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Tom Dreesen joined me to discuss his half white / half black comedy team and the racism they encountered; how he and Tim Reid started as an anti-drug program; first saw TV at 17 (Honeymooners); being a pin boy, caddie, insurance salesman but wanting to be a comedian; The Tonight Show; getting bumped four times; his first appearance; working with Sammy Davis, Jr.; game shows; the exhilaration of working in front of 20,000 people not there to see you; Frank Sinatra always being on time, rising for women, and being a gentleman; how people always ask about the mob and not to have them do you a favor; Jules Podell; would stay at Sinatra's house; became friends; a saloon saloon singer and a saloon comic; Don Rickles; George Burns trying out new material at 95; the new Pope; Sinatra's charity; The Magnificent Obsession; materials own you; David Letterman vs. Jay Leno in love of stand up; Freddie Prinze; bat boy for the Cubs; introducing friends to their idols; Bobby Rydell; Wrigley Field is frozen in time; his one week as a talk show host; the Chicago Blackhawks
Send us a textOn this Episode Tom and Bert continue "The Spotlight Series" on entertainment influencers thru the decades!There are Stories to tell and the Guys will cover and discuss the beginnings and the careers of some of the greatest influencers throughout ALL of the entertainment industry.Today's Podcast will cover 2 Legends of the Music scene from the early rock n roll years. These 2 artists are icons from the 1950's and 1960's era. We introduce to you "The Bobby's".........Bobby Rydell and Bobby Darin!!!Listen in as we discuss the humble beginnings and amazing accomplishments of two of the greatest teen idols from the Golden Era of Music!CHAPTERS:(1:00) Bobby Rydell- "The Teen Idol"(26:31) Bobby Darin- "The Latin Lover"Enjoy the Show!You can email us at reeldealzmoviesandmusic@gmail.com or visit our Facebook page, Reel Dealz Podcast: Movies & Music Thru The Decades to leave comments and/or TEXT us at 843-855-1704 as well.
Con Sam Cooke, Rebeldes del Rock, Bobby Rydell ft. Chubby Checker, Dúo Dinámico, Mike Ríos, Rudy Ventura y Su Conjunto, Gelu, Luisito Rey, Adriano Celentano, Peppino di Capri, les Chats Sauvages, Dalida, Serge Gainsbourg, Chaka Demus & Pliers, Trixie Smith & the Black Masters, Barry White, Shirley & Company, Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin y Bachman Turner Overdrive.
Kids. What is wrong with kids these days? They're not perfect like we were. It's musicals month and we've arrived at a 60s musical and the only musical Bob already saw prior to this month. This musical, inspired by Elvis getting drafted into the army, is a pop culture spoof and a launchpad for a young Ann-Margret who mesmerizes in this 1963 George Sidney adaptation of “BYE BYE BIRDIE”. A popular singer gets to kiss a small tawn girl in small town Ohio and if this works out then 5 or 6 people could be set for life! It's an extensive cast that also stars Dick Van Dyke as a speed dealer, Janet Leigh as a withered old marm, Bobby Rydell who is being cucked by a teen idol despite being one in real life, Paul Lynde as the perfect father and Maureen Stapleton as the perfect mother. It also stars Ed Sullivan as himself. A crafty musical comedy that rightly deserves its place as one of the great teen movies and the best movie ever featuring a turtle high on speed. JFK would be dead later this same year. Just thought I'd mention that. Here's a link: https://archive.org/details/ByBBd1963 Subscribe to us on YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuJf3lkRI-BLUTsLI_ehOsg Contact us here: MOVIEHUMPERS@gmail.com Check our past & current film ratings here: https://moviehumpers.wordpress.com Hear us on podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6o6PSNJFGXJeENgqtPY4h7 Our OG podcast “Documenteers”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/documenteers-the-documentary-podcast/id1321652249 Soundcloud feed: https://soundcloud.com/documenteers Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/culturewrought
National Pretzel day. Entertainment from 2013. 1st person found innocent for temporty insanity, 1st organ at a baseball game, Chernobyl Nuclear disaster happened in the Ukraine. Todays birthdays - Carol Burnett, Bobby Rydell, George Wright, Jet Li, Kevin James, Tionne Watkins, Tom Welling, Stana Katic, Channing Tatum. Lucille Ball died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Friday, I'm in love - The CureThe pretzel song - The Hungry Food BandWhen I was your man - Bruno MarsCruise - Florida Georgia LineBirthdays - In da club - 50 CentThe Carol Burnett showWild one - Bobby RydellDreamweaver - Gary WrightKing of Queens TV themeNo scrubs - TLCExit - Its not love - DokkenFollow Jeff Stampka on facebook
"Next time I have a daughter, I hope it's a boy!" Bye Bye Birdie (1963) directed by George Sidney and starring Janet Leigh, Dick Van Dyke, Ann-Margaret, Maureen Stapleton, Bobby Rydell and Paul Lynde Next Time: New Orleans (1947)
Solo Episode Connect with Terry Lohrbeer as she celebrates her 3rd Anniversary as a podcaster and host of Kickass Boomers A massive Thank You to all of my guests over the last 3 years and to my loyal audience. Some of my favorites & audience favorites over the years were: 1 favorite was Bobby Rydell in Ep #21 & a replay #79 Bobby Rydell was a teen idol when I was growing up and we grew up in the same city of Phila. Bobby shares lots of stories of living in South Philly and his long singing & entertaining career. Two Gold Medal winners: Laura Eiman Ep61 & replay Ep95 Laura won a Gold Medal at 63 in Olympic Weightlifting and is now a Mental Toughness Coach. Carol Cooke Ep151 is from Australia and she is a 3x Gold-Medalist in the Paralympics with multiple sclerosis Ep 9 & Ep 99 was Myra Berg and her surfing partner both in their 60's and they continue to tandem surf. Ep81 with a fellow podcaster James Gardner of Your History Your Story where he interviews children & grandchildren of famous people from history. Three Age Activist: Ep134 Hunter Leonard from Australia owner & founder of Silver & Wise Ep84 Kathrine Etsy , 87 yrs, Activist for Aging Well Ep80 Kathleen Sinclair 77 yrs, her book - F#ck Aging Ep147 with Beatrice Bruno- The Drill Sergeant of Life Ep140 Julis Linn - Childhood diabetic to Sexy Senior Ep139 Gramps Jeffrey shows us how to build better relationships with your grandchildren Ep137 Trisha Gallagher manifested a trip to Boliva, South America just by asking the Universe. Learn what she did Ep122 Grandmapreneur -Inventor & Author Connie Inukai Ep118 Joey Drolshagen tells us Boomers can still find their Passion Two Actresses Ep107 with Mariann Aalda who played DiDi Bannister from an ABC soap opera Ep150 Mia Altieri who co-wrote "There's A Dead Girl In My Yard" Ep116 Doug Stebleton- Filmmaker & Documentarian A shout out to my International Listeners and the Guests I've interviewed from countries around the world including: Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Thailand, Denmark, Canada, Russia, Japan & Israel Thank you to everyone who have made Kickass Boomers such a wonderful success and I look forward to interviewing many great guests as I enter my fourth year of podcasting . Connect with Host Terry Lohrbeer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2658545911065461/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrylohrbeer/ Instagram: kickassboomers Twitter: @kickassboomers Website: kickassboomers.com Connect to Premiere Podcast Pros for podcast editing: premierepodcastpros@gmail.com LEAVE A REVIEW and join me on my journey to become and stay a Kickass Boomer! Visit http://kickassboomers.com/ to listen to the previous episodes. Also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Email terry@kickassboomers.com and connect with me online and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Solo Episode Connect with Terry Lohrbeer as she celebrates her 3rd Anniversary as a podcaster and host of Kickass Boomers A massive Thank You to all of my guests over the last 3 years and to my loyal audience. Some of my favorites & audience favorites over the years were: 1 favorite was Bobby Rydell in Ep #21 & a replay #79 Bobby Rydell was a teen idol when I was growing up and we grew up in the same city of Phila. Bobby shares lots of stories of living in South Philly and his long singing & entertaining career. Two Gold Medal winners: Laura Eiman Ep61 & replay Ep95 Laura won a Gold Medal at 63 in Olympic Weightlifting and is now a Mental Toughness Coach. Carol Cooke Ep151 is from Australia and she is a 3x Gold-Medalist in the Paralympics with multiple sclerosis Ep 9 & Ep 99 was Myra Berg and her surfing partner both in their 60's and they continue to tandem surf. Ep81 with a fellow podcaster James Gardner of Your History Your Story where he interviews children & grandchildren of famous people from history. Three Age Activist: Ep134 Hunter Leonard from Australia owner & founder of Silver & Wise Ep84 Kathrine Etsy , 87 yrs, Activist for Aging Well Ep80 Kathleen Sinclair 77 yrs, her book - F#ck Aging Ep147 with Beatrice Bruno- The Drill Sergeant of Life Ep140 Julis Linn - Childhood diabetic to Sexy Senior Ep139 Gramps Jeffrey shows us how to build better relationships with your grandchildren Ep137 Trisha Gallagher manifested a trip to Boliva, South America just by asking the Universe. Learn what she did Ep122 Grandmapreneur -Inventor & Author Connie Inukai Ep118 Joey Drolshagen tells us Boomers can still find their Passion Two Actresses Ep107 with Mariann Aalda who played DiDi Bannister from an ABC soap opera Ep150 Mia Altieri who co-wrote "There's A Dead Girl In My Yard" Ep116 Doug Stebleton- Filmmaker & Documentarian A shout out to my International Listeners and the Guests I've interviewed from countries around the world including: Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Thailand, Denmark, Canada, Russia, Japan & Israel Thank you to everyone who have made Kickass Boomers such a wonderful success and I look forward to interviewing many great guests as I enter my fourth year of podcasting . Connect with Host Terry Lohrbeer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2658545911065461/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrylohrbeer/ Instagram: kickassboomers Twitter: @kickassboomers Website: kickassboomers.com Connect to Premiere Podcast Pros for podcast editing: premierepodcastpros@gmail.com LEAVE A REVIEW and join me on my journey to become and stay a Kickass Boomer! Visit http://kickassboomers.com/ to listen to the previous episodes. Also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Email terry@kickassboomers.com and connect with me online and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Regresamos a aquella primera mitad de los años 60. Todos los estilos que confluyeron en las listas de éxitos y dieron forma a la música popular de esos días son el manantial inagotable del que extraemos las canciones de este coleccionable.Playlist;(sintonía) THE CHANTAYS “Pipeline”THE SURFARIS “Surfer Joe”STEVIE WONDER “Fingertips (part 2)”THE MARVELETTES “Please Mr Postman”CHUBBY CHECKER “Pony time”BOBBY RYDELL and CHUBBY CHECKER “Teach me to twist”LITTLE EVA “He is the boy”DIONNE WARWICK “Walk on by”ARETHA FRANKLIN “Rock-a-bye your baby with a dixie melody”ERMA FRANKLIN “I don’t want no mama’s boy”LITTLE RICHARD “Memories are made of this”SWINGIN BLUE JEANS “Good Golly Miss Molly”THE ANIMALS “I’m cryin’”ALAN PRICE “I put a spell on you”SCREAMIN’ JAY HAWKINS “Nitty Gritty”THE SHADOWS “F.B.I.”KATHY KIRBY “Dance on”ARTHUR ALEXANDER “Call me lonesome” Escuchar audio
National Prezel day. Pop Culutre from 1971. Chernobyl Nuclear disaster, 1st time temporty insanity used to get away with murder, Chicago Cubs 1st to use an organ at baseball game. Todays birthdays - Carol Burnett, Bobby Rydell, Gary Wright, Jet Li, Kevin James, Tionne Watkins, Tom Welling, Stana Katic, Channing Tatum. Lucille Ball died.
Nueva entrega del coleccionable dedicado a rescatar canciones que dieron forma al pop de la primera mitad de los años 60. Playlist; (sintonía) HERB ALPERT and THE TIJUANA BRASS “Lonely bull” BO DIDDLEY “You can’t judge a book by its cover” THE PRETTY THINGS “Honey I need” THE EASYBEATS “She’s so fine” PAUL REVERE and THE RAIDERS “Just like me” DAVIE JONES with THE KING BEES “Louie Louie go home” EDDIE COCHRAN “Three steps to heaven” OTIS REDDING “Pain in my heart” ERNIE K DOE “Mother in law” AL HIRT “Java” ANN MARGRETT “I just don’t understand” ELVIS PRESLEY “C’mon everybody” TIMI YURO “What’s the matter baby (is it hurting you)” JOHNNY KIDD and THE PIRATES “Baby you’ve got what it takes” FABIAN “Kissin’ and twistin’” THE JORDANAIRES “I walk the line” PETER and GORDON “Lucille” BOBBY RYDELL “A world without love” BRENDA LEE “Emotions” Escuchar audio
"Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday nightBut I am so lazy, don't want to wander, I stay at home at nightBut I don't feel afraid, as long as I gaze on Waterloo SunsetI am in paradiseEvery day I look at the world from my windowBut chilly, chilly is the evening timeWaterloo Sunset's fine"I can't promise you a Waterloo Sunset but I can guarantee a musical paradise for at least 2 Hours. Please join me along with John Batdorf & James Lee Stanley, XTC, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Return To Forever, Nilsson, Al Stewart, Sarah McLachlan, Tufano & Giamerese, Richie Havens, Frank Sinatra, Gabor Szabo, Connie Francis, Chuck Mangione, Al Kooper, Steely Dan, Bobby Rydell, Simon & Garfunkel, The Doors, Brenda Lee, The Kinks, Paul Anka, Yes, Al DiMeola, Traffic and Peter Gabriel...
Nueva entrega de este coleccionable dedicado a recordar grandes canciones de todo el abanico de estilos que dieron forma a la música pop de la primera mitad de los años 60. (Foto del podcast; The Shangri-Las, 1964) Playlist; (sintonía) THE SHADOWS “Walkin’” BUDDY HOLLY “Crying waiting hoping” THE BOBBY FULLER 4 “Let her dance” SAM COOKE “Another Saturday night” THE ROLLING STONES “If you need me” FATS DOMINO “It keeps raining” CLARENCE “FROGMAN” HENRY “(I don't know why) but I do” JOE BROWN and THE BRUVVERS “It only took a minute” THE VIBRATIONS “Watusi” OSCAR BROWN JR “The work song” THE CONTOURS “Do you love me” THE ROYAL SHOWBAND WATERFORD “The huckle buck” SHARON MARIE “Run around lover” BERT KAEMPFERT “Chicken talk” BOBBY RYDELL “I wanna thank you” THE SHANGRI-LAS “Leader of the pack” HELEN SHAPIRO “Not responsable” THE SHARADES “Dumb head” ROY ORBISON “In dreams” Escuchar audio
Well this is a heck of a song with so many different reasons of what could make it great or what could make it bad if you listen to Glen Gamboa from New York Newsday. Tomorrow is Today is the 8th song off of the legendarily poorly recorded first album. If you listen to the 1971 recording it has an entire orchestra. If you listen to the 1983 re-recording it's only piano. Which one do you like best? And who is Bobby Rydell? Find out in this episode.
194. As we close in on the last remaining days of 2022, let's take a few moments to remember the incredible rockabilly & rock 'n' roll heroes that we lost in the last 12 months. It's important to revere our idols while we can but it's also important to keep the music & memories of all these rockin' pioneers alive through their music. Join us on "Go Kat, GO!" as we celebrate the music of Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley, Roddy Jackson, Sandy Nelson, Bobby Rydell, Ronnie Hawkins, Charlie Gracie & Mack Allen Smith. We've got plenty of modern day rockin' idols to celebrate as well! The 2023 Ameripolitan Music Awards are just around the corner and tonight we'll spin tracks from nominees The Televisionaries, The Phantom Shakers, The Hi-Jivers, The Ichi-Bons, Saudia Young, Mozzy Dee, Jane Rose & The Deadends, Amy Griffin, Sean K. Preston, Nic Roulette, Mitch Polzak & Eddie Clendening! Be sure to QUICKLY vote for your favourites before the polls close on the 31st: go to Ameripolitan.org and smash those VOTE buttons (be sure to cast a ballot for the AZTEC WEREWOLF, DJ Del Villarreal in the BEST DJ category)! Celebrate the rockinest' New Year of all with DJ Del's "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" -good to the last bop!™Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!
It's a triple play - no, not "Tinkers to Evers to Chance-" but, a spectacular combo nonetheless: Dion (The Wanderer), Jay Black of Jay and the Americans (Cara Mia), and Bobby Rydell (Wild One). Bill and Rich, The Splendid Bohemians, present these titans to you for three cautionary, yet inspiring examples of late-career, Show Biz road warriors. They may have been bloodied, but they were unbowed, and stood in the ring until the final bell tolled. Dion remains, and is the last man standing, but our Bronx Bomber still shines on brightly like a bluesy diamond.
Canta con CRISTINA AGUILERA, VANILLA ICE, QUEEN, DAVID BOWIE, ELVIS, MIRLA, JOSE LUIS RODRIGUEZ, BON JOVI, MONTANER,... Y MUCHOS MAS!!! Baila con ROLANDO LA SERIE, LED ZEPPELIN, TEEN TOPS, BOBBY RYDELL, AZUCAR CACAO Y LECHE, PARTRIDGE FAMILY, JACKSON 5, BEACHO BOYS,... Y MUCHOS MAS!!! Recuerda a JOE FRAZIER, el triunfo de ORIOLES DE BALTIMORE, el inicio de LA LIGA JUSTICIERA, "DANZA CON LOBOS", "EL CID", "LA HIJA DE RYAN", "IRONSIDE",... Y MUCHO MAS!!! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/genteenambiente/support
Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts. Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne. Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin. He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller, because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch
60's Sensations has some amazing artists this week with Leapy Lee starting us off. Down the track there's some Bobby Rydell, Helen Shapiro, and many more! #RadioSouthland #SouthlandRadio #SouthlandMusic #SixtiesTunes #SixtiesMusic #GreatMusic #LeapyLee #BobbyRydell #HelenShapiro #Waihopai #Murihiku #Aotearoa #NewZealand
She owns a six-room themed B & B in a DooWop town. She hires an Elvis impersonator. She serves guests pretzels and shakes in a room dominated by an old-time jukebox. Meet Sheila Brown, co-owned of Summer Nites, a handsome property that oozes style and charm. She'll be the guest on TRAVEL ITCH RADIO this week, on Thursday, August 25, with host Dan Schlossberg and co-host Maryellen Nugent Lee. Listen live at 8p EDT on iTunes and BlogTalkRadio.com as Sheila reveals how she takes guests back in time to the era of Bobby Rydell's 'Wildwood Days' and Marilyn Monroe's short but sensational film career. The show will be the 472nd overall as the podcast completes its 11th season.
Super excited to announce new guest, Donald Grabowski, to The Story!Don lives below Elizabethtown and has lived in Lancaster County all of his life. He has been a public school and university music educator for 33 years until 2013.Don was the Director of Bass Studies at Millersville University for 18 years, and has been an active bassist in jazz, symphonic and chamber music. As Hempfield High School Director of Orchestras his orchestras were selected to perform at the PA Music Educators Conference twice, and is in his 13th year as adjudicator for Music in the Parks/Festivals of Music. He has traveled and performed in parts of Austria, Germany and Hungary, and since 2005 is a member of Allegro, The Chamber Orchestra of Lancaster. He has performed with other varied chamber music events, the Lancaster Opera Workshop, and various jazz and rock ensembles. He has been found playing bass in the Hershey Theater orchestra for traveling Broadway Shows, for stars like Jim Brickman, John Blake, and at American Music Theater for Don Rickles, Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell.He is currently one of the bass players for LCBC Church serving numerous area campuses.Don is the founder and owner of the online company Musician's Practice Glove, since 2015. This is a glove for musicians who play under unique conditions and circumstances, sold on Amazon worldwide, Walmart and Sweetwater Music.He has been Treasurer and Board Member of NAMI Lancaster County PA for 6 years and served as a Family-to-Family teacher with his wife. Don also has been a member of Elizabethtown Rotary Club for over 8 years and is Past President for 2020-21. Don and Peggy have 3 grown boys and two grand-children.You can find Don and his work here: https://musicianslive.org/https://linktr.ee/musicianspracticegloveSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-story/donations
Super excited to announce new guest, Donald Grabowski, to The Story!Don lives below Elizabethtown and has lived in Lancaster County all of his life. He has been a public school and university music educator for 33 years until 2013.Don was the Director of Bass Studies at Millersville University for 18 years, and has been an active bassist in jazz, symphonic and chamber music. As Hempfield High School Director of Orchestras his orchestras were selected to perform at the PA Music Educators Conference twice, and is in his 13th year as adjudicator for Music in the Parks/Festivals of Music. He has traveled and performed in parts of Austria, Germany and Hungary, and since 2005 is a member of Allegro, The Chamber Orchestra of Lancaster. He has performed with other varied chamber music events, the Lancaster Opera Workshop, and various jazz and rock ensembles. He has been found playing bass in the Hershey Theater orchestra for traveling Broadway Shows, for stars like Jim Brickman, John Blake, and at American Music Theater for Don Rickles, Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell.He is currently one of the bass players for LCBC Church serving numerous area campuses.Don is the founder and owner of the online company Musician's Practice Glove, since 2015. This is a glove for musicians who play under unique conditions and circumstances, sold on Amazon worldwide, Walmart and Sweetwater Music.He has been Treasurer and Board Member of NAMI Lancaster County PA for 6 years and served as a Family-to-Family teacher with his wife. Don also has been a member of Elizabethtown Rotary Club for over 8 years and is Past President for 2020-21. Don and Peggy have 3 grown boys and two grand-children.You can find Don and his work here: https://musicianslive.org/https://linktr.ee/musicianspracticegloveSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-story/donations
Dodie Stevens was a singing prodigy at the age of four. By the time she was seven she began making local television appearances, and in 1959, at age thirteen, she had the #1 hit, gold record “Pink Shoe Laces”. She followed with “Yes, I'm Lonesome Tonight”, “No” and “Merry, Merry Christmas Baby”, which all hit the Billboard charts in the early '60s.While still in high school, Dodie's career skyrocketed. She appeared on Dick Clark's American Bandstand and starred with Fabian in her first film, “Hound Dog Man”, followed by “Convicts Four”, starring Ben Gazzara. She also co-starred with Frankie Avalon in “Alakazam The Great”, an animated feature film. She continued to record a string of singles and albums, and more television guest appearances followed, including The Bob Hope Show, and Pat Boone's Chevy Showroom. Dodie also toured worldwide with Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Paul Anka, Bobby Rydell and many more teen idols from that era.In the early 70's she joined Sergio Mendes and Brasil '77 touring internationally and recording three albums for A&M Records until 1973. She continued to perform in concert with artists such as Harry Belafonte, Boz Scaggs and Loretta Lynn, including numerous appearances on The Tonight Show, Midnight Special and Solid Gold. For twelve years she worked exclusively with Mac Davis in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and every major music theatre worldwide. During this time, she also appeared in television specials with Dolly Parton, Donna Summer and Luther Vandross. In addition, in the '80s, you would have heard Dodie's voice on television commercials including Sprint and Dole Pineapple.By 1990 she was starring in, as well as co-producing her Doo Wop Revue, “Bop”, a high-energy show full of some of the most memorable songs from the early years of rock & roll, including her own hit, “Pink Shoe Laces”. For the next few years, they worked casinos in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Reno to standing ovations.Shortly thereafter, Dodie began touring with other recording artists from the 50s and 60s and included her talented daughter Stephanie in her shows. They later formed a southern-rock band, “a.k.a. Stevens”, singing classic rock & roll and country and co-writing all their originals. They recorded only one album “Outlaw of the Heart”, which was the opening act for Toby Keith and worked in a variety of venues across the country.During Dodie's career, she has performed in every major city in the United States and internationally, including Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, China, Philippines, France, Monaco, Saudi Arabia, the Caribbean, United Kingdom, (command performance for the Queen), and a special performance at The Kennedy Center for former President George H. W. Bush.Today, Dodie continues to sing with her daughter, making personal appearances in Doo Wop concerts nationwide. She recently appeared on the PBS television special “At The Drive-In”, hosted by her earlier co-star, Fabian, and the TNN special, “Rock & Roll Graffiti”. In February 2009, she joined her peers in Clear Lake, Iowa at the Surf Ballroom to perform in a 5-day memorial concert, “Fifty Winters Later” (in memory of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper). When Dodie is not performing, she teaches singing and is a performance coach in San Diego, California, which gives her the opportunity to share her expertise and experience in the music industry with the new generation of talent.In 2018, Dodie and Stephanie developed a unique, motivational concert, "Affirmasong", using musical affirmations (written by Dodie) to inspire change in the world. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Richard discusses continuing COVID, Sean Hannity/Mark Meadows collusion, and Mother's day guest Bobby Rydell and his mother with Richard's mother and father. “Richard Bey Talk” brings Richard Bey to podcasting, with thought provoking entertainment and humor, exploring society and culture, entertainment, news, and politics. Richard is joined by broadcast professional Albert Reinoso to comment on what's happening around us all. Richard Bey is an American talk show host, popular in the 1990's as host of daytime TV's “The Richard Bey Show”, about ordinary people's personal stories, topical news, and personal interviews. Richard Bey has since hosted national radio shows on ABC Radio, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, and “The Wall Street Journal: This Morning.” Follow Richard Bey and "Richard Bey Talk," like and subscribe: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/beytalk YouTube – Richard Bey Talk https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtpY2hIgbzRVvZEcwRc45Hw Spotify (Audio or Video Podcast) - https://open.spotify.com/show/2ySoVTOVeSal8XqXBlmToI Find “Richard Bey Talk” on podcast directories like Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts. Like and subscribe so you won't miss an episode. Thank you!
Welcome back to News of the Month, where I talk about a few different entertainment news stories that feel important and/or interesting to me. The stories I'll be talking about this time involve the WICKED film being split into two parts, THE HUNGER GAMES movie prequel, DANCING WITH THE STARS moving to Disney+, as well as the deaths of Estelle Harris, Bobby Rydell, Rae Allen, Gilbert Gottfried, and Robert Morse. Don Darryl Rivera's tribute to Gilbert Gottfried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnFbINH9oH4 If you love this show, please leave us a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/karereviewspodcast and follow the simple instructions. Follow Kare Reviews at www.karereviews.net and on Twitter: @KareReviews Also please visit the newly launched Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/jeffreykare?fan_landing=true Follow Jeffrey Kare on Twitter: @JeffreyKare If you like what you've heard here, please subscribe to any one of the following places where the Kare Reviews Podcast is available. Anchor: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-kare Apple: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kare-reviews-podcast/id1453846013 Google: www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy85NWFhZDFjL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/6GL69s4zoDQmBcZf3NALTG Breaker: www.breaker.audio/kare-reviews-podcast Overcast: overcast.fm/itunes1453846013/kare-reviews-podcast Pocket Casts: pca.st/47Vw RadioPublic: radiopublic.com/kare-reviews-podcast-6rMdXk --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-kare/support
pretzels, pop culture 1989, jet li, bobby rydell, carol burnett, charles richter, john wilkes booth killed, 1st organ at baseball game, gary wright, stana katic, kevin james, tlc-tionne watkins, channing tatum
Harford County Living presents Conversations with Rich Bennett, coming to you from the Freedom Federal Credit Union studios.On this episode, Rich is joined by Joyce Conroy of WHFC 91.1 FM. Joyce is the Host of the Block Party which can be heard on Saturday Nights on WHFC 91.1 FM. When it comes to rock and roll, Joyce is truly the Queen of Oldies Rock and Roll Radio. Her knowledge, interviews, and choice of music will have you coming back every Saturday to hear more. From the Electric Prunes to KISS and "yum-yums" like Tommy James and Bobby Rydell, the Queen will keep you glued to the radio.Sponsored by WHFC 91.1 FMRecommended podcast - Rock & Roll High School With Pete GanbargIf you have an idea or something or someone you would like to hear on the podcast, let us know by sending an email to podcast@harfordcountyliving.com.Please follow our Facebook Pages at Conversations with Rich Bennett and Harford County LivingHosted on BuzzsproutINTRODUCING... 4X THE REWARDS ON GASWith gas prices higher than ever, we wanted a way to help reduce your pain at the pump.That's why Freedom's Platinum Rewards Visa Credit Card is proud to introduce 4X the rewards on fuel.2Use your Platinum Rewards Visa when filling up your vehicle and earn 4x the rewards points. Redeem points for a wide selection of premium merchandise, gift cards to Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEFreedom Federal Credit Union HELPING YOU REACH YOUR FINANCIAL DREAMSWHFC 911.1 FM It's all about community. WHFC 91.1 FM, Harford Community College Radio, is the college radio staDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
"There you stood on the edge of your feather, Expecting to fly.While I laughed, I wondered whether I could wave goodbye,Now you know I'd try, Babe, now you know I'd try.Babe, now you know I'd try, Babe."Please join me for today's lesson in flight on the Sunday Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing on the Independent 885FM and 885FM.org. Joining us will be Dylan LeBlanc, Bruce Springsteen, Radiohead, Jean Luc Ponty, NRBQ, David Crosby, Seatrain, Robin Trower, Marc Cohn, Trevor Gordon Hall, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Frank Sinatra, John Mellencamp, The Byrds, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, XTC, Eric Burdon & The Animals, Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble, Dire Straits, Glen Campbell, Beatles, Jeff beck and Buffalo Springfield. Plus we pay tribute to Bobby Rydell who passed away last week.
Here are the songs in the broadcast. Wild One - Bobby Rydell - R&B/Pop - 1960 Soulful Strut - Young Holt Unlimited - R&B - 1968 Forgive Me Girl - The Force MD's - R&B - 1984 I Cant Stand To See You Cry - Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - R&B - 1972 Not On The Outside - Eddie Kendrick - R&B - 1973 Baby Lets Dance Tonight (Soulpersona Remix) - Jay King - R&B - 2021 So In Love - Jennifer Holliday - R&B - 2022 Bada Ba Ba (Stay Together) - Royalty Duo - R&B - 2022 Believe In Love - Brother Reggie - R&B - 2022 Dance Moonlight Remix - Susanne Smith - R&B - 2022
Our Kickass Boomer of the Day is 50's and 60's teen idol, Bobby Rydell. He is a singer, drummer, actor, author, and entertainer hailing from South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If his name sounds familiar, it's because you've probably watched him before, Boomer Nation. He appeared in the 1963 classic with Ann-Margret “Bye Bye Birdie.” Bobby has continued to inspire boomers with his performances, as well as his story, which he published in his book, Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol On The Rocks: A Tale of Second Chances. We talked about the second chances he got in love and in life and how he's making the most out of his time. Join me in this episode and learn why Bobby is a Kickass Boomer! [00:01 - 05:48] Opening Segment [05:49 - 18:24] Saying Hello to “Bye Bye Birdie” [18:25 - 30:48] Nurturing Your Craft [30:49 - 43:00] Bouncing Back From Life's Challenges [43:01 - 54:59] Having Lifelong Friends [55:00 - 56:23] Closing Segment Tweetable Quotes: “...you have your highs, your lows, your peaks, your valleys, your ups, your downs...you just gotta keep on doing what you're doing to nurture your craft.” - Bobby Rydell “I always have time for everybody.” - Bobby Rydell Resources mentioned: Follow Bobby on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. ----- BEE BOLD, NOT OLD. LEAVE A REVIEW and join me on my journey to become and stay a Kickass Boomer! Visit http://kickassboomers.com/ to listen to the previous episodes. Also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Email terry@kickassboomers.com and connect with me online and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Cousin Brucie plays the greatest hits of all time. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Sonny Curtis joins Cousin Brucie for and interview and sings a accapella version of "Love is All Around". Cousin Brucie also remembers his friend Bobby Rydell
High gas prices are not going to stop people from taking road trips this summer; RIP Legendary singer Bobby Rydell; Burger King is getting sued for a stupid reason
If you love vintage SNL, you probably know the name Joe Piscopo. For younger folks, Joe was a star of the show back in the 1980s with Eddie Murphy. Today he does amazing stage performances paying tribute to the Sinatra era. He's a radio show host in New York City and a friend of a music legend who died yesterday – Bobby Rydell. Stigall and Piscopo remember some fun stories about the man and then Joe regales us with some showbiz commentary of his own. Plus hear a bonus throwback interview with Bobby Rydell from 2020 when Stigall was live for a Trump rally in Wildwood, NJ. It's a fun conversation before we get to one of the saddest moments ever captured on video of an American president. Emerald Robinson and Stigall analyze the devastating optics of Obama's visit to the Biden White House yesterday.
Today on the Zeoli Show, Rich discussed the increasing coverage of Hunter Biden and his emails/texts found on his laptop. Despite what perceived dismissal of the controversial story surrounding the Biden White House when it comes to the President's son, many people are hoping this entire story can go away by the simple arrest and charge of Hunter Biden. 6:04-NEWS 6:10-Pennsylvania Commonwealth court pauses Governor Wolf's carbon tax 6:27-The avian flu is becoming an issue in the U.S. 6:38-Progressives want us to believe Elon Musk's stake in Twitter is "bad for free speech" 6:45-Banning conspiracy theories just gives them credence 6:54-Cracker Jack's debut "Cracker Jill's" 7:03-NEWS 7:06-Bobby Rydell passes away at 79 7:09-Tipping is a racist practice 7:30-JPMorgan Chase CEO Jaime Dimon gives the win to work from home workers 7:36-Biden administration extends pause on student loan payments 7:45-CUT SHEET | Senator Sanders congratulates Starbucks employees for unionizing | Senator Sanders wants us to know it's all about power | Pelosi states Democrats have no intention of losing the 2022 midterms | Elon Musk has now become public enemy number 1 | 8:05-Finding out who is "the big guy" mentioned in Hunter Biden's emails and texts 8:15-Biden's Administration wants everything involving Hunter Biden to go away 8:20-NEWS 8:35-Dogs figured out how to use their facial muscles to appeal to humans 9:02-NEWS 9:07- Stanford Professor calls cops on Berkeley professor after war of words turns personal. 9:35-the FBI is doubling down of tracking social media posts 9:42-CUT SHEET | Brian Stelter fears Elon Musk buying shares of Twitter | mainstream media panics over the new climate change report | Psaki questioned on how the U.S. has done everything to combat Russia except put military on the ground | Tiger Woods plans to play The Masters | China is providing chemicals to the criminal drug networks 9:55-Final Thoughts Photo by: Chip Somodevilla / Staff
Zeoli Show Hour 2: In the second hour of the Zeoli Show, Rich discussed how progressives are now targeting the practice of tipping as a racist act, that once again is riddled with false information behind the alleged connection to slavery as the origins of tipping. Also, President Biden is extending the student loan payment moratorium until the end of August. If the Biden economy is doing well, why do they continue extending this moratorium other than political decision making. 7:03-NEWS 7:06-Bobby Rydell passes away at 79 7:09-Tipping is a racist practice 7:30-JPMorgan Chase CEO Jaime Dimon gives the win to work from home workers 7:36-Biden administration extends pause on student loan payments 7:45-CUT SHEET | Senator Sanders congratulates Starbucks employees for unionizing | Senator Sanders wants us to know it's all about power | Pelosi states Democrats have no intention of losing the 2022 midterms | Elon Musk has now become public enemy number 1 Photo by: Getty Images
From the archives, our 2016 interview with Bobby Rydell, whose musical stardom emerged from South Philadelphia in the 1950s. He passed away this week at the age of 79.
On this edition of The Other Side of Midnight: Frank Morano is a yes-man. But not about the casino proposal for Manhattan! We remember Bobby Rydell, revisiting his music and past interviews, Carl Hoffman, a former contributing editor of Wired and National Geographic Traveler and the best-selling author of five books, including “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art” joins us for our Morano Mystery: What really happened to Michael Rockefeller? Dan Kovalik, human rights activist, labor rights lawyer and author of “The Plot to Scapegoat Russia” offers some more info on Russia-Ukraine war. Plus more distraction, debate, and discovery on The Other Side, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bobby Rydell writes of his encounters with such giants of 20th century show business as Frank Sinatra, Ann-Margret, The Beatles, Red Skelton, Jack Benny and Dick Clark, whose Philly-based American Bandstand helped make Rydell the world's biggest teen idol in the years between Elvis Presley's army induction and the advent of Beatlemania. Rydell also delves into the darker and more dramatic aspects of his life, including the death of his beloved first wife, Camille, his decades of alcohol abuse, and the last-ditch transplant surgery that saved his life. Bobby Rydell was a singer who was born and raised in South Philadelphia. He appeared on American Bandstand for the first time in 1959 and had 19 Top 40 hits.
The world lost a true star on April 5th 2022. A performer across eight decades. A teen idol and film star in the 1950's and 1960's, still singing and performing in 2022 with his lifelong friends Frankie Avalon and Fabian Forte. In April 2021, Bobby talked about the highs and lows of his life with Scary and Gary. As a tribute to his life and the joy he gave to millions, we want to share this episode with you once more. Ladies and Gentleman for one more time, Mr Bobby Rydell www.bobbyrydell.com
On today's What to Watch: Nick and Vanessa Lachey host the new relationship reality series The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, where one person in a couple is ready to marry but the other isn't, so they get to choose a partner to live with for a trial marriage to help decide their relationship's fate. Ethan Hawke tells us about his villainous turn in the Disney+ Marvel series Moon Knight, where Oscar Isaac plays the titular mercenary; and on TLC's new docuseries Body Parts, an anaplastologist combines her love of biology and art to make specialty prosthetics for people who've lost body parts, everything from arms, ears, even eyes. Plus, entertainment headlines — including the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation reprising their roles on the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard, another international version in the RuPaul's Drag Race franchise, and the death of former teen idol and actor Bobby Rydell — and trivia. More at ew.com, ew.com/wtw, and @EW. Host/Producer: Gerrad Hall (@gerradhall); Editor/Producer: Joshua Heller (@joshuaheller); Writers: Tyler Aquilina (@tyler_aquilina) and Calie Schepp; Executive Producer: Chanelle Johnson (@chanelleberlin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joe Michaels joins the show to talk about the RiverCats Opening Night and chats with RoverCats President Chip Macon! Toger Woods is back, Happy Birthday to Peter Grant, remembering Kurt Cobain on the 28th Anniversary of his passing (April 5, 1994), memories of Courtney Love's father Hank Harrison in studio, Rest in Peace to Bobby Rydell and Joe Messina...
Dean Richards, entertainment reporter for WGN, joined Bob Sirott to provide the latest news in entertainment. Bob and Dean talked about the death of musician, Bobby Rydell, Justin Bieber’s gift to his fans, and Kourtney Kardashian’s and Travis Barker’s stop in Las Vegas. They also shared details about Ed Sheeran’s copyright suit and what to […]
NBA News, NFL News, NFL Free Agency, MLB News, NHL News, Coronavirus impact on the sports & entertainment, ABC's The Rookie, The Good Doctor, Fox Shows, NBC Shows, ABC Shows, A Farewell to Tommy Davis, Gerda Weissmann Klein, Bobby Rydell, Mantas Kvedaravicus, Rodney Richardson, Maks Levin, Walter Coblenz, Barrie Youngfellow, CW McCall, Patrick Demarchelier, AJ Crimson, Helmut Huber, Paul Herman, Tom Parker, Marvin J Chomsky & Estelle Harris. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/on-the-radar/support
In a tribute to rock ‘n' roll legend Bobby Rydell, we replay our episode from 2021 where Donna was joined by Bobby to reminisce about their co-starring roles on 1966's The Milton Berle Show.
NOTE: This episode went up before the allegations about Dylan, in a lawsuit filed on Friday, were made public on Monday night. Had I been aware of them, I would at least have commented at the beginning of the episode. Episode one hundred and thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, and the controversy over Dylan going electric, 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 "Hold What You've Got" by Joe Tex. 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 A couple of times I refer to “CBS”. Dylan's label in the US was Columbia Records, a subsidiary of CBS Inc, but in the rest of the world the label traded as “CBS Records”. I should probably have used “Columbia” throughout... Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Dylan. Much of the information in this episode comes from Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. The New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff I talk about is here. And for the information about the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone", I relied on yet another book by Heylin, All the Madmen. Dylan's albums up to 1967 can all be found in their original mono mixes on this box set. And Dylan's performances at Newport from 1963 through 1965 are on this DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend. It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him, and in all those coffee-table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines. Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring, folk scene until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracised him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man. Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers, he was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival. And like all these stories, it's an oversimplification but there's an element of truth to it too. So today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric. We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe. And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever. We're going to look at Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes -- most recently the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on "Blowin' in the Wind", and when we left him there he had just recorded his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released. As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album. While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson. We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a Black Harvard graduate and political conservative whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music. But Wilson saw two things in Dylan -- the undeniable power of his lyrics, and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles. Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing, but his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success. Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band -- "Mixed-Up Confusion", backed with "Corrina, Corrina", a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson. Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmie Rodgers style keening that foreshadow his work of the late sixties: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Corrina, Corrina (single version)"] A different take of that track was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals. Those originals fell into roughly two types -- there were songs like "Masters of War", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which dealt in some way with the political events of the time -- the fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and more -- but did so in an elliptical, poetic way; and there were songs about distance in a relationship -- songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings -- the girl has left him, and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't. While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again, and he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back through to anger and resentment. The surprising thing about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rotolo, and a change of producers. If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was -- you'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented, young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson style Delta blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life. By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out. But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of "spokesman for a generation" -- a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited. Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream, and becoming more politicised. And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootenanny boycott: [Excerpt: The Brothers Four, “Hootenanny Saturday Night”] We've talked before about Hootenanny, the folk TV show, but what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time. The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band the Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's Communist leanings. The Weavers were --- according to some sources -- told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused. It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered, and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s. To give a relevant example -- Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for. Again, someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album. So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly. Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootenanny until they asked Seeger on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result. But the odd thing was, whenever anyone *actually asked* Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music. So while the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a Communist, that Communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootenanny with his band the New Lost City Ramblers, and when the Tarriers were invited on to the show but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear. Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why. When he spoke about the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say: [Excerpt: Dylan talks about the boycott. Transcript: "Now a friend of mine, a friend of all yours I'm sure, Pete Seeger's been blacklisted [applause]. He and another group called the Weavers who are around New York [applause] I turned down that television show, but I got no right [applause] but . . . I feel bad turning it down, because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it. They oughta turn it down. They aren't even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted. Uh—which is, which is a bad thing. I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad, it's bad all around."] Hootenanny started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him -- but turning the show down was also good publicity. Hootenanny wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered. It would also not be the only one he turned down. In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he agreed on one condition -- that he be allowed to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right-wing in the middle of the twentieth century, and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time. They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason -- we heard the Chad Mitchell Trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" a couple of weeks ago. So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan Show, it would only be to perform his song about them: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues"] Now, the Ed Sullivan Show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was after all meant to be an entertainment show, and so Dylan didn't appear on the show -- and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost. It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song -- he never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades. By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Rotolo. Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Rotolo she was extremely politically motivated. She was also a fan of Dylan's writing, and had started recording versions of his songs on her albums: [Excerpt: Joan Baez, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959, as a spinoff from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously. As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases -- both musics appealed at this point to educated, middle-class, liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit Bohemian -- the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked (and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill). Both Newport festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as three thousand more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans, but the jazz festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the folk festival came back as well. By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee headed by Pete Seeger. At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of the first night, which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome". To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being "one of the rising stars of the folk movement" to being the most important musician in the movement -- still just one of many, but the first among equals. He was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them -- like he was a star. And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs -- though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours, Baez's pure, trained, voice, rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side (live at Newport 1963)"] At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964. The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kind of songs that people wanted and expected from him -- there were songs about particular recent news events, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", the true story of the murder of a Black woman by a white man, and "Only a Pawn in Their Game", about the murder of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. There were fictional dramatisations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like "North Country Blues", in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", about a farmer driven to despair by poverty who ends up killing his whole family and himself. As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"] But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums. Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Rotolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time. He also started to distance himself from Baez at this point, though the two would remain together until mid 1965. He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do. He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself, and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make. The entire album was recorded in one session, along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut -- like the early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that we heard in the episode on that song. Elliott was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing. Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for the New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes. Dylan told Hentoff "“There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don't want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally." Dylan was right to say that there were no finger-pointing songs. The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal -- "Ballad in Plain D", in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rotolo, laying the blame -- unfairly, as he would later admit -- on her older sister. The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions. The opening track, in particular, "All I Really Want to Do", which in Dylan's version was a Jimmie Rodgers style hillbilly tune, became the subject of duelling cover versions. The Byrds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "All I Really Want to Do"] But Cher also released a version -- which the Byrds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a Byrds live show where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] In America, the Byrds' version only made number forty on the charts, while Cher made number fifteen. In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number nine but the Byrds charted higher at number four. Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs. He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time -- and indeed, he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful, as Cash had lobbied for him within the company -- and he'd recently started to let that influence show. His most recent hit, "Understand Your Man", owed more than a little to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and Cash had also started recording protest songs. At Newport, Cash performed his own version of "Don't Think Twice": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] Cash and Dylan met up, with June Carter and Joan Baez, in Baez's hotel room, and according to later descriptions they were both so excited to meet each other they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds. They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash. One of them was "It Ain't Me Babe", a song that seems at least slightly inspired by "She Loves You" -- you can sing the "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "no, no, no" together -- and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top five country hit: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "It Ain't Me Babe"] But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song -- and his meeting with the Beatles seems to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records. This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while -- Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands. As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of "House of the Rising Sun", basing the new backing on the Animals' hit version. The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (electric version)”] Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr, the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British R&B bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly-Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album. His "So Many Roads" album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks -- Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson -- who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins -- plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist but who is credited on piano for the album: [Excerpt: John Hammond, Jr. "Who Do You Love?"] Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians. Instead, for his next album he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg -- a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cameo-Parkway and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others; the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee. Not all of these played on all the finished tracks -- and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions, where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all -- but that's the lineup that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing it All Back Home. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old-school folk singers Dylan was still associating with. Its opening lines seem to be a riff on "Taking it Easy", a song that had originally been written in the forties by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac Singers, where it had been a song about air-raid sirens: [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Taking it Easy"] But had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the Weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Taking it Easy"] Dylan took that verse, and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm, and connected it to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a freeform, stream-of-consciousness proto-psychedelic lyric inspired as much by the Beat poets as by any musician -- it's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] "Subterranean Homesick Blues" made the top forty in the US -- it only made number thirty-nine, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US. And it made the top ten in the UK -- but it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction. To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets. The opening side of Bringing it All Back Home is all electric, but the B-side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody -- it's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side that this was still the same Dylan they knew. And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him. Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style -- a young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to *be* Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to "Blowing in the Wind": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Catch the Wind (original single version)"] On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had -- though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage. Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Dont Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had dueted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored. It's even worse to see Bob Neuwirth, a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same. It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship. Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record. But he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians. Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers -- Mayall, Hughie Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McVie, though it was unsuccessful and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief. During the session Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording "I'll Keep it With Mine" until a couple of years later. But one other thing happened in England. After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC -- his first full televised concert. Unfortunately, that show never went ahead -- there was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it with what was said to be food poisoning. It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while, and took the opportunity to write what he's variously described as being ten or twenty pages of stream of consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen. He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his breakup with Baez, it's not hard to guess. The first attempt at recording the song was a false start. On June the fifteenth, Dylan and most of the same musicians who'd played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of -- but the song was at this point in waltz time: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (early version)"] The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on "House of the Rising Sun", overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up. But we'll hear more about "The Sound of Silence" in a few weeks' time. The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one. Al Kooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded. He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in and got tuned up before Wilson arrived. But then Kooper heard Bloomfield play, realised that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all. But then, before they started recording "Like a Rolling Stone", which by now was in 4/4 time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on. Kooper saw his chance -- he played a bit of keyboards, too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in. Kooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Kooper went into the studio and sat at the organ. Kooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track. This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Kooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor -- indeed, for much of the song, Kooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure. Luckily, Kooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] The finished record came in at around six minutes -- and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was six minutes and thirteen seconds long. That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album. The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is five minutes fifty-eight, as it has a shorter fade. I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix. Whatever the exact length, it was much, much, longer than the norm for a single -- the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes -- and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single. But eventually it was released as one side, in full: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] That's Bruce Langhorne there playing that rather sloppy tambourine part, high in the mix. The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US, only being held off from the top spot by "Help!" by the Beatles. It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan. Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together -- and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the Spring, the two were very friendly. But they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records. In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-seventies. So "Like a Rolling Stone" was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music. The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments. The Newport Folk Festival had *always* had electric performers -- John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and The Staple Singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared. What there was, was a backlash against pop music. You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge. Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, and so on had been massive. Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sell-outs, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved. But at the same time, those acts *were* doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music. They were making programmes like Hootenanny possible -- and the folkies didn't like Hootenanny, but Hootenanny existing meant that the New Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got. There was a recognition, then, that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene. And it was those acts, the Kingston Trios and Peter, Paul, and Marys, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music. If Hootenanny gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke, but it's not so great if you want to hear "Tom Dooley" or "If I Had a Hammer". And so many of the old guard in the folk movement weren't wary of electric guitars *as instruments*, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music. For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem. The faultlines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues, presented by Alan Lomax. Lomax had no objection to rock and roll -- indeed, earlier in the festival the Chambers Brothers, a Black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and R&B songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said “I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock 'n' roll!” But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield band met his criteria of "authenticity". And he had a point. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group -- their rhythm section were Black musicians who had played with Howlin' Wolf -- and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the South Side of Chicago, but their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they'd quickly moved to playing clubs on the North side, where Black musicians had generally not been able to play. Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann. There was a difference -- they were from Chicago, not from the Home Counties -- but they were still scholars coming at the music from the outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture. The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the Stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will -- he wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything? One he'd never even heard -- but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing. So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite but hardly rapturous. He said "Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up...I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the rest. That's what I hear—I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not." He then introduced the musicians, and they started to play an old Little Walter song: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Juke"] But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be. Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth, Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling round in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around. But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused. Lomax tried to get the Festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded, until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean that all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would also be out. Nobody's entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues Band to back Dylan on stage, as a snub to Lomax. But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Kooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member. Grossman gave Kooper a pair of backstage passes, and told him to meet up with Dylan. And so, for Dylan's performance on the Sunday -- scheduled in the middle of the day, rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper. He opened with his recent single "Maggie's Farm", and followed it with the new one, "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live at Newport)"] After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called "Phantom Engineer", which they hadn't rehearsed properly and which was an utter train wreck. And then they left the stage. And there was booing. How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some. Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short, others say that the audience was mostly happy but there were just a few people booing. And others say that the booing mostly came from the front -- that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front. That's certainly what Pete Seeger said. Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage. He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound. He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound. According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bikel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothchild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume. When Boyd got there, he found Rothchild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was also on the board. When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was "adequately represented at the sound controls", that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger. Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction -- while it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him. Eventually Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs. He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live at Newport)"] But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency fifty-six years later. Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said "He's gone to get his axe" -- using musicians' slang for a guitar. But many of the crowd didn't know that slang. But they had seen Pete Seeger furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work-songs, sung by people who kept time by chopping wood, and according to some people Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang. So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival -- Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so. Paul Rothchild even later claimed to have seen Seeger brandishing it. The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away by saying that he might have said something like "I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables". In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan, as much as he was concerned -- shortly afterwards he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part "I like some rock and roll a great deal. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch. I just don't feel that aggressive, personally. But I have a question. Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll? I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer... Who knows, but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry. It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words, asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended. Hoping that perhaps I'm wrong—but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again." Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public. He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan. But the end result was the same -- Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd. He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that. He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group. From now on Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation, or the leader of a movement. He was a young man with a leather jacket and a Stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music. And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.
Bruce Kimmel is probably the most popular returning guest on The Partridge Family television series. He made an immediate impact with the viewers and struck an instant chemistry with David Cassidy, Shirley Jones and Susan Dey. In this special episode, Bruce recalls how the cast made him feel like one of the family, his friendship with David and speaks movingly about the man he knew. Bruce is a renowned film and stage director, author, composer, actor, songwriter and a Grammy-nominated music producer. He has one of the longest-running daily blogs which celebrates 20 years this November. He wrote and directed The First Nudie Musical, has produced solo albums for Helen Reddy, Petula Clark and worked with Lauren Bacall, and Dorothy Loudon who starred alongside David in his first short lived Broadway show, The Fig Leaves Are Falling in 1969. Bruce has produced and hosted a monthly cabaret series, Kritzerland, for more than a decade which he moved online during the past year winning critical acclaim. He reflects today on his influences as a boy, early auditions, why he always has to be creative, his approach to directing, and admits he has never had a holiday in 35 years. He opens up about his depression and the epiphany which pulled him back from the brink. When we caught up, Bruce had just finished the first night of Motel 66, a collection of one-act plays, one of which he had directed, all set in motel courtyards along the historic Route 66. Further information about Bruce and his daily blog can be found on www.Haineshisway.com and visit www.kritzerland.com for details of his shows. If you have missed any of my conversations on The David Cassidy Connections podcast where I have enjoyed the company of guests including Bobby Rydell, Felix Cavaliere, John Bahler, Ruth McCartney and fans from around the world, you can find all of them on your chosen podcast platform. Share with your friends and let's make something special happen. Read more about his memories of working with David in my book, Cherish David Cassidy A Legacy of Love available from Amazon and all major bookstores online, or order in store. HELP US SPREAD THE WORD! I would love it if you could please share The David Cassidy Connections with your Twitter followers. Click here to post a tweet Follow The David Cassidy Connections wherever you listen to audio! Follow The David Cassidy Connections on Apple Podcasts Follow Google Podcasts - the david cassidy connections Follow The David Cassidy Connections | Podcast on Spotify
He's the teen idol star of the fifties and sixties that never wanted a show business career, much less a teen idol singer but that's what happened to him anyway. While sitting on his house steps as a 14 year old kid watching an ambulance take his father to the hospital after a heart attack, Fabian is approached by a record producer looking for a kid with great looks to make into the next star from Philly like Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell and others. Fabian is shocked and annoyed with this guy who doesn't seem to realize his dad's in the ambulance. Weeks later when dad is home, the producer returns and this time Fabian takes him up on the offer. It was a wise decision that would propel the kid into an international recording artist and movie star. This is the interview you don't want to miss.
My very special guest is American music legend, Bobby Rydell, one of the first teenage idols. Bobby's first hit Kissin' Time made him a household name in 1959. This was followed by Wild One, Forget Him and Volare among other hits which secured an image which won millions of hearts around the world. Bobby, who recently turned 79, explains in our brutally honest conversation, that he always wanted to be recognised as more than a teenage idol, and he achieved that. He still tours today with his childhood friend Frankie Avalon and another celebrated teen star, Fabian as The Golden Boys. He has enjoyed more than six decades of success. Frank Sinatra said he was his favourite singer and Bobby shares amusing anecdotes from his glittering career. He also speaks movingly about his addiction to alcohol, how a double liver and kidney transplant saved his life and how his career has blossomed in recent years. HELP US SPREAD THE WORD! I would love it if you could please share The David Cassidy Connections with your Twitter followers. Click here to post a tweet! Follow The David Cassidy Connections wherever you listen to audio! Follow The David Cassidy Connections on Apple Podcasts Follow Google Podcasts - the david cassidy connections Follow The David Cassidy Connections | Podcast on Spotify Visit his website www.bobbyrydell.com for details of touring dates.
Bobby Rydell is an American entertainment legend With a musical career now spanning eight decades including thirty four, Billboard Top 100 Hits and selling Twenty Five Million records, Bobby continues to perform with his life long pals Frankie Avalon and Fabian in The olden Boys Show (apologies the G fell off the page!) Away from the music Bobby is an advocate for organ donation having been the recipient of a double organ transplant in 2012 when he received a Liver and Kidney. Bobby talks about this and his debt of gratitude to the donor. This was the culmination of years of alcohol abuse after the death of his first wife. Bobby opens up to Scary and Gary about his struggles and his love for his wife Linda the light in his life and soon to be subject for his first ever tattoo! Of course you can't have a music legend on a podcast without a few stories. A few names get mentioned, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Joe DiMaggio, The Everley Brothers, Ann Margaret, Dick Van Dyke, Cliff Richard and even the Royal Family. You won't Forget Him. For information about Bobby www.bobbyrydell.com For information about organ donation US - www.organdonor.gov UK - www.organdonation.nhs.uk
On this week's episode of "Who's Your Band?," we welcome music legend Bobby Rydell, and Gas Digital founder Ralph Sutton! We talk music, being a pop star, Philadelphia Eagles football, and so much more! Watch the video version of this episode https://youtu.be/D6-p6io6RE0 (https://youtu.be/D6-p6io6RE0)