Podcast appearances and mentions of Brian Wilson

Hi, About A Girl fans! We think you'll love the new season of Blood on the Tracks, which takes a deep dive into the life of Brian Wilson. You don't have to take our word for it, though. Check out the trailer and decide for yourself! About the show: In 1966, Brian Wilson planned to follow up the Beach Boys' groundbreaking album Pet Sounds with an even bigger musical statement. He was writing a teenage symphony to God. That album, Smile, was never finished. Instead, Brian slowly unraveled, as the pressure to make something profound weighed heavy on him. He worried that he wasn't good enough. He worried that he was a failure in the eyes of the record company, his band, his peers, and his own father. He thought his house was bugged. He thought the music he was making conjured some strange voodoo that had a disastrous impact on the real world. He became paranoid. He self-medicated with amphetamines, hash, and LSD. He held meetings in his swimming pool. He imagined people who weren't there. And eventually, in 1967, he went off the proverbial deep end. Did the real Brian Wilson ever resurface? Part true crime, part historical fiction, part spoken word lo-fi beat noir brought to you by Jake Brennan, and featuring the fictionalized voice Brian Wilson, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS sounds like nothing you've heard before. Because you can't push the needle into the red without leaving a little blood on the tracks. Listen to Blood on The Tracks: The Brian Wilson Story on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Philadelphia Phillies winning streak came to end this weekend at the hands of the New York Mets. Not only did the winning streak come to an end but so did the streak of winning series also come to end by the Mets. The Phillies were without the services of the teams leading home run hitter Kyle Schwarber all weekend with a mild calf strain, and of course are still missing the reigning MVP Bryce Harper. The Philadelphia Eagles opened their 2022 Preseason schedule Friday night against the New York Jets. The Jets won by a score of 24-21. Jalen Hurts and the Eagles starters all played one series on both sides of the ball before giving way to the rest of the roster. The Phillies travel to Cincinnati this week to take on the Cincinnati Reds before returning home next weekend to welcome back the New York Mets.Join Thomas Arnone, Nick DelGozzo, Greg Milakovic, and maybe Brian Wilson as they look back at the series against the Mets and what lies ahead for the Phillies. Join the show and discuss if, The weekend series against the Mets has changed your outlook for the Phillies playoff chances. Do you Agree or Disagree with that statement. The guys will also look ahead at the rest of the Wild Card standings and where the Phillies will end up. Bryce Harper looks to ramp up his rehab as he will take BP from a pitching machine early parts of this week. Harper wants to return to the lineup and help this team push toward the playoffs. The fellas will also briefly touch on the Eagles' first preseason game and what to look forward to for the remainder of the preseason. Finally, the guys will end the show with their Crumbs of the Week segment.

Hi, Dear Young Rocker fans! We think you'll love the new season of Blood on the Tracks, which takes a deep dive into the life of Brian Wilson. You don't have to take our word for it, though. Check out the trailer and decide for yourself! About the show: In 1966, Brian Wilson planned to follow up the Beach Boys' groundbreaking album Pet Sounds with an even bigger musical statement. He was writing a teenage symphony to God. That album, Smile, was never finished. Instead, Brian slowly unraveled, as the pressure to make something profound weighed heavy on him. He worried that he wasn't good enough. He worried that he was a failure in the eyes of the record company, his band, his peers, and his own father. He thought his house was bugged. He thought the music he was making conjured some strange voodoo that had a disastrous impact on the real world. He became paranoid. He self-medicated with amphetamines, hash, and LSD. He held meetings in his swimming pool. He imagined people who weren't there. And eventually, in 1967, he went off the proverbial deep end. Did the real Brian Wilson ever resurface? Part true crime, part historical fiction, part spoken word lo-fi beat noir brought to you by Jake Brennan, and featuring the fictionalized voice Brian Wilson, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS sounds like nothing you've heard before. Because you can't push the needle into the red without leaving a little blood on the tracks. Listen to Blood on The Tracks: The Brian Wilson Story on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, Citizen Critic fans! We think you'll love the new season of Blood on the Tracks, which takes a deep dive into the life of Brian Wilson. You don't have to take our word for it, though. Check out the trailer and decide for yourself! About the show: In 1966, Brian Wilson planned to follow up the Beach Boys' groundbreaking album Pet Sounds with an even bigger musical statement. He was writing a teenage symphony to God. That album, Smile, was never finished. Instead, Brian slowly unraveled, as the pressure to make something profound weighed heavy on him. He worried that he wasn't good enough. He worried that he was a failure in the eyes of the record company, his band, his peers, and his own father. He thought his house was bugged. He thought the music he was making conjured some strange voodoo that had a disastrous impact on the real world. He became paranoid. He self-medicated with amphetamines, hash, and LSD. He held meetings in his swimming pool. He imagined people who weren't there. And eventually, in 1967, he went off the proverbial deep end. Did the real Brian Wilson ever resurface? Part true crime, part historical fiction, part spoken word lo-fi beat noir brought to you by Jake Brennan, and featuring the fictionalized voice Brian Wilson, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS sounds like nothing you've heard before. Because you can't push the needle into the red without leaving a little blood on the tracks. Listen to Blood on The Tracks: The Brian Wilson Story on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, Citizen Critic fans! We think you'll love the new season of Blood on the Tracks, which takes a deep dive into the life of Brian Wilson. You don't have to take our word for it, though. Check out the trailer and decide for yourself! About the show: In 1966, Brian Wilson planned to follow up the Beach Boys' groundbreaking album Pet Sounds with an even bigger musical statement. He was writing a teenage symphony to God. That album, Smile, was never finished. Instead, Brian slowly unraveled, as the pressure to make something profound weighed heavy on him. He worried that he wasn't good enough. He worried that he was a failure in the eyes of the record company, his band, his peers, and his own father. He thought his house was bugged. He thought the music he was making conjured some strange voodoo that had a disastrous impact on the real world. He became paranoid. He self-medicated with amphetamines, hash, and LSD. He held meetings in his swimming pool. He imagined people who weren't there. And eventually, in 1967, he went off the proverbial deep end. Did the real Brian Wilson ever resurface? Part true crime, part historical fiction, part spoken word lo-fi beat noir brought to you by Jake Brennan, and featuring the fictionalized voice Brian Wilson, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS sounds like nothing you've heard before. Because you can't push the needle into the red without leaving a little blood on the tracks. Listen to Blood on The Tracks: The Brian Wilson Story on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before the Beach Boys began to work on Smile, Brian Wilson was already expanding his mind with the aid of LSD. The drug proved to be a point of contention with other band members, who bristled at Brian's newfound mind-altering methodology. Brian's LSD intake didn't just spark arguments between the Beach Boys. LSD made a black-and-white appear in Technicolor for the first time. It made water taste like it fell straight from heaven. It made musical notation come alive, notes and staffs just floating in the air. But LSD also brought with it a rising feeling of anxiety. The walls got bigger. Every room was suffocating. And before too long...the voices began to speak inside Brian's head.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Things are pretty calm around here at the moment, but sometimes they get a little shaky. Where are we? We're inside the mind of Brian Douglas Wilson, of course, the genius behind the Beach Boys' unprecedented masterpiece Pet Sounds. There are lots of things in here...songs, melodies, ideas...but there are also many dark corners for things to lurk in. For people to lurk in. As Brian continues to work on the band's follow-up to Pet Sounds, a so-called teenage symphony to God called Smile, the dark corners of his mind come alive. That's when the vibrations turned from good...to bad.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosted by Mark Kelley and Rick Hogg.  Support the show by becoming a member of the OTR Patreon Page!   MANSCAPED.COM Promo Code: OTR20 OTR Training! On Demand  Web Sites: warhogg.com www.kelleydefense.com   Hoist ! Use PROMO CODE: OTR10 Kill Cliff ! Use PROMO CODE: OTR15 Vertx ! Use PROMO CODE: OTR Brute Force Tactical ! Use PROMO CODE: OTR15 Combat Flip Flops ! Use PROMO CODE: OTR25   Alpha Elite Performance ! Use PROMO CODE: OTR15   Battle Brothers Shaving Co ! Use PROMO CODE: OnTheRange15   Instaragm: On The Range Podcast War HOGG Tactical Kelley Defense   #ontherangepodcast #rickhogg #markkelley   -Rick Hogg is a 29 year US Army Special Operation Combat Veteran. Rick has taken his 13 combat deployments, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and teaching experience as a Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat instructor and harnessed them into War HOGG Tactical, Inc.   -Mark Kelley is a US Army Combat veteran and 29 year major city Law Enforcement Officer. Mark turned his military, tactical officer, and dignitary protection team leader experience into Kelley Defense. Mark has trained Military, Law Enforcement and civilian personnel.

Brian Wilson, co-chair of the upcoming Coaches for Charity Kickoff Classic, discusses the games on Sept. 1 and also how the community can support the worthy cause.

Pete Rose demonstrates again how out-of-touch with reality he is during his visit to Citizens Bank Park.The MLB has a major competitive balance problem with the widening gap between good teams and bad ones compared to prior years. The data will shock you!Which closer has the best entrance song of all time – Edwin Diaz, Mariano Rivera, Brian Wilson, or someone else?The Yankees are 7-13 since the All Star Game. While the division remains strongly under their control, is their significantly worse pitching, accompanied by lower offensive results, cause for concern as we approach the final two months of the season, or will the Yanks shake off this cold spell and return to dominance?Keith Hernandez requested time off to avoid broadcasting the upcoming Mets games against the Phillies because Keith hates doing Phillies games and the Phillies are not good enough for his standards. Since Girardi's firing, the Phillies are 40-20 while the Mets are 38-21. Since 1935, the Mets have the worst single season winning percentage with a record of 40-120, which occurred in 1962. We're curious if Philadelphia broadcasters refused to do Mets games back then?Max Scherzer had a shocking occurrence when the Mets bat boy ran along the backstop during his windup. The reaction from Scherzer, and on social media, make this a must-see video clip.http://speakingofsportspod.com/https://twitter.com/Speak_of_Sportshttps://www.facebook.com/SpeakingofSportsPod 

In 1966, Brian Wilson planned to follow up the Beach Boys' groundbreaking album Pet Sounds with an even bigger musical statement. He was writing a teenage symphony to God. That album, Smile, was never finished. Instead, Brian slowly unraveled, as the pressure to make something profound weighed heavy on him. He worried that he wasn't good enough. He worried that he was a failure in the eyes of the record company, his band, his peers, and his own father. He thought his house was bugged. He thought the music he was making conjured some strange voodoo that had a disastrous impact on the real world. He became paranoid. He self-medicated with amphetamines, hash, and LSD. He held meetings in his swimming pool. He imagined people who weren't there. And eventually, in 1967, he went off the proverbial deep end. Did the real Brian Wilson ever resurface? Part true crime, part historical fiction, part spoken word lo-fi beat noir brought to you by Jake Brennan, and featuring the fictionalized voice Brian Wilson, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS sounds like nothing you've heard before. Because you can't push the needle into the red without leaving a little blood on the tracks. Listen to BLOOD ON THE TRACKS: THE BRIAN WILSON STORY beginning August 15.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Volgende week speelt Otto-Jan op de Lokerse Feesten. Omdat hij weet hoe moeilijk het is om een album te maken, verdiept hij zich graag in het verhaal van bands die daar ook wel eens mee worstelden. Smile van de Beach Boys is daar een schoolvoorbeeld van. Brian Wilson combineerde in de jaren 60 psychische problemen met diverse soorten drugs en dat bleek een lastige combo voor artiesten die een album proberen af te werken. Dit is het verhaal van een van de meest legendarische platen aller tijden. 

Die Welt ist grau und hässlich, dann ist die Grand Bazaar Bernard Grancher der perfekte Begleiter für Ihren Konkurs. ## Super-mâle et sarcophage chimique Chers adeptes, Règle numéro 1: Ne jamais parler d'autre chose que du GBBG Règle numéro 2: Si tu parle d'autre chose que du GBBG, saches que ce sera toujours du GBBG. Règle numéro 3: Si tu enfreins une des 2 première règles, reporte toi à la troisième règle. Règle numéro 4: Si tu es sortis de la boucle mentale initiée par la troisième règle, tu dois te donner les moyens d' enfreindre une des 2 premières règles. Le GBBG 89 vous permettra de vous perfectionner. Au programme : 1. Générique 2. Brian Wilson - song for children 3. Prurient - many jewels surrounds the crown 4. Tele/funken - Geneva 5. Blue sabbath - Kartoffel katastrophe 6. Sculpture - Tooth Lock 7. Munch munch - wolfman's life 8. Myland and Lion - Jupiter festival 9. Popol gluant - Solo piano 18 10. Members of tinnitus music - Räds for röcks 11. R. Stevie Moore - Advertising agency of fucking Bernard Grancher # Grand Bazaar Bernard Grancher Die GBBG ist ein Radioprogramm von Bernard Grancher produziert. Sein starkes psychotrope Potential ergibt sich aus der Nähe zu den gefährlichsten Drogen. So ist die Sendung für alle Fälle von Leber- und Dickdarmerkrankungen empfohlen. Es ist nicht notwendig, an Gott zu glauben, um die Sendung zu hören, aber es ist verboten in ihr Potenzial für die Verbesserung des Intelligenzquotienten zu sehen. Der Intelligenzquotient ist eine proletarische prospektive Vorstellung, die ein positiv perspektivistisches Ziel dem Menschseins geben soll. Dies ist durch diese Sendung erwiesen, durch den menschliche Zustand ist er es nicht. * http://www.grandbazaarbernardgrancher.com/

On this episode Scott has Mark Smith from the Music Relish Podcast on to discuss the Happy Mondays, the 'Madchester" music scene of the mid 80's to early 90's,  artists re-recording their own music and RocDocs.

Brian Wilson visited Jonesy's Jukebox a few days before the release of his album "Smile" on September 24, 2004. This was an important time for Wilson, who re-emerged onto the world stage after completing the project that he had shelved in 1967. In the newly recorded introduction of this podcast, Jonesy recommends the recent documentary "Long Promised Road" which gives great insight into the genius of the Beach Boys' primary songwriter. Enjoy Steve Jones' candid conversation with one of the most revered musicians of modern times. Be sure to subscribe to Jonesy's Jukebox for free on your favorite podcast platform and get a different show each Monday.

It’s been three decades since a young Canadian band surprised the world by singing about Brian Wilson, Yoko Ono, New Kids, Ninth Grade, Box sets, and more in an upbeat style full of harmonies. Mike, Mike, Ricky, Michelle, and Kornflake were all fully clothed discussing their thoughts on the impact and influence of the debut … The Earth Station One Podcast – 30th Anniversary of Barenaked Ladies Gordon Album Read More » The post The Earth Station One Podcast – 30th Anniversary of Barenaked Ladies Gordon Album appeared first on The ESO Network.

It's been three decades since a young Canadian band surprised the world by singing about Brian Wilson, Yoko Ono, New Kids, ninth grade, box sets, and more in an upbeat style full of harmonies. Mike, Mike, Ricky, Michelle, and Kornflake were all fully clothed discussing their thoughts on the impact and influence of the debut album. Plus, filmmaker Ryan Suffern suffers through the Geek Seat. All this, along with Ashley's Box Office Buzz, Angela's A Geek Girl's Take, and Shout Outs! We want to hear from you! Feedback is always welcome. Please write to us at feedback@earthstationone.com and subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcast, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, or wherever fine podcasts are found. Table of Contents 0:00:00 Show Open / Interview & Geek Seat with Ryan Suffern 0:53:50 Box Office Buzz 0:56:40 The 30th Anniversary of The BareNaked Ladies Album 'Gordon' 2:12:39 A Geek Girls Take 2:14:57 Show Close Links Earth Station One on Apple Podcasts Earth Station One on Stitcher Radio Earth Station One on Spotify Past Episodes of The Earth Station One Podcast The ESO Network Patreon The New ESO Network TeePublic Store ESO Network Patreon Angela's A Geek Girl's Take Ashley's Box Office Buzz Michelle's Iconic Rock Talk Show The Earth Station One Website NSC Live TV Tifosi Optical Ryan Suffern Official Website Iconic Rock Talk Show Flopcast Radio Cult Promos Tifosi Optics Blurred Nerds 42Cast The ESO Network Patreon If you would like to leave feedback or a comment on the show please feel free to email us at feedback@earthstationone.com Special Guests: Kornflake, Michele Bourg, Ricky Zhero, and Ryan Suffern.

** PLEASE SUBSCRIBE ** Brought to you by FUNKNSTUFF.NET and hosted by Scott "DR GX" Goldfine — musicologist and author of “Everything Is on THE ONE: The First Guide of Funk” ― “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” is the interview show that gets DEEP into the pocket with contemporary music's foremost masters of the groove. Become a TRUTH IN RHYTHM Member through YouTube or at https://www.patreon.com/truthinrhythm. Featured in TIR Episode 251 (Part 2 of 2): Keyboardist, producer, composer & arranger Jeff Bova. After early on working with iconoclastic producer Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock and the R&B band Change, he went on to lend his talents to a cavalcade of rock, pop and R&B stars, including earning a Grammy producing Celine Dion in 1996.  Other collabs include Robert Palmer, Yoko Ono, David Lee Roth, Billy Squier, Billy Joel, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, Hall & Oates, Jody Watley, Chaka Khan, Meat Loaf, Vanessa Williams, Joe Cocker, Cyndi Lauper, R Kelly, Cher, Michael Bolton, Brian Wilson, Tina Turner, Michael McDonald, Starpoint, Average White Band, Kurtis Blow, Maceo Parker, Bootsy's Rubber Band, Bad Company, Iron Maiden and Joe Bonamassa.  RECORDED JUNE 2022 LEGAL NOTICE: All video and audio content protected by copyright. Any use of this material is strictly prohibited without expressed consent from original content producer and owner Scott Goldfine, dba FUNKNSTUFF. For inquiries, email info@funknstuff.net. TRUTH IN RHYTHM is a registered U.S. Trademark (Serial #88540281). Get your copy of "Everything Is on the One: The First Guide of Funk" today! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541256603/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1541256603&linkCode=as2&tag=funknstuff-20&linkId=b6c7558ddc7f8fc9fe440c5d9f3c400

Welcome to Garden City Church! https://secure.subsplash.com/ui/access/637H74/ute_cKJAwI_UZSqVeCn1Ut_WwcuqTTqRY3cGq-UlXeSLZApM9HoC0en4pr3ck9FsBu0NebQUhcfAqDCGCrNq-HGuVYjBmjsMPw96obXhKBclVLt6TpzAAE8M6fMbNQXQORahfyqwa04XmOwPTOxlRQ#/ (Give) https://www.gardencitynw.com/about-us (Contact us) https://gardencity.ccbchurch.com/goto/forms/46/responses/new (Are you new?) https://www.instagram.com/gardencity_church/ (Instagram) https://www.facebook.com/whitewaterchurch/ (Facebook)

STUPID THINGS WE DO TO LOOK COOL: ☞ Talking on speakerphone in public:  Why have a private conversation that invades everyone else's space? (Do it over text, like the rest of us…or at least turn it up so we can hear the other person better!) ☞ Taking pics of cash:  Rather than looking cool, this gives the impression of trying too hard. It's just as bad as bragging about how rich your parents are!) ☞ Boasting about not being on social media:  Just like despising popular trends, there's not much point in bragging about not being on social media. It doesn't make you “better” than anyone else. (Same thing about eating vegan?) ☞ Insisting on having the last word:  Sure, it gives you a momentarily exhilarating feeling, but it never, but it doesn't mean you've satisfactorily resolved the conflict. ☞ Using abusive swear words and insults:  Insults directed at a person's gender, orientation, physical or mental ability, or skin color not only decreases your cool factor, it actually makes you appear intolerant. (But…isn't that what Twitter was invented for?) ☞ Making fun of others' hobbies or interests: Laughing at someone else about what they enjoy because it's perceived as cheesy says more about the person poking fun than it does about the person showing an interest in something. (Yeah, [***co-host***]!) ☞ Using your zodiac sign as an excuse:  We've all heard someone do it: “Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I'm a stubborn Taurus”. Don't use your zodiac sign as an excuse to continue bad behavior. (So, what excuse should I use?) DID YOU KNOW? Super skinny people are more likely to be couch potatoes than those with a normal or high body mass index (BMI), a new study says. Researchers in China have found that it's not more activity and less food which keeps many people fitting into a size small. The author of the study says the researchers “expected to find that these (very thin) people are really active”, but the study found “They had lower food intakes and lower activity, as well as surprisingly higher-than-expected resting metabolic rates”. Entertainment News Question of the Podcast Fun Facts ✓ The English language is said to be one of the happiest languages in the world – the word “happy” is used 3 times more often than the word “sad”. ✓ The word “Goodbye” originally comes from an Old English phrase meaning “god be with you”. ON THE ROAD YET AGAIN: A CNN feature story is calling it “Classic Rock's Farewell Tour”. At arenas and stadiums across the world, never before has such a grizzled group of rock icons graced so many major stages at the same time. The problem? It's not likely to happen again. Here are the names and ages of some of the music superstars who are on the road this summer, some of them on “farewell” tours…others well, it just might turn out to be their farewell tours too… ⇒ Kiss – Gene Simmons (73 next month), Paul Stanley (70) ⇒ Carlos Santana (74) ⇒ Elton John (75) ⇒ Rod Stewart (77) ⇒ Eric Clapton (77) ⇒ Roger Waters [ex-Pink Floyd] (78) ⇒ The Who – Roger Daltrey (78), Pete Townshend (77) ⇒ The Rolling Stones – Mick Jagger (79), Keith Richards (78) ⇒ Brian Wilson [ex-Beach Boys] (80) ⇒ Paul McCartney (80) ⇒ Bob Dylan (81) ⇒ Ringo Starr (82) WATER COOLER QUESTION: Question:  65% of women have made their partner do THIS before going out. What is it? Answer:  Change their shoes Question:  25% of people admit they have stayed in a relationship because they liked THIS about their partner. What is it? Answer:  Their dog Mindy' Deep Thought Question Quote of the Podcast That's it for todays show! If you love what we do and want more of us check out our website http://lowtreestudios.com (lowtreestudios.com). The links provided in our show notes. Enjoy your evening and thank you for listening to the The Jason & Mindy Podcast where we feature topics that serve as an informative and entertaining break from life's daily grind. Lowtree...

** PLEASE SUBSCRIBE ** Brought to you by FUNKNSTUFF.NET and hosted by Scott "DR GX" Goldfine — musicologist and author of “Everything Is on THE ONE: The First Guide of Funk” ― “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” is the interview show that gets DEEP into the pocket with contemporary music's foremost masters of the groove. Become a TRUTH IN RHYTHM Member through YouTube or at https://www.patreon.com/truthinrhythm. Featured in TIR Episode 251 (Part 1 of 2): Keyboardist, producer, composer & arranger Jeff Bova. After early on working with iconoclastic producer Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock and the R&B band Change, he went on to lend his talents to a cavalcade of rock, pop and R&B stars, including earning a Grammy producing Celine Dion in 1996.  Other collabs include Robert Palmer, Yoko Ono, David Lee Roth, Billy Squier, Billy Joel, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, Hall & Oates, Jody Watley, Chaka Khan, Meat Loaf, Vanessa Williams, Joe Cocker, Cyndi Lauper, R Kelly, Cher, Michael Bolton, Brian Wilson, Tina Turner, Michael McDonald, Starpoint, Average White Band, Kurtis Blow, Maceo Parker, Bootsy's Rubber Band, Bad Company, Iron Maiden and Joe Bonamassa.  RECORDED JUNE 2022 LEGAL NOTICE: All video and audio content protected by copyright. Any use of this material is strictly prohibited without expressed consent from original content producer and owner Scott Goldfine, dba FUNKNSTUFF. For inquiries, email info@funknstuff.net. TRUTH IN RHYTHM is a registered U.S. Trademark (Serial #88540281). Get your copy of "Everything Is on the One: The First Guide of Funk" today! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541256603/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1541256603&linkCode=as2&tag=funknstuff-20&linkId=b6c7558ddc7f8fc9fe440c5d9f3c400

durée : 01:55:57 - Retour de plage du jeudi 28 juillet 2022 - par : Thierry Jousse - Auteur, compositeur, interprète et producteur, Brian Wilson est à l'affiche de cet épisode de "Retour de plage", musicien surdoué et membre fondateur des Beach Boys. - réalisé par : Yassine Bouzar

Matt Bissonette has played bass for David Lee Roth, Brian Wilson, Rick Springfield and is now touring with Elton John. […]

The Sly Dog and The Wife talk about the recent Brian Wilson and Chicago headlining show they saw. We talk about the venue, rude fans, speculate respectfully about the state of Brian Wilson, and The Wife takes shots at 80's Chicago. This is a super fun episode you won't wanna miss.   Tune in and turn it up!

New Billie Eilish, the new Jack White sounds raw in a good way, a tribute to Brian Wilson, Bananarama is back, a ZZ Top documentary soundtrack, Willie Nelson is launching a festival, a woman gets criticized for showing too much cleavage at her son's birthday, 10 things we buy and never use, a plane turned around because the pilots were fighting, the youngest black student ever admitted into med school, a nagging spouse is the best way to keep sunscreen on, and Vinnie reads your texts! 

Mike covers Mexican President Lopez-Obrador's offer to Assange, Jim Breuer's comedy special, seeing Brian Wilson and Chicago recently and other news stories.   Support Jackman Radio by becoming a monthly patron:  https://www.patreon.com/JackmanRadio Venmo: SenatorJackman86

The Philadelphia Phillies enter the MLB All-Star break on a high note as they sweep the Miami Marlins this weekend. The Phillies haven't swept the Marlins, in Miami, since 2010. The Phillies enter the All-Star Break tied with the St Louis Cardinals for the 3rd and final wild card spot, Phillies of course own the tiebreaker over the Cardinals. Will the Phillies make a significant move prior to or at the MLB Trade Deadline? The MLB First-Year Player Draft is Sunday night and the Phillies have the #17 overall pick in the 1st Round.The Phillies have a 12-8 record since Bryce Harper was injured and their pitching staff has a 3.07 era. The Phillies should be major players at the trade deadline. The Phillies will make multiple trades prior to the August 2nd Trade Deadline, do you Agree or Disagree? Join Thomas Arnone, Nick DelGozzo, Brian Wilson, and Greg Milakovic to discuss the plans after the All-Star Break. The Phillies look to add to a lackluster farm system tonight as they will draft with the #17 overall pick in the 1st round of tonight's MLB Draft. The Phillies look to seize the momentum and end their post-season-less streak. Join the discussion!

The Great American Songbook is comprised of the most significant work of top early 20th-century American jazz, pop and show tunes artists. Folks like Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin are responsible for writing many of the standards that American culture was built on. Today on the show we honor their legacy and discuss 3 […]

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode -- there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript Transcript Just a note before I begin, this episode deals with mental illness and with the methods, close to torture, used to treat it in the middle of the last century, so anyone for whom that's a delicate subject may want to skip this one. There's a term that often gets used about some musicians, "outsider music", and it's a term that I'm somewhat uncomfortable with. It's a term that gets applied to anyone eccentric, whether someone like Jandek who releases his own albums through mail order and just does his own thing, or someone like Hasil Adkins who made wild rockabilly music, or an entertainer like Tiny Tim who had a bizarre but consistent view of showbusiness, or a band like the Shaggs who were just plain incompetent, or people like Wesley Willis or Wild Man Fischer who had serious mental health problems. The problem with the term is that it erases these differences, and that it assumes that the most interesting thing about the music is the person behind it. It also erases talent, especially in the case of mentally ill artists. There are several mutually incompatible assumptions about creative artists who have mental health problems. One is that their music should be treated like a freak show, and either appreciated for that reason (if you're someone who gets their entertainment from someone else's suffering) or disdained (if you don't want to do that). Other people think that the mental illness *makes* the music, that great art comes from mental health problems, while yet others will argue that someone's art has nothing at all to do with their mental health, and is not influenced by it in any way. All of these positions are, of course, wrong. Mental illness doesn't stop someone from making great art -- except when it takes away the ability to make art at all of course -- people like Brian Wilson or Vincent Van Gogh are testament to that, and their best work has nothing to do with a freak show. But nor does it grant the ability to make great art. Someone with no musical talent who develops schizophrenia just becomes a schizophrenic person with no musical talent. But to say that mental illness doesn't affect the work is also nonsense. Everything about someone's life affects their art, especially something as important as their mental health. And the real problem with these labels comes with those artists who don't manage to develop a substantial body of work before their illness sets in. Those with real musical talent, but who end up getting put in the outsider artist bucket because their work is so obviously affected by their illness. And one of those is Roky Erickson, of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Erickson started his career aged fifteen with a group based in Austin, Texas, called the Spades -- and I hope that this wasn't intended as a racial slur, as the word was sometimes used at this time. Their first single, "We Sell Soul", released in 1965, shows the clear influence of "Gloria" by Them: [Excerpt: The Spades, "We Sell Soul"] That was a regional hit, and so their second single, the first song that Erickson had ever written, was recorded in the same style: [Excerpt: The Spades, "You're Gonna Miss Me"] But by December 1965, Erickson had left the Spades, and joined Stacy Sutherland, Benny Thurman, and John Ike Walton, the members of another band called the Lingsmen. They were joined by a fifth man, Tommy Hall, who became the band's lyricist, liner-note writer, and general spokesman, and who played an electric jug, creating an effect somewhere between bubbling and a wobble board. Hall started calling the group's music "psychedelic rock" in late 1965 after being influenced by Timothy Leary, and I've seen some people say he was the first person ever to use the term. The group released a rerecorded version of "You're Gonna Miss Me" on a small local label: [Excerpt: The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss Me"] That was released in January 1966, and later picked up by a larger label, International Artists, which was the home of a lot of Texan psychedelic bands, like the Golden Dawn and the Red Crayola. It spent most of the year slowly climbing the charts, eventually reaching number fifty-five -- the highest chart position the group would ever have. It was included on their debut album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, released towards the end of the year, by which time Thurman had been replaced by Ronnie Leatherman on bass. The album's liner notes were written by Hall and had a large amount of advocacy for the use of psychedelic drugs -- as did the music itself, though some of this was a little more subtle, like the song "Fire Engine", where the line "let me take you to the empty place" was meant to sound like "DMT place", DMT being a psychedelic drug: [Excerpt: The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, "Fire Engine"] Around this time, the band crossed paths with Janis Joplin, who was a big fan of the group and who they tried to get to join them, but Joplin decided to move to California instead. Tommy Hall was a huge advocate for both the potential of LSD to open people's minds, and of the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski, and his enthusiasm for both showed up on the group's second album. Unfortunately, not all of the group were of quite the same mind, and Leatherman and Walton left early in the sessions for that album, Easter Everywhere, which was considered not quite up to the standards of the previous album, though Erickson and Hall's eight-minute long "Slip Inside This House" is a favourite of most of the fans. [Excerpt: The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, "Slip Inside This House"] Unfortunately, the band started to disintegrate. The core of Erickson, Hall, and Sutherland remained together, but various bass players and drummers came and went -- though one of the band's rhythm sections, Duke Davis and Danny Thomas, was good enough that the band's label got them to back Lightnin' Hopkins on his album Free Form Patterns. According to reports I've read, Davis and Thomas were both on acid during the session, but they still play solidly throughout: [Excerpt: Lightnin' Hopkins, "Give Me Time to Think"] Another potential bass player at this point was a roommate of Erickson's, who Erickson tried to get into the band but who Hall turned down. Townes Van Zandt later went on to rather bigger things. Erickson also started to have some mental problems -- apparently taking LSD literally every day for years is not great for you. And when he was arrested for marijuana possession, he decided to use his mental health as a way to get out of a potential ten-year jail sentence, by getting three years in a psychiatric hospital instead. He later claimed that he was lying about his problems and acting mad to get this sentence, but he had been having problems before then. Hall and Sutherland and their current rhythm section finished up a few demos, and the record label put out one final album made up of outtakes, plus a faked live album with crowd noise overdubbed on some earlier studio recordings, but with their lead singer in hospital for three years the band split up. Hall became a Scientologist and quit the music industry altogether. If Erickson *was* faking his illness when he went into the hospital, he wasn't faking it by the time he came out. Psychiatric medicine was still in its infancy then. It's far from wonderful today, but at least in general you can be relatively sure that the treatment won't make you worse. That wasn't the case in the late sixties and early seventies, and Erickson was forced through multiple sessions of electro-shock therapy. (To be clear, electro-shock therapy can sometimes be effective for some conditions when done properly and with the patient's consent. This wasn't either.) When Erickson finally got out, he tried to put his life back together, and formed a new band called Bleib Alien, later renamed Roky Erickson and the Aliens, who made hard rock records with lyrics about science fiction and horror themes like zombies, fire demons, medical experimentation, and two-headed dogs: [Excerpt: Roky Erickson and the Aliens, "Two-Headed Dog"] Erickson became a cult artist, cited as an influence by everyone from Henry Rollins to ZZ Top, and intermittently released recordings for the next few decades, but he spent much of the time dealing with severe, untreated, schizophrenia. There are many stories about this time that get shared, and are easy to find online, but which I'm not going to repeat here because they tend to be shared in a freak-show manner. But by 2001 he was placed in the legal custody of his brother . This kind of situation is often abused, but in Erickson's case it seems to have done him good. His brother got him legal and medical help, and helped him start finally receiving royalties on some of his records. There was a one-off fiftieth anniversary reunion of most of the living original members of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and in 2010 Erickson released his finest album, a collaboration with the band Okkervil River, True Love Cast Out All Evil: [Excerpt: Roky Erickson and Okkervil River, "Ain't Blues Too Bad"] By all accounts the last years of Erickson's life were happier and more comfortable than any he'd had. He got to tour the world, playing for appreciative crowds, he got his schizophrenia under control, and he was able to live a relatively independent life, and to know that new generations of musicians admired his work. He died in 2019, aged seventy-one.

Former Giants closer Brian Wilson tells Murph and Mac about the moment he knew Buster Posey would be a Hall of Famer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Former Giants closer Brian Wilson tells Murph and Mac about the moment he knew Buster Posey would be a Hall of Famer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Brian Wilson, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen. De lijst met hoogbejaarde popsterren die de concertpodia langs trekken is lang. Wat drijft deze oude mannen om maar door te blijven gaan? Hoe houden ze het vol? En waarom zijn het voornamelijk mannen?  Muziekjournalist Niels Aalberts, van onder andere de VPRO-podcast De Machine over de muziekindustrie, vertelt in podcast De Dag wat muzikanten doen om nog tot in de zeventig of zelfs tachtig live concerten te kunnen geven. Mick Jagger en Bruce Springsteen houden er een strikt dieet en strak trainingsschema op na, Tom Jones zweert bij hydrateren en weer anderen zoeken hulp bij sterke bandleden die het muzikaal van ze overnemen als het nodig is.  De kwaliteit van oude rockers op het podium wisselt sterk, zegt Niels, maar vals of niet vals: de magie van een live concert blijft fans de stadions in trekken én de muzikanten het podium op klauteren. Reageren? Mail dedag@radio1.nl

She & Him comparten 'Til I Die', otra de las canciones que incluyen en su nuevo disco, un homenaje a las composiciones de Brian Wilson y Beach Boys. Seguimos con Beach Boys, que celebran este año su 60ª aniversario y escuchamos otra de las canciones de la banda sonora de 'Elvis', 'Power Of My Love', de Elvis Presley con la incorporación de Jack White. Aparte, estrenamos 'Los Chicos No Lloran', la primera canción, estival y sofisticada, del primer disco en solitario de Frank Gálvez. SHE & HIM - Til I Die BEACH BOYS – God Only Knows ELVIS PRESLEY, JACK WHITE – Power Of My Love JACK WHITE – What’s The Trick RAYE - Hard Out Here SUPERORGANISM ft. GEN HOSHINO, STEPHEN MALKMUS & PI JA MA - Into The Sun VARRY BRAVA ft SOLEÁ MORENTE – Bajo La Luz Perfecta CRYSTAL FIGHTERS – Wild Ones NENO – Siéntelo TROYE SIVAN – Easy THUNDERCAT – Fly Like An Eagle GORILLAZ ft THUNDERCAT – Cracker Island FRANK GÁLVEZ - Los Chicos No Lloran DORA – I Do LCD SOUNDSYSTEM -Tonite SON LITTLE - Stoned Love SLEAFORD MODS ft. Billy NOMATES - Mork n Mindy Escuchar audio

Jim Keltner's career in music has been nothing short of iconic. For those who go deep into discographies and liner notes, you know that the name Keltner is associated with a litany of some of the biggest names in the world of music, including George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Joe Cocker, Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, Steely Dan, Seals & Crofts, Randy Newman, The Bee Gees, The Traveling Wilburys, Brian Wilson and so many more. From his early beginnings with Gary Lewis and the Playboys, to the Concert for Bangladesh, to Steely Dan's “Josie” and so much more, we're here to talk to a musician who's seen it all and played it all. Inside MusiCast is pleased to welcome Jim Keltner.

First of all, Happy Independence Day everybody!  I'm so pleased to publish another episode of American Song on America's birthday!Back in America, ever since the plane crash in the winter of 1959 that ended the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, American rock and roll had been sort of losing steam.  By 1964, it very easily could have just petered out.   Certainly, the likes of Frankie Avalon, and post-army Elvis were not going anywhere exciting.  It was a new day, what was needed was music for a new generation.  The British Invasion shot a whole new attitude, excitement and energy right into the veins of American culture. Just like American culture changed England, the Brits changed American music.   You can see that play out in the competition between the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and the Beatles.  The English band's changed American culture, too.  Sex was prolific.   Drugs were everywhere.   On the Merv Griffin show,  Timothy Leary told his audience he'd used LSD 311 times and predicted a coming age when kids would be educated through the use of psychedelic drugs, unlocking their internal Smithsonian Institutes or Libraries of Congress. The British Invasion also caused a chain reaction all across America when local musicians formed new bands, for instance Roger McGuinn and David Crosby who formed the Byrds.  It was a powerful response to the excitement, new sounds, perspectives, and inspiration that bands like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who injected back into our rock scene.All this, and lots more, in this month's episode of American Song!IN THIS MONTH'S EPISODE:The Who - My GenerationBob Dylan - 4th Time AroundThe Beatles - Norwegian WoodThe Beatles - You've Got to Hide Your Love AwayBob Dylan - Got to Serve SomeoneJohn Lennon - Serve YourselfThe Rolling Stones - Crackin' UpThe Beatles - RainThe Beach Boys - Wouldn't It Be NiceThe Beatles - Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club BandThe Beach Boys - Good VibrationsBrian Wilson - Our Prayer/ GeeJohn Lennon - Promo for Tower RecordsElton John - Texan Love SongLed Zepellin - Whole Lotta LoveJohn Lennon - Cold TurkeyPaul McCartney - Interview 1967The Beatles - Lucy in the Sky With DiamondsThe Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years from HomeDr. Timothy Leary - Interview 1967Blind Faith - In the Presence of the LordJohn Lennon - GodJohn Lennon - Interview 1966The Byrds - Eight Miles HighThe Standells - Dirty WaterThe Monkees - The Last Train to ClarksvilleJimi Hendrix - Purple HazeBob Dylan - Mr. Tambourine ManPaul Revere and the Raiders - Indian ReservationThe Turtles - Happy TogetherThe Lovin' Spoonful - Do You Believe in MagicSimon & Garfunkel - Mrs. RobinsonThe Young Rascals - Good Lovin'The Mama's and the Papa's - California DreamingTommy James and the Shondells - Hanky PankyThe Beatles - Revolution 9The Doors - The EndVedder/ Tierney/ Krieger/ Manzarek - Doors Induction to Rock and Roll Hall of FameThe Velvet Underground - HeroinThe Strokes - Walk on the Wild SideSonic Youth - European SonU2 - Satellite of LoveREM - Femme FataleDavid Byrne - Candy SaysBowie/ Reed - Waiting for the ManQueen - God Save the Queen

Andy meets his holo-self, our current pundit peeves, tales of road depression, Carlin and Brian Wilson doc reports, how to "how to,” listener questions, and much more Spiraling.

In keeping with the way our psychedelic universe determined that Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, and Ray Davies were all to be born within days of each other, we rank our favourite "forgotten era" Beach Boys songs and continue with our new and much loved A.M Radio style talking over songs format.  Dig in.  

Two master craftsmen of pop/rock, born two days apart; both possessing a good number of commonalities as well as some major diverging paths. My returning guest, journalist Glenn Greenberg (Paul McCartney at 80) and I discuss their friendship and rivalry, as well as what each learned from the other.    Here's the 1967 CBS TV special, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution: https://youtu.be/vyiGFRj5b-k    The Brian Wilson/"Surf's Up" sequence appears 50 minutes in, but the earlier "debate" between Graham Nash and Peter Noone is worth the price of admission alone. 

The Philadelphia Phillies are completing a road trip by taking on the San Diego Padres Sunday afternoon. The Philadelphia Sixers traded Danny Green and the #23 pick in the 2022 First round of the NBA Draft to the Memphis Grizzlies for De'Anthony Melton Thursday night. The Phillies are on the hunt for another victory which would take the series win after dropping two games in Texas to the Texas Rangers. Last night, Blake Snell threw a 2-2 pitch to Bryce Harper in the top of the 4th inning that went hard high and inside hitting and fracturing the left thumb of Harper. Bryce Harper has been placed on the 10 day IL and Mickey Moniak has been recalled from Lehigh Valley to take Bryce's roster spot. Bryce is out indefinitely for now until more tests can be run to determine the fracture. After Bryce exited the game the offense came to life as JT Realmuto hit a solo HR and the Phillies offense rallied to win the game 4-2. Join Thomas Arnone, Nick DelGozzo, Brian Wilson, and Greg Milakovic as they discuss the series with the Padres as well as the Harper injury. The Phillies will make the playoffs despite Bryce Harper missing significant time, do you Agree or Disagree with that statement. Join the discussion and let the guys know! Can the current roster compiled of three guys making over $100 million dollars carry the load while Harper is out? The guys will also discuss who on the current team needs to step up to fill the Harper void as well as any names in the trade market to target. The panel will quickly discuss the aftermath of the NBA Draft and what the trade for Melton means for the Sixers next year. Finally, the guys will end the show with their Crumbs of the Week as they always do.

This week we sit down and celebrate Paul McCartney & Brian Wilson's birthdays, talk the Kate Bush resurgence, Beyonce's new single, and review new albums from Drake and Foals!

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --