Podcasts about Boots Randolph

Episode Notes S6E10 - Join us as we sit down with the one and only Laura Pursell. She'll be telling us tales from acting to singing her hits and much much more. Her nostalgic, lush and heartfelt voice, Laura Pursell's smooth west coast vocals are backed by the genius of her famous father Bill Pursell, who wrote 8 out of 10 arrangements and played piano on all 10 tracks. The rich orchestration, recorded by Nashville's A-team players. Mr. Pursell is perhaps best known for his hit record "Our Winter Love," but also played piano on many of Johnny Cash's albums in the 1960s, and worked as a session musician and arranger for Patsy Cline, Johnny Paycheck, Hoover, Joan Baez, Eric Andersen, Scotty Moore, J.J. Cale, Willie Nelson, Dan Fogelberg, and others. In 1985, Pursell was named Composer of the Year by the Tennessee Music Teachers Association. HELPFUL LINKS: VETERANS: https://www.va.gov/.../mental-health/suicide-prevention/ ADDICTION: https://lp.recoverycentersofamerica.com/.../continuum-of.../ Due you know someone that has lost their lives due to addiction? Or even someone that has made a full recovery? Reach out to Johnny Whitaker so they can help to celebrate the lives lost/ lives recovered at overdoseawareness0831@gmail.com Follow our guest https://www.laurapursell.com/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0700958/ https://www.youtube.com/c/LauraPursell http://bhbpr.com/ Toking with the Dead: https://www.stilltoking.com/ ————————————— Follow Still Toking With and their friends! https://smartpa.ge/5zv1 ————————————— Produced by Leo Pond and The Dorkening Podcast Network MORE ABOUT THE GUEST: Singer/Actress Laura Pursell was born and raised in Nashville, TN surrounded by music (her father is pianist Bill Pursell, who had the hit record “Our Winter Love” (1963) and was a go-to sideman in Nashville for Marty Robbins, Patsy Cline, Chet Atkins, Boots Randolph, Johnny Cash, and many, many others. At 18, she was cast as Dick Van Patton's niece in a nationally televised Christmas special, “The Gift of Song”, starring a host of country music stars. Relocating to LA in the early 90's, she studied at the South Coast Repertory and Beverly Hills Playhouse and has starred in countless stage productions all over LA, including "Blue Moon Dancing" by Ed Graczyk, "In the City for the Summer" (Variety singled out her gritty performance), and the farcical, outrageous "And Then There was Nun" which played to sold out houses for 2 extensions, where she did a hilarious sendup of Gloria Swanson. She was a long time member of the Company of Angels, LA's oldest repertory theatre, winning a Dramalogue Award for her saucy, sword-wielding performance in the mainstage production of “Zastrozzi”. She appeared in an iconic video for Weird Al Yankovic, spoofing Tanya Harding in the "Mmmm Mmmm" song (where she did her own figure skating). She appeared in several episodes of "Days of Our Lives" and had a small but pivotal role in "The Landlady" starring Talia Shire. In 2013, she was cast as one of the three leads in a hilarious coming-of-middle-age web series called "Living the Dream", and in 2015, she had the starring role in "Only the Moon Howls", a moving one act which won the Encore! Award at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Her performance was singled out for its "deep emotional access" and hailed as "heartbreaking", "truthful", "sensitive" and "vulnerable". A film version of the piece is planned for late 2015. In 2001, she landed a plum role, singing for Betty and President Gerald Ford in Palm Springs. Over the years, she has recorded and performed with some of the greatest jazz musicians on the west coast. She has performed in St. Petersburg, Russia, Dublin Ireland and in west coast venues such as Spazio, Vitello's, The Money Tree, Barone's, Monteleone's, The San Ysidro Ranch (Santa Barbara), Vicky's of Santa Fe (Palm Springs) and the Canyon Club. She appeared with Gary Tole's "Legends of Swing" orchestra and the Doug MacDonald's 13-piece "Jazz Coalition". She currently performs every Thursday at Mixology 101 in the Grove at the LA Farmer's Market with a stellar jazz trio. Find out more at https://still-toking-with.pinecast.co Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/still-toking-with/13da5f46-65d7-47be-b832-20740d7de20d

In the state of California, it is expressly prohibited for individuals to consume alcoholic beverages while simultaneously operating a motor vehicle equipped with a sunroof, if said sunroof is open and the vehicle is traveling at a speed exceeding 25 miles per hour. However, an exemption to this law is granted to individuals who are wearing a clown costume, provided they honk their horn in rhythm to 'Yakety Sax' by Boots Randolph and execute at least three consecutive dance moves from the 'Macarena' prior to each sip.In the state of Texas, it is unlawful for any person to consume alcoholic beverages while riding a horse within city limits, unless said individual is wearing a cowboy hat adorned with no less than three flashing LED lights and reciting the Texas Pledge of Allegiance backwards. Additionally, if the horse is named 'Buddy' and is trained to tap dance, the rider must perform a synchronized tap routine with the horse for a minimum of thirty seconds before taking each sip. ★ Support this podcast ★

Upbeat jazz for the New Year: Billie Holiday, Glenn Miller, Oscar Aleman, Harry Roy & His Orchestra, Earl Bostic, Heritage Hall Jazz Band, Pete Fountain, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sam Butera, Louis Prima, Claude Bolling, Jean-Luc Dayan & Steve La Spina, James Rivers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Boots Randolph.

Upbeat jazz for the New Year: Billie Holiday, Glenn Miller, Oscar Aleman, Harry Roy & His Orchestra, Earl Bostic, Heritage Hall Jazz Band, Pete Fountain, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sam Butera, Louis Prima, Claude Bolling, Jean-Luc Dayan & Steve La Spina, James Rivers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Boots Randolph.

In this episode of Ear and Loathing, your hosts Aaron, Damon and George (The Gitmo Bros) talk about Jeff Lynne's jizz stains, Ringo and Barbara's toner cartridge conflict, Mrs. McCavendish's bedtime ritual, and fight for your right to robot. In the Torture Chamber segment, George and Aaron compete for meaningless points by making Damon listen to his most hated music. Will Damon survive the Torture Chamber long enough to play one of his favorite songs? Tune in and find out! Songs featured in this episode: "Yakety Sax" (Boots Randolph), "Happy Hour" (The Housemartins), "I Am Your Robot" (Elton John)

In preparation for their journey to Windsor, Mary attempts to attune to Vordenberg's Javelin of Lightning and gets more than he bargained for...Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DnDarkPodcastMerch available at: https://www.dndarkpodcast.com/storehttps://ratethispodcast.com/dndarkInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dndark_podcast/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dndark_podcastReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDarkPodcast/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dndarkpodcastCast:Crypt Keeper (GM) - Danger Dan JerzJack Griffon, The Invisible Man - Grayson NormanErik, the Phantom of the Opera - Aaron KaufholdLarry Talbot, The Wolfman - Jordan NelsonMary, The Frankenstein Monster - Ben MagnetImhotep, The Mummy - Daniel CruzFeaturing Jenai Pellarin as Carmilla KarnsteinOriginal Music:Lets All Have a Ball by Ryan Whyte Maloney and Tony CarboneyAdditional Music:Benny Hill Theme (Medieval Cover) by Middle Ages Music parody of Yakety Sax - James Q. "Spider" Rich, Boots Randolph

The team makes their way back to the safety of Stratford and Imhotep's suffering continues to get worse...Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DnDarkPodcastMerch available at: https://www.dndarkpodcast.com/storehttps://ratethispodcast.com/dndarkInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dndark_podcast/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dndark_podcastReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDarkPodcast/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dndarkpodcastCast:Crypt Keeper (GM) - Danger Dan JerzJack Griffon, The Invisible Man - Grayson NormanErik, the Phantom of the Opera - Aaron KaufholdLarry Talbot, The Wolfman - Jordan NelsonMary, The Frankenstein Monster - Ben MagnetImhotep, The Mummy - Daniel CruzFeaturing Jenai Pellarin as Carmilla KarnsteinOriginal Music:Lets All Have a Ball by Ryan Whyte Maloney and Tony CarboneyAdditional Music:Benny Hill Theme (Medieval Cover) by Middle Ages Music parody of Yakety Sax - James Q. "Spider" Rich, Boots Randolph

A listener-suggested show! Well, ok, one of our loyal listeners suggested a new-to-us artist, and this was one of her best known covers, so here we go with "Moon River" on this edition of Same Difference! Join AJ and Johnny as they listen to and discuss versions by Henry Mancini, the Vince Guiraldi trio, Jon Batiste, Dr. John, Boots Randolph, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, and new-to-us artist Stella Katherine Cole.

On tonight's show: Teddy Wilson, Artie Shaw and His Orchestra, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Helen Humes, Harry Carney with Paul Gonsalves and Harold Ashby & The Duke's Men, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Nancy Wilson & The Great Jazz Trio, Stéphane Grappelli & McCoy Tyner, Boots Randolph, Danny Grissett, Don Byas, and Ahmad Jamal.

For Decades Alfred Hawthorne Hill -- known to us as Benny Hill -- was a titan of British (and later American) television comedy with a show that blended slapstick, parody, mime, and a generous helping of double entendre. Benny presided over the show with a rascally gleam in his eye and Boots Randolph's hit "Yakety Sax" was used as the theme -- to the point people had no idea it wasn't written just for the show. Feeling Benny had run his course (after 35 years!) tv bigwigs axed the program in 1989, but the British public begged to differ, keeping it popular in reruns and DVD reissues to this day. As always, find extra clips below and thanks for sharing our shows! Want more Benny Hill? Benny was a high energy host and this 1965 clip catches a bit of that, along with a great take on a German English instructor.https://youtu.be/EmMZ9J-EKlQ Benny's shows always featured a lot of double entendre and general naughtiness. That style eventually fell out of favor, though Hill noted the butt of his "hanky panky" jokes always were the guys. Here's Benny in a sketch about a reluctant bridegroom. https://youtu.be/jZMcP9SoTVc Parodies of American television were stock in trade for Benny Hill, particularly of crime and detective shows. Hill was a fine mimic, and here he takes on three top cops -- Frank Cannon, McCloud, and Hercule Poirot. https://youtu.be/EMId43b-fWA

The PCs finish the fight in the library and then explore the old tomes and framed parchment. Music:"Cervantes" by Wenches & Rogues"Yakety Sax" by Boots Randolph"Mud Hardy's" by Wenches & RoguesAll other music by Tabletop AudioThanks for listening! You can find us on Twitter @25northpodcastYou can join our Discord community with this invite code "beNzEN8JjY"You can send us an email at 25northpodcast@gmail.com if you wish

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: the Nat King Cole Trio, Oscar Peterson (Billie Holiday vocals), Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Stanley Turrentine, Paul Desmond, Boots Randolph, Boogaloo Joe Jones, Yusef Lateef, The Modern Jazz Quartet, and Sonny Rollins.

Ay Boo-Boo! The gang are joined by Wes Mattice this week for another edition of Actual Bookclub! Join us for some listener feedback, a special comic book haul and our discussion of "The Surgeon's Tale: Offertorino" from the Baltimore Novel!  08:38 - Listener Feedback 27:32 - The Surgeon's Tale Check out Nick Warmack's Original Art collection (including Baltimore illustrations) on CAF https://www.comicartfans.com/galleryroom.asp?gsub=29587 "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister and "Yakety Sax" by Boots Randolph and James Rich used for educational purposes only Banner image by Matt Strackbein - https://linktr.ee/TheLetterhack Logo by Ross Radke https://www.rossradke.com/ opening and closing theme by https://onlybeast.com/ 

Welcome to Sounds Like Radio Volume 121 where we find the Jolly Boys going into action to save a fellow Jolly Boy from getting fired. In this Great Gildersleeve episode from December 13, 1951 the town's filled with gossip that someone's getting fired. It will be a sticky situation with the solution they figure to save the job. Another good Willard Waterman episode from his first year as Gildy. Willard and the show's writing and characters just improve as the show goes along. You'll hear how it happens as we move along through the 1950's with the Great Gildersleeve. And as always Your Humble Host is here to help as we suggest ways to help out the Jolly Boys. Along for the ride are Doris Day, Boots Randolph, Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby & Al Jolson and a quick duet from them, Jo Stafford, Bill Frawley (Fred Mertz of I Love Lucy) returns to sing a nice one, and Chet Baker sings all about how the Jolly Boys think about their buddy. It's a show filled with neat music and a neat episode of the Great Gildersleeve. P.S. Just to correct a mistake in today's show, it was Ethan Hawke that starred as Chet Baker in the movie "Born To Be Blue."

Ever heard of a Japanese horror film called House? It's evidence that LSD was popular in 1970s Japan…kinda like this week's episodes of Kamen Rider (1971). Nathan and Drew continue to dismantle Gelshocker's plans and question the logic and family-friendliness of their kaijin. Catgecko recalls the aforementioned film, and Canarycobra leads to a discussion of Ouroboros. (Look it up). Only on Henshin Men can you get content this wild and thought-provoking!Follow Henshin Men on Twitter: @HenshinMenPod. Join the official Facebook fan page for this and The Monster Island Film Vault, The Markalite Lounge.Listen to Travis's main podcast, Kaiju Weekly, and Nathan's podcasts, The Monster Island Film Vault and The Power Trip.Henshin Men is a proud member of the Kaiju Ramen Podcast Network.MUSIC:                                                                                           -“Kamen Rider - Let's Go!! Rider Kick (Cover)” by Eternal Melee -“Not Your Above-Average Joe [Standing Ovation]” by Ivan Hakštok -“ Yakety Sax” by Boots Randolph

Toe-tapping jazz tonight: Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, Gene Krupa, Stuff Smith, Ben Webster & Johnny Hodges, Sergio Mendes, Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Hodges & Septet, Billy Taylor, Duke Ellington, Boots Randolph, Mongo Santamaria, New Orleans' Own The Dukes of Dixieland, Louise Tobin with Peanuts Hucko, Zoot Sims, and Dal Richards & His Orchestra.

Toe-tapping jazz tonight: Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson, Gene Krupa, Stuff Smith, Ben Webster & Johnny Hodges, Sergio Mendes, Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Hodges & Septet, Billy Taylor, Duke Ellington, Boots Randolph, Mongo Santamaria, New Orleans' Own The Dukes of Dixieland, Louise Tobin with Peanuts Hucko, Zoot Sims, and Dal Richards & His Orchestra.

TWITTER STILL SUCKS: Our hosts take a second to check in on the state of Twitter, recently purchased by billionaire, Elon Musk, and all the strange changes that have been made to the service. TOS VS. TNG: D. Bethel briefly returns to Star Trek by watching the last original series movie/first Next Generation movie, Star Trek: Generations. It's...fine. CHAPTERS: (00:00) Intro - Veteran's Day (01:52) The new "old" NES Garbage Pail Kids game (07:11) Twitter is still a disaster, and getting worse (26:11) Star Trek: Generations is definitely a movie that exists. (35:18) Outro - Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries (38:15) Outtakes RELEVANT LINKS: -The trailer for the "documentary" about the "discovery" of Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike and the Quest for Stale Gum game. -"Twitter Comes Tumblr-ing Down." Comic Lab, 10 November 2022. The episode of the excellent Comic Lab podcast (with Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett) where they thoroughly investigate the fall––and fallout––of Twitter. RELEVANT EPISODES: -"Alien Control Party" (22 January 2016): Where our hosts discuss previous Digital Eclipse ports in their discussion about archiving old video games. -"Aggressive Modulation" (04 November 2022): Where our hosts reflect on, and analyze, the legacy of Star Trek: The Next Generation. INFO: -Visit our website at forallintents.net and leave your thoughts as comments on the page for this episode. -Join our Facebook page -Social: Andrew - Twitter & Instagram, D. Bethel - Twitter & Instagram -Subscribe to our YouTube channel. FEATURED MUSIC: "Disco Medusae" by Kevin McLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3652-disco-medusae "District Four" by Kevin McLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3662-district-four Tracks are licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ "Yakety Sax" by Boots Randolph

John Peet tells us his story about starting as a bartender in Cincinnati, winding through LA, and ending up as the bar owner of Jane's Hideaway in Nashville. Crafting cocktails, running a music venue, and rescuing a beat up piano are just some of the tales (the ghost of Boots Randolph?) we'll hear on this episode. And check out his Friends of Jane playlist, featuring acts that have graced the Jane stage: https://open.spotify.com/user/shebmo

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: jazz from 1931 to 2000.  Benny Goodman and the The Mills Brothers, Sammy Kaye, Bobby Hackett and Jack Teagarden, Charlie Byrd, Boots Randolph, Benny Carter, Joe Morello, Eddie Harris, The Taylor Eigsti Trio, Miles Davis, Shirley Horn, Frank Sinatra & Chrissie Hynde, and the Harold Mabern Trio.

Boots Randolph [00:26] "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" Love Songs for a Late Evening Columbia House 1P 6114 1974 That's right, the man who brought us "Yakety Sax" brings us the Kern and Harbach classic. Swans [03:45] "Love Will Tear Us Apart (Black Version)" Love Will Tear Us Apart Caroline Records CAROL 1454 1988 The Jarboe version of the Joy Division classic, engineered by the excellent Wharton Tiers. Cocteau Twins [07:39] "Love's Easy Tears" Love's Easy Tears 4AD BAD 610 1986 Title track from one of the many Cocteau Twins EPs. The Cure [11:16] "The Love Cats (Extended Version)" The Love Cats Fiction Records ficsx 19 1983 Evidently this was a throw-away song by Smith. Not too shabby if that's the case. Guitar Wolf [16:57] "Loverock" Loverock Narnack Records NCK 7020 2004 The jet-rockers blast off with this title track from their 2004 Narnack release on gold vinyl. New Order [20:11] "Face Up" Low-Life Qwest Records 1-25289 1985 My favorite track from New Order's third studio album. The concert video Pumped Full of Drugs that was made around this time contains an excellent version of this song. Terry Allen [25:12] "Truckload of Art" Lubbock (On Everything) Paradise of Bachelors PoB-27 2016 That'll show them high-falutin' New York artists. Terry is accompanied by such luminaries as Ponty Bone, Joe Ely, and Lloyd Maines. Originally released on Fate Records in 1979. Tim Cohen [30:34] "Bedfellows" Luck Man Sinderlyn LYN-024 2017 Another excellent solo outing from San Francisco's own Tim Cohen Cocteau Twins [34:25] "Feathers-Oar-Blades" Lullabies 4AD BAD 213 1982 Some very angular material from an EP that followed close on the heels of their debut album Garlands. André Kostelantez and his Orchestra [38:51] "Manuel de Falla: Spanish Dance (from La vida breve)" The Lure of Spain Columbia CL 943 1957 A little trip to Spain from the Russian-born American conductor. It makes for a pretty lively number when you accidentally record it at 45rpm! Johnny Mandel & Various [41:07] "Going Home" MAS*H (Original Soundtrack Recording) Columbia Masterworks OS 3520 1970 And that's pretty much how you handle Altman-esque overlapping dialogue for a soundtrack. Ella Fitzgerald with the Paul Smith Quartet [44:41] "Mack the Knife" Mack the Knife - Ella in Berlin Verve MG VS-64041 1960 (1967 repress) Now that is how you improvise. Malcolm McLaren [51:28] "Madam Butterfly" Madam Butterfly Island Records 0-96915 1984 A 12" single from Malcolm's attempt to fuse contemporary R&B with opera. Syd Barrett [57:53] "Gigolo Aunt" The Madcap Laughs/Barrett Capitol Records SABB-11314 1983 Excellent double record compilation of the two solo Barrett albums. Syd is joined by bandmates David Gilmour on bass, and Richard Wright on keys. Music behind the DJ: "My Sweet Lord" by Terry Baxter and his Orchestra

Tim continues his discussion on life on the road with The Joe English Band, his faith, his career, modern christian music as well as the new music he is working on now.

One of the biggest, longest running, and commercially successful bands of the rock era was founded by Carlos Santana, the only consistent member of the band throughout the years.  That band of course is simply named Santana, and their debut album was also known as Santana.Santana has always been about fusion, and you get that with this debut as well.  There's jazz, Latin, calypso, funk, and soul in there, all held together by the guitar virtuosity of Mexican-American Carlos Santana.  The debut album provides a lot of opportunity to take in Santana's guitar work with about half the songs being instrumentals.  Santana came to prominence with their live shows, and of course would be propelled to the top with their concert at Woodstock.The lineup for this iteration of Santana would of course include Carlos Santana on guitar and backing vocals.  Greg Rolie would be on lead vocals and piano, as Carlos Santana usually had someone else on lead vocals in all the different iterations of his band.  Rolie would go on to found the band Journey, as would a future Santana member, Neal Schon.  Other band members were David Brown on bass, Michael Schrieve on drums, Michael Carabello, Jose "Chepito" Areas, and Marcus Malone on congas and percussion.The band was formed in San Francisco in 1966 as the Santana Blues Band.  Promoter Chet Helms told the band that they couldn't be successful with Latin-infused rock, and recommended that Santana "keep his day job" as a dishwasher at Tick Tock's Drive-In.  Time would prove how wrong Helms' advice was.  Santana has sold over 43 million albums in the US, and perhaps 100 million worldwide.Friend of the show Vann Mathis joins us for this podcast. Soul SacrificeIf you have seen the documentary about the August 1969 Woodstock music festival you may have heard this instrumental song.  This one had three screens projecting, one of the band and the other two scanning people at the concert.PersuasionA deeper cut sung by frontman and keyboardist Greg Rolie about a woman that his "put a spell" on a guy, and he can't think of anyone but her.  "Like the devil in disguise, something about you baby.  You're one, you're one of a kind."SavorThis is a hard driving instrumental.  One thing you get from Santana other than the excellent guitar riffs is a lot of congas.Evil WaysThis was Santana's second single the band's first hit, topping out at number 9 on the Billboard charts.  This song was a cover originally recorded by jazz percussionist Willy Bobo in 1967.  It has a great guitar solo. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:The theme from the television series “Sesame Street”The Sesame Street Kids sing this well-known children's television theme which debuted in November of 1969. STAFF PICKS:Sugar, Sugar  by The ArchiesBrian's staff pick was performed by the cartoon band “The Archies.”  Don Kirshner heard it and decided that it needed to be released.  After persuading radio stations to play it, the song took off and became the biggest single hit of the year.Suspicious Minds by Elvis PresleyMark James wrote this and recorded it in 1968, but Elvis would make it successful in 1969.  It was his 18th and last number 1 single.  The song itself is inspired by James' relationship with his first wife.  He still had feelings for his childhood girlfriend, and his wife had suspicions about that.  Undun   by The Guess WhoRob's staff pick is from Winnipeg's own The Guess Who.  Randy Bachman wrote this about a girl he dated who went into a coma after doing drugs.  It is Bachman's favorite song done with the band.  It was actually the B-side of a song called “Laughing.”Space Cowboy  by the Steve Miller BandWayne finishes us off with a song from Steve Miller's third album, Brave New World. It has a psychedelic feel.  The main guitar riff borrows heavily from "Lady Madonna" by the Beatles.  Steve Miller played at the Monterrey Pops Festival.  INSTRUMENTAL/COMEDY TRACK:Yakety Sax From The Benny Hill ShowThe song was first used on The Benny Hill Show in November 1969.  It was composed by James Q. “Spider” Rich and Boots Randolph.

Join Mike, Dan and Ashley this week in remembering the iconic saxophonist, Boots Randolph. Not only was he a major player in the Nashville Sound playing on such hits as “Return to Sender” and “Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree” but had his own smash hit with “Yakety Sax!” In Boots' 2003 NAMM interview you will hear from the man himself as well as Chuck Surack, Founder of Sweetwater Sound and Tim Smith, Studio Musician and Professor at Frost School of Music who sat down to remember their dear friend.

From Bruce Willis to Boots Randolph to Kareem Abdul Jabar - this episode is a fun look at all the "brushes" we had with fame. Some really cool people, in fact! Household names or not, it's still a great conversation starter, when you're tired of political opinions and heated discussions! Just start talking about famous people, and watch how the conversation takes a crazy turn.

Beyond Ringside Sports Radio "Beyond Ringside Live / The Shooters Gallery BR Archive #827 May 14, 2020 "The Check Cleared... The Money Is In The Bank" Welcome to The Complete Broadcast Episode of "Beyond Ringside Live - The Shooters Gallery" from Thursday May 14, 2020 A Fearless Foursome (known as Eddie Layne, Shane Noles, Phil Stamper, and Ted Guinness) Take Aim on a wide variety of topics. And yes.. there is a Boots Randolph "Yakkity Sax" reference in the show. You're invited to let us know what's on Your Mind, as it pertains to some of our topics. The easy ways are: @BeyondRingside on Twitter, as well as Facebook.com/BeyondRingsideLive and Facebook.com/BeyondRingside. Drop us a note sometime. =============================================== Our Appreciation to Matthew (Teknoaxe) Huffaker for a lot of the music you hear on Beyond Ringside Radio. You can check out his site at www.Teknoaxe.com, and also on YouTube. Letter of Permission is on file. "The Shooters Gallery" broadcasts on Thursdays at 8:30pm Central. Beyond Ringside Live broadcasts on Sundays at 6:00pm Central or on Tuesdays at 8:30pm Central We welcome You to Listen Online through: ***Our Online Home at www.BeyondRingside.com ***www.ProWrestlingRadio.net ***TuneIn Radio (TuneIn.com and their Mobile Apps)

We need your help, gang! We are raising funds for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund! We will be giving away some AWESOME Hellboy comics to randomly selected donors for each dollar donated, some are signed by Mignola! See our social media accounts for details of the prizes (psst...more will be added)! LINK HERE  https://www.gofundme.com/f/hellboy-bookclub-fundraiser-and-comic-giveaway Oh yeah, we also have a new episode this week! We're reading stories from "Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. 1953." Check out our discussion of "Wandering Souls," and "Beyond the Fences," after you donate! Thank you! 00:55 - John says a thing 09:14 - Listener Feedback 23:26 - Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. discussion   "Benny Hill Theme" by Boots Randolph used for educational purposes only Check our social media links for more info on the giveaway! https://www.facebook.com/hellboybookclub https://www.instagram.com/hellboybookclub https://twitter.com/hellboybookclub  

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Muleskinner Blues" by the Fendermen. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----  Resources Apologies for the delay this week -- I've been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don't worry, it's not anything serious...    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud's rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. It's not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it's still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis' sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis' continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It's well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn't record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn't record it for a few more days. Before I start this week's episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We've already covered his work of course, in episodes on "Tutti Frutti" and "Keep A Knockin'", and I don't really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don't think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don't think you can argue that those three weren't the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we're covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we've looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let's have a few moments' noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Ooh! My Soul!"] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we're going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we're entering the sixties, we're leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we're definitely leaving for now. Elvis' two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he'd been separated from everyone he knew, and he'd met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He'd recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years -- "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck", "Hard-Headed Woman", "One Night", "I Need Your Love Tonight", and "A Big Hunk O' Love". Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel's from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted -- his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn't due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don't want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn't have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland -- the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father's new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show -- he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis' early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis' last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session -- Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He'll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He'll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland -- the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis' last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well -- as well as having sung on Elvis' pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles -- Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all -- Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going -- the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves -- and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled "Make Me Know It" took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Make Me Know It"] Elvis' voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army -- he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman's "A Mess of Blues": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "A Mess of Blues"] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single -- a mediocre track called "Stuck on You": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Stuck on You"] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of "Stuck on You" backed with "Fame and Fortune" was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders -- they came out in sleeves that just read "Elvis' 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World", because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra -- The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he'd gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt's bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip -- that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he'd been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through "Fame and Fortune". He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, "Stuck on You", and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings "Love Me Tender" while Elvis sings Sinatra's "Witchcraft". Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock "Love Me Tender", but Elvis takes Sinatra's song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There's a passage in Umberto Eco's book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write "I love you madly". A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing "As Barbara Cartland might say, 'I love you madly'". This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco's view) can't. By this definition, Sinatra's performance is modernist -- he's just showing contempt for the material -- while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he's also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, "Love Me Tender/Witchcraft"] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of "Fever" that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Fever"] Then there was "Like a Baby", a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis' best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Like a Baby"] The next song was a huge departure from anything he'd done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin's 1950 hit "There's No Tomorrow": [Excerpt: Tony Martin, "There's No Tomorrow"] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he'd mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, "There's No Tomorrow" was based on the old song "O Sole Mio", which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became "It's Now or Never". Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he'd given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "It's Now Or Never"] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn't have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel's wife Marie's favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA's A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake -- because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn't see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis' repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that's almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from "King Creole", a cover version of "Such a Night", the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song "Reconsider Baby", the light Latin pop song "The Girl of My Best Friend", a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge -- in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks -- three singles and a twelve-track album -- and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it's very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called "GI Blues", intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn't going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were "business reasons" -- Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called "Wooden Heart", based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we'll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Wooden Heart"] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis' film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren't songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don't work as a poem. There's a habit even among Elvis' fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn't happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work -- he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it's clear that the time in the Army wasn't the problem -- it's just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did -- he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn't in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he'd been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis' role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There's quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis' acting in them, but there's no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis' own musical instincts yet -- he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he'd wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "His Hand in Mine"] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn't like, GI Blues, that was the big success -- and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies -- an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year -- a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like "Ito Eats": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Ito Eats"] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren't as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn't going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like "There's No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car". When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn't be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that "Elvis died when he went into the Army". We'll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Sweet Nothin's" by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "16 Candles" by the Crests. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  ----more---- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of "Dynamite" I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period -- artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I've put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee's autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I've had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee's music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn't go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade -- just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she's almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer -- while membership of the "hall of fame" doesn't mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she's the only performer we've dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we're going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as "Little Miss Dynamite": [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "Sweet Nothin's"]  Lee's music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday -- a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape -- some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show -- and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you'll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, "Jambalaya"] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis -- Elvis' first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley's songs, the ballad "Old Shep". But more typical of Foley's style was his big hit "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Red Foley, "Sugarfoot Rag"] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement -- his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda's parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda's career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing "Jambalaya". Red Foley said of that performance many years later: "I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I'd forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes." Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee -- that's the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee's archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we've seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions -- Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name "Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)", though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of "Jambalaya", which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), "Jambalaya"] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she'd never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang "Jambalaya" backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley's manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings -- for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots -- and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como's. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background -- right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he'd done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts -- his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he'd helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens' brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he'd later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn't do was get a hit record. The song "Dynamite" gave her the nickname she'd be known by for the rest of her life, "Little Miss Dynamite", but it wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, "Dynamite"] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", didn't chart at all at the time, it's been a perennial hit over the decades since -- in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree"] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen -- they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren't having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried -- and largely succeeded -- to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn't start to hit until Beatlemania some years later -- and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten's efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled "Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!" But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda's first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren't the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like "Ain't I'm A Dog": [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, "Ain't I'm A Dog"] Self's biggest success as a performer came with "Bop-A-Lena", a song clearly intended to cash in on "Be-Bop-A-Lula", but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey -- astonishingly, this record, which some have called "the first punk record" was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, "Bop-A-Lena"] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self's only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable -- as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn't get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher's office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn't play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self's performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee's career - "Sweet Nothin's": [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "Sweet Nothin's"] "Sweet Nothin's" became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited -- but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released -- enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours -- "all-star revues". But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She'd recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville's first rock and roll band. They'd had a few minor local hits that hadn't had much national success, like "My Love Song For You": [Excerpt: The Casuals, "My Love Song For You"] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit "Everlasting Love". The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called "Look For A Star" that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, "Look For A Star"] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, "Look For A Star"] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he'd go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals -- Cason and Richard Williams -- had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of "Blue Velvet": [Excerpt: The Statues, "Blue Velvet"] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too... But it wasn't the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team -- Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis' early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda's biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular -- Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change -- but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee's first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound -- though it wasn't originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up "Sweet Nothin's", they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write "Guitar Man" for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "That's All You Gotta Do"] That went to number six in the charts -- a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self -- a short song called "I'm Sorry", which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said "I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry' over and over". But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "I'm Sorry"] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while "That's All You Gotta Do" was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years -- one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart -- and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland's choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as "the King and Queen of Rock and Roll", performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn't listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven't been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn't head to Germany until the end of May -- he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA -- she recorded her hit "It Started All Over Again" in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "It Started All Over Again"] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn't even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn's utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing -- Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit "Fool #1" on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers -- and if Lewisohn doesn't mention something in his books, it didn't happen. (I've tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn't play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee's most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don't seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up -- her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang's first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, "Honky Tonk Angels Medley"] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day -- they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she's not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways -- Kanye West sampled "Sweet Nothin's" in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I'm afraid I can't excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there's a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “16 Candles” by the Crests. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of “Dynamite” I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period — artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee’s autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I’ve had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee’s music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn’t go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade — just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she’s almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer — while membership of the “hall of fame” doesn’t mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she’s the only performer we’ve dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we’re going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as “Little Miss Dynamite”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”]  Lee’s music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday — a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape — some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show — and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you’ll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, “Jambalaya”] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis — Elvis’ first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley’s songs, the ballad “Old Shep”. But more typical of Foley’s style was his big hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Red Foley, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement — his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda’s parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda’s career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing “Jambalaya”. Red Foley said of that performance many years later: “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.” Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee — that’s the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee’s archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we’ve seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions — Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name “Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)”, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of “Jambalaya”, which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), “Jambalaya”] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she’d never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang “Jambalaya” backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley’s manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings — for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots — and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como’s. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background — right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he’d done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts — his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he’d helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens’ brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he’d later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn’t do was get a hit record. The song “Dynamite” gave her the nickname she’d be known by for the rest of her life, “Little Miss Dynamite”, but it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Dynamite”] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, didn’t chart at all at the time, it’s been a perennial hit over the decades since — in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen — they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren’t having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried — and largely succeeded — to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn’t start to hit until Beatlemania some years later — and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten’s efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled “Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!” But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda’s first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren’t the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like “Ain’t I’m A Dog”: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m A Dog”] Self’s biggest success as a performer came with “Bop-A-Lena”, a song clearly intended to cash in on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey — astonishingly, this record, which some have called “the first punk record” was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Bop-A-Lena”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self’s only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable — as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn’t get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher’s office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn’t play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self’s performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee’s career – “Sweet Nothin’s”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”] “Sweet Nothin’s” became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited — but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released — enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours — “all-star revues”. But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She’d recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville’s first rock and roll band. They’d had a few minor local hits that hadn’t had much national success, like “My Love Song For You”: [Excerpt: The Casuals, “My Love Song For You”] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit “Everlasting Love”. The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called “Look For A Star” that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, “Look For A Star”] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, “Look For A Star”] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he’d go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals — Cason and Richard Williams — had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of “Blue Velvet”: [Excerpt: The Statues, “Blue Velvet”] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too… But it wasn’t the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team — Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis’ early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda’s biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular — Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change — but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee’s first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound — though it wasn’t originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up “Sweet Nothin’s”, they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write “Guitar Man” for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “That’s All You Gotta Do”] That went to number six in the charts — a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self — a short song called “I’m Sorry”, which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said “I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over”. But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while “That’s All You Gotta Do” was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years — one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart — and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland’s choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as “the King and Queen of Rock and Roll”, performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn’t listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven’t been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn’t head to Germany until the end of May — he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA — she recorded her hit “It Started All Over Again” in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “It Started All Over Again”] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn’t even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing — Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit “Fool #1” on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers — and if Lewisohn doesn’t mention something in his books, it didn’t happen. (I’ve tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn’t play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee’s most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don’t seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up — her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang’s first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, “Honky Tonk Angels Medley”] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day — they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she’s not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways — Kanye West sampled “Sweet Nothin’s” in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I’m afraid I can’t excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there’s a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “16 Candles” by the Crests. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of “Dynamite” I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period — artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee’s autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I’ve had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee’s music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn’t go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade — just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she’s almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer — while membership of the “hall of fame” doesn’t mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she’s the only performer we’ve dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we’re going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as “Little Miss Dynamite”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”]  Lee’s music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday — a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape — some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show — and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you’ll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, “Jambalaya”] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis — Elvis’ first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley’s songs, the ballad “Old Shep”. But more typical of Foley’s style was his big hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Red Foley, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement — his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda’s parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda’s career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing “Jambalaya”. Red Foley said of that performance many years later: “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.” Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee — that’s the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee’s archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we’ve seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions — Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name “Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)”, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of “Jambalaya”, which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), “Jambalaya”] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she’d never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang “Jambalaya” backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley’s manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings — for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots — and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como’s. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background — right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he’d done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts — his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he’d helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens’ brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he’d later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn’t do was get a hit record. The song “Dynamite” gave her the nickname she’d be known by for the rest of her life, “Little Miss Dynamite”, but it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Dynamite”] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, didn’t chart at all at the time, it’s been a perennial hit over the decades since — in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen — they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren’t having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried — and largely succeeded — to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn’t start to hit until Beatlemania some years later — and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten’s efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled “Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!” But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda’s first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren’t the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like “Ain’t I’m A Dog”: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m A Dog”] Self’s biggest success as a performer came with “Bop-A-Lena”, a song clearly intended to cash in on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey — astonishingly, this record, which some have called “the first punk record” was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Bop-A-Lena”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self’s only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable — as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn’t get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher’s office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn’t play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self’s performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee’s career – “Sweet Nothin’s”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”] “Sweet Nothin’s” became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited — but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released — enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours — “all-star revues”. But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She’d recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville’s first rock and roll band. They’d had a few minor local hits that hadn’t had much national success, like “My Love Song For You”: [Excerpt: The Casuals, “My Love Song For You”] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit “Everlasting Love”. The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called “Look For A Star” that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, “Look For A Star”] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, “Look For A Star”] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he’d go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals — Cason and Richard Williams — had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of “Blue Velvet”: [Excerpt: The Statues, “Blue Velvet”] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too… But it wasn’t the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team — Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis’ early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda’s biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular — Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change — but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee’s first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound — though it wasn’t originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up “Sweet Nothin’s”, they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write “Guitar Man” for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “That’s All You Gotta Do”] That went to number six in the charts — a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self — a short song called “I’m Sorry”, which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said “I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over”. But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while “That’s All You Gotta Do” was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years — one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart — and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland’s choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as “the King and Queen of Rock and Roll”, performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn’t listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven’t been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn’t head to Germany until the end of May — he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA — she recorded her hit “It Started All Over Again” in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “It Started All Over Again”] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn’t even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing — Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit “Fool #1” on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers — and if Lewisohn doesn’t mention something in his books, it didn’t happen. (I’ve tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn’t play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee’s most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don’t seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up — her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang’s first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, “Honky Tonk Angels Medley”] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day — they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she’s not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways — Kanye West sampled “Sweet Nothin’s” in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I’m afraid I can’t excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there’s a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

Dita Von Teese is not only the International Queen of Burlesque, but also an adoring fan of Bob Baker Marionette Theater. On this episode of The BobPod, Dita speaks with hosts Timothy Nordwind and Elena Flores about her favorite songs and memories from BBMT and plays rare music taken from the Theater's infamous music archive. Alongside songs from Little Stevie Wonder, Boots Randolph, and a cute baby seal, Dita regales us with stories of her love for antique cars, Orange County, and Betty Grable. Plus, special insights into future (very exciting!) collaborations that Dita is brainstorming with the Bob Baker Marionettes. Sit back, relax, and get ready for a BobPod portrait of the incredibly talented and unique Dita Von Teese. And for more at-home Dita, be sure to check out her latest book, “Your Beauty Mark”!

In this episode, James discusses: The definition of vulnerability and how to embrace it in our lives. Know your audience. How to identify your vision. Key Takeaways: When we believe in us, we don’t go to the area of fear, doubt, and worry. We are not alone – the world needs our unique tone to harmonize in order to be one. As we each rise up and share our song, we make it easier to make the next person do the same. When you make a presentation – ask questions. Every single time. "There has never been a better time in history to speak our truth and to share our soul’s voice." —  James Fantastik Hepler References: As a Man Thinketh – James Allen Day by Day with James Allen – Vick Johnson What Does It Take – Jr. Walker and the Allstars Boots Randolph Connect with James Fantastik Hepler: Website: FantastikLeadership.com LinkedIn: James Fantastik Hepler Facebook: Fantastik Voice / Leadership Training Instagram: @fantastikvoicetraining To Receive Your Free 5 Simple Steps to Uplevel Your Communication Skills – Simply Log Into…JamesFantastik.com/5Steps

Opening: Yakety Sax (Boots Randolph) Another set of fairs . . . sleepless, sunburnt and hungover We're changing our name. Welcome to the "After Fair Podcast" "This is Wilson, Tony isn't here . . ." We discuss the fairs, back to back weekends, and the wall of humanity that overran us The guys save the day with fresh toilet paper Tony puts Harlan's cell phone number on a billboard We host an hour-long flag retirement with every Boy Scout in this part of the country Tony wins the watermelon eating contest . . . again John reveals his secret liquor stash Our by-laws committee meets to discuss revisions for the first time in decades It's good to be back after Lodge! Closing: Kiss Me, I'm S--tfaced (Dropkick Murphys) Email us at afterlodge@gmail.com Hang out with us on /r/AfterLodge Find us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter @AfterLodge Leave us a voicemail at 215-792-3538 Join us on IRC: irc.snoonet.org #freemasonry

Doug is back from Australia and riding in style. Recorded April 28th, 2018 at the FunHouse in Bisbee, AZ with Doug Stanhope (@DougStanhope), Mat Becker (@houdini357), Chad Shank (@HDFatty), and Ggreg Chaille (@gregchaille). Produced and Edited by Chaille. This episode is sponsored by  Blue Apron – Check out this week's menu and get your first 3 meals FREE at [BlueApron.com/stanhope](www.BlueApron.com/stanhope).  Casper Mattresses – Get $50 toward select mattresses by visiting [Casper.com/stanhope](www.Casper.com/stanhope) and using promo code “STANHOPE” at checkout. Terms and Conditions apply. Go to [http://www.dougstanhope.com/tour-dates/](http://www.dougstanhope.com/tour-dates/) for tickets to all upcoming 2018 shows in Canada and the UK.  LINKS: Chad Shank Voice Over info at [www.AudioShank.com](www.AudioShank.com) Support the Innocence Project - [www.innocenceproject.org](www.innocenceproject.org) Closing song “King of the Road" written by Roger Miller and performed by Boots Randolph on the Jimmy Dean Hour - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFS1pl0DNLE

In celebration of what would have been his 83rd birthday, The Music History Project team dives deep into what made Elvis Presley the King of Rock & Roll. In part one of a two part series, we discuss the early days of Elvis, his instruments, and his recordings. Interview segments include Ron Tutt, Mike Ladd, Herb Brochstein, Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana, James Burton, Chip Young, Fred Foster, Boots Randolph, and Norbert Putnam.

Peace has come to Tumbleweed Valley, and the ozone is safe. But as the Riders relax in the bunkhouse of the Triple X Ranch, a phone call from Dick Clark brings a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! But as the Riders leave for Hollywood, arch-villain Slocum emerges from the barren wasteland of the nuclear explosion… featuring Boots Randolph!

Jack, Martha and Rob discuss The Road, Boots Randolph (again), Walking Dead, InTouchables, Risiculous Fishing, H2O: Just Add Water, Key Lime Deserts, Nellie & Joe's Key West Lime Juice, VitaMix, Voice of America Radio, BBC, Golden Knights, Survivor, Rupert, Big Brother, Sinister, Ethan Hawke, Mr. Boogy, Dr. Who, Under the Dome, Dexter, Lovecraft, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Dexter, Dave Maresca and the Walking Dead Podcast.

Rob, Martha and Jack discuss Boots Randolph, The Butler, Marvel NOW, Miley Cyrus, Twerking, Elektra, Breaking Bad, Wilfred and so much more.

This week’s show attempts to straddle the worlds of alarm clocks and twanging surf guitar. Alarm clocks are provided by the Advisory Circle’s Jon Brooks who has somehow managed to craft an entire album made entirely from the sounds made … Continue reading →

The hosts talk about April Fool's day, Green Day Rock Band, Infinity Ward and the PS3 in this half-length edition of the Game Nutz Podcast. Hopefully regular recording and editing schedules will resume soon.Yes, the joke was drawn out for two weeks due to skipping a week for the podcast then late editing. This officially makes us lame.Subscribe and listen (or just listen) to the podcast over at our FeedBurner page.Music is "Yakety Sax", ©1963 Boots Randolph, ironically used without permission.

New Wynonna & Waxahatchee, Amanda Shires, Secret City Band, As Is + The Clash, The Steeldrivers, Ghost-Note, Eartha Kitt, Ca Honeydrops, Michelle Shocked, Shanna In A Dress, Derek Smalls, Brian Ray & Smokey Robinson... Birthdays for Billy Powell, Mickey Finn, Ian Hunter, Michael Clarke, Curtis Mayfield, Boots Randolph