Podcast appearances and mentions of booker t jones

Valerie June is a Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter whose music has been praised by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, NPR, and Bob Dylan himself (who is a self-proclaimed fan). She has performed with John Prine, Norah Jones, Booker T. Jones, Robert Plant, Meshell Ndegeocello, Dave Matthews, Angelique Kidjo, Willie Nelson, Brandi Carlile, and Elvis Costello, written books of poetry and on art, and is a certified yoga and mindfulness instructor. We talk to Valerie about intention setting and the law of attraction, learning to live with chronic illness, testing different approaches and your creative limits, manifesting, rituals and routines to get ready to be present for people, and a whole lot more.Get more access and support this show by subscribing to our Patreon, right here.Links:Valerie JuneEp 39 - Joe HenryEp 17 - Elizabeth Cook'The Artist's Way' Elizabeth CottonMississippi John HurtSkip JamesCarla ThomasClick here to watch this conversation on YouTube.Social Media:The Other 22 Hours InstagramThe Other 22 Hours TikTokMichaela Anne InstagramAaron Shafer-Haiss InstagramAll music written, performed, and produced by Aaron Shafer-Haiss. Become a subscribing member on our Patreon to gain more inside access including exclusive content, workshops, the chance to have your questions answered by our upcoming guests, and more.

Valerie June's journey to what we might call ‘cult stardom' hasn't been easy. “I was cleaning houses while playing bars & clubs at night. And I had a vision that I would not make it - my music wouldn't reach its audience through regular means - it would reach its audience through musicians. My friends would help me. I'm a musician's musician”. Working through a talented community of musicians that has included Booker T Jones, Brandi Carlile and none other than Mavis Staples, eventually brought Valerie June together with her own audience. For her new project, June works with Blind Boys of Alabama, Norah Jones, DJ Cavem Moetavation and M Ward, supremo guitarist and producer of new album Owls, Omens and Oracles. I wanted to get her view of her own music, because the music business loves to put artists in lanes, boxes and pigeon holes. How on earth did an eclectic artist like June slip through the cracks? Her music has been described by others as an amalgam of soul, gospel, Appalachian folk, bluegrass, country, spiritual pop, African blues and my own favourite…cosmic rock. How does she describe her music in response to this assessment? With a joyful guffaw and an emphatic reaction: “I'm a singer-songwriter. I follow the songs, whatever they want to be is what I do. I'm kinda like their servant. All those names related to the music - I used to get attached to those and now I don't ”.In Jeff Tweedy's entertaining memoir World Within a Song, the author, singer songwriter and Wilco frontman says: “Taking something old and making it sound modern is nothing new”. And yet obsessing over your references, but melding them into something that is uniquely you is one of the key themes for artists of longevity. Both concepts are critical to June's work.“I do commune with the ancestors. I know I'm standing on the shoulders of many who came before me. I feel them beside me as I'm talking now. I'm not doing this by myself. I wanted to understand my people through music, and I got there through studying the blues”. Most songs come to me as voices. I'll try this instrument and be like “no, not that one…like Goldilocks. I try many different instruments to connect that voice to what it wants. Then, I found a team of people to listen to and understand”. If Valerie June really is the Goldilocks of songcraft, the results are indeed nourishing.Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

In early 1970, Booker T Jones was on sabbatical in California having grown disillusioned with confines of Stax Records and Memphis, when he heard the Beatles' latest effort, Abbey Road. So moved was he by the Beatles' genius and daring, that he sat down and drafted his own Memphis-style tribute to the group. The album, released later that same year, is titled McLemore Avenue, after the street where Stax's studio and headquarters were located. This week on BSC, we have Memphis' very own Booker T and The MG's tribute band, The Maitre D's, performing McLemore Avenue from start to finish in a performance captured on the cutting room floor of Studio A at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

For our last series of the season, we have the story of the rise and fall, the rebirth and eventual demise of the legendary Memphis R&B, soul and funk label, Stax Records. This month we're talking about the groundbreaking album that helped kickstart what came to be known as the “Memphis sound” - the first official release on the Stax Record Label, 1962's “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.s.

**Lynda Law's Soul Show Replay On traxfm.org. This Week Lynda Features Soul/Boogie/Dance Classics/Contemporary Soul From Earl Klugh, Brainstorm, Bobby Caldwell, The Temptations, Booker T Jones, Tower Of Power, Billy Ocean, D Train, Sister Sledge, Detroit Emeralds, Kool & The Gang & More #originalpirates #soulmusic #contemporarysoul #70smusic #80smusic #disco #danceclassics Catch Lynda's Soul Show Every Tuesday From 4:00PM UK Time On www.traxfm.org Listen Live Here Via The Trax FM Player: chat.traxfm.org/player/index.html Mixcloud LIVE :mixcloud.com/live/traxfm Free Trax FM Android App: play.google.com/store/apps/det...mradio.ba.a6bcb The Trax FM Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092342916738 Trax FM Live On Hear This: hearthis.at/k8bdngt4/live Tunerr: tunerr.co/radio/Trax-FM Radio Garden: Trax FM Link: http://radio.garden/listen/trax-fm/IEnsCj55 OnLine Radio Box: onlineradiobox.com/uk/trax/?cs...cs=uk.traxRadio Radio Deck: radiodeck.com/radio/5a09e2de87...7e3370db06d44dc Radio.Net: traxfmlondon.radio.net Stream Radio : streema.com/radios/Trax_FM..The_Originals Live Online Radio: liveonlineradio.net/english/tr...ax-fm-103-3.htm**

Six String Hayride Classic Country Podcast, Episode 53, A Happy Hayride Christmas.Gene Autry announces the arrival of Santa and Rudolph. Willie Nelson gives us Pretty Paper and Frosty the Snowman. Take a Sleigh Ride with Dolly Parton, The History of Silent Night, The Elvis Christmas Album, and a visit from The Andrew Sisters. Jim discusses the Gene Autry Christmas songs, Chris comments on Willie Nelson's Christmas collaboration with Booker T Jones, and Santa is Coming Soon. If you are celebrating Jesus Birthday, Santa's Birthday, or loading up on Chinese food and watching Die hard, we have some fun Christmas Tunes for you. Bonus Santa's Cupcake recipe with the late great Gilda Radner and all the usual shenanigans with Chris and Jim. Have a Happy Christmas, A Peaceful New Year, and Always Be Kind. Peace and Donuts from Chris and Jim at Six String Hayride.

Be sure to see Mindi Abair live in concert on Friday, December 20 at the Capitol Theatre in Clearwater, FL. You can learn more at RuthEckerdHall.com.“ She'll Move You” – Keb' Mo'“Forget You, Who's Your Sax Player? – Steven Tyler on American Idol“21st Century Sophistication, A Gritty, Raucous Spirit, And Exceptional Creative Imagination” – Allmusic.ComDuring her remarkable 24-year recording career, saxophonist/vocalist Mindi Abair has garnered 2 GRAMMY nominations, recorded with some of the biggest names in music, and built a substantial following among jazz and blues audiences with her soaring melodies and powerhouse style. In 2014, Mindi received her first GRAMMY nomination in the Best Pop Instrumental Album category for Summer Horns with Dave Koz, Richard Elliot and Gerald Albright, followed by a 2015 GRAMMY nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album for her solo LP Wild Heart featuring the late Gregg Allman, Joe Perry, Trombone Shorty, Booker T. Jones, Keb' Mo', and Max Weinberg.You might know her as the featured saxophonist on American Idol, sitting in with Paul Shaffer on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Roots on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, or from moonlighting on tour with Duran Duran or Aerosmith. As a solo artist, she has consistently topped the Billboard Contemporary Jazz and Blues charts. In 2018, Mindi Abair and The Boneshakers won 8 Independent Blues Awards including Artist of the Year, and an Independent Music Award for Best Blues Song Fan Award for “Pretty Good For A Girl” featuring Joe Bonamassa. They won the 2019 LA Critics Award for Best Holiday Album for All I Got For Christmas Is The Blues. And in 2019, 2020 and 2021 Mindi was nominated by the Blues Music Awards as the Best Instrumentalist: Horn.As creator, designer and owner, Mindi launched www.wineandjazz.com in 2019 as a lifestyle concept that brings together the worlds of wine and music through members-only exclusive wines paired with personally curated music playlists, label art and branded wine and music worldwide adventures and festivals.Mindi wrote the book “How To Play Madison Square Garden – A Guide To Stage Performance” and served 10 years as an LA Chapter Governor, President and National Trustee for The Recording Academy.Mindi has toured and/or recorded with: Aerosmith, Joe Bonamassa, Smokey Robinson, Joe Perry, Trombone Shorty, Booker T. Jones, Gregg Allman, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Fantastic Negrito, Waddy Wachtel, Bobby Rush, Keb' Mo', Teena Marie, Lee Ritenour, Adam Sandler, Duran Duran, Bill Champlin, Richard Elliott, Jimmy Webb, Max Weinberg, Dave Koz, Peter White, Gerald Albright, Mandy Moore, Lalah Hathaway and the Backstreet Boys.Today's audio was recorded over Zoom. Production assistance by Chandler Balkcom, Adam Darbyshire, and Arantza Romero. Host and editor: Warren Buchholz. Arts Axis Florida is a product of WUSF and is sponsored by Community Foundation Tampa Bay, the Gobioff Foundation with support from the Palladium by you. Thank you for your support. Learn more about Jazz on Arts Axis Florida by visiting our website at wusfjazz.org. Copyright 2024 WUSF.

This week, Pete pays tribute to the late Quincy Jones who recently passed, as well as birthday celebrations for Minnie Riperton, Eloise Laws and for Booker T Jones. New music comes from Rob de Boer, Emila Disco and 2 from the new album from Joel Sarakula. There is also an airing for Love Sick on Acid Jazz from Hugh Brooker's Night Trains, released on a 7" for the first time. For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/superfly-funk-and-soul-show/Tune into new broadcasts of the Superfly Funk & Soul Show, LIVE, Fridays from 10 AM - 12 PM EST / 3 - 5 PM GMT.//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What can you see about this legendary artist that hasn't already been said? Booker T and the MGs recorded Green Onions in the early 1960s, and his career after that is absolutely astounding. We talked about working with Willie Nelson, his classic organ tones, and of course his incredible music catalog. Enjoy! 

Antoine Arvizu is the studio owner and manager, recording and producing most of the artists that come to us for that “Compound Sound”. Some artists and producers of note include:  Chicano Batman, Ryan Bingham (Grammy and Oscar winner for Crazy Heart), Marc Ford (The Black Crowes, Ben Harper, Booker T. Jones), Ikey Owens (Free Moral Agents, Jack White, The Mars Volta), Jay Buchanan (Rival Sons)… Arvizu began his music career as a drummer in the late 70s/early 80s as punk rock morphed into an alternative art rock. A founding member of Dr. Dream Records recording artists National Peoples Gang, he toured internationally before disbanding in the mid-90s; sharing the stage with such iconic bands as The Flaming Lips, Nirvana, Soundgarden, fIREHOSE and many more during those early days of "indie rock". A recording career began in 1991 at the now defunct The Toledo studio in Long Beach engineering for Sublime, Rocket From The Crypt, Big Drill Car and many more. Later in the nineties he was a founding member of the Delta Blues group Bourbon Jones, earning the moniker Two Drum Tony, famous for simply playing the 26″ Radio King bass drum and cowhide snare, digging deep into the second line style of New Orleans blues and swing. It was in 1998 that Antoine had the opportunity to engineer at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. The list of fine artists that come through those studios is staggering, to name a few: Paul McCartney, The JB's, Richard Carpenter, Elliot Smith, Faith Hill… and the list of world class engineers and producers is outrageous; education through osmosis. In 2003, happy to finally have a studio to truly call home, Antoine joined The Compound Studio to help create “An Organic Recording Experience". Studio Website: https://www.thecompoundstudio.com/Dicogs Link: https://www.discogs.com/artist/468078-Anthony-Arvizu This episode is brought to you byGo to BETTERHELP.com/apologue for confidential online counselling.use the code word Apologue for a 7 day free trial Pledge monthly with Patreon https://www.patreon.com/apologueShop Apologue products at http://apologue.ca/shop

This week on Beale Street Caravan, we take a look back at the 2022 Memphis Music Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. Highlighted performances include Booker T. Jones, and a tribute to Mavis Staples by some of the phenomenal women in Memphis music. We also sit down with acclaimed musician and leader of the night's house band, Kurt Clayton, for an interview. Grammy nominated blues man, Guy Davis, will be with us to deliver an installment of the Blues Hall of Fame, an exploration of the lives of the pioneers and innovators enshrined in the Blues Hall of Fame, here in Memphis, TN, brought to you by the Blues Foundation.  

#23- Otis Redding-Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul (Stax) Released October 1966, Recorded May-September 1966  Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, recorded at Stax Recording Studios in Memphis, is a seminal work in Otis Redding's career and soul music. Produced by Jim Stewart, Isaac Hayes, and Booker T. Jones, the album features legendary Stax studio musicians like Steve Cropper, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Al Jackson Jr., Booker T. Jones, and the Memphis Horns. It includes standout tracks such as the iconic "Try a Little Tenderness," "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)," and "My Lover's Prayer." It covers like "Day Tripper" and "Tennessee Waltz," each showcasing Redding's dynamic vocal range and the band's tight, soulful arrangements. The album received critical acclaim, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 73 on the Billboard 200, solidifying Redding's legacy as a master of soulful expression and musical innovation. Full Album on YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn1E4mv4x-I4oNQ0qlroeWXxa4lDD4Lj9&si=6SlxhnkIL8UdM3Ms Full Album on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/25uNcuL4dAoV62eKmr8Q0Y?si=hK3DknToSX2TkN_3ggWDiA Curated 1966 Playlist Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7I6dzYc5UJfko8unziRMWf?si=a07e4d1e27944d00

To Support the Channel:Patreon  https://www.patreon.com/AskZacTip jar:  https://paypal.me/AskZacVenmo @AskZac  Or check out my store for merch  - https://my-store-be0243.creator-spring.com/Today we look at forgotten R&B guitar greats Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Booker T. Jones & Joe South. They each played on huge hits, yet are rarely hailed, and worse yet, many times their parts are credited to other players. We right this wrong by looking at Chip's part on "Respect," Tommy's on Seesaw," Booker's on "I Forgot To Be Your Lover," and Joe's work on "Chain Of Fools." CORRECTION Estelle, not Mae Axton founded STAX.Playlist Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Booker T. Jones & Joe Southhttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/6m3jIsJDPv2YsxJaMDfZ23?si=b85ionyPTBekDoX20wYf0w&pi=u-fPRZ8oNKTjCz1967 Fender Telecaster - stock except for compensated saddles. Refret by Nick at Glaser InstrumentsMore on the 1967 Maplecap Telehttps://youtu.be/K62c9ycOTlUAmp:2023 Headstrong Lil' King with 12" Eminence GA-SC64 speakerhttps://headstrongamps.com/lil-king-ampStrings: D'Addario NYXL 95-44https://amzn.to/41rnl0V#askzac #r&bguitar #telecasterSupport the Show.

William Bell is a soul legend who scored an early hit for Memphis's Stax Records with 1961's “You Don't Miss Your Water” and wrote and sang such much-covered classics as “I Forgot To Be Your Lover,” “Everybody Loves a Winner” and “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday.” He and Booker T. Jones co-wrote Albert King's “Born Under a Bad Sign,” and Bell vividly recalls the story behind that one. He also recounts his friendship with Otis Redding and how Redding's death, followed by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, affected him, Memphis and beyond. At age 84, Bell continues to make music, releasing the Grammy-winning album This Is Where I Live in 2017 and One Day Closer to Home last year. His voice and writing—as well as his wit and memory—remain impressively strong.

The incredible Booker T. Jones, keyboardist for Booker T. & M.G.'s joined Bret to talk about the excellent new HBO docuseries, "STAX: SOULSVILLE U.S.A." premiering May 20. Is this Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and producer also the leader of the single greatest rock and soul band of all time? Maybe!

**The Groove Doctors Friday Drive Time Show Replay On traxfm.org. This Week The Groove Doctor Featured 80's Grooves/Rare Groove/Contemporary Soul From Empress. Enchantment. Spank. T.S Monk. Love Exchange. The Emotion. Sonya Spence. The Time. Booker T Jones. Cashflow. Curtis Hairston. Kinsman Dazz. Banda Black Rio & More . The Groove Doctors Drive Time Show Live Friday's At 5PM UK Time The Station: traxfm.org #traxfm #groovedoctor #drivetimeshow #soul #funk #boogie #raregrooves #70ssoul #80ssoul #disco #neosoul #r&b #contemporarysoul Listen Live Here Via The Trax FM Player: chat.traxfm.org/player/index.html Mixcloud LIVE :mixcloud.com/live/traxfm Free Trax FM Android App: play.google.com/store/apps/det...mradio.ba.a6bcb The Trax FM Facebook Page : facebook.com/profile.php?id=10...100092342916738 Trax FM Live On Hear This: hearthis.at/k8bdngt4/live Tunerr: tunerr.co/radio/Trax-FM Radio Garden: Trax FM Link: radio.garden/listen/trax-fm/IEnsCj55 OnLine Radio Box: onlineradiobox.com/uk/trax/?cs...cs=uk.traxRadio Radio Deck: radiodeck.com/radio/5a09e2de87...7e3370db06d44dc Radio.Net: traxfmlondon.radio.net Stream Radio : streema.com/radios/Trax_FM..The_Originals Live Online Radio: liveonlineradio.net/english/tr...ax-fm-103-3.htm**

This week on Beale Street Caravan, we take a look back at the 2022 Memphis Music Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. Highlighted performances include Booker T. Jones, and a tribute to Mavis Staples by some of the phenomenal women in Memphis music. We also sit down with acclaimed musician and leader of the night's house band, Kurt Clayton, for an interview. Grammy nominated blues man, Guy Davis, will be with us to deliver an installment of the Blues Hall of Fame, an exploration of the lives of the pioneers and innovators enshrined in the Blues Hall of Fame, here in Memphis, TN, brought to you by the Blues Foundation.      

Booker T. Jones is one of the true geniuses of American music, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer as a keyboardist, composer, and bandleader (see “Green Onions,” “Soul Man,” “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” etc.), but also as a producer, which is the role he played in the creation of Willie's 1978 masterpiece, Stardust. It was a highly improbable pairing and production, and on this OBW episode, Booker explains all of it—how he met Willie, how they picked the songs, how they ended up recording in Emmylou Harris's living room—with a focus on the Hoagy Carmichael classic, “Georgia on My Mind.”

Todays guest is LA based session drummer, Neal Daniels. Neal has done performances/worked with an array of great artists, from Liz Phair, LP, Booker T Jones and even Dua Lipa, his most recent gig is holding down the drum throne with multi platinum pop/rock band 'Matchbox 20', who are about to embark on an Australian tour. He also runs a remote drum studio called White Fish Studios. We speak about that and so much more, so smash that play button. For more on Neal Daniels, please visit www.nealdaniels.com For more on Travis Marc, please visit www.travismarc.com For more on the Musicians Mentor, please visit www.musician-mentor.com Lastly, please remember to rate, review, follow and share as we continue to make new content for ya'll , thank you. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musiciansmentor/support

Barbra Streisand [00:20] "The Christmas Song" Seasons Greetings from Barbra Streisand... and Friends Columbia Special Products CSS 1075 1969 Babs takes things in a particularly saccharine direction, but I suppose not every version can be the Nat King Cole Trio. Rockpile [04:25] "Heart" Seconds of Pleasure Columbia JC 36886 1980 The iconic album from the band that until this point has backed solo efforts from Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds knock it out of the park on their only release as Rockpile. Guitarist Billy Bremnar steps up to take the lead vocals on this snappy number. Pavement [07:00] "Frontwards" The Secret History, Volume 1 (1990-1992) Matador OLE-1064-1 2015 A compilation from a few years ago of early Pavement material. This one is a live version of one of my favorite Pavement songs, performed at Brixton Academy in London on December 14, 1992. Years later Los Campesinos! would win my musical heart with their version of this song (https://youtu.be/DnEa4ES7ep4?si=WeB_oCdOz73gNL0E). The Fresh & Onlys [10:21] "Do You Believe in Destiny" Secrets Walls Sacred Bones Records SBR-056 2011 Always love that big spacey sound Wymond Miles brings with his guitar. Peter Gabriel [14:53] "Shock the Monkey" Security Geffen Records XGHS 2011 1982 If you ask Peter Gabriel what this album is titled, he will likely say "Peter Gabriel", like his previous 3 solo efforts. If you ask Geffen Records what this album is called, they will say "Security". The more you know. The Seeds [20:16] "Can't Seem to Make You Mine" The Seeds GNP Crescendo GNP 2023 1966 A top notch side 1, track 1 from these garage rock progenitors featuring the one and only Sky Saxon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQWVHvjdfZw). Eigenlicht [23:19] "There Lies Already the Shadow of Annihilation" Self-Annihilating Consciousness Gilead Media Relic94 2018 Blackened metal from up Olympia WA way. A brief intro into this epic album. If it sounds like something that you might be interested in, definitely check out this release. The Who [25:13] "Odorono/Tattoo" Sell Out Decca DL 74950 1967 The third studio album from The Who and easily my favorite Who album. I made this one a twofer to give you, the listener, a better feel for the album. Bernard Gunther [33:08] "Face Slapping" Sensory Awakening: Relaxation Esalen Institute 1968 Evidently there is a follow-up record for this... Sensory Awakening: Couples. Yowza. Mitch Miller and the Gang [35:32] "Singin' in the Rain/All I Do Is Dream of You/Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goodbye)" Sentimental Sing Along with Mitch Columbia CS 8251 1960 Not sure about the last part of that medley, but the first two are solid selections from the titular film. Luna [38:57] "(Walkin' Thru' the) Sleepy City" A Sentimental Education Double Feature Records LP-DBL-0013 2017 A fine collection of covers from one of my favorite bands. This Jagger/Richards number orignally appeared on the Stones compilation album Metamorphosis (https://youtu.be/fRDtVsAvM-8?si=wyGkrescNCIU4vWd). The Parting Gifts also do a great Spector-esque cover (https://youtu.be/P903W_tJNi0?si=Fyw8WEIcJidDI4Ga). Frank Sinatra [42:42] "September Song" September of My Years Reprise Records FS 1014 1965 Frank handles this Weill number pretty well. For my money, the Lou Reed version (https://youtu.be/dHVqWRxpqXk?si=Jop71rSbI5jTlzXF) that appears on the Hal Willner project "September Song: The Music of Kurt Weill". Serana-Maneesh [48:22] "Drain Cosmetics" Serena-Maneesh Playlouderecordings PLAYR 4LP 2006 Another great side one, track one. Some mid-aighties shoegaze goodness out of Norway. Saw them perform an amazing at the Bottom of the Hill on this tour. Kermit the Frog [52:03] "Green" The Sesame Street Record Columbia CR 21530 1970 Sing it,œœ Kermie. Rosanne Cash [54:27] "Seven Year Ache" Seven Year Ache Columbia JC 36965 1981 This song has been stuck in my brain since it was first released, due in large part due to the synth lines courtesy of Booker T Jones. This was a number one album on the country charts for Rosanne, and made it to number 26 on the Billboard 200 that year. _Music behind the DJ: "Make the World Go Away" by Lawrence Welk

This episode was recorded on August 6th, 2023 at the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park, California. The lineup includes Booker T. Jones, Chris Smither, Karla Bonoff, Steve Poltz, and Amber Rubarth. https://bit.ly/3MfEMvQ

A Middle Tennessee Business Podcast...Keio Stroud has had an impressive and diverse career drumming for some of Nashville's most successful and well-respected artists, producers and musicians including the following:Rodney Crowell, Richard Marx, Jake Owen, Deana Carter, Little Big Town, Hank Williams Jr, Emmylou Harris, Keith Urban, Hank Williams jr, Roseanne Cash, Lee Brice, Taj Mahal, The Nashville Star television show, Jason Aldean, Tiffany, Tommy Simms, Kip Moore, Buddy Miller, Keb' Mo', Randy Houser, Guy Clark, Micky Gilley, The Randy Rogers Band, Jamie O'Neal, Thompson Square, Leroy Parnell, Stoney LaRue, Peter Collins, Chely Wright, Booker T. Jones, Brian Setzer, Florida Georgia Line, Lee Brice, Terri Clark, Sarah Buxton, Frankie Ballard, Ray Scott, Halfway to Hazard, Jedd Hughes, The Wooten Brothers, Chuck Wicks, Will Kimbrough, Al Anderson, Gary Nicholson, Chad Warrix, Laura Bell Bundy, Mike Farris, John Popper, Keith Anderson, Beth Neilson Chapman, The Lost Trailers, Trent Willmon, Mark Mcguin, Wade Hayes, Joey DeGraw, Amy Dalley, Jermaine Jackson, Blue County, Victoria Shaw, Gretchen Wilson, Dee Snyder, Jason Meadows, Dean Dillon, Craig Wayne Boyd, Arlis Albritton, Ty Herndon, Jimmy Wayne, Chris DeStefano, Josh Gracin, Jaron and The Long Road To Love, Buxton Hughes, and many others.Stuff that came up:Daughter loves dad jokesThe beginning of relationship was through daily dad jokesPath to become a musician-is it pure luck? Path to longevity- business mind/sense People have 2 reasons to meet with him- meet for coffee to pick brain or meet to let him know “how much they know” they know the answers but not the experience Have to be able to tolerate person on tour- attitude vs aptitude; people will always pick the nice personToilet paper can change the attitude of the whole company; aka cutting corners can make a big impact; “be as professional as your bathroom”Metal mania drinking game- 36 hour bus rideOh, I get why you're “it”; charisma and believing in yourselfAwareness is good business; you can do it but maybe not like that personOnly speak about things I can control/fixNobody puts baby in the corner uber rideGives Rodney crowell all his success Who would be your tribute band - living colourWhat's your problem? Setting up next 20 years (40) of life; forgot how hard it was to start over; Deon effect know your worth and get paid for itWhere do you wanna be in 20 years- working w kid and be happy; be better off than i am now; driven by having purposeCheaper to go into a studio now than remote*****SUBSCRIBE/RATE/FOLLOW What's Your Problem? PODCAST:www.whatsyourproblempodcast.comwww.instagram.com/whatsyourproblempodwww.instagram.com/jimmccarthyvosTiktok: @jimmccarthyvos __________________________________________________________The Dad Joke Challenge is sponsored by Ed Fox and Tradebank of Nashville, for when you have unsold inventory or services and think that barter is smarter, go to www.nashville.tradebank.com. The Dad joke challenge with Ed Fox - Author of 101 groan-tastic dad jokes available on Amazon Kindle, or you could go TikTok channel @specialedfoxdadjokes____________________________________________________________****You hear Jim mention it on almost every episode, ME vs. WE and how 2023 will be 1943 all over again….order “PENDULUM:How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future”:https://a.co/d/7oKK7Ip__________________________________________________________________________The co-author of Pendulum wrote a myriad of other books and started a non-profit 21st Century Non-Traditional Business School that you should really check out: Wizard Academy - www.wizardacademy.org__________________________________________________________________________Talking about the real problems (and possible solutions) of everyday business owners and professionals in and around Middle Tennessee and beyond...this is the What's Your Problem Podcast!

[00:55] Award-winning Television and Radio Personality Monica Adams is teaming up with Trattoria Marcella, Clayton Winehouse, and Yuppy Puppy Pet Spa - Yuppy Puppy Forever Rescue to host the first annual "An Evening with the Real Monica Adams" to benefit rescue animals. The event will take place November 4 from 6-8p at Clayton Winehouse, 7911 Clayton Road Clayton, MO 63117. Food from Award Winning Italian Restaurant Trattoria Marcella, Wine and Bourbon Tastings courtesy of Clayton Winehouse, a motivational speaking engagement from Monica Adams, and a live and silent auction with 100 percent proceeds benefitting Yuppy Puppies Forever Rescue. Yuppy Puppies Forever Rescue is a rescue/adoption facility for orphaned dogs to have a second chance and is under the umbrella organization of Yuppy Puppy Pet Spa, located in O'Fallon and Cottleville, MO. Monica launched The Real Monica Adams show in the spring of 2023 helping her viewers live a more balanced life. [31:20] Selma Hortense Burke was an American sculptor and a member of the Harlem Renaissance movement. She is best know for a bas relief portrait of the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. This relief was the inspiration for the dime but Burke was never given credit for the design. The recording of Selma Burke was done by Booker T. Jones.This is Season 6! For more episodes, go to stlintune.com#yuppypuppies #dogrescue #monicaadams #claytonwinehouse #trattoriamarclla #yuppypuppypetspa #selmaburke #dime #basrelief #sculptor

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 7, 2023 is: portentous • por-TEN-tuss • adjective Portentous is a formal and literary term that describes something that gives a sign or warning that something (and usually something bad or unpleasant) is going to happen. It can also describe the pompous attitude or behavior of someone who is trying to seem important, serious, or impressive. // Edgar Allan Poe's stories are filled with portentous foreshadowing. // The author's portentous speech was long and tedious and peppered with anecdotes about brushes with fame. See the entry > Examples: “Let me begin with the rainstorm. My Much Better Half and I are having our kitchen and downstairs guest bathroom remodeled. ‘Don't expect smooth sailing,' we were forewarned. This proved a portentous metaphor because returning from my daily run I opened the front door and found myself in need of a boat. While I was out, a worker clogged and broke the toilet … and it runneth over continuously for an hour or more.” — Woody Woodburn, Ventura County (California) Star, 11 Aug. 2023 Did you know? “If it wasn't for bad luck / You know I wouldn't have no luck at all.” So sang Albert King on the 1967 song “Born Under a Bad Sign,” written by Booker T. Jones (of Booker T. and the MG's) and soul singer William Bell. He may have been singing about the ominous portent of being born during an unfavorable astrological alignment, but the classic tune became a standard of the blues. Portents are also at the heart of the adjective portentous, which describes things forewarning future events—usually events of the bad luck variety. Both portent and portentous come from the Latin noun portentum, meaning “omen or sign.” Since entering English in the 15th century, portentous has picked up additional senses, including “grave, solemn, significant” (as in “burdened with making portentous decisions”), which was added to our dictionary in 1934. It's more recently moved into less estimable semantic territory, describing both the pompous and the excessive.

An American record producer and Grammy Award winning recording engineer, Doug has worked with some of the best Pop, Indie, and Rock musicians.  His roster includes the critically acclaimed Girls, and their offspring-solo artist Christopher Owens, Tokyo Police Club and French Kicks.  Recently, he has been in the studio with Aussie favorites Birds Of Tokyo, Roadkill Ghost Choir, Twin Peaks, Elle King, and LA's Dear Boy. Recording and mixing credits include Australia's The Vines, Paul Dempsey, Powder Finger, as well as American pop phenoms Katie Perry, Fallout Boy and Miley Cyrus. Other credits include Booker T Jones, Guided By Voices, The Whigs, The Pharcyde, Guru, Dr Dog, Company of Thieves, The Honorary Title, Islands, Liz Phair, Starsailor, Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, and the Stone Foxes. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT: Quitting audio college as a fast track to working in the audio industry How to rise up the ranks in a studio Working for Jack Joseph Puig The simple trick for getting things to sound good How to analyze reference tracks Getting mixes to translate Why your monitors aren't your problem NS10s: why they're the worst Preserving the sound of a client's rough mixes Getting bug, wide guitars His simple approach to micing guitar amps A trick for getting wider drum room sounds Working with Tokyo Police Club Using Transient Designers on room mics Committing to sounds on the way in The importance of automation to make mixes sound exciting Notable gear mentioned in this episode: Shure SM57: https://sweetwater.sjv.io/vN2JYO To learn more about Doug Boehm, visit: https://www.dougboehmmusic.com/ For tips on how to improve your mixes, visit https://masteryourmix.com/ Looking for 1-on-1 feedback and training to help you create pro-quality mixes? Check out my new coaching program Amplitude and apply to join: https://masteryourmix.com/amplitude/ Download your FREE copy of the Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: https://masteryourmix.com/blueprint/ Get your copy of the #1 Amazon bestselling book, The Mixing Mindset – The Step-By-Step Formula For Creating Professional Rock Mixes From Your Home Studio: https://masteryourmix.com/mixingmindsetbook/ Join the FREE MasterYourMix Facebook community: https://links.masteryourmix.com/community To make sure that you don't miss an episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on Android. Have your questions answered on the show. Send them to questions@masteryourmix.com Thanks for listening! Please leave a rating and review on iTunes!

The R&B great was joined in the LifeMinute Studios by Stax Music Academy Executive Director Pat Mitchell Worley

The R&B great was joined in the LifeMinute Studios by Stax Music Academy Executive Director Pat Mitchell Worley

SUMMARYStax Records legend Deanie Parker talks about writing songs for Otis Redding, Albert King, William Bell, and Carla Thomas, dives deep on what made the Stax environment so special, and shines a light on the recently-released box sets of forgotten Stax songwriter demos. PART ONEScott and Paul discuss the wild story behind the monumental box set Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos.PART TWOOur in-depth interview with Deanie ParkerABOUT DEANIE PARKERWhile still in high school, Deanie Parker won a Memphis talent contest and an audition for Jim Stewart at Stax Records. He signed her and released her debut single, on the Volt label, in 1963. The self-penned “My Imaginary Guy” became a regional hit, but the life of a touring artist was not for Parker. She became the first Black employee at Stax's Satellite Record Shop before joining the label staff as the company's first publicist in 1964. Learning on the job while studying journalism at Memphis State, Parker eventually became the company's Vice President of Public Affairs. One of the first female publicists in the music industry, she worked closely with Isaac Hayes, Booker T & the MG's, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Albert King, and others. Wearing many hats at Stax, Deanie continued to write songs with colleagues such as Steve Cropper, Booker T. Jones, Eddie Floyd, Bettye Crutcher, Mack Rice, Mable John, and Homer Banks, with whom she penned the soul classic “Ain't That a Lot of Love.” The list of Stax artists who recorded her songs includes Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, William Bell, Sam & Dave, The Staple Singers, and more. Her other writing skills were put to use penning liner notes for classic albums such as Sam & Dave's Hold On, I'm Comin', Albert King's Born Under a Bad Sign, Otis Redding's Live in Europe, and Shirley Brown's Woman to Woman. From 1987 through 1995, Deanie served as the Assistant Director of the Memphis in May International Festival. A tireless champion of the Stax legacy, she became the first President and CEO of Soulsville, the nonprofit organization established to build and manage the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Stax Music Academy, and the Soulsville Charter School. She was appointed to the Tennessee Arts Commission in 2004 and, in 2009, was awarded two Emmy awards for the I Am a Man documentary short, for which she was an executive producer and the title song composer. The list of artists outside the Stax family who've covered Deanie Parker's songs includes The Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello, Darlene Love, Taj Mahal, Three Dog Night, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Band, New York Dolls, Simply Red, Hall & Oates, and many others. She is a co-producer and co-liner notes writer of the seven-CD collection Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, and was recently announced as a 2023 inductee into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. 

Skip Saylor is a renowned music engineer with a rich history of working in LA's legendary studios. He is credited on eight of @Billboard's Top 300 selling records of all time and has produced award winning music with everyone from TomPetty, DianaRoss, Beyoncé, soul legend Booker T Jones (+more), and has made music for legendary the Barbie company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

A joint mix with Leah Borromeo for Radio AlHara Airing June 3, 2023 01. Sun Ra - Nuclear War 02. This Is the Deep - The Best Is Yet To Come 03. Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love 04. Otis Redding -(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay 05. Sam Shalabi and Stefan Christoff - Flying Street 06. Sam Shalabi and Stefan Christoff - Elephantine 07. Jan Kees Helms - time is elastic 08. Badiâa Bouhrizi - (إلى سلمى) Ila Selma 09. Ikebe Shakedown - Road Song Below are the notes from Leah on her selections: Sun Ra - Nuclear War "Cos when it comes, your ass gotta go. A New York sister called Savitri reminded me of this song through an Insta dance she did to it. This is basically high school basements, bad weed, half formed political ideologies, hormones and angst flooding back and every second of it is beautiful." This Is the Deep - The Best Is Yet To Come "London bands have an unsubtle obsession with 70s roots and beats. This megaband consisting of almost everyone else in a particular scene hits the Harry Nilsson / Randy Newman vibes with a Serge Gainsbourg pipe. When their music isn't lounging in a Laurel Canyon basement, they're laundering themselves through Devo and Womack & Womack. " Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love "The album this track lives on was released in 1984, the year my mom had a death threat from the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Not long after that, my parents and I left Manila under the premise I would be going to DisneyLand. I don't ever remember liking Mickey Mouse. We left my brother and sisters behind as assurance we'd return. We didn't. Not until we'd claimed asylum and had to re-enter the United States from our country of origin. Which almost never happened because in 1989, the year we went back to do it, my godfather was the Secretary of Defense as troops loyal to Marcos staged a coup attempt against President Corazon Aquino. It was December and we were stranded in Japan, waiting for a flight to Manila. My mom organised a protest, lobbied the heads of Japan Airlines and raised an almighty stink that resulted in a standing room only jumbo jet packed w Filipino families led by military escort to Manila. I remember boarding the back of a military jeep zooming through the Makati streets to our house. I remember the sounds of explosions going off while walking our dogs not far from where we lived and my mom being taken in a Presidential car to Malacanang Palace. I remember missing my siblings so much, I asked for a teddy bear each to stand in for them when we eventually left. And this song - that I couldn't place until an algorithm on YouTube did it for me and everything flooded back." (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay - Otis Redding "One of the songs I will probably sing when I am senile. Not only is this bang in my vocal range, this and Tina Turner's "Proud Mary" are my go to karaoke songs. The great Booker T. Jones played on this. It's all from the Detroit / Chicago / Memphis tradition of soul and gospel music that I like to paint my upbringing in Chicago with. But it's also the best soundtrack to a long road trip I took w my mom on Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses across the lower 48 from September 84 to Feb/March 85 when we finally settled in Chicago and found a sponsor for our asylum claim. My mom always found a way to do exactly as she wished as long as it pertained to securing my future, be it hard or easy. And she gave up a lot for me. The fact I write this in relative comfort and privilege is a testament to her sacrifice."

This week's guest is Neal Daniels…an LA-based drummer with credits that include LP, Liz Phair, Matt Nathanson, Booker T. Jones, Post Malone, Due Lipa, Camila Cabello and many more. As is common with this podcast, we've known each other from afar for quite some time, but this podcast keeps bringing people together! Neal is a pro drummer through and through and this is certainly a masterclass in the journey towards enlightenment. We talk about the music that sparked his initial interest in drums / his inevitable stoner rock stage / his previous tendency to overplay / his moving to LA & feeling lost with his playing. Don't worry, it all has a happy ending. Please enjoy my conversation with Neal Daniels about the 5 records that shaped him into the player he is today. Cheers!  Call / Text Me your picks @ (424) 253-6676 Just state: ⁃            Your name ⁃            Where you're calling from  ⁃            A little backstory of yourself as a drummer (whatever you feel comfortable  with…but do some self promotion, we all want to support you!) NEALS BIG FAT FIVE

JUST PLAIN BILL?JUST AS I AM by Bill Withers (Sussex, 1971)Bill Withers was uncategorizable. Was he a soul artist? A folk musician? A blues singer? He certainly was no pop star. He picked a nylon string guitar, for God's sakes! But, even so, he was one of the most covered songwriters who ever plied the craft. His appeal was universal. There hasn't been any aspiring singer, of any genre, who hasn't tried to put over Lean on Me or Ain't No Sunshine. Bill belonged to all of us. Just As I Am was Bill's debut album, produced by one of the premier soul artists, Booker T Jones, but in it he covers folk avatar Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin', and Paul McCartney's Let it Be.  Listen to Grandma's Hands and you can hear the guitar of rock icon Steven Stills. The MG's Duck Dunn plays some of the bass parts, but so does Chris Etheridge of The Flying Burrito Brothers.Withers narrates part of his story himself in the cut Do it Good. The son of a miner from Slab Fork, West Virginia, Bill worked as a machinist for Douglas Aircraft, IBM, and Ford - all the while sending out demo tapes until Clarence Avant signed him to Sussex, where he hit it with Ain't No Sunshine at the age of 32 - way over the hill by pop star standards. He's pictured on the label holding his lunch pail, dressed in a t shirt and jeans - and when he first hit pay dirt, he refused to quit his job, saying that the music business was “fickle”. Is it ever! The common touch was always part of Bill's magic. And, of course, an uncanny talent and instinct, not to mention a warm baritone that poured like honey out of America's car radios.When he was inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 he was characteristically understated when he said: “I don't think I've done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia.” Neither do we.

This week on Beale Street Caravan, listen to a special anniversary performance from Booker T. Jones and Stax Music Academy Alumni, the Franklin Brothers. The performance celebrates the 60th anniversary of Booker T. & the M.G.'s hit, “Green Onions”, as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of Stax Museum.  Grammy nominated blues man, Guy Davis, will be with us to deliver an installment of the Blues Hall of Fame, an exploration of the lives of the pioneers and innovators enshrined in the Blues Hall of Fame, here in Memphis, TN, brought to you by the Blues Foundation.

Episode 163 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay", Stax Records, and the short, tragic, life of Otis Redding. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Soul Man" by Sam and Dave. 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 No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Redding, even if I split into multiple parts. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Redding was Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky. Ribowsky is usually a very good, reliable, writer, but in this case there are a couple of lapses in editing which make it not a book I can wholeheartedly recommend, but the research on the biographical details of Redding seems to be the best. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. There are two Original Album Series box sets which between them contain all the albums Redding released in his life plus his first few posthumous albums, for a low price. Volume 1, volume 2. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I begin -- this episode ends with a description of a plane crash, which some people may find upsetting. There's also a mention of gun violence. In 2019 the film Summer of Soul came out. If you're unfamiliar with this film, it's a documentary of an event, the Harlem Cultural Festival, which gets called the "Black Woodstock" because it took place in the summer of 1969, overlapping the weekend that Woodstock happened. That event was a series of weekend free concerts in New York, performed by many of the greatest acts in Black music at that time -- people like Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, and the Fifth Dimension. One thing that that film did was to throw into sharp relief a lot of the performances we've seen over the years by legends of white rock music of the same time. If you watch the film of Woodstock, or the earlier Monterey Pop festival, it's apparent that a lot of the musicians are quite sloppy. This is easy to dismiss as being a product of the situation -- they're playing outdoor venues, with no opportunity to soundcheck, using primitive PA systems, and often without monitors. Anyone would sound a bit sloppy in that situation, right? That is until you listen to the performances on the Summer of Soul soundtrack. The performers on those shows are playing in the same kind of circumstances, and in the case of Woodstock literally at the same time, so it's a fair comparison, and there really is no comparison. Whatever you think of the quality of the *music* (and some of my very favourite artists played at Monterey and Woodstock), the *musicianship* is orders of magnitude better at the Harlem Cultural Festival [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (live)”] And of course there's a reason for this. Most of the people who played at those big hippie festivals had not had the same experiences as the Black musicians. The Black players were mostly veterans of the chitlin' circuit, where you had to play multiple shows a day, in front of demanding crowds who wanted their money's worth, and who wanted you to be able to play and also put on a show at the same time. When you're playing for crowds of working people who have spent a significant proportion of their money to go to the show, and on a bill with a dozen other acts who are competing for that audience's attention, you are going to get good or stop working. The guitar bands at Woodstock and Monterey, though, hadn't had the same kind of pressure. Their audiences were much more forgiving, much more willing to go with the musicians, view themselves as part of a community with them. And they had to play far fewer shows than the chitlin' circuit veterans, so they simply didn't develop the same chops before becoming famous (the best of them did after fame, of course). And so it's no surprise that while a lot of bands became more famous as a result of the Monterey Pop Festival, only three really became breakout stars in America as a direct result of it. One of those was the Who, who were already the third or fourth biggest band in the UK by that point, either just behind or just ahead of the Kinks, and so the surprise is more that it took them that long to become big in America. But the other two were themselves veterans of the chitlin' circuit. If you buy the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of Monterey Pop, you get two extra discs along with the disc with the film of the full festival on it -- the only two performances that were thought worth turning into their own short mini-films. One of them is Jimi Hendrix's performance, and we will talk about that in a future episode. The other is titled Shake! Otis at Monterey: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Shake! (live at Monterey Pop Festival)"] Otis Redding came from Macon, Georgia, the home town of Little Richard, who became one of his biggest early influences, and like Richard he was torn in his early years between religion and secular music -- though in most other ways he was very different from Richard, and in particular he came from a much more supportive family. While his father, Otis senior, was a deacon in the church, and didn't approve much of blues, R&B, or jazz music or listen to it himself, he didn't prevent his son from listening to it, so young Otis grew up listening to records by Richard -- of whom he later said "If it hadn't been for Little Richard I would not be here... Richard has soul too. My present music has a lot of him in it" -- and another favourite, Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Indeed, it's unclear exactly how much Otis senior *did* disapprove of those supposedly-sinful kinds of music. The biography I used as a source for this, and which says that Otis senior wouldn't listen to blues or jazz music at all, also quotes his son as saying that when he was a child his mother and father used to play him "a calypso song out then called 'Run Joe'" That will of course be this one: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Run Joe"] I find it hard to reconcile the idea of someone who refused to listen to the blues or jazz listening to Louis Jordan, but then people are complex. Whatever Otis senior's feelings about secular music, he recognised from a very early age that his son had a special talent, and encouraged him to become a gospel singer. And at the same time he was listening to Little Richard, young Otis was also listening to gospel singers. One particular influence was a blind street singer, Reverend Pearly Brown: [Excerpt: Reverend Pearly Brown, "Ninety Nine and a Half Won't Do"] Redding was someone who cared deeply about his father's opinion, and it might well have been that he would eventually have become a gospel performer, because he started his career with a foot in both camps. What seems to have made the difference is that when he was sixteen, his father came down with tuberculosis. Even a few years earlier this would have been a terminal diagnosis, but thankfully by this point antibiotics had been invented, and the deacon eventually recovered. But it did mean that Otis junior had to become the family breadwinner while his father was sick, and so he turned decisively towards the kind of music that could make more money. He'd already started performing secular music. He'd joined a band led by Gladys Williams, who was the first female bandleader in the area. Williams sadly doesn't seem to have recorded anything -- discogs has a listing of a funk single by a Gladys Williams on a tiny label which may or may not be the same person, but in general she avoided recording studios, only wanting to play live -- but she was a very influential figure in Georgia music. According to her former trumpeter Newton Collier, who later went on to play with Redding and others, she trained both Fats Gonder and Lewis Hamlin, who went on to join the lineup of James Brown's band that made Live at the Apollo, and Collier says that Hamlin's arrangements for that album, and the way the band would segue from one track to another, were all things he'd been taught by Miss Gladys. Redding sang with Gladys Williams for a while, and she took him under her wing, trained him, and became his de facto first manager. She got him to perform at local talent shows, where he won fifteen weeks in a row, before he got banned from performing to give everyone else a chance. At all of these shows, the song he performed was one that Miss Gladys had rehearsed with him, Little Richard's "Heeby Jeebies": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Heeby Jeebies"] At this time, Redding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two greats of fifties Georgia R&B -- Little Richard and James Brown -- plus some by his other idol Sam Cooke, and those singers would remain his greatest influences throughout his career. After his stint with Williams, Redding went on to join another band, Pat T Cake and the Mighty Panthers, whose guitarist Johnny Jenkins would be a major presence in his life for several years. The Mighty Panthers were soon giving Redding top billing, and advertising gigs as featuring Otis "Rockin' Robin" Redding -- presumably that was another song in his live repertoire. By this time Redding was sounding enough like Little Richard that when Richard's old backing band, The Upsetters, were looking for a new singer after Richard quit rock and roll for the ministry, they took Redding on as their vocalist for a tour. Once that tour had ended, Redding returned home to find that Johnny Jenkins had quit the Mighty Panthers and formed a new band, the Pinetoppers. Redding joined that band, who were managed by a white teenager named Phil Walden, who soon became Redding's personal manager as well. Walden and Redding developed a very strong bond, to the extent that Walden, who was studying at university, spent all his tuition money promoting Redding and almost got kicked out. When Redding found this out, he actually went round to everyone he knew and got loans from everyone until he had enough to pay for Walden's tuition -- much of it paid in coins. They had a strong enough bond that Walden would remain his manager for the rest of Redding's life, and even when Walden had to do two years in the Army in Germany, he managed Redding long-distance, with his brother looking after things at home. But of course, there wasn't much of a music industry in Georgia, and so with Walden's blessing and support, he moved to LA in 1960 to try to become a star. Just before he left, his girlfriend Zelma told him she was pregnant. He assured her that he was only going to be away for a few months, and that he would be back in time for the birth, and that he intended to come back to Georgia rich and marry her. Her response was "Sure you is". In LA, Redding met up with a local record producer, James "Jimmy Mack" McEachin, who would later go on to become an actor, appearing in several films with Clint Eastwood. McEachin produced a session for Redding at Gold Star studios, with arrangements by Rene Hall and using several of the musicians who later became the Wrecking Crew. "She's All Right", the first single that came from that session, was intended to sound as much like Jackie Wilson as possible, and was released under the name of The Shooters, the vocal group who provided the backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Shooters, "She's All Right"] "She's All Right" was released on Trans World, a small label owned by Morris Bernstein, who also owned Finer Arts records (and "She's All Right" seems to have been released on both labels). Neither of Bernstein's labels had any great success -- the biggest record they put out was a single by the Hollywood Argyles that came out after they'd stopped having hits -- and they didn't have any connection to the R&B market. Redding and McEachin couldn't find any R&B labels that wanted to pick up their recordings, and so Redding did return to Georgia and marry Zelma a few days before the birth of their son Dexter. Back in Georgia, he hooked up again with the Pinetoppers, and he and Jenkins started trying local record labels, attempting to get records put out by either of them. Redding was the first, and Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers put out a single, "Shout Bamalama", a slight reworking of a song that he'd recorded as "Gamma Lamma" for McEachin, which was obviously heavily influenced by Little Richard: [Excerpt: Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers, "Shout Bamalama"] That single was produced by a local record company owner, Bobby Smith, who signed Redding to a contract which Redding didn't read, but which turned out to be a management contract as well as a record contract. This would later be a problem, as Redding didn't have an actual contract with Phil Walden -- one thing that comes up time and again in stories about music in the Deep South at this time is people operating on handshake deals and presuming good faith on the part of each other. There was a problem with the record which nobody had foreseen though -- Redding was the first Black artist signed to Smith's label, which was called Confederate Records, and its logo was the Southern Cross. Now Smith, by all accounts, was less personally racist than most white men in Georgia at the time, and hadn't intended that as any kind of statement of white supremacy -- he'd just used a popular local symbol, without thinking through the implications. But as the phrase goes, intent isn't magic, and while Smith didn't intend it as racist, rather unsurprisingly Black DJs and record shops didn't see things in the same light. Smith was told by several DJs that they wouldn't play the record while it was on that label, and he started up a new subsidiary label, Orbit, and put the record out on that label. Redding and Smith continued collaborating, and there were plans for Redding to put out a second single on Orbit. That single was going to be "These Arms of Mine", a song Redding had originally given to another Confederate artist, a rockabilly performer called Buddy Leach (who doesn't seem to be the same Buddy Leach as the Democratic politician from Louisiana, or the saxophone player with George Thorogood and the Destroyers). Leach had recorded it as a B-side, with the slightly altered title "These Arms Are Mine". Sadly I can't provide an excerpt of that, as the record is so rare that even websites I've found by rockabilly collectors who are trying to get everything on Confederate Records haven't managed to get hold of copies. Meanwhile, Johnny Jenkins had been recording on another label, Tifco, and had put out a single called "Pinetop": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, "Pinetop"] That record had attracted the attention of Joe Galkin. Galkin was a semi-independent record promoter, who had worked for Atlantic in New York before moving back to his home town of Macon. Galkin had proved himself as a promoter by being responsible for the massive amounts of airplay given to Solomon Burke's "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)"] After that, Jerry Wexler had given Galkin fifty dollars a week and an expense account, and Galkin would drive to all the Black radio stations in the South and pitch Atlantic's records to them. But Galkin also had his own record label, Gerald Records, and when he went to those stations and heard them playing something from a smaller label, he would quickly negotiate with that smaller label, buy the master and the artist's contract, and put the record out on Gerald Records -- and then he would sell the track and the artist on to Atlantic, taking ten percent of the record's future earnings and a finder's fee. This is what happened with Johnny Jenkins' single, which was reissued on Gerald and then on Atlantic. Galkin signed Jenkins to a contract -- another of those contracts which also made him Jenkins' manager, and indeed the manager of the Pinetops. Jenkins' record ended up selling about twenty-five thousand records, but when Galkin saw the Pinetoppers performing live, he realised that Otis Redding was the real star. Since he had a contract with Jenkins, he came to an agreement with Walden, who was still Jenkins' manager as well as Redding's -- Walden would get fifty percent of Jenkins' publishing and they would be co-managers of Jenkins. But Galkin had plans for Redding, which he didn't tell anyone about, not even Redding himself. The one person he did tell was Jerry Wexler, who he phoned up and asked for two thousand dollars, explaining that he wanted to record Jenkins' follow-up single at Stax, and he also wanted to bring along a singer he'd discovered, who sang with Jenkins' band. Wexler agreed -- Atlantic had recently started distributing Stax's records on a handshake deal of much the same kind that Redding had with Walden. As far as everyone else was concerned, though, the session was just for Johnny Jenkins, the known quantity who'd already released a single for Atlantic. Otis Redding, meanwhile, was having to work a lot of odd jobs to feed his rapidly growing family, and one of those jobs was to work as Johnny Jenkins' driver, as Jenkins didn't have a driving license. So Galkin suggested that, given that Memphis was quite a long drive, Redding should drive Galkin and Jenkins to Stax, and carry the equipment for them. Bobby Smith, who still thought of himself as Redding's manager, was eager to help his friend's bandmate with his big break (and to help Galkin, in the hope that maybe Atlantic would start distributing Confederate too), and so he lent Redding the company station wagon to drive them to the session.The other Pinetoppers wouldn't be going -- Jenkins was going to be backed by Booker T and the MGs, the normal Stax backing band. Phil Walden, though, had told Redding that he should try to take the opportunity to get himself heard by Stax, and he pestered the musicians as they recorded Jenkins' "Spunky": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "Spunky"] Cropper later remembered “During the session, Al Jackson says to me, ‘The big tall guy that was driving Johnny, he's been bugging me to death, wanting me to hear him sing,' Al said, ‘Would you take some time and get this guy off of my back and listen to him?' And I said, ‘After the session I'll try to do it,' and then I just forgot about it.” What Redding didn't know, though Walden might have, is that Galkin had planned all along to get Redding to record while he was there. Galkin claimed to be Redding's manager, and told Jim Stewart, the co-owner of Stax who acted as main engineer and supervising producer on the sessions at this point, that Wexler had only funded the session on the basis that Redding would also get a shot at recording. Stewart was unimpressed -- Jenkins' session had not gone well, and it had taken them more than two hours to get two tracks down, but Galkin offered Stewart a trade -- Galkin, as Redding's manager, would take half of Stax's mechanical royalties for the records (which wouldn't be much) but in turn would give Stewart half the publishing on Redding's songs. That was enough to make Stewart interested, but by this point Booker T. Jones had already left the studio, so Steve Cropper moved to the piano for the forty minutes that was left of the session, with Jenkins remaining on guitar, and they tried to get two sides of a single cut. The first track they cut was "Hey Hey Baby", which didn't impress Stewart much -- he simply said that the world didn't need another Little Richard -- and so with time running out they cut another track, the ballad Redding had already given to Buddy Leach. He asked Cropper, who didn't play piano well, to play "church chords", by which he meant triplets, and Cropper said "he started singing ‘These Arms of Mine' and I know my hair lifted about three inches and I couldn't believe this guy's voice": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That was more impressive, though Stewart carefully feigned disinterest. Stewart and Galkin put together a contract which signed Redding to Stax -- though they put the single out on the less-important Volt subsidiary, as they did for much of Redding's subsequent output -- and gave Galkin and Stewart fifty percent each of the publishing rights to Redding's songs. Redding signed it, not even realising he was signing a proper contract rather than just one for a single record, because he was just used to signing whatever bit of paper was put in front of him at the time. This one was slightly different though, because Redding had had his twenty-first birthday since the last time he'd signed a contract, and so Galkin assumed that that meant all his other contracts were invalid -- not realising that Redding's contract with Bobby Smith had been countersigned by Redding's mother, and so was also legal. Walden also didn't realise that, but *did* realise that Galkin representing himself as Redding's manager to Stax might be a problem, so he quickly got Redding to sign a proper contract, formalising the handshake basis they'd been operating on up to that point. Walden was at this point in the middle of his Army service, but got the signature while he was home on leave. Walden then signed a deal with Galkin, giving Walden half of Galkin's fifty percent cut of Redding's publishing in return for Galkin getting a share of Walden's management proceeds. By this point everyone was on the same page -- Otis Redding was going to be a big star, and he became everyone's prime focus. Johnny Jenkins remained signed to Walden's agency -- which quickly grew to represent almost every big soul star that wasn't signed to Motown -- but he was regarded as a footnote. His record came out eventually on Volt, almost two years later, but he didn't release another record until 1968. Jenkins did, though, go on to have some influence. In 1970 he was given the opportunity to sing lead on an album backed by Duane Allman and the members of the Muscle Shoals studio band, many of whom went on to form the Allman Brothers Band. That record contained a cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Guilded Splinters" which was later sampled by Beck for "Loser", the Wu-Tang Clan for "Gun Will Go" and Oasis for their hit "Go Let it Out": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"] Jenkins would play guitar on several future Otis Redding sessions, but would hold a grudge against Redding for the rest of his life for taking the stardom he thought was rightfully his, and would be one of the few people to have anything negative to say about Redding after his early death. When Bobby Smith heard about the release of "These Arms of Mine", he was furious, as his contract with Redding *was* in fact legally valid, and he'd been intending to get Redding to record the song himself. However, he realised that Stax could call on the resources of Atlantic Records, and Joe Galkin also hinted that if he played nice Atlantic might start distributing Confederate, too. Smith signed away all his rights to Redding -- again, thinking that he was only signing away the rights to a single record and song, and not reading the contract closely enough. In this case, Smith only had one working eye, and that wasn't good enough to see clearly -- he had to hold paper right up to his face to read anything on it -- and he simply couldn't read the small print on the contract, and so signed over Otis Redding's management, record contract, and publishing, for a flat seven hundred dollars. Now everything was legally -- if perhaps not ethically -- in the clear. Phil Walden was Otis Redding's manager, Stax was his record label, Joe Galkin got a cut off the top, and Walden, Galkin, and Jim Stewart all shared Redding's publishing. Although, to make it a hit, one more thing had to happen, and one more person had to get a cut of the song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That sound was becoming out of fashion among Black listeners at the time. It was considered passe, and even though the Stax musicians loved the record, Jim Stewart didn't, and put it out not because he believed in Otis Redding, but because he believed in Joe Galkin. As Stewart later said “The Black radio stations were getting out of that Black country sound, we put it out to appease and please Joe.” For the most part DJs ignored the record, despite Galkin pushing it -- it was released in October 1962, that month which we have already pinpointed as the start of the sixties, and came out at the same time as a couple of other Stax releases, and the one they were really pushing was Carla Thomas' "I'll Bring it Home to You", an answer record to Sam Cooke's "Bring it On Home to Me": [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "I'll Bring it Home to You"] "These Arms of Mine" wasn't even released as the A-side -- that was "Hey Hey Baby" -- until John R came along. John R was a Nashville DJ, and in fact he was the reason that Bobby Smith even knew that Redding had signed to Stax. R had heard Buddy Leach's version of the song, and called Smith, who was a friend of his, to tell him that his record had been covered, and that was the first Smith had heard of the matter. But R also called Jim Stewart at Stax, and told him that he was promoting the wrong side, and that if they started promoting "These Arms of Mine", R would play the record on his radio show, which could be heard in twenty-eight states. And, as a gesture of thanks for this suggestion -- and definitely not as payola, which would be very illegal -- Stewart gave R his share of the publishing rights to the song, which eventually made the top twenty on the R&B charts, and slipped into the lower end of the Hot One Hundred. "These Arms of Mine" was actually recorded at a turning point for Stax as an organisation. By the time it was released, Booker T Jones had left Memphis to go to university in Indiana to study music, with his tuition being paid for by his share of the royalties for "Green Onions", which hit the charts around the same time as Redding's first session: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] Most of Stax's most important sessions were recorded at weekends -- Jim Stewart still had a day job as a bank manager at this point, and he supervised the records that were likely to be hits -- so Jones could often commute back to the studio for session work, and could play sessions during his holidays. The rest of the time, other people would cover the piano parts, often Cropper, who played piano on Redding's next sessions, with Jenkins once again on guitar. As "These Arms of Mine" didn't start to become a hit until March, Redding didn't go into the studio again until June, when he cut the follow-up, "That's What My Heart Needs", with the MGs, Jenkins, and the horn section of the Mar-Keys. That made number twenty-seven on the Cashbox R&B chart -- this was in the period when Billboard had stopped having one. The follow-up, "Pain in My Heart", was cut in September and did even better, making number eleven on the Cashbox R&B chart: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Pain in My Heart"] It did well enough in fact that the Rolling Stones cut a cover version of the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Pain in My Heart"] Though Redding didn't get the songwriting royalties -- by that point Allen Toussaint had noticed how closely it resembled a song he'd written for Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart": [Excerpt: Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart"] And so the writing credit was changed to be Naomi Neville, one of the pseudonyms Toussaint used. By this point Redding was getting steady work, and becoming a popular live act. He'd put together his own band, and had asked Jenkins to join, but Jenkins didn't want to play second fiddle to him, and refused, and soon stopped being invited to the recording sessions as well. Indeed, Redding was *eager* to get as many of his old friends working with him as he could. For his second and third sessions, as well as bringing Jenkins, he'd brought along a whole gang of musicians from his touring show, and persuaded Stax to put out records by them, too. At those sessions, as well as Redding's singles, they also cut records by his valet (which was the term R&B performers in those years used for what we'd now call a gofer or roadie) Oscar Mack: [Excerpt: Oscar Mack, "Don't Be Afraid of Love"] For Eddie Kirkland, the guitarist in his touring band, who had previously played with John Lee Hooker and whose single was released under the name "Eddie Kirk": [Excerpt: Eddie Kirk, "The Hawg, Part 1"] And Bobby Marchan, a singer and female impersonator from New Orleans who had had some massive hits a few years earlier both on his own and as the singer with Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, but had ended up in Macon without a record deal and been taken under Redding's wing: [Excerpt: Bobby Marchan, "What Can I Do?"] Redding would continue, throughout his life, to be someone who tried to build musical careers for his friends, though none of those singles was successful. The changes in Stax continued. In late autumn 1963, Atlantic got worried by the lack of new product coming from Stax. Carla Thomas had had a couple of R&B hits, and they were expecting a new single, but every time Jerry Wexler phoned Stax asking where the new single was, he was told it would be coming soon but the equipment was broken. After a couple of weeks of this, Wexler decided something fishy was going on, and sent Tom Dowd, his genius engineer, down to Stax to investigate. Dowd found when he got there that the equipment *was* broken, and had been for weeks, and was a simple fix. When Dowd spoke to Stewart, though, he discovered that they didn't know where to source replacement parts from. Dowd phoned his assistant in New York, and told him to go to the electronics shop and get the parts he needed. Then, as there were no next-day courier services at that time, Dowd's assistant went to the airport, found a flight attendant who was flying to Memphis, and gave her the parts and twenty-five dollars, with a promise of twenty-five more if she gave them to Dowd at the other end. The next morning, Dowd had the equipment fixed, and everyone involved became convinced that Dowd was a miracle worker, especially after he showed Steve Cropper some rudimentary tape-manipulation techniques that Cropper had never encountered before. Dowd had to wait around in Memphis for his flight, so he went to play golf with the musicians for a bit, and then they thought they might as well pop back to the studio and test the equipment out. When they did, Rufus Thomas -- Carla Thomas' father, who had also had a number of hits himself on Stax and Sun -- popped his head round the door to see if the equipment was working now. They told him it was, and he said he had a song if they were up for a spot of recording. They were, and so when Dowd flew back that night, he was able to tell Wexler not only that the next Carla Thomas single would soon be on its way, but that he had the tapes of a big hit single with him right there: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Walking the Dog"] "Walking the Dog" was a sensation. Jim Stewart later said “I remember our first order out of Chicago. I was in New York in Jerry Wexler's office at the time and Paul Glass, who was our distributor in Chicago, called in an order for sixty-five thousand records. I said to Jerry, ‘Do you mean sixty-five hundred?' And he said, ‘Hell no, he wants sixty-five thousand.' That was the first order! He believed in the record so much that we ended up selling about two hundred thousand in Chicago alone.” The record made the top ten on the pop charts, but that wasn't the biggest thing that Dowd had taken away from the session. He came back raving to Wexler about the way they made records in Memphis, and how different it was from the New York way. In New York, there was a strict separation between the people in the control room and the musicians in the studio, the musicians were playing from written charts, and everyone had a job and did just that job. In Memphis, the musicians were making up the arrangements as they went, and everyone was producing or engineering all at the same time. Dowd, as someone with more technical ability than anyone at Stax, and who was also a trained musician who could make musical suggestions, was soon regularly commuting down to Memphis to be part of the production team, and Jerry Wexler was soon going down to record with other Atlantic artists there, as we heard about in the episode on "Midnight Hour". Shortly after Dowd's first visit to Memphis, another key member of the Stax team entered the picture. Right at the end of 1963, Floyd Newman recorded a track called "Frog Stomp", on which he used his own band rather than the MGs and Mar-Keys: [Excerpt: Floyd Newman, "Frog Stomp"] The piano player and co-writer on that track was a young man named Isaac Hayes, who had been trying to get work at Stax for some time. He'd started out as a singer, and had made a record, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round", at American Sound, the studio run by the former Stax engineer and musician Chips Moman: [Excerpt: Isaac Hayes, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round"] But that hadn't been a success, and Hayes had continued working a day job at a slaughterhouse -- and would continue doing so for much of the next few years, even after he started working at Stax (it's truly amazing how many of the people involved in Stax were making music as what we would now call a side-hustle). Hayes had become a piano player as a way of getting a little extra money -- he'd been offered a job as a fill-in when someone else had pulled out at the last minute on a gig on New Year's Eve, and took it even though he couldn't actually play piano, and spent his first show desperately vamping with two fingers, and was just lucky the audience was too drunk to care. But he had a remarkable facility for the instrument, and while unlike Booker T Jones he would never gain a great deal of technical knowledge, and was embarrassed for the rest of his life by both his playing ability and his lack of theory knowledge, he was as great as they come at soul, at playing with feel, and at inventing new harmonies on the fly. They still didn't have a musician at Stax that could replace Booker T, who was still off at university, so Isaac Hayes was taken on as a second session keyboard player, to cover for Jones when Jones was in Indiana -- though Hayes himself also had to work his own sessions around his dayjob, so didn't end up playing on "In the Midnight Hour", for example, because he was at the slaughterhouse. The first recording session that Hayes played on as a session player was an Otis Redding single, either his fourth single for Stax, "Come to Me", or his fifth, "Security": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] "Security" is usually pointed to by fans as the point at which Redding really comes into his own, and started directing the musicians more. There's a distinct difference, in particular, in the interplay between Cropper's guitar, the Mar-Keys' horns, and Redding's voice. Where previously the horns had tended to play mostly pads, just holding chords under Redding's voice, now they were starting to do answering phrases. Jim Stewart always said that the only reason Stax used a horn section at all was because he'd been unable to find a decent group of backing vocalists, and the function the horns played on most of the early Stax recordings was somewhat similar to the one that the Jordanaires had played for Elvis, or the Picks for Buddy Holly, basically doing "oooh" sounds to fatten out the sound, plus the odd sax solo or simple riff. The way Redding used the horns, though, was more like the way Ray Charles used the Raelettes, or the interplay of a doo-wop vocal group, with call and response, interjections, and asides. He also did something in "Security" that would become a hallmark of records made at Stax -- instead of a solo, the instrumental break is played by the horns as an ensemble: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] According to Wayne Jackson, the Mar-Keys' trumpeter, Redding was the one who had the idea of doing these horn ensemble sections, and the musicians liked them enough that they continued doing them on all the future sessions, no matter who with. The last Stax single of 1964 took the "Security" sound and refined it, and became the template for every big Stax hit to follow. "Mr. Pitiful" was the first collaboration between Redding and Steve Cropper, and was primarily Cropper's idea. Cropper later remembered “There was a disc jockey here named Moohah. He started calling Otis ‘Mr. Pitiful' 'cause he sounded so pitiful singing his ballads. So I said, ‘Great idea for a song!' I got the idea for writing about it in the shower. I was on my way down to pick up Otis. I got down there and I was humming it in the car. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?' We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, he hummed a horn line, boom—we had it. When Jim Stewart walked in we had it all worked up. Two or three cuts later, there it was.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] Cropper would often note later that Redding would never write about himself, but that Cropper would put details of Redding's life and persona into the songs, from "Mr. Pitiful" right up to their final collaboration, in which Cropper came up with lines about leaving home in Georgia. "Mr Pitiful" went to number ten on the R&B chart and peaked at number forty-one on the hot one hundred, and its B-side, "That's How Strong My Love Is", also made the R&B top twenty. Cropper and Redding soon settled into a fruitful writing partnership, to the extent that Cropper even kept a guitar permanently tuned to an open chord so that Redding could use it. Redding couldn't play the guitar, but liked to use one as a songwriting tool. When a guitar is tuned in standard tuning, you have to be able to make chord shapes to play it, because the sound of the open strings is a discord: [demonstrates] But you can tune a guitar so all the strings are the notes of a single chord, so they sound good together even when you don't make a chord shape: [demonstrates open-E tuning] With one of these open tunings, you can play chords with just a single finger barring a fret, and so they're very popular with, for example, slide guitarists who use a metal slide to play, or someone like Dolly Parton who has such long fingernails it's difficult to form chord shapes. Someone like Parton is of course an accomplished player, but open tunings also mean that someone who can't play well can just put their finger down on a fret and have it be a chord, so you can write songs just by running one finger up and down the fretboard: [demonstrates] So Redding could write, and even play acoustic rhythm guitar on some songs, which he did quite a lot in later years, without ever learning how to make chords. Now, there's a downside to this -- which is why standard tuning is still standard. If you tune to an open major chord, you can play major chords easily but minor chords become far more difficult. Handily, that wasn't a problem at Stax, because according to Isaac Hayes, Jim Stewart banned minor chords from being played at Stax. Hayes said “We'd play a chord in a session, and Jim would say, ‘I don't want to hear that chord.' Jim's ears were just tuned into one, four, and five. I mean, just simple changes. He said they were the breadwinners. He didn't like minor chords. Marvell and I always would try to put that pretty stuff in there. Jim didn't like that. We'd bump heads about that stuff. Me and Marvell fought all the time that. Booker wanted change as well. As time progressed, I was able to sneak a few in.” Of course, minor chords weren't *completely* banned from Stax, and some did sneak through, but even ballads would often have only major chords -- like Redding's next single, "I've Been Loving You Too Long". That track had its origins with Jerry Butler, the singer who had been lead vocalist of the Impressions before starting a solo career and having success with tracks like "For Your Precious Love": [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "For Your Precious Love"] Redding liked that song, and covered it himself on his second album, and he had become friendly with Butler. Butler had half-written a song, and played it for Redding, who told him he'd like to fiddle with it, see what he could do. Butler forgot about the conversation, until he got a phone call from Redding, telling him that he'd recorded the song. Butler was confused, and also a little upset -- he'd been planning to finish the song himself, and record it. But then Redding played him the track, and Butler decided that doing so would be pointless -- it was Redding's song now: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I've Been Loving You Too Long"] "I've Been Loving You Too Long" became Redding's first really big hit, making number two on the R&B chart and twenty-one on the Hot One Hundred. It was soon being covered by the Rolling Stones and Ike & Tina Turner, and while Redding was still not really known to the white pop market, he was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars on the R&B scene. His record sales were still not matching his live performances -- he would always make far more money from appearances than from records -- but he was by now the performer that every other soul singer wanted to copy. "I've Been Loving You Too Long" came out just after Redding's second album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, which happened to be the first album released on Volt Records. Before that, while Stax and Volt had released the singles, they'd licensed all the album tracks to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, which had released the small number of albums put out by Stax artists. But times were changing and the LP market was becoming bigger. And more importantly, the *stereo* LP market was becoming bigger. Singles were still only released in mono, and would be for the next few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audiophiles, and they wanted stereo. This was a problem for Stax, because they only had a mono tape recorder, and they were scared of changing anything about their setup in case it destroyed their sound. Tom Dowd, who had been recording in eight track for years, was appalled by the technical limitations at the McLemore Ave studio, but eventually managed to get Jim Stewart, who despite -- or possibly because of -- being a white country musician was the most concerned that they keep their Black soul sound, to agree to a compromise. They would keep everything hooked up exactly the same -- the same primitive mixers, the same mono tape recorder -- and Stax would continue doing their mixes for mono, and all their singles would come directly off that mono tape. But at the same time, they would *also* have a two-track tape recorder plugged in to the mixer, with half the channels going on one track and half on the other. So while they were making the mix, they'd *also* be getting a stereo dump of that mix. The limitations of the situation meant that they might end up with drums and vocals in one channel and everything else in the other -- although as the musicians cut everything together in the studio, which had a lot of natural echo, leakage meant there was a *bit* of everything on every track -- but it would still be stereo. Redding's next album, Otis Blue, was recorded on this new equipment, with Dowd travelling down from New York to operate it. Dowd was so keen on making the album stereo that during that session, they rerecorded Redding's two most recent singles, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and "Respect" (which hadn't yet come out but was in the process of being released) in soundalike versions so there would be stereo versions of the songs on the album -- so the stereo and mono versions of Otis Blue actually have different performances of those songs on them. It shows how intense the work rate was at Stax -- and how good they were at their jobs -- that apart from the opening track "Ole Man Trouble", which had already been recorded as a B-side, all of Otis Blue, which is often considered the greatest soul album in history, was recorded in a twenty-eight hour period, and it would have been shorter but there was a four-hour break in the middle, from 10PM to 2AM, so that the musicians on the session could play their regular local club gigs. And then after the album was finished, Otis left the session to perform a gig that evening. Tom Dowd, in particular, was astonished by the way Redding took charge in the studio, and how even though he had no technical musical knowledge, he would direct the musicians. Dowd called Redding a genius and told Phil Walden that the only two other artists he'd worked with who had as much ability in the studio were Bobby Darin and Ray Charles. Other than those singles and "Ole Man Trouble", Otis Blue was made up entirely of cover versions. There were three versions of songs by Sam Cooke, who had died just a few months earlier, and whose death had hit Redding hard -- for all that he styled himself on Little Richard vocally, he was also in awe of Cooke as a singer and stage presence. There were also covers of songs by The Temptations, William Bell, and B.B. King. And there was also an odd choice -- Steve Cropper suggested that Redding cut a cover of a song by a white band that was in the charts at the time: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Redding had never heard the song before -- he was not paying attention to the white pop scene at the time, just to his competition on the R&B charts -- but he was interested in doing it. Cropper sat by the turntable, scribbling down what he thought the lyrics Jagger was singing were, and they cut the track. Redding starts out more or less singing the right words: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] But quickly ends up just ad-libbing random exclamations in the same way that he would in many of his live performances: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Otis Blue made number one on the R&B album chart, and also made number six on the UK album chart -- Redding, like many soul artists, was far more popular in the UK than in the US. It only made number seventy-five on the pop album charts in the US, but it did a remarkable thing as far as Stax was concerned -- it *stayed* in the lower reaches of the charts, and on the R&B album charts, for a long time. Redding had become what is known as a "catalogue artist", something that was almost unknown in rock and soul music at this time, but which was just starting to appear. Up to 1965, the interlinked genres that we now think of as rock and roll, rock, pop, blues, R&B, and soul, had all operated on the basis that singles were where the money was, and that singles should be treated like periodicals -- they go on the shelves, stay there for a few weeks, get replaced by the new thing, and nobody's interested any more. This had contributed to the explosive rate of change in pop music between about 1954 and 1968. You'd package old singles up into albums, and stick some filler tracks on there as a way of making a tiny bit of money from tracks which weren't good enough to release as singles, but that was just squeezing the last few drops of juice out of the orange, it wasn't really where the money was. The only exceptions were those artists like Ray Charles who crossed over into the jazz and adult pop markets. But in general, your record sales in the first few weeks and months *were* your record sales. But by the mid-sixties, as album sales started to take off more, things started to change. And Otis Redding was one of the first artists to really benefit from that. He wasn't having huge hit singles, and his albums weren't making the pop top forty, but they *kept selling*. Redding wouldn't have an album make the top forty in his lifetime, but they sold consistently, and everything from Otis Blue onward sold two hundred thousand or so copies -- a massive number in the much smaller album market of the time. These sales gave Redding some leverage. His contract with Stax was coming to an end in a few months, and he was getting offers from other companies. As part of his contract renegotiation, he got Jim Stewart -- who like so many people in this story including Redding himself liked to operate on handshake deals and assumptions of good faith on the part of everyone else, and who prided himself on being totally fair and not driving hard bargains -- to rework his publishing deal. Now Redding's music was going to be published by Redwal Music -- named after Redding and Phil Walden -- which was owned as a four-way split between Redding, Walden, Stewart, and Joe Galkin. Redding also got the right as part of his contract negotiations to record other artists using Stax's facilities and musicians. He set up his own label, Jotis Records -- a portmanteau of Joe and Otis, for Joe Galkin and himself, and put out records by Arthur Conley: [Excerpt: Arthur Conley, "Who's Fooling Who?"] Loretta Williams [Excerpt: Loretta Williams, "I'm Missing You"] and Billy Young [Excerpt: Billy Young, "The Sloopy"] None of these was a success, but it was another example of how Redding was trying to use his success to boost others. There were other changes going on at Stax as well. The company was becoming more tightly integrated with Atlantic Records -- Tom Dowd had started engineering more sessions, Jerry Wexler was turning up all the time, and they were starting to make records for Atlantic, as we discussed in the episode on "In the Midnight Hour". Atlantic were also loaning Stax Sam and Dave, who were contracted to Atlantic but treated as Stax artists, and whose hits were written by the new Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "Soul Man"] Redding was not hugely impressed by Sam and Dave, once saying in an interview "When I first heard the Righteous Brothers, I thought they were colored. I think they sing better than Sam and Dave", but they were having more and bigger chart hits than him, though they didn't have the same level of album sales. Also, by now Booker T and the MGs had a new bass player. Donald "Duck" Dunn had always been the "other" bass player at Stax, ever since he'd started with the Mar-Keys, and he'd played on many of Redding's recordings, as had Lewie Steinberg, the original bass player with the MGs. But in early 1965, the Stax studio musicians had cut a record originally intending it to be a Mar-Keys record, but decided to put it out as by Booker T and the MGs, even though Booker T wasn't there at the time -- Isaac Hayes played keyboards on the track: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Boot-Leg"] Booker T Jones would always have a place at Stax, and would soon be back full time as he finished his degree, but from that point on Duck Dunn, not Lewie Steinberg, was the bass player for the MGs. Another change in 1965 was that Stax got serious about promotion. Up to this point, they'd just relied on Atlantic to promote their records, but obviously Atlantic put more effort into promoting records on which it made all the money than ones it just distributed. But as part of the deal to make records with Sam and Dave and Wilson Pickett, Atlantic had finally put their arrangement with Stax on a contractual footing, rather than their previous handshake deal, and they'd agreed to pay half the salary of a publicity person for Stax. Stax brought in Al Bell, who made a huge impression. Bell had been a DJ in Memphis, who had gone off to work with Martin Luther King for a while, before leaving after a year because, as he put it "I was not about passive resistance. I was about economic development, economic empowerment.” He'd returned to DJing, first in Memphis, then in Washington DC, where he'd been one of the biggest boosters of Stax records in the area. While he was in Washington, he'd also started making records himself. He'd produced several singles for Grover Mitchell on Decca: [Excerpt: Grover Mitchell, "Midnight Tears"] Those records were supervised by Milt Gabler, the same Milt Gabler who produced Louis Jordan's records and "Rock Around the Clock", and Bell co-produced them with Eddie Floyd, who wrote that song, and Chester Simmons, formerly of the Moonglows, and the three of them started their own label, Safice, which had put out a few records by Floyd and others, on the same kind of deal with Atlantic that Stax had: [Excerpt: Eddie Floyd, "Make Up Your Mind"] Floyd would himself soon become a staff songwriter at Stax. As with almost every decision at Stax, the decision to hire Bell was a cause of disagreement between Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, the "Ax" in Stax, who wasn't as involved in the day-to-day studio operations as her brother, but who was often regarded by the musicians as at least as important to the spirit of the label, and who tended to disagree with her brother on pretty much everything. Stewart didn't want to hire Bell, but according to Cropper “Estelle and I said, ‘Hey, we need somebody that can liaison between the disc jockeys and he's the man to do it. Atlantic's going into a radio station with six Atlantic records and one Stax record. We're not getting our due.' We knew that. We needed more promotion and he had all the pull with all those disc jockeys. He knew E. Rodney Jones and all the big cats, the Montagues and so on. He knew every one of them.” Many people at Stax will say that the label didn't even really start until Bell joined -- and he became so important to the label that he would eventually take it over from Stewart and Axton. Bell came in every day and immediately started phoning DJs, all day every day, starting in the morning with the drivetime East Coast DJs, and working his way across the US, ending up at midnight phoning the evening DJs in California. Booker T Jones said of him “He had energy like Otis Redding, except he wasn't a singer. He had the same type of energy. He'd come in the room, pull up his shoulders and that energy would start. He would start talking about the music business or what was going on and he energized everywhere he was. He was our Otis for promotion. It was the same type of energy charisma.” Meanwhile, of course, Redding was constantly releasing singles. Two more singles were released from Otis Blue -- his versions of "My Girl" and "Satisfaction", and he also released "I Can't Turn You Loose", which was originally the B-side to "Just One More Day" but ended up charting higher than its original A-side. It's around this time that Redding did something which seems completely out of character, but which really must be mentioned given that with very few exceptions everyone in his life talks about him as some kind of saint. One of Redding's friends was beaten up, and Redding, the friend, and another friend drove to the assailant's house and started shooting through the windows, starting a gun battle in which Redding got grazed. His friend got convicted of attempted murder, and got two years' probation, while Redding himself didn't face any criminal charges but did get sued by the victims, and settled out of court for a few hundred dollars. By this point Redding was becoming hugely rich from his concert appearances and album sales, but he still hadn't had a top twenty pop hit. He needed to break the white market. And so in April 1966, Redding went to LA, to play the Sunset Strip: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect (live at the Whisky A-Go-Go)"] Redding's performance at the Whisky A-Go-Go, a venue which otherwise hosted bands like the Doors, the Byrds, the Mothers of Invention, and Love, was his first real interaction with the white rock scene, part of a process that had started with his recording of "Satisfaction". The three-day residency got rave reviews, though the plans to release a live album of the shows were scuppered when Jim Stewart listened back to the tapes and decided that Redding's horn players were often out of tune. But almost everyone on the LA scene came out to see the shows, and Redding blew them away. According to one biography of Redding I used, it was seeing how Redding tuned his guitar that inspired the guitarist from the support band, the Rising Sons, to start playing in the same tuning -- though I can't believe for a moment that Ry Cooder, one of the greatest slide guitarists of his generation, didn't already know about open tunings. But Redding definitely impressed that band -- Taj Mahal, their lead singer, later said it was "one of the most amazing performances I'd ever seen". Also at the gigs was Bob Dylan, who played Redding a song he'd just recorded but not yet released: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Redding agreed that the song sounded perfect for him, and said he would record it. He apparently made some attempts at rehearsing it at least, but never ended up recording it. He thought the first verse and chorus were great, but had problems with the second verse: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Those lyrics were just too abstract for him to find a way to connect with them emotionally, and as a result he found himself completely unable to sing them. But like his recording of "Satisfaction", this was another clue to him that he should start paying more attention to what was going on in the white music industry, and that there might be things he could incorporate into his own style. As a result of the LA gigs, Bill Graham booked Redding for the Fillmore in San Francisco. Redding was at first cautious, thinking this might be a step too far, and that he wouldn't go down well with the hippie crowd, but Graham persuaded him, saying that whenever he asked any of the people who the San Francisco crowds most loved -- Jerry Garcia or Paul Butterfield or Mike Bloomfield -- who *they* most wanted to see play there, they all said Otis Redding. Redding reluctantly agreed, but before he took a trip to San Francisco, there was somewhere even further out for him to go. Redding was about to head to England but before he did there was another album to make, and this one would see even more of a push for the white market, though still trying to keep everything soulful. As well as Redding originals, including "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)", another song in the mould of "Mr. Pitiful", there was another cover of a contemporary hit by a guitar band -- this time a version of the Beatles' "Day Tripper" -- and two covers of old standards; the country song "Tennessee Waltz", which had recently been covered by Sam Cooke, and a song made famous by Bing Crosby, "Try a Little Tenderness". That song almost certainly came to mind because it had recently been used in the film Dr. Strangelove, but it had also been covered relatively recently by two soul greats, Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Live Medley: I Love You For Sentimental Reasons/Try a Little Tenderness/You Send Me"] This version had horn parts arranged by Isaac Hayes, who by this point had been elevated to be considered one of the "Big Six" at Stax records -- Hayes, his songwriting partner David Porter, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T. Jones, and Al Jackson, were all given special status at the company, and treated as co-producers on every record -- all the records were now credited as produced by "staff", but it was the Big Six who split the royalties. Hayes came up with a horn part that was inspired by Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come", and which dominated the early part of the track: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] Then the band came in, slowly at first: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] But Al Jackson surprised them when they ran through the track by deciding that after the main song had been played, he'd kick the track into double-time, and give Redding a chance to stretch out and do his trademark grunts and "got-ta"s. The single version faded out shortly after that, but the version on the album kept going for an extra thirty seconds: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] As Booker T. Jones said “Al came up with the idea of breaking up the rhythm, and Otis just took that and ran with it. He really got excited once he found out what Al was going to do on the drums. He realized how he could finish the song. That he could start it like a ballad and finish it full of emotion. That's how a lot of our arrangements would come together. Somebody would come up with something totally outrageous.” And it would have lasted longer but Jim Stewart pushed the faders down, realising the track was an uncommercial length even as it was. Live, the track could often stretch out to seven minutes or longer, as Redding drove the crowd into a frenzy, and it soon became one of the highlights of his live set, and a signature song for him: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness (live in London)"] In September 1966, Redding went on his first tour outside the US. His records had all done much better in the UK than they had in America, and they were huge favourites of everyone on the Mod scene, and when he arrived in the UK he had a limo sent by Brian Epstein to meet him at the airport. The tour was an odd one, with multiple London shows, shows in a couple of big cities like Manchester and Bristol, and shows in smallish towns in Hampshire and Lincolnshire. Apparently the shows outside London weren't particularly well attended, but the London shows were all packed to overflowing. Redding also got his own episode of Ready! Steady! Go!, on which he performed solo as well as with guest stars Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, Chris Farlowe and Eric Burdon, "Shake/Land of a Thousand Dances"] After the UK tour, he went on a short tour of the Eastern US with Sam and Dave as his support act, and then headed west to the Fillmore for his three day residency there, introducing him to the San Francisco music scene. His first night at the venue was supported by the Grateful Dead, the second by Johnny Talbot and De Thangs and the third by Country Joe and the Fish, but there was no question that it was Otis Redding that everyone was coming to see. Janis Joplin turned up at the Fillmore every day at 3PM, to make sure she could be right at the front for Redding's shows that night, and Bill Graham said, decades later, "By far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison. Then or now." However, after the Fillmore gigs, for the first time ever he started missing shows. The Sentinel, a Black newspaper in LA, reported a few days later "Otis Redding, the rock singer, failed to make many friends here the other day when he was slated to appear on the Christmas Eve show[...] Failed to draw well, and Redding reportedly would not go on." The Sentinel seem to think that Redding was just being a diva, but it's likely that this was the first sign of a problem that would change everything about his career -- he was developing vocal polyps that were making singing painful. It's notable though that the Sentinel refers to Redding as a "rock" singer, and shows again how different genres appeared in the mid-sixties to how they appear today. In that light, it's interesting to look at a quote from Redding from a few months later -- "Everybody thinks that all songs by colored people are rhythm and blues, but that's not true. Johnny Taylor, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King are blues singers. James Brown is not a blues singer. He has a rock and roll beat and he can sing slow pop songs. My own songs "Respect" and "Mr Pitiful" aren't blues songs. I'm speaking in terms of the beat and structure of the music. A blues is a song that goes twelve bars all the way through. Most of my songs are soul songs." So in Redding's eyes, neither he nor James Brown were R&B -- he was soul, which was a different thing from R&B, while Brown was rock and roll and pop, not soul, but journalists thought that Redding was rock. But while the lines between these things were far less distinct than they are today, and Redding was trying to cross over to the white audience, he knew what genre he was in, and celebrated that in a song he wrote with his friend Art

Legendary artist/producer/songwriter Booker T Jones takes us through his life and music on The Stew and Podcast and YouTube. Leading the house band at Stax records in Memphis. Working with Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Rufus Thomas, and Wilson Pickett. Also, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young, backing Otis at the Monterey Pop Festival and leading his own band Booker T and the MG's.  His thoughts on the most memorable person he met and his induction into The  Rock Hall of Fame. Lots of stories and music to go with it. Booker leads a 10-piece Stax Revue Band on stage at Jack Singer Hall Saturday, Feb 25.  

Feliz Navidad Banda Querida! Esta semana Piro tiene a un invitado inesperado y fuera de serie, el gran novelista y melómano mexicano Xavier Velasco, ganador del premio Premio Internacional Alfaguara de Novela 2003 por su novela “Diablo Guardián”, con quien platica de sus triunfos y sus fracasos! Además, Piro recomienda The Union, el álbum en colaboración de Elton John y Leon Russell, con participaciones de Booker T. Jones, Neil Young, Robert Randolph y Brian Wilson! ¡Bienvenidos!

Host Nate Wilcox and Tony discuss the career of Eddie Floyd and his connections to the wider world of R&B. Buy the book and support the show.Download this episode.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER NEW ORLEANSNew Orleans Music: One of the World's Most Unique and Important Cultural JewelsTake Me to the River New Orleans,” the second film, celebrates the rich musical history, the heritage, legacy, and influence of New Orleans and Louisiana. A true collaboration and melting pot of influences from around the World, that came together and formed one of the world's most unique cultural jewels. Our adventure shows the resiliency of surviving disaster to a formidable rebirth. Pairing legacy musicians with stars of today.There is nothing like the music of New Orleans. It is a wholly unique, worldwide collaboration that has resulted in an exceptional musical genre never before heard. This film will give the viewer an insightful historical perspective of how global influences shaped, and continue to shape, a musical quilt that formed the music of this extraordinary city. Influences came from many places: Cuba, South America, Africa, Europe, Canada, America. All contributed to the blending and shaping of a musical genre that is rich in culture and heritage. We, as Americans, are the conservators of this unique cultural phenomenon.The film will highlight 20 to 25 new songs, combining multiple generations of New Orleans musicians. Legacy musicians will collaborate with stars of today and students from the Tipitina's foundation, under the guidance and tutelage of Donald Harrison.This film shows that New Orleans music has always been a collaboration of intergenerational, interracial, intercontinental and genderless effort.New Orleans music includes the creation and influences of American jazz and jazz musicians and the introduction of unique instruments, story songs and life's hardships from around the world.Award winning filmmaker/director/producer/musician Martin Shore started his career as a musician. Mr. Shore has toured with Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, Bluesman Willie, and many others. He has produced soundtracks and has acted as music supervisor for a number of feature films, including Saw, Saw II, Rize, and Rock School, among others. He has been a music producer for a variety of artists, including Snoop Dogg, G-Eazy, Yo Gotti, Mavis Staples, Booker T. Jones, North Mississippi Allstars, and many others.Source: https://takemetotheriver.orgSource: https://www.amazon.com/Take-Me-River-Orleans-Various/dp/B09QXMGVQJThis episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast.Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.Support the show

Author Alan Moore, the creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, tells us why he's done with comics in favour of writing his first short story collection, Illuminations. Grammy-winning R&B legend Booker T. Jones reflects on his life and legacy, which he celebrated with the release of a memoir and album. This year's Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, Suzette Mayr, discusses her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter. Diggstown star Vinessa Antoine talks about being Canadian primetime television's first Black female lawyer.

Author Alan Moore, the creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, tells us why he's done with comics in favour of writing his first short story collection, Illuminations. Grammy-winning R&B legend Booker T. Jones reflects on his life and legacy, which he celebrated with the release of a memoir and album. This year's Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, Suzette Mayr, discusses her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter. Diggstown star Vinessa Antoine talks about being Canadian primetime television's first Black female lawyer.

William Bell, Booker T. Jones, and me.

Drew Vandenberg is a recording engineer based in Athens, Georgia. He got an internship at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, GA when he was 16, and then went to college at Indiana University where he received a B.S. in Recording Arts. He's been working on records with people ever since. Some of his clients include: Faye Webster, Toro y Moi, SPELLLING, of Montreal, Kishi Bashi, Kristine Leschper, S.G. Goodman, Bambara, and Dent May. He was an assistant engineer on a Grammy Award winning album from Booker T. Jones. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT: Practicing your craft Finding a balance of wet vs dry sounding tracks  How to create depth in a mix without using reverb or delay Getting great indie drum tones How to baffle drums when recording Using uncommon stereo mic techniques for overheads and room tracks Why the 3:1 rule is so important Understanding phase vs. polarity Why you shouldn't time-align your multi-mic'd instruments Giving back to charity with your audio skills To learn more about Drew Vandenberg, visit: http://www.vbergindustries.com/ To learn more tips on how to improve your mixes, visit https://masteryourmix.com/ Download your FREE copy of the Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: https://masteryourmix.com/blueprint/ Get your copy of the #1 Amazon bestselling book, The Mixing Mindset – The Step-By-Step Formula For Creating Professional Rock Mixes From Your Home Studio: https://masteryourmix.com/mixingmindsetbook/ Join the FREE MasterYourMix Facebook community: https://links.masteryourmix.com/community To make sure that you don't miss an episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on Android. Have your questions answered on the show. Send them to questions@masteryourmix.com Thanks for listening! Please leave a rating and review on iTunes!

In this episode we welcome the very engaging Robert Gordon "all the way from" his hometown of Memphis and ask him to talk about the music of his city from Sun and Stax to Alex Chilton and Big Star.Robert tells us about his childhood, along with the blues epiphany that was watching Furry Lewis support the Rolling Stones on the Memphis leg of their 1975 U.S. tour. Moving on to Stax, we look back at a great 1988 interview Robert did with the Memphis Horns' Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson — and then forward to the Wattstax festival, staged in L.A. 50 years ago this summer.Clips from the week's new audio interview — Tony Scherman asking Billy Gibbons about Robert Johnson — afford us the perfect excuse not just to discuss ZZ Top and their imminent new album but to revisit our guest's exhaustive 1991 essay on the "plundering" of Delta blues legend Johnson's estate.Mark talks us through a selection of newly-added library pieces about Frankie Lymon, Alma Cogan, San Francisco's Trips festival, Syreeta, Gang of Four and Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy. In the absence of a vacationing Jasper, Barney wraps things up with quotes from articles about rock scribe R(ichard) Meltzer, the Specials and — circling back to Stax — Booker T. Jones recalling co-writing Albert King's brooding 'Born Under a Bad Sign' with William Bell...Many thanks to special guest Robert Gordon; the 25th anniversary edition of It Came From Memphis is published by Third Man Books and available now. Visit his website at therobertgordon.com.Pieces discussed: The Memphis Horns, The plundering of Robert Johnson, It Came From Memphis, Wattstax, Wattstax, Wattstax, Billy Gibbons audio, Frankie Lymon, Andrew Loog Oldham, Syreeta, Punk magazine, XTC, Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, Alma Cogan, Trips Festival, Sly Stone, Gang of Four, Richard Meltzer, The Specials and Booker T. Jones.

In this episode we welcome the very engaging Robert Gordon "all the way from" his hometown of Memphis and ask him to talk about the music of his city from Sun and Stax to Alex Chilton and Big Star.Robert tells us about his childhood, along with the blues epiphany that was watching Furry Lewis support the Rolling Stones on the Memphis leg of their 1975 U.S. tour. Moving on to Stax, we look back at a great 1988 interview Robert did with the Memphis Horns' Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson — and then forward to the Wattstax festival, staged in L.A. 50 years ago this summer.Clips from the week's new audio interview — Tony Scherman asking Billy Gibbons about Robert Johnson — afford us the perfect excuse not just to discuss ZZ Top and their imminent new album but to revisit our guest's exhaustive 1991 essay on the "plundering" of Delta blues legend Johnson's estate.Mark talks us through a selection of newly-added library pieces about Frankie Lymon, Alma Cogan, San Francisco's Trips festival, Syreeta, Gang of Four and Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy. In the absence of a vacationing Jasper, Barney wraps things up with quotes from articles about rock scribe R(ichard) Meltzer, the Specials and — circling back to Stax — Booker T. Jones recalling co-writing Albert King's brooding 'Born Under a Bad Sign' with William Bell...Many thanks to special guest Robert Gordon; the 25th anniversary edition of It Came From Memphis is published by Third Man Books and available now. Visit his website at therobertgordon.com.Pieces discussed: The Memphis Horns, The plundering of Robert Johnson, It Came From Memphis, Wattstax, Wattstax, Wattstax, Billy Gibbons audio, Frankie Lymon, Andrew Loog Oldham, Syreeta, Punk magazine, XTC, Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, Alma Cogan, Trips Festival, Sly Stone, Gang of Four, Richard Meltzer, The Specials and Booker T. Jones.

Rita Coolidge soared as a singer and songwriter, working with Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Bobby Womack, and Booker T. Jones. She was denied credit for writing the famous piano coda to “Layla” and her contribution to “Superstar,” a huge hit for The Carpenters, was similarly unsung. That was all before she met country rock troubadour Kris Kristofferson, whose superhuman levels of drinking did not help their marriage as her solo career took off. This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners and includes descriptions of domestic violence. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Roads to and from Memphis; Mike Berringer; https://www.theirverybest.com/episodes/008-booker-t-jones

Greg adds a song to the Desert Island Jukebox that he thought featured Steve Cropper on guitar, but actually has Booker T. Jones playing organ and guitar. Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU Send us a Voice Memo: https://bit.ly/2RyD5Ah

The results are in, Youngsters. We are passionate about Are You Passionate!The incredible John Craigie joins us for a second time, this time to talk about Neil's second album of the 2000's. And boy do we have mixed thoughts. We talk about Booker T. Jones meets Ol' Silver Gold. We get really close to getting into 9/11 conspiracies, but we show a little restraint. Luke wonders why McGruff the crime dog didn't make it into the liner notes. Russ thinks this album would have fit well in the middle of Neil's 80's records.Apologies in advance for the not-as-stellar audio quality. I'm still working out the kinks for zoom episodes.SUPPORT OUR FRIEND JOHN CRAIGIE! Grab some of his music and merch at: https://johncraigiemusic.com/SUPPORT US, TOO! Grab our goodies and read Mike's blog at: https://www.longmayyouyoungpodcast.com/SUPPORT PANTHEON PODCASTS! Hear their other great music shows at: http://pantheonpodcasts.com/

The results are in, Youngsters. We are passionate about Are You Passionate!The incredible John Craigie joins us for a second time, this time to talk about Neil's second album of the 2000's. And boy do we have mixed thoughts. We talk about Booker T. Jones meets Ol' Silver Gold. We get really close to getting into 9/11 conspiracies, but we show a little restraint. Luke wonders why McGruff the crime dog didn't make it into the liner notes. Russ thinks this album would have fit well in the middle of Neil's 80's records.Apologies in advance for the not-as-stellar audio quality. I'm still working out the kinks for zoom episodes.SUPPORT OUR FRIEND JOHN CRAIGIE! Grab some of his music and merch at: https://johncraigiemusic.com/SUPPORT US, TOO! Grab our goodies and read Mike's blog at: https://www.longmayyouyoungpodcast.com/SUPPORT PANTHEON PODCASTS! Hear their other great music shows at: http://pantheonpodcasts.com/