Podcasts about Charlie Christian

Eddie Durham provenía de la próspera escena de Kansas City: sus amigos Eddie Tompkins y Paul Webster, ambos de esa ciudad, lo habían recomendado a su líder. Cuando estaba con la banda de Bennie Moten, alrededor de 1930, Durham había presentado la guitarra resonadora National. Esto le daba a su sonido una peculiar calidad fuerte, aguda y metálica, a medio camino entre el banjo y la guitarra eléctrica del futuro. Con José Manuel Corrales.

This is episode 20 of Ben's radio show Red White Blues: an Anthology of America's Music (aired 14 November 2024 on Radio Buena Vida). We're able to share it because the music played is all non-commercial V-Discs taken from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/V-discs1-991943-1944. On this episode, we look at the history of V-Discs and the rise of vinyl. In August of 1942, the American Federation of Musicians declared a strike: an all-out ban on members going into the studio and recording music. The strike was called to force the big three record companies to increase the royalty rate on recorded music paid to musicians, which had become a substantial part of music workers' business in an American culture structured around the production of consumer goods. The strike would last for two years, in which time no commercial records were made. But the US military and the big labels joined forces to create V-Discs (or Victory Discs)—non-commercial records for the enjoyment of the American soldiers and staff stationed abroad. Records up to this point were made of a rationed material sorely needed in the production of armaments: shellac. With the US having an abundance of oil, the petroleum-based vinyl record came to prominence and it's been that way ever since. Oil-based plastic didn't just shape music manufacture in its own image, though—it shaped American consumerism, which undergirds the world as we know it through mass production and mass communication, the end result of which is masses. It's us. Tracks played (with V-Disc catalog numbers in brackets): 1. “Ain't Misbehaving & Two Sleepy People”, Fats Waller [32] 2. “There's Gonna Be A Hot Time In The Town Of Berlin”, Frank Sinatra [72]—with introduction from side A (“I Only Have Eyes For You”) 3. “Blues in Berlin”, Josh White [44] 4. “Pearl Harbor Blues”, Dr Clayton [82] 5. “Ring Dem Bells”, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra [37] 6. “Redman Blues”, Don Redman Orchestra [104] 7. “A Smooth One”, Benny Goodman, Cootie Williams, Charlie Christian et. al. [187] 8. “Jelly Jelly”, Earl Hines and His Orchestra [308] If you like the show, you can listen to every episode right here on SoundCloud or by following this link: https://soundcloud.com/spaghettiforbrains/sets/red-white-blues

It's the 140th episode of the Truth About Vintage Amps podcast, where amp tech Skip Simmons eventually fields your questions on all-things-tube amps!  As always, use all advice at your own risk. Want to be a part of our show? Just email us a question or voice memo to podcast@fretboardjournal.com. Some of the topics discussed this week:  2:35 What's on Skip's Bench: A modified ES-150 Charlie Christian amp with a non-field coil speaker 4:22 Smilin' Skip's: Stuff for Sale 5:15 Loma Rica's Aztec Recording Studio; the Ralph Shine Blues Band; Skip's new guitar; Sylvia Massy (Sylvia's shop); Weed, California; the Fretboard Summit 2025 (register here) 18:01 Our sponsors (and baby goats): Grez Guitars; Emerald City Guitars and Amplified Parts (Jensen speakers are currently on sale!) 23:42: Alamo and other budget amplifiers; the COVID gear boost has deflated 25:35 Amp bargains (look for two transformers); a black panel Super Reverb; Silvertone Twin-Twelve and optocouplers 28:53 The Alembic Pre-Amp in a pedal (or two): Frog Pedals (link); Sushi Box FX (link); Mexican Pizza with Boboli pizza crust; starved plate loads 35:41 PSA: You can buy WD-40 by the gallon 38:22 Should I put the original transformer back in my 1966 Fender Princeton? 44:07 Preferred replacement 12AT7 reverb driver tubes 47:26 Two-prong shock in the studio 50:35 A converted Stromberg-Carlson; speaker-driven effects channel? Rudy Van Gelder; the usable range of a bright cap 57:55 A Plush 3000G tubes and tremolo with a mystery rectifier tube 1:03:08 What's with the lettering on my 1950s Rauland Lyric transformer 1:06:47 Putting a JBL in an Ampeg Rocket 2; a Traynor Studio Mate Hosted by amp tech Skip Simmons and co-hosted/produced by Jason Verlinde of the Fretboard Journal.  Don't forget, we have a Patreon page. Join us to get show updates and get to the front of the question line. 

IKE QUEBEC “QUINTET” – New York, July 18, 1944Blue HarlemIke Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Milt Hinton (b) J.C. Heard (d) “SWINGTET” – New York, September 25, 1944If I had you, Mads About YouJonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Ike Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Oscar Pettiford (b) J.C. Heard (d) JOHN HARDEE “SEXTET” – New York, February 28, 1946Hard tack, If I had you, Mad about youJohn Hardee (ts) Sammy Benskin (p) Tiny Grimes (g) John Simmons (b) Sidney Catlett (d)“SWINGTETT” – New York, May 31, 1946River edge rock,C jam blues, Flying home, Tiny's boogie woogieTrummy Young (tb) John Hardee (ts) Marlowe Morris (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Jimmy Butts (b) Eddie Nicholson (d) EDMOND HALL “CELESTE QUARTET” – New York, February 5, 1941Edmond Hall blues, Celestial expressEdmond Hall (cl) Meade Lux Lewis (celeste) Charlie Christian (g) Israel Crosby (b) “ALL STAR QUINTET” – New York, January 25, 1944Rumpin' in '44, Seein' RedEdmond Hall (cl) Red Norvo (vib) Teddy Wilson (p) Carl Kress (g) Johnny Williams (b) y su Swingtet : Jonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Continue reading Puro Jazz 15 de octubre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

IKE QUEBEC “QUINTET” – New York, July 18, 1944Blue HarlemIke Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Milt Hinton (b) J.C. Heard (d) “SWINGTET” – New York, September 25, 1944If I had you, Mads About YouJonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Ike Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Oscar Pettiford (b) J.C. Heard (d) JOHN HARDEE “SEXTET” – New York, February 28, 1946Hard tack, If I had you, Mad about youJohn Hardee (ts) Sammy Benskin (p) Tiny Grimes (g) John Simmons (b) Sidney Catlett (d)“SWINGTETT” – New York, May 31, 1946River edge rock,C jam blues, Flying home, Tiny's boogie woogieTrummy Young (tb) John Hardee (ts) Marlowe Morris (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Jimmy Butts (b) Eddie Nicholson (d) EDMOND HALL “CELESTE QUARTET” – New York, February 5, 1941Edmond Hall blues, Celestial expressEdmond Hall (cl) Meade Lux Lewis (celeste) Charlie Christian (g) Israel Crosby (b) “ALL STAR QUINTET” – New York, January 25, 1944Rumpin' in '44, Seein' RedEdmond Hall (cl) Red Norvo (vib) Teddy Wilson (p) Carl Kress (g) Johnny Williams (b) y su Swingtet : Jonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Continue reading Puro Jazz 15 de octubre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

Der beste Gitarrist der Welt ist: Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Lita Ford, Andres Segovia, John Frusciante, Chuck Berry, Paco de Lucia, George Harrison, Bonnie Raitt, Catharina Valente, Charlie Christian, John McLaughlin, Tom Morello, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Joan Jett, Nile Rodgers, Nancy Wilson, Jimmy Page, Malcolm Young, Brad Paisley, Mark Knopfler…und alle anderen, die eure Herzen höher schlagen lassen! Henning und Till erzählen was über ihre Helden der Saitenzunft! Die Songs der Sendung: 1) Something / The Beatles2) Know your enemy / Rage Against The Machine3) Up to my neck in you / AC/DC4) Give it away / The Red Hot Chili Peppers5) I´m coming out / Diana Ross 6) Where´s life? / Keziah Jones7) Close my eyes / Lita Ford8) Pinball Wizard / Pete Townshend Links zur Sendung: Guitar heroes on George Harrison:https://www.guitarworld.com/features/george-harrison-greatest-guitar-moments Jimi Hendrix in der Dick Cavett–Show:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJxiCZwP_GI Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s Show Notes! Wonderful World: Explore London from above, HERE. Bon Appetit: Check out 5 INCREDIBLE street food finds in London! Click HERE! Sounds Good: Happy belated birthday to the legendary jazz & swing guitar player, Charlie Christian! Listen to “Swing To Bop” HERE!

Today's show features music performed by Honeyboy Edwards and Charlie Christian

The 2024 National Recording Registry “Clarinet Marmalade” – Lt. James Reese Europe's 369th U.S. Infantry Band (1919) “Kauhavan Polkka” – Viola Turpeinen and John Rosendahl (1928) Wisconsin Folksong Collection (1937-1946) “Rose Room” – Benny Goodman Sextet with Charlie Christian (1939) “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – Gene Autry (1949) “Tennessee Waltz” – Patti Page (1950) “Rocket ‘88'” – Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (1951)  “Catch a Falling Star” / ”Magic Moments” – Perry Como (1957) “Chances Are” – Johnny Mathis (1957)  “The Sidewinder” – Lee Morgan (1964) “Surrealistic Pillow” – Jefferson Airplane (1967) “Ain't No Sunshine” – Bill Withers (1971) “This is a Recording” – Lily Tomlin (1971) “J.D. Crowe & the New South” – J.D. Crowe & the New South (1975) “Arrival” – ABBA (1976) “El Cantante” – Héctor Lavoe (1978) “The Cars” – The Cars (1978)  “Parallel Lines” – Blondie (1978) “La-Di-Da-Di” – Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick (MC Ricky D) (1985) “Don't Worry, Be Happy” – Bobby McFerrin (1988) “Amor Eterno” – Juan Gabriel (1990) “Pieces of Africa” – Kronos Quartet (1992) “Dookie” – Green Day (1994) “Ready to Die” – The Notorious B.I.G. (1994) “Wide Open Spaces” – The Chicks (1998) Find out more at https://registry-a-podcast.pinecast.co

The confluence of cultures in Oklahoma, from Blacks who arrived as enslaved persons from the southeastern United States to European immigrants, created the ideal environment for the musical form known as Jazz to take root. Jazz performers such as Charlie Christian, the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, and the Ernie Fields Orchestra made their mark on the genre starting out in small clubs located in Tulsa's Greenwood and Oklahoma City's Deep Deuce districts and later traveling to New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. In this episode, Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn discuss Oklahoma's early jazz scene and interview Carmen Fields, author of “Going Back to T-Town: The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band.” Ms. Fields discusses her father's legacy, the musicians in the orchestra, his hits, and her brother, Ernie Fields, Jr.

Un jeu alerte, rapide et brillant. Des notes bien détachées et un style à cheval entre le swing, le be-bop et le rock : c'est Mary Osborne, guitariste oubliée aujourd'hui, mais qui croisa Charlie Christian et accompagna Billie Holiday. Une musicienne, parfois chanteuse, qui maitrisait l'art du swing à la perfection.

In this episode of the Learn Jazz Standards Podcast, Brent explores the question of who the greatest jazz guitarist is. Acknowledging the subjectivity of such a determination, Brent highlights influential figures like Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, and many other jazz guitar legends. Emphasizing the importance of studying various players regardless of one's instrument, Brent encourages listeners to delve into the unique sounds and styles of these guitarists to enhance their own musicality. The episode concludes with a reminder that knowledge without action and quality practice is not truly beneficial.Important Links:Free Guide to learning standards by ear: Learn Jazz Standards the Smart WayLJS Inner Circle MembershipListen to the Learn Jazz Standards PodcastLearn Jazz Standards Inner Circle: Get 50% off your first month! Want to get your jazz question answered on the podcast? Click here.

The electric guitar is a beautiful, maddening instrument, and man does it sound good in the right hands. On this episode, Kirk takes a deep dive into solos by guitar legends Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, Jimi Hendrix, and Larry Carlton.FEATURED/DISCUSSED:"Seven Come Eleven" by Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman, recorded by the Benny Goodman Sextet in 1939"Fried Pies" by Wes Montgomery from Boss Guitar, 1963"Hey Joe" by Billy Roberts recorded by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on Are You Experienced?, 1967Larry Carlton's solo on "Kid Charlemagne" by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (AKA Steely Dan) from The Royal Scam, 1976OUTRO SOLOIST: Kirk HamiltonKirk returns for another outro guitar solo, this time with a few new licks under his belt.-----LINKS-----SUPPORT STRONG SONGSPaypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STOREstore.strongsongspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIA@StrongSongs | @Kirkhamilton | IG: @Kirk_HamiltonNEWSLETTERhttps://kirkhamilton.substack.com/subscribeJOIN THE DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmOUTRO SOLO PLAY-A-LONG:https://soundcloud.com/kirkhamilton/strong-songs-outro-music-no-soloSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music----------------NOVEMBER 2023 WHOLE-NOTE PATRONSCesarCorpus FriskyBen BarronCatherine WarnerDamon WhiteKaya WoodallDan AustinJay SwartzMiriam JoySEAN D WINNIERushDaniel Hannon-BarryChristopher MillerJamie WhiteChristopher McConnellDavid MascettiJoe LaskaKen HirshJezMelanie AndrichJenness GardnerDave SharpeSami SamhuriJeremy DawsonAccessViolationAndre BremerDave FloreyNOVEMBER 2023 HALF-NOTE PATRONSEthan LaserBrian John PeterChris RemoMatt SchoenthalAaron WilsonDent EarlCarlos LernerMisty HaisfieldAbraham BenrubiChristopher BrunoChris KotarbaCallum WebbLynda MacNeilDick MorganBen SteinSusan GreenSean MurphyJake YumatillaAlan BroughRandal VegterGo Birds!Whit SidenerRobert Granatdave malloyNick GallowayHeather Johnsonjohn halpinPeter HardingDavidMeghan O'LearyJohn BaumanDax and Dane HuddlestonMartín SalíasStu BakerSteve MartinoDr Arthur A GrayCarolinaGary PierceMatt BaxterLuigi BocciaE Margaret WartonCharles McGeeCatherine ClauseEthan BaumanKenIsWearingAHatJordan BlockAaron WadeJeff UlmJamieDeebsPortland Eye CareCarrie SchneiderRichard SneddonDoreen CarlsonDavid McDarbyWendy GilchristElliot RosenLisa TurnerPaul WayperBruno GaetaKenneth JungAdam StofskyZak RemerRishi SahayJason ReitmanAilie FraserRob TsukNATALIE MISTILISJosh SingerAmy Lynn ThornsenAdam WKelli BrockingtonVictoria YuBrad Clarkmino caposselaSteve PaquinEmma SklarBernard KhooRobert HeuerMatthew GoldenDavid NoahGeraldine ButlerMadeleine MaderJason PrattAbbie BergDoug BelewDermot CrowleyAchint SrivastavaRyan RairighMichael BermanOlivia BishopLinda DuffyBonnie PrinsenLiz SegerEoin de BurcaKevin PotterM Shane BordersDallas HockleyJason GerryNathan GouwensLauren ReayEric PrestemonDamian BradyAngela LivingstoneSarah SulanDiane HughesMichael CasnerLowell MeyerStephen TsoneffJoshua HillWenGeoff GoldenRob FPascal RuegerRandy SouzaClare HolbertonDiane TurnerTom ColemanMark PerryDhu WikMelEric HelmJonathan DanielsMichael FlahertyJarrod SchindlerCaro Fieldmichael bochnerNaomi WatsonDavid CushmanAlexanderChris KGavin DoigSam FennTanner MortonAJ SchusterJennifer BushDavid StroudAmanda FurlottiAndrew BakerAndrew FairL.B. MorseBill ThorntonBrian AmoebasBrett DouvilleJeffrey OlsonMatt BetzelNate from KalamazooMelanie StiversRichard TollerAlexander PolsonEarl LozadaJustin McElroyArjun SharmaJames JohnsonKevin MorrellColin Hodo

Tonight's show: Eubie Blake, Charlie Christian, Glenn Miller, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Louise Tobin with Peanuts Hucko, Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Claude Bolling, Allen Toussaint, Dianne Reeves, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

Born in New Orleans in 1899, Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson was one of America's great blues and jazz artists, touring with Bessie Smith, recording with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, with Charlie Christian and Eddie Lang, with stride piano giant James P. Johnson and so many more.He was a guitar pioneer. In fact, blues historian Gérard Herzhaft believes Johnson was "undeniably the creator of the guitar solo played note by note with a pick, which has become the standard in jazz, blues, country and rock.”He started that style as early as 1927 with his solo on "6/88 Glide" for Okeh Records.More Chops Than ThatBut while his guitar innovations reached both Delta blues and urban players who adapted and developed them into the modern electric blues style, Johnson also was known in the 1920s as a sophisticated and urbane singer and composer. In fact, "of the 40 ads for his records that appeared in The Chicago Defender between 1926 and 1931,” music historian Elijah Wald notes, “not one even mentioned that he played guitar."But when record sales plunged in the Depression, Johnson's output dwindled and he worked for a while at a Cleveland radio station, among other jobs, just to make ends meet. Things started looking up again in 1937 when he went to Chicago to begin recording for Decca. Two years later he joined Lester Melrose's roster at the new Bluebird Records, for which Lonnie recorded 34 tracks over the next five years.The SongA solo hit from one for the last of the Bluebird sessions was Johnson's composition, “He's a Jelly Roll Baker,” recorded Feb. 13, 1942, with Blind John Davis on piano and Andrew Harris on bass.In addition to its scintillating guitar break, the track's lyrics demonstrate Lonnie Johnson's growth as a savvy songwriter. “Jelly Roll Baker” presents a swaggering protagonist who proclaims his love-making prowess with women from all walks of society, from a judge's wife to a hospital nurse.InfluencesLonnie's second career — which included “I Know It's Love” on which he switched to the electric guitar that would be his signature instrument from then on — eventually disappeared under an avalanche of rock 'n' roll in the early ‘50s. Ironically, “Tomorrow Night,” a Johnson hit on King Records, was one of Elvis Presley's earliest pressings for Sam Phillips at the Sun studios. (Presley recorded it in September 1954, though it wasn't released for another dozen year.) Meanwhile, Lonnie Johnson gained acclaim with a new crowd 10 years later during the folk music revival. The Flood learned its version of “Jelly Roll Baker” from Tom Rush's debut Elektra album, released in 1965. Rush, who picked up the tune from fellow folkie Geoff Muldaur, recorded it with Bill Lee on bass and John Sebastian on harmonica.Lonnie's Last YearsJohnson life was cut short when he was hit by a car while walking on a sidewalk in Toronto in March 1969. Seriously injured, he suffered a broken hip and kidney damage. A benefit concert was held on in May 1969, with two dozen acts, including Ian and Sylvia, John Lee Hooker and Hagood Hardy. Never fully recovering from a subsequent stroke, Johnson died 13 months later.Our Take on the TuneAs noted, while this sassy song as written and recorded 80 years ago as a rhythm and blues hit, we owe our version to our folk music heroes of the 1960s.To this day, it's one of those perfect warmup tunes for us, because it provides plenty of stretching-out room for solos by everyone in the house, Danny and Sam, Randy and Jack.More Blues?If you're not ready to end today's blues infusion, you can get a big dose of Floodishness with the Blues Channel on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to tune in and enjoy the jelly roll. 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

This week we're listening to early jazz guitarists who faced individual and societal struggles, even resistance by the jazz world to their chosen instrument. Guitarists Eddie Lang, Lonnie Johnson, Nick Lucas, Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie Christian, and Django Reinhardt will be featured.

Jazz guitarist Dan Wilson. He spent the majority of his youth within the church community, where his musical path began and something he has never left behind.    Traces of his major guitar influences – including Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, Joe Pass, and George Benson to name a few – can be discerned through his playing, but his musical identity has been shaped by everything from gospel and blues to traditional jazz, hip-hop and horn players like Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson.   Dan's career took him on an exploratory journey into foundations laid down by the guitar/organ tradition, eventually leading to an invitation to perform with jazz great Joey DeFranchesco's trio quartet, with which Dan Wilson went on to earn a GRAMMY Award nomination with and for DeFranchesco's Project Freedom album.   Dan Wilson's fourth album as a leader, Things Eternal, He takes stock of the lessons learned from each of those rich sources, ensuring that their legacy lives on through him even as some of them pass on.  . #jazzmusic #gospelmusic #church #bluesmusix #guitar #guitarist #wesmontgomery #joepass #gerogebenson #joeydefranchesco #music #recordingartist 

Jazz guitarist Dan Wilson. He spent the majority of his youth within the church community, where his musical path began and something he has never left behind.    Traces of his major guitar influences – including Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, Joe Pass, and George Benson to name a few – can be discerned through his playing, but his musical identity has been shaped by everything from gospel and blues to traditional jazz, hip-hop and horn players like Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson.   Dan's career took him on an exploratory journey into foundations laid down by the guitar/organ tradition, eventually leading to an invitation to perform with jazz great Joey DeFranchesco's trio quartet, with which Dan Wilson went on to earn a GRAMMY Award nomination with and for DeFranchesco's Project Freedom album.   Dan Wilson's fourth album as a leader, Things Eternal, He takes stock of the lessons learned from each of those rich sources, ensuring that their legacy lives on through him even as some of them pass on.  . #jazzmusic #gospelmusic #church #bluesmusix #guitar #guitarist #wesmontgomery #joepass #gerogebenson #joeydefranchesco #music #recordingartist 

The Benny Goodman Sextet (actually a septet) performed with the big band during the second half of Charlie Christian's tenure with the band in 1940 until he had to leave in the summer of 1941 due to ill health. With Cootie Williams, Georgie Auld, Artie Bernstein and a mix of Count Basie, Kenny Kersey, Milt Raskin and Johnny Guarnieri on piano and Dave Tough, Harry Jaeger and Nick Fatool on drums, the small group had superior jazz talent as well as great arrangements built on the riffs of Christian and his electric guitar. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Good News: Amazing progress in the fight against cancer! Link HERE. The Good Word: One more amazing quote from Jane Austen. Good To Know: Some (un)surprising trivia about American Thanksgiving eating…. Good News: Using litigation to fight against climate change is growing, Link HERE. Wonderful World: Check out a great video from Great Art Explained, […]

Some oddly constructed small groups featured by Goodman on his regular radio broadcasts in 1939. This was the time between when Gene Krupa and his replacement Dave Tough left and Charlie Christian appeared and Goodman was obviously trying different things, including using Leonard Ware and George Rose on electric guitar. Also unique was a duo between Goodman and bass player Artie Bernstein on "Tea For Two." --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

This is the first part of a two-part interview where Bob Holmes of SUSS speaks with Steve Gunn and David Moore about their recent collaboration as well as their work with other artists, including David's Bing & Ruth. They also bring along an amazing playlist of artists, including Hayden Pedigo, Charlie Christian, Frantz Casseus, Willamette and many more.

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

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Eric Demmer  | I'm A Guitar Player  | So Fine  |   |  | Greg Brice  | My Life  | Greg Brice  |  | Charlie Christian  | Down on Teddy's Hill,  Pagin' Dr. Christian  | Charlie Christian at Minton's | Sawmill Roots Orchestra  | Wagon Swing  | Sawmill Roots Orchestra | Tom Harpo Walker feat Dani Wild  | Ride on  | Bruised Heart Blues  |  | Mark Harrison  | Panic Attack  | On The Chicken Sandwich Train | King Biscuit Boys  | In My Time Of Dying  | Organic & Natural  |  | Memphis Slim  | Blue And Lonesome  | Deep South Piano Blues - Rockin The House | Jimmy Yancey  | Yancey Stomp  | Blues and Boogie  |  | Marie Knight  | Beams Of Heaven  | The Gospel Truth Live | Larkin Poe  | Crocodile Rock  | Kindred Spirits (2020) | Jerry Lee Lewis  | I Can Still Hear The Music In The Restroom  | A Whole Lotta... Jerry Lee Lewis (CD3) | Buddy Whittington and Jim Suhler  |  Ain't Got the Scratch  | Texas Scratch  |  | Rebecca Downes  | Terrorise  | The Space Between Us | CHICK WILLIS  | You Got The Devil In You  | Things I Used To Do  | 

The Wanderers made one recording date in 1935 and placed themselves as an excellent territory jazz band . .featuring three members (Marvin Montgomery on banjo, Dick Reinhart on guitar and Bert Dodson on bass) that went to the Light Crust Doughboys later that year. These are their first records and then a selection of Light Crust DB sides featuring them as well as Kenneth Pitts, Cecil Brower, Muryel "Zeke" Campbell on electric guitar (pre-Charlie Christian!) and the great Knocky Parker on piano --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

On this episode I chatted with Executive Director of the Black Liberated Arts Center Anita Arnold about the life of world famous Oklahoma City guitar player Charlie Christian.  Charlie Christian Festival June 1-3 https://charliechristian.org/  Go to: https://www.blacinc.org/ Donate here for Childrens Health Foundation Our Goal $10,000 https://donorbox.org/this-is-oklahoma... Thanks to our sponsors. The Oklahoma Hall of Fame at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum telling Oklahoma's story through its people since 1927. For more information go to www.oklahomahof.com and for daily updates go to https://lnkd.in/g_gsxQM The Chickasaw Nation is economically strong, culturally vibrant and full of energetic people dedicated to the preservation of family, community and heritage. www.chickasaw.net Diffee Ford Lincoln. Third generation Oklahoma business, the Diffee family continues to do business the right way, the family way. Go to www.diffeeford.net for all your new and used car needs and follow them on instagram https://lnkd.in/drq7RMu2 The Choctaw people have a rich history and a bright future. At the Choctaw Cultural Center, you can take part in a story 14,000 years in the making. The Choctaw Cultural Center is more than a museum. It's a living, breathing experience. Visit www.choctawculturalcenter.com to plan your visit.

On this episode I chatted with Executive Director Anita Arnold about the BLAC. Their mission is “To use the vehicle of fine arts to provide the total community of Oklahoma with an exposure to African, African-American/Black Culture with a special emphasis on education Oklahoma's youth."  Charlie Christian Festival June 1-3 https://charliechristian.org/  Go to: https://www.blacinc.org/ Donate here for Childrens Health Foundation Our Goal $10,000 https://donorbox.org/this-is-oklahoma... Thanks to our sponsors. The Oklahoma Hall of Fame at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum telling Oklahoma's story through its people since 1927. For more information go to www.oklahomahof.com and for daily updates go to https://lnkd.in/g_gsxQM The Chickasaw Nation is economically strong, culturally vibrant and full of energetic people dedicated to the preservation of family, community and heritage. www.chickasaw.net Diffee Ford Lincoln. Third generation Oklahoma business, the Diffee family continues to do business the right way, the family way. Go to www.diffeeford.net for all your new and used car needs and follow them on instagram https://lnkd.in/drq7RMu2 The Choctaw people have a rich history and a bright future. At the Choctaw Cultural Center, you can take part in a story 14,000 years in the making. The Choctaw Cultural Center is more than a museum. It's a living, breathing experience. Visit www.choctawculturalcenter.com to plan your visit.

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: songs from 1927 to 1969. Fats Waller, Count Basie & His Orchestra, Dinah Shore & Buddy Clark, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington And His Famous Orchestra with Johnny Hodges, Roland Kirk, Nat King Cole, Al Hirt, Miles Davis, Bud Powell Trio (Kenny Clark drum solo), Johnny Hodges, Herbie Mann, and then Ella Fitzgerald with the Ernie Heckscher Big Band & Tommy Flanagan.

Lonnie Johnson may arguably be the most influential guitarist of all time. He was the first guitarist to play single string solos in both jazz and blues styles long before even Django Reinhardt or Charlie Christian. Robert Johnson imitated him on record and BB King and many others cited him as a major influence. He was also a superb singer with a gentle, mellow voice and was a terrific and prolific songwriter. His career, which began in the mid 1920s, before the advent of electric (microphone) recording, lasted through parts of six decades and included multiple comebacks. Part 1 covers his life, carreer and recordings through the recording ban of the Second World War. Support the show

有时候一种音乐边界的拓宽，单靠音乐家超前的意识和超高的水平是不够的，还需要人类在技术上有所突破。爵士乐吉他大师 Charlie Christian 正是因为一个乐器上技术的突破，才能够在短短的两年多时间，达到后人无法企及的高度，最终成为一代宗师，为后世留下了宝贵的音乐遗产。 - 聊天的人 - 米周，「Why for Jazz」主播 - 本期曲单 - Opening - Charlie Christian - Swing to Bop Charlie Christian - Guy's Got to Go Charlie Christian - Hittin' the Bottle Ending - Charlie Christian - Rose Room - 制作团队 - 制作：B 混音/声音设计：邵旻 节目运营：小米粒 视觉设计：Jessi、齐寒 - 本节目由 JustPod 出品 ©2022上海斛律网络科技有限公司 - - 互动方式 - 微博: @JustPod @播客一下 小红书：JustPod气氛组 微信公众号：JustPod/播客一下 联系邮箱：contact@justpod.fm

A little over a month ago, UK guitarmaker Richard Waddell (Uberfrank Guitars) shared photos of his latest creation to Instagram: an electric baritone guitar built for musician and friend Daniel Marcus Clark. This wild instrument - featuring a unique offset body, a Charlie Christian pickup in the neck, a three-pole bass pickup, dual outputs, a built-in capo system, and even a secret compartment in the pickguard - made guitarists around the world take notice. On this week's Fretboard Journal Podcast, we talk to Richard and Daniel about their collaboration. We discuss the original inspiration for the body's shape (a vintage Coral Hornet), Daniel's unique live rig, the unlikely hinge that made the secret compartment work, the ideas that didn't make it in to the finished guitar, plus a lot more. Daniel Marcus Clark's new album, 'I've been thinking,' is available now on Bandcamp if you want to hear this guitar (and musician) in action. https://danielmarcusclark.bandcamp.com  https://www.uberfrankguitars.com Love the show and want to support the Fretboard Journal Podcast? Pick up a digital subscription to our magazine: https://shop.fretboardjournal.com/collections/downloads/products/fretboard-journal-digital-subscription-offer (It's just $30 annually and it goes a long way towards supporting the show...and you get to read the Fretboard Journal!)  Pre-order An Instrument Maker's Guide to Insanity and Redemption: Behind-the-Scenes Stories from the Instrument Making and Repair Community here. Our podcast is sponsored by Peghead Nation (use the promo code FRETBOARD and get your first month free or $20 off any annual subscription); Izotope (use the coupon code FRET10 to save 10% off their plug-ins); and Calton Cases.

Get ready to shred! Joy and cohost Buddy are building the most epic guitarchestra (aka guitar orchestra) in this week's episode — so they're auditioning some of history's most notable guitar players. Jazz innovator Charlie Christian shows off his strumming solos, which made scores of people want to buy electric guitars. Les Paul not only plays the electric guitar, he updates the look and sound, paving the way for rock and roll. And musician Sima Cunningham from the band Ohmme stops by to show off the special pedals she uses to push the boundaries of what a guitar even sounds like. Of course, the biggest question is: will Joy's air guitar chops earn her a seat in the guitarchestra? All shredding aside, see if you can put this First Things First in the correct order: record players, headphones and pianos. Also, why do movie trailers come at the beginning of movies? Didja Know makes sense of it all! This episode was sponsored by: Fabric Insurance (Meetfabric.com/forever - Apply today in just 10 minutes at meet fabric dot com slash forever. Policies issued by Western-Southern Life Assurance Company. Not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions.)

Bienvenidos amantes de la música, Barney Kessel fue un guitarrista de Bop, Cool, West Coast, Pop y Rock. Perteneció a un grupo de músicos de sesión que fueron míticos por su calidad. ("Wrecking Crew" - El equipo de demolición) Gracias a ello fue un guitarrista omnipresente pero anónimo. La experiencia de tocar con Charlie Christian (quien fue su principal influencia) le hizo desarrollar su propio estilo, ya que sólo sabía tocar como su mentor. A partir de ese evento comenzó a trabajar con grandes Big Bands. (Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet) En 1944 apareció en el cortometraje "Jammin' The Blues" protagonizado por Lester Young. En la década de los 50 se unió al trío del pianista Oscar Peterson, en los 70 creó el trío de guitarristas "Great Guitars" junto a Herb Ellis y Charlie Byrd. La selección de hoy es del álbum "To Swing or not to Swing" (1955). Qué lo disfruten! Los temas son: 1. You Came a Long Way from St. Louis (Tema de inicio) 2. Begin The Blues 3. Wall Street 4. Midnight Sun 5. Contemporary Blues 6. 12th Street Rag Recomendamos el cortometraje "Jammin' The Blues" (1944) https://bit.ly/3LrCJU4 *Suscríbete a nuestro canal. Si ya lo has hecho, considera apoyarnos en Patreon como mecenas para hacer sustentable nuestro programa y mantener nuestro viaje en vuelo. (Podrás acceder a episodios adelantados y exclusivos) patreon.com/ViajeJazz?fan_landing=true *Ayúdanos con un Me gusta, Comparte y Comenta. * En viajealmundodeljazz.com encuentra un reproductor de Jazz Moderno y Jazz Clásico.

Good News: Botswana has drastically reduced the incidence of mother-to-infant HIV transmission through amazing efforts, Link HERE. The Good Word: Wrapping up a week of JRR Tolkien quotes with a pair of memorable ones. Good To Know: A pretty cool fact about boiling water on Mount Everest. Good News: The population of an adorable but […]

Today's show features music performed by Honeyboy Edwards and Charlie Christian

Good News: After some struggles to get offshoot wind farms going in the UK, the largest single turbine is slated to be built soon, Link HERE. The Good Word: A lovely thought from Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. Good To Know: An odd and fun fact about bats giving birth! Good News: […]

Good News: European Bison have been reintroduced to England’s wilderness and are roaming free for the first time in two thousand years! Link HERE. The Good Word: A truly thoughtful quote from JRR Tolkien. Good To Know: A startling fact from the depths of Medieval history… Good News: London is experiencing a real cycling renaissance, […]

Brother Dave Schools us on How to Rock Out with Passionate BluesBrother Dave is a guitarist/vocalist whose passionate and eclectic style defies categorization!We learn of Dave's unique background, and his love of the guitar, especially the pedal steel. We'll hear three of his latest songs, Bak'n Blues, Lonely & Blue, and  Road Trip. While his musical influences are firmly based on Roots and Blues, his stylings are infused with Country, Rock, and Jazz sounds that embody both classic and modern sensibilities. Dave's vocals are a cross between Gregg Allman, B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Band, Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, and even Bonnie Raitt.  His guitar stylings are a diverse blend of the earlier accomplished guitarists…..Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Freddie, B.B. and Albert King, Chet Atkins, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Johnny Winter, as well as contemporary artists such as Joe Bonamassa, Kirk Fletcher, and Eric Gales.Since the age of 17, Brother Dave has been gigging with various NYC-based bands, touring all over the East Coast and Europe, and performing for audiences of all ages and tastes.While he has the distinction of having opened for such world-class performers as Johnny Winter, Dickey Betts, Buddy Miles, Elvin Bishop, Debbie Davies, Room full of Blues, Shemieka Copeland, and Little Charlie and The Night Cats, he is just as likely to be seen entertaining the patrons of a small intimate lounge or private party.These days you can catch Brother Dave playing Solo Acoustic or with his Band, Brother Dave & The Brave, in Restaurants, Pubs, Clubs, and a variety of music venues all over Long Island, New York City, Connecticut, and the entire tri-state region.  You'll find him backing up some of the area's finest Vocalists and Bands playing: Jazz, Classic/90's Rock, Blues, Swing, Reggae, Indian, Country; whatever the genre!His guitar and gritty well-honed vocals can be heard on many recordings created by our local musicians.No matter your age, musical taste, or where you call home, Brother Dave and The Brave has something to inspire everyone as they effortlessly tap the soul of American music, fusing the familiar with the new and vibrant.Brother Dave is an act not to be missed! Connect with The Long Island Sound Podcast:Website: Https://GigDestiny.com/podcast Follow Steve Yusko, GigDestiny.com, and his adventures:  Website: https://www.GigDestiny.com  Twitter, Instagram,  YouTube, FacebookSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21aCeQWDmD4fkucpfVf9Email: Steve@GigDestiny.com IThe growth of The Long Island Sound Podcast has been exponential. Help us grow the show!Subscribe to the GigDestiny.com Site here for bonus contentSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelCall the Listener Line & leave your comments: (631) 800-3579 Remember to Rate & Review the show! Help us keep the conversation going with your donation - Click Right Here or go to GigDestiny.com Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE

Luego de Charlie Christian la guitarra alcanza ese rol solista protagónico que nunca dejó. En el bop, hoy hablamos de y escuchamos a Jimmy Raney, al "pulpo" Tal Farlow, al maestro Jim Hall así como a Herb Ellis, Gabor Szabo, Grant Green y Kenny Burrell.

Comenzamos a analizar el trayecto de la guitarra en esta aventura del jazz lo cual nos llevará siete episodios. En la primera entrega rendimos homenaje a los guitarristas de blues (precursores) Robert Johnson, LeadBelly, Big Bill Bronzy y a los pioneros del jazz Johnny St Cyr y Lonnie Johnson.  La magia de la seccion rítmica de Freddie Green en el swing, Eddie Lang y Eddie Condon en Chicago y la revolución de Charlie Christian en swing y bop, entre otros

It's the 95th episode of the Truth About Vintage Amps! Despite some technical / Zoom difficulties, Skip and Jason talk about replacement transformers, smoking Earthsound amps, bias, and more.  This week's episode is sponsored by Calton Cases, Jupiter Condenser Co., Amplified Parts and Grez Guitars. You can also use the discount code FRET10 to save 10% off your Izotope purchase. Support us on Patreon.com for added content and the occasional surprise.  Some of the topics discussed this week: 1:32 Econoco, the giant tube rebuilding place in Woodland, California (link, h/t www.reelaudio.net) 3:16 Cordless yard tools 4:31 What's on Skip's bench: A Charlie Christian-style amp head for Todd Clinesmith; John Munnerlyn's Magnatone-inspired guitars, the power transformer from a blonde Tremolux head; blue molded caps 9:56 The Truth About Vintage Amps Patreon page (link); congrats to Patreon supporter Josh F. on winning a Body and Soul fuzz pedal (Body and Soul on Instagram) 14:18 Nate the syrup guy's 1965 Vibro Champ, redux; inverse feedback; reversing the primary leads on the power transformer 20:31 Beginner's Corner: Cathode bias vs. fixed bias vs. grid bias 25:07 Find this guy: Ham operator Armond Noble, the Kon-Tiki, World Radio News 27:00 A 1964 Fender Super Reverb with a strange volume taper 30:57 A tuxedo Princeton going to the Los Angeles Guitar Show 31:45 Mid-'60s Ampeg B-18N with a weird noise and a single glowing power tube that fixes itself with the standby switch 37:32 A loose rectifier tube in a 1968 Fender Deluxe Reverb 41:32 Fumes from soldering 43:35 Fixing the polarity at a local dive bar 50:38 The goat murder trial is over 53:25 Sourcing the washer behind the jewel light on a Silverface Champ 58:04 Schematics for a Webster TP12-1 PA, making a Blackstar cleaner by swapping the pre-amp tube 1:03:44 A smoking 1973 Earthsound amp 1:11:20 A Harmony H400 combo up for grabs; the Fender Bantam Bass schematic 1:15:09 Replacement output transformers for Fender Champs, Princetons, and Deluxes; rewinding output transformers 1:26:37 Literary recommendation: 'Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies' by Jared Diamond Submit your amp questions, recipes and life hacks to the podcast via podcast@fretboardjournal.com and don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

Episode 149 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Respect", and the journey of Aretha Franklin from teenage gospel singer to the Queen of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm Just a Mops" by the Mops. 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/ Also, people may be interested in a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, run by a friend of mine (I'm not on FB myself) which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ Errata I say "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody" instead of "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody". Also I say Spooner Oldham co-wrote "Do Right Woman". I meant Chips Moman. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. I also relied heavily on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You by Matt Dobkin. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Rick Hall's The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame contains his side of the story. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. And the I Never Loved a Man album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode,  I have to say that there are some things people may want to be aware of before listening to this. This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with subjects including child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny. I will of course try to deal with those subjects as tactfully as possible, but those of you who may be upset by those topics may want to check the episode transcript before or instead of listening. Those of you who leave comments or send me messages saying "why can't you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue-signalling?" may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well, I won't mind. And one more thing to say before I get into the meat of the episode -- this episode puts me in a more difficult position than most other episodes of the podcast have. When I've talked about awful things that have happened in the course of this podcast previously, I have either been talking about perpetrators -- people like Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis who did truly reprehensible things -- or about victims who have talked very publicly about the abuse they've suffered, people like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner, who said very clearly "this is what happened to me and I want it on the public record". In the case of Aretha Franklin, she has been portrayed as a victim *by others*, and there are things that have been said about her life and her relationships which suggest that she suffered in some very terrible ways. But she herself apparently never saw herself as a victim, and didn't want some aspects of her private life talking about. At the start of David Ritz's biography of her, which is one of my main sources here, he recounts a conversation he had with her: "When I mentioned the possibility of my writing an independent biography, she said, “As long as I can approve it before it's published.” “Then it wouldn't be independent,” I said. “Why should it be independent?” “So I can tell the story from my point of view.” “But it's not your story, it's mine.” “You're an important historical figure, Aretha. Others will inevitably come along to tell your story. That's the blessing and burden of being a public figure.” “More burden than blessing,” she said." Now, Aretha Franklin is sadly dead, but I think that she still deserves the basic respect of being allowed privacy. So I will talk here about public matters, things she acknowledged in her own autobiography, and things that she and the people around her did in public situations like recording studios and concert venues. But there are aspects to the story of Aretha Franklin as that story is commonly told, which may well be true, but are of mostly prurient interest, don't add much to the story of how the music came to be made, and which she herself didn't want people talking about. So there will be things people might expect me to talk about in this episode, incidents where people in her life, usually men, treated her badly, that I'm going to leave out. That information is out there if people want to look for it, but I don't see myself as under any obligation to share it. That's not me making excuses for people who did inexcusable things, that's me showing some respect to one of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Because, of course, respect is what this is all about: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Respect"] One name that's come up a few times in this podcast, but who we haven't really talked about that much, is Bobby "Blue" Bland. We mentioned him as the single biggest influence on the style of Van Morrison, but Bland was an important figure in the Memphis music scene of the early fifties, which we talked about in several early episodes. He was one of the Beale Streeters, the loose aggregation of musicians that also included B.B. King and Johnny Ace, he worked with Ike Turner, and was one of the key links between blues and soul in the fifties and early sixties, with records like "Turn on Your Love Light": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn on Your Love Light"] But while Bland was influenced by many musicians we've talked about, his biggest influence wasn't a singer at all. It was a preacher he saw give a sermon in the early 1940s. As he said decades later: "Wasn't his words that got me—I couldn't tell you what he talked on that day, couldn't tell you what any of it meant, but it was the way he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He'd catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church. “‘Since when you so keen on church?' Mama asked. “‘I like that preacher,' I said. “‘Reverend Franklin?' she asked. “‘Well, if he's the one who sings when he preaches, that's the one I like.'" Bland was impressed by C.L. Franklin, and so were other Memphis musicians. Long after Franklin had moved to Detroit, they remembered him, and Bland and B.B. King would go to Franklin's church to see him preach whenever they were in the city. And Bland studied Franklin's records. He said later "I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin." Bland would study Franklin's records, and would take the style that Franklin used in recorded sermons like "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest": [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest"] And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland's "I Pity the Fool": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "I Pity the Fool"] But of course, that wasn't the only influence the Reverend C.L. Franklin had on the course of soul music. C.L. Franklin had grown up poor, on a Mississippi farm, and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule, ploughing the farm for his stepfather. But he had a fierce intelligence and became an autodidact, travelling regularly to the nearest library, thirty miles away, on a horse-drawn wagon, and reading everything he could get his hands on. At the age of sixteen he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an itinerant preacher. He would travel between many small country churches and build up audiences there -- and he would also study everyone else preaching there, analysing their sermons, seeing if he could anticipate their line of argument and get ahead of them, figuring out the structure. But unlike many people in the conservative Black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible. He saw blues music and Black church sermons as both being part of the same thing -- a Black culture and folklore that was worthy of respect in both its spiritual and secular aspects. He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but wasn't the main pastor at any of them. He got married aged twenty, though that marriage didn't last, and he seems to have been ambitious for a greater respectability. When that marriage failed, in June 1936, he married Barbara Siggers, a very intelligent, cultured, young single mother who had attended Booker T Washington High School, the best Black school in Memphis, and he adopted her son Vaughn. While he was mostly still doing churches in Mississippi, he took on one in Memphis as well, in an extremely poor area, but it gave him a foot in the door to the biggest Black city in the US. Barbara would later be called "one of the really great gospel singers" by no less than Mahalia Jackson. We don't have any recordings of Barbara singing, but Mahalia Jackson certainly knew what she was talking about when it came to great gospel singers: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] Rev. Franklin was hugely personally ambitious, and he also wanted to get out of rural Mississippi, where the Klan were very active at this time, especially after his daughter Erma was born in 1938. They moved to Memphis in 1939, where he got a full-time position at New Salem Baptist Church, where for the first time he was able to earn a steady living from just one church and not have to tour round multiple churches. He soon became so popular that if you wanted to get a seat for the service at noon, you had to turn up for the 8AM Sunday School or you'd be forced to stand. He also enrolled for college courses at LeMoyne College. He didn't get a degree, but spent three years as a part-time student studying theology, literature, and sociology, and soon developed a liberal theology that was very different from the conservative fundamentalism he'd grown up in, though still very much part of the Baptist church. Where he'd grown up with a literalism that said the Bible was literally true, he started to accept things like evolution, and to see much of the Bible as metaphor. Now, we talked in the last episode about how impossible it is to get an accurate picture of the lives of religious leaders, because their life stories are told by those who admire them, and that's very much the case for C.L. Franklin. Franklin was a man who had many, many, admirable qualities -- he was fiercely intelligent, well-read, a superb public speaker, a man who was by all accounts genuinely compassionate towards those in need, and he became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and inspired tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of people, directly and indirectly, to change the world for the better. He also raised several children who loved and admired him and were protective of his memory. And as such, there is an inevitable bias in the sources on Franklin's life. And so there's a tendency to soften the very worst things he did, some of which were very, very bad. For example in Nick Salvatore's biography of him, he talks about Franklin, in 1940, fathering a daughter with someone who is described as "a teenager" and "quite young". No details of her age other than that are given, and a few paragraphs later the age of a girl who was then sixteen *is* given, talking about having known the girl in question, and so the impression is given that the girl he impregnated was also probably in her late teens. Which would still be bad, but a man in his early twenties fathering a child with a girl in her late teens is something that can perhaps be forgiven as being a different time. But while the girl in question may have been a teenager when she gave birth, she was *twelve years old* when she became pregnant, by C.L. Franklin, the pastor of her church, who was in a position of power over her in multiple ways. Twelve years old. And this is not the only awful thing that Franklin did -- he was also known to regularly beat up women he was having affairs with, in public. I mention this now because everything else I say about him in this episode is filtered through sources who saw these things as forgivable character flaws in an otherwise admirable human being, and I can't correct for those biases because I don't know the truth. So it's going to sound like he was a truly great man. But bear those facts in mind. Barbara stayed with Franklin for the present, after discovering what he had done, but their marriage was a difficult one, and they split up and reconciled a handful of times. They had three more children together -- Cecil, Aretha, and Carolyn -- and remained together as Franklin moved on first to a church in Buffalo, New York, and then to New Bethel Church, in Detroit, on Hastings Street, a street which was the centre of Black nightlife in the city, as immortalised in John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Boogie Chillen"] Before moving to Detroit, Franklin had already started to get more political, as his congregation in Buffalo had largely been union members, and being free from the worst excesses of segregation allowed him to talk more openly about civil rights, but that only accelerated when he moved to Detroit, which had been torn apart just a couple of years earlier by police violence against Black protestors. Franklin had started building a reputation when in Memphis using radio broadcasts, and by the time he moved to Detroit he was able to command a very high salary, and not only that, his family were given a mansion by the church, in a rich part of town far away from most of his congregation. Smokey Robinson, who was Cecil Franklin's best friend and a frequent visitor to the mansion through most of his childhood, described it later, saying "Once inside, I'm awestruck -- oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I've never seen nothing like that before!" He made a lot of money, but he also increased church attendance so much that he earned that money. He had already been broadcasting on the radio, but when he started his Sunday night broadcasts in Detroit, he came up with a trick of having his sermons run long, so the show would end before the climax. People listening decided that they would have to start turning up in person to hear the end of the sermons, and soon he became so popular that the church would be so full that crowds would have to form on the street outside to listen. Other churches rescheduled their services so they wouldn't clash with Franklin's, and most of the other Black Baptist ministers in the city would go along to watch him preach. In 1948 though, a couple of years after moving to Detroit, Barbara finally left her husband. She took Vaughn with her and moved back to Buffalo, leaving the four biological children she'd had with C.L. with their father.  But it's important to note that she didn't leave her children -- they would visit her on a regular basis, and stay with her over school holidays. Aretha later said "Despite the fact that it has been written innumerable times, it is an absolute lie that my mother abandoned us. In no way, shape, form, or fashion did our mother desert us." Barbara's place in the home was filled by many women -- C.L. Franklin's mother moved up from Mississippi to help him take care of the children, the ladies from the church would often help out, and even stars like Mahalia Jackson would turn up and cook meals for the children. There were also the women with whom Franklin carried on affairs, including Anna Gordy, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington, the most important female jazz and blues singer of the fifties, who had major R&B hits with records like her version of "Cold Cold Heart": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Cold Cold Heart"] Although my own favourite record of hers is "Big Long Slidin' Thing", which she made with arranger Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Big Long Slidin' Thing"] It's about a trombone. Get your minds out of the gutter. Washington was one of the biggest vocal influences on young Aretha, but the single biggest influence was Clara Ward, another of C.L. Franklin's many girlfriends. Ward was the longest-lasting of these, and there seems to have been a lot of hope on both her part and Aretha's that she and Rev. Franklin would marry, though Franklin always made it very clear that monogamy wouldn't suit him. Ward was one of the three major female gospel singers of the middle part of the century, and possibly even more technically impressive as a vocalist than the other two, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson. Where Jackson was an austere performer, who refused to perform in secular contexts at all for most of her life, and took herself and her music very seriously, and Tharpe was a raunchier, funnier, more down-to-earth performer who was happy to play for blues audiences and even to play secular music on occasion, Ward was a *glamorous* performer, who wore sequined dresses and piled her hair high on her head. Ward had become a singer in 1931 when her mother had what she later talked about as a religious epiphany, and decided she wasn't going to be a labourer any more, she was going to devote her life to gospel music. Ward's mother had formed a vocal group with her two daughters, and Clara quickly became the star and her mother's meal ticket -- and her mother was very possessive of that ticket, to the extent that Ward, who was a bisexual woman who mostly preferred men, had more relationships with women, because her mother wouldn't let her be alone with the men she was attracted to. But Ward did manage to keep a relationship going with C.L. Franklin, and Aretha Franklin talked about the moment she decided to become a singer, when she saw Ward singing "Peace in the Valley" at a funeral: [Excerpt: Clara Ward, "Peace in the Valley"] As well as looking towards Ward as a vocal influence, Aretha was also influenced by her as a person -- she became a mother figure to Aretha, who would talk later about watching Ward eat, and noting her taking little delicate bites, and getting an idea of what it meant to be ladylike from her. After Ward's death in 1973, a notebook was found in which she had written her opinions of other singers. For Aretha she wrote “My baby Aretha, she doesn't know how good she is. Doubts self. Some day—to the moon. I love that girl.” Ward's influence became especially important to Aretha and her siblings after their mother died of a heart attack a few years after leaving her husband, when Aretha was ten, and Aretha, already a very introverted child, became even more so. Everyone who knew Aretha said that her later diva-ish reputation came out of a deep sense of insecurity and introversion -- that she was a desperately private, closed-off, person who would rarely express her emotions at all, and who would look away from you rather than make eye contact. The only time she let herself express emotions was when she performed music. And music was hugely important in the Franklin household. Most preachers in the Black church at that time were a bit dismissive of gospel music, because they thought the music took away from their prestige -- they saw it as a necessary evil, and resented it taking up space when their congregations could have been listening to them. But Rev. Franklin was himself a rather good singer, and even made a few gospel records himself in 1950, recording for Joe Von Battle, who owned a record shop on Hastings Street and also put out records by blues singers: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "I Am Climbing Higher Mountains" ] The church's musical director was James Cleveland, one of the most important gospel artists of the fifties and sixties, who sang with groups like the Caravans: [Excerpt: The Caravans, "What Kind of Man is This?" ] Cleveland, who had started out in the choir run by Thomas Dorsey, the writer of “Take My Hand Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley”, moved in with the Franklin family for a while, and he gave the girls tips on playing the piano -- much later he would play piano on Aretha's album Amazing Grace, and she said of him “He showed me some real nice chords, and I liked his deep, deep sound”. Other than Clara Ward, he was probably the single biggest musical influence on Aretha. And all the touring gospel musicians would make appearances at New Bethel Church, not least of them Sam Cooke, who first appeared there with the Highway QCs and would continue to do so after joining the Soul Stirrers: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of his Garment"] Young Aretha and her older sister Erma both had massive crushes on Cooke, and there were rumours that he had an affair with one or both of them when they were in their teens, though both denied it. Aretha later said "When I first saw him, all I could do was sigh... Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight." But it wasn't just gospel music that filled the house. One of the major ways that C.L. Franklin's liberalism showed was in his love of secular music, especially jazz and blues, which he regarded as just as important in Black cultural life as gospel music. We already talked about Dinah Washington being a regular visitor to the house, but every major Black entertainer would visit the Franklin residence when they were in Detroit. Both Aretha and Cecil Franklin vividly remembered visits from Art Tatum, who would sit at the piano and play for the family and their guests: [Excerpt: Art Tatum, "Tiger Rag"] Tatum was such a spectacular pianist that there's now a musicological term, the tatum, named after him, for the smallest possible discernible rhythmic interval between two notes. Young Aretha was thrilled by his technique, and by that of Oscar Peterson, who also regularly came to the Franklin home, sometimes along with Ella Fitzgerald. Nat "King" Cole was another regular visitor. The Franklin children all absorbed the music these people -- the most important musicians of the time -- were playing in their home, and young Aretha in particular became an astonishing singer and also an accomplished pianist. Smokey Robinson later said: “The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We'd pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I'd recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” C.L. Franklin became more involved in the music business still when Joe Von Battle started releasing records of his sermons, which had become steadily more politically aware: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "Dry Bones in the Valley"] Franklin was not a Marxist -- he was a liberal, but like many liberals was willing to stand with Marxists where they had shared interests, even when it was dangerous. For example in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, he had James and Grace Lee Boggs, two Marxist revolutionaries, come to the pulpit and talk about their support for the anti-colonial revolution in Kenya, and they sold four hundred copies of their pamphlet after their talk, because he saw that the struggle of Black Africans to get out from white colonial rule was the same struggle as that of Black Americans. And Franklin's powerful sermons started getting broadcast on the radio in areas further out from Detroit, as Chess Records picked up the distribution for them and people started playing the records on other stations. People like future Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson would later talk about listening to C.L. Franklin's records on the radio and being inspired -- a whole generation of Black Civil Rights leaders took their cues from him, and as the 1950s and 60s went on he became closer and closer to Martin Luther King in particular. But C.L. Franklin was always as much an ambitious showman as an activist, and he started putting together gospel tours, consisting mostly of music but with himself giving a sermon as the headline act. And he became very, very wealthy from these tours. On one trip in the south, his car broke down, and he couldn't find a mechanic willing to work on it. A group of white men started mocking him with racist terms, trying to provoke him, as he was dressed well and driving a nice car (albeit one that had broken down). Rather than arguing with them, he walked to a car dealership, and bought a new car with the cash that he had on him. By 1956 he was getting around $4000 per appearance, roughly equivalent to $43,000 today, and he was making a *lot* of appearances. He also sold half a million records that year. Various gospel singers, including the Clara Ward Singers, would perform on the tours he organised, and one of those performers was Franklin's middle daughter Aretha. Aretha had become pregnant when she was twelve, and after giving birth to the child she dropped out of school, but her grandmother did most of the child-rearing for her, while she accompanied her father on tour. Aretha's first recordings, made when she was just fourteen, show what an astonishing talent she already was at that young age. She would grow as an artist, of course, as she aged and gained experience, but those early gospel records already show an astounding maturity and ability. It's jaw-dropping to listen to these records of a fourteen-year-old, and immediately recognise them as a fully-formed Aretha Franklin. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] Smokey Robinson's assessment that she was born with her gifts fully formed doesn't seem like an exaggeration when you hear that. For the latter half of the fifties, Aretha toured with her father, performing on the gospel circuit and becoming known there. But the Franklin sisters were starting to get ideas about moving into secular music. This was largely because their family friend Sam Cooke had done just that, with "You Send Me": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Aretha and Erma still worshipped Cooke, and Aretha would later talk about getting dressed up just to watch Cooke appear on the TV. Their brother Cecil later said "I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. Erma and Ree said they weren't going because they were so heartbroken that Sam had recently married. I didn't believe them. And I knew I was right when they started getting dressed about noon for the nine o'clock show. Because they were underage, they put on a ton of makeup to look older. It didn't matter 'cause Berry Gordy's sisters, Anna and Gwen, worked the photo concession down there, taking pictures of the party people. Anna was tight with Daddy and was sure to let my sisters in. She did, and they came home with stars in their eyes.” Moving from gospel to secular music still had a stigma against it in the gospel world, but Rev. Franklin had never seen secular music as sinful, and he encouraged his daughters in their ambitions. Erma was the first to go secular, forming a girl group, the Cleo-Patrettes, at the suggestion of the Four Tops, who were family friends, and recording a single for Joe Von Battle's J-V-B label, "No Other Love": [Excerpt: The Cleo-Patrettes, "No Other Love"] But the group didn't go any further, as Rev. Franklin insisted that his eldest daughter had to finish school and go to university before she could become a professional singer. Erma missed other opportunities for different reasons, though -- Berry Gordy, at this time still a jobbing songwriter, offered her a song he'd written with his sister and Roquel Davis, but Erma thought of herself as a jazz singer and didn't want to do R&B, and so "All I Could Do Was Cry" was given to Etta James instead, who had a top forty pop hit with it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] While Erma's move into secular music was slowed by her father wanting her to have an education, there was no such pressure on Aretha, as she had already dropped out. But Aretha had a different problem -- she was very insecure, and said that church audiences "weren't critics, but worshippers", but she was worried that nightclub audiences in particular were just the kind of people who would just be looking for flaws, rather than wanting to support the performer as church audiences did. But eventually she got up the nerve to make the move. There was the possibility of her getting signed to Motown -- her brother was still best friends with Smokey Robinson, while the Gordy family were close to her father -- but Rev. Franklin had his eye on bigger things. He wanted her to be signed to Columbia, which in 1960 was the most prestigious of all the major labels. As Aretha's brother Cecil later said "He wanted Ree on Columbia, the label that recorded Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Percy Faith, and Doris Day. Daddy said that Columbia was the biggest and best record company in the world. Leonard Bernstein recorded for Columbia." They went out to New York to see Phil Moore, a legendary vocal coach and arranger who had helped make Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge into stars, but Moore actually refused to take her on as a client, saying "She does not require my services. Her style has already been developed. Her style is in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration. It simply requires the right material. Her stage presentation is not of immediate concern. All that will come later. The immediate concern is the material that will suit her best. And the reason that concern will not be easily addressed is because I can't imagine any material that will not suit her." That last would become a problem for the next few years, but the immediate issue was to get someone at Columbia to listen to her, and Moore could help with that -- he was friends with John Hammond. Hammond is a name that's come up several times in the podcast already -- we mentioned him in the very earliest episodes, and also in episode ninety-eight, where we looked at his signing of Bob Dylan. But Hammond was a legend in the music business. He had produced sessions for Bessie Smith, had discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, had convinced Benny Goodman to hire Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, had signed Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Columbia, had organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which we talked about in the first few episodes of this podcast, and was about to put out the first album of Robert Johnson's recordings. Of all the executives at Columbia, he was the one who had the greatest eye for talent, and the greatest understanding of Black musical culture. Moore suggested that the Franklins get Major Holley to produce a demo recording that he could get Hammond to listen to. Major Holley was a family friend, and a jazz bassist who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins among others, and he put together a set of songs for Aretha that would emphasise the jazz side of her abilities, pitching her as a Dinah Washington style bluesy jazz singer. The highlight of the demo was a version of "Today I Sing the Blues", a song that had originally been recorded by Helen Humes, the singer who we last heard of recording “Be Baba Leba” with Bill Doggett: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Today I Sing the Blues"] That original version had been produced by Hammond, but the song had also recently been covered by Aretha's idol, Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Today I Sing the Blues"] Hammond was hugely impressed by the demo, and signed Aretha straight away, and got to work producing her first album. But he and Rev. Franklin had different ideas about what Aretha should do. Hammond wanted to make a fairly raw-sounding bluesy jazz album, the kind of recording he had produced with Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but Rev. Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market -- he was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat "King" Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted her recording standards like "Over the Rainbow". This showed a lack of understanding on Rev. Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point. As Etta James later said, "If you wanna have Black hits, you gotta understand the Black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on Black stations... Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the Black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn't know nothing 'bout crossing over.” But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly, because Sam Cooke had been working on RCA Records, trying to get them to sign Aretha, and Rev. Franklin wanted an album out so they could start booking club dates for her, and was saying that if they didn't get one done quickly he'd take up that offer, and so they came up with a compromise set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two R&B top ten hits, "Won't Be Long" and Aretha's version of "Today I Sing the Blues": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] This is not to say that Aretha herself saw this as a compromise -- she later said "I have never compromised my material. Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one. And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn't know how to produce a record, who does? No, the fault was with promotion." And this is something important to bear in mind as we talk about her Columbia records. Many, *many* people have presented those records as Aretha being told what to do by producers who didn't understand her art and were making her record songs that didn't fit her style. That's not what's happening with the Columbia records. Everyone actually involved said that Aretha was very involved in the choices made -- and there are some genuinely great tracks on those albums. The problem is that they're *unfocused*. Aretha was only eighteen when she signed to the label, and she loved all sorts of music -- blues, jazz, soul, standards, gospel, middle-of-the-road pop music -- and wanted to sing all those kinds of music. And she *could* sing all those kinds of music, and sing them well. But it meant the records weren't coherent. You didn't know what you were getting, and there was no artistic personality that dominated them, it was just what Aretha felt like recording. Around this time, Aretha started to think that maybe her father didn't know what he was talking about when it came to popular music success, even though she idolised him in most areas, and she turned to another figure, who would soon become both her husband and manager. Ted White. Her sister Erma, who was at that time touring with Lloyd Price, had introduced them, but in fact Aretha had first seen White years earlier, in her own house -- he had been Dinah Washington's boyfriend in the fifties, and her first sight of him had been carrying a drunk Washington out of the house after a party. In interviews with David Ritz, who wrote biographies of many major soul stars including both Aretha Franklin and Etta James, James had a lot to say about White, saying “Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha. My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fuqua, used to talk about him. Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn't surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls—like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—had pimps for boyfriends and managers. That was standard operating procedure. My own mother had made a living turning tricks. When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business. It was in our genes. Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid." She compared White to Ike Turner, saying "Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world. When Harvey Fuqua introduced me to him—this was the fifties, before he was with Aretha—I saw him as a super-hip extra-smooth cat. I liked him. He knew music. He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs. He had manners. Later, when I ran into him and Aretha—this was the sixties—I saw that she wasn't as shy as she used to be." White was a pimp, but he was also someone with music business experience -- he owned an unsuccessful publishing company, and also ran a chain of jukeboxes. He was also thirty, while Aretha was only eighteen. But White didn't like the people in Aretha's life at the time -- he didn't get on well with her father, and he also clashed with John Hammond. And Aretha was also annoyed at Hammond, because her sister Erma had signed to Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, and was releasing her own singles: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Hello Again"] Aretha was certain that Hammond had signed Erma, even though Hammond had nothing to do with Epic Records, and Erma had actually been recommended by Lloyd Price. And Aretha, while for much of her career she would support her sister, was also terrified that her sister might have a big hit before her and leave Aretha in her shadow. Hammond was still the credited producer on Aretha's second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, but his lack of say in the sessions can be shown in the choice of lead-off single. "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" was originally recorded by Al Jolson in 1918: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] Rev. Franklin pushed for the song, as he was a fan of Jolson -- Jolson, oddly, had a large Black fanbase, despite his having been a blackface performer, because he had *also* been a strong advocate of Black musicians like Cab Calloway, and the level of racism in the media of the twenties through forties was so astonishingly high that even a blackface performer could seem comparatively OK. Aretha's performance was good, but it was hardly the kind of thing that audiences were clamouring for in 1961: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] That single came out the month after _Down Beat_ magazine gave Aretha the "new-star female vocalist award", and it oddly made the pop top forty, her first record to do so, and the B-side made the R&B top ten, but for the next few years both chart success and critical acclaim eluded her. None of her next nine singles would make higher than number eighty-six on the Hot One Hundred, and none would make the R&B charts at all. After that transitional second album, she was paired with producer Bob Mersey, who was precisely the kind of white pop producer that one would expect for someone who hoped for crossover success. Mersey was the producer for many of Columbia's biggest stars at the time -- people like Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Patti Page, and Mel Tormé -- and it was that kind of audience that Aretha wanted to go for at this point. To give an example of the kind of thing that Mersey was doing, just the month before he started work on his first collaboration with Aretha, _The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin_, his production of Andy Williams singing "Moon River" was released: [Excerpt: Andy Williams, "Moon River"] This was the kind of audience Aretha was going for when it came to record sales – the person she compared herself to most frequently at this point was Barbra Streisand – though in live performances she was playing with a small jazz group in jazz venues, and going for the same kind of jazz-soul crossover audience as Dinah Washington or Ray Charles. The strategy seems to have been to get something like the success of her idol Sam Cooke, who could play to soul audiences but also play the Copacabana, but the problem was that Cooke had built an audience before doing that -- she hadn't. But even though she hadn't built up an audience, musicians were starting to pay attention. Ted White, who was still in touch with Dinah Washington, later said “Women are very catty. They'll see a girl who's dressed very well and they'll say, Yeah, but look at those shoes, or look at that hairdo. Aretha was the only singer I've ever known that Dinah had no negative comments about. She just stood with her mouth open when she heard Aretha sing.” The great jazz vocalist Carmen McRea went to see Aretha at the Village Vanguard in New York around this time, having heard the comparisons to Dinah Washington, and met her afterwards. She later said "Given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah. Instead, she was the shyest thing I've ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn't say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning. Anyway, I didn't give her any advice because she didn't ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she'd have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn't have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn't figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz." So musicians were listening to Aretha, even if everyone else wasn't. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, for example, was full of old standards like "Try a Little Tenderness": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] That performance inspired Otis Redding to cut his own version of that song a few years later: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And it might also have inspired Aretha's friend and idol Sam Cooke to include the song in his own lounge sets. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin also included Aretha's first original composition, but in general it wasn't a very well-received album. In 1963, the first cracks started to develop in Aretha's relationship with Ted White. According to her siblings, part of the strain was because Aretha's increasing commitment to the civil rights movement was costing her professional opportunities. Her brother Cecil later said "Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,' she'd drop everything and do just that. I don't think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King's cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.' But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.' She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely." In part her increasing activism was because of her father's own increase in activity. The benefit that Cecil is talking about there is probably one in Chicago organised by Mahalia Jackson, where Aretha headlined on a bill that also included Jackson, Eartha Kitt, and the comedian Dick Gregory. That was less than a month before her father organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a trial run for the more famous March on Washington a few weeks later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was run by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which was formed by Rev. Franklin and Rev. Albert Cleage, a much more radical Black nationalist who often differed with Franklin's more moderate integrationist stance. They both worked together to organise the Walk to Freedom, but Franklin's stance predominated, as several white liberal politicians, like the Mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, were included in the largely-Black March. It drew crowds of 125,000 people, and Dr. King called it "one of the most wonderful things that has happened in America", and it was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history up to that point. King's speech in Detroit was recorded and released on Motown Records: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech”] He later returned to the same ideas in his more famous speech in Washington. During that civil rights spring and summer of 1963, Aretha also recorded what many think of as the best of her Columbia albums, a collection of jazz standards  called Laughing on the Outside, which included songs like "Solitude", "Ol' Man River" and "I Wanna Be Around": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Wanna Be Around"] The opening track, "Skylark", was Etta James' favourite ever Aretha Franklin performance, and is regarded by many as the definitive take on the song: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Skylark"] Etta James later talked about discussing the track with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of Aretha's early influences, who had recorded her own version of the song: "Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?' I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn't you?' Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again.” But while the album got noticed by other musicians, it didn't get much attention from the wider public. Mersey decided that a change in direction was needed, and they needed to get in someone with more of a jazz background to work with Aretha. He brought in pianist and arranger Bobby Scott, who had previously worked with people like Lester Young, and Scott said of their first meeting “My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn't look at me when I spoke. She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me...For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.'” They started recording together, but the sides they cut wouldn't be released for a few years. Instead, Aretha and Mersey went in yet another direction. Dinah Washington died suddenly in December 1963, and given that Aretha was already being compared to Washington by almost everyone, and that Washington had been a huge influence on her, as well as having been close to both her father and her husband/manager, it made sense to go into the studio and quickly cut a tribute album, with Aretha singing Washington's hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Cold Cold Heart"] Unfortunately, while Washington had been wildly popular, and one of the most important figures in jazz and R&B in the forties and fifties, her style was out of date. The tribute album, titled Unforgettable, came out in February 1964, the same month that Beatlemania hit the US. Dinah Washington was the past, and trying to position Aretha as "the new Dinah Washington" would doom her to obscurity. John Hammond later said "I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.” At this point, Columbia brought in Clyde Otis, an independent producer and songwriter who had worked with artists like Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and indeed had written one of the songs on Unforgettable, but had also worked with people like Brook Benton, who had a much more R&B audience. For example, he'd written "Baby, You Got What It Takes" for Benton and Washington to do as a duet: [Excerpt: Brook Benton and Dinah Washington, "Baby, You Got What it Takes"] In 1962, when he was working at Mercury Records before going independent, Otis had produced thirty-three of the fifty-one singles the label put out that year that had charted. Columbia had decided that they were going to position Aretha firmly in the R&B market, and assigned Otis to do just that. At first, though, Otis had no more luck with getting Aretha to sing R&B than anyone else had. He later said "Aretha, though, couldn't be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra's own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That's not the point. The point is to find a hit.' But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,' Streisand's smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one's gonna beat Barbra at her own game." But after several months of this, eventually Aretha and White came round to the idea of making an R&B record. Otis produced an album of contemporary R&B, with covers of music from the more sophisticated end of the soul market, songs like "My Guy", "Every Little Bit Hurts", and "Walk on By", along with a few new originals brought in by Otis. The title track, "Runnin' Out of Fools", became her biggest hit in three years, making number fifty-seven on the pop charts and number thirty on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Runnin' Out of Fools"] After that album, they recorded another album with Otis producing, a live-in-the-studio jazz album, but again nobody involved could agree on a style for her. By this time it was obvious that she was unhappy with Columbia and would be leaving the label soon, and they wanted to get as much material in the can as they could, so they could continue releasing material after she left. But her working relationship with Otis was deteriorating -- Otis and Ted White did not get on, Aretha and White were having their own problems, and Aretha had started just not showing up for some sessions, with nobody knowing where she was. Columbia passed her on to yet another producer, this time Bob Johnston, who had just had a hit with Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte": [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"] Johnston was just about to hit an incredible hot streak as a producer. At the same time as his sessions with Aretha, he was also producing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and just after the sessions finished he'd go on to produce Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence album. In the next few years he would produce a run of classic Dylan albums like Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and New Morning, Simon & Garfunkel's follow up Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Leonard Cohen's first three albums, and Johnny Cash's comeback with the Live at Folsom Prison album and its follow up At San Quentin. He also produced records for Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, the Byrds, and Burl Ives during that time period. But you may notice that while that's as great a run of records as any producer was putting out at the time, it has little to do with the kind of music that Aretha Franklin was making then, or would become famous with. Johnston produced a string-heavy session in which Aretha once again tried to sing old standards by people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. She then just didn't turn up for some more sessions, until one final session in August, when she recorded songs like "Swanee" and "You Made Me Love You". For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio. She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time. Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded, but none of them had any success at all. Many of the records she'd made for Columbia had been genuinely great -- there's a popular perception that she was being held back by a record company that forced her to sing material she didn't like, but in fact she *loved* old standards, and jazz tunes, and contemporary pop at least as much as any other kind of music. Truly great musicians tend to have extremely eclectic tastes, and Aretha Franklin was a truly great musician if anyone was. Her Columbia albums are as good as any albums in those genres put out in that time period, and she remained proud of them for the rest of her life. But that very eclecticism had meant that she hadn't established a strong identity as a performer -- everyone who heard her records knew she was a great singer, but nobody knew what "an Aretha Franklin record" really meant -- and she hadn't had a single real hit, which was the thing she wanted more than anything. All that changed when in the early hours of the morning, Jerry Wexler was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson Pickett track -- from the timeline, it was probably the session for "Mustang Sally", which coincidentally was published by Ted White's publishing company, as Sir Mack Rice, the writer, was a neighbour of White and Franklin, and to which Aretha had made an uncredited songwriting contribution: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] Whatever the session, it wasn't going well. Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals, had turned up and had started winding Pickett up, telling him he sounded just like James Brown. Pickett *hated* Brown -- it seems like almost every male soul singer of the sixties hated James Brown -- and went to physically attack Sledge. Wexler got between the two men to protect his investments in them -- both were the kind of men who could easily cause some serious damage to anyone they hit -- and Pickett threw him to one side and charged at Sledge. At that moment the phone went, and Wexler yelled at the two of them to calm down so he could talk on the phone. The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic. Rev. Louise Bishop, later a Democratic politician in Pennsylvania, was at this time a broadcaster, presenting a radio gospel programme, and she knew Aretha. She'd been to see her perform, and had been astonished by Aretha's performance of a recent Otis Redding single, "Respect": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect"] Redding will, by the way, be getting his own episode in a few months' time, which is why I've not covered the making of that record here. Bishop thought that Aretha did the song even better than Redding -- something Bishop hadn't thought possible. When she got talking to Aretha after the show, she discovered that her contract with Columbia was up, and Aretha didn't really know what she was going to do -- maybe she'd start her own label or something. She hadn't been into the studio in more than a year, but she did have some songs she'd been working on. Bishop was good friends with Jerry Wexler, and she knew that he was a big fan of Aretha's, and had been saying for a while that when her contract was up he'd like to sign her. Bishop offered to make the connection, and then went back home and phoned Wexler's wife, waking her up -- it was one in the morning by this point, but Bishop was accustomed to phoning Wexler late at night when it was something important. Wexler's wife then phoned him in Muscle Shoals, and he phoned Bishop back and made the arrangements to meet up. Initially, Wexler wasn't thinking about producing Aretha himself -- this was still the period when he and the Ertegun brothers were thinking of selling Atlantic and getting out of the music business, and so while he signed her to the label he was originally going to hand her over to Jim Stewart at Stax to record, as he had with Sam and Dave. But in a baffling turn of events, Jim Stewart didn't actually want to record her, and so Wexler determined that he had better do it himself. And he didn't want to do it with slick New York musicians -- he wanted to bring out the gospel sound in her voice, and he thought the best way to do that was with musicians from what Charles Hughes refers to as "the country-soul triangle" of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. So he booked a week's worth of sessions at FAME studios, and got in FAME's regular rhythm section, plus a couple of musicians from American Recordings in Memphis -- Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham. Oldham's friend and songwriting partner Dan Penn came along as well -- he wasn't officially part of the session, but he was a fan of Aretha's and wasn't going to miss this. Penn had been the first person that Rick Hall, the owner of FAME, had called when Wexler had booked the studio, because Hall hadn't actually heard of Aretha Franklin up to that point, but didn't want to let Wexler know that. Penn had assured him that Aretha was one of the all-time great talents, and that she just needed the right production to become massive. As Hall put it in his autobiography, "Dan tended in those days to hate anything he didn't write, so I figured if he felt that strongly about her, then she was probably going to be a big star." Charlie Chalmers, a horn player who regularly played with these musicians, was tasked with putting together a horn section. The first song they recorded that day was one that the musicians weren't that impressed with at first. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" was written by a songwriter named Ronnie Shannon, who had driven from Georgia to Detroit hoping to sell his songs to Motown. He'd popped into a barber's shop where Ted White was having his hair cut to ask for directions to Motown, and White had signed him to his own publishing company and got him to write songs for Aretha. On hearing the demo, the musicians thought that the song was mediocre and a bit shapeless: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) (demo)"] But everyone there was agreed that Aretha herself was spectacular. She didn't speak much to the musicians, just went to the piano and sat down and started playing, and Jerry Wexler later compared her playing to Thelonius Monk (who was indeed one of the jazz musicians who had influenced her). While Spooner Oldham had been booked to play piano, it was quickly decided to switch him to electric piano and organ, leaving the acoustic piano for Aretha to play, and she would play piano on all the sessions Wexler produced for her in future. Although while Wexler is the credited producer (and on this initial session Rick Hall at FAME is a credited co-producer), everyone involved, including Wexler, said that the musicians were taking their cues from Aretha rather than anyone else. She would outline the arrangements at the piano, and everyone else would fit in with what she was doing, coming up with head arrangements directed by her. But Wexler played a vital role in mediating between her and the musicians and engineering staff, all of whom he knew and she didn't. As Rick Hall said "After her brief introduction by Wexler, she said very little to me or anyone else in the studio other than Jerry or her husband for the rest of the day. I don't think Aretha and I ever made eye contact after our introduction, simply because we were both so totally focused on our music and consumed by what we were doing." The musicians started working on "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)", and at first found it difficult to get the groove, but then Oldham came up with an electric piano lick which everyone involved thought of as the key that unlocked the song for them: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)"] After that, they took a break. Most of them were pleased with the track, though Rick Hall wasn't especially happy. But then Rick Hall wasn't especially happy about anything at that point. He'd always used mono for his recordings until then, but had been basically forced to install at least a two-track system by Tom Dowd, Atlantic's chief engineer, and was resentful of this imposition. During the break, Dan Penn went off to finish a song he and Spooner Oldham had been writing, which he hoped Aretha would record at the session: [Excerpt: Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"] They had the basic structure of the song down, but hadn't quite finished the middle eight, and both Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin chipped in uncredited lyrical contributions -- Aretha's line was "as long as we're together baby, you'd better show some respect to me". Penn, Oldham, Chips Moman, Roger Hawkins, and Tommy Cogbill started cutting a backing track for the song, with Penn singing lead initially with the idea that Aretha would overdub her vocal. But while they were doing this, things had been going wrong with the other participants. All the FAME and American rhythm section players were white, as were Wexler, Hall, and Dowd, and Wexler had been very aware of this, and of the fact that they were recording in Alabama, where Aretha and her husband might not feel totally safe, so he'd specifically requested that the horn section at least contain some Black musicians. But Charlie Chalmers hadn't been able to get any of the Black musicians he would normally call when putting together a horn section, and had ended up with an all-white horn section as well, including one player, a trumpet player called Ken Laxton, who had a reputation as a good player but had never worked with any of the other musicians there -- he was an outsider in a group of people who regularly worked together and had a pre-existing relationship. As the two outsiders, Laxton and Ted White had, at first, bonded, and indeed had started drinking vodka together, passing a bottle between themselves, in a way that Rick Hall would normally not allow in a session -- at the time, the county the studio was in was still a dry county. But as Wexler said, “A redneck patronizing a Black man is a dangerous camaraderie,” and White and Laxton soon had a major falling out. Everyone involved tells a different story about what it was that caused them to start rowing, though it seems to have been to do with Laxton not showing the proper respect for Aretha, or even actually sexually assaulting her -- Dan Penn later said “I always heard he patted her on the butt or somethin', and what would have been wrong with that anyway?”, which says an awful lot about the attitudes of these white Southern men who thought of themselves as very progressive, and were -- for white Southern men in early 1967. Either way, White got very, very annoyed, and insisted that Laxton get fired from the session, which he was, but that still didn't satisfy White, and he stormed off to the motel, drunk and angry. The rest of them finished cutting a basic track for "Do Right Woman", but nobody was very happy with it. Oldham said later “She liked the song but hadn't had time to practice it or settle into it I remember there was Roger playing the drums and Cogbill playing the bass. And I'm on these little simplistic chords on organ, just holding chords so the song would be understood. And that was sort of where it was left. Dan had to sing the vocal, because she didn't know the song, in the wrong key for him. That's what they left with—Dan singing the wrong-key vocal and this little simplistic organ and a bass and a drum. We had a whole week to do everything—we had plenty of time—so there was no hurry to do anything in particular.” Penn was less optimistic, saying "But as I rem

Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire" by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. 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 "My Friend Jack" by the Smoke. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode and the shorter spoken-word tracks. Information on Dick Bock, World Pacific, and Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger have all released autobiographies. Densmore's is out of print, but I referred to Manzarek's and Krieger's here. Of the two Krieger's is vastly more reliable. I also used Mick Wall's book on the Doors and Stephen Davis' biography of Jim Morrison. Information about Elektra Records came from Follow the Music by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, which is available as a free PDF download on Elektra's website. Biographical information on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi comes from this book, written by one of his followers. The Doors' complete studio albums can be bought as MP3s for £14. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are two big problems that arise for anyone trying to get an accurate picture of history, and which have certainly arisen for me during the course of this podcast -- things which make sources unreliable enough that you feel you have to caveat everything you say on a subject. One of those is hagiography, and the converse desire to tear heroes down. No matter what one wants to say on, say, the subjects of Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith, the only sources we have for their lives are written either by people who want to present them as unblemished paragons of virtue, or by people who want to destroy that portrayal -- we know that any source is written by someone with a bias, and it might be a bias we agree with, but it's still a bias. The other, related, problem, is deliberate disinformation. This comes up especially for people dealing with military history -- during conflicts, governments obviously don't want their opponents to know when their attacks have caused damage, or to know what their own plans are, and after a war has concluded the belligerent parties want to cover up their own mistakes and war crimes. We're sadly seeing that at the moment in the situation in Ukraine -- depending on one's media diet, one could get radically different ideas of what is actually going on in that terrible conflict. But it happens all the time, in all wars, and on all sides. Take the Vietnam War. While the US was involved on the side of the South Vietnamese government from the start of that conflict, it was in a very minor way, mostly just providing supplies and training. Most historians look at the real start of US involvement in that war as having been in August 1964. President Johnson had been wanting, since assuming the Presidency in November 1963 after the death of John F Kennedy, to get further into the war, but had needed an excuse to do so. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident provided him with that excuse. On August the second, a fleet of US warships entered into what the North Vietnamese considered their territorial waters -- they used a different distance from shore to mark their territorial waters than most other countries used, and one which wasn't generally accepted, but which they considered important. Because of this, some North Vietnamese ships started following the American ones. The American ships, who thought they weren't doing anything wrong, set off what they considered to be warning shots, and the North Vietnamese ships fired back, which to the American ships was considered them attacking. Some fire was exchanged, but not much happened. Two days later, the American ships believed they were getting attacked again, and spent several hours firing at what they believed were North Vietnamese submarines. It was later revealed that this was just the American sonar systems playing up, and that they were almost certainly firing at nothing at all, and some even suspected that at the time -- President Johnson apparently told other people in confidence that in his opinion they'd been firing at stray dolphins. But that second "attack", however flimsy the evidence, was enough that Johnson could tell Congress and the nation that an American fleet had been attacked by the North Vietnamese, and use that as justification to get Congress to authorise him sending huge numbers of troops to Vietnam, and getting America thoroughly embroiled in a war that would cost innumerable lives and billions of dollars for what turned out to be no benefit at all to anyone. The commander of the US fleet involved in the Gulf of Tonkin operation was then-Captain, later Rear Admiral, Steve Morrison: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] We've talked a bit in this podcast previously about the development of jazz in the forties, fifties, and early sixties -- there was a lot of back and forth influence in those days between jazz, blues, R&B, country, and rock and roll, far more than one might imagine looking at the popular histories of these genres, and so we've looked at swing, bebop, and modal jazz before now. But one style of music we haven't touched on is the type that was arguably the most popular and influential style of jazz in the fifties, even though we've mentioned several of the people involved in it. We've never yet had a proper look at Cool Jazz. Cool Jazz, as its name suggests, is a style of music that was more laid back than the more frenetic bebop or hard-edged modal jazz. It was a style that sounded sophisticated, that sounded relaxed, that prized melody and melodic invention over super-fast technical wizardry, and that produced much of what we now think of when we think of "jazz" as a popular style of music. The records of Dave Brubeck, for example, arguably the most popular fifties jazz musician, are very much in the "cool jazz" mode: [Excerpt: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"] And we have mentioned on several occasions the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were cited as influences by everyone from Ray Charles to the Kinks to the Modern Folk Quartet: [Excerpt: The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Regret?"] We have also occasionally mentioned people like Mose Allison, who occasionally worked in the Cool Jazz mode. But we've never really looked at it as a unified thing. Cool Jazz, like several of the other developments in jazz we've looked at, owes its existence to the work of the trumpeter Miles Davis, who was one of the early greats of bop and who later pioneered modal jazz. In 1948, in between his bop and modal periods, Davis put together a short-lived nine-piece group, the Miles Davis Nonette, who performed together for a couple of weeks in late 1948, and who recorded three sessions in 1949 and 1950, but who otherwise didn't perform much. Each of those sessions had a slightly different lineup, but key people involved in the recordings were Davis himself, arranger Gil Evans, piano player John Lewis, who would later go on to become the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan. Mulligan and Evans, and the group's alto player Lee Konitz, had all been working for the big band Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, a band which along with the conventional swing instruments also had a French horn player and a tuba player, and which had recorded soft, mellow, relaxing music: [Excerpt: Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, "To Each His Own"] The Davis Nonette also included French horn and tuba, and was explicitly modelled on Thornhill's style, but in a stripped-down version. They used the style of playing that Thornhill preferred, with no vibrato, and with his emphasis on unison playing, with different instruments doubling each other playing the melody, rather than call-and response riffing: [Excerpt: The Miles Davis Nonette, "Venus De Milo"] Those recordings were released as singles in 1949 and 1950, and were later reissued in 1957 as an album titled "Birth of the Cool", by which point Cool Jazz had become an established style, though Davis himself had long since moved on in other musical directions. After the Birth of the Cool sessions, Gerry Mulligan had recorded an album as a bandleader himself, and then had moved to the West Coast, where he'd started writing arrangements for Stan Kenton, one of the more progressive big band leaders of the period: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton, "Young Blood"] While working for Kenton, Mulligan had started playing dates at a club called the Haig, where the headliner was the vibraphone player Red Norvo. While Norvo had started out as a big-band musician, playing with people like Benny Goodman, he had recently started working in a trio, with just a guitarist, initially Tal Farlowe, and bass player, initially Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Red Norvo, "This Can't Be Love"] By 1952 Mingus had left Norvo's group, but they were still using the trio format, and that meant there was no piano at the venue, which meant that Mulligan had to form a band that didn't rely on the chordal structures that a piano would provide -- the idea of a group with a rhythm section that *didn't* have a piano was quite an innovation in jazz at this time, and freeing themselves from that standard instrument ended up opening up extra possibilities. His group consisted of himself on saxophone, Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums. They made music in much the same loose, casual, style as the recordings Mulligan had made with Davis, but in a much smaller group with the emphasis being on the interplay between Mulligan and Baker. And this group were the first group to record on a new label, Pacific Jazz, founded by Dick Bock. Bock had served in the Navy during World War II, and had come back from the South Pacific with two tastes -- a taste for hashish, and for music that was outside the conventional American pop mould. Bock *loved* the Mulligan Quartet, and in partnership with his friend Roy Harte, a notable jazz drummer, he raised three hundred and fifty dollars to record the first album by Mulligan's new group: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "Aren't You Glad You're You?"] Pacific Jazz, the label Bock and Harte founded, soon became *the* dominant label for Cool Jazz, which also became known as the West Coast Sound.  The early releases on the label were almost entirely by the Mulligan Quartet, released either under Mulligan's name, as by Chet Baker, or as "Lee Konitz and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet" when Mulligan's old bandmate Konitz joined them. These records became big hits, at least in the world of jazz. But both Mulligan and Baker were heroin addicts, and in 1953 Mulligan got arrested and spent six months in prison. And while he was there, Chet Baker made some recordings in his own right and became a bona fide star. Not only was Baker a great jazz trumpet player, he was also very good looking, and it turned out he could sing too. The Mulligan group had made the song "My Funny Valentine" one of the highlights of its live shows, with Baker taking a trumpet solo: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "My Funny Valentine"] But when Baker recorded a vocal version, for his album Chet Baker Sings, it made Baker famous: [Excerpt: Chet Baker, "My Funny Valentine"] When Mulligan got out of prison, he wanted to rehire Baker, but Baker was now topping the popularity polls in all the jazz magazines, and was the biggest breakout jazz star of the early fifties. But Mulligan formed a new group, and this just meant that Pacific Jazz had *two* of the biggest acts in jazz on its books now, rather than just one. But while Bock loved jazz, he was also fascinated by other kinds of music, and while he was in New York at the beginning of 1956 he was invited by his friend George Avakian, a producer who had worked with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and others, to come and see a performance by an Indian musician he was working with. Avakian was just about to produce Ravi Shankar's first American album, The Sounds of India, for Columbia Records. But Columbia didn't think that there was much of a market for Shankar's music -- they were putting it out as a speciality release rather than something that would appeal to the general public -- and so they were happy for Bock to sign Shankar to his own label. Bock renamed the company World Pacific, to signify that it was now going to be putting out music from all over the world, not just jazz, though he kept the Pacific Jazz label for its jazz releases, and he produced Shankar's next album,  India's Master Musician: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Charu Keshi"] Most of Shankar's recordings for the next decade would be produced by Bock, and Bock would also try to find ways to combine Shankar's music with jazz, though Shankar tried to keep a distinction between the two. But for example on Shankar's next album for World Pacific, Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali, he was joined by a group of West Coast jazz musicians including Bud Shank (who we'll hear about again in a future episode) on flute: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] But World Pacific weren't just putting out music. They also put out spoken-word records. Some of those were things that would appeal to their jazz audience, like the comedy of Lord Buckley: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Willy the Shake"] But they also put out spoken-word albums that appealed to Bock's interest in spirituality and philosophy, like an album by Gerald Heard. Heard had previously written the liner notes for Chet Baker Sings!, but as well as being a jazz fan Heard was very connected in the world of the arts -- he was a very close friend with Aldous Huxley -- and was also interested in various forms of non-Western spirituality. He practiced yoga, and was also fascinated by Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism: [Excerpt: Gerald Heard, "Paraphrased from the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu"] We've come across Heard before, in passing, in the episode on "Tomorrow Never Knows", when Ralph Mentzner said of his experiments with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions" -- Heard was friends with both Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and in fact had been invited by them to take part in the mescaline trip that Huxley wrote about in his book The Doors of Perception, the book that popularised psychedelic drug use, though Heard was unable to attend at that time. Heard was a huge influence on the early psychedelic movement -- though he always advised Leary and his associates not to be so public with their advocacy, and just to keep it to a small enlightened circle rather than risk the wrath of the establishment -- and he's cited by almost everyone in Leary's circle as having been the person who, more than anything else, inspired them to investigate both psychedelic drugs and mysticism. He's the person who connected Bill W. of Alcoholics Anonymous with Osmond and got him advocating LSD use. It was Heard's books that made Huston Smith, the great scholar of comparative religions and associate of Leary, interested in mysticism and religions outside his own Christianity, and Heard was one of the people who gave Leary advice during his early experiments. So it's not surprising that Bock also became interested in Leary's ideas before they became mainstream. Indeed, in 1964 he got Shankar to do the music for a short film based on The Psychedelic Experience, which Shankar did as a favour for his friend even though Shankar didn't approve of drug use. The film won an award in 1965, but quickly disappeared from circulation as its ideas were too controversial: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience (film)] And Heard introduced Bock to other ideas around philosophy and non-Western religions. In particular, Bock became an advocate for a little-known Hindu mystic who had visited the US in 1959 teaching a new style of meditation which he called Transcendental Meditation. A lot is unclear about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even his birth name -- both "Maharishi" and "Yogi" are honorifics rather than names as such, though he later took on both as part of his official name, and in this and future episodes I'll refer to him as "the Maharishi". What we do know is that he was born in India, and had attained a degree in physics before going off to study with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a teacher of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Now, I am not a Hindu, and only have a passing knowledge of Hindu theology and traditions, and from what I can gather getting a proper understanding requires a level of cultural understanding I don't have, and in particular a knowledge of the Sanskrit language, so my deepest apologies for any mangling I do of these beliefs in trying to talk about them as they pertain to mid-sixties psychedelic rock. I hope my ignorance is forgivable, and seen as what it is rather than malice. But the teachings of this school as I understand them seem to centre around an idea of non-separation -- that God is in all things, and is all things, and that there is no separation between different things, and that you merely have to gain a deep realisation of this. The Maharishi later encapsulated this in the phrase "I am that, thou art that, all this is that", which much later the Beach Boys, several of whom were followers of the Maharishi, would turn into a song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "All This is That"] The other phrase they're singing there, "Jai Guru Dev" is also a phrase from the Maharishi, and refers to his teacher Brahmananda Saraswati -- it means "all hail the divine teacher" or "glory to the heavenly one", and "guru dev" or "guru deva" was the name the Maharishi would use for Saraswati after his death, as the Maharishi believed that Saraswati was an actual incarnation of God. It's that phrase that John Lennon is singing in "Across the Universe" as well, another song later inspired by the Maharishi's teachings: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The Maharishi became, by his own account, Saraswati's closest disciple, advisor, and right-hand man, and was privy to his innermost thoughts. However, on Saraswati's death the leadership of the monastery he led became deeply contested, with two different rivals to the position, and the Maharishi was neither -- the rules of the monastery said that only people born into the Brahmin caste could reach the highest positions in the monastery's structure, and the Maharishi was not a Brahmin. So instead of remaining in the monastery, the Maharishi went out into the world to teach a new form of meditation which he claimed he had learned from Guru Dev, a technique which became known as transcendental meditation. The Maharishi would, for the rest of his life, always claim that the system he taught was Guru Dev's teaching for the world, not his own, though the other people who had been at the monastery with him said different things about what Saraswati had taught -- but of course it's perfectly possible for a spiritual leader to have had multiple ideas and given different people different tasks. The crucial thing about the Maharishi's teaching, the way it differed from everything else in the history of Hindu monasticism (as best I understand this) is that all previous teachers of meditation had taught that to get the benefit of the techniques one had to be a renunciate -- you should go off and become a monk and give up all worldly pleasures and devote your life to prayer and meditation. Traditionally, Hinduism has taught that there are four stages of life -- the student, the householder or married person with a family, the retired person, and the Sanyasi, or renunciate, but that you could skip straight from being a student to being a Sanyasi and spend your life as a monk. The Maharishi, though, said: "Obviously enough there are two ways of life: the way of the Sanyasi and the way of life of a householder. One is quite opposed to the other. A Sanyasi renounces everything of the world, whereas a householder needs and accumulates everything. The one realises, through renunciation and detachment, while the other goes through all attachments and accumulation of all that is needed for physical life." What the Maharishi taught was that there are some people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by giving up all the pleasures of the senses, eating the plainest possible food, having no sexual, familial, or romantic connections with anyone else, and having no possessions, while there are other people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by being really rich and having a lot of nice stuff and loads of friends and generally enjoying the pleasures of the flesh -- and that just as there are types of meditation that can help the first group reach enlightenment, there are also types of meditation that will fit into the latter kind of lifestyle, and will help those people reach oneness with God but without having to give up their cars and houses and money. And indeed, he taught that by following his teachings you could get *more* of those worldly pleasures. All you had to do, according to his teaching, was to sit still for fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a day, and concentrate on a single Sanskrit word or phrase, a mantra, which you would be given after going through a short course of teaching. There was nothing else to it, and you would eventually reach the same levels of enlightenment as the ascetics who spent seventy years living in a cave and eating only rice -- and you'd end up richer, too. The appeal of this particular school is, of course, immediately apparent, and Bock became a big advocate of the Maharishi, and put out three albums of his lectures: [Excerpt: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "Deep Meditation"] Bock even met his second wife at one of the Maharishi's lectures, in 1961. In the early sixties, World Pacific got bought up by Liberty Records, the label for which Jan and Dean and others recorded, but Bock remained in charge of the label, and expanded it, adding another subsidiary, Aura Records, to put out rock and roll singles. Aura was much less successful than the other World Pacific labels. The first record the label put out was a girl-group record, "Shooby Dooby", by the Lewis Sisters, two jazz-singing white schoolteachers from Michigan who would later go on to have a brief career at Motown: [Excerpt: The Lewis Sisters, "Shooby Dooby"] The most successful act that Aura ever had was Sonny Knight, an R&B singer who had had a top twenty hit in 1956 with "Confidential", a song he'd recorded on Specialty Records with Bumps Blackwell, and which had been written by Dorinda Morgan: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "Confidential"] But Knight's biggest hit on Aura, "If You Want This Love", only made number seventy-one on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "If You Want This Love"] Knight would later go on to write a novel, The Day the Music Died, which Greil Marcus described as "the bitterest book ever written about how rock'n'roll came to be and what it turned into". Marcus said it was about "how a rich version of American black culture is transformed into a horrible, enormously profitable white parody of itself: as white labels sign black artists only to ensure their oblivion and keep those blacks they can't control penned up in the ghetto of the black charts; as white America, faced with something good, responds with a poison that will ultimately ruin even honest men". Given that Knight was the artist who did the *best* out of Aura Records, that says a great deal about the label. But one of the bands that Aura signed, who did absolutely nothing on the charts, was a group called Rick and the Ravens, led by a singer called Screamin' Ray Daniels. They were an LA club band who played a mixture of the surf music which the audiences wanted and covers of blues songs which Daniels preferred to sing. They put out two singles on Aura, "Henrietta": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Henrietta"] and "Soul Train": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Soul Train"] Ray Daniels was a stage name -- his birth name was Ray Manzarek, and he would later return to that name -- and the core of the band was Ray on vocals and his brothers Rick on guitar and Jim on harmonica. Manzarek thought of himself as a pretty decent singer, but they were just a bar band, and music wasn't really his ideal career.  Manzarek had been sent to college by his solidly lower-middle-class Chicago family in the hope that he would become a lawyer, but after getting a degree in economics and a brief stint in the army, which he'd signed up for to avoid getting drafted in the same way people like Dean Torrence did, he'd gone off to UCLA to study film, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. His family had followed him to California, and he'd joined his brothers' band as a way of making a little extra money on the side, rather than as a way to become a serious musician. Manzarek liked the blues songs they performed, and wasn't particularly keen on the surf music, but thought it was OK. What he really liked, though, was jazz -- he was a particular fan of McCoy Tyner, the pianist on all the great John Coltrane records: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was a piano player himself, though he didn't play much with the Ravens, and he wanted more than anything to be able to play like Tyner, and so when Rick and the Ravens got signed to Aura Records, he of course became friendly with Dick Bock, who had produced so many great jazz records and worked with so many of the greats of the genre. But Manzarek was also having some problems in his life. He'd started taking LSD, which was still legal, and been fascinated by its effects, but worried that he couldn't control them -- he couldn't tell whether he was going to have a good trip or a bad one. He was wondering if there was a way he could have the same kind of revelatory mystical experience but in a more controlled manner. When he mentioned this to Bock, Bock told him that the best method he knew for doing that was transcendental meditation. Bock gave him a copy of one of the Maharishi's albums, and told him to go to a lecture on transcendental meditation, run by the head of the Maharishi's west-coast organisation, as by this point the Maharishi's organisation, known as Spiritual Regeneration, had an international infrastructure, though it was still nowhere near as big as it would soon become. At the lecture, Manzarek got talking to one of the other audience members, a younger man named John Densmore. Densmore had come to the lecture with his friend Robby Krieger, and both had come for the same reason that Manzarek had -- they'd been having bad trips and so had become a little disillusioned with acid. Krieger had been the one who'd heard about transcendental meditation, while he was studying the sitar and sarod at UCLA -- though Krieger would later always say that his real major had been in "not joining the Army". UCLA had one of the few courses in Indian music available in the US at the time, as thanks in part to Bock California had become the centre of American interest in music from India -- so much so that in 1967 Ravi Shankar would open up a branch of his own Kinnara Music School there. (And you can get an idea of how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction when researching this episode that one of the biographies I've used for the Doors says that Krieger heard about the Maharishi while studying at the Kinnara school. As the only branch of the Kinnara school that was open at this point was in Mumbai, it's safe to say that unless Krieger had a *really* long commute he wasn't studying there at this point.) Densmore and Manzarek got talking, and they found that they shared a lot of the same tastes in jazz -- just as Manzarek was a fan of McCoy Tyner, so Densmore was a fan of Elvin Jones, the drummer on those Coltrane records, and they both loved the interplay of the two musicians: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was starting to play a bit more keyboards with the Ravens, and he was also getting annoyed with the Ravens' drummer, who had started missing rehearsals -- he'd turn up only for the shows themselves. He thought it might be an idea to get Densmore to join the group, and Densmore agreed to come along for a rehearsal. That initial rehearsal Densmore attended had Manzarek and his brothers, and may have had a bass player named Patricia Hansen, who was playing with the group from time to time around this point, though she was mostly playing with a different bar band, Patty and the Esquires. But as well as the normal group members, there was someone else there, a friend of Manzarek's from film school named Jim Morrison. Morrison was someone who, by Manzarek's later accounts, had been very close to Manzarek at university, and who Manzarek had regarded as a genius, with a vast knowledge of beat poetry and European art film, but who had been regarded by most of the other students and the lecturers as being a disruptive influence. Morrison had been a fat, asthmatic, introverted kid -- he'd had health problems as a child, including a bout of rheumatic fever which might have weakened his heart, and he'd also been prone to playing the kind of "practical jokes" which can often be a cover for deeper problems. For example, as a child he was apparently fond of playing dead -- lying in the corridors at school and being completely unresponsive for long periods no matter what anyone did to move him, then suddenly getting up and laughing at anyone who had been concerned and telling them it was a joke. Given how frequently Morrison would actually pass out in later life, often after having taken some substance or other, at least one biographer has suggested that he might have had undiagnosed epilepsy (or epilepsy that was diagnosed but which he chose to keep a secret) and have been having absence seizures and covering for them with the jokes. Robby Krieger also says in his own autobiography that he used to have the same doctor as Morrison, and the doctor once made an offhand comment about Morrison having severe health problems, "as if it was common knowledge". His health difficulties, his weight, his introversion, and the experience of moving home constantly as a kid because of his father's career in the Navy, had combined to give him a different attitude to most of his fellow students, and in particular a feeling of rootlessness -- he never owned or even rented his own home in later years, just moving in with friends or girlfriends -- and a lack of sense of his own identity, which would often lead to him making up lies about his life and acting as if he believed them. In particular, he would usually claim to friends that his parents were dead, or that he had no contact with them, even though his family have always said he was in at least semi-regular contact. At university, Morrison had been a big fan of Rick and the Ravens, and had gone to see them perform regularly, but would always disrupt the shows -- he was, by all accounts, a lovely person when sober but an aggressive boor when drunk -- by shouting out for them to play "Louie Louie", a song they didn't include in their sets. Eventually one of Ray's brothers had called his bluff and said they'd play the song, but only if Morrison got up on stage and sang it. He had -- the first time he'd ever performed live -- and had surprised everyone by being quite a good singer. After graduation, Morrison and Manzarek had gone their separate ways, with Morrison saying he was moving to New York. But a few weeks later they'd encountered each other on the beach -- Morrison had decided to stay in LA, and had been staying with a friend, mostly sleeping on the friend's rooftop. He'd been taking so much LSD he'd forgotten to eat for weeks at a time, and had lost a great deal of weight, and Manzarek properly realised for the first time that his friend was actually good-looking. Morrison also told Manzarek that he'd been writing songs -- this was summer 1965, and the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", and the Stones' "Satisfaction" had all shown him that there was potential for pop songs to have more interesting lyrical content than "Louie Louie". Manzarek asked him to sing some of the songs he'd been writing, and as Manzarek later put it "he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the Turkey Joint, but in a Chet Baker voice". The first song Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek was one of the songs that Rick and the Ravens would rehearse that first time with John Densmore, "Moonlight Drive": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Moonlight Drive"] Manzarek invited Morrison to move in with him and his girlfriend. Manzarek seems to have thought of himself as a mentor, a father figure, for Morrison, though whether that's how Morrison thought of him is impossible to say. Manzarek, who had a habit of choosing the myth over the truth, would later claim that he had immediately decided that he and Morrison were going to be a duo and find a whole new set of musicians, but all the evidence points to him just inviting Morrison to join the Ravens as the singer Certainly the first recordings this group made, a series of demos, were under Rick and the Ravens' name, and paid for by Aura Records. They're all of songs written by Morrison, and seem to be sung by Morrison and Manzarek in close harmony throughout. But the demos did not impress the head of Liberty Records, which now owned Aura, and who saw no commercial potential in them, even in one that later became a number one hit when rerecorded a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Hello I Love You"] Although to be fair, that song is clearly the work of a beginning songwriter, as Morrison has just taken the riff to "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks, and stuck new words to it: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day and All of the Night"] But it seems to have been the lack of success of these demos that convinced Manzarek's brothers and Patricia Hansen to quit the band. According to Manzarek, his brothers were not interested in what they saw as Morrison's pretensions towards poetry, and didn't think this person who seemed shy and introverted in rehearsals but who they otherwise knew as a loud annoying drunk in the audience would make a good frontman. So Rick and the Ravens were down to just Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, and John Densmore, but they continued shopping their demos around, and after being turned down by almost everyone they were signed by Columbia Records, specifically by Billy James, who they liked because he'd written the liner notes to a Byrds album, comparing them to Coltrane, and Manzarek liked the idea of working with an A&R man who knew Coltrane's work, though he wasn't impressed by the Byrds themselves, later writing "The Byrds were country, they didn't have any black in them at all. They couldn't play jazz. Hell, they probably didn't even know anything about jazz. They were folk-rock, for cri-sake. Country music. For whites only." (Ray Manzarek was white). They didn't get an advance from Columbia, but they did get free equipment -- Columbia had just bought Vox, who made amplifiers and musical instruments, and Manzarek in particular was very pleased to have a Vox organ, the same kind that the Animals and the Dave Clark Five used. But they needed a guitarist and a bass player. Manzarek claimed in his autobiography that he was thinking along the lines of a four-piece group even before he met Densmore, and that his thoughts had been "Someone has to be Thumper and someone has to be Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz. And the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have to make the music I heard in my head." But whatever Manzarek was thinking, there were only two people who auditioned for the role of the guitar player in this new version of the band, both of them friends of Densmore, and in fact two people who had been best friends since high school -- Bill Wolff and Robby Krieger. Wolff and Krieger had both gone to private boarding school -- they had both originally gone to normal state schools, but their parents had independently decided they were bad influences on each other and sent them away to boarding school to get away from each other, but accidentally sent them to the same school -- and had also learned guitar together. They had both loved a record of flamenco guitar called Dos Flamencos by Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino: [Excerpt: Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino, "Caracolés"] And they'd decided they were going to become the new Dos Flamencos. They'd also regularly sneaked out of school to go and see a jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a band which featured Bob Weir, who was also at their school, along with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen McKernan. Krieger was also a big fan of folk and blues music, especially bluesy folk-revivalists like Spider John Koerner, and was a massive fan of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Krieger and Densmore had known each other before Krieger had been transferred to boarding school, and had met back up at university, where they would hang out together and go to see Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, and other jazz musicians. At this time Krieger had still been a folk and blues purist, but then he went to see Chuck Berry live, mostly because Skip James and Big Mama Thornton were also on the bill, and he had a Damascene conversion -- the next day he went to a music shop and traded in his acoustic for a red Gibson, as close to the one Chuck Berry played as he could find. Wolff, Densmore, Krieger, and piano player Grant Johnson had formed a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and when the Ravens were looking for a new guitarist, it was natural that they tried the two guitarists from Densmore's other band. Krieger had the advantage over Wolff for two reasons -- one of which was actually partly Wolff's doing. To quote Krieger's autobiography: "A critic once said I had 'the worst hair in rock 'n' roll'. It stung pretty bad, but I can't say they were wrong. I always battled with my naturally frizzy, kinky, Jewfro, so one day my friend Bill Wolff and I experimented with Ultra Sheen, a hair relaxer marketed mainly to Black consumers. The results were remarkable. Wolff, as we all called him, said 'You're starting to look like that jerk Bryan MacLean'". According to Krieger, his new hairdo made him better looking than Wolff, at least until the straightener wore off, and this was one of the two things that made the group choose him over Wolff, who was a better technical player. The other was that Krieger played with a bottleneck, which astonished the other members. If you're unfamiliar with bottleneck playing, it's a common technique in the blues. You tune your guitar to an open chord, and then use a resonant tube -- these days usually a specially-made metal slide that goes on your finger, but for older blues musicians often an actual neck of a bottle, broken off and filed down -- to slide across the strings. Slide guitar is one of the most important styles in blues, especially electric blues, and you can hear it in the playing of greats like Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Dust My Broom"] But while the members of the group all claimed to be blues fans -- Manzarek talks in his autobiography about going to see Muddy Waters in a club in the South Side of Chicago where he and his friends were the only white faces in the audience -- none of them had any idea what bottleneck playing was, and Manzarek was worried when Krieger pulled it out that he was going to use it as a weapon, that being the only association he had with bottle necks. But once Krieger played with it, they were all convinced he had to be their guitarist, and Morrison said he wanted that sound on everything. Krieger joining seems to have changed the dynamic of the band enormously. Both Morrison and Densmore would independently refer to Krieger as their best friend in the band -- Manzarek said that having a best friend was a childish idea and he didn't have one. But where before this had been Manzarek's band with Morrison as the singer, it quickly became a band centred around the creative collaboration between Krieger and Morrison. Krieger seems to have been too likeable for Manzarek to dislike him, and indeed seems to have been the peacemaker in the band on many occasions, but Manzarek soon grew to resent Densmore, seemingly as the closeness he had felt to Morrison started to diminish, especially after Morrison moved out of Manzarek's house, apparently because Manzarek was starting to remind him of his father. The group soon changed their name from the Ravens to one inspired by Morrison's reading. Aldous Huxley's book on psychedelic drugs had been titled The Doors of Perception, and that title had in turn come from a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the great mystic poet and artist William Blake, who had written "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Incidentally, in one of those weird coincidences that I like to note when they come up, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell had also inspired the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, about the divorce of heaven and hell, and both Lewis and Huxley died on the same date, the twenty-second of November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy died). Morrison decided that he wanted to rename the group The Doors, although none of the other group members were particularly keen on the idea -- Krieger said that he thought they should name the group Perception instead. Initially the group rehearsed only songs written by Morrison, along with a few cover versions. They worked up a version of Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man", originally recorded by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] And a version of "Alabama Song", a song written by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill, from the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with English language lyrics by  Elisabeth Hauptmann. That song had originally been recorded by Lotte Lenya, and it was her version that the group based their version on, at the suggestion of Manzarek's girlfriend: [Excerpt: Lotte Lenya, "Alabama Song"] Though it's likely given their tastes in jazz that they were also aware of a recent recording of the song by Eric Dolphy and John Lewis: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy and John Lewis, "Alabama Song"] But Morrison started to get a little dissatisfied with the fact that he was writing all the group's original material at this point, and he started to put pressure on the others to bring in songs. One of the first things they had agreed was that all band members would get equal credit and shares of the songwriting, so that nobody would have an incentive to push their own mediocre song at the expense of someone else's great one, but Morrison did want the others to start pulling their weight. As it would turn out, for the most part Manzarek and Densmore wouldn't bring in many song ideas, but Krieger would, and the first one he brought in would be the song that would make them into stars. The song Krieger brought in was one he called "Light My Fire", and at this point it only had one verse and a chorus. According to Manzarek, Densmore made fun of the song when it was initially brought in, saying "we're not a folk-rock band" and suggesting that Krieger might try selling it to the Mamas and the Papas, but the other band members liked it -- but it's important to remember here that Manzarek and Densmore had huge grudges against each other for most of their lives, and that Manzarek is not generally known as an entirely reliable narrator. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about the influences that have been acknowledged for this song, but before I do there's one that I haven't seen mentioned much but which seems to me to be very likely to have at least been a subconscious influence -- "She's Not There" by the Zombies: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Now, there are several similarities to note about the Zombies record. First, like the Doors, the Zombies were a keyboard-driven band. Second, there's the dynamics of the songs -- both have soft, slightly jazzy verses and then a more straight-ahead rock chorus. And finally there's the verse chord sequence. The verse for "She's Not There" goes from Am to D repeatedly: [demonstrates] While the verse for "Light My Fire" goes from Am to F sharp minor -- and for those who don't know, the notes in a D chord are D, F sharp, and A, while the notes in an F sharp minor chord are F sharp, A, and C sharp -- they're very similar chords. So "She's Not There" is: [demonstrates] While "Light My Fire" is: [demonstrates] At least, that's what Manzarek plays. According to Krieger, he played an Asus2 chord rather than an A minor chord, but Manzarek heard it as an A minor and played that instead. Now again, I've not seen anyone acknowledge "She's Not There" as an influence, but given the other influences that they do acknowledge, and the music that was generally in the air at the time, it would not surprise me even the smallest amount if it was. But either way, what Krieger brought in was a simple verse and chorus: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] Incidentally, I've been talking about the song as having A minor chords, but you'll actually hear the song in two different keys during this episode, even though it's the same performance throughout, and sometimes it might not sound right to people familiar with a particular version of the record. The band played the song with the verse starting with A minor, and that's how the mono single mix was released, and I'll be using excerpts of that in general. But when the stereo version of the album was released, which had a longer instrumental break, the track was mastered about a semitone too slow, and that's what I'll be excerpting when talking about the solos -- and apparently that speed discrepancy has been fixed in more recent remasterings of the album than the one I'm using. So if you know the song and bits of what I play sound odd to you, that's why. Krieger didn't have a second verse, and so writing the second verse's lyrics was the next challenge. There was apparently some disagreement within the band about the lyrics that Morrison came up with, with their references to funeral pyres, but Morrison won the day, insisting that the song needed some darkness to go with the light of the first verse. Both verses would get repeated at the end of the song, in reverse order, rather than anyone writing a third or fourth verse. Morrison also changed the last line of the chorus -- in Krieger's original version, he'd sung "Come on baby, light my fire" three times, but Morrison changed the last line to "try to set the night on fire", which Krieger thought was a definite improvement. They then came up with an extended instrumental section for the band members to solo in. This was inspired by John Coltrane, though I have seen different people make different claims as to which particular Coltrane record it was inspired by. Many sources, including Krieger, say it was based on Coltrane's famous version of "My Favorite Things": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] But Manzarek in his autobiography says it was inspired by Ole, the track that Coltrane recorded with Eric Dolphy: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Ole"] Both are of course similar musical ideas, and either could have inspired the “Light My Fire” instrumental section, though none of the Doors are anything like as good or inventive on their instruments as Coltrane's group (and of course "Light My Fire" is in four-four rather than three-four): [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] So they had a basic verse-chorus song with a long instrumental jam session in the middle. Now comes the bit that there's some dispute over.  Both Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger agree that Manzarek came up with the melody used in the intro, but differ wildly over who came up with the chord sequence for it and when, and how it was put into the song. According to Manzarek, he came up with the whole thing as an intro for the song at that first rehearsal of it, and instructed the other band members what to do. According to Krieger, though, the story is rather different, and the evidence seems to be weighted in Krieger's favour. In early live performances of the song, they started the song with the Am-F sharp minor shifts that were used in the verse itself, and continued doing this even after the song was recorded: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (live at the Matrix)"] But they needed a way to get back out of the solo section and into the third verse. To do this, Krieger came up with a sequence that starts with a change from G to D, then from D to F, before going into a circle of fifths -- not the ascending circle of fifths in songs like "Hey Joe", but a descending one, the same sequence as in "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" or "I Will Survive", ending on an A flat: [demonstrates] To get from the A flat to the A minor or Asus2 chord on which the verse starts, he simply then shifted up a semitone from A flat to A major for two bars: [demonstrates] Over the top of that chord sequence that Krieger had come up with, Manzarek put a melody line which was inspired by one of Bach's two-part inventions. The one that's commonly cited is Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779"] Though I don't believe Manzarek has ever stated directly which piece he was inspired by other than that it was one of the two-part inventions, and to be honest none of them sound very much like what he plays to my ears, and I think more than anything he was just going for a generalised baroque style rather than anything more specific. And there are certainly stylistic things in there that are suggestive of the baroque -- the stepwise movement, the sort of skipping triplets, and so on: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] But that was just to get out of the solo section and back into the verses. It was only when they finally took the song into the studio that Paul Rothchild, the producer who we will talk about more later, came up with the idea of giving the song more structure by both starting and ending with that sequence, and formalised it so that rather than just general noodling it was an integral part of the song. They now had at least one song that they thought had the potential to be a big hit. The problem was that they had not as yet played any gigs, and nor did they have a record deal, or a bass player. The lack of a record deal may sound surprising, but they were dropped by Columbia before ever recording for them. There are several different stories as to why. One biography I've read says that after they were signed, none of the label's staff producers wanted to work with them and so they were dropped -- though that goes against some of the other things I've read, which say that Terry Melcher was interested in producing them. Other sources say that Morrison went in for a meeting with some of the company executives while on acid, came out very pleased with himself at how well he'd talked to them because he'd been able to control their minds with his telepathic powers, and they were dropped shortly afterwards. And others say that they were dropped as part of a larger set of cutbacks the company was making, and that while Billy James fought to keep them at Columbia, he lost the fight. Either way, they were stuck without a deal, and without any proper gigs, though they started picking up the odd private party here and there -- Krieger's father was a wealthy aerospace engineer who did some work for Howard Hughes among others, and he got his son's group booked to play a set of jazz standards at a corporate event for Hughes, and they got a few more gigs of that nature, though the Hughes gig didn't exactly go well -- Manzarek was on acid, Krieger and Morrison were on speed, and the bass player they brought in for the gig managed to break two strings, something that would require an almost superhuman effort. That bass player didn't last long, and nor did the next -- they tried several, but found that the addition of a bass player made them sound less interesting, more like the Animals or the Rolling Stones than a group with their own character. But they needed something to hold down the low part, and it couldn't be Manzarek on the organ, as the Vox organ had a muddy sound when he tried to play too many notes at once. But that problem solved itself when they played one of their earliest gigs. There, Manzarek found that another band, who were regulars at the club, had left their Fender keyboard bass there, clipped to the top of the piano. Manzarek tried playing that, and found he could play basslines on that with his left hand and the main parts with his right hand. Krieger got his father to buy one for the group -- though Manzarek was upset that they bought the wrong colour -- and they were now able to perform without a bass player. Not only that, but it gave the group a distinctive sound quite unlike all the other bands. Manzarek couldn't play busy bass lines while also playing lead lines with his right hand, and so he ended up going for simple lines without a great deal of movement, which added to the hypnotic feel of the group's music – though on records they would often be supplemented by a session bass player to give them a fuller sound. While the group were still trying to get a record deal, they were also looking for regular gigs, and eventually they found one. The Sunset Strip was *the* place to be, and they wanted desperately to play one of the popular venues there like the Whisky A-Go-Go, but those venues only employed bands who already had record deals. They did, though, manage to get a residency at a tiny, unpopular, club on the strip called The London Fog, and they played there, often to only a handful of people, while slowly building in confidence as performers. At first, Morrison was so shy that Manzarek had to sing harmony with him throughout the sets, acting as joint frontman. Krieger later said "It's rarely talked about, but Ray was a natural born showman, and his knack for stirring drama would serve the Doors' legacy well in later years" But Morrison soon gained enough confidence to sing by himself. But they weren't bringing in any customers, and the London Fog told them that they were soon going to be dropped -- and the club itself shut not long after. But luckily for the group, just before the end of their booking, the booker for the Whisky A-Go-Go, Ronnie Haran walked in with a genuine pop star, Peter Asher, who as half of Peter & Gordon had had a hit with "A World Without Love", written by his sister's boyfriend, Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Haran was impressed with the group, and they were impressed that she had brought in a real celebrity. She offered them a residency at the club, not as the headlining act -- that would always be a group that had records out -- but as the consistent support act for whichever big act they had booked. The group agreed -- after Morrison first tried to play it cool and told Haran they would have to consider it, to the consternation of his bandmates. They were thrilled, though, to discover that one of the first acts they supported at the Whisky would be Them, Van Morrison's group -- one of the cover versions they had been playing had been Them's "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] They supported Them for two weeks at the Whisky, and Jim Morrison watched Van Morrison intently. The two men had very similar personalities according to the other members of the Doors, and Morrison picked up a lot of his performing style from watching Van on stage every night. The last night Them played the venue, Morrison joined them on stage for an extended version of “Gloria” which everyone involved remembered as the highlight of their time there. Every major band on the LA scene played residencies at the Whisky, and over the summer of 1966 the Doors were the support act for the Mothers of Invention, the Byrds, the Turtles, the Buffalo Springfield, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. This was a time when the Sunset Strip was the centre of Californian musical life, before that centre moved to San Francisco, and the Doors were right at the heart of it. Though it wasn't all great -- this was also the period when there were a series of riots around Sunset Strip, as immortalised in the American International Pictures film Riot on Sunset Strip, and its theme song, by the Standells: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] We'll look at those riots in more detail in a future episode, so I'll leave discussing them for now, but I just wanted to make sure they got mentioned. That Standells song, incidentally, was co-written by John Fleck, who under his old name of John Fleckenstein we saw last episode as the original bass player for Love. And it was Love who ensured that the Doors finally got the record deal they needed. The deal came at a perfect time for the Doors -- just like when they'd been picked up by the Whisky A Go-Go just as they were about to lose their job at the London Fog, so they got signed to a record deal just as they were about to lose their job at the Whisky. They lost that job because of a new song that Krieger and Morrison had written. "The End" had started out as Krieger's attempt at writing a raga in the style of Ravi Shankar, and he had brought it in to one of his increasingly frequent writing sessions with Morrison, where the two of them would work out songs without the rest of the band, and Morrison had added lyrics to it. Lyrics that were partly inspired by his own fraught relationship with his parents, and partly by Oedipus Rex: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] And in the live performance, Morrison had finished that phrase with the appropriate four-letter Oedipal payoff, much to the dismay of the owners of the Whisky A Go Go, who had told the group they would no longer be performing there. But three days before that, the group had signed a deal with Elektra Records. Elektra had for a long time been a folk specialist label, but they had recently branched out into other music, first with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favourite of Robby Krieger's, and then with their first real rock signing, Love. And Love were playing a residency at the Whisky A Go Go, and Arthur Lee had encouraged Jac Holzman, the label's owner, to come and check out their support band, who he thought were definitely worth signing. The first time Holzman saw them he was unimpressed -- they sounded to him just like a bunch of other white blues bands -- but he trusted Arthur Lee's judgement and came back a couple more times. The third time, they performed their version of "Alabama Song", and everything clicked into place for Holzman. He immediately signed the group to a three-album deal with an option to extend it to seven. The group were thrilled -- Elektra wasn't a major label like Columbia, but they were a label that nurtured artists and wouldn't just toss them aside. They were even happier when soon after they signed to Elektra, the label signed up a new head of West Coast A&R -- Billy James, the man who had signed them to Columbia, and who they knew would be in their corner. Jac Holzman also had the perfect producer for the group, though he needed a little persuading. Paul Rothchild had made his name as the producer for the first couple of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] They were Robby Krieger's favourite group, so it made sense to have Rothchild on that level. And while Rothchild had mostly worked in New York, he was in LA that summer, working on the debut album by another Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. The musicians on Buckley's album were almost all part of the same LA scene that the Doors were part of -- other than Buckley's normal guitarist Lee Underwood there was keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, bass player Jim Fielder, who had had a brief stint in the Mothers of Invention and was about to join Buffalo Springfield, and drummer Billy Mundi, who was about to join the Mothers of Invention. And Buckley himself sang in a crooning voice extremely similar to that of Morrison, though Buckley had a much larger range: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] There was one problem, though -- Rothchild didn't want to do it. He wasn't at all impressed with the band at first, and he wanted to sign a different band, managed by Albert Grossman, instead. But Holzman persuaded him because Rothchild owed him a favour -- Rothchild had just spent several months in prison after a drug bust, and while he was inside Holzman had given his wife a job so she would have an income, and Holzman also did all the paperwork with Rothchild's parole officer to allow him to leave the state. So with great reluctance Rothchild took the job, though he soon came to appreciate the group's music. He didn't appreciate their second session though. The first day, they'd tried recording a version of "The End", but it hadn't worked, so on the second night they tried recording it again, but this time Morrison was on acid and behaving rather oddly. The final version of "The End" had to be cut together from two takes, and the reason is that at the point we heard earlier: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] Morrison was whirling around, thrashing about, and knocked over a TV that the engineer, Bruce Botnick, had brought into the studio so he could watch the baseball game -- which Manzarek later exaggerated to Morrison throwing the TV through the plate glass window between the studio and the control room. According to everyone else, Morrison just knocked it over and they picked it up after the take finished and it still worked fine. But Morrison had taken a *lot* of acid, and on the way home after the session he became convinced that he had a psychic knowledge that the studio was on fire. He got his girlfriend to turn the car back around, drove back to the studio, climbed over the fence, saw the glowing red lightbulbs in the studio, became convinced that they were fires, and sprayed the entire place with the fire extinguisher, before leaving convinced he had saved the band's equipment -- and leaving telltale evidence as his boot got stuck in the fence on the way out and he just left it there. But despite that little hiccup, the sessions generally went well, and the group and label were pleased with the results. The first single released from the album, "Break on Through", didn't make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Break on Through"] But when the album came out in January 1967, Elektra put all its resources behind the album, and it started to get a bit of airplay as a result. In particular, one DJ on the new FM radio started playing "Light My Fire" -- at this time, FM had only just started, and while AM radio stuck to three-minute singles for the most part, FM stations would play a wider variety of music. Some of the AM DJs started telling Elektra that they would play the record, too, if it was the length of a normal single, and so Rothchild and Botnick went into the studio and edited the track down to half its previous seven-and-a-half-minute length. When the group were called in to hear the edit, they were initially quite excited to hear what kind of clever editing microsurgery had been done to bring the song down to the required length, but they were horrified when Rothchild actually played it for them. As far as the group were concerned, the heart of the song was the extended instrumental improvisation that took up the middle section: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] On the album version, that lasted over three minutes. Rothchild and Botnick cut that section down to just this: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (single edit)"] The group were mortified -- what had been done to their song? That wasn't the sound of people trying to be McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, it was just... a pop song.  Rothchild explained that that was the point -- to get the song played on AM radio and get the group a hit. He pointed out how the Beatles records never had an instrumental section that lasted more than eight bars, and the group eventually talked them

"Flying Home" Benny Goodman Sextet Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Artie Bernstein, Nick Fatool. El tema es una composición de Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, Eddie DeLange. El tema se grabó el 2 de octubre del año 1939. Tras la intro de Henderson al piano sigue el solo de Goodman al clarinete, un soberbio Charlie Christian a la guitarra eléctrica, Lionel Hampton magnífico al vibráfono y finalmente el líder de la grabación al clarinete. © Pachi Tapiz, 2022 En anteriores episodios de JazzX5/HDO/LODLMA/Maltidos Jazztardos/Tomajazz Remembers… https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=42323 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=42447 Más información sobre Charlie Christian http://www.soloflight.cc/ Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html. Las sugerencias, quejas, felicitaciones, opiniones y el contacto en general en jazzx5 @ tomajazz.com También por WhatsApp en el teléfono de contacto. JazzX5 y los podcast de Tomajazz en Telegram En Tomajazz hemos abierto un canal de Telegram para que estés al tanto, al instante, de los nuevos podcast. Puedes suscribirte en https://t.me/TomajazzPodcast. Pachi Tapiz en Tomajazz https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=17847

"Seven Come Eleven" Benny Goodman Sextet Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Artie Bernstein, Nick Fatool. El tema es una composición de Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, Eddie DeLange. El tema se grabó el 22 de noviembre del año 1939. Comienza el turno de los solos con Goodman al clarinete, Charlie Christian a la guitarra eléctrica, Lionel Hampton al vibráfono y finalmente el líder de la grabación al clarinete. Este tema de estudio, disponible habitualmente en los recopilatorios de Columbia - Legacy no se debe confundir con la la versión en directo que grabó en el programa "Camel Caravan" de la NBC Radio Network en el hotel Waldorf Astoria de Nueva York el mismo sexteto tres días más tarde, en la que el guitarrista era capaz de estar todavía más entonado que en la versión de estudio. © Pachi Tapiz, 2022 En anteriores episodios de JazzX5/HDO/LODLMA/Maltidos Jazztardos/Tomajazz Remembers… https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=42323 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=42447 Más información sobre Charlie Christian http://www.soloflight.cc/ Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html. Las sugerencias, quejas, felicitaciones, opiniones y el contacto en general en jazzx5 @ tomajazz.com También por WhatsApp en el teléfono de contacto. JazzX5 y los podcast de Tomajazz en Telegram En Tomajazz hemos abierto un canal de Telegram para que estés al tanto, al instante, de los nuevos podcast. Puedes suscribirte en https://t.me/TomajazzPodcast. Pachi Tapiz en Tomajazz https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=17847

Hello and welcome to the final part of our Black History Month Celebration. I am one week behind due to the covid virus hitting my household. I think you will enjoy this set as these are some of the artists I didn't get around to in the previous two shows. Some of the artists on today's show include Charlie Christian, John Kirby, Louis Armstrong, The Ink Spots, Benny Moten, and Chu Berry. I hope you enjoy these great musicians from the Big Band Era. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

Five decades after David Bowie's seminal tour, we reflect on the concerts that have left a mark.Billie HolidayCafé Society, New York City, early 1939The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. The birth of bebopMinton's Playhouse, New York City, 1941Rising young originals such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the guitarist Charlie Christian lived off commercial swing gigs in 1941, but they forged the revolutionary modern jazz style called bebop in tumultuous after-hours Harlem jam sessions, where Thelonious Monk and the drums innovator Kenny Clarke were in the house band. Buddy Holly and the CricketsUK tour, March 1958Britain had never seen a rock band before March 1958. Then, for 25 consecutive nights, came the first true rock band – guitar, bass and drums, a revolution in horn-rimmed specs. A schoolboy Keith Richards caught a London show, but many more future stars would see Buddy Holly on TV during his visit, when he appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Muddy WatersWhalley Range, Manchester, 7 May 1964It was the brilliant idea of the Granada TV producer Johnnie Hamp to film a selection of blues greats in south Manchester's derelict Wilbraham Road railway station, mocked up to looked like the deep south, with “wanted” posters, washtubs and even goats and chickens. About 200 people arrived by rail to see the Gospel and Blues Train: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Cousin Joe, Otis Spann and the duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee giving intense performances on the platform. Waters was mobbed by blues-mad youngsters. Tharpe arrived in a pony and trap and seized the opportunity presented by a Mancunian downpour to strap on an electric guitar and launch spontaneously into Didn't It Rain? Countless musicians, including Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, subsequently told Hamp they were influenced by the show, which broadcast to millions and was instrumental in taking the blues explosion to the mainstream. Bob DylanNewport folk festival, Rhode Island, 25 July 1965 It was a Sunburst Fender Stratocaster that stole the show at Newport in 1965. Dylan's decision to play an electric guitar on a largely acoustic bill stunned the crowd, with many booing and jeering. Audiences for his world tour were similarly polarised, one disgruntled heckler in Manchester yelling: “Judas!” at the former folk hero. Essentially, it was the birth of folk rock – the real-time expansion of a genre. Frankie Valli and the Four SeasonsFranklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania, 1966A show in a college gym was the breakthrough that made arena rock possible. The PA system supplied by the Clair brothers so impressed Valli that he took them on tour as his personal sound engineers. Other artists noticed the quality and soon they were in demand. Their sound systems spurred rock's spread to the big halls. The Velvet UndergroundThe Dom, New York City, 7 April 1966A former Polish wedding hall hosted the birth of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Andy Warhol showed films and worked the lights, his “superstars” danced and the Velvet Underground played at a volume witnesses tended to describe in terms of violence: rock music as envelopment and sensory assault. The BeatlesCandlestick Park, San Francisco, 29 August 1966The Beatles' final real gig wasn't a great show. The stadium was half-empty, the band at the end of their tether, struggling to recreate the sound of their latest recordings. But it represented a shift in rock music: no more Beatles gigs meant more time in the studio – and albums that would change everything, again. The 14 Hour Technicolor DreamAlexandra Palace, London, 29 April 1967British counterculture's coming-out ball. Every one of the country's psychedelic luminaries played – Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Tomorrow and the Pretty Things among them. Performance art was provided by Yoko Ono, while the sense that the audience was as much part of the spectacle as the artists presaged 80s rave culture. Big Brother and the Holding CompanyJanis Joplin as part of Big Brother and the Holding CompanyJanis Joplin at Monterey as part of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Monterey pop festival, California, 17 June 1967Arriving at Monterey with a lesser-known San Francisco psychedelic bluesy rock band, 24-year-old Janis Joplin gleefully demolished every stereotype of the “demure” female singer. The hard-living, hard-rocking Texan's raucous, gut-wrenching performance attracted international attention and has been described as one of the greatest ever. Terry RileyPhiladelphia College of Art, 17 November 1967Not the birth of minimalism, but certainly its breakthrough. Riley's eight-hour set of tape manipulation and organ pulses, played to an audience seated on hammocks and cushions, generated an early recording of his classic Poppy Nogood and set the pace for electronic experimentalism in chill-out environments decades ahead. James Brown‘Are we together or we ain't?' James Brown calms stage invaders on 5 April 1968.Boston Garden, 5 April 1968The night after the assassination of Martin Luther King, violent protests spread across many US cities. In Boston, Brown's show was almost cancelled for fear it might become a hotspot for public outcry. Instead, the show was repurposed: broadcast live on TV and radio in an effort to ease the grief and tension. Fans climbed on stage as he sang I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me); police officers rallied. Brown paused the song. “I'll be fine,” he told the officers, then turned to the stage invaders: “You're not being fair to yourselves and me, or your race. Now, I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people … Are we together or we ain't?” The crowd cheered. The fans climbed down. Brown turned to the drummer: “Hit that thing, man.” Mahalia Jackson and Mavis StaplesHarlem cultural festival, New York City, 13 July 1969Effectively buried until the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul resurrected its memory, the 1969 Harlem cultural festival was possibly the greatest selection of black talent ever assembled, from Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone. If you had to pick a highlight, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples' charged performance of Take My Hand, Precious Lord might be it. Jimi HendrixJimi Hendrix at WoodstockWoodstock festival, New York, 18 August 1969Often cited as the gig that defined the 60s, the countercultural festival attracted half a million people to upstate New York. Hendrix's deconstruction of The Star-Spangled Banner was interpreted as a protest at the Vietnam war, while “three days of peace and love” showed that people power could change history. The WhoThe University of Leeds, 14 February 1970A Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque outside the university's refectory now honours the site of the incendiary live performance of the post-Tommy, Keith Moon-era Who captured on Live at Leeds, often cited as the greatest live rock album. Elton JohnThe Troubadour, Los Angeles, 25 August 1970Not quite overnight success, but close: Elton John walked on to the stage of a celebrity-packed Troubadour a largely unknown British singer-songwriter, and walked off it a star. Aside from the music, a backstage decision to wear an outrageous outfit and a burst of energetic showmanship midway through the gig helped: two lessons he has never forgotten. BB KingCook County jail, 10 September 1970Two years after Johnny Cash's turn at Folsom prison, the blues legend King performed in Chicago to an audience of 2,000 prisoners, mostly young and black. A subsequent live album highlighted the dire conditions at the jail, helping bring about prison reform, which became a lifelong cause for King. Aretha Franklin at Fillmore West5-7 March 1971Franklin's appearance at Fillmore West wasn't a star-making performance – she was already very much a star – but it featured the Queen of Soul at the peak of her powers, actively seeking to build a bridge to a post-hippy audience, covering Stephen Stills, Bread and the Beatles. Judging by the crowd's reaction, it worked. David BowieHammersmith Odeon, London, 3 July 1973The moment when David Bowie appears to announce his retirement during this show is astonishing: the crowd's screams become a vast howl of disappointment, peppered with yells of “No!” Did he mean it? Bob Marley & the WailersThe Lyceum, London, 17-18 July 1975Probably the most dynamic and exhilarating reggae concerts ever. Perhaps more importantly, the presentation was familiar enough to the rock establishment to allow them to feel comfortable with roots reggae. The Last WaltzWinterland Ballroom, San Francisco, 25 November 1976This Thanksgiving Day show was billed as the Band's “farewell concert appearance”. Sex PistolsRiver Thames, 7 June 1977Mick Smith, Consultant M: (619) 227.3118 E: mick.smith@wsiworld.com Commercials Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-1-commercials Narratives Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-2-narrativesDo you want a free competitive analysis? Let me know at:https://hubs.ly/Q0139TgJ0Website:https://www.wsiworld.com/mick-smithLinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/wsi-smith-consulting/Make an appointment:https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/mick-smithBe sure to subscribe, like, & review The Doctor of Digital™ Podcast:https://www.spreaker.com/show/g-mick-smith-phds-tracksSign up for the Doctor Up A Podcast course:https://doctor-up-a-podcast.thinkific.com/

Episode one hundred and thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, and the influence of jazz and Indian music on psychedelic rock. This is a long one... 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 "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as there were multiple artists with too many songs. Information on John Coltrane came from Coltrane by Ben Ratliffe, while information on Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This dissertation looks at the influence of Slonimsky on Coltrane. All Coltrane's music is worth getting, but this 5-CD set containing Impressions is the most relevant cheap selection of his material for these purposes. This collection has the Shankar material released in the West up to 1962. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This episode is the second part of a loose trilogy of episodes set in LA in 1966. We're going to be spending a *lot* of time around LA and Hollywood for the next few months -- seven of the next thirteen episodes are based there, and there'll be more after that. But it's going to take a while to get there. This is going to be an absurdly long episode, because in order to get to LA in 1966 again, we're going to have to start off in the 1940s in New York, and take a brief detour to India. Because in order to explain this: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] We're first going to have to explain this: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India (#3)"] Before we begin this, I just want to say something. This episode runs long, and covers a *lot* of musical ground, and as part of that it covers several of the most important musicians of the twentieth century -- but musicians in the fields of jazz, which is a music I know something about, but am not an expert in, and Hindustani classical music, which is very much not even close to my area of expertise. It also contains a chunk of music theory, which again, I know a little about -- but only really enough to know how much I don't know. I am going to try to get the information about these musicians right, but I want to emphasise that at times I will be straying *vastly* out of my lane, in ways that may well seem like they're minimising these musicians. I am trying to give just enough information about them to tell the story, and I would urge anyone who becomes interested in the music I talk about in the early parts of this episode to go out and find more expert sources to fill in the gap. And conversely, if you know more about these musics than I do, please forgive any inaccuracies. I am going to do my best to get all of this right, because accuracy is important, but I suspect that every single sentence in the first hour or so of this episode could be footnoted with something pointing out all the places where what I've said is only somewhat true. Also, I apologise if I mispronounce any names or words in this episode, though I've tried my best to get it right -- I've been unable to find recordings of some words and names being spoken, while with others I've heard multiple versions. To tell today's story, we're going to have to go right back to some things we looked at in the first episode, on "Flying Home". For those of you who don't remember -- which is fair enough, since that episode was more than three years ago -- in that episode we looked at a jazz record by the Benny Goodman Sextet, which was one of the earliest popular recordings to feature electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Flying Home"] Now, we talked about quite a lot of things in that episode which have played out in later episodes, but one thing we only mentioned in passing, there or later, was a style of music called bebop. We did talk about how Charlie Christian, the guitarist on that record, was one of the innovators of that style, but we didn't really go into what it was properly. Indeed, I deliberately did not mention in that episode something that I was saving until now, because we actually heard *two* hugely influential bebop musicians in that episode,  and I was leaving the other one to talk about here. In that episode we saw how Lionel Hampton, the Benny Goodman band's vibraphone player, went on to form his own band, and how that band became one of the foundational influences for the genres that became known as jump blues and R&B. And we especially noted the saxophone solo on Hampton's remake of "Flying Home", played by Illinois Jacquet: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, "Flying Home"] We mentioned in that episode how Illinois Jacquet's saxophone solo there set the template for all tenor sax playing in R&B and rock and roll music for decades to come -- his honking style became quite simply how you play rock and roll or R&B saxophone, and without that solo you don't have any of the records by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Coasters, or a dozen other acts that we discussed. But what we didn't look at in that episode is that that is a big band record, so of course there is more than just one saxophone player on it. And one of the other saxophone players on that recording is Dexter Gordon, a musician who was originally from LA. Those of you with long memories will remember that back in the first year or so of the podcast we talked a lot about the music programme at Jefferson High School in LA, and about Samuel Browne, the music teacher whose music programme gave the world the Coasters, the Penguins, the Platters, Etta James, Art Farmer, Richard Berry, Big Jay McNeely, Barry White, and more other important musicians than I can possibly name here. Gordon was yet another of Browne's students -- one who Browne regularly gave detention to, just to make him practice his scales. Gordon didn't get much chance to shine in the Lionel Hampton band, because he was only second tenor, with Jacquet taking many of the solos. But he was learning from playing in a band with Jacquet, and while Gordon didn't ever develop a honk like Jacquet's, he did adopt some of Jacquet's full tone in his own sound. There aren't many recordings of Gordon playing solos in his early years, because they coincided with the American Federation of Musicians' recording strike that we talked about in those early episodes, but he did record a few sessions in 1943 for a label small enough not to be covered by the ban, and you can hear something of Jacquet's tone in those recordings, along with the influence of Lester Young, who influenced all tenor sax players at this time: [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole with Dexter Gordon, "I've Found a New Baby"] The piano player on that session, incidentally, is Nat "King" Cole, when he was still one of the most respected jazz pianists on the scene, before he switched primarily to vocals. And Gordon took this Jacquet-influenced tone, and used it to become the second great saxophone hero of bebop music, after Charlie Parker -- and the first great tenor sax hero of the music. I've mentioned bebop before on several occasions, but never really got into it in detail. It was a style that developed in New York in the mid to late forties, and a lot of the earliest examples of it went unrecorded thanks to that musicians' strike, but the style emphasised small groups improvising together, and expanding their sense of melody and harmony. The music prized virtuosity and musical intelligence over everything else, and was fast and jittery-sounding. The musicians would go on long, extended, improvisations, incorporating ideas both from the blues and from the modern classical music of people like Bartok and Stravinsky, which challenged conventional tonality. In particular, one aspect which became prominent in bebop music was a type of scale known as the bebop scale. In most of the music we've looked at in this podcast to this point, the scales used have been seven-note scales -- do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti- which make an octave with a second, higher, do tone. So in the scale of C major we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then another C: [demonstrates] Bebop scales, on the other hand, would generally have an extra note in, making an eight-note scale, by adding in what is called a chromatic passing note. For example, a typical bebop C major scale might add in the note G#, so the scale would go C,D,E,F,G,G#, A, B, C: [demonstrates] You'd play this extra note for the most part, when moving between the two notes it's between, so in that scale you'd mostly use it when moving from G to A, or from A to G. Now I'm far from a bebop player, so this won't sound like bebop, but I can demonstrate the kind of thing if I first noodle a little scalar melody in the key of C major: [demonstrates] And then play the same thing, but adding in a G# every time I go between the G and the A in either direction: [demonstrates] That is not bebop music, but I hope you can see what a difference that chromatic passing tone makes to the melody. But again, that's not bebop, because I'm not a bebop player. Dexter Gordon, though, *was* a bebop player. He moved to New York while playing with Louis Armstrong's band, and soon became part of the bebop scene, which at the time centred around Charlie Christian, the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, and the alto sax player Charlie Parker, sometimes nicknamed "bird" or "Yardbird", who is often regarded as the greatest of them all. Gillespie, Parker, and Gordon also played in Billy Eckstine's big band, which gave many of the leading bebop musicians the opportunity to play in what was still the most popular idiom at the time -- you can hear Gordon have a saxophone battle with Gene Ammons on "Blowing the Blues Away" in a lineup of the band that also included Art Blakey on drums and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet: [Excerpt: Billy Eckstine, "Blowing the Blues Away"] But Gordon was soon leading his own small band sessions, and making records for labels like Savoy, on which you can definitely hear the influence of Illinois Jacquet on his tone, even as he's playing music that's more melodically experimental by far than the jump band music of the Hampton band: [Excerpt: Dexter Gordon, "Dexter Digs In"] Basically, in the late 1940s, if you were wanting to play bebop on the saxophone, you had two models to follow -- Charlie Parker, the great alto saxophonist with his angular, atonal, melodic sense and fast, virtuosic, playing, or Dexter Gordon, the tenor saxophonist, whose style had more R&B grease and wit to it, who would quote popular melodies in his own improvisations. And John Coltrane followed both. Coltrane's first instrument was the alto sax, and when he was primarily an alto player he would copy Charlie Parker's style. When he switched to being primarily a tenor player -- though he would always continue playing both instruments, and later in his career would also play soprano sax -- he took up much of Gordon's mellower tone, though he was also influenced by other tenor players, like Lester Young, the great player with Count Basie's band, and Johnny Hodges, who played with Duke Ellington. Now, it is important to note here that John Coltrane is a very, very, big deal. Depending on your opinion of Ornette Coleman's playing, Coltrane is by most accounts either the last or penultimate truly great innovator in jazz saxophone, and arguably the single foremost figure in the music in the last half of the twentieth century. In this podcast I'm only able to tell you enough about him to give you the information you need to understand the material about the Byrds, but were I to do a similar history of jazz in five hundred songs, Coltrane would have a similar position to someone like the Beatles -- he's such a major figure that he is literally venerated as a saint by the African Orthodox Church, and a couple of other Episcopal churches have at least made the case for his sainthood. So anything I say here about him is not even beginning to scratch the surface of his towering importance to jazz music, but it will, I hope, give some idea of his importance to the development of the Byrds -- a group of whom he was almost certainly totally unaware. Coltrane started out playing as a teenager, and his earliest recordings were when he was nineteen and in the armed forces, just after the end of World War II. At that time, he was very much a beginner, although a talented one, and on his early amateur recordings you can hear him trying to imitate Parker without really knowing what it was that Parker was doing that made him so great. But as well as having some natural talent, he had one big attribute that made him stand out -- his utter devotion to his music. He was so uninterested in anything other than mastering his instrument that one day a friend was telling him about a baseball game he'd watched, and all Coltrane could do was ask in confusion "Who's Willie Mays?" Coltrane would regularly practice his saxophone until his reed was red with blood, but he would also study other musicians. And not just in jazz. He knew that Charlie Parker had intensely studied Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and so Coltrane would study that too: [Excerpt: Stravinsky, "Firebird Suite"] Coltrane joined the band of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who was one of those figures like Johnny Otis, with whom Vinson would later perform for many years, who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. Vinson was a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner, but he was also a bebop sax player, and what he wanted was a tenor sax player who could play tenor the way Charlie Parker played alto, but do it in an R&B setting. Coltrane switched from alto to tenor, and spent a year or so playing with Vinson's band. No recordings exist of Coltrane with Vinson that I'm aware of, but you can get an idea of what he sounded like from his next band. By this point, Dizzy Gillespie had graduated from small bebop groups to leading a big band, and he got Coltrane in as one of his alto players, though Coltrane would often also play tenor with Gillespie, as on this recording from 1951, which has Coltrane on tenor, Gillespie on trumpet, with Kenny Burrell and two of the future Modern Jazz Quartet, Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, showing that the roots of modern jazz were not very far at all from the roots of rock and roll: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "We Love to Boogie"] After leaving Gillespie's band, Coltrane played with a lot of important musicians over the next four or five years, like Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, and Jimmy Smith, and occasionally sat in with Miles Davis, but at this point he was still not a major musician in the genre. He was a competent, working, sideman, but he was also struggling with alcohol and heroin, and hadn't really found his own voice. But then Miles Davis asked Coltrane to join his band full-time. Coltrane was actually Davis' second choice -- he really wanted Sonny Rollins, who was widely considered the best new tenor player around, but he was eventually persuaded to take Coltrane. During his first period with Davis, Coltrane grew rapidly as a musician, and also played on a *lot* of other people's sessions. In a three year period Coltrane went from Davis to Thelonius Monk's group then back to Davis' group, and also recorded as both a sideman and a band leader on a ton of sessions. You can get a box set of his recordings from May 1956 through December 1958 that comes to nineteen CDs -- and that's not counting the recordings with Miles Davis, which aren't included on that set. Unsurprisingly, just through playing this much, Coltrane had grown enormously as a player, and he was particularly fascinated by harmonics, playing with the notes of a chord, in arpeggios, and pushing music to its harmonic limits, as you can hear in his solo on Davis' "Straight, No Chaser", which pushes the limits of the jazz solo as far as they'd gone to that point: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Straight, No Chaser"] But on the same album as that, "Milestones", we also have the first appearance of a new style, modal jazz. Now, to explain this, we have to go back to the scales again. We looked at the normal Western scale, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, but you can start a scale on any of those notes, and which note you start on creates what is called a different mode. The modes are given Greek names, and each mode has a different feel to it. If you start on do, we call this the major scale or the Ionian mode. This is the normal scale we heard before -- C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C: [demonstrates] Most music – about seventy percent of the melodies you're likely to have heard, uses that mode. If you start on re, it would go re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re, or D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D, the Dorian mode: [demonstrates] Melodies with this mode tend to have a sort of wistful feel, like "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair"] or many of George Harrison's songs: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Me Mine"] Starting on mi, you have the Phrygian mode, mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi: [demonstrates] The Phrygian mode is not especially widely used, but does turn up in some popular works like Barber's Adagio for Strings: [Excerpt: Barber, "Adagio for Strings"] Then there's the Lydian mode, fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa: [demonstrates] This mode isn't used much at all in pop music -- the most prominent example I can think of is "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke: [Excerpt: The Left Banke, "Pretty Ballerina"] Starting on so, we have so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so -- the Mixolydian mode: [demonstrates] That mode has a sort of bluesy or folky tone to it, and you also find it in a lot of traditional tunes, like "She Moves Through the Fair": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga"] And in things like "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] Though that goes into Dorian for the middle section. Starting on la, we have the Aeolian mode, which is also known as the natural minor scale, and is often just talked about as “the minor scale”: [demonstrates] That's obviously used in innumerable songs, for example "Losing My Religion" by REM: [Excerpt: REM, "Losing My Religion"] And finally you have the Locrian mode ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti: [demonstrates] That basically doesn't get used, unless someone wants to show off that they know the Locrian mode. The only vaguely familiar example I can think of is "Army of Me" by Bjork: [Excerpt: Bjork, "Army of Me"] I hope that brief excursion through the seven most common modes in Western diatonic music gives you some idea of the difference that musical modes can make to a piece. Anyway, as I was saying, on the "Milestones" album, we get some of the first examples of a form that became known as modal jazz. Now, the ideas of modal jazz had been around for a few years at that point -- oddly, it seems to be one of the first types of popular music to have existed in theory before existing in practice. George Russell, an acquaintance of Davis who was a self-taught music theorist, had written a book in 1953 titled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. That book argues that rather than looking at the diatonic scale as the basis for music, one should instead look at a chord progression called the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is exactly what it sounds like -- you change chords to one a fifth away from it, and then do that again and again, either going up, so you'd have chords with the roots C-G-D-A-E-B-F# and so on: [demonstrates] Or, more commonly, going down, though usually when going downwards you tend to cheat a bit and sharpen one of the notes so you can stay in one key, so you'd get chords with roots C-F-B-E-A-D-G, usually the chords C, F, B diminished, Em, Am, Dm, G: [demonstrates] That descending cycle of fifths is used in all sorts of music, everything from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money"] to "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor: [Excerpt: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive"] But what Russell pointed out is that if you do the upwards cycle of fifths, and you *don't* change any of the notes, the first seven root notes you get are the same seven notes you'd find in the Lydian mode, just reordered -- C-D-E-F#-G-A-B . Russell then argued that much of the way harmony and melody work in jazz could be thought of as people experimenting with the way the Lydian mode works, and the way the cycle of fifths leads you further and further away from the tonal centre. Now, you could probably do an entire podcast series as long as this one on the implications of this, and I am honestly just trying to summarise enough information here that you can get a vague gist, but Russell's book had a profound effect on how jazz musicians started to think about harmony and melody. Instead of improvising around the chord changes to songs, they were now basing improvisations and compositions around modes and the notes in them. Rather than having a lot of chord changes, you might just play a single root note that stays the same throughout, or only changes a couple of times in the whole piece, and just imply changes with the clash between the root note and whatever modal note the solo instrument is playing. The track "Milestones" on the Milestones album shows this kind of thinking in full effect -- the song consists of a section in G Dorian, followed by a section in A Aeolian (or E Phrygian depending on how you look at it). Each section has only one implied chord -- a Gm7 for the G Dorian section, and an Am7(b13) for the A Aeolian section -- over which Davis, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and Coltrane on tenor, all solo: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] (For the pedants among you, that track was originally titled "Miles" on the first pressings of the album, but it was retitled "Milestones" on subsequent pressings). The modal form would be taken even further on Davis' next album to be recorded, Porgy and Bess, which featured much fuller orchestrations and didn't have Coltrane on it. Davis later said that when the arranger Gil Evans wrote the arrangements for that album, he didn't write any chords at all, just a scale, which Davis could improvise around. But it was on the album after that, Kind of Blue, which again featured Coltrane on saxophone, that modal jazz made its big breakthrough to becoming the dominant form of jazz music. As with what Evans had done on Porgy and Bess, Davis gave the other instrumentalists modes to play, rather than a chord sequence to improvise over or a melody line to play with. He explained his thinking behind this in an interview with Nat Hentoff, saying "When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords ... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." This style shows up in "So What", the opening track on the album, which is in some ways a very conventional song structure -- it's a thirty-two bar AABA structure. But instead of a chord sequence, it's based on modes in two keys -- the A section is in D Dorian, while the B section is in E-flat Dorian: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "So What"] Kind of Blue would become one of the contenders for greatest jazz album of all time, and one of the most influential records ever made in any genre -- and it could be argued that that track we just heard, "So What", inspired a whole other genre we'll be looking at in a future episode -- but Coltrane still felt the need to explore more ideas, and to branch out on his own. In particular, while he was interested in modal music, he was also interested in exploring more kinds of scales than just modes, and to do this he had to, at least for the moment, reintroduce chord changes into what he was doing. He was inspired in particular by reading Nicolas Slonimsky's classic Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Coltrane had recently signed a new contract as a solo artist with Atlantic Records, and recorded what is generally considered his first true masterpiece album as a solo artist, Giant Steps, with several members of the Davis band, just two weeks after recording Kind of Blue. The title track to Giant Steps is the most prominent example of what are known in jazz as the Coltrane changes -- a cycle of thirds, similar to the cycle of fifths we talked about earlier. The track itself seems to have two sources. The first is the bridge of the old standard "Have You Met Miss Jones?", as famously played by Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Have You Met Miss Jones?" And the second is an exercise from Slonimsky's book: [Excerpt: Pattern #286 from Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns] Coltrane combined these ideas to come up with "Giant Steps", which is based entirely around these cycles of thirds, and Slonimsky's example: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"] Now, I realise that this is meant to be a history of rock music, not jazz musicology theory time, so I promise you I am just hitting the high points here. And only the points that affect Coltrane's development as far as it influenced the music we're looking at in this episode. And so we're actually going to skip over Coltrane's commercial high-point, My Favourite Things, and most of the rest of his work for Atlantic, even though that music is some of the most important jazz music ever recorded. Instead, I'm going to summarise a whole lot of very important music by simply saying that while Coltrane was very interested in this musical idea of the cycle of thirds, he did not like being tied to precise chord changes, and liked the freedom that modal jazz gave to him. By 1960, when his contract with Atlantic was ending and his contract with Impulse was beginning, and he recorded the two albums Olé and Africa/Brass pretty much back to back, he had hit on a new style with the help of Eric Dolphy, a flute, clarinet, and alto sax player who would become an important figure in Coltrane's life. Dolphy died far too young -- he went into a diabetic coma and doctors assumed that because he was a Black jazz musician he must have overdosed, even though he was actually a teetotal abstainer, so he didn't get the treatment he needed -- but he made such a profound influence on Coltrane's life that Coltrane would carry Dolphy's picture with him after his death. Dolphy was even more of a theorist than Coltrane, and another devotee of Slonimsky's book, and he was someone who had studied a great deal of twentieth-century classical music, particularly people like Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and Edgard Varese. Dolphy even performed Varese's piece Density 21.5 in concert, an extremely demanding piece for solo flute. I don't know of a recording of Dolphy performing it, sadly, but this version should give some idea: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Density 21.5"] Encouraged by Dolphy, Coltrane started making music based around no changes at all, with any changes being implied by the melody. The title song of Africa/Brass, "Africa", takes up an entire side of one album, and doesn't have a single actual chord change on it, with Dolphy and pianist McCoy Tyner coming up with a brass-heavy arrangement for Coltrane to improvise over a single chord: [Excerpt: The John Coltrane Quartet: "Africa"] This was a return to the idea of modal jazz, based on scales rather than chord changes, but by implying chord changes, often changes based on thirds, Coltrane was often using different scales than the modes that had been used in modal jazz. And while, as the title suggested, "Africa" was inspired by the music of Africa, the use of a single drone chord underneath solos based on a scale was inspired by the music of another continent altogether. Since at least the mid-1950s, both Coltrane and Dolphy had been interested in Indian music. They appear to have first become interested in a record released by Folkways, Music Of India, Morning And Evening Ragas by Ali Akbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But the musician they ended up being most inspired by was a friend of Khan's, Ravi Shankar, who like Khan had been taught by the great sarod player Alauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's father. The elder Khan, who was generally known as "Baba", meaning "father", was possibly *the* most influential Indian musician of the first half of the twentieth century, and was a big part of the revitalisation of Indian music that went hand in hand with the growth of Indian nationalism. He was an ascetic who lived for music and nothing else, and would write five to ten new compositions every day, telling Shankar "Do one thing well and you can achieve everything. Do everything and you achieve nothing". Alauddin Khan was a very religious Muslim, but one who saw music as the ultimate way to God and could find truths in other faiths. When Shankar first got to know him, they were both touring as musicians in a dance troupe run by Shankar's elder brother, which was promoting Indian arts in the West, and he talked about taking Khan to hear the organ playing at Notre Dame cathedral, and Khan bursting into tears and saying "here is God". Khan was not alone in this view. The classical music of Northern India, the music that Khan played and taught, had been very influenced by Sufism, which was for most of Muslim history the dominant intellectual and theological tradition in Islam. Now, I am going to sum up a thousand years of theology and practice, of a religion I don't belong to, in a couple of sentences here, so just assume that what I'm saying is wrong, and *please* don't take offence if you are Sufi yourself and believe I am misrepresenting you. But my understanding of Sufism is that Sufis are extremely devoted to attaining knowledge and understanding of God, and believe that strict adherence to Muslim law is the best way to attain that knowledge -- that it is the way that God himself has prescribed for humans to know him -- but that such knowledge can be reached by people of other faiths if they approach their own traditions with enough devotion. Sufi ideas infuse much of Northern Indian classical music, and so for example it has been considered acceptable for Muslims to sing Hindu religious music and Hindus to sing songs of praise to Allah. So while Ravi Shankar was Hindu and Alauddin Khan was Muslim, Khan was able to become Shankar's guru in what both men regarded as a religious observance, and even to marry Khan's daughter. Khan was a famously cruel disciplinarian -- once hospitalising a student after hitting him with a tuning hammer -- but he earned the devotion of his students by enforcing the same discipline on himself. He abstained from sex so he could put all his energies into music, and was known to tie his hair to the ceiling while he practiced, so he could not fall asleep no matter how long he kept playing. Both Khan and his son Ali Akhbar Khan played the sarod, while Shankar played the sitar, but they all played the same kind of music, which is based on the concept of the raga. Now, in some ways, a raga can be considered equivalent to a mode in Western music: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But a raga is not *just* a mode -- it sits somewhere between Western conceptions of a mode and a melody. It has a scale, like a mode, but it can have different scales going up or down, and rules about which notes can be moved to from which other notes. So for example (and using Western tones so as not to confuse things further), a raga might say that it's possible to move up from the note G to D, but not down from D to G. Ragas are essentially a very restrictive set of rules which allow the musician playing them to improvise freely within those rules. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the violinist Yehudi Mehuin, at the time the most well-known classical musician in the world, had become fascinated by Indian music as part of a wider programme of his to learn more music outside what he regarded as the overly-constricting scope of the Western classical tradition in which he had been trained. He had become a particular fan of Shankar, and had invited him over to the US to perform. Shankar had refused to come at that point, sending his brother-in-law Ali Akbar Khan over, as he was in the middle of a difficult divorce, and that had been when Khan had recorded that album which had fascinated Coltrane and Dolphy. But Shankar soon followed himself, and made his own records: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] The music that both Khan and Shankar played was a particular style of Hindustani classical music, which has three elements -- there's a melody instrument, in Shankar's case the sitar and in Khan's the sarod, both of them fretted stringed instruments which have additional strings that resonate along with the main melody string, giving their unique sound. These are the most distinctive Indian instruments, but the melody can be played on all sorts of other instruments, whether Indian instruments like the bansuri and shehnai, which are very similar to the flute and oboe respectively, or Western instruments like the violin. Historically, the melody has also often been sung rather than played, but Indian instrumental music has had much more influence on Western popular music than Indian vocal music has, so we're mostly looking at that here. Along with the melody instrument there's a percussion instrument, usually the tabla, which is a pair of hand drums. Rather than keep a steady, simple, beat like the drum kit in rock music, the percussion has its own patterns and cycles, called talas, which like ragas are heavily formalised but leave a great amount of room for improvisation. The percussion and the melody are in a sort of dialogue with each other, and play off each other in a variety of ways. And finally there's the drone instrument, usually a stringed instrument called a tamboura. The drone is what it sounds like -- a single note, sustained and repeated throughout the piece, providing a harmonic grounding for the improvisations of the melody instrument. Sometimes, rather than just a single root note, it will be a root and fifth, providing a single chord to improvise over, but as often it will be just one note. Often that note will be doubled at the octave, so you might have a drone on both low E and high E. The result provides a very strict, precise, formal, structure for an infinitely varied form of expression, and Shankar was a master of it: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] Dolphy and, especially, Coltrane became fascinated by Indian music, and Coltrane desperately wanted to record with Shankar -- he even later named his son Ravi in honour of the great musician. It wasn't just the music as music, but music as spiritual practice, that Coltrane was engaged with. He was a deeply religious man but one who was open to multiple faith traditions -- he had been brought up as a Methodist, and both his grandfathers were ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but his first wife, Naima, who inspired his personal favourite of his own compositions, was a Muslim, while his second wife, Swamini Turiyasangitananda (who he married after leaving Naima in 1963 and who continued to perform as Alice Coltrane even after she took that name, and was herself an extraordinarily accomplished jazz musician on both piano and harp), was a Hindu, and both of them profoundly influenced Coltrane's own spirituality. Some have even suggested that Coltrane's fascination with a cycle of thirds came from the idea that the third could represent both the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti -- the three major forms of Brahman in Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. So a music which was a religious discipline for more than one religion, and which worked well with the harmonic and melodic ideas that Coltrane had been exploring in jazz and learning about through his studies of modern classical music, was bound to appeal to Coltrane, and he started using the idea of having two basses provide an octave drone similar to that of the tamboura, leading to tracks like "Africa" and "Olé": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Olé"] Several sources have stated that that song was an influence on "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and I can sort of see that, though most of the interviews I've seen with Ray Manzarek have him talking about Coltrane's earlier version of "My Favourite Things" as the main influence there. Coltrane finally managed to meet with Shankar in December 1961, and spent a lot of time with him -- the two discussed recording an album together with McCoy Tyner, though nothing came of it. Shankar said of their several meetings that month: "The music was fantastic. I was much impressed, but one thing distressed me. There was turbulence in the music that gave me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the trouble … Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was studying yoga, and reading the Bhagavad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much turmoil. I could not understand it." Coltrane said in turn "I like Ravi Shankar very much. When I hear his music, I want to copy it – not note for note of course, but in his spirit. What brings me closest to Ravi is the modal aspect of his art. Currently, at the particular stage I find myself in, I seem to be going through a modal phase … There's a lot of modal music that is played every day throughout the world. It is particularly evident in Africa, but if you look at Spain or Scotland, India or China, you'll discover this again in each case … It's this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me; that's what I'm aiming for." And the month before Coltrane met Shankar, Coltrane had had a now-legendary residency at the Village Vanguard in New York with his band, including Dolphy, which had resulted not only in the famous Live at the Village Vanguard album, but in two tracks on Coltrane's studio album Impressions. Those shows were among the most controversial in the history of jazz, though the Village Vanguard album is now often included in lists of the most important records in jazz. Downbeat magazine, the leading magazine for jazz fans at the time, described those shows as "musical nonsense" and "a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend" -- though by the time Impressions came out in 1963, that opinion had been revised somewhat. Harvey Pekar, the comic writer and jazz critic, also writing in DownBeat, gave Impressions five stars, saying "Not all the music on this album is excellent (which is what a five-star rating signifies,) but some is more than excellent". And while among Coltrane fans the piece from these Village Vanguard shows that is of most interest is the extended blues masterpiece "Chasin' the Trane" which takes up a whole side of the Village Vanguard LP, for our purposes we're most interested in one of the two tracks that was held over for Impressions. This was another of Coltrane's experiments in using the drones he'd found in Indian musical forms, like "Africa" and "Olé". This time it was also inspired by a specific piece of music, though not an instrumental one. Rather it was a vocal performance -- a recording on a Folkways album of Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida chanting one of the Vedas, the religious texts which are among the oldest texts sacred to any surviving religion: [Excerpt: Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida, "Vedic Chanting"] Coltrane took that basic melodic idea, and combined it with his own modal approach to jazz, and the inspiration he was taking from Shankar's music, and came up with a piece called "India": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] Which is where we came in, isn't it? [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] So now, finally, we get to the Byrds. Even before "Mr. Tambourine Man" went to number one in the charts, the Byrds were facing problems with their sound being co-opted as the latest hip thing. Their location in LA, at the centre of the entertainment world, was obviously a huge advantage to them in many ways, but it also made them incredibly visible to people who wanted to hop onto a bandwagon. The group built up much of their fanbase playing at Ciro's -- the nightclub on the Sunset Strip that we mentioned in the previous episode which later reopened as It's Boss -- and among those in the crowd were Sonny and Cher. And Sonny brought along his tape recorder. The Byrds' follow-up single to "Mr. Tambourine Man", released while that song was still going up the charts, was another Dylan song, "All I Really Want to Do". But it had to contend with this: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] Cher's single, produced by Sonny, was her first solo single since the duo had become successful, and came out before the Byrds' version, and the Byrds were convinced that elements of the arrangement, especially the guitar part, came from the version they'd been performing live – though of course Sonny was no stranger to jangly guitars himself, having co-written “Needles and Pins”, the song that pretty much invented the jangle. Cher made number fifteen on the charts, while the Byrds only made number forty. Their version did beat Cher's in the UK charts, though. The record company was so worried about the competition that for a while they started promoting the B-side as the A-side. That B-side was an original by Gene Clark, though one that very clearly showed the group's debt to the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] While it was very obviously derived from the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", especially the riff, it was still a very strong, original, piece of work in its own right. It was the song that convinced the group's producer, Terry Melcher, that they were a serious proposition as artists in their own right, rather than just as performers of Dylan's material, and it was also a favourite of the group's co-manager, Jim Dickson, who picked out Clark's use of the word "probably" in the chorus as particularly telling -- the singer thinks he will feel better when the subject of the song is gone, but only probably. He's not certain. "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", after being promoted as the A-side for a short time, reached number one hundred and two on the charts, but the label quickly decided to re-flip it and concentrate on promoting the Dylan song as the single. The group themselves weren't too bothered about their thunder having been stolen by Sonny and Cher, but their new publicist was incandescent. Derek Taylor had been a journalist for the Daily Express, which at that time was a respectable enough newspaper (though that is very much no longer the case). He'd become involved in the music industry after writing an early profile on the Beatles, at which point he had been taken on by the Beatles' organisation first to ghostwrite George Harrison's newspaper column and Brian Epstein's autobiography, and then as their full-time publicist and liner-note writer. He'd left the organisation at the end of 1964, and had moved to the US, where he had set up as an independent music publicist, working for the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and various other acts in their overlapping social circles, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders. Taylor was absolutely furious on the group's behalf, saying "I was not only disappointed, I was disgusted. Sonny and Cher went to Ciro's and ripped off the Byrds and, being obsessive, I could not get this out of my mind that Sonny and Cher had done this terrible thing. I didn't know that much about the record business and, in my experience with the Beatles, cover versions didn't make any difference. But by covering the Byrds, it seemed that you could knock them off the perch. And Sonny and Cher, in my opinion, stole that song at Ciro's and interfered with the Byrds' career and very nearly blew them out of the game." But while the single was a comparative flop, the Mr. Tambourine Man album, which came out shortly after, was much more successful. It contained the A and B sides of both the group's first two singles, although a different vocal take of "All I Really Want to Do" was used from the single release, along with two more Dylan covers, and a couple more originals -- five of the twelve songs on the album were original in total, three of them Gene Clark solo compositions and the other two co-written by Clark and Roger McGuinn. To round it out there was a version of the 1939 song "We'll Meet Again", made famous by Vera Lynn, which you may remember us discussing in episode ninety as an example of early synthesiser use, but which had recently become popular in a rerecorded version from the 1950s, thanks to its use at the end of Dr. Strangelove; there was a song written by Jackie DeShannon; and "The Bells of Rhymney", a song in which Pete Seeger set a poem about a mining disaster in Wales to music. So a fairly standard repertoire for early folk-rock, though slightly heavier on Dylan than most. While the group's Hollywood notoriety caused them problems like the Sonny and Cher one, it did also give them advantages. For example, they got to play at the fourth of July party hosted by Jane Fonda, to guests including her father Henry and brother Peter, Louis Jordan, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Sidney Poitier. Derek Taylor, who was used to the Beatles' formal dress and politeness at important events, imposed on them by Brian Epstein, was shocked when the Byrds turned up informally dressed, and even more shocked when Vito Paulekas and Carl Franzoni showed up. Vito (who was always known by his first name) and Franzoni are both important but marginal figures in the LA scene. Neither were musicians, though Vito did make one record, produced by Kim Fowley: [Excerpt: Vito and the Hands, "Vito and the Hands"] Rather Vito was a sculptor in his fifties, who had become part of the rock and roll scene and had gathered around him a dance troupe consisting largely of much younger women, and also of himself and Franzoni. Their circle, which also included Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, who weren't part of their dance troupe but were definitely part of their crowd, will be talked about much more in future episodes, but for now we'll just say that they are often considered proto-hippies, though they would have disputed that characterisation themselves quite vigorously; that they were regular dancers at Ciro's and became regular parts of the act of both the Byrds and the Mothers of Invention; and we'll give this rather explicit description of their performances from Frank Zappa: "The high point of the performance was Carl Franzoni, our 'go-go boy.' He was wearing ballet tights, frugging violently. Carl has testicles which are bigger than a breadbox. Much bigger than a breadbox. The looks on the faces of the Baptist teens experiencing their grandeur is a treasured memory." Paints a vivid picture, doesn't it? So you can possibly imagine why Derek Taylor later said "When Carl Franzoni and Vito came, I got into a terrible panic". But Jim Dickson explained to him that it was Hollywood and people were used to that kind of thing, and even though Taylor described seeing Henry Fonda and his wife pinned against the wall by the writhing Franzoni and the other dancers, apparently everyone had a good time. And then the next month, the group went on their first UK tour. On which nobody had a good time: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] Even before the tour, Derek Taylor had reservations. Obviously the Byrds should tour the UK -- London, in particular, was the centre of the cultural world at that time, and Taylor wanted the group to meet his old friends the Beatles and visit Carnaby Street. But at the same time, there seemed to be something a little... off... about the promoters they were dealing with, Joe Collins, the father of Joan and Jackie Collins, and a man named Mervyn Conn. As Taylor said later "All I did know was that the correspondence from Mervyn Conn didn't assure me. I kept expressing doubts about the contents of the letters. There was something about the grammar. You know, 'I'll give you a deal', and 'We'll get you some good gigs'. The whole thing was very much showbusiness. Almost pantomime showbusiness." But still, it seemed like it was worth making the trip, even when Musicians Union problems nearly derailed the whole thing. We've talked previously about how disagreements between the unions in the US and UK meant that musicians from one country couldn't tour the other for decades, and about how that slightly changed in the late fifties. But the new system required a one-in, one-out system where tours had to be set up as exchanges so nobody was taking anyone's job, and nobody had bothered to find a five-piece group of equivalent popularity to the Byrds to tour America in return. Luckily, the Dave Clark Five stepped into the breach, and were able to do a US tour on short notice, so that problem was solved. And then, as soon as they landed, the group were confronted with a lawsuit. From the Birds: [Excerpt: The Birds, "No Good Without You Baby"] These Birds, spelled with an "i", not a "y", were a Mod group from London, who had started out as the Thunderbirds, but had had to shorten their name when the London R&B singer Chris Farlowe and his band the Thunderbirds had started to have some success. They'd become the Birds, and released a couple of unsuccessful singles, but had slowly built up a reasonable following and had a couple of TV appearances. Then they'd started to receive complaints from their fans that when they went into the record shops to ask for the new record by the Birds, they were being sold some jangly folky stuff about tambourines, rather than Bo Diddley inspired R&B. So the first thing the American Byrds saw in England, after a long and difficult flight which had left them very tired and depressed, especially Gene Clark, who hated flying, was someone suing them for loss of earnings. The lawsuit never progressed any further, and the British group changed their name to Birds Birds, and quickly disappeared from music history -- apart from their guitarist, Ronnie Wood, who we'll be hearing from again. But the experience was not exactly the welcome the group had been hoping for, and is reflected in one of the lines that Gene Clark wrote in the song he later came up with about the trip -- "Nowhere is there love to be found among those afraid of losing their ground". And the rest of the tour was not much of an improvement. Chris Hillman came down with bronchitis on the first night, David Crosby kept turning his amp up too high, resulting in the other members copying him and the sound in the venues they were playing seeming distorted, and most of all they just seemed, to the British crowds, to be unprofessional. British audiences were used to groups running on, seeming excited, talking to the crowd between songs, and generally putting on a show. The Byrds, on the other hand, sauntered on stage, and didn't even look at the audience, much less talk to them. What seemed to the LA audience as studied cool seemed to the UK audience like the group were rude, unprofessional, and big-headed. At one show, towards the end of the set, one girl in the audience cried out "Aren't you even going to say anything?", to which Crosby responded "Goodbye" and the group walked off, without any of them having said another word. When they played the Flamingo Club, the biggest cheer of the night came when their short set ended and the manager said that the club was now going to play records for dancing until the support act, Geno Washington and the Ramjam Band, were ready to do another set. Michael Clarke and Roger McGuinn also came down with bronchitis, the group were miserable and sick, and they were getting absolutely panned in the reviews. The closest thing they got to a positive review was when Paul Jones of Manfred Mann was asked about them, and he praised some of their act -- perceptively pointing to their version of "We'll Meet Again" as being in the Pop Art tradition of recontextualising something familiar so it could be looked at freshly -- but even he ended up also criticising several aspects of the show and ended by saying "I think they're going to be a lot better in the future". And then, just to rub salt in the wound, Sonny and Cher turned up in the UK. The Byrds' version of "All I Really Want to Do" massively outsold theirs in the UK, but their big hit became omnipresent: [Excerpt: Sonny and Cher, "I Got You Babe"] And the press seemed to think that Sonny and Cher, rather than the Byrds, were the true representatives of the American youth culture. The Byrds were already yesterday's news. The tour wasn't all bad -- it did boost sales of the group's records, and they became friendly with the Beatles, Stones, and Donovan. So much so that when later in the month the Beatles returned to the US, the Byrds were invited to join them at a party they were holding in Benedict Canyon, and it was thanks to the Byrds attending that party that two things happened to influence the Beatles' songwriting. The first was that Crosby brought his Hollywood friend Peter Fonda along. Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying, and insisted on showing them his self-inflicted bullet wounds. This did not go down well with John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom were on acid at the time. As Lennon later said, "We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it's like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! ... It was scary. You know ... when you're flying high and [whispers] "I know what it's like to be dead, man" Eventually they asked Fonda to get out, and the experience later inspired Lennon to write this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Said, She Said"] Incidentally, like all the Beatles songs of that period, that was adapted for the cartoon TV series based on the group, in this case as a follow-the-bouncing-ball animation. There are few things which sum up the oddness of mid-sixties culture more vividly than the fact that there was a massively popular kids' cartoon with a cheery singalong version of a song about a bad acid trip and knowing what it's like to be dead. But there was another, more positive, influence on the Beatles to come out of them having invited the Byrds to the party. Once Fonda had been kicked out, Crosby and Harrison became chatty, and started talking about the sitar, an instrument that Harrison had recently become interested in. Crosby showed Harrison some ragas on the guitar, and suggested he start listening to Ravi Shankar, who Crosby had recently become a fan of. And we'll be tracking Shankar's influence on Harrison, and through him the Beatles, and through them the whole course of twentieth century culture, in future episodes. Crosby's admiration both of Ravi Shankar and of John Coltrane was soon to show in the Byrds' records, but first they needed a new single. They'd made attempts at a version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and had even tried to get both George Harrison and Paul McCartney to add harmonica to that track, but that didn't work out. Then just before the UK tour, Terry Melcher had got Jack Nitzsche to come up with an arrangement of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (version 1)"] Nitzsche's arrangement was designed to sound as much like a Sonny and Cher record as possible, and at first the intention was just to overdub McGuinn's guitar and vocals onto a track by the Wrecking Crew. The group weren't happy at this, and even McGuinn, who was the friendliest of the group with Melcher and who the record was meant to spotlight, disliked it. The eventual track was cut by the group, with Jim Dickson producing, to show they could do a good job of the song by themselves, with the intention that Melcher would then polish it and finish it in the studio, but Melcher dropped the idea of doing the song at all. There was a growing factionalism in the group by this point, with McGuinn and to a lesser extent Michael Clarke being friendly with Melcher. Crosby disliked Melcher and was pushing for Jim Dickson to replace him as producer, largely because he thought that Melcher was vetoing Crosby's songs and giving Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn free run of the songwriting. Dickson on the other hand was friendliest with Crosby, but wasn't much keener on Crosby's songwriting than Melcher was, thinking Gene Clark was the real writing talent in the group. It didn't help that Crosby's songs tended to be things like harmonically complex pieces based on science fiction novels -- Crosby was a big fan of the writer Robert Heinlein, and in particular of the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and brought in at least two songs inspired by that novel, which were left off albums -- his song "Stranger in a Strange Land" was eventually recorded by the San Francisco group Blackburn & Snow: [Excerpt: Blackburn & Snow, "Stranger in a Strange Land"] Oddly, Jim Dickson objected to what became the Byrds' next single for reasons that come from the same roots as the Heinlein novel. A short while earlier, McGuinn had worked as a guitarist and arranger on an album by the folk singer Judy Collins, and one of the songs she had recorded on that album was a song written by Pete Seeger, setting the first eight verses of chapter three of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes to music: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There is a Season"] McGuinn wanted to do an electric version of that song as the Byrds' next single, and Melcher sided with him, but Dickson was against the idea, citing the philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who was a big influence both on the counterculture and on Heinlein. Korzybski, in his book Science and Sanity, argued that many of the problems with the world are caused by the practice in Aristotelean logic of excluding the middle and only talking about things and their opposites, saying that things could be either A or Not-A, which in his view excluded most of actual reality. Dickson's argument was that the lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with their inflexible Aristotelianism, were hopelessly outmoded and would make the group a laughing stock among anyone who had paid attention to the intellectual revolutions of the previous few decades. "A time of love, a time of hate"? What about all the times that are neither for loving or hating, and all the emotions that are complex mixtures of love and hate? In his eyes, this was going to make the group look like lightweights. Terry Melcher disagreed, and forced the group through take after take, until they got what became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Turn! Turn! Turn!"] After the single was released and became a hit, the battle lines in the group hardened. It was McGuinn and Melcher on one side, Crosby and Dickson on the other, with Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and Gene Clark more or less neutral in the middle, but tending to side more and more with the two Ms largely because of Crosby's ability to rub everyone up the wrong way. At one point during the sessions for the next album, tempers flared so much that Michael Clarke actually got up, went over to Crosby, and punched Crosby so hard that he fell off his seat. Crosby, being Hollywood to the bone, yelled at Clarke "You'll never work in this town again!", but the others tended to agree that on that occasion Crosby had it coming. Clarke, when asked about it later, said "I slapped him because he was being an asshole. He wasn't productive. It was necessary." Things came to a head in the filming for a video for the next single, Gene Clark's "Set You Free This Time". Michael Clarke was taller than the other Byrds, and to get the shot right, so the angles would line up, he had to stand further from the camera than the rest of them. David Crosby -- the member with most knowledge of the film industry, whose father was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, so who definitely understood the reasoning for this -- was sulking that once again a Gene Clark song had been chosen for promotion rather than one of his songs, and started manipulating Michael Clarke, telling him that he was being moved backwards because the others were jealous of his good looks, and that he needed to move forward to be with the rest of them. Multiple takes were ruined because Clarke listened to Crosby, and eventually Jim Dickson got furious at Clarke and went over and slapped him on the face. All hell broke loose. Michael Clarke wasn't particularly bothered by being slapped by Dickson, but Crosby took that as an excuse to leave, walking off before the first shot of the day had been completed. Dickson ran after Crosby, who turned round and punched Dickson in the mouth. Dickson grabbed hold of Crosby and held him in a chokehold. Gene Clark came up and pulled Dickson off Crosby, trying to break up the fight, and then Crosby yelled "Yeah, that's right, Gene! Hold him so I can hit him again!" At this point if Clark let Dickson go, Dickson would have attacked Crosby again. If he held Dickson, Crosby would have taken it as an invitation to hit him more. Clark's dilemma was eventually relieved by Barry Feinstein, the cameraman, who came in and broke everything up. It may seem odd that Crosby and Dickson, who were on the same side, were the ones who got into a fight, while Michael Clarke, who had previously hit Crosby, was listening to Crosby over Dickson, but that's indicative of how everyone felt about Crosby. As Dickson later put it, "People have stronger feelings about David Crosby. I love David more than the rest and I hate him more than the rest. I love McGuinn the least, and I hate him the least, because he doesn't give you emotional feedback. You don't get a chance. The hate is in equal proportion to how much you love them." McGuinn was finding all this deeply distressing -- Dickson and Crosby were violent men, and Michael Clarke and Hillman could be provoked to violence, but McGuinn was a pacifist both by conviction and temperament. Everything was conspiring to push the camps further apart. For example, Gene Clark made more money than the rest because of his songwriting royalties, and so got himself a good car. McGuinn had problems with his car, and knowing that the other members were jealous of Clark, Melcher offered to lend McGuinn one of his own Cadillacs, partly in an attempt to be friendly, and partly to make sure the jealousy over Clark's car didn't cause further problems in the group. But, of course, now Gene Clark had a Ferrarri and Roger McGuinn had a Cadillac, where was David Crosby's car? He stormed into Dickson's office and told him that if by the end of the tour the group were going on, Crosby didn't have a Bentley, he was quitting the group. There was only one thing for it. Terry Melcher had to go. The group had recorded their second album, and if they couldn't fix the problems within the band, they would have to deal with the problems from outside. While the group were on tour, Jim Dickson told Melcher they would no longer be working with him as their producer. On the tour bus, the group listened over and over to a tape McGuinn had made of Crosby's favourite music. On one side was a collection of recordings of Ravi Shankar, and on the other was two Coltrane albums -- Africa/Brass and Impressions: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] The group listened to this, and basically no other music, on the tour, and while they were touring Gene Clark was working on what he hoped would be the group's next single -- an impressionistic song about their trip to the UK, which started "Six miles high and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known". After he had it half complete, he showed it to Crosby, who helped him out with the lyrics, coming up with lines like "Rain, grey town, known for its sound" to describe London. The song talked about the crowds that followed them, about the music -- namechecking the Small Faces, who at the time had only released two single

Episode one hundred and thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a special long episode, running almost ninety minutes, looking at "My Generation" by the Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I mispronounce the Herman's Hermits track "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" as "Can You Hear My Heartbeat". I say "Rebel Without a Cause" when I mean "The Wild One". Brando was not in "Rebel Without a Cause". Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This mix does not include the Dixon of Dock Green theme, as I was unable to find a full version of that theme anywhere (though a version with Jack Warner singing, titled "An Ordinary Copper" is often labelled as it) and what you hear in this episode is the only fragment I could get a clean copy of. The best compilation of the Who's music is Maximum A's & B's, a three-disc set containing the A and B sides of every single they released. The super-deluxe five-CD version of the My Generation album appears to be out of print as a CD, but can be purchased digitally. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, including: Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which I don't necessarily recommend reading, but which is certainly an influential book. Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts by George Melly which I *do* recommend reading if you have any interest at all in British pop culture of the fifties and sixties. Jim Marshall: The Father of Loud by Rich Maloof gave me all the biographical details about Marshall. The Who Before the Who by Doug Sandom, a rather thin book of reminiscences by the group's first drummer. The Ox by Paul Rees, an authorised biography of John Entwistle based on notes for his never-completed autobiography. Who I Am, the autobiography of Pete Townshend, is one of the better rock autobiographies. A Band With Built-In Hate by Peter Stanfield is an examination of the group in the context of pop-art and Mod. And Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by Andy Neill and Matt Kent is a day-by-day listing of the group's activities up to 1978. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript In 1991, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. That book was predicated on a simple idea -- that there are patterns in American history, and that those patterns can be predicted in their rough outline. Not in the fine details, but broadly -- those of you currently watching the TV series Foundation, or familiar with Isaac Asimov's original novels, will have the idea already, because Strauss and Howe claimed to have invented a formula which worked as well as Asimov's fictional Psychohistory. Their claim was that, broadly speaking, generations can be thought to have a dominant personality type, influenced by the events that took place while they were growing up, which in turn are influenced by the personality types of the older generations. Because of this, Strauss and Howe claimed, American society had settled into a semi-stable pattern, where events repeat on a roughly eighty-eight-year cycle, driven by the behaviours of different personality types at different stages of their lives. You have four types of generation, which cycle -- the Adaptive, Idealist, Reactive, and Civic types. At any given time, one of these will be the elder statespeople, one will be the middle-aged people in positions of power, one will be the young rising people doing most of the work, and one will be the kids still growing up. You can predict what will happen, in broad outline, by how each of those generation types will react to challenges, and what position they will be in when those challenges arise. The idea is that major events change your personality, and also how you react to future events, and that how, say, Pearl Harbor affected someone will have been different for a kid hearing about the attack on the radio, an adult at the age to be drafted, and an adult who was too old to fight. The thesis of this book has, rather oddly, entered mainstream thought so completely that its ideas are taken as basic assumptions now by much of the popular discourse, even though on reading it the authors are so vague that pretty much anything can be taken as confirmation of their hypotheses, in much the same way that newspaper horoscopes always seem like they could apply to almost everyone's life. And sometimes, of course, they're just way off. For example they make the prediction that in 2020 there would be a massive crisis that would last several years, which would lead to a massive sense of community, in which "America will be implacably resolved to do what needs doing and fix what needs fixing", and in which the main task of those aged forty to sixty at that point would be to restrain those in leadership positions in the sixty-to-eighty age group from making irrational, impetuous, decisions which might lead to apocalypse. The crisis would likely end in triumph, but there was also a chance it might end in "moral fatigue, vast human tragedy, and a weak and vengeful sense of victory". I'm sure that none of my listeners can think of any events in 2020 that match this particular pattern. Despite its lack of rigour, Strauss and Howe's basic idea is now part of most people's intellectual toolkit, even if we don't necessarily think of them as the source for it. Indeed, even though they only talk about America in their book, their generational concept gets applied willy-nilly to much of the Western world. And likewise, for the most part we tend to think of the generations, whether American or otherwise, using the names they used. For the generations who were alive at the time they were writing, they used five main names, three of which we still use. Those born between 1901 and 1924 they term the "GI Generation", though those are now usually termed the "Greatest Generation". Those born between 1924 and 1942 were the "Silent Generation", those born 1943 through 1960 were the Boomers, and those born between 1982 and 2003 they labelled Millennials. Those born between 1961 and 1981 they labelled "thirteeners", because they were the unlucky thirteenth generation to be born in America since the declaration of independence. But that name didn't catch on. Instead, the name that people use to describe that generation is "Generation X", named after a late-seventies punk band led by Billy Idol: [Excerpt: Generation X, "Your Generation"] That band were short-lived, but they were in constant dialogue with the pop culture of ten to fifteen years earlier, Idol's own childhood. As well as that song, "Your Generation", which is obviously referring to the song this week's episode is about, they also recorded versions of John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth", of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", and an original song called "Ready Steady Go", about being in love with Cathy McGowan, the presenter of that show. And even their name was a reference, because Generation X were named after a book published in 1964, about not the generation we call Generation X, but about the Baby Boomers, and specifically about a series of fights on beaches across the South Coast of England between what at that point amounted to two gangs. These were fights between the old guard, the Rockers -- people who represented the recent past who wouldn't go away, what Americans would call "greasers", people who modelled themselves on Marlon Brando in Rebel Without A Cause, and who thought music had peaked with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran -- and a newer, younger, hipper, group of people, who represented the new, the modern -- the Mods: [Excerpt: The Who, "My Generation"] Jim Marshall, if he'd been American, would have been considered one of the Greatest Generation, but his upbringing was not typical of that, or of any, generation. When he was five, he was diagnosed as having skeletal tuberculosis, which had made his bones weak and easily broken. To protect them, he spent the next seven years of his life, from age five until twelve, in hospital in a full-body cast. The only opportunity he got to move during those years was for a few minutes every three months, when the cast would be cut off and reapplied to account for his growth during that time. Unsurprisingly, once he was finally out of the cast, he discovered he loved moving -- a lot. He dropped out of school aged thirteen -- most people at the time left school at aged fourteen anyway, and since he'd missed all his schooling to that point it didn't seem worth his while carrying on -- and took on multiple jobs, working sixty hours a week or more. But the job he made most money at was as an entertainer. He started out as a tap-dancer, taking advantage of his new mobility, but then his song-and-dance man routine became steadily more song and less dance, as people started to notice his vocal resemblance to Bing Crosby. He was working six nights a week as a singer, but when World War II broke out, the drummer in the seven-piece band he was working with was drafted -- Marshall wouldn't ever be drafted because of his history of illness. The other members of the band knew that as a dancer he had a good sense of rhythm, and so they made a suggestion -- if Jim took over the drums, they could split the money six ways rather than seven. Marshall agreed, but he discovered there was a problem. The drum kit was always positioned at the back of the stage, behind the PA, and he couldn't hear the other musicians clearly. This is actually OK for a drummer -- you're keeping time, and the rest of the band are following you, so as long as you can *sort of* hear them everyone can stay together. But a singer needs to be able to hear everything clearly, in order to stay on key. And this was in the days before monitor speakers, so the only option available was to just have a louder PA system. And since one wasn't available, Marshall just had to build one himself. And that's how Jim Marshall started building amplifiers. Marshall eventually gave up playing the drums, and retired to run a music shop. There's a story about Marshall's last gig as a drummer, which isn't in the biography of Marshall I read for this episode, but is told in other places by the son of the bandleader at that gig. Apparently Marshall had a very fraught relationship with his father, who was among other things a semi-professional boxer, and at that gig Marshall senior turned up and started heckling his son from the audience. Eventually the younger Marshall jumped off the stage and started hitting his dad, winning the fight, but he decided he wasn't going to perform in public any more. The band leader for that show was Clifford Townshend, a clarinet player and saxophonist whose main gig was as part of the Squadronaires, a band that had originally been formed during World War II by RAF servicemen to entertain other troops. Townshend, who had been a member of Oswald Moseley's fascist Blackshirts in the thirties but later had a change of heart, was a second-generation woodwind player -- his father had been a semi-professional flute player. As well as working with the Squadronaires, Townshend also put out one record under his own name in 1956, a version of "Unchained Melody" credited to "Cliff Townsend and his singing saxophone": [Excerpt: Cliff Townshend and his Singing Saxophone, "Unchained Melody"] Cliff's wife often performed with him -- she was a professional singer who had  actually lied about her age in order to join up with the Air Force and sing with the group -- but they had a tempestuous marriage, and split up multiple times. As a result of this, and the travelling lifestyle of musicians, there were periods where their son Peter was sent to live with his grandmother, who was seriously abusive, traumatising the young boy in ways that would affect him for the rest of his life. When Pete Townshend was growing up, he wasn't particularly influenced by music, in part because it was his dad's job rather than a hobby, and his parents had very few records in the house. He did, though, take up the harmonica and learn to play the theme tune to Dixon of Dock Green: [Excerpt: Tommy Reilly, "Dixon of Dock Green Theme"] His first exposure to rock and roll wasn't through Elvis or Little Richard, but rather through Ray Ellington. Ellington was a British jazz singer and drummer, heavily influenced by Louis Jordan, who provided regular musical performances on the Goon Show throughout the fifties, and on one episode had performed "That Rock 'n' Rollin' Man": [Excerpt: Ray Ellington, "That Rock 'N' Rollin' Man"] Young Pete's assessment of that, as he remembered it later, was "I thought it some kind of hybrid jazz: swing music with stupid lyrics. But it felt youthful and rebellious, like The Goon Show itself." But he got hooked on rock and roll when his father took him and a friend to see a film: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Rock Around the Clock"] According to Townshend's autobiography, "I asked Dad what he thought of the music. He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was OK. For me it was more than just OK. After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same." Young Pete would soon go and see Bill Haley live – his first rock and roll gig. But the older Townshend would soon revise his opinion of rock and roll, because it soon marked the end of the kind of music that had allowed him to earn his living -- though he still managed to get regular work, playing a clarinet was suddenly far less lucrative than it had been. Pete decided that he wanted to play the saxophone, like his dad, but soon he switched first to guitar and then to banjo. His first guitar was bought for him by his abusive grandmother, and three of the strings snapped almost immediately, so he carried on playing with just three strings for a while. He got very little encouragement from his parents, and didn't really improve for a couple of years. But then the trad jazz boom happened, and Townshend teamed up with a friend of his who played the trumpet and French horn. He had initially bonded with John Entwistle over their shared sense of humour -- both kids loved Mad magazine and would make tape recordings together of themselves doing comedy routines inspired by the Goon show and Hancock's Half Hour -- but Entwistle was also a very accomplished musician, who could play multiple instruments. Entwistle had formed a trad band called the Confederates, and Townshend joined them on banjo and guitar, but they didn't stay together for long. Both boys, though, would join a variety of other bands, both together and separately. As the trad boom faded and rock and roll regained its dominance among British youth, there was little place for Entwistle's trumpet in the music that was popular among teenagers, and at first Entwistle decided to try making his trumpet sound more like a saxophone, using a helmet as a mute to try to get it to sound like the sax on "Ramrod" by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Eddy soon became Entwistle's hero. We've talked about him before a couple of times, briefly, but not in depth, but Duane Eddy had a style that was totally different from most guitar heroes. Instead of playing mostly on the treble strings of the guitar, playing high twiddly parts, Eddy played low notes on the bass strings of his guitar, giving him the style that he summed up in album titles like "The Twang's the Thang" and "Have Twangy Guitar Will Travel". After a couple of years of having hits with this sound, produced by Lee Hazelwood and Lester Sill, Eddy also started playing another instrument, the instrument variously known as the six-string bass, the baritone guitar, or the Danelectro bass (after the company that manufactured the most popular model).  The baritone guitar has six strings, like a normal guitar, but it's tuned lower than a standard guitar -- usually a fourth lower, though different players have different preferences. The Danelectro became very popular in recording studios in the early sixties, because it helped solve a big problem in recording bass tones. You can hear more about this in the episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I recommended last week, but basically double basses were very, very difficult to record in the 1950s, and you'd often end up just getting a thudding, muddy, sound from them, which is one reason why when you listen to a lot of early rockabilly the bass is doing nothing very interesting, just playing root notes -- you couldn't easily get much clarity on the instrument at all. Conversely, with electric basses, with the primitive amps of the time, you didn't get anything like the full sound that you'd get from a double bass, but you *did* get a clear sound that would cut through on a cheap radio in a way that the sound of a double bass wouldn't. So the solution was obvious -- you have an electric instrument *and* a double bass play the same part. Use the double bass for the big dull throbbing sound, but use the electric one to give the sound some shape and cut-through. If you're doing that, you mostly want the trebly part of the electric instrument's tone, so you play it with a pick rather than fingers, and it makes sense to use a Danelectro rather than a standard bass guitar, as the Danelectro is more trebly than a normal bass. This combination, of Danelectro and double bass, appears to have been invented by Owen Bradley, and you can hear it for example on this record by Patsy Cline, with Bob Moore on double bass and Harold Bradley on baritone guitar: [Excerpt: Patsy Cline, "Crazy"] This sound, known as "tic-tac bass", was soon picked up by a lot of producers, and it became the standard way of getting a bass sound in both Nashville and LA. It's all over the Beach Boys' best records, and many of Jack Nitzsche's arrangements, and many of the other records the Wrecking Crew played on, and it's on most of the stuff the Nashville A-Team played on from the late fifties through mid-sixties, records by people like Elvis, Roy Orbison, Arthur Alexander, and the Everly Brothers. Lee Hazelwood was one of the first producers to pick up on this sound -- indeed, Duane Eddy has said several times that Hazelwood invented the sound before Owen Bradley did, though I think Bradley did it first -- and many of Eddy's records featured that bass sound, and eventually Eddy started playing a baritone guitar himself, as a lead instrument, playing it on records like "Because They're Young": [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Because They're Young"] Duane Eddy was John Entwistle's idol, and Entwistle learned Eddy's whole repertoire on trumpet, playing the saxophone parts. But then, realising that the guitar was always louder than the trumpet in the bands he was in, he realised that if he wanted to be heard, he should probably switch to guitar himself. And it made sense that a bass would be easier to play than a regular guitar -- if you only have four strings, there's more space between them, so playing is easier. So he started playing the bass, trying to sound as much like Eddy as he could. He had no problem picking up the instrument -- he was already a multi-instrumentalist -- but he did have a problem actually getting hold of one, as all the electric bass guitars available in the UK at the time were prohibitively expensive. Eventually he made one himself, with the help of someone in a local music shop, and that served for a time, though he would soon trade up to more professional instruments, eventually amassing the biggest collection of basses in the world. One day, Entwistle was approached on the street by an acquaintance, Roger Daltrey, who said to him "I hear you play bass" -- Entwistle was, at the time, carrying his bass. Daltrey was at this time a guitarist -- like Entwistle, he'd built his own instrument -- and he was the leader of a band called Del Angelo and his Detours. Daltrey wasn't Del Angelo, the lead singer -- that was a man called Colin Dawson who by all accounts sounded a little like Cliff Richard -- but he was the bandleader, hired and fired the members, and was in charge of their setlists. Daltrey lured Entwistle away from the band he was in with Townshend by telling him that the Detours were getting proper paid gigs, though they weren't getting many at the time. Unfortunately, one of the group's other guitarists, the member who owned the best amp, died in an accident not long after Entwistle joined the band. However, the amp was left in the group's possession, and Entwistle used it to lure Pete Townshend into the group by telling him he could use it -- and not telling him that he'd be sharing the amp with Daltrey. Townshend would later talk about his audition for the Detours -- as he was walking up the street towards Daltrey's house, he saw a stunningly beautiful woman walking away from the house crying. She saw his guitar case and said "Are you going to Roger's?" "Yes." "Well you can tell him, it's that bloody guitar or me". Townshend relayed the message, and Daltrey responded "Sod her. Come in." The audition was a formality, with the main questions being whether Townshend could play two parts of the regular repertoire for a working band at that time -- "Hava Nagila", and the Shadows' "Man of Mystery": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Townshend could play both of those, and so he was in. The group would mostly play chart hits by groups like the Shadows, but as trad jazz hadn't completely died out yet they would also do breakout sessions playing trad jazz, with Townshend on banjo, Entwistle on trumpet and Daltrey on trombone. From the start, there was a temperamental mismatch between the group's two guitarists. Daltrey was thoroughly working-class, culturally conservative,  had dropped out of school to go to work at a sheet metal factory, and saw himself as a no-nonsense plain-speaking man. Townshend was from a relatively well-off upper-middle-class family, was for a brief time a member of the Communist Party, and was by this point studying at art school, where he was hugely impressed by a lecture from Gustav Metzger titled “Auto-Destructive Art, Auto-Creative Art: The Struggle For The Machine Arts Of The Future”, about Metzger's creation of artworks which destroyed themselves. Townshend was at art school during a period when the whole idea of what an art school was for was in flux, something that's typified by a story Townshend tells about two of his early lectures. At the first, the lecturer came in and told the class to all draw a straight line. They all did, and then the lecturer told off anyone who had drawn anything that was anything other than six inches long, perfectly straight, without a ruler, going north-south, with a 3B pencil, saying that anything else at all was self-indulgence of the kind that needed to be drummed out of them if they wanted to get work as commercial artists. Then in another lecture, a different lecturer came in and asked them all to draw a straight line. They all drew perfectly straight, six-inch, north-south lines in 3B pencil, as the first lecturer had taught them. The new lecturer started yelling at them, then brought in someone else to yell at them as well, and then cut his hand open with a knife and dragged it across a piece of paper, smearing a rough line with his own blood, and screamed "THAT'S a line!" Townshend's sympathies lay very much with the second lecturer. Another big influence on Townshend at this point was a jazz double-bass player, Malcolm Cecil. Cecil would later go on to become a pioneer in electronic music as half of TONTO's Expanding Head Band, and we'll be looking at his work in more detail in a future episode, but at this point he was a fixture on the UK jazz scene. He'd been a member of Blues Incorporated, and had also played with modern jazz players like Dick Morrissey: [Excerpt: Dick Morrissey, "Jellyroll"] But Townshend was particularly impressed with a performance in which Cecil demonstrated unorthodox ways to play the double-bass, including playing so hard he broke the strings, and using a saw as a bow, sawing through the strings and damaging the body of the instrument. But these influences, for the moment, didn't affect the Detours, who were still doing the Cliff and the Shadows routine. Eventually Colin Dawson quit the group, and Daltrey took over the lead vocal role for the Detours, who settled into a lineup of Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and drummer Doug Sandom, who was much older than the rest of the group -- he was born in 1930, while Daltrey and Entwistle were born in 1944 and Townshend in 1945. For a while, Daltrey continued playing guitar as well as singing, but his hands were often damaged by his work at the sheet-metal factory, making guitar painful for him. Then the group got a support slot with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, who at this point were a four-piece band, with Kidd singing backed by bass, drums, and Mick Green playing one guitar on which he played both rhythm and lead parts: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Doctor Feel Good"] Green was at the time considered possibly the best guitarist in Britain, and the sound the Pirates were able to get with only one guitar convinced the Detours that they would be OK if Daltrey switched to just singing, so the group changed to what is now known as a "power trio" format. Townshend was a huge admirer of Steve Cropper, another guitarist who played both rhythm and lead, and started trying to adopt parts of Cropper's style, playing mostly chords, while Entwistle went for a much more fluid bass style than most, essentially turning the bass into another lead instrument, patterning his playing after Duane Eddy's work. By this time, Townshend was starting to push against Daltrey's leadership a little, especially when it came to repertoire. Townshend had a couple of American friends at art school who had been deported after being caught smoking dope, and had left their records with Townshend for safe-keeping. As a result, Townshend had become a devotee of blues and R&B music, especially the jazzier stuff like Ray Charles, Mose Allison, and Booker T and the MGs. He also admired guitar-based blues records like those by Howlin' Wolf or Jimmy Reed. Townshend kept pushing for this music to be incorporated into the group's sets, but Daltrey would push back, insisting as the leader that they should play the chart hits that everyone else played, rather than what he saw as Townshend's art-school nonsense. Townshend insisted, and eventually won -- within a short while the group had become a pure R&B group, and Daltrey was soon a convert, and became the biggest advocate of that style in the band. But there was a problem with only having one guitar, and that was volume. In particular, Townshend didn't want to be able to hear hecklers. There were gangsters in some of the audiences who would shout requests for particular songs, and you had to play them or else, even if they were completely unsuitable for the rest of the audience's tastes. But if you were playing so loud you couldn't hear the shouting, you had an excuse. Both Entwistle and Townshend had started buying amplifiers from Jim Marshall, who had opened up a music shop after quitting drums -- Townshend actually bought his first one from a shop assistant in Marshall's shop, John McLaughlin, who would later himself become a well-known guitarist. Entwistle, wanting to be heard over Townshend, had bought a cabinet with four twelve-inch speakers in it. Townshend, wanting to be heard over Entwistle, had bought *two* of these cabinets, and stacked them, one on top of the other, against Marshall's protestations -- Marshall said that they would vibrate so much that the top one might fall over and injure someone. Townshend didn't listen, and the Marshall stack was born. This ultra-amplification also led Townshend to change his guitar style further. He was increasingly reliant on distortion and feedback, rather than on traditional instrumental skills. Now, there are basically two kinds of chords that are used in most Western music. There are major chords, which consist of the first, third, and fifth note of the scale, and these are the basic chords that everyone starts with. So you can strum between G major and F major: [demonstrates G and F chords] There's also minor chords, where you flatten the third note, which sound a little sadder than major chords, so playing G minor and F minor: [demonstrates Gm and Fm chords] There are of course other kinds of chord -- basically any collection of notes counts as a chord, and can work musically in some context. But major and minor chords are the basic harmonic building blocks of most pop music. But when you're using a lot of distortion and feedback, you create a lot of extra harmonics -- extra notes that your instrument makes along with the ones you're playing. And for mathematical reasons I won't go into here because this is already a very long episode, the harmonics generated by playing the first and fifth notes sound fine together, but the harmonics from a third or minor third don't go along with them at all. The solution to this problem is to play what are known as "power chords", which are just the root and fifth notes, with no third at all, and which sound ambiguous as to whether they're major or minor. Townshend started to build his technique around these chords, playing for the most part on the bottom three strings of his guitar, which sounds like this: [demonstrates G5 and F5 chords] Townshend wasn't the first person to use power chords -- they're used on a lot of the Howlin' Wolf records he liked, and before Townshend would become famous the Kinks had used them on "You Really Got Me" -- but he was one of the first British guitarists to make them a major part of his personal style. Around this time, the Detours were starting to become seriously popular, and Townshend was starting to get exhausted by the constant demands on his time from being in the band and going to art school. He talked about this with one of his lecturers, who asked how much Townshend was earning from the band. When Townshend told him he was making thirty pounds a week, the lecturer was shocked, and said that was more than *he* was earning. Townshend should probably just quit art school, because it wasn't like he was going to make more money from anything he could learn there. Around this time, two things changed the group's image. The first was that they played a support slot for the Rolling Stones in December 1963. Townshend saw Keith Richards swinging his arm over his head and then bringing it down on the guitar, to loosen up his muscles, and he thought that looked fantastic, and started copying it -- from very early on, Townshend wanted to have a physical presence on stage that would be all about his body, to distract from his face, as he was embarrassed about the size of his nose. They played a second support slot for the Stones a few weeks later, and not wanting to look like he was copying Richards, Townshend didn't do that move, but then he noticed that Richards didn't do it either. He asked about it after the gig, and Richards didn't know what he was talking about -- "Swing me what?" -- so Townshend took that as a green light to make that move, which became known as the windmill, his own. The second thing was when in February 1964 a group appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars: [Excerpt: Johnny Devlin and the Detours, "Sometimes"] Johnny Devlin and the Detours had had national media exposure, which meant that Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and Sandom had to change the name of their group. They eventually settled on "The Who", It was around this time that the group got their first serious management, a man named Helmut Gorden, who owned a doorknob factory. Gorden had no management experience, but he did offer the group a regular salary, and pay for new equipment for them. However, when he tried to sign the group to a proper contract, as most of them were still under twenty-one he needed their parents to countersign for them. Townshend's parents, being experienced in the music industry, refused to sign, and so the group continued under Gorden's management without a contract. Gorden, not having management experience, didn't have any contacts in the music industry. But his barber did. Gorden enthused about his group to Jack Marks, the barber, and Marks in turn told some of his other clients about this group he'd been hearing about. Tony Hatch wasn't interested, as he already had a guitar group with the Searchers, but Chris Parmenter at Fontana Records was, and an audition was arranged. At the audition, among other numbers, they played Bo Diddley's "Here 'Tis": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Here 'Tis"] Unfortunately for Doug, he didn't play well on that song, and Townshend started berating him. Doug also knew that Parmenter had reservations about him, because he was so much older than the rest of the band -- he was thirty-four at the time, while the rest of the group were only just turning twenty -- and he was also the least keen of the group on the R&B material they were playing. He'd been warned by Entwistle, his closest friend in the group, that Daltrey and Townshend were thinking of dropping him, and so he decided to jump before he was pushed, walking out of the audition. He agreed to come back for a handful more gigs that were already booked in, but that was the end of his time in the band, and of his time in the music industry -- though oddly not of his friendship with the group. Unlike other famous examples of an early member not fitting in and being forced out before a band becomes big, Sandom remained friends with the other members, and Townshend wrote the foreword to his autobiography, calling him a mentor figure, while Daltrey apparently insisted that Sandom phone him for a chat every Sunday, at the same time every week, until Sandom's death in 2019 at the age of eighty-nine. The group tried a few other drummers, including someone who Jim Marshall had been giving drum lessons to, Mitch Mitchell, before settling on the drummer for another group that played the same circuit, the Beachcombers, who played mostly Shadows material, plus the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean songs that their drummer, Keith Moon, loved. Moon and Entwistle soon became a formidable rhythm section, and despite having been turned down by Fontana, they were clearly going places. But they needed an image -- and one was provided for them by Pete Meaden. Meaden was another person who got his hair cut by Jack Marks, and he had had  little bit of music business experience, having worked for Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager, for a while before going on to manage a group called the Moments, whose career highlight was recording a soundalike cover version of "You Really Got Me" for an American budget label: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] The Moments never had any big success, but Meaden's nose for talent was not wrong, as their teenage lead singer, Steve Marriott, later went on to much better things. Pete Meaden was taken on as Helmut Gorden's assistant, but from this point on the group decided to regard him as their de facto manager, and as more than just a manager. To Townshend in particular he was a guru figure, and he shaped the group to appeal to the Mods. Now, we've not talked much about the Mods previously, and what little has been said has been a bit contradictory. That's because the Mods were a tiny subculture at this point -- or to be more precise, they were three subcultures. The original mods had come along in the late 1950s, at a time when there was a division among jazz fans between fans of traditional New Orleans jazz -- "trad" -- and modern jazz. The mods were modernists, hence the name, but for the most part they weren't as interested in music as in clothes. They were a small group of young working-class men, almost all gay, who dressed flamboyantly and dandyishly, and who saw themselves, their clothing, and their bodies as works of art. In the late fifties, Britain was going through something of an economic boom, and this was the first time that working-class men *could* buy nice clothes. These working-class dandies would have to visit tailors to get specially modified clothes made, but they could just about afford to do so. The mod image was at first something that belonged to a very, very, small clique of people. But then John Stephens opened his first shop. This was the first era when short runs of factory-produced clothing became possible, and Stephens, a stylish young man, opened a shop on Carnaby Street, then a relatively cheap place to open a shop. He painted the outside yellow, played loud pop music, and attracted a young crowd. Stephens was selling factory-made clothes that still looked unique -- short runs of odd-coloured jeans, three-button jackets, and other men's fashion. Soon Carnaby Street became the hub for men's fashion in London, thanks largely to Stephens. At one point Stephens owned fifteen different shops, nine of them on Carnaby Street itself, and Stephens' shops appealed to the kind of people that the Kinks would satirise in their early 1966 hit single "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] Many of those who visited Stephens' shops were the larger, second, generation of mods. I'm going to quote here from George Melly's Revolt Into Style, the first book to properly analyse British pop culture of the fifties and sixties, by someone who was there: "As the ‘mod' thing spread it lost its purity. For the next generation of Mods, those who picked up the ‘mod' thing around 1963, clothes, while still their central preoccupation, weren't enough. They needed music (Rhythm and Blues), transport (scooters) and drugs (pep pills). What's more they needed fashion ready-made. They hadn't the time or the fanaticism to invent their own styles, and this is where Carnaby Street came in." Melly goes on to talk about how these new Mods were viewed with distaste by the older Mods, who left the scene. The choice of music for these new Mods was as much due to geographic proximity as anything else. Carnaby Street is just round the corner from Wardour Street, and Wardour Street is where the two clubs that between them were the twin poles of the London R&B scenes, the Marquee and the Flamingo, were both located. So it made sense that the young people frequenting John Stephens' boutiques on Carnaby Street were the same people who made up the audiences -- and the bands -- at those clubs. But by 1964, even these second-generation Mods were in a minority compared to a new, third generation, and here I'm going to quote Melly again: "But the Carnaby Street Mods were not the final stage in the history of this particular movement. The word was taken over finally by a new and more violent sector, the urban working class at the gang-forming age, and this became quite sinister. The gang stage rejected the wilder flights of Carnaby Street in favour of extreme sartorial neatness. Everything about them was neat, pretty and creepy: dark glasses, Nero hair-cuts, Chelsea boots, polo-necked sweaters worn under skinny V-necked pullovers, gleaming scooters and transistors. Even their offensive weapons were pretty—tiny hammers and screwdrivers. En masse they looked like a pack of weasels." I would urge anyone who's interested in British social history to read Melly's book in full -- it's well worth it. These third-stage Mods soon made up the bulk of the movement, and they were the ones who, in summer 1964, got into the gang fights that were breathlessly reported in all the tabloid newspapers. Pete Meaden was a Mod, and as far as I can tell he was a leading-edge second-stage Mod, though as with all these things who was in what generation of Mods is a bit blurry. Meaden had a whole idea of Mod-as-lifestyle and Mod-as-philosophy, which worked well with the group's R&B leanings, and with Townshend's art-school-inspired fascination with the aesthetics of Pop Art. Meaden got the group a residency at the Railway Hotel, a favourite Mod hangout, and he also changed their name -- The Who didn't sound Mod enough. In Mod circles at the time there was a hierarchy, with the coolest people, the Faces, at the top, below them a slightly larger group of people known as Numbers, and below them the mass of generic people known as Tickets. Meaden saw himself as the band's Svengali, so he was obviously the Face, so the group had to be Numbers -- so they became The High Numbers. Meaden got the group a one-off single deal, to record two songs he had allegedly written, both of which had lyrics geared specifically for the Mods. The A-side was "Zoot Suit": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Zoot Suit"] This had a melody that was stolen wholesale from "Misery" by the Dynamics: [Excerpt: The Dynamics, "Misery"] The B-side, meanwhile, was titled "I'm the Face": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "I'm the Face"] Which anyone with any interest at all in blues music will recognise immediately as being "Got Love if You Want It" by Slim Harpo: [Excerpt: Slim Harpo, "Got Love if You Want it"] Unfortunately for the High Numbers, that single didn't have much success. Mod was a local phenomenon, which never took off outside London and its suburbs, and so the songs didn't have much appeal in the rest of the country -- while within London, Mod fashions were moving so quickly that by the time the record came out, all its up-to-the-minute references were desperately outdated. But while the record didn't have much success, the group were getting a big live following among the Mods, and their awareness of rapidly shifting trends in that subculture paid off for them in terms of stagecraft. To quote Townshend: "What the Mods taught us was how to lead by following. I mean, you'd look at the dance floor and see some bloke stop during the dance of the week and for some reason feel like doing some silly sort of step. And you'd notice some of the blokes around him looking out of the corners of their eyes and thinking 'is this the latest?' And on their own, without acknowledging the first fellow, a few of 'em would start dancing that way. And we'd be watching. By the time they looked up on the stage again, we'd be doing that dance and they'd think the original guy had been imitating us. And next week they'd come back and look to us for dances". And then Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp came into the Railway Hotel. Kit Lambert was the son of Constant Lambert, the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, who the economist John Maynard Keynes described as the most brilliant man he'd ever met. Constant Lambert was possibly Britain's foremost composer of the pre-war era, and one of the first people from the serious music establishment to recognise the potential of jazz and blues music. His most famous composition, "The Rio Grande", written in 1927 about a fictitious South American river, is often compared with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue: [Excerpt: Constant Lambert, "The Rio Grande"] Kit Lambert was thus brought up in an atmosphere of great privilege, both financially and intellectually, with his godfather being the composer Sir William Walton while his godmother was the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, with whom his father was having an affair. As a result of the problems between his parents, Lambert spent much of his childhood living with his grandmother. After studying history at Oxford and doing his national service, Lambert had spent a few months studying film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, where he went because Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Renais taught there -- or at least so he would later say, though there's no evidence I can find that Godard actually taught there, so either he went there under a mistaken impression or he lied about it later to make himself sound more interesting. However, he'd got bored with his studies after only a few months, and decided that he knew enough to just make a film himself, and he planned his first documentary. In early 1961, despite having little film experience, he joined two friends from university, Richard Mason and John Hemming, in an attempt to make a documentary film tracing the source of the Iriri, a river in South America that was at that point the longest unnavigated river in the world. Unfortunately, the expedition was as disastrous as it's possible for such an expedition to be. In May 1961 they landed in the Amazon basin and headed off on their expedition to find the source of the Iriri, with the help of five local porters and three people sent along by the Brazillian government to map the new areas they were to discover. Unfortunately, by September, not only had they not found the source of the Iriri, they'd actually not managed to find the Iriri itself, four and a half months apparently not being a long enough time to find an eight-hundred-and-ten-mile-long river. And then Mason made his way into history in the worst possible way, by becoming the last, to date, British person to be murdered by an uncontacted indigenous tribe, the Panará, who shot him with eight poison arrows and then bludgeoned his skull. A little over a decade later the Panará made contact with the wider world after nearly being wiped out by disease. They remembered killing Mason and said that they'd been scared by the swishing noise his jeans had made, as they'd never encountered anyone who wore clothes before. Before they made contact, the Panará were also known as the Kreen-Akrore, a name given them by the Kayapó people, meaning "round-cut head", a reference to the way they styled their hair, brushed forward and trimmed over the forehead in a way that was remarkably similar to some of the Mod styles. Before they made contact, Paul McCartney would in 1970 record an instrumental, "Kreen Akrore", after being inspired by a documentary called The Tribe That Hides From Man. McCartney's instrumental includes sound effects, including McCartney firing a bow and arrow, though apparently the bow-string snapped during the recording: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Kreen Akrore"] For a while, Lambert was under suspicion for the murder, though the Daily Express, which had sponsored the expedition, persuaded Brazillian police to drop the charges. While he was in Rio waiting for the legal case to be sorted, Lambert developed what one book on the Who describes as "a serious anal infection". Astonishingly, this experience did not put Lambert off from the film industry, though he wouldn't try to make another film of his own for a couple of years. Instead, he went to work at Shepperton Studios, where he was an uncredited second AD on many films, including From Russia With Love and The L-Shaped Room. Another second AD working on many of the same films was Chris Stamp, the brother of the actor Terence Stamp, who was just starting out in his own career. Stamp and Lambert became close friends, despite -- or because of -- their differences. Lambert was bisexual, and preferred men to women, Stamp was straight. Lambert was the godson of a knight and a dame, Stamp was a working-class East End Cockney. Lambert was a film-school dropout full of ideas and grand ambitions, but unsure how best to put those ideas into practice, Stamp was a practical, hands-on, man. The two complemented each other perfectly, and became flatmates and collaborators. After seeing A Hard Day's Night, they decided that they were going to make their own pop film -- a documentary, inspired by the French nouvelle vague school of cinema, which would chart a pop band from playing lowly clubs to being massive pop stars. Now all they needed was to find a band that were playing lowly clubs but could become massive stars. And they found that band at the Railway Hotel, when they saw the High Numbers. Stamp and Lambert started making their film, and completed part of it, which can be found on YouTube: [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Oo Poo Pa Doo"] The surviving part of the film is actually very, very, well done for people who'd never directed a film before, and I have no doubt that if they'd completed the film, to be titled High Numbers, it would be regarded as one of the classic depictions of early-sixties London club life, to be classed along with The Small World of Sammy Lee and Expresso Bongo. What's even more astonishing, though, is how *modern* the group look. Most footage of guitar bands of this period looks very dated, not just in the fashions, but in everything -- the attitude of the performers, their body language, the way they hold their instruments. The best performances are still thrilling, but you can tell when they were filmed. On the other hand, the High Numbers look ungainly and awkward, like the lads of no more than twenty that they are -- but in a way that was actually shocking to me when I first saw this footage. Because they look *exactly* like every guitar band I played on the same bill as during my own attempts at being in bands between 2000 and about 2005. If it weren't for the fact that they have such recognisable faces, if you'd told me this was footage of some band I played on the same bill with at the Star and Garter or Night and Day Cafe in 2003, I'd believe it unquestioningly. But while Lambert and Stamp started out making a film, they soon pivoted and decided that they could go into management. Of course, the High Numbers did already have management -- Pete Meaden and Helmut Gorden -- but after consulting with the Beatles' lawyer, David Jacobs, Lambert and Stamp found out that Gorden's contract with the band was invalid, and so when Gorden got back from a holiday, he found himself usurped. Meaden was a bit more difficult to get rid of, even though he had less claim on the group than Gorden -- he was officially their publicist, not their manager, and his only deal was with Gorden, even though the group considered him their manager. While Meaden didn't have a contractual claim though, he did have one argument in his favour, which is that he had a large friend named Phil the Greek, who had a big knife. When this claim was put to Lambert and Stamp, they agreed that this was a very good point indeed, one that they hadn't considered, and agreed to pay Meaden off with two hundred and fifty pounds. This would not be the last big expense that Stamp and Lambert would have as the managers of the Who, as the group were now renamed. Their agreement with the group had the two managers taking forty percent of the group's earnings, while the four band members would split the other sixty percent between themselves -- an arrangement which should theoretically have had the managers coming out ahead. But they also agreed to pay the group's expenses. And that was to prove very costly indeed. Shortly after they started managing the group, at a gig at the Railway Hotel, which had low ceilings, Townshend lifted his guitar up a bit higher than he'd intended, and broke the headstock. Townshend had a spare guitar with him, so this was OK, and he also remembered Gustav Metzger and his ideas of auto-destructive art, and Malcolm Cecil sawing through his bass strings and damaging his bass, and decided that it was better for him to look like he'd meant to do that than to look like an idiot who'd accidentally broken his guitar, so he repeated the motion, smashing his guitar to bits, before carrying on the show with his spare. The next week, the crowd were excited, expecting the same thing again, but Townshend hadn't brought a spare guitar with him. So as not to disappoint them, Keith Moon destroyed his drum kit instead. This destruction was annoying to Entwistle, who saw musical instruments as something close to sacred, and it also annoyed the group's managers at first, because musical instruments are expensive. But they soon saw the value this brought to the band's shows, and reluctantly agreed to keep buying them new instruments. So for the first couple of years, Lambert and Stamp lost money on the group. They funded this partly through Lambert's savings, partly through Stamp continuing to do film work, and partly from investors in their company, one of whom was Russ Conway, the easy-listening piano player who'd had hits like "Side Saddle": [Excerpt: Russ Conway, "Side Saddle"] Conway's connections actually got the group another audition for a record label, Decca (although Conway himself recorded for EMI), but the group were turned down. The managers were told that they would have been signed, but they didn't have any original material. So Pete Townshend was given the task of writing some original material. By this time Townshend's musical world was expanding far beyond the R&B that the group were performing on stage, and he talks in his autobiography about the music he was listening to while he was trying to write his early songs. There was "Green Onions", which he'd been listening to for years in his attempt to emulate Steve Cropper's guitar style, but there was also The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and two tracks he names in particular, "Devil's Jump" by John Lee Hooker: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Devil's Jump"] And "Better Get Hit in Your Soul" by Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus, "Better Get Hit In Your Soul"] He was also listening to what he described as "a record that changed my life as a composer", a recording of baroque music that included sections of Purcell's Gordian Knot Untied: [Excerpt: Purcell, Chaconne from Gordian Knot Untied] Townshend had a notebook in which he listed the records he wanted to obtain, and he reproduces that list in his autobiography -- "‘Marvin Gaye, 1-2-3, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder's Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert [Nina Simone], Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk Around Midnight and Brilliant Corners.'" He was also listening to a lot of Stockhausen and Charlie Parker, and to the Everly Brothers -- who by this point were almost the only artist that all four members of the Who agreed were any good, because Daltrey was now fully committed to the R&B music he'd originally dismissed, and disliked what he thought was the pretentiousness of the music Townshend was listening to, while Keith Moon was primarily a fan of the Beach Boys. But everyone could agree that the Everlys, with their sensitive interpretations, exquisite harmonies, and Bo Diddley-inflected guitars, were great, and so the group added several songs from the Everlys' 1965 albums Rock N Soul and Beat N Soul to their set, like "Man With Money": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Man With Money"] Despite Daltrey's objections to diluting the purity of the group's R&B sound, Townshend brought all these influences into his songwriting. The first song he wrote to see release was not actually recorded by the Who, but a song he co-wrote for a minor beat group called the Naturals, who released it as a B-side: [Excerpt: The Naturals, "It Was You"] But shortly after this, the group got their first big break, thanks to Lambert's personal assistant, Anya Butler. Butler was friends with Shel Talmy's wife, and got Talmy to listen to the group. Townshend in particular was eager to work with Talmy, as he was a big fan of the Kinks, who were just becoming big, and who Talmy produced. Talmy signed the group to a production deal, and then signed a deal to license their records to Decca in America -- which Lambert and Stamp didn't realise wasn't the same label as British Decca. Decca in turn sublicensed the group's recordings to their British subsidiary Brunswick, which meant that the group got a minuscule royalty for sales in Britain, as their recordings were being sold through three corporate layers all taking their cut. This didn't matter to them at first, though, and they went into the studio excited to cut their first record as The Who. As was typical at the time, Talmy brought in a few session players to help out. Clem Cattini turned out not to be needed, and left quickly, but Jimmy Page stuck around -- not to play on the A-side, which Townshend said was "so simple even I could play it", but the B-side, a version of the old blues standard "Bald-Headed Woman", which Talmy had copyrighted in his own name and had already had the Kinks record: [Excerpt: The Who, "Bald-Headed Woman"] Apparently the only reason that Page played on that is that Page wouldn't let Townshend use his fuzzbox. As well as Page and Cattini, Talmy also brought in some backing vocalists. These were the Ivy League, a writing and production collective consisting at this point of John Carter and Ken Lewis, both of whom had previously been in a band with Page, and Perry Ford. The Ivy League were huge hit-makers in the mid-sixties, though most people don't recognise their name. Carter and Lewis had just written "Can You Hear My Heartbeat" for Herman's Hermits: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "Can You Hear My Heartbeat?"] And, along with a couple of other singers who joined the group, the Ivy League would go on to sing backing vocals on hits by Sandie Shaw, Tom Jones and others. Together and separately the members of the Ivy League were also responsible for writing, producing, and singing on "Let's Go to San Francisco" by the Flowerpot Men, "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, "Beach Baby" by First Class, and more, as well as their big hit under their own name, "Tossing and Turning": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "Tossing and Turning"] Though my favourite of their tracks is their baroque pop masterpiece "My World Fell Down": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "My World Fell Down"] As you can tell, the Ivy League were masters of the Beach Boys sound that Moon, and to a lesser extent Townshend, loved. That backing vocal sound was combined with a hard-driving riff inspired by the Kinks' early hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night", and with lyrics that explored inarticulacy, a major theme of Townshend's lyrics: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] "I Can't Explain" made the top ten, thanks in part to a publicity stunt that Lambert came up with. The group had been booked on to Ready, Steady, Go!, and the floor manager of the show mentioned to Lambert that they were having difficulty getting an audience for that week's show -- they were short about a hundred and fifty people, and they needed young, energetic, dancers. Lambert suggested that the best place to find young, energetic, dancers, was at the Marquee on a Tuesday night -- which just happened to be the night of the Who's regular residency at the club. Come the day of filming, the Ready, Steady, Go! audience was full of the Who's most hardcore fans, all of whom had been told by Lambert to throw scarves at the band when they started playing. It was one of the most memorable performances on the show. But even though the record was a big hit, Daltrey was unhappy. The man who'd started out as guitarist in a Shadows cover band and who'd strenuously objected to the group's inclusion of R&B material now had the zeal of a convert. He didn't want to be doing this "soft commercial pop", or Townshend's art-school nonsense. He wanted to be an R&B singer, playing hard music for working-class men like him. Two decisions were taken to mollify the lead singer. The first was that when they went into the studio to record their first album, it was all soul and R&B apart from one original. The album was going to consist of three James Brown covers, three Motown covers, Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", and a cover of Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Louie Louie" sequel "Louie Come Home", retitled "Lubie". All of this was material that Daltrey was very comfortable with. Also, Daltrey was given some input into the second single, which would be the only song credited to Daltrey and Townshend, and Daltrey's only songwriting contribution to a Who A-side. Townshend had come up with the title "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" while listening to Charlie Parker, and had written the song based on that title, but Daltrey was allowed to rewrite the lyrics and make suggestions as to the arrangement. That record also made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Who, "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere"] But Daltrey would soon become even more disillusioned. The album they'd recorded was shelved, though some tracks were later used for what became the My Generation album, and Kit Lambert told the Melody Maker “The Who are having serious doubts about the state of R&B. Now the LP material will consist of hard pop. They've finished with ‘Smokestack Lightning'!” That wasn't the only thing they were finished with -- Townshend and Moon were tired of their band's leader, and also just didn't think he was a particularly good singer -- and weren't shy about saying so, even to the press. Entwistle, a natural peacemaker, didn't feel as strongly, but there was a definite split forming in the band. Things came to a head on a European tour. Daltrey was sick of this pop nonsense, he was sick of the arty ideas of Townshend, and he was also sick of the other members' drug use. Daltrey didn't indulge himself, but the other band members had been using drugs long before they became successful, and they were all using uppers, which offended Daltrey greatly. He flushed Keith Moon's pill stash down the toilet, and screamed at his band mates that they were a bunch of junkies, then physically attacked Moon. All three of the other band members agreed -- Daltrey was out of the band. They were going to continue as a trio. But after a couple of days, Daltrey was back in the group. This was mostly because Daltrey had come crawling back to them, apologising -- he was in a very bad place at the time, having left his wife and kid, and was actually living in the back of the group's tour van. But it was also because Lambert and Stamp persuaded the group they needed Daltrey, at least for the moment, because he'd sung lead on their latest single, and that single was starting to rise up the charts. "My Generation" had had a long and torturous journey from conception to realisation. Musically it originally had been inspired by Mose Allison's "Young Man's Blues": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Young Man's Blues"] Townshend had taken that musical mood and tied it to a lyric that was inspired by a trilogy of TV plays, The Generations, by the socialist playwright David Mercer, whose plays were mostly about family disagreements that involved politics and class, as in the case of the first of those plays, where two upwardly-mobile young brothers of very different political views go back to visit their working-class family when their mother is on her deathbed, and are confronted by the differences they have with each other, and with the uneducated father who sacrificed to give them a better life than he had: [Excerpt: Where the Difference Begins] Townshend's original demo for the song was very much in the style of Mose Allison, as the excerpt of it that's been made available on various deluxe reissues of the album shows: [Excerpt: Pete Townshend, "My Generation (demo)"] But Lambert had not been hugely impressed by that demo. Stamp had suggested that Townshend try a heavier guitar riff, which he did, and then Lambert had added the further suggestion that the music would be improved by a few key changes -- Townshend was at first unsure about this, because he already thought he was a bit too influenced by the Kinks, and he regarded Ray Davies as, in his words, "the master of modulation", but eventually he agreed, and decided that the key changes did improve the song. Stamp made one final suggestion after hearing the next demo version of the song. A while earlier, the Who had been one of the many British groups, like the Yardbirds and the Animals, who had backed Sonny Boy Williamson II on his UK tour. Williamson had occasionally done a little bit of a stutter in some of his performances, and Daltrey had picked up on that and started doing it. Townshend had in turn imitated Daltrey's mannerism a couple of times on the demo, and Stamp thought that was something that could be accentuated. Townshend agreed, and reworked the song, inspired by John Lee Hooker's "Stuttering Blues": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Stuttering Blues"] The stuttering made all the difference, and it worked on three levels. It reinforced the themes of inarticulacy that run throughout the Who's early work -- their first single, after all, had been called "I Can't Explain", and Townshend talks movingly in his autobiography about talking to teenage fans who felt that "I Can't Explain" had said for them the things they couldn't say th