Podcast appearances and mentions of bruce langhorne

What's your most loved and least favorite song on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited?! Dan chose Zimmerman's acclaimed sixth album for us to rank in this fun episode about a world class wordsmith and his out-of-tune guitar. We hit the guest ranker jackpot getting singer/songwriters Lloyd Cole and the Old 97's Rhett Miller to chime in with their most and least loved songs on the album. Listen at WeWillRankYouPod.com, Apple, Spotify and Desolation Row. Follow us and weigh in with your favorites on Facebook, Instagram & Threads and Twitter @wewillrankyoupod.SPOILERS/FILE UNDER: Joan Baez, bahhhhs, Ballad of a Thin Man, Beastie Boys, the Beatles, Blonde on Blonde, Mike Bloomfield, blues, Bringing It All Back Home, Johnny Cash, Champaign, Illinois, Lloyd Cole, the Commotions, Desolation Row, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, From a Buick 6, folk music, folk rock, going electric, Grateful Dead, Paul Griffin, harmonica, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Highway 61 Revisited, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Juarez, Mister Jones, Judas, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, Al Kooper, Bruce Langhorne, Sam Lay, Gordon Lightfoot, Like a Rolling Stone, lyrics, Charlie McCoy, Meet Me In The Morning, Milk Cow Blues, Rhett Miller, Newport Folk Festival, Old 97s, out of tune guitar, Queen Jane Approximately, rap, Rolling Stone magazine, Rue Morgue Avenue, siren whistle, tack piano, Tombstone Blues, Violent Femmes, Wilco, wordsmith, 1965.US: http://www.WeWillRankYouPod.com wewillrankyoupod@gmail.comNEW! Host tips: Venmo @wewillrankyoupodhttp://www.facebook.com/WeWillRankYouPodhttp://www.instagram.com/WeWillRankYouPodhttps://www.threads.net/@WeWillRankYouPodhttp://www.twitter.com/WeWillRankYouPo http://www.YourOlderBrother.com(Sam's music page) http://www.YerDoinGreat.com (Adam's music page)https://open.spotify.com/user/dancecarbuzz (Dan's playlists)

For the past month, the world has been fascinated by a new movie about a 20-year-old with a head full of ideas rolling from the North Country into New York City in 1961 and changing music forever. The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown just yesterday scored eight Oscar nominations, including nods for best picture, best director, best lead and supporting actors, best sound and more.It already had garnered awards and nominations, from the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild, from BAFTA and Critics Choice.Our Tribute This week's podcast, a tribute to this wonderful film, features a tune from that same time period in the Dylan story. It's our version of Bob's version of “Corrina, Corrina.”As reported here earlier, most of Dylan's earliest fans know this song as a track on the Freewheelin' album, but it also was the flipside of his first single, a 45 rpm that appeared ever so briefly in record stores in the early 1960s.It's curious that “Corrina, Corrina” is not among the tunes covered in A Complete Unknown, since the movie is all about Bob going electric. As most diehard Dylanologists know, that 1962 track was the young singer's first recorded work with a band (albeit the barest bones of a band, just a bit of light drumming, bass and some tasteful solo electric guitar).That solo guitar was famously played by Bruce Langhorne, the same Bruce Langhorne who three years later reappeared in the Dylan orbit on the Bringing It All Back Home album, whose tunes famously are much featured in the film. Heeeey, Mister Tambourine Man….Our Take on the TuneOn this Flood track from last week's rehearsal, the guitars seem to be dancing together. Just listen to Danny Cox's big, warm solos over Charlie Bowen's subtle slides on his resonator.A Bigger Batch of BobMeanwhile, hey, if you've detected a Dylan deficiency lately in your daily diet, The Flood has a cure: An entire Bob-centric playlist is ready for a spin in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to read all about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Known to Bob Dylan's earliest fans as the B side of his first single, “Corrina, Corrina” appeared briefly in record stores in late 1962. However, versions of that wonderful 12-bar blues already had been rattling around America's musical consciousness for at least a half century before that.In 1918, Roger Graham published a song called “Has Anybody Seen My Corrine?” In the next decade, Corrina was being flirted with by Vernon Dalhart and Wilbur Sweatman, by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bo Carter of the Mississippi Sheiks.Corrina's Mid-LifeIn the 1930s and ‘40s, novelty, blues and even Western swing versions of Corrina-centric tunes were being released; then in the 1950s and ‘60s, assorted rock renditions arose, like Joe Turner's in 1956 and Bill Haley's in 1959, and, of course, wild man Jerry Lee Lewis's in 1965. But if you listen to any — or, well, all — of those versions, you won't hear anything that sounds much like the soulful, thoughtful version that Bob Dylan recorded in October 1962 for his landmark Freewheelin' album, his second Columbia Records release.As Dylan told writer Nat Hentoff for the liner notes of that disc, “I'd never heard ‘Corrina, Corrina' exactly the way it first was, so that this version is the way it came out of me.”In a classic understatement, Phillippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon note in their authoritative Bob Dylan: All the Songs, “As always, his adaptation is very personal.”The Blues NotesMargotin and Guesdon point out that, while Dylan used most of the lyrics and structure from earlier versions of the song, he also borrowed a perfect line — “I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings” — from the great blues innovator Robert Johnson's 1937 “Stones in My Pathway.” Dylan kept elements of Johnson's melody, but goes for a much bluesier, more soulful vibe.Meanwhile, “the shadow of another bluesman floats over this song” as well, the book continues, “another Johnson, named Lonnie.”The authors quote Dylan as saying, “I was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working, and I must say he greatly influenced me. I used to watch him every chance I got, and sometimes he let me play with him.”Early ElectricityBob's “Corrina, Corrina” is especially noteworthy to the Dylan community because it was his first recorded work with a band, though, of course, it was the barest bones of a band, just a bit of light drumming, bass and some tasteful solo electric guitar. And of course, that solo guitar was famously played by Bruce Langhorne, the same Bruce Langhorne who was to reappear in the Dylan orbit three years later on Bringing It All Back Home. Heeeey, Mister Tambourine Man….Folk ProcessUltimately, whether Dylan heard any of those earlier “Corrina” tunes is irrelevant, because what emerged from his work with the song is so different from its precursors that he could have copyrighted it for himself as it is more or less a new song and not a rearranged "traditional.” Interestingly, Dylan's version also added another chapter to the Corrina evolutionary story, because six years after that 1962 release, Taj Mahal used the Dylan formula to craft his own "Corrina" for his Natch'l Blues album: He built it around Robert Johnson lines and completely abandoned the context of all those Corrina originals.Our Take on the TuneBefore we played this one at a recent rehearsal, we had a bit of conversation about all those more raucous renditions of “Corrina, Corrina” of our youth (and mom and dad's youth…. of grandma's youth…)But then when we kicked off the song, we all just naturally dropped into the bluesy, moody groove that Dylan established. This is our first take on the tune, but it feels like it's campaigning to be a regular in the repertoire. Stay tuned.The Bob Dylan PlaylistBy the way, as we've said before in Flood Watch, the richest, deepest vein of music we have ever mined has been Dylan's extraordinary oeuvre. From The Flood's earliest days to just last week, we have faithfully tapped into tunes from darn-near every era in Bob's long career.Last spring, to celebrate Dylan's 81st birthday, we've put together a special hour of music in our free Radio Floodango music streaming feature that offers Flood performances from the past four decade. To check it out, click here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Peter Fonda directs himelf, Warren Oates and Verna Bloom in THE HIRED HAND, photographed by the legend that was Vilmos Zsigmond and scored by another absolute legend - Bruce Langhorne! It's a Western. But it's not. But it is? Tune in to find out what we think it is and also to hear us fanboy about Vilmos! Next up: A COLT IS MY PASSPORT, 1967.

Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 338′34″ Goodbye Old Paint by Arthur Russell on Love Is Overtaking Me (Audika) 343′08″ Genocide by Link Wray on The Swan Singles Collection 1963-1967 (Rollercoaster Records) 346′10″ All Around My Spirit by Kathy Lowe on No Separation (Kathy Lowe) 348′58″ Willie O'Winsbury by Anne Briggs on A Collection (Topic Records) 354′28″ Living in a Trance by Ferlin Husky on Walkin' & A Hummin' (Capitol) 357′57″ FatHa & La Ilaha Ila Allah by Inov Gnawa on Innov Gnawa (Remix-Culture) 364′15″ Drums by Laurie Spiegel on The Expanding Universe (Unseeen Worlds) 374′34″ La Ilaha Ila Allah by Mahleem Mahmoud Ghania on Aicha (Hive Mind Records) 382′40″ Arch Leaves by Bruce Langhorne on The Hired Hand (Scissor Tail Records) 384′54″ Child Among the Weeds by Lal & Mike Waterson on Bright Phoebus (Domino) 388′24″ The Dreamer by Willie Dunn on Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology (Light in the Attic) 391′07″ It Calls for You by Ned Doheny on Ned Doheny (Asylum) 396′04″ Soldier of the Heart by Judee Sill on Heart Food (Elektra) Check out the full archives on the website.

NOTE: This episode went up before the allegations about Dylan, in a lawsuit filed on Friday, were made public on Monday night. Had I been aware of them, I would at least have commented at the beginning of the episode. Episode one hundred and thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, and the controversy over Dylan going electric, Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Hold What You've Got" by Joe Tex. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum A couple of times I refer to “CBS”. Dylan's label in the US was Columbia Records, a subsidiary of CBS Inc, but in the rest of the world the label traded as “CBS Records”. I should probably have used “Columbia” throughout... Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Dylan. Much of the information in this episode comes from Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. The New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff I talk about is here. And for the information about the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone", I relied on yet another book by Heylin, All the Madmen. Dylan's albums up to 1967 can all be found in their original mono mixes on this box set. And Dylan's performances at Newport from 1963 through 1965 are on this DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend. It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him, and in all those coffee-table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines. Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring, folk scene until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracised him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man. Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers, he was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival. And like all these stories, it's an oversimplification but there's an element of truth to it too. So today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric. We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe. And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever. We're going to look at Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes -- most recently the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on "Blowin' in the Wind", and when we left him there he had just recorded his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released. As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album. While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson. We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a Black Harvard graduate and political conservative whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music. But Wilson saw two things in Dylan -- the undeniable power of his lyrics, and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles. Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing, but his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success. Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band -- "Mixed-Up Confusion", backed with "Corrina, Corrina", a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson. Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmie Rodgers style keening that foreshadow his work of the late sixties: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Corrina, Corrina (single version)"] A different take of that track was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals. Those originals fell into roughly two types -- there were songs like "Masters of War", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which dealt in some way with the political events of the time -- the fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and more -- but did so in an elliptical, poetic way; and there were songs about distance in a relationship -- songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings -- the girl has left him, and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't.  While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again, and he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back through to anger and resentment. The surprising thing about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rotolo, and a change of producers. If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was -- you'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented, young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson style Delta blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life. By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out.  But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of "spokesman for a generation" -- a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited. Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream, and becoming more politicised. And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootenanny boycott: [Excerpt: The Brothers Four, “Hootenanny Saturday Night”] We've talked before about Hootenanny, the folk TV show, but what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time. The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band the Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's Communist leanings. The Weavers were --- according to some sources -- told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused. It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered, and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s. To give a relevant example -- Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for. Again,  someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album. So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly. Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootenanny until they asked Seeger on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result. But the odd thing was, whenever anyone *actually asked* Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music. So while the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a Communist, that Communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootenanny with his band the New Lost City Ramblers, and when the Tarriers were invited on to the show but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear. Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why. When he spoke about  the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say: [Excerpt: Dylan talks about the boycott. Transcript: "Now a friend of mine, a friend of all yours I'm sure, Pete Seeger's been blacklisted [applause]. He and another group called the Weavers who are around New York [applause] I turned down that television show, but I got no right [applause] but . . . I feel bad turning it down, because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it. They oughta turn it down. They aren't even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted. Uh—which is, which is a bad thing. I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad, it's bad all around."] Hootenanny started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him -- but turning the show down was also good publicity. Hootenanny wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered. It would also not be the only one he turned down. In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he agreed on one condition -- that he be allowed to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right-wing in the middle of the twentieth century, and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time. They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason -- we heard the Chad Mitchell Trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" a couple of weeks ago.  So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan Show, it would only be to perform his song about them: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues"] Now, the Ed Sullivan Show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was after all meant to be an entertainment show, and so Dylan didn't appear on the show -- and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost. It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song -- he never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades. By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Rotolo. Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Rotolo she was extremely politically motivated. She was also a fan of Dylan's writing, and had started recording versions of his songs on her albums: [Excerpt: Joan Baez, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959, as a spinoff from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously. As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases -- both musics appealed at this point to educated, middle-class, liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit Bohemian -- the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked (and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill). Both Newport festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as three thousand more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans, but the jazz  festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the folk festival came back as well. By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee headed by Pete Seeger.  At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of the first night, which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome".  To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being "one of the rising stars of the folk movement" to being the most important musician in the movement -- still just one of many, but the first among equals. He was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them -- like he was a star. And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs -- though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours, Baez's pure, trained, voice, rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side (live at Newport 1963)"] At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964. The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kind of songs that people wanted and expected from him -- there were songs about particular recent news events, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll",  the true story of the murder of a Black woman by a white man, and  "Only a Pawn in Their Game", about the murder of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. There were fictional dramatisations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like "North Country Blues", in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", about a farmer driven to despair by poverty who ends up killing his whole family and himself. As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"] But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums. Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Rotolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time. He also started to distance himself from Baez at this point, though the two would remain together until mid 1965. He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do.  He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself, and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make.  The entire album was recorded in one session, along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut -- like the early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that we heard in the episode on that song. Elliott was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing. Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for the New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes.  Dylan told Hentoff "“There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don't want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally." Dylan was right to say that there were no finger-pointing songs. The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal -- "Ballad in Plain D", in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rotolo, laying the blame -- unfairly, as he would later admit -- on her older sister. The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions. The opening track, in particular, "All I Really Want to Do", which in Dylan's version was a Jimmie Rodgers style hillbilly tune, became the subject of duelling cover versions. The Byrds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "All I Really Want to Do"] But Cher also released a version -- which the Byrds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a Byrds live show where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] In America, the Byrds' version only made number forty on the charts, while Cher made number fifteen. In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number nine but the Byrds charted higher at number four.  Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs. He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time -- and indeed, he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful, as Cash had lobbied for him within the company -- and he'd recently started to let that influence show. His most recent hit, "Understand Your Man", owed more than a little to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and Cash had also started recording protest songs. At Newport, Cash performed his own version of "Don't Think Twice": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] Cash and Dylan met up, with June Carter and Joan Baez, in Baez's hotel room, and according to later descriptions they were both so excited to meet each other they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds. They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash. One of them was "It Ain't Me Babe", a song that seems at least slightly inspired by "She Loves You" -- you can sing the "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "no, no, no" together -- and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top five country hit: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "It Ain't Me Babe"] But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song -- and his meeting with the Beatles seems to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records. This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while -- Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands. As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of "House of the Rising Sun", basing the new backing on the Animals' hit version. The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (electric version)”] Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr, the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British R&B bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly-Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album. His "So Many Roads" album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks -- Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson -- who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins -- plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist but who is credited on piano for the album: [Excerpt: John Hammond, Jr. "Who Do You Love?"] Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians. Instead, for his next album he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg -- a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cameo-Parkway and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others; the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee. Not all of these played on all the finished tracks -- and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions, where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all -- but that's the lineup that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing it All Back Home. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old-school folk singers Dylan was still associating with. Its opening lines seem to be a riff on "Taking it Easy", a song that had originally been written in the forties by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac Singers, where it had been a song about air-raid sirens: [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Taking it Easy"] But had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the Weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Taking it Easy"] Dylan took that verse, and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm, and connected it to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a freeform, stream-of-consciousness proto-psychedelic lyric inspired as much by the Beat poets as by any musician -- it's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] "Subterranean Homesick Blues" made the top forty in the US -- it only made number thirty-nine, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US. And it made the top ten in the UK -- but it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction. To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets. The opening side of Bringing it All Back Home is all electric, but the B-side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody -- it's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side that this was still the same Dylan they knew.  And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him. Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style -- a young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to *be* Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to "Blowing in the Wind": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Catch the Wind (original single version)"] On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had -- though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage. Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Dont Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had dueted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored. It's even worse to see Bob Neuwirth,  a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same. It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship. Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record. But he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians. Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers -- Mayall, Hughie Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McVie, though it was unsuccessful and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief. During the session Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording "I'll Keep it With Mine" until a couple of years later. But one other thing happened in England. After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC -- his first full televised concert. Unfortunately, that show never went ahead -- there was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it with what was said to be food poisoning. It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while, and took the opportunity to write what he's variously described as being ten or twenty pages of stream of consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen. He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his breakup with Baez, it's not hard to guess. The first attempt at recording the song was a false start. On June the fifteenth, Dylan and most of the same musicians who'd played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of -- but the song was at this point in waltz time: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (early version)"] The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on "House of the Rising Sun", overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up. But we'll hear more about "The Sound of Silence" in a few weeks' time. The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one. Al Kooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded. He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in and got tuned up before Wilson arrived. But then Kooper heard Bloomfield play, realised that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all.  But then, before they started recording "Like a Rolling Stone", which by now was in 4/4 time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on. Kooper saw his chance -- he played a bit of keyboards, too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in. Kooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Kooper went into the studio and sat at the organ.  Kooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track. This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Kooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor -- indeed, for much of the song, Kooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure. Luckily, Kooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] The finished record came in at around six minutes -- and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was six minutes and thirteen seconds long. That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album. The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is five minutes fifty-eight, as it has a shorter fade. I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix. Whatever the exact length, it was much, much, longer than the norm for a single -- the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes -- and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single. But eventually it was released as one side, in full: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] That's Bruce Langhorne there playing that rather sloppy tambourine part, high in the mix. The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US, only being held off from the top spot by "Help!" by the Beatles.  It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan. Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together -- and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the Spring, the two were very friendly. But they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records. In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-seventies. So "Like a Rolling Stone" was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music. The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments. The Newport Folk Festival had *always* had electric performers -- John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and The Staple Singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared. What there was, was a backlash against pop music. You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge. Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, and so on had been massive. Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sell-outs, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved. But at the same time, those acts *were* doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music. They were making programmes like Hootenanny possible -- and the folkies didn't like Hootenanny, but Hootenanny existing meant that the New Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got. There was a recognition, then, that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene. And it was those acts, the Kingston Trios and Peter, Paul, and Marys, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music. If Hootenanny gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke, but it's not so great if you want to hear "Tom Dooley" or "If I Had a Hammer". And so many of the old guard in the folk movement weren't wary of electric guitars *as instruments*, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music. For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem. The faultlines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues, presented by Alan Lomax. Lomax had no objection to rock and roll -- indeed, earlier in the festival the Chambers Brothers, a Black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and R&B songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said “I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock 'n' roll!” But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield band met his criteria of "authenticity". And he had a point. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group -- their rhythm section were Black musicians who had played with Howlin' Wolf -- and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the South Side of Chicago, but their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they'd quickly moved to playing clubs on the North side, where Black musicians had generally not been able to play. Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann. There was a difference -- they were from Chicago, not from the Home Counties -- but they were still scholars coming at the music from the outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture. The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the Stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will -- he wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything? One he'd never even heard -- but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing. So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite but hardly rapturous. He said "Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up...I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the rest. That's what I hear—I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not." He then introduced the musicians, and they started to play an old Little Walter song: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Juke"] But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be. Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth, Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling round in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around. But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused. Lomax tried to get the Festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded, until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean that all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would also be out.  Nobody's entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues Band to back Dylan on stage, as a snub to Lomax. But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Kooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member. Grossman gave Kooper a pair of backstage passes, and told him to meet up with Dylan. And so, for Dylan's performance on the Sunday -- scheduled in the middle of the day, rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper. He opened with his recent single "Maggie's Farm", and followed it with the new one, "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live at Newport)"] After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called "Phantom Engineer", which they hadn't rehearsed properly and which was an utter train wreck. And then they left the stage. And there was booing. How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some. Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short, others say that the audience was mostly happy but there were just a few people booing. And others say that the booing mostly came from the front -- that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front. That's certainly what Pete Seeger said. Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage. He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound. He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound. According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bikel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothchild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume. When Boyd got there, he found Rothchild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was also on the board. When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was "adequately represented at the sound controls", that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger. Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction -- while it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him. Eventually Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs. He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live at Newport)"] But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency fifty-six years later. Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said "He's gone to get his axe" -- using musicians' slang for a guitar. But many of the crowd didn't know that slang. But they had seen Pete Seeger furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work-songs, sung by people who kept time by chopping wood, and according to some people Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang. So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival -- Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so. Paul Rothchild even later claimed to have seen Seeger brandishing it. The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away by saying that he might have said something like "I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables". In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan, as much as he was concerned -- shortly afterwards he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part "I like some rock and roll a great deal. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch. I just don't feel that aggressive, personally. But I have a question. Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll?  I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer... Who knows, but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry. It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words, asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended. Hoping that perhaps I'm wrong—but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again." Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public. He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan. But the end result was the same -- Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd. He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that. He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group. From now on Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation, or the leader of a movement. He was a young man with a leather jacket and a Stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music. And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.

Episode one hundred and twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, and the start of LA folk-rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum The version of this originally uploaded got the date of the Dylan tour filmed for Don't Look Back wrong. I edited out the half-sentence in question when this was pointed out to me very shortly after uploading. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with the exception of the early Gene Clark demo snippet, which I've not been able to find a longer version of). For information on Dylan and the song, I've mostly used these books: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. While for the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings, while this contains the pre-Byrds recordings the group members did with Jim Dickson. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take a look at one of the pivotal recordings in folk-rock music, a track which, though it was not by any means the first folk-rock record, came to define the subgenre in the minds of the listening public, and which by bringing together the disparate threads of influence from Bob Dylan, the Searchers, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, manages to be arguably the record that defines early 1965. We're going to look at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Folk-rock as a genre was something that was bound to happen sooner rather than later. We've already seen how many of the British R&B bands that were becoming popular in the US were influenced by folk music, with records like "House of the Rising Sun" taking traditional folk songs and repurposing them for a rock idiom. And as soon as British bands started to have a big influence on American music, that would have to inspire a reassessment by American musicians of their own folk music. Because of course, while the British bands were inspired by rock and roll, they were all also coming from a skiffle tradition which saw Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and the rest as being the people to emulate, and that would show up in their music. Most of the British bands came from the bluesier end of the folk tradition -- with the exception of the Liverpool bands, who pretty much all liked their Black music on the poppy side and their roots music to be more in a country vein -- but they were still all playing music which showed the clear influence of country and folk as well as blues. And that influence was particularly obvious to those American musicians who were suddenly interested in becoming rock and roll stars, but who had previously been folkies. Musicians like Gene Clark. Gene Clark was born in Missouri, and had formed a rock and roll group in his teens called Joe Meyers and the Sharks. According to many biographies, the Sharks put out a record of Clark's song "Blue Ribbons", but as far as I've been able to tell, this was Clark embellishing things a great deal -- the only evidence of this song that anyone has been able to find is a home recording from this time, of which a few seconds were used in a documentary on Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Blue Ribbons"] After his period in the Sharks, Clark became a folk singer, starting out in a group called the Surf Riders. But in August 1963 he was spotted by the New Christy Minstrels, a fourteen-piece ultra-commercial folk group who had just released a big hit single, "Green Green", with a lead sung by one of their members, Barry McGuire: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] Clark was hired to replace a departing member, and joined the group, who as well as McGuire at that time also included Larry Ramos, who would later go on to join The Association and sing joint lead on their big hit "Never My Love": [Excerpt: The Association, "Never My Love"] Clark was only in the New Christy Minstrels for a few months, but he appeared on several of their albums -- they recorded four albums during the months he was with the group, but there's some debate as to whether he appeared on all of them, as he may have missed some recording sessions when he had a cold. Clark didn't get much opportunity to sing lead on the records, but he was more prominent in live performances, and can be seen and heard in the many TV appearances the group did in late 1963: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Julianne"] But Clark was not a good fit for the group -- he didn't put himself forward very much, which meant he didn't get many lead vocals, which meant in turn that he seemed not to be pulling his weight. But the thing that really changed his mind came in late 1963, on tour in Canada, when he heard this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] Clark knew instantly that that was the kind of music he wanted to be making, and when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came out in the US soon afterwards, it was the impetus that Clark needed in order to quit the group and move to California. There he visited the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, and saw another performer who had been in an ultra-commercial folk group until he had been bitten by the Beatle bug -- Roger McGuinn. One note here -- Roger McGuinn at this point used his birth name, but he changed it for religious reasons in 1967.  I've been unable to find out his views on his old name -- whether he considers it closer to a trans person's deadname which would be disrespectful to mention, or to something like Reg Dwight becoming Elton John or David Jones becoming David Bowie. As I presume everyone listening to this has access to a search engine and can find out his birth name if at all interested, I'll be using "Roger McGuinn" throughout this episode, and any other episodes that deal with him, at least until I find out for certain how he feels about the use of that name. McGuinn had grown up in Chicago, and become obsessed with the guitar after seeing Elvis on TV in 1956, but as rockabilly had waned in popularity he had moved into folk music, taking lessons from Frank Hamilton, a musician who had played in a group with Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and who would later go on to join a 1960s lineup of the Weavers. Hamilton taught McGuinn Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie songs, and taught him how to play the banjo. Hamilton also gave McGuinn an enthusiasm for the twelve-string guitar, an instrument that had been popular among folk musicians like Lead Belly, but which had largely fallen out of fashion. McGuinn became a regular in the audience at the Gate of Horn, a folk club owned by Albert Grossman, who would later become Bob Dylan's manager, and watched performers like Odetta and Josh White. He also built up his own small repertoire of songs by people like Ewan MacColl, which he would perform at coffee shops. At one of those coffee shops he was seen by a member of the Limeliters, one of the many Kingston Trio-alike groups that had come up during the folk boom. The Limeliters were after a guitarist to back them, and offered McGuinn the job. He turned it down at first, as he was still in school, but as it turned out the job was still open when he graduated, and so young McGuinn found himself straight out of school playing the Hollywood Bowl on a bill including Eartha Kitt. McGuinn only played with the Limeliters for six weeks, but in that short time he ended up playing on a top five album, as he was with them at the Ash Grove when they recorded their live album Tonight in Person: [Excerpt: The Limeliters, "Madeira, M'Dear"] After being sacked by the Limeliters, McGuinn spent a short while playing the clubs around LA, before being hired by another commercial folk group, the Chad Mitchell Trio, who like the Limeliters before them needed an accompanist. McGuinn wasn't particularly happy working with the trio, who in his telling regarded themselves as the stars and McGuinn very much as the hired help. He also didn't respect them as musicians, and thought they were little to do with folk music as he understood the term. Despite this, McGuinn stayed with the Chad Mitchell Trio for two and a half years, and played on two albums with them -- Mighty Day on Campus, and Live at the Bitter End: [Excerpt: The Chad Mitchell Trio, "The John Birch Society" ] McGuinn stuck it out with the Chad Mitchell trio until his twentieth birthday, and he was just about to accept an offer to join the New Christy Minstrels himself when he got a better one. Bobby Darin was in the audience at a Chad Mitchell Trio show, and approached McGuinn afterwards. Darin had started out in the music business as a songwriter, working with his friend Don Kirshner, but had had some success in the late fifties and early sixties as one of the interchangeable teen idol Bobbies who would appear on American Bandstand, with records like "Dream Lover" and "Splish Splash": [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] But Darin had always been more musically adventurous than most of his contemporaries, and with his hit version of "Mack the Knife" he had successfully moved into the adult cabaret market. And like other singers breaking into that market, like Sam Cooke, he had decided to incorporate folk music into his act. He would do his big-band set, then there would be a fifteen-minute set of folk songs, backed just by guitar and stand-up bass. Darin wanted McGuinn to be his guitarist and backing vocalist for these folk sets, and offered to double what the Chad Mitchell Trio was paying him. Darin wasn't just impressed with McGuinn's musicianship -- he also liked his showmanship, which came mostly from McGuinn being bored and mildly disgusted with the music he was playing on stage. He would pull faces behind the Chad Mitchell Trio's back, the audience would laugh, and the trio would think the laughter was for them. For a while, McGuinn was happy playing with Darin, who he later talked about as being a mentor. But then Darin had some vocal problems and had to take some time off the road. However, he didn't drop McGuinn altogether -- rather, he gave him a job in the Brill Building, writing songs for Darin's publishing company. One of the songs he wrote there was "Beach Ball", co-written with Frank Gari. A knock-off of "Da Doo Ron Ron", retooled as a beach party song, the recording released as by the City Surfers apparently features McGuinn, Gari, Darin on drums and Terry Melcher on piano: [Excerpt: The City Surfers, "Beach Ball"] That wasn't a hit, but a cover version by Jimmy Hannan was a local hit in Melbourne, Australia: [Excerpt: Jimmy Hannan “Beach Ball”] That record is mostly notable for its backing vocalists, three brothers who would soon go on to become famous as the Bee Gees. Darin soon advised McGuinn that if he really wanted to become successful, he should become a rock and roll singer, and so McGuinn left Darin's employ and struck out as a solo performer, playing folk songs with a rock backbeat around Greenwich Village, before joining a Beatles tribute act playing clubs around New York. He was given further encouragement by Dion DiMucci, another late-fifties singer who like Darin was trying to make the transition to playing for adult crowds. DiMucci had been lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts, but had had more success as a solo act with records like "The Wanderer": [Excerpt: Dion, "The Wanderer"] Dion was insistent that McGuinn had something -- that he wasn't just imitating the Beatles, as he thought, but that he was doing something a little more original. Encouraged by Dion, McGuinn made his way west to LA, where he was playing the Troubadour supporting Roger Miller, when Gene Clark walked in. Clark saw McGuinn as a kindred spirit -- another folkie who'd had his musical world revolutionised by the Beatles -- and suggested that the two become a duo, performing in the style of Peter and Gordon, the British duo who'd recently had a big hit with "World Without Love", a song written for them by Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "World Without Love"] The duo act didn't last long though, because they were soon joined by a third singer, David Crosby. Crosby had grown up in LA -- his father, Floyd Crosby, was an award-winning cinematographer, who had won an Oscar for his work on Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, and a Golden Globe for High Noon, but is now best known for his wonderfully lurid work on a whole series of films starring Vincent Price, including The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, Tales of Terror, and Comedy of Terrors. Like many children of privilege, David had been a spoiled child, and he had taken to burglary for kicks, and had impregnated a schoolfriend and then run off rather than take responsibility for the child. Travelling across the US as a way to escape the consequences of his actions, he had spent some time hanging out with musicians like Fred Neil, Paul Kantner, and Travis Edmondson, the latter of whom had recorded a version of Crosby's first song, "Cross the Plains": [Excerpt: Travis Edmondson, "Cross the Plains"] Edmondson had also introduced Crosby to cannabis, and Crosby soon took to smoking everything he could, even once smoking aspirin to see if he could get high from that. When he'd run out of money, Crosby, like Clark and McGuinn, had joined an ultra-commercial folk group. In Crosby's case it was Les Baxter's Balladeers, put together by the bandleader who was better known for his exotica recordings. While Crosby was in the Balladeers, they were recorded for an album called "Jack Linkletter Presents A Folk Festival", a compilation of live recordings hosted by the host of Hootenanny: [Excerpt: Les Baxter's Balladeers, "Ride Up"] It's possible that Crosby got the job with Baxter through his father's connections -- Baxter did the music for many films made by Roger Corman, the producer and director of those Vincent Price films. Either way, Crosby didn't last long in the Balladeers. After he left the group, he started performing solo sets, playing folk music but with a jazz tinge to it -- Crosby was already interested in pushing the boundaries of what chords and melodies could be used in folk. Crosby didn't go down particularly well with the folk-club crowds, but he did impress one man. Jim Dickson had got into the music industry more or less by accident -- he had seen the comedian Lord Buckley, a white man who did satirical routines in a hipsterish argot that owed more than a little to Black slang, and had been impressed by him. He had recorded Buckley with his own money, and had put out Buckley's first album Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes on his own label, before selling the rights of the album to Elektra records: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen"] Dickson had gone on to become a freelance producer, often getting his records put out by Elektra, making both jazz records with people like Red Mitchell: [Excerpt: Red Mitchell, "Jim's Blues"] And country, folk, and bluegrass records, with people like the Dillards, whose first few albums he produced: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duelling Banjos"] Dickson had also recently started up a publishing company, Tickson Music, with a partner, and the first song they had published had been written by a friend of Crosby's, Dino Valenti, with whom at one point Crosby had shared a houseboat: [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Dickson, before that song became a big hit for the Youngbloods, he had had to sell the rights to it, to the Kingston Trio's managers, as Valenti had been arrested and needed bail money, and it was the only way to raise the funds required. Dickson liked Crosby's performance, and became his manager. Dickson had access to a recording studio, and started recording Crosby singing traditional songs and songs to which Dickson owned the copyright -- at this point Crosby wasn't writing much, and so Dickson got him to record material like "Get Together": [Excerpt: David Crosby, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Crosby, Dickson's initial idea, to get him signed to Warner Brothers records as a solo artist using those recordings, didn't work out. But Gene Clark had seen Crosby perform live and thought he was impressive. He told McGuinn about him, and the three men soon hit it off -- they were able to sing three-part harmony together as soon as they met. ( This is one characteristic of Crosby that acquaintances often note -- he's a natural harmony singer, and is able to fit his voice into pre-existing groups of other singers very easily, and make it sound natural). Crosby introduced the pair to Dickson, who had a brainwave. These were folkies, but they didn't really sing like folkies -- they'd grown up on rock and roll, and they were all listening to the Beatles now. There was a gap in the market, between the Beatles and Peter, Paul, and Mary, for something with harmonies, a soft sound, and a social conscience, but a rock and roll beat. Something that was intelligent, but still fun, and which could appeal to the screaming teenage girls and to the college kids who were listening to Dylan. In Crosby, McGuinn, and Clark, Dickson thought he had found the people who could do just that. The group named themselves The Jet Set -- a name thought up by McGuinn, who loved flying and everything about the air, and which they also thought gave them a certain sophistication -- and their first demo recording, with all three of them on twelve-string guitars, shows the direction they were going in. "The Only Girl I Adore", written by McGuinn and Clark, has what I can only assume is the group trying for Liverpool accents and failing miserably, and call and response and "yeah yeah" vocals that are clearly meant to evoke the Beatles. It actually does a remarkably good job of evoking some of Paul McCartney's melodic style -- but the rhythm guitar is pure Don Everly: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "The Only Girl I Adore"] The Jet Set jettisoned their folk instruments for good after watching A Hard Day's Night -- Roger McGuinn traded in his banjo and got an electric twelve-string Rickenbacker just like the one that George Harrison played, and they went all-in on the British Invasion sound, copying the Beatles but also the Searchers, whose jangly sound was perfect for the Rickenbacker, and who had the same kind of solid harmony sound the Jet Set were going for. Of course, if you're going to try to sound like the Beatles and the Searchers, you need a drummer, and McGuinn and Crosby were both acquainted with a young man who had been born Michael Dick, but who had understandably changed his name to Michael Clarke. He was only eighteen, and wasn't a particularly good drummer, but he did have one huge advantage, which is that he looked exactly like Brian Jones. So the Jet Set now had a full lineup -- Roger McGuinn on lead guitar, Gene Clark on rhythm guitar, David Crosby was learning bass, and Michael Clarke on drums. But that wasn't the lineup on their first recordings. Crosby was finding it difficult to learn the bass, and Michael Clarke wasn't yet very proficient on drums, so for what became their first record Dickson decided to bring in a professional rhythm section, hiring two of the Wrecking Crew, bass player Ray Pohlman and drummer Earl Palmer, to back the three singers, with McGuinn and Gene Clark on guitars: [Excerpt: The Beefeaters, "Please Let Me Love You"] That was put out on a one-single deal with Elektra Records, and Jim Dickson made the deal under the condition that it couldn't be released under the group's real name -- he wanted to test what kind of potential they had without spoiling their reputation. So instead of being put out as by the Jet Set, it was put out as by the Beefeaters -- the kind of fake British name that a lot of American bands were using at the time, to try and make themselves seem like they might be British. The record did nothing, but nobody was expecting it to do much, so they weren't particularly bothered. And anyway, there was another problem to deal with. David Crosby had been finding it difficult to play bass and sing -- this was one reason that he only sang, and didn't play, on the Beefeaters single. His bass playing was wooden and rigid, and he wasn't getting better. So it was decided that Crosby would just sing, and not play anything at all. As a result, the group needed a new bass player, and Dickson knew someone who he thought would fit the bill, despite him not being a bass player. Chris Hillman had become a professional musician in his teens, playing mandolin in a bluegrass group called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, who made one album of bluegrass standards for sale through supermarkets: [Excerpt: The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, "Shady Grove"] Hillman had moved on to a group called the Golden State Boys, which featured two brothers, Vern and Rex Gosdin. The Golden State Boys had been signed to a management contract by Dickson, who had renamed the group the Hillmen after their mandolin player -- Hillman was very much in the background in the group, and Dickson believed that he would be given a little more confidence if he was pushed to the front. The Hillmen had recorded one album, which wasn't released until many years later, and which had featured Hillman singing lead on the Bob Dylan song "When the Ship Comes In": [Excerpt: The Hillmen, "When the Ship Comes In"] Hillman had gone on from there to join a bluegrass group managed by Randy Sparks, the same person who was in charge of the New Christy Minstrels, and who specialised in putting out ultra-commercialised versions of roots music for pop audiences. But Dickson knew that Hillman didn't like playing with that group, and would be interested in doing something very different, so even though Hillman didn't play bass, Dickson invited him to join the group. There was almost another lineup change at this point, as well. McGuinn and Gene Clark were getting sick of David Crosby's attitude -- Crosby was the most technically knowledgeable musician in the group, but was at this point not much of a songwriter. He was not at all shy about pointing out what he considered flaws in the songs that McGuinn and Clark were writing, but he wasn't producing anything better himself. Eventually McGuinn and Clark decided to kick Crosby out of the group altogether, but they reconsidered when Dickson told them that if Crosby went he was going too. As far as Dickson was concerned, the group needed Crosby's vocals, and that was an end of the matter. Crosby was back in the group, and all was forgotten. But there was another problem related to Crosby, as the Jet Set found out when they played their first gig, an unannounced spot at the Troubadour. The group had perfected their image, with their Beatles suits and pose of studied cool, but Crosby had never performed without an instrument before. He spent the gig prancing around the stage, trying to act like a rock star, wiggling his bottom in what he thought was a suggestive manner. It wasn't, and the audience found it hilarious. Crosby, who took himself very seriously at this point in time, felt humiliated, and decided that he needed to get an instrument to play. Obviously he couldn't go back to playing bass, so he did the only thing that seemed possible -- he started undermining Gene Clark's confidence as a player, telling him he was playing behind the beat. Clark -- who was actually a perfectly reasonable rhythm player -- was non-confrontational by nature and believed Crosby's criticisms. Soon he *was* playing behind the beat, because his confidence had been shaken. Crosby took over the rhythm guitar role, and from that point on it would be Gene Clark, not David Crosby, who would have to go on stage without an instrument. The Jet Set were still not getting very many gigs, but they were constantly in the studio, working on material. The most notable song they recorded in this period is "You Showed Me", a song written by Gene Clark and McGuinn, which would not see release at the time but which would later become a hit for both the Turtles and the Lightning Seeds: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "You Showed Me"] Clark in particular was flourishing as a songwriter, and becoming a genuine talent. But Jim Dickson thought that the song that had the best chance of being the Jet Set's breakout hit wasn't one that they were writing themselves, but one that he'd heard Bob Dylan perform in concert, but which Dylan had not yet released himself. In 1964, Dylan was writing far more material than he could reasonably record, even given the fact that his albums at this point often took little more time to record than to listen to. One song he'd written but not yet put out on an album was "Mr. Tambourine Man". Dylan had written the song in April 1964, and started performing it live as early as May, when he was on a UK tour that would later be memorialised in D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back. That performance was later released in 2014 for copyright extension purposes on vinyl, in a limited run of a hundred copies. I *believe* this recording is from that: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live Royal Festival Hall 1964)"] Jim Dickson remembered the song after seeing Dylan perform it live, and started pushing Witmark Music, Dylan's publishers, to send him a demo of the song. Dylan had recorded several demos, and the one that Witmark sent over was a version that was recorded with Ramblin' Jack Elliot singing harmony, recorded for Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, but left off the album as Elliot had been off key at points: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (from Bootleg Series vol 7)] There have been all sorts of hypotheses about what "Mr. Tambourine Man" is really about. Robert Shelton, for example, suspects the song is inspired by Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater. de Quincey uses a term for opium, "the dark idol", which is supposedly a translation of the Latin phrase "mater tenebrarum", which actually means "mother of darkness" (or mother of death or mother of gloom). Shelton believes that Dylan probably liked the sound of "mater tenebrarum" and turned it into "Mister Tambourine Man". Others have tried to find links to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or claimed that Mr. Tambourine Man is actually Jesus. Dylan, on the other hand, had a much more prosaic explanation -- that Mr. Tambourine Man was a friend of his named Bruce Langhorne, who was prominent in the Greenwich Village folk scene. As well as being a guitarist, Langhorne was also a percussionist, and played a large Turkish frame drum, several feet in diameter, which looked and sounded quite like a massively oversized tambourine. Dylan got that image in his head and wrote a song about it. Sometimes a tambourine is just a tambourine. (Also, in a neat little coincidence, Dylan has acknowledged that he took the phrase “jingle jangle” from a routine by Jim Dickson's old client, Lord Buckley.) Dickson was convinced that "Mr. Tambourine Man" would be a massive hit, but the group didn't like it. Gene Clark, who was at this point the group's only lead singer, didn't think it fit his voice or had anything in common with the songs he was writing. Roger McGuinn was nervous about doing a Dylan song, because he'd played at the same Greenwich Village clubs as Dylan when both were starting out -- he had felt a rivalry with Dylan then, and wasn't entirely comfortable with inviting comparisons with someone who had grown so much as an artist while McGuinn was still very much at the beginning of his career. And David Crosby simply didn't think that such a long, wordy, song had a chance of being a hit. So Dickson started to manipulate the group. First, since Clark didn't like singing the song, he gave the lead to McGuinn. The song now had one champion in the band, and McGuinn was also a good choice as he had a hypothesis that there was a space for a vocal sound that split the difference between John Lennon and Bob Dylan, and was trying to make himself sound like that -- not realising that Lennon himself was busily working on making his voice more Dylanesque at the same time. But that still wasn't enough -- even after Dickson worked with the group to cut the song down so it was only two choruses and one verse, and so came in under two minutes, rather than the five minutes that Dylan's original version lasted, Crosby in particular was still agitating that the group should just drop the song. So Dickson decided to bring in Dylan himself. Dickson was acquainted with Dylan, and told him that he was managing a Beatles-style group who were doing one of Dylan's songs, and invited him to come along to a rehearsal. Dylan came, partly out of politeness, but also because Dylan was as aware as anyone of the commercial realities of the music business. Dylan was making most of his money at this point as a songwriter, from having other people perform his songs, and he was well aware that the Beatles had changed what hit records sounded like. If the kids were listening to beat groups instead of to Peter, Paul, and Mary, then Dylan's continued commercial success relied on him getting beat groups to perform his songs. So he agreed to come and hear Jim Dickson's beat group, and see what he thought of what they were doing with his song. Of course, once the group realised that Dylan was going to be coming to listen to them, they decided that they had better actually work on their arrangement of the song. They came up with something that featured McGuinn's Searchers-style twelve-string playing, the group's trademark harmonies, and a rather incongruous-sounding marching beat: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "Mr. Tambourine Man (early version)"] Dylan heard their performance, and was impressed, telling them "You can DANCE to it!" Dylan went on a charm offensive with the group, winning all of them round except Crosby -- but even Crosby stopped arguing the point, realising he'd lost. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was now a regular part of their repertoire. But they still didn't have a record deal, until one came from an unexpected direction. The group were playing their demos to a local promoter, Benny Shapiro, when Shapiro's teenage daughter came in to the room, excited because the music sounded so much like the Beatles. Shapiro later joked about this to the great jazz trumpet player Miles Davis, and Davis told his record label about this new group, and suddenly they were being signed to Columbia Records. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was going to be their first single, but before that they had to do something about the group's name, as Columbia pointed out that there was already a British group called the Jet Set. The group discussed this over Thanksgiving turkey, and the fact that they were eating a bird reminded Gene Clark of a song by the group's friend Dino Valenti, "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] Clark suggested "The Birdses", but the group agreed it wasn't quite right -- though McGuinn, who was obsessed with aviation, did like the idea of a name that was associated with flight. Dickson's business partner Eddie Tickner suggested that they just call themselves "The Birds", but the group saw a problem with that, too -- "bird" being English slang for "girl", they worried that if they called themselves that people might think they were gay. So how about messing with the vowels, the same way the Beatles had changed the spelling of their name? They thought about Burds with a "u" and Berds with an "e", before McGuinn hit on Byrds with a y, which appealed to him because of Admiral Byrd, an explorer and pioneering aviator. They all agreed that the name was perfect -- it began with a "b", just like Beatles and Beach Boys, it was a pun like the Beatles, and it signified flight, which was important to McGuinn. As the group entered 1965, another major event happened in McGuinn's life -- the one that would lead to him changing his name. A while earlier, McGuinn had met a friend in Greenwich Village and had offered him a joint. The friend had refused, saying that he had something better than dope. McGuinn was intrigued to try this "something better" and went along with his friend to what turned out to be a religious meeting, of the new religious movement Subud, a group which believes, among other things, that there are seven levels of existence from gross matter to pure spirit, and which often encourages members to change their names. McGuinn was someone who was very much looking for meaning in his life -- around this time he also became a devotee of the self-help writer Norman Vincent Peale thanks to his mother sending him a copy of Peale's book on positive thinking -- and so he agreed to give the organisation a go. Subud involves a form of meditation called the laithan, and on his third attempt at doing this meditation, McGuinn had experienced what he believed was contact with God -- an intense hallucinatory experience which changed his life forever. McGuinn was initiated into Subud ten days before going into the studio to record "Mr. Tambourine Man", and according to his self-description, whatever Bob Dylan thought the song was about, he was singing to God when he sang it -- in earlier interviews he said he was singing to Allah, but now he's a born-again Christian he tends to use "God". The group had been assigned by CBS to Terry Melcher, mostly because he was the only staff producer they had on the West Coast who had any idea at all about rock and roll music, and Melcher immediately started to mould the group into his idea of what a pop group should be. For their first single, Melcher decided that he wasn't going to use the group, other than McGuinn, for anything other than vocals. Michael Clarke in particular was still a very shaky drummer (and would never be the best on his instrument) while Hillman and Crosby were adequate but not anything special on bass and guitar. Melcher knew that the group's sound depended on McGuinn's electric twelve-string sound, so he kept that, but other than that the Byrds' only contribution to the A-side was McGuinn, Crosby, and Clark on vocals. Everything else was supplied by members of the Wrecking Crew -- Jerry Cole on guitar, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Hal Blaine on drums: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Indeed, not everyone who performed at the session is even clearly audible on the recording. Both Gene Clark and Leon Russell were actually mixed out by Melcher -- both of them are audible, Clark more than Russell, but only because of leakage onto other people's microphones. The final arrangement was a mix of influences. McGuinn's twelve-string sound was clearly inspired by the Searchers, and the part he's playing is allegedly influenced by Bach, though I've never seen any noticeable resemblance to anything Bach ever wrote. The overall sound was an attempt to sound like the Beatles, while Melcher always said that the arrangement and feel of the track was inspired by "Don't Worry Baby" by the Beach Boys. This is particularly noticeable in the bass part -- compare the part on the Beach Boys record: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby (instrumental mix with backing vocals)"] to the tag on the Byrds record: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Five days before the Byrds recorded their single, Bob Dylan had finally recorded his own version of the song, with the tambourine man himself, Bruce Langhorne, playing guitar, and it was released three weeks before the Byrds' version, as an album track on Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Dylan's album would become one of the most important of his career, as we'll discuss in a couple of weeks, when we next look at Dylan. But it also provided an additional publicity boost for the Byrds, and as a result their record quickly went to number one in both the UK and America, becoming the first record of a Dylan song to go to number one on any chart. Dylan's place in the new pop order was now secured; the Byrds had shown that American artists could compete with the British Invasion on its own terms -- that the new wave of guitar bands still had a place for Americans; and folk-rock was soon identified as the next big commercial trend. And over the next few weeks we'll see how all those things played out throughout the mid sixties.

Nick Waterhouse is a singer, songwriter and guitarist based in Los Angeles. Since 2010 he's recorded and produced several records, using largely vintage and analog equipment. In this episode Nick tells what embarrassing habits he's picked up during pandemic and how he's traded his home sickness for road sickness. Joe and Nick share stories about their experience recording at London's "Toe Rag" studio and Nick hips us to Bruce Langhorne, the alleged "Tamborine Man" and early electrifier of folk music. We hear a new tune from Nicks forthcoming record Promenade Blue. Enjoy! Music by Nick Waterhouse, Palm Fronds and Joe Plummer. Episode sponsored by Izotope. Visit Izotope.com

Episode 65 Alec and Derek continue riding this Acid Western trail to talk about The Hired Hand (1971). Banking on the wild success of Easy Rider in 1969 Universal offered Peter Fonda full artistic control to create his directorial debut. Reversing the previous films youthful lust for the open road, Fonda delivered an elegiac western chamber-drama meditating on the longing to return home. Showcasing the work of legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond in his debut feature, the innovative editing from Frank Mazzola (Performance), the music of multi-instrumentalist Bruce Langhorne (the inspiration for Dylan’s Tambourine Man) not to mention show-stopping support from Warren Oates and a particularly unforgettable performance from Verna Bloom. The Hired Hand is in itself a return home to the legendary westerns Peter’s father Henry made with John Ford, as well as a worthy successor, though one that brings with it a new and at times feminist perspective on the genre.

This week, we have a very good friend of MFP, Mr. Brian Ripps back on the show! Tune in to hear Brian perform his original song and to hear DJ Dave's picks of the week! Featuring Songs by Chuck Berry, Fela Kuti, The Doors, Porches, Herman's Hermit, Angelo Badalamenti with Grady Tate, and Bruce Langhorne! SUBSCRIBE: iTunes  TWITTER: @MusicFirstPcast FACEBOOK: Music First Podcast EMAIL: MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com

Matthew Bannister on Robert Pirsig, author of the best selling book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Shobha Nehru, the Hungarian woman who married into India's most powerful political dynasty - and used her position to confront Prime Minister Indira Ghandi about human rights abuses. Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer who worked closely with Martin Scorsese. Leo Baxendale, the cartoonist and publisher who created the Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx. And Bruce Langhorne, the guitarist on some of Bob Dylan's best known songs. Producer: Neil George.

On this week's episode we discuss the cinematographer behind the Goodfellas' tracking shot, THE Mr. Tambourine Man, a man who single handedly reinvented the electric guitar and the last living person to be (verified) born in the 1800s.

Mientras parece que estamos a merced de dos payasos que están a punto de activar sus respectivos Dispositivos del Fin del Mundo, solo para mostrar al otro que tiene las manos más grandes y la mente más pequeña, en Soleado seguimos con lo de los temarracos del demonio. Hay dos de la mano del tristemente fallecido Bruce Langhorne, también conocido como Mr. Tambourine Man, y muchos más de Duke Bird Jnr, Laetutua Sadier, Ondatrópica, Louis Coles, Tenderlonious, Izo Fitzroy, Jill Peacock y Winter Family.

New (and new to me) music from Lee Fields and the Expressions, The Comsat Angels, V, CiRCA69, Floating Points, Marty Segal, Ian William Craig, Eberhard Weber, Bruce Langhorne, The Stratfords, Salyu x salyu, Ray Cathode, Joe Harriott with the Amancio D'Silva Quartet, Factory Floor, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Paul Jebanasam, Egyptian Lover, Marissa Nadler, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani.

Episode 38. Our roundup of what's currently spinning at DFC Towers includes a trip to THE BARN from Lunaris, synth Sci-Fi score SYNCHRONICITY, chilling horror about A BOY and the cursed emanations of THE VVITCH. SJ unearths a killer biker soundtrack comp and as usual there's our MAIN THEME and HERE BE MONSTER selections. SJ takes also takes us through the unreleased soundtrack world of composer BRUCE LANGHORNE. We're joined for a special crossover episode by RAY HARKINS from the 100 WORDS OR LESS podcast, as we discuss the DIY/Punk/Hardcore roots of many of the current independent soundtrack labels, our shared passions for film and soundtracks and Ray takes the Vinyl Score challenge. Created by Tony Giles & Scott Johannsson Recorded at Solatron Studios, Birmingham UK Theme Music by Scott Johannsson DFC Logo by Dan Cullinan January 30th 2016

downloadon iTunesThis episode on Talking bout Practice : Billy Ray Stupendous and I watch a gross movie while recording th show; I say "@ any rate" @ least 100 times; Billy says "in that regard" perhaps 6 or 7 times; teenage memories are unearthed; rich people and poor people are vilified or speculated upon; people who use their phones @ th movies are sentenced to hard labour; if you've got bionic ears you can hear wine being poured and bacon being fried; we disagree on 2 movies and agree on @ least 3; I assume (wrongly) that McLintock! preceded The Searchers; you are invited to e-mail me if you want to watch a retarded Canadian comedy w/ a heart of gold; and we begin to formulate th answer to a question you have already answered in yr head.Table of contents:00:00  "Leaning" performed by Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish01:38  "If I seem distracted ..." / Andrzej Żuławski 03:51  Recap: Billy's cinema therapy05:03  "What's your favorite way to experience a film?"07:11  "You hate rich people"10:11  Disgusting thing on screen11:33  "They don't need that money"13:49  Metropolitan (Whit Stillman 1990)20:42  Web 1.0 / flickyoucrew23:24  Downloading a canon / record stores / nostalgia31:53  McLintock! (Andrew V. McLaglen 1963) vs The Searchers (John Ford 1956)38:33  Cinema as communal experience / idiots on their phones / Shotgun Cinema (New Orleans)49:16  Crime Wave (John Paizs 1985)57:13  How many e-mail addresses we've got58:40  "What makes a film good?"1:03:16  Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn 2014)1:05:21  Unfamiliar world, failed film? / The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang 2005) 1:11:04  Loveable films nobody has seen 1:14:56  "Opening" performed by Bruce Langhorne