So Brown decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided to book a run of shows at the Apollo Theatre, and record them, paying for the recordings with his own money. This was a week-long engagement, with shows running all day every day -- Brown and his band would play five shows a day, and Brown would wear a different suit for every show. This was in October 1962, the month that we've already established as the month the sixties started -- the month the Beatles released their first single, the Beach Boys released their first record outside the US, and the first Bond film came out, all on the same day at the beginning of the month. By the end of October, when Brown appeared at the Apollo, the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, and there were several points during the run where it looked like the world itself might not last until November 62. Douglas Wolk has written an entire book on the live album that resulted, which claims to be a recording of the midnight performance from October the twenty-fourth, though it seems like it was actually compiled from multiple performances. The album only records the headline performance, but Wolk describes what a full show by the James Brown Revue at the Apollo was like in October 1962, and the following description is indebted to his book, which I'll link in the show notes. The show would start with the "James Brown Orchestra" -- the backing band. They would play a set of instrumentals, and a group of dancers called the Brownies would join them: [Excerpt: James Brown Presents His Band, "Night Flying"] At various points during the set, Brown himself would join the band for a song or two, playing keyboards or drums. After the band's instrumental set, the Valentinos would take the stage for a few songs. This was before they'd been taken on by Sam Cooke, who would take them under his wing very soon after these shows, but the Valentinos were already recording artists in their own right, and had recently released "Lookin' For a Love": [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "Lookin' For a Love"] Next up would be Yvonne Fair, now visibly pregnant with her boss' child, to sing her few numbers: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "You Can Make it if You Try"] Freddie King was on next, another artist for the King family of labels who'd had a run of R&B hits the previous year, promoting his new single "I'm On My Way to Atlanta": [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I'm on My Way to Atlanta"] After King came Solomon Burke, who had been signed to Atlantic earlier that year and just started having hits, and was the new hot thing on the scene, but not yet the massive star he became: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] After Burke came a change of pace -- the vaudeville comedian Pigmeat Markham would take the stage and perform a couple of comedy sketches. We actually know exactly how these went, as Brown wasn't the only one recording a live album there that week, and Markham's album "The World's Greatest Clown" was a result of these shows and released on Chess Records: [Excerpt: Pigmeat Markham, "Go Ahead and Sing"] And after Markham would come the main event. Fats Gonder, the band's organist, would give the introduction we heard at the beginning of the episode -- and backstage, Danny Ray, who had been taken on as James Brown's valet that very week (according to Wolk -- I've seen other sources saying he'd joined Brown's organisation in 1960), was listening closely. He would soon go on to take over the role of MC, and would introduce Brown in much the same way as Gonder had at every show until Brown's death forty-four years later. The live album is an astonishing tour de force, showing Brown and his band generating a level of excitement that few bands then or now could hope to equal. It's even more astonishing when you realise two things. The first is that this was *before* any of the hits that most people now associate with the name James Brown -- before "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "Sex Machine", or "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" or "Say it Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" or "Funky Drummer" or "Get Up Offa That Thing". It's still an *unformed* James Brown, only six years into a fifty-year career, and still without most of what made him famous. The other thing is, as Wolk notes, if you listen to any live bootleg recordings from this time, the microphone distorts all the time, because Brown is singing so loud. Here, the vocal tone is clean, because Brown knew he was being recorded. This is the sound of James Brown restraining himself: [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] The album was released a few months later, and proved Syd Nathan's judgement utterly, utterly, wrong. It became the thirty-second biggest selling album of 1963 -- an amazing achievement given that it was released on a small independent label that dealt almost exclusively in singles, and which had no real presence in the pop market. The album spent sixty-six weeks on the album charts, making number two on the charts -- the pop album charts, not R&B charts. There wasn't an R&B albums chart until 1965, and Live at the Apollo basically forced Billboard to create one, and more or less single-handedly created the R&B albums market. It was such a popular album in 1963 that DJs took to playing the whole album -- breaking for commercials as they turned the side over, but otherwise not interrupting it. It turned Brown from merely a relatively big R&B star into a megastar. But oddly, given this astonishing level of success, Brown's singles in 1963 were slightly less successful than they had been in the previous few years -- possibly partly because he decided to record a few versions of old standards, changing direction as he had for much of his career. Johnny Terry quit the Famous Flames, to join the Drifters, becoming part of the lineup that recorded "Under the Boardwalk" and "Saturday Night at the Movies". Brown also recorded a second live album, Pure Dynamite!, which is generally considered a little lacklustre in comparison to the Apollo album. There were other changes to the lineup as well as Terry leaving. Brown wanted to hire a new drummer, Melvin Parker, who agreed to join the band, but only if Brown took on his sax-playing brother, Maceo, along with him. Maceo soon became one of the most prominent musicians in Brown's band, and his distinctive saxophone playing is all over many of Brown's biggest hits. The first big hit that the Parkers played on was released as by James Brown and his Orchestra, rather than James Brown and the Famous Flames, and was a landmark in Brown's evolution as a musician: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Out of Sight"] The Famous Flames did sing on the B-side of that, a song called "Maybe the Last Time", which was ripped off from the same Pops Staples song that the Rolling Stones later ripped off for their own hit single. But that would be the last time Brown would use them in the studio -- from that point on, the Famous Flames were purely a live act, although Bobby Byrd, but not the other members, would continue to sing on the records. The reason it was credited to James Brown, rather than to James Brown and the Famous Flames, is that "Out of Sight" was released on Smash Records, to which Brown -- but not the Flames -- had signed a little while earlier. Brown had become sick of what he saw as King Records' incompetence, and had found what he and his advisors thought was a loophole in his contract. Brown had been signed to King Records under a personal services contract as a singer, not under a musician contract as a musician, and so they believed that he could sign to Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury, as a musician. He did, and he made what he thought of as a fresh start on his new label by recording "Caldonia", a cover of a song by his idol Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Caldonia"] Understandably, King Records sued on the reasonable grounds that Brown was signed to them as a singer, and they got an injunction to stop him recording for Smash -- but by the time the injunction came through, Brown had already released two albums and three singles for the label. The injunction prevented Brown from recording any new material for the rest of 1964, though both labels continued to release stockpiled material during that time. While he was unable to record new material, October 1964 saw Brown's biggest opportunity to cross over to a white audience -- the TAMI Show: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight (TAMI show live)"] We've mentioned the TAMI show a couple of times in previous episodes, but didn't go into it in much detail. It was a filmed concert which featured Jan and Dean, the Barbarians, Lesley Gore, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, the Supremes, and, as the two top acts, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. Rather oddly, the point of the TAMI Show wasn't the music as such. Rather it was intended as a demonstration of a technical process. Before videotape became cheap and a standard, it was difficult to record TV shows for later broadcast, for distribution to other countries, or for archive. The way they used to be recorded was a process known as telerecording in the UK and kinescoping in the US, and that was about as crude as it's possible to get -- you'd get a film camera, point it at a TV showing the programme you wanted to record, and film the TV screen. There was specialist equipment to do this, but that was all it actually did. Almost all surviving TV from the fifties and sixties -- and even some from the seventies -- was preserved by this method rather than by videotape. Even after videotape started being used to make the programmes, there were differing standards and tapes were expensive, so if you were making a programme in the UK and wanted a copy for US broadcast, or vice versa, you'd make a telerecording. But what if you wanted to make a TV show that you could also show on cinema screens? If you're filming a TV screen, and then you project that film onto a big screen, you get a blurry, low-resolution, mess -- or at least you did with the 525-line TV screens that were used in the US at the time. So a company named Electronovision came into the picture, for those rare times when you wanted to do something using video cameras that would be shown at the cinema. Rather than shoot in 525-line resolution, their cameras shot in 819-line resolution -- super high definition for the time, but capable of being recorded onto standard videotape with appropriate modifications for the equipment. But that meant that when you kinescoped the production, it was nearly twice the resolution that a standard US TV broadcast would be, and so it didn't look terrible when shown in a cinema. The owner of the Electronovision process had had a hit with a cinema release of a performance by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and he needed a follow-up, and decided that another filmed live performance would be the best way to make use of his process -- TV cameras were much more useful for capturing live performances than film cameras, for a variety of dull technical reasons, and so this was one of the few areas where Electronovision might actually be useful. And so Bill Roden, one of the heads of Electronovision, turned to a TV director named Steve Binder, who was working at the time on the Steve Allen show, one of the big variety shows, second only to Ed Sullivan, and who would soon go on to direct Hullaballoo. Roden asked Binder to make a concert film, shot on video, which would be released on the big screen by American International Pictures (the same organisation with which David Crosby's father worked so often). Binder had contacts with West Coast record labels, and particularly with Lou Adler's organisation, which managed Jan and Dean. He also had been in touch with a promoter who was putting on a package tour of British musicians. So they decided that their next demonstration of the capabilities of the equipment would be a show featuring performers from "all over the world", as the theme song put it -- by which they meant all over the continental United States plus two major British cities. For those acts who didn't have their own bands -- or whose bands needed augmenting -- there was an orchestra, centred around members of the Wrecking Crew, conducted by Jack Nitzsche, and the Blossoms were on hand to provide backing vocals where required. Jan and Dean would host the show and sing the theme song. James Brown had had less pop success than any of the other artists on the show except for the Barbarians, who are now best-known for their appearances on the Nuggets collection of relatively obscure garage rock singles, and whose biggest hit, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" only went to number fifty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] The Barbarians were being touted as the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones, but the general cultural moment of the time can be summed up by that line "You're either a girl or you come from Liverpool" -- which was where the Rolling Stones came from. Or at least, it was where Americans seemed to think they came from given both that song, and the theme song of the TAMI show, written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, which sang about “the Rolling Stones from Liverpool”, and also referred to Brown as "the king of the blues": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Here They Come From All Over The World"] But other than the Barbarians, the TAMI show was one of the few places in which all the major pop music movements of the late fifties and early sixties could be found in one place -- there was the Merseybeat of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Dakotas, already past their commercial peak but not yet realising it, the fifties rock of Chuck Berry, who actually ended up performing one song with Gerry and the Pacemakers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry and Gerry and the Pacemakers: "Maybellene"] And there was the Brill Building pop of Lesley Gore, the British R&B of the Rolling Stones right at the point of their breakthrough, the vocal surf music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and three of the most important Motown acts, with Brown the other representative of soul on the bill. But the billing was a sore point. James Brown's manager insisted that he should be the headliner of the show, and indeed by some accounts the Rolling Stones also thought that they should probably not try to follow him -- though other accounts say that the Stones were equally insistent that they *must* be the headliners. It was a difficult decision, because Brown was much less well known, but it was eventually decided that the Rolling Stones would go on last. Most people talking about the event, including most of those involved with the production, have since stated that this was a mistake, because nobody could follow James Brown, though in interviews Mick Jagger has always insisted that the Stones didn't have to follow Brown, as there was a recording break between acts and they weren't even playing to the same audience -- though others have disputed that quite vigorously. But what absolutely everyone has agreed is that Brown gave the performance of a lifetime, and that it was miraculously captured by the cameras. I say its capture was miraculous because every other act had done a full rehearsal for the TV cameras, and had had a full shot-by-shot plan worked out by Binder beforehand. But according to Steve Binder -- though all the accounts of the show are contradictory -- Brown refused to do a rehearsal -- so even though he had by far the most complex and choreographed performance of the event, Binder and his camera crew had to make decisions by pure instinct, rather than by having an actual plan they'd worked out in advance of what shots to use. This is one of the rare times when I wish this was a video series rather than a podcast, because the visuals are a huge part of this performance -- Brown is a whirlwind of activity, moving all over the stage in a similar way to Jackie Wilson, one of his big influences, and doing an astonishing gliding dance step in which he stands on one leg and moves sideways almost as if on wheels. The full performance is easily findable online, and is well worth seeking out. But still, just hearing the music and the audience's reaction can give some insight: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight" (TAMI Show)] The Rolling Stones apparently watched the show in horror, unable to imagine following that -- though when they did, the audience response was fine: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Around and Around"] Incidentally, Chuck Berry must have been quite pleased with his payday from the TAMI Show, given that as well as his own performance the Stones did one of his songs, as did Gerry and the Pacemakers, as we heard earlier, and the Beach Boys did "Surfin' USA" for which he had won sole songwriting credit. After the TAMI Show, Mick Jagger would completely change his attitude to performing, and would spend the rest of his career trying to imitate Brown's performing style. He was unsuccessful in this, but still came close enough that he's still regarded as one of the great frontmen, nearly sixty years later. Brown kept performing, and his labels kept releasing material, but he was still not allowed to record, until in early 1965 a court reached a ruling -- yes, Brown wasn't signed as a musician to King Records, so he was perfectly within his rights to record with Smash Records. As an instrumentalist. But Brown *was* signed to King Records as a singer, so he was obliged to record vocal tracks for them, and only for them. So until his contract with Smash lapsed, he had to record twice as much material -- he had to keep recording instrumentals, playing piano or organ, for Smash, while recording vocal tracks for King Records. His first new record, released as by "James Brown" rather than the earlier billings of "James Brown and his Orchestra" or "James Brown and the Famous Flames", was for King, and was almost a remake of "Out of Sight", his hit for Smash Records. But even so, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" was a major step forward, and is often cited as the first true funk record. This is largely because of the presence of a new guitarist in Brown's band. Jimmy Nolen had started out as a violin player, but like many musicians in the 1950s he had been massively influenced by T-Bone Walker, and had switched to playing guitar. He was discovered as a guitarist by the bluesman Jimmy Wilson, who had had a minor hit with "Tin Pan Alley": [Excerpt: Jimmy Wilson, "Tin Pan Alley"] Wilson had brought Nolen to LA, where he'd soon parted from Wilson and started working with a whole variety of bandleaders. His first recording came with Monte Easter on Aladdin Records: [Excerpt: Monte Easter, "Blues in the Evening"] After working with Easter, he started recording with Chuck Higgins, and also started recording by himself. At this point, Nolen was just one of many West Coast blues guitarists with a similar style, influenced by T-Bone Walker -- he was competing with Pete "Guitar" Lewis, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and Guitar Slim, and wasn't yet quite as good as any of them. But he was still making some influential records. His version of "After Hours", for example, released under his own name on Federal Records, was a big influence on Roy Buchanan, who would record several versions of the standard based on Nolen's arrangement: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "After Hours"] Nolen had released records on many labels, but his most important early association came from records he made but didn't release. In the mid-fifties, Johnny Otis produced a couple of tracks by Nolen, for Otis' Dig Records label, but they weren't released until decades later: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "Jimmy's Jive"] But when Otis had a falling out with his longtime guitar player Pete "Guitar" Lewis, who was one of the best players in LA but who was increasingly becoming unreliable due to his alcoholism, Otis hired Nolen to replace him. It's Nolen who's playing on most of the best-known recordings Otis made in the late fifties, like "Casting My Spell": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Casting My Spell"] And of course Otis' biggest hit "Willie and the Hand Jive": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] Nolen left Otis after a few years, and spent the early sixties mostly playing in scratch bands backing blues singers, and not recording. It was during this time that Nolen developed the style that would revolutionise music. The style he developed was unique in several different ways. The first was in Nolen's choice of chords. We talked last week about how Pete Townshend's guitar playing became based on simplifying chords and only playing power chords. Nolen went the other way -- while his voicings often only included two or three notes, he was also often using very complex chords with *more* notes than a standard chord. As we discussed last week, in most popular music, the chords are based around either major or minor triads -- the first, third, and fifth notes of a scale, so you have an E major chord, which is the notes E, G sharp, and B: [Excerpt: E major chord] It's also fairly common to have what are called seventh chords, which are actually a triad with an added flattened seventh, so an E7 chord would be the notes E, G sharp, B, and D: [Excerpt: E7 chord] But Nolen built his style around dominant ninth chords, often just called ninth chords. Dominant ninth chords are mostly thought of as jazz chords because they're mildly dissonant. They consist of the first, third, fifth, flattened seventh, *and* ninth of a scale, so an E9 would be the notes E, G sharp, B, D, and F sharp: [Excerpt: E9 chord] Another way of looking at that is that you're playing both a major chord *and* at the same time a minor chord that starts on the fifth note, so an E major and B minor chord at the same time: [Demonstrates Emajor, B minor, E9] It's not completely unknown for pop songs to use ninth chords, but it's very rare. Probably the most prominent example came from a couple of years after the period we're talking about, when in mid-1967 Bobby Gentry basically built the whole song "Ode to Billie Joe" around a D9 chord, barely ever moving off it: [Excerpt: Bobby Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe"] That shows the kind of thing that ninth chords are useful for -- because they have so many notes in them, you can just keep hammering on the same chord for a long time, and the melody can go wherever it wants and will fit over it. The record we're looking at, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", actually has three chords in it -- it's basically a twelve-bar blues, like "Out of Sight" was, just with these ninth chords sometimes used instead of more conventional chords -- but as Brown's style got more experimental in future years, he would often build songs with no chord changes at all, just with Nolen playing a single ninth chord throughout. There's a possibly-apocryphal story, told in a few different ways, but the gist of which is that when auditioning Nolen's replacement many years later, Brown asked "Can you play an E ninth chord?" "Yes, of course" came the reply. "But can you play an E ninth chord *all night*?" The reason Brown asked this, if he did, is that playing like Nolen is *extremely* physically demanding. Because the other thing about Nolen's style is that he was an extremely percussive player. In his years backing blues musicians, he'd had to play with many different drummers, and knew they weren't always reliable timekeepers. So he'd started playing like a drummer himself, developing a technique called chicken-scratching, based on the Bo Diddley style he'd played with Otis, where he'd often play rapid, consistent, semiquaver chords, keeping the time himself so the drummer didn't have to. Other times he'd just play single, jagged-sounding, chords to accentuate the beat. He used guitars with single-coil pickups and turned the treble up and got rid of all the midrange, so the sound would cut through no matter what. As well as playing full-voiced chords, he'd also sometimes mute all the strings while he strummed, giving a percussive scratching sound rather than letting the strings ring. In short, the sound he got was this: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] And that is the sound that became funk guitar. If you listen to Jimmy Nolen's playing on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", that guitar sound -- chicken scratched ninth chords -- is what every funk guitarist after him based their style on. It's not Nolen's guitar playing in its actual final form -- that wouldn't come until he started using wah wah pedals, which weren't mass produced until early 1967 -- but it's very clear when listening to the track that this is the birth of funk. The original studio recording of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" actually sounds odd if you listen to it now -- it's slower than the single, and lasts almost seven minutes: [Excerpt: James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (parts 1, 2, and 3)"] But for release as a single, it was sped up a semitone, a ton of reverb was added, and it was edited down to just a few seconds over two minutes. The result was an obvious hit single: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] Or at least, it was an obvious hit single to everyone except Syd Nathan, who as you'll have already predicted by now didn't like the song. Indeed according to Brown, he was so disgusted with the record that he threw his acetate copy of it onto the floor. But Brown got his way, and the single came out, and it became the biggest hit of Brown's career up to that point, not only giving him his first R&B number one since "Try Me" seven years earlier, but also crossing over to the pop charts in a way he hadn't before. He'd had the odd top thirty or even top twenty pop single in the past, but now he was in the top ten, and getting noticed by the music business establishment in a way he hadn't earlier. Brown's audience went from being medium-sized crowds of almost exclusively Black people with the occasional white face, to a much larger, more integrated, audience. Indeed, at the Grammys the next year, while the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector and the whole Motown stable were overlooked in favour of the big winners for that year Roger Miller, Herb Alpert, and the Anita Kerr Singers, even an organisation with its finger so notoriously off the pulse of the music industry as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Grammys, couldn't fail to find the pulse of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and gave Brown the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues record, beating out the other nominees "In the Midnight Hour", "My Girl", "Shotgun" by Junior Walker, and "Shake" by Sam Cooke. From this point on, Syd Nathan would no longer argue with James Brown as to which of his records would be released. After nine years of being the hardest working man in showbusiness, James Brown had now become the Godfather of Soul, and his real career had just begun.
One of the most fascinating things we love about musicians, is when they decide to completely change their direction. Whether thats musical direction or they simply fall out of love with the business. We have all experienced moments when our favourite music icons leave their fans confused and scratching their heads, wondering what happened. Or in some cases when it's an ex band member, who completely rips the band apart with them to go do something else. In this podcast episode we look at a few female artists that interest both Ian and Mick and explore the music they started creating and then suddenly decided to change direction in music or actually quit altogether. This episode looks at their reasons for doing so, was it the right choice or should they have stayed? Our hosts discuss stars such as Alanis Morisette, Anne Briggs and Bobby Gentry and the fascinating stories on both their music and lives.
This time around the guys talk about Bobby Gentry's 1967 Classic "Ode To Billie Joe". Spoiler Alert, Eric gets to talk about murder....again. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lyricsandlaughs/message
This time around the guys talk about Bobby Gentry's 1967 Classic "Ode To Billie Joe". Spoiler Alert, Eric gets to talk about murder....again.
En El Guateque de Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es; domingos, 22,05h) rescatamos olvidadas melodías del ayer. Le mostramos nuestra eterna gratitud a los voluntarios de la Cruz Roja y Media Luna Roja (Ana María Parra). Mayo es el mes de las flores, y también el mes que vinieron al mundo muchos músicos insignes a los que recordamos: Lita Torelló, Donovan, Raphael, Steve Winwood, Eric Burdon, Stevie Wonder, Trini López, Ricky Nelson...En 1970, Bobby Gentry cantante norteamericana de folk, llevo su tema "I'll never fall in love again" a los primeros puestos de las listas y, como era norma habitual de la época, lo lanzó también en castellano. " Canto al sol" era un canto a la madre naturaleza. Sencillo extraído del LP "Maria Ostiz" (Hispavox, 1968), segundo grande de esta artista (nuestra Joan Baez particular, nunca suficientemente reconocida) y segundo también con ese mismo título. "A Pesar de Todo" (Compañía Fonográfica Española, 1972) es uno de los grandes discos de Hilario Camacho, para cuya grabación se desplazó a Londres y a Bretaña, arropando las canciones y la voz de Hilario con un gran plantel de músicos que realizaron un excelente trabajo en la instrumentación de las canciones. De la gran Gelu recuperamos su fabulosa versión de The Way You Look Tonight ... Lo Que Te Gustó De Mí (1962) compuesta por Jerome Kern. Billie Holliday la interpretó en la pelicula “En alas de la danza”, y en ella nos narra como cuando estás enamorado no importa el frío del mundo, con sólo pensar en él/ella todo se vuelve cálido. Los Extraños demostraron gran habilidad para hacer suyos temas poco conocidos en España, pero que habían triunfado en otros países. En "Do Re Mi” , de Earl King, Los Extraños pretenden enseñarnos la escala musical. Escrita por los hermanos Gibb (Bee Gees) " I started a joke supuestamente trata sobre alguien que ha hecho o dicho algo horriblemente mal; una canción muy espiritual con una melodía inquietantemente hermosa. El autor de la canción Chritsiansen, interpretada por France Gall, fue Jacques Datin (habitualmente con Maurice Vidalin a las letras), quizá el segundo mejor proveedor de canciones para France Gall. Una canción de puro pop veraniego, de melodía inolvidable: la historia de un romance de verano entre la protagonista de la canción y un hippy noruego que tocaba su guitarra en las esquinas de la Costa Azul. En enero de 1961, ya con su verdadero nombre, Gene Pitney logró salir del anonimato con el sencillo “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away”, en el que tocó todos los instrumentos. La canción fue el primer sencillo de Pitney en las listas de éxitos y pasó 8 semanas en la lista Billboard Hot 100. Nos despedimos con esta diosa francesa del ye-yé , Ria Bartok - la 'otra' Sylvie Vartan-, que participó en 1965 en el Festival de la Canción Mediterránea en Barcelona, y grabó este disco en castellano el mismo año: 'Algo bueno me va a pasar'. Y espero que a ti también.
This week, the 6th edition of the theme Guys and Dolls includes another twelve great songs titled with a person’s name. Paul Peterson refers to ‘Sandy’, Janis Joplin is with ‘Bobby McGee’ and Bobby Gentry remembers ‘Billie Joe’. The Australian […] http://media.blubrry.com/yesterday_once_more/p/joy.org.au/yesterdayoncemore/wp-content/uploads/sites/157/2020/12/2020-11-29-YesterdayOnceMore-GuysAndDolls6.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:39 — 48.2MB) Subscribe or Follow Us: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS The post Guys and Dolls – 6 appeared first on Yesterday Once More.
Hoy queremos volver a señalar que el tema instrumental que abre y cierre cada uno de nuestros programas fue un regalo exclusivo de un gran amigo como Tony Luz, pionero del rock ‘n’ roll en España. Él fue autor e intérprete único de la sintonía de TOMA UNO. Y Tony Luz murió hace exactamente tres años, por lo que queremos compartir con vosotros lo mucho que le echamos de menos desde entonces. El 29 de noviembre de 1975, hace exactamente 45 años, Neil Young grabó "Like a Hurricane" en el Broken Arrow Ranch in Woodside, California, aunque no saldría a la luz hasta dos años más tarde, cuando se editó en single y formó parte del álbum American Stars 'n Bars. El noveno de los 10 discos que componen el segundo volumen de sus Neil Young Archives recién publicado, se abre con aquella canción que el canadiense compuso en la parte trasera de un DeSoto Suburban, el coche de finales de los años 40 que pertenecía a su vecino Taylor Phelps en La Honda, un pequeño pueblo del condado de San Mateo, en California. Por entonces se estaba recuperando de una operación en las cuerdas vocales que le impedían cantar y toda su energía la expresaba a través de la guitarra. Cubriendo tan solo cuatro años de su carrera, de 1972 a 1976, en el segundo volumen de su entrega de archivos personales, Neil Young se fija en la que todos consideramos su etapa más prolífica, e incluye 12 canciones nunca lanzadas en ningún formato, mientras que 50 son versiones inéditas de canciones conocidas. Entre los temas no publicados hasta ahora encontramos esta grabación junto a su paisana Joni Mitchell, que el 26 de agosto de 1973, llegó al Studio Instrument Rentals de Los Ángeles, donde Neil Young estaba sacando adelante Tonight’s the Night junto a los guitarristas Ben Keith y Nils Lofgren, el batería Ralph Molina y el bajista Billy Talbot. Es decir los Santa Monica Flyers. En aquel estudio surgió una versión desconocida hasta ahora de “Raised on Robbery”, la conversación de una prostituta que intenta ligar con un hombre solitario en un hotel, sin éxito. Al año siguiente sería el single de anticipo del álbum Court and Spark de la también artista canadiense. Kindred Spirits es uno de los discos de versiones más interesantes que hemos escuchado en mucho tiempo. Larkin Poe, sus protagonistas, han utilizado la variedad de estilos elegidos para moverse por una variedad de amplios espacios sonoros que abarca desde Robert Johnson a Post Malone, pasando por Lenny Kravitz, Allman Brothers, Elvis Presley, Elton John, los Moody Blues, Derek And The Dominos y Neil Young. En este último caso, las hermanas Lovell han elegido “Rockin’ In The Free World”, una canción que partió de una frase de Frank Sampedro cuando pensaban hacer un concierto en la Unión Soviética en 1989 y que formó parte en su álbum Freedom, con dos versiones, una eléctrica y otra acústica al estilo de “Hey Hey My My” en Rust Never Sleep. Hablaba de George Bush padre, del Ayatollah Khomeini y de Jesse Jackson. Cuando Trump se presentó a las elecciones en 2016 utilizó la canción contra la voluntad del canadiense. Kelsey Waldon fue el único fichaje en vida de John Prine de su sello Oh Boy!, por deseo expreso de su dueño, el fallecido músico de Illinois a causa del COVID-19. Nativa de Monkey’s Eyebrow, en Kentucky, tiene una extraordinaria capacidad para componer canciones muy personales que abarcan las más distintas facetas de la condición humana desde su visión como sureña de un país como el suyo. Es por eso que los derechos humanos se han convertido en uno de los focos de su último EP, They’ll Never Keep Us Down, donde canta sobre la injusticia racial o las condiciones laborales de los mineros del carbón de su tierra natal. Para ello se ha acogido a siete canciones de músicos tan dispares como Nina Simone, Hazel Dickens, Bob Dylan, Neil Young o Kristofferson. Su versión de "I Wish I Knew How It would Feel to Be Free", un tema que se convirtió en himno en pro de los derechos civiles en Estados Unidos durante los años 60 y que Nina Simone hizo muy popular en el 67, ha contado con Devon Gilfillian en el apoyo vocal. El pasado jueves 12, Lucinda Williams hizo público el segundo de los seis conciertos temáticos que ha grabado con el título de Lu's Jukebox en apoyo de promotores y salas de conciertos y que irá distribuyendo hasta finales de año. Esta vez se trataba de Southern Soul From Memphis To Muscle Shoals And More, con una selección de 10 versiones e canciones de rhythm and blues y una de cierre que suponía recordar su álbum Car Wheels on a Gravel Road gracias a “Still I Long for Your Kiss”. Lucinda recordó a Brook Benton, Ann Pebbles, Etta James, Al Green, Otis Redding, Bobby Gentry o Joe South entre otros y, por supuesto, no olvidó a Barbara Lynn, cuyo “You’ll Lose a Good Thing” de 1962 también cantó Aretha Franklin e incluso fue versionada por Freddy Fender en el 1976, llevándola al No.1 de las listas de country. La canción que anticipó el último álbum de Lucinda Williams, Good Souls Better Angels, fue "Man Without A Soul", tres años después de que revisara aquel Sweet Old World de 1992. En ese registro se dedicó a abordar los problemas que les son más cercanos y, por supuesto, no ha podido obviar las cuestiones políticas, un terreno en el que, además, entró en profundidad. Hablamos de un disco con evidentes tintes de blues, elementos de rock y un poderoso protagonismo de la guitarra de Stuart Mathis. Ahora esa canción ha obtenido una nominación al premio Grammy a la mejor canción de raíz Americana, compartido con su marido, Tom Overby, que compuso el tema con ella. Desde Carolina del Sur, el guitarrista Marcus King se ha convertido en una de las grandes realidades de la música Americana con acento sureño. Ahora al lado del productor Dan Auerbach, ha conseguido precisamente la nominación al mejor álbum de Americana con El Dorado, el primero de sus álbumes como solista tras su etapa como cabeza visible de la Marcus King Band. Un disco que incluye piezas tan rotundas como “The Well”, compuesta por él, Auerbach y Ronnie Bowman, que sirvió en su momento como primera escucha del trabajo con un impactante trabajo a la guitarra. Acaba de cumplir 28 años y Billy Strings, que recibió el apodo de su tía, se ha convertido en un instrumentista con una envidiable habilidad para interpretar las distintas formas en que se manifiesta el bluegrass. Este joven músico de Lansing, en el estado de Michigan, es la gran realidad de un género muy revitalizado en este siglo XXI. Home, su último álbum, aspira a llevarse un Grammy como mejor álbum de bluegrass, un regalo sonoro impregnado de miradas al pasado que recuerdan a las jam bands, y también a los grandes del jazz o del bluegrass. Son los sonidos puros que, como en “Hollow Heart”, memorizan de dónde viene y le activan a encontrar nuevos horizontes. Si la Country Music Association se olvidó mencionar a John Prine en su última gala de entrega de premios, la Academia de la Música no lo ha hecho y ha nominado al Grammy al artista como mejor interpretación de Americana del año por “I Remember Everything”, la última canción grabada por el mítico artista que nos arrebató el Covid-19 el pasado mes de abril. Competirá también con Lucinda Williams y su marido para lograr ser la mejor canción de raíz Americana. "I Remember Everything" está compuesta por Prine y su buen amigo Pat McLaughlin, contando recuerdos del pasado que dejan una marca indeleble. En enero de 2018, la USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative publicó un estudio sobre la industria musical, señalando que la mujer necesitaba un mínimo de seis años para situarse al mismo nivel del hombre. She Is The Music, es una organización que busca cerrar esa brecha, apoyando a las mujeres en todos los aspectos de la industria de la música, aumentando sus oportunidades y su visibilidad, procurando que la próxima generación de mujeres consiga roles de liderazgo en esa industria. The Highwomen han tomado la iniciativa junto a She Is The Music para organizar campus de composición femeninos y ayudar a financiar programas de tutoría. “Crowded Table”, una canción que Natalie Hemby y Brandi Carlile han compuesto con Lori McKenna y que se ha convertido en todo un himno desde que las escucharon estrenarlo en el Newport Folk Festival del año pasado. Ahora, sus tres compositoras aspiran a llevarse el Grammy como mejor canción country. A lo largo de su carrera, Linda Ronstadt ha cantado temas de todos los estilos musicales imaginables, desde country a ópera y comedia musical, pasando por folk, rhythm'n'blues, rock'n'roll, pop o música latina. En todos los casos, su voz ha brillado tanto que se ha convertido en una de las vocalistas femeninas de mayor prestigio. Su segundo álbum en solitario, Silk Purse, cumplió esta primavera medio siglo desde su publicación, siendo recordado por canciones como “Long Long Time”, una balada exquisita que llegó a ser nominada a los premios Grammy y en el que hablaba de haber hecho todo lo posible por retener a su pareja. Ahora, 50 años después, la legendaria artista de Arizona ve como su documental Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice está nominada para llevarse el fonógrafo dorado como mejor película musical. Escuchar audio
Emisión T02E38 de "Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar". En esta ocasión nos deleitamos con Il Maniscalco Maldestro, Adam and the Ants, The Go-Betweens, Altered Images, Throwing Muses, XTC, Brian Eno & David Byrne, Bessie Smith, Judy Henske, Bobby Gentry, Psychic TV, Abigail Grush, Deerhoof y Tom Tom Club Además de todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Y si quieren convidar con un cafecito☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/lascosasquehay Programa emitido originalmente el 22 de noviembre de 2020 por FM La Tribu, 88.7, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Emisión T02E39 de "Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar". En esta ocasión nos deleitamos con Il Maniscalco Maldestro, Adam and the Ants, The Go-Betweens, Altered Images, Throwing Muses, XTC, Brian Eno & David Byrne, Bessie Smith, Judy Henske, Bobby Gentry, Psychic TV, Abigail Grush, Deerhoof y Tom Tom Club Además de todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Y si quieren convidar con un cafecito☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/lascosasquehay Programa emitido originalmente el 22 de noviembre de 2020 por FM La Tribu, 88.7, Buenos Aires, Argentina
DE SANDWICH ZONDAG 1 november 2020 Evergreen Stemweek Uur 1 1. The shadow of your smile – Tony Bennett 2. Weet je wat we doen – Conny Vandenbos 3. Hijo de la luna – Mecano 4. Mozart Symphony No. 40 – Waldo de los Rios 5. I’ll never fall in love again – Bobby Gentry 6. Autumn leaves – Eva Cassidy 7. Droomland – Johnny Jordaan & Willy Alberti 8. Il volo – Zucchero 9. Classical gas – Mason Williams 10. How glad I am – Nancy Wilson 11. Andorra – Colin Blunstone 12. Lemon tree – Fools Garden 13. De bom valt nooit – Herman van Veen 14. Dolce Paola – Adamo 15. Who pays the ferryman – Yannis Markopoulos Uur 2 1. Chicago – Graham Nash 2. Prachtig mooie dag – Daniel Lohues 3. Formidable – Stromae 4. Praying for time – George Michael 5. Where is the love – Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway 6. Brothers in arms – Dire Straits 7. Dat ik je mis – Maaike Ouboter 8. Take five – Dave Brubeck Quartet 9. Gli impermeabili – Paolo Conte 10. None of us are free – Solomon Burke 11. De neus umhoeg – Rowwen Heze 12. Thanks for the love – Earth & Fire 13. Soul limbo – Booker T & The MG’s
For years, whenever she performed a concert, Patty Smyth heard the same question from fans: “People would be like, ‘When are you gonna give us new music? When are you gonna give us new music?' I kept saying, “I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it… IT'S ABOUT TIME is Smyth doing it — for the first time in 28 years, not counting the 2015 holiday album COME ON DECEMBER. And on the eight-song set, produced in Nashville by Grammy Award-winner Dann Huff, the veteran songstress is doing it with the same passion, fire and provocative temperament that she's displayed since her ferocious arrival with the band Scandal in 1982, except now with the perspective and wisdom of three more decades of life and legacy she's attained during the interim. “I've been touring and playing shows with the same band for 12 years, just having a blast,” says Smyth, a Brooklyn native who now resides in Malibu and New York City with her husband, pro tennis legend John McEnroe. “I was always writing, but I didn't really think about, ‘Should I put out a record?' It's so difficult right now, so I didn't know whether I should do it or not. Then I finally went into the zone of writing these songs I felt were poignant and relevant for me, and I started to realize this is a real thing that's happening and just went with it.” Smyth's instincts, of course, have established a career that's made her something of a legend in her own right as one of the foremost singers, and not just female singers, in rock. With the band Scandal, Smyth filled radio during the early 80s with indelible hits such as “Goodbye To You,” “Love's Got a Line on You” and “The Warrior,” a Top 10 smash that also topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart. She didn't miss a beat after the band's dissolution, either, following with a pair of well-received solo albums (NEVER ENOUGH and the Roy Bittan-produced PATTY SMYTH) and more hits, including “Never Enough” and “Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough,” a duet with Don Henley that vaulted Smyth to the top of the Adult Contemporary charts, and to No. 1 in Canada. Along the way Smyth was also asked to replace David Lee Roth in Van Halen (she was eight months pregnant so the time wasn't right) and made guest appearances on the Hooters' NERVOUS NIGHT album and a couple of Henley's platinum releases. Her “Look What Love Has done” for the film JUNIOR was nominated for Academy and Grammy Awards, and Smyth's “Wish I Were You” was a soundtrack theme song for the 1998 box office smash ARMAGEDDON. But it's no great secret, and maybe even a source of pride, that Smyth — who reunited with Scandal for a time during the 00s — has spent most of the past two decades below the proverbial radar. Family is the main reason, raising a brood of six mine, his and ours with McEnroe and giving those duties the same determined and passionate priority Smyth gave her music career. “I was literally drowning in kids!” she says with a laugh — noting that it was daughter Ruby who encouraged Smyth to be part of the VH1 BANDS REUNITED episode in 2004 that resurrected Scandal. “My life just got too big for me to get around it. I've lived it, and it was great. But I had to step back (from music); I just didn't think I would step back for as long as I did.” With the children all grown (youngest daughter Ava is 21), Smyth found herself using songwriting to take stock of where she finds herself in life now and what she's learned over those intervening years as a wife, a mother and a community member as well as an artist who hasn't entirely shed the chippy defiance of her youth. “Y'know, here we are. We still love music, we still like to have fun, but we're in our fifties — How the hell did that happen! It went really fast, y'know. And for me that's a little bit of a bittersweet thing. It's a privilege to get older and you're lucky to get older, but you do lose things.” Recording IT'S ABOUT TIME — which also includes covers of Bobby Gentry's “Ode to Billie Joe” and Tom Waits' “Downtown Train,” both staples in Smyth's live show — in Nashville was a treat, meanwhile. (She recorded “Downtown Train” before, in fact — on her debut solo album, two years after Waits' original version and two years before Rod Stewart's hit rendition.) She wrote songs with a variety of collaborators, including good pal Liz Rose, while she's known producer Huff since his days in the rock band Giant; He's since gone on to win Producer of the Year and Musician of the Year awards from the Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music, helming hits for the likes of Shania Twain, Keith Urban, Carrie Underwood, Martina McBride, Celine Dion, Kelly Clarkson and scores of others. “I knew him as a guitar player. When I found out he was a big producer I was like, ‘Do you want to work with me?'” Smyth recalls. They recorded primarily at legendary Blackbird Studios, with co-producer Ilya Toshinskly handling acoustic guitar and a crack band that included guitarist Derek Wells, keyboardist Charlie Judge, bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas and drummer Chris McHugh. “All I ever wanted to do was sing and perform, and when I discovered I could write I was so friggin' happy,” Smyth says. “I want to just keep getting better and more disciplined and keep moving forward. My No.1 priority, my kids, are all good and grown now, so the music can be it for me again, and I'm really enjoying that.”
In deze aflevering van Ladies Time zulke uiteenlopende karakters. Van chanteuse Mireille Mathieu tot de Libanese legende Fairuz. De enigmatische Bobby Gentry heeft meer dan 50 jaar na haar iconische plaat The Delta Sweete nog altijd navolgsters, zoals Sarah Jarosz. En mondharmonica-speelster Hermine Deurlo blaast met een wel heel bekend deuntje het hele verhaaltje uit...
David Hill - All Shook Up (1957) The original recording. From Discogs.com: Birtha was one of the leading female rock bands performing during the early 1970s. The band consisted of four women: Shele Pinizzotto (guitar), Rosemary Butler (bass), Sherry Hagler (keyboards) and Liver Favela (drums). All four members of the group performed lead vocals and harmonies. Liver was the last member to join Birtha in 1968. The group immediately started playing the club circuit and toured from California to Alaska. From 1968 to 1971 Birtha worked to tighten and refine their rock sound and in 1971 they started writing their own material, most by themselves, occasionally in partnership with other parties, including Mark Wickman and Gabriel Mekler. Birtha signed a record contract with Dunhill Records in 1972 and recorded their first album "Birtha" with record producer Gabriel Mekler and engineers Dave Hassinger and Val Garay. After the release of their first album, Birtha began playing rock concerts and clubs throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. While taking breaks in their home town, Los Angeles, they would often play The Whiskey and The Troubadour and frequently played a club in Glendale, CA called The Sopwith Camel. In 1973 Birtha recorded their second album, "Can't Stop The Madness" with producer and engineer Christopher Huston. The band was on the road for more than 250 days a year and played with groups like, Fleetwood Mac, Alice Cooper, Poco, Black Oak Arkansas, Cheech and Chong, The Kinks, B.B. King, Three Dog Night, James Gang and many more. The band broke up in 1975 and all the members went their separate ways. Birtha - Dirty Work (1973) Birtha - All This Love (1973) Birtha - Don't Let it Get You Down (1973) Birtha - Free Spirit (1972) National Guard Session with Skitch Henderson, Bobby Gentry, and Glen Campbell. (1969) Radio Moscow Signals - Treachery of the violent kind. Chuck Barris Syndicate - Donnie (1968) Eddie Rambeau - Summertime Guy (1962) Freddy Cannon - At The Disco Down (1980) Strange, strange, strange. Freddy Cannon - Hey Punk Rocker (1980) ? Peter Ivers - In Heaven (1977) From the movie Eraserhead. The Avant Garde - Naturally Stoned (1968) Luie Luie - Sweet and Tender Touchy (1974) Luie Luie - Tasty Touchy (1974) The Avant Garde - Honey and Gall (1968) The Avant Garde - Well Well Well (1968) The Avant Garde - Fly With Me (1968) The Deep - Crystal Nite (1966) From Wikipedia: Psychedelic Moods is the debut album by the American psychedelic rock band, The Deep, and was released on Cameo-Parkway Records in October 1966. The album was one of the first pieces to produce a consistent psychedelic theme throughout the whole LP. All of the material featured was originally composed by the band. Despite the conflicting dates, it is generally considered the first album to use the term "psychedelic" in its title. The Deep - Psychedelic Moon (1966) The Deep - Trip #76 (1966) The Executives - Moving In A Circle (1968) The Executives - Parenthesis (1969) Written by J. Webb. The Executives - Sit Down I Think I Love You (1968) Les Humphries Singers - Cum On Feel The Noize/Breaking Me Up/Herbie Knows How (1974) The Executives - My Aim Is To Please You (1967) Billy Preston - My Sweet Lord (1970) Muzak of some kind John Simon - My Name Is Jack (1968) Written by John Simon after he was recommended to Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary to help with the movie, “You Are What You Eat”, for which he did the soundtrack, writing and performing most of the tracks, including this song. The movie is unwatchable. Sammy Davis Jr. - You Can Count On Me (Theme from Hawaii 5-O) (1976) The Sunrays - Bye, Baby, Bye (1966) 13th Floor Elevators - Zale's Jewelry Ad (1967?) Bobbi Blake - Too Many Babies (?) Song-poem Mrs. Marshall manages to make dinner for the family with the aid of the Robot. Ed Marvin reporting. Caloric a-la-carte Oven promo.
In deze aflevering een aantal liedjes die geen covers zijn maar wel verdacht veel op elkaar lijken. Zoals te beluisteren bij The Prettty Things en The Who, Moon Martin en Robert Palmer en Nicole Atkins en Bobby Gentry. Verder verscheen de definitieve biografie over Robert Johnson: Up Jumped The Devil, waarin heel wat heilige huisjes sneuvelen. Zoals de mythe dat hij zijn ziel aan de duivel verkocht zou hebben. Vandaar nog maar eens naar de roots van de meest legendarische blueszanger allertijden.
The former Editor of British Vogue remembers her very first party, a glamorous weekend in Paris (sans parents), and the many sartorial adventures that inspired her new book. Anecdotes interspersed with music: Patti Smith, Gloria: In Excelsis Deo; Bobby Gentry, Ode to Billy Joe; Leonard Cohen, Suzanne; Emmylou Harris, White Shoes; Peter Noone & The Herman’s Hermits, Lady Barbara.
Strong song writing is always a wonderful part of the musical machinery that give so much, and truly delivers on the emotional front. On this episode of Euphoric Musicality Radio, great music is bursting at the seams with songs from artists that are giving credence for their love of musicians who inspire them to find their path and their voice. Mercury Reve assemble may fine singers that need to be heard on this tribute of Delta Sweetie; a truly revolutionary record by the magnificent Bobby Gentry. The homage is provided to a lost classic album is simply exercised. Throw in artists who are in the vein of Joni Mitchell, throw in some modern cuts for good measure, and all the pieces are falling into place for a transcendent ride. Join us if you are feeling frisky and want to give your earholes musical ambrosia, with surprises! For playlist visit: www.euphoricmusicalityradio.ca/episodes Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/euphoricmusicalityradio Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/euphmusicradioFollow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/euphoricmusicalityradio E-mail: euphoricmusicalityradio@gmail.comWebsite: www.euphoricmusicalityradio.ca Credits:EMR Host: CurtisEMR Producer Lesley
Lögin sem hljóma í þættinum nutu vinsælda árið 1969: Söknuður með Roof Tops, Dizzy með Tommy Roe, Il Paradiso/(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice með Ptty Pravo/Amen Corner, Build Me A Buttercup með The Foundations, Suvar Sugar með The Archies, Tracy með The Cuff Links, I'll Never Fall In Love Again með Bobby Gentry, My Cherie Amour með Stevie Wonder, Proud Mary og Bad Moon Rising með Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aquarius/Let The Sunshine með The 5th Dimension, Pinball Wizard með The Who og Þó líði ár og öld með Björgvini Halldórssyni.
Lögin sem hljóma í þættinum nutu vinsælda árið 1969: Söknuður með Roof Tops, Dizzy með Tommy Roe, Il Paradiso/(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice með Ptty Pravo/Amen Corner, Build Me A Buttercup með The Foundations, Suvar Sugar með The Archies, Tracy með The Cuff Links, I'll Never Fall In Love Again með Bobby Gentry, My Cherie Amour með Stevie Wonder, Proud Mary og Bad Moon Rising með Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aquarius/Let The Sunshine með The 5th Dimension, Pinball Wizard með The Who og Þó líði ár og öld með Björgvini Halldórssyni.
Lögin sem hljóma í þættinum nutu vinsælda árið 1969: Söknuður með Roof Tops, Dizzy með Tommy Roe, Il Paradiso/(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice með Ptty Pravo/Amen Corner, Build Me A Buttercup með The Foundations, Suvar Sugar með The Archies, Tracy með The Cuff Links, I'll Never Fall In Love Again með Bobby Gentry, My Cherie Amour með Stevie Wonder, Proud Mary og Bad Moon Rising með Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aquarius/Let The Sunshine með The 5th Dimension, Pinball Wizard með The Who og Þó líði ár og öld með Björgvini Halldórssyni.
Lögin sem hljóma í þættinum nutu vinsælda árið 1969: Söknuður með Roof Tops, Dizzy með Tommy Roe, Il Paradiso/(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice með Ptty Pravo/Amen Corner, Build Me A Buttercup með The Foundations, Suvar Sugar með The Archies, Tracy með The Cuff Links, I'll Never Fall In Love Again með Bobby Gentry, My Cherie Amour með Stevie Wonder, Proud Mary og Bad Moon Rising með Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aquarius/Let The Sunshine með The 5th Dimension, Pinball Wizard með The Who og Þó líði ár og öld með Björgvini Halldórssyni.
In de uitzending van vandaag veel muziek uit Texas met onder meer Don Walser, James Steinle en Hayes Carll. Steve Earle maakte een tributeplaat rond het werk van Guy Clark, exact tien jaar na zijn hommage aan Townes van Zandt. En de indie-rockers van Mercury Rev deden een remake van Bobby Gentry's tweede album uit 1968 getiteld Delta Sweete Revisited met allemaal dames op zang.
In the first hour of the show I look at some new releases and our UK Country Artist Of The Week is Lisa Wright. Our Album Of The Week is Bobby Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited by Mercury Rev. In the second hour Dina plays more of her favourite Country tracks. Please note - Although the show was recorded for broadcast on the said date the actual broadcast date may be later. You can contact myself or Dina at redrosecountryuk@gmail.com If you enjoy the show please share this post on social media to help promote the show
In the first hour of the show I look at some new releases and our UK Country Artist Of The Week is Lisa Wright. Our Album Of The Week is Bobby Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited by Mercury Rev. In the second hour Dina plays more of her favourite Country tracks. Please note - Although the show was recorded for broadcast on the said date the actual broadcast date may be later. You can contact myself or Dina at redrosecountryuk@gmail.com If you enjoy the show please share this post on social media to help promote the show
Episode #16 with music from Bobby Gentry, Kasey Musgrave, The Band, Kristofferson Blackberry Smoke and more. Plus stories about naps, turkeys and other exciting topics.
Rowland Salley has been the bassist with Chris Isaak & Silvertone since 1985. His song “Killing the Blues,” won the Grammy Award with the duet by Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin, and Alison Krauss of Union Station on the October, 2007 Rounder release “Raising Sand.” The song, originally recorded by Rowland on his solo record “Killing the Blues,” has also been covered by John Prine, Shawn Colvin, Chris Smithers, and many others. As a bass player, he has played and/or recorded with Bobby Gentry, the Traum Brothers, Ian and Sylvia, Joan Baez, John Prine, Shawn Colvin, Lucinda Williams, Maria Muldaur and others, and created an instructional DVD called “Learning Electric Bass.” Rowland also paints, and his watercolor paintings have been displayed in the San Francisco Presidio, San Francisco, and a selection of them are reproduced for sale as postcards in the San Francisco area. His documentary film, ‘Why the Artist Creates,’ won a national Silver Telly award, and was nominated for an Emmy. He also has a cool dog named Woody. Join us as we explore this amazing and creative artist’s music story. The MOTR Show is the audio podcast for Musicians On The Record with David Ward. Subscribe now to be updated on the latest episodes! You can also watch all our interviews on our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/MusiciansOnTheRecord?sub_confirmation=1 and our website at www.MusiciansOnTheRecord.com See More MOTR! -On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MusiciansOnTheRecord/ -On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/MusiciansOnTheRecord?sub_confirmation=1 -On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/musiciansontherecord/ -On Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidwardMOTR -On the Web: www.MusiciansOnTheRecord.com Never miss another MOTR Interview again! Sign up for our free newsletter at http://bit.ly/MOTRNewsletter ************************************** Music: http://www.purple-planet.com Copyright © 2018 Musicians On The Record
Sluit om 23:00 uur je weekend of met twee uur MusicTrails met Marc Stakenburg op 40UP Radio. Muziek van Albert King, Sister Rosetta Tharp, Rufus, The Band, The Jayhawks, Bobby Gentry, Townes van Zandt en Aretha Franklin.
Sluit om 23:00 uur je weekend of met twee uur MusicTrails met Marc Stakenburg op 40UP Radio. Muziek van Albert King, Sister Rosetta Tharp, Rufus, The Band, The Jayhawks, Bobby Gentry, Townes van Zandt en Aretha Franklin.
Miles Davis, Bobby Gentry, Lost Gospel Ensemble, fatuomata Diawara, Sister Nancy, Shinehead, The Clash, Saidah Bab Talibah, Freestylers, Jolly Boys, Braids, DJ FoodPopulation, Gated Communities, eradicating threat, Wild Rose, flexibility, income inequality, Israel's fence, Brevik vs Sheikh Mohammed, Norway vs Guantanamo
Welcome to another episode of A Buddhist Podcast. On tonights show we have a special guest, the wonderful Peter Morris! Peter talks about a fundamental aspect of Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism, the Gohonzon. Karen reads an amazing experience from the lovely Erica Holding who lives in California! We have great music as well! Tonight we have Howard Jones playing Love Never Wasted from his new album Ordinary Heroes. From the Podsafe Music Network we have Bobby Gentry singing Goldie Hawn. We also have, by special permission from the Lovespirals, their brand new track called Shine from their new album which drops this week, Future Past. You can get copies of the album signed by Ryan and Anji from their website and a free digital download. Thank you so much for listening to the show and for your support, we never take it for granted and really do appreciate it. Have a truly wonderful week!
Hot Music Tonight © 2009 by Spider Robinson Music: Tom Rush, Swamp Valley Ladybugs, Women's Chain Gang (1939), Tres Femmes, James Taylor & Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Bobby Gentry & Donovan, Jim Croce, Django Reinhardt playing electric guitar w/ Duke Ellington Orchestra, Nobutake Ito and the Swing Niglots of Tokyo, Celso Machado, Todd Butler, Todd Butler w/ Spider Robinson, Spider Robinson folkaoke tracks, Todd Butler & Doug Cox, Dori Legge & Kathy Rubbico.
Slow Sculpture © 2009 by Spider Robinson Reading: SLOW SCULPTURE by Theodore Sturgeon. Music: Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara, Richard Galliano & Gonzalo Rubalcaba, James Taylor & Bobby Gentry, Chet Atkins & Paul Yandell.
Tonights lecture on Chapter 2 covers the phrase, Sho-i sha ga. Nyorai hoben. Chiken hara-mitsu. Kai i gu-soku! Thank you to my amazing Karen for making it possible and to the warm encouragement of Mr Johnny Hindes Thank you to everybody for downloading the show. The music tonight comes from Kevin Reeves and Bobby Gentry from music.podshow.com Best wishes to everyone
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