Podcasts about Chas Chandler

Un Dernier Disque avant la fin du monde

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2023

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 --

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The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Hey Joe! (Part 2)

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2023 82:52

Vous vous souvenez à la fin de la première partie on a écouté la version de Tim Rose….. Et La version de Rose a également été entendue de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique. Elle a notamment été entendue par Chas Chandler, le bassiste des Animals. Certaines sources semblent suggérer que Chandler a d'abord entendu la chanson interprétée par un groupe appelé The Creation, mais dans une biographie que j'ai lue de ce groupe, il est clairement indiqué qu'il n'a commencé à jouer la chanson qu'en 1967.

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Tiny Supervillans (It's 1996 and Claire is introduced to Mr Pinkwhistle)

Everyone Dies In Sunderland: A podcast about growing up terrified in the eighties and nineties

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 6, 2022 64:11

In the mid 1990s Britain carried out an interesting social experiment to see if taking a children from a chaotic and poverty-ridden childhood in some of most deprived parts of the North, giving them a dehumanising nickname, making them some kind of weird celebrity, and repeatedly publicly condemning in the hope that would stop their offending behaviour.Rat boy. Spider boy. Worm boy. Boomerang boy. Balaclava boy. The singing defective. Who were they? And what became of them? Did widespread national condemnation work?Spoiler alert: It didn't work.But this is a time when the government literally wanted the justice system to, and this is a quote from the Prime Minister “understand less and condemn more” And it's the story of a region too, and by that I mean, this is what they thought of us back then. DID SOMEONE SAY LISTENER OFFER! LISTEN TO FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN GET 20% OF A SPIRIT SEEKERS GHOST HUNT NEAR YOU!*It's 1996! Jarvis Cocker wiggles his bum and then gets beaten up by a man dressed as Buddha! Chas Chandler dies – but not before he'd helped Jimi Hendrix busk near Byker (but not near Byker Grove)! Babylon Zoo spend more time at number one than Liz Truss did at number 10 (or did they?)John creatively fills that fiscal black hole we've heard so much about. Gareth introduces Claire to Mr Pinkwhistle. Roy of the Rovers gets seriously weird.Who are your bewildering local heroes? People like Lord Latif or the guy from Durham who looks like Mario? Is he a lecturer at the university or did John dream that?You can reach us on email everyonediesinsunderland@gmail.com, on Twitter at @everyonediespod, on Facebook and Instagram. Our theme music is performed and written by The Way Out, was it not? Usually though, it's “Steady Away” by Pete Dilley and can be found on his album Half-truths and Hearsay which you can/should buy/stream here because he's got a kid on the way and kids need shoes. https://petedilley.bandcamp.com/album/half-truths-and-hearsay It's me. Hi. I'm the problem, it's me. *As long as you live in Sunderland.

Jimi Hendrix - Are you experienced

Füzz

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2022

Plata Þáttarins fyrsta plata Jimi Hendrix ? Are you experienced sem datt inn á bandaríska vinsældalistann í þessari viku árið 1967 ? fyrir 55 árum síðan. Vinur þáttarins er ennþá í sumarfríi en óskalagasíminn opnar kl. 20.00 - 5687123. Are you experienced er tímamótaplata og sannarlega ein af vörðum rokksögunnar. Hún kom út 12. Maí 1967, var 77 vikur (rúmt ár) á topp 40 á bandaríska vinsældalistanum. Rolling Stone setti plötuna í 15. sæti yfir bestu plötur sögunnar árið 2003. Hún fór hæst í 2. Sæti breska listans og var á honum í 33. vikur. Bandaríkjamaðurinn var búinn að vera að ströggla árum saman í heimalandinu sem gítarleikari í R&B hljómsveitum þegar hann kom til Bretlands og Chas Chandler fyrrum bassaleikari hljómsveitarinnar Animals og Michael Jeffrey umboðsmaður Animals gerðust umboðsmenn hans. Chandler fékk Hendrix til að koma til Englands og hjálpaði honum að setja saman hljómsveitina The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Fólk flykktist til að sjá nýju gítarhetjuna í London sem var flinkari og glæsilegri en allir hinir strákarnir í borginni, líka Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck og þeir allir. Hendrix gerði plötusamning við nýtt fyrirtæki sem hét Track og var í eigu umboðsmanna The Who, Kit Lambert og Chris Stamp, en þá hafði Decca útgáfan hafnað honum unga Hendrix. Platan var tekin upp í sextán upptökulotum frá október ?66 til apríl ?67 í þremur mismunandi stúíóum í London. Nykur - Sjáið sólina þjást Foo Fighters - Everlong Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Bring it on Sex Pistols - I?m not your steppin?stone Jet Black Joe - Stepping Stone Mammút - Salt Kælan Mikla - Hvítir sandar AC/DC - Back in black SÍMATÍMI Suede - She still leads me on 10 Speed - Space queen Pixies - Dregs of the wine Rolling Stones - Streets of love Rolling Stones - Street fighting man T.Rex - Get it on Zoox - Revolution now Jimi Hendrix Experience - Foxey lady Led Zeppelin - Ramble on The Beatles - Taxman (2022 mix) Built to spill - Spiderweb Elastica - Waking up Mars Volta - Blacklight shine Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are you experienced The Stranglers - Hanging around Iron Maiden - Killers DDT Skordýraeitur - Fita Pretenders - Precoius Jimi Hendrix Experience - Manic depression Manic Street Preachers - Motorsycle emptiness Uriah Heep - Look at yourself

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Jimi Hendrix - Are you experienced

Füzz

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2022

Plata Þáttarins fyrsta plata Jimi Hendrix ? Are you experienced sem datt inn á bandaríska vinsældalistann í þessari viku árið 1967 ? fyrir 55 árum síðan. Vinur þáttarins er ennþá í sumarfríi en óskalagasíminn opnar kl. 20.00 - 5687123. Are you experienced er tímamótaplata og sannarlega ein af vörðum rokksögunnar. Hún kom út 12. Maí 1967, var 77 vikur (rúmt ár) á topp 40 á bandaríska vinsældalistanum. Rolling Stone setti plötuna í 15. sæti yfir bestu plötur sögunnar árið 2003. Hún fór hæst í 2. Sæti breska listans og var á honum í 33. vikur. Bandaríkjamaðurinn var búinn að vera að ströggla árum saman í heimalandinu sem gítarleikari í R&B hljómsveitum þegar hann kom til Bretlands og Chas Chandler fyrrum bassaleikari hljómsveitarinnar Animals og Michael Jeffrey umboðsmaður Animals gerðust umboðsmenn hans. Chandler fékk Hendrix til að koma til Englands og hjálpaði honum að setja saman hljómsveitina The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Fólk flykktist til að sjá nýju gítarhetjuna í London sem var flinkari og glæsilegri en allir hinir strákarnir í borginni, líka Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck og þeir allir. Hendrix gerði plötusamning við nýtt fyrirtæki sem hét Track og var í eigu umboðsmanna The Who, Kit Lambert og Chris Stamp, en þá hafði Decca útgáfan hafnað honum unga Hendrix. Platan var tekin upp í sextán upptökulotum frá október ?66 til apríl ?67 í þremur mismunandi stúíóum í London. Nykur - Sjáið sólina þjást Foo Fighters - Everlong Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Bring it on Sex Pistols - I?m not your steppin?stone Jet Black Joe - Stepping Stone Mammút - Salt Kælan Mikla - Hvítir sandar AC/DC - Back in black SÍMATÍMI Suede - She still leads me on 10 Speed - Space queen Pixies - Dregs of the wine Rolling Stones - Streets of love Rolling Stones - Street fighting man T.Rex - Get it on Zoox - Revolution now Jimi Hendrix Experience - Foxey lady Led Zeppelin - Ramble on The Beatles - Taxman (2022 mix) Built to spill - Spiderweb Elastica - Waking up Mars Volta - Blacklight shine Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are you experienced The Stranglers - Hanging around Iron Maiden - Killers DDT Skordýraeitur - Fita Pretenders - Precoius Jimi Hendrix Experience - Manic depression Manic Street Preachers - Motorsycle emptiness Uriah Heep - Look at yourself

england track built animals rolling stones experienced jimi hendrix eric clapton plata jeff beck decca bandar jimi hendrix experience chas chandler bretlands platan vinur kit lambert chris stamp

Jimi Hendrix - Are you experienced

Füzz

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2022 155:00

Plata Þáttarins fyrsta plata Jimi Hendrix ? Are you experienced sem datt inn á bandaríska vinsældalistann í þessari viku árið 1967 ? fyrir 55 árum síðan. Vinur þáttarins er ennþá í sumarfríi en óskalagasíminn opnar kl. 20.00 - 5687123. Are you experienced er tímamótaplata og sannarlega ein af vörðum rokksögunnar. Hún kom út 12. Maí 1967, var 77 vikur (rúmt ár) á topp 40 á bandaríska vinsældalistanum. Rolling Stone setti plötuna í 15. sæti yfir bestu plötur sögunnar árið 2003. Hún fór hæst í 2. Sæti breska listans og var á honum í 33. vikur. Bandaríkjamaðurinn var búinn að vera að ströggla árum saman í heimalandinu sem gítarleikari í R&B hljómsveitum þegar hann kom til Bretlands og Chas Chandler fyrrum bassaleikari hljómsveitarinnar Animals og Michael Jeffrey umboðsmaður Animals gerðust umboðsmenn hans. Chandler fékk Hendrix til að koma til Englands og hjálpaði honum að setja saman hljómsveitina The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Fólk flykktist til að sjá nýju gítarhetjuna í London sem var flinkari og glæsilegri en allir hinir strákarnir í borginni, líka Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck og þeir allir. Hendrix gerði plötusamning við nýtt fyrirtæki sem hét Track og var í eigu umboðsmanna The Who, Kit Lambert og Chris Stamp, en þá hafði Decca útgáfan hafnað honum unga Hendrix. Platan var tekin upp í sextán upptökulotum frá október ?66 til apríl ?67 í þremur mismunandi stúíóum í London. Nykur - Sjáið sólina þjást Foo Fighters - Everlong Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Bring it on Sex Pistols - I?m not your steppin?stone Jet Black Joe - Stepping Stone Mammút - Salt Kælan Mikla - Hvítir sandar AC/DC - Back in black SÍMATÍMI Suede - She still leads me on 10 Speed - Space queen Pixies - Dregs of the wine Rolling Stones - Streets of love Rolling Stones - Street fighting man T.Rex - Get it on Zoox - Revolution now Jimi Hendrix Experience - Foxey lady Led Zeppelin - Ramble on The Beatles - Taxman (2022 mix) Built to spill - Spiderweb Elastica - Waking up Mars Volta - Blacklight shine Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are you experienced The Stranglers - Hanging around Iron Maiden - Killers DDT Skordýraeitur - Fita Pretenders - Precoius Jimi Hendrix Experience - Manic depression Manic Street Preachers - Motorsycle emptiness Uriah Heep - Look at yourself

england track built animals rolling stones experienced jimi hendrix eric clapton plata jeff beck decca bandar jimi hendrix experience chas chandler bretlands platan vinur kit lambert chris stamp

The Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Are You Experienced?"

The Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 8, 2022 38:22

The focus here, after a classic two-part episode about Hendrix in the Fall of 2019, is the game-changing album, "Are You Experienced?" The Experience's debut set fire to all conventions except the use of instruments and electricity to create sound!!! Jimi's brilliance is underlined by the perfect sonic bed by Noel & Mitch for the exercising of the passions exhibited in those grooves!The social conditions of the times are discussed as are their impact on the final contents of both the U.S. and U.K. versions of the album.Please check out our sponsors:Boldfoot Socks https://boldfoot.comCrooked Eye Brewery https://crookedeyebrewery.com/Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/And check our blog about exciting premier events for Danny Garcia's new film, "Nightclubbing!"

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"The Wind Cries Mary" 2022-07-21 Random Soundcheck

Random Soundchecks

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2022 4:19

Jimi Hendrix, Chas Chandler, and wisdom.

wind jimi hendrix cries soundcheck chas chandler

Performance Anxiety: Stephen Lawrie (The Telescopes)

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2022 60:43

Stephen Lawrie grew up with music. His dad was approached by Chas Chandler before he signed Jimi Hendrix. But his band broke up before they signed a contract and were lost to history. But his father's love of music transferred to Stephen. He remembers being mesmerized by guitars as a toddler. He formed The Telescopes in the late 80's and has been the only consistent member. In fact, the most consistent thing about The Telescopes has been change. Whether it's band members or the sound of the music itself, no Telescopes album is the same as the previous ones.Stephen admits that the band stopped doing anything when he lost the inspiration to write. He also admitted that sometimes he's been more inspired by what he DIDN'T want to do than by what he wanted to do. He tells me how the 4th Telescopes album was a direct result of not being able to play the third album live! And speaking of live Telescopes, the band has a policy of never turning their amps off during a live show. They just see how long it takes for the venue to turn them off!Check out Stephen and The Telescopes on the socials, pick up The Telescopes albums on Bandcamp. Also check out Foam Giant, a new project he's been collaborating on. Check us out @PerformanceAnx on social media. Rate & review episodes! You can support the show through ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety or performanceanx.threadless.com. Remember to check out all the other great shows on the Pantheon Podcast Network. And thank you for listening to Stephen Lawrie on Performance Anxiety.

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Performance Anxiety: Stephen Lawrie (The Telescopes)

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2022 62:13

Stephen Lawrie grew up with music. His dad was approached by Chas Chandler before he signed Jimi Hendrix. But his band broke up before they signed a contract and were lost to history. But his father's love of music transferred to Stephen. He remembers being mesmerized by guitars as a toddler. He formed The Telescopes in the late 80's and has been the only consistent member. In fact, the most consistent thing about The Telescopes has been change. Whether it's band members or the sound of the music itself, no Telescopes album is the same as the previous ones. Stephen admits that the band stopped doing anything when he lost the inspiration to write. He also admitted that sometimes he's been more inspired by what he DIDN'T want to do than by what he wanted to do. He tells me how the 4th Telescopes album was a direct result of not being able to play the third album live! And speaking of live Telescopes, the band has a policy of never turning their amps off during a live show. They just see how long it takes for the venue to turn them off! Check out Stephen and The Telescopes on the socials, pick up The Telescopes albums on Bandcamp. Also check out Foam Giant, a new project he's been collaborating on. Check us out @PerformanceAnx on social media. Rate & review episodes! You can support the show through ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety or performanceanx.threadless.com. Remember to check out all the other great shows on the Pantheon Podcast Network. And thank you for listening to Stephen Lawrie on Performance Anxiety. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

bandcamp jimi hendrix performance anxiety telescopes lawrie pantheon podcast network chas chandler

Stephen Lawrie (The Telescopes)

Performance Anxiety

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2022 60:43

Stephen Lawrie grew up with music. His dad was approached by Chas Chandler before he signed Jimi Hendrix. But his band broke up before they signed a contract and were lost to history. But his father's love of music transferred to Stephen. He remembers being mesmerized by guitars as a toddler. He formed The Telescopes in the late 80's and has been the only consistent member. In fact, the most consistent thing about The Telescopes has been change. Whether it's band members or the sound of the music itself, no Telescopes album is the same as the previous ones.Stephen admits that the band stopped doing anything when he lost the inspiration to write. He also admitted that sometimes he's been more inspired by what he DIDN'T want to do than by what he wanted to do. He tells me how the 4th Telescopes album was a direct result of not being able to play the third album live! And speaking of live Telescopes, the band has a policy of never turning their amps off during a live show. They just see how long it takes for the venue to turn them off!Check out Stephen and The Telescopes on the socials, pick up The Telescopes albums on Bandcamp. Also check out Foam Giant, a new project he's been collaborating on. Check us out @PerformanceAnx on social media. Rate & review episodes! You can support the show through ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety or performanceanx.threadless.com. Remember to check out all the other great shows on the Pantheon Podcast Network. And thank you for listening to Stephen Lawrie on Performance Anxiety.

bandcamp jimi hendrix performance anxiety telescopes lawrie pantheon podcast network chas chandler

Stephen Lawrie (The Telescopes)

Performance Anxiety

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2022 63:13

Stephen Lawrie grew up with music. His dad was approached by Chas Chandler before he signed Jimi Hendrix. But his band broke up before they signed a contract and were lost to history. But his father's love of music transferred to Stephen. He remembers being mesmerized by guitars as a toddler. He formed The Telescopes in the late 80's and has been the only consistent member. In fact, the most consistent thing about The Telescopes has been change. Whether it's band members or the sound of the music itself, no Telescopes album is the same as the previous ones. Stephen admits that the band stopped doing anything when he lost the inspiration to write. He also admitted that sometimes he's been more inspired by what he DIDN'T want to do than by what he wanted to do. He tells me how the 4th Telescopes album was a direct result of not being able to play the third album live! And speaking of live Telescopes, the band has a policy of never turning their amps off during a live show. They just see how long it takes for the venue to turn them off! Check out Stephen and The Telescopes on the socials, pick up The Telescopes albums on Bandcamp. Also check out Foam Giant, a new project he's been collaborating on. Check us out @PerformanceAnx on social media. Rate & review episodes! You can support the show through ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety or performanceanx.threadless.com. Remember to check out all the other great shows on the Pantheon Podcast Network. And thank you for listening to Stephen Lawrie on Performance Anxiety. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

bandcamp jimi hendrix performance anxiety telescopes lawrie pantheon podcast network chas chandler

Episode 147: “Hey Joe” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Pod Gave Rock'N Roll To You

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 16, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on "Making Time" by The Creation. 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. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. Information on Arthur Lee and Love came from Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson, and Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns. Information on Gary Usher's work with the Surfaris and the Sons of Adam came from The California Sound by Stephen McParland, which can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Information on Jimi Hendrix came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. Information on the history of "Hey Joe" itself came from all these sources plus Hey Joe: The Unauthorised Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro, though note that most of that book is about post-1967 cover versions. Most of the pre-Experience session work by Jimi Hendrix I excerpt in this episode is on this box set of alternate takes and live recordings. And "Hey Joe" can be found on Are You Experienced? Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before we start – this episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns, and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs. If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focusses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence, or murder, and my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter, but it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on "Stagger Lee" and "Ida Red", about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have to look at the way a song like "Hound Dog" changed from the Willie Mae Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change, and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea which remains constant no matter how much the song changes. Like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man -- sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a forty-four, and tries to escape -- sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley, in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, "Little Sadie": [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley, "Little Sadie"] At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as "Cocaine Blues" or "Take a Whiff on Me", which was popular around the same time: [Excerpt: The Memphis Jug Band, "Cocaine Habit Blues"] And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of "Little Sadie" now had a reason to kill his woman -- a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her. The first recording of this version, under the name "Cocaine Blues" seems to have been a Western Swing version by W. A. Nichol's Western Aces: [Excerpt: W.A. Nichol's Western Aces, "Cocaine Blues"] Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time -- I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichol's version -- and his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Cocaine Blues"] That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song -- Mose Allison's classic jazz number "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both "Cocaine Blues" and as "Transfusion Blues". In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom pen", so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalised his career after several years of limited success: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Cocaine Blues (live at Folsom Prison)"] While that was Cash's first live recording at a prison, though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison -- ever since the success of his single "Folsom Prison Blues" he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for eleven years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as "Cocaine Blues" -- a man with a forty-four who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer, who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerde's Folk City he'd met a woman named Niela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called "Mean World Blues" that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Mean World Blues"] Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" or "In the Pines", or sometimes "Black Girl": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"] Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" comes -- it's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it for example in "Lord Randall", the song on which Bob Dylan based "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea. "Baby Please Don't Go To Town" is a question-and-answer song in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on "Eight Miles High" I talked about the circle of fifths -- a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E [demonstrates] That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town", and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later: [Excerpt: Niela Miller, "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town"] After Roberts and Miller broke up, Miller kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences. There was that question-and-answer folk-song format, there's the story of "Cocaine Blues" with its protagonist getting a forty-four to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. "Hey, Joe!" was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early fifties: [Excerpt: Carl Smith, "Hey Joe!"] That was written by Boudleaux Bryant, a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers, and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Laine made the top ten in the US: [Excerpt: Frankie Laine, "Hey Joe"] Laine's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Laine was the biggest star in music in Britain -- at the time the UK charts only had a top twelve, and at one point four of the singles in the top twelve were by Laine, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells which made the country top ten later that year: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Hey Joe"] Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that "Hey Joe" had almost no further cover versions for twenty years, though it did become part of the Searchers' setlist, and was included on their Live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hey Joe"] But that song was clearly on Roberts' mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late fifties and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a twelve-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Len Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Jansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who *didn't* claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later: [Excerpt: Billy Roberts, "Hey Joe"] Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Miller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said "Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question/answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism... I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit. He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologize to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Some time around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story, which change the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly -- everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was "Hey Joe", and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti. We've met Valenti before, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- he was a singer/songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written "Get Together": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] As we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written "Hey Joe" so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to "Hey Joe" in his own name -- even though Roberts had already registered it -- and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt. Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played "his" song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the Byrds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the Byrds formed, and indeed we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] And Crosby *loved* "Hey Joe", which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two Byrds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dickson, who had strong opinions about it, saying later "Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Byrds' myth. And he may not have liked the Byrds' myth. He fought for 'Hey Joe' and he did it. As long as I could say 'No!' I did, and when I couldn't any more they did it. You had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else... 'Hey Joe' I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a Byrds song." Indeed, Dickson was so opposed to the song that he would later say “One of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn! Turn! Turn! album.” Dickson was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their Fifth Dimension album, the album which included "Eight Miles High". That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the "Eight Miles High" episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material -- doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger The album ended up with only eleven songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after "Eight Miles High" weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, "5D", a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinn said of the organ part "When he came into the studio I told him to think Bach. He was already thinking Bach before that anyway.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D"] While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top forty. The next single did, just about -- a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] The "Fifth Dimension" album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Allen Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at that time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it, and even Crosby later said "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. Everybody makes mistakes." McGuinn said later "The reason Crosby did lead on 'Hey Joe' was because it was *his* song. He didn't write it but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Hey Joe"] Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison style version Crosby had been doing previously. And the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuinn quote, because the full version continues "He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him. Then both Love and The Leaves had a minor hit with it and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist." The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing. And the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the Byrds -- Bryan MacLean. MacLean and Crosby had been very close because they were both from very similar backgrounds -- they were both Hollywood brats with huge egos. MacLean later said "Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about, because he was just like me!" MacLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin, his neighbour when growing up was Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of "Needles and Pins", who he was introduced to by Sharon Sheeley, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladeer, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues", which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Roads Blues"] Reading interviews with people who knew MacLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up. John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said "There was a young kid, Bryan MacLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn" while Chris Hillman said "He was a pretty good kid but a wee bit cocky." He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the Byrds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Cooder, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Curt Boettcher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Cooder formed The Rising Sons, a multi-racial blues band who were for a while the main rivals to the Byrds on the scene. MacLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the Byrds, and particularly to Crosby. He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said "He was a hard-working guy on our behalf. As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically – more like his gofer, in fact." But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the Byrds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the Monkees, unsuccessfully, but shortly after that -- some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat -- he went to Ben Frank's -- the LA hangout that had actually been namechecked in the open call for Monkees auditions, which said they wanted "Ben Franks types", and there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Echols would later remember "He was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long, strawberry hair. All the girls loved him. For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time." Lee and Echols were both Black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmie Lunceford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with "The Honeydripper", as we heard way back in the episode on "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford and the Delta Rhythm Boys, "The Honeydripper"] However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighbourhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Echols family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Echols, and the two became close friends from that point on. Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion by a salesman who would go around with a donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey, He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead -- he was a spoiled child, by all accounts, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties. Johnny Echols had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Echols family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free-jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Echols, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon-breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Echols was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing "Last Night", the instrumental that had been a hit for the Mar-Keys on Stax records: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- the LA Group, in imitation of Booker T and the MGs – the Memphis Group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar. He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny "Guitar" Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit, and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul acts that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the O'Jays, and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still under-age, and they would pencil in fake moustaches to play the clubs so they'd appear older. In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast -- Johnny "Guitar" Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others -- and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show, and so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up, and Echols learned all of them -- playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names -- they had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever Black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say "When I was a little boy I would listen to Nat 'King' Cole and I would look at that purple Capitol Records logo. I wanted to be on Capitol, that was my goal. Later on I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood -- did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capitol, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore-Beechwood. I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capitol". The record that the LAGs released, though, was not very good, a track called "Rumble-Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] Lee later said "I was young and very inexperienced and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since." The LAGs were dropped by Capitol after one single, and for the next little while Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar -- though Echols has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was "I Been Trying", a Phil Spector soundalike released by Little Ray: [Excerpt: Little Ray, "I Been Trying"] And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like "Slow Jerk" by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals, "Slow Jerk"] and "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Echols was also playing with a lot of other people, and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard, so when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them. They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically -- he would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it "wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot". As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British Invasion bands -- Arthur was in the audience for the TAMI show, and quite impressed by Mick Jagger -- and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cooke for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Del-Fi records, where they cut "Luci Baines", a "Twist and Shout" knock-off with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American Four track, "Stay Away", was recorded but went unreleased until 2006: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the American Four, "Stay Away"] Soon the American Four were changing their sound and name again. This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Sons, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Lee was very impressed by them as an multiracial band making aggressive, loud, guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and *he* had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live though, in their recordings, produced by the Byrds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Sons often had the same garage band folk-punk sound that Lee and Echols would soon make their own: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] But while the Rising Sons recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Echols' band, now renamed once again to The Grass Roots, to become the Byrds' new challengers. Lee later said "I named the group The Grass Roots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said 'the grass roots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems instead of sitting around talking about it'". After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Mick Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at -- both the Stones and the Byrds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group. He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front. So the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname "Bummer Bob" because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him (and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969). So when Bryan MacLean introduced himself to Lee and Echols, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to Byrds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the Grass Roots, and Bummer Bob was out. The Grass Roots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their "Folk and Roll" album, which featured "The Universal Coward"... Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause in to terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with a song for that album called "Where Where You When I Needed You?": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Sloan and Barri decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name, and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name, and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves The Grass Roots, and so that's what they did: [Excerpt: The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Echols would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part -- that Adler had come in to a Grass Roots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him. Echols and MacLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Echols claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new Grass Roots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point -- he'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Luv Brassieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The Grass Roots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Bryan MacLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself. And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bido Lito's, he started making his big lead spot a version of "Hey Joe", which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the Searchers had popularised in their cover version of "Needles and Pins", the song originally recorded by MacLean's old girlfriend Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very, common among the LA bands, most notably on the Byrds' "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late eighties Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for: "The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe"). When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish. Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that" [and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with 'f' that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows] "D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like 'Needles and Pins.'" The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand: [demonstrates] And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Byrds, and the Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D: [demonstrates] So that riff became the Big Thing in LA after the Byrds popularised the Searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of "Hey Joe". In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March: [Excerpt: Love, "Hey Joe"] But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it – although other than the Byrds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like "Louie Louie" before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the "Hey Joe" melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to "Hey Joe", titled "Wanted Dead or Alive", about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Shaun Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers: [Excerpt: The Rogues, "Wanted Dead or Alive"] The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as "Hey Joe", or at least as "Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?", which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on "Hey Joe", and was produced by Nik Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?": [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] Roberts' original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Byrds, had been "where you going with that money in your hand?", and had Joe headed off to *buy* the gun. But as Echols later said “What happened was Bob Lee from The Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to 'Hey Joe'. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics. The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Well I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel .44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.' It never says ‘Hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand.' Those were the words I wrote just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it. That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on The Leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.” That first release by the Leaves also contained an extra verse -- a nod to Love's previous name: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] That original recording credited the song as public domain -- apparently Bryan MacLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single. Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded "Hey Joe", but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called the Fender IV, who made records like "Malibu Run": [Excerpt: The Fender IV, "Malibu Run"] Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love -- their drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song "Feathered Fish" for them: [Excerpt: Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] But while they were the first to record "Hey Joe", their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act -- this time with the Surfaris, the surf group who had had a hit with "Wipe Out". Coincidentally, the Surfaris had just changed bass players -- their most recent bass player, Ken Forssi, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of “Hey Joe” in 1966. Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Surfaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the "gun in your hand" lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W. Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nik Venet. Usher said later "I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was Public Domain; meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it, takes the songwriting credit. I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it." The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped. But when the Leaves cut the song for a *third* time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number thirty-one: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] And *that* version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti. Which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top forty with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise -- they would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this -- he deserved all the money, not just half of it -- but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing "his" song to other people, too. One of those other people was Vince Martin. Martin had been a member of a folk-pop group called the Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with "Cindy, Oh Cindy": [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Cindy, Oh Cindy"] But as we heard in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folkie, in a duo with Fred Neil, and recorded an album with him, "Tear Down the Walls": [Excerpt: Fred Neil and Vince Martin, "Morning Dew"] That song we just heard, "Morning Dew", was another question-and-answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard for which he continued to collect royalties: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Morning Dew"] This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Lovin' Spoonful episode too, when he was in a band named the Big Three with Cass Elliot and her coincidentally-named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song "Oh! Susanna": [Excerpt: The Big Three, "The Banjo Song"] The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number-one hit "Venus", and didn't give Rose any credit: [Excerpt: Shocking Blue, "Venus"] But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was "Hey Joe". Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it, or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalchian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name -- he would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself, but no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts' copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts' in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Echols had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Hey Joe"] Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well. And in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called the Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bumped into Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend, who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice (or possibly Mo-rees) James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first -- there are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or (as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later) a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point. But it was still a very early one. And by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude -- though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims -- and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did. Hendrix was a sponge. But Lee did influence him. Indeed, one of Hendrix's *last* sessions, in March 1970, was guesting on an album by Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "Everlasting First"] Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Allen Hendrix, which made his father, James Allen Hendrix, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worry that he'd been named after another man who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as "Buster" to avoid the issue. When Al Hendrix came back from the war the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix -- James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother -- though the family continued calling him "Buster". Little James Hendrix Junior didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimi's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimi was the only one to remain with his parents -- the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him. The only one that Jimi had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Al and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimi (and for a few years Leon), he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendrix was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimi grew up introverted, and stuttering, and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction -- he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabbe, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs -- and the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the forties and fifties, most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people -- there wasn't a very large Black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was thirteen Jimi's favourite record was Dean Martin's "Memories are Made of This": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Memories are Made of This"] He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimi was fifteen, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimi's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimi became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Bensons' most vivid memory of Jimi in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimi his very first guitar. By this time Jimi and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimi asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimi the guitar. She said later “He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.” He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play it left-handed -- until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimi would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else, but as soon as Al came in he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimi's mother died when he was fifteen, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimi and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral -- depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimi the bus fare and told him to go by himself and Jimi was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimi and Leon from going. After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimi started to hang around with a friend called Pernell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimi was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on "Louie Louie" who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Eventually Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendrix to buy Jimi a decent electric guitar on credit -- Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due. As well as blues and R&B, Jimi was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was "Tall Cool One" by the Fabulous Wailers, the local group who popularised a version of "Louie Louie" based on Holden's one: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] As we talked about in the "Louie Louie" episode, the Fabulous Wailers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimi was a regular in the audience, later writing his song "Spanish Castle Magic" about those shows: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] He was also a big fan of Duane Eddy, and soon learned Eddy's big hits "Forty Miles of Bad Road", "Because They're Young", and "Peter Gunn" -- a song he would return to much later in his life: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Peter Gunn/Catastrophe"] His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start -- the first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set, because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said "That's not my style". This would be a common story for the next several years. After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band. [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the Army, in order to make a steady living, and so did he -- although not entirely by choice. He was arrested, twice, for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice -- either go to prison, or sign up for the Army for three years. He chose the latter. At first, the Army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous "Screaming Eagles", whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the Division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendrix were Black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only Black audiences. And Hendrix quickly discovered that Black audiences in the Southern states weren't interested in "Louie Louie", Duane Eddy, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point -- when Hendrix and Cox started playing together, in a trio called the Kasuals, they had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer. The Kasuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the Army, and Hendrix had another two and a bit years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the Army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could -- he pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years, he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money. The Kasuals expanded their lineup, adding a second guitarist, Alphonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendrix and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record *sounds* like a 1965 record, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible – and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track (which later became a Northern Soul favourite) so I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendrix session: [Excerpt: Frank Howard and the Commanders, "I'm So Glad"] This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point -- he would flit between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points, nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft. One story from around this time sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing -- he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician -- and his slightly formal manner of speech. He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied “I was simply trying to get that B.B. King tone down and my experiment failed.” Bookings for the King Kasuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Kasuals, who now had a horn section. The new lineup of King Kasuals were playing the chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use -- playing with his teeth like Alphonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a fifty-foot cord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue, still playing, like Guitar Slim used to. As well as playing with the King Kasuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit -- people who had had one or two hits, or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo. The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)"] But he lacked discipline. “Five dates would go beautifully,” Burke later said, “and then at the next show, he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song. I just couldn't handle it anymore.” Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelettes, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964 he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group. Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosa Lee Brooks session (and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't), then the first record Hendrix played on was their single "Testify": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy Mercy"] After leaving the Isleys, Hendrix joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour, in Memphis, he went to Stax studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished, and introduced himself. Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white -- he'd assumed that he must be Black -- and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on "Mercy Mercy", one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks -- Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't brought along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt, and after the show Richard screamed at him “I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!” While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me", which like "Mercy Mercy" was written by Don Covay, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me"] According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosa Lee Brooks, on New Year's Eve 1964. At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names, including Jimmy James, for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosa Lee Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike & Tina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off. Hendrix met Brooks afterwards, and told her she looked like his mother -- a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by. The two got into a relationship, and were soon talking about becoming a duo like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia -- "Love is Strange" was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they made together was the "My Diary" single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period. Brooks would later recall Little

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The Hellacopters, Slade ja uutiset

Rock Around The Blog

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2022 33:35

Rockin ilosanomaa livenä ja levyillä! 2022 ja 1972! Kuunnelluissa levyissä The Hellacoptersin uutuus Eyes Of Oblivion sekä Sladen klassikkolive Slade Alive! Studiossa Sami Ruokangas ja Juha Kakkuri. Jakson soittolista: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3czkDp1paz2j0Tjgo7sCL9?si=6657d719d1e547dd Uutisissa keikkoja ja levyjä: Eric Clapton, The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, Helsinki Blues Festival, Dave Lindholm, Punk It, Johnny Rotten, Rival Sons, Public Imaga Ltd, Faith No More, Mike Patton, Duran Duran, Jethro Tull, Nick Mason, Rock Fest Hyvinkää, Huora, Nyrkkitappelu, Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Megadeth, Killing Joke, Candlemass, Johan Längqvist, Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi, The Clash, Sex Pistols, ZZ Top, Rolling Stones, Wigwam, Risto Vuorimies, Ronnie Österberg, Måns "Måsse" Groundstroem, Jim Pembroke, "Rekku" Rechardt, Pedro Hietanen, Jan Noponen, Rolling Records, The Black Crowes, Silver Arrow, The Temptations, T. Rex, Rod Stewart, Little Feat, David Bowie, Chris Robinson, Rich Robinson, Aerosmith, Joe Perry ja Rufus Thomas, Muuten menossa ovat mukana Status Quo, Dr. Feelgood, Hurriganes, Steppenwolf, Chas Chandler, The Animals, Jimi Hendrix, KISS, WASP, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, Sweet, Tavastia, Dregen, Mokoma, Venom, Nicke Andersson, Boba Fett, The Allman Brothers Band, The Beatles, Judas Priest, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ramones, ABBA, Ghost, Lucifer, Johanna Sadonis, Blue Öyster Cult ja Papa Emeritus.

Fun Size/The Wind Cries Mary

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2022 9:35

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockJimi Hendrix 1967 “The Wind Cries Mary” single released on Track Reprise. Written by Jimi Hendrix and produced by Chas Chandler.Personel:Jimi Hendrix - guitars, vocalsNoel Redding - bass guitarMitch Mitchell - drumsCover:Performed by Neal Marsh and Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.

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The Wind Cries Mary/Is That Pennywise?

Pod Gave Rock'N Roll To You

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2022 47:23

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockJimi Hendrix 1967 “The Wind Cries Mary” single released on Track Reprise. Written by Jimi Hendrix and produced by Chas Chandler.Personel:Marvin Gaye - lead and background vocals, piano, mellotronThe Andantes - additional background (harmony) vocalsWild Bill Moore - tenor saxophone soloDavid van de Pitte - string conductionThe Funk Brothers other instrumentationCover:Performed by Neal Marsh and Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Radiohead “Kid A”Radiohead “Amnesiac”The BeatlesNeil Young “Cinnamon Girl”ToolRed Hot Chili PeppersRage Against the MachineDavid Bowie “Black Star”Green Day “American Idiot”The StrokesGreen Day “Dookie”Paul McCartneyThe EaglesBob Dylan Radiohead “Idioteque”Radiohead “Optimistic”Radiohead “How To Disappear Completely”Radiohead “Everything in It's Right Place”Radiohead “Motion Picture Soundtrack”Radiohead “The Pyramid Song”Radiohead “Life in a Glass House”Radiohead “OK Computer”Radiohead “Paranoid Android”Thom YorkeJohnny GreenwoodSmile “You'll Never Work in Televesion Again”Anakin SkywalkerDarth VaderRadiohead “In Rainbows”Smashing PumpkinsBilly CorganEric ClaptonJimi PageMotownChuck Berry “Wee, Wee Hours”Muddy WatersJimi Hendrix “Angel”Jimi Hendrix “Little Wing”Jimi Hendrix “Third Stone From the Sun”Kenny Wayne ShepardStevie Ray VaughnKurt CobainGinger BakerCurtis MayfieldOtis ReddingSteve CropperJim MorrisonJanis JoplinOzzy Osbourne “Crazy Train”Jimi Hendrix “Fire”Keith RichardsChazz ChandlerThe AnimalsJimmy James and the Blue FlamesJimi Hendrix “Purple Haze”The BeatlesJimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced?”Jimi Hendrix “Castles Made of Sand”Jimi Hendrix “Hey Joe”Jack WhiteJohn Maher “Sob Rock”Bob DylanWidespread PanicSealRichie SamboraEric JohnsonPat BooneStingMark RaboeLaura CoxMiles Davis “Madamoiselle Mabrie”

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Double Shot - Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go) - 16/12/2021

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2021 7:31

En 1967, Jimi Hendrix s’empare de ce morceau, pour en faire le classique qu’on connaît aujourd’hui, en compagnie du batteur Mitch Mitchell et du bassiste Noel Redding dans la formule légendaire de The Jimi Hendrix Experience sur l’album ''Are You Experienced'' (du moins sur son édition nord-américaine et sur sa réédition) produit par Chas Chandler (ex-bassiste des Animals et manager du groupe et plus tard de Slade). --- Jean-Paul Smismans vous propose un titre original accompagné de ses reprises. (Re)découvrez les grand hits des 50-60’s ainsi que les covers de ces titres mythiques dans les 70’s, 80’s, 90’s et même plus récents. ''Double Shot'' le lundi à 16h45 dans On The Road Again.

Gered Mankowitz chats about his iconic photographs of The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix and how Brian Jones was a handful

Sounds and Vision Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2021 45:58

Legendary rock 'n' roll photographer Gered Mankowitz joins Sounds and Vision to talk and reminisce with Andrew on a variety of subjects. The two chat about how Brian Jones was a troubled soul, the story behind the famous Rolling Stones' Primrose Hill photo session, Marianne Faithfull's early days, and how Jimi Hendrix's landmark London performance at Bag O'Nails went over Gered and Andrew's heads. But that's only part of the conversation and part of the story — listen in and enjoy.Show Notes:Gered MankowitzGered Mankowitz on TwitterWolf MankowitzStriptease, Soho and Cliff Richard in Expresso BongoUniversal head Lucian Grainge to earn more than all UK songwriters combinedSounds and Vision S2E4: Jonathan BeckerRobert Kincaid and The Bridges of Madison CountyKeith Grant: The Story Of Olympic StudiosThe Rolling Stones - Flowers (album cover)Rolling Stones - Mason's Yard to Primrose Hill 1965-1967. Photographs by Gered Mancowitz"The Rolling Stones on Primrose Hill in 1966. I suggested that we take the band to Primrose Hill in the North of London for a shoot after an all-nighter in the recording studio."Gered Mankowitz on his intimate photos of The Rolling Stones (interview)"The Rolling Stones at RCA Studios Hollywood, in 1965."The Rolling Stones interview - Denmark 1965"Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones photographed at a recording session at Olympic Studios in London in 1966."The Rolling Stones - "Ruby Tuesday" (instrumental)Jack NitzscheDavid Bailey and the Story of Fashion Photography"I shot this rarely seen portrait of Marianne Faithfull in The Salisbury Pub, St. Martin's Lane in 1964."Marianne Faithfull - Come My Way (album cover)Robert Frank Captured America Like No Other ArtistCocksucker Blues: Robert Frank's Suppressed Rolling Stones DocumentaryThe Rolling Stones - "You Better Move On" (on the Arthur Haynes Show, 1964)"Charlie Watts at home in 1966. Shirley Watts can be seen in the upstairs window!"Chas Chandler: The man who discovered Jimi HendrixJimi Hendrix's first London performance at the Bag O'NailsRock Stars Wearing Granny Takes a Trip"I shot two sessions with Jimi Hendrix at my Mason's Yard studio in central London. This shot Jimi 'Velvet & Lace' is from the first session taken in 1967."Gered Mankowitz on Jimi HendrixMy best shot: Jimi Hendrix by Gered Mankowitz

Episode 466 – Constantine: City of Demons

Generation Animation

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2021 43:16

Chris Borroto of HOVAF joins us to talk demon hunting and having sex with the city of LA. JOIN OUR DISCORD CHAT!WE NOW HAVE SHIRTS AND MORE FOR SALE! Broadcast on November 14th, 2021Featuring:Bianca Torres, Felipe Diaz-Vera, & Chris Borroto Summary: A decade after a tragic mistake, Chas Chandler and occult investigator John Constantine set

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Episode 35 | Philip Norman ["Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix"]

Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2021 43:47

Over fifty years after his death, Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) is celebrated as the greatest rock guitarist of all time. But before he was setting guitars and the world aflame, James Marshall Hendrix was a shy kid in Seattle, plucking at a broken ukulele and in fear of a father who would hit him for playing left-handed. Bringing Jimi's story to vivid life against the backdrop of midcentury rock, and with a wealth of new information, acclaimed music biographer Philip Norman delivers a captivating and definitive portrait of a musical legend.Drawing from unprecedented access to Jimi's brother, Leon Hendrix, who provides disturbing details about their childhood, as well as Kathy Etchingham and Linda Keith, the two women who played vital roles in Jimi's rise to stardom, Norman traces Jimi's life from playing in clubs on the segregated Chitlin' Circuit, where he encountered daily racism, to barely surviving in New York's Greenwich Village, where was taken up by the Animals' bass player Chas Chandler in 1966 and exported to Swinging London and international stardom.For four staggering years, from 1966 to 1970, Jimi totally rewrote the rules of rock stardom, notably at Monterey and Woodstock (where he played his protest-infused rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner”), while becoming the highest-paid musician of his day. But it all abruptly ended in the shabby basement of a London hotel with Jimi's too-early death. With remarkable detail, Wild Thing finally reveals the truth behind this long-shrouded tragedy.Norman's exhaustive research reveals a young man who was as shy and polite in private as he was outrageous in public, whose insecurity about his singing voice could never be allayed by his instrumental genius, and whose unavailing efforts to please his father left him searching for the family he felt he never truly had. Filled with insights into the greatest moments in rock history, Wild Thing is a mesmerizing account of music's most enduring and endearing figures.Philip Norman is the best-selling biographer of Eric Clapton, Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and Jimi Hendrix. A novelist and a playwright, he lives in London.Purchase a copy of "Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix" through Liveright Books/WWNorton: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631495892Listen to a playlist of the music discussed in this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1E2qgiPpmVxTSC4rA7qBYl?si=681ed5656179492fThe Booked On Rock Website: https://www.bookedonrock.comFollow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonrockpodcastTWITTER: https://twitter.com/bookedonrockSupport Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent book store here: https://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finderContact The Booked On Rock Podcast:thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.comThe Booked On Rock Theme Song: “Whoosh” by Crowander [ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/crowander]The Booked On Rock “Latest Books On Rock Releases” Song: “Slippery Rocks” by Crowander [ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/crowander]

Episode 55: Jimi Hendrix Part Six - Marshall Marshall Marshall

On In Five

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2021 91:43

On this episode of On In Five, we are looking at even more of Jimi as he navigated his way through 1968; losing his long time manager Chas Chandler, finally dealing with his first manager Ed Chalpin, and even hinting at a full breakup of the Jimi Hendrix Experience as the world knew it.

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IBC Studios

Rock is here: Londres

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2021 8:54

Hoy te invitamos a visitar un estudio muy famoso en las décadas de los 70s y ‘80s, por el que pasaron los principales artistas del momento, desde The Who a Elton John, pasando por Clapton, Rod Stewart, Hendrix, los Stones y, cuándo no, The Beatles. Son los IBC Recording Studios.El nombre completo era International Broadcasting Company, conocidos como los estudios IBC, que se hicieron famosos porque por esas consolas pasaron los artistas más importantes del rock.Por ejemplo, acá fue donde Deep Purple comenzaría a gestar una de las piedras fundamentales del Heavy: su álbum "In Rock" comenzó a ser registrado en los IBC en octubre de 1969 y continuaron en 1970: "Child In Time", "Cry Free", "Into The Fire", "Living Wreck" y "Speed King" se perpetuaron en este histórico lugar.Por acá pasó también Cream, que grabó "Badge", la canción compuesta por Eric Clapton y George Harrison. Grabaron Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page... The Kinks registraron "You Really Got Me"; también Rod Stewart, The Rolling Stones... y The Who, que grabó dos de los momentos más destacados de su carrera: su ópera rock "Tommy" y "My generation".Antes te había mencionado que los Beatles habían pasado por los IBC Studios... En realidad, los Fab Four no grabaron acá ninguno de sus álbumes oficiales, sino el especial Around The Beatles, en abril de 1964, y que fue emitido por televisión al mes siguiente.Para este show interpretaron un medley con "Love Me Do/Please Please Me/From Me To You/She Loves You/I Want To Hold Your Hand", reversiones de algunos de sus clásicos (como "Can't Buy Me Love") y un cover de la canción "Shout" que no incluyeron en ninguno de sus discos y figura solamente en este especial, por lo que toma aún más valor para los amantes y coleccionistas de la banda.En realidad, la historia cuenta que este especial fue grabado en los Wembley Park Studios y ésto es parcialmente cierto. Ahí grabaron el programa, pero en realidad las canciones fueron registradas previamente en los IBC, para luego hacer playback en el programa de televisión.Hacia el final de los ‘70s, Chas Chandler (exitoso manager, productor y también bajista original de The Animals) compró la compañía y la rebautizó Portland Recording Studios. El edificio está ubicado en el 35 de Portland Place, en la zona de Marylebone y a pocas cuadras del Regent's Park. De hecho, la estación de subte más cercana es, justamente, Regent's Park, de la línea Bakerloo. Actualmente, parte del edificio es ocupado por el consulado de Colombia en Londres.Vamos a despedirnos con el primer corte difusión de "Tommy", ópera rock de la banda The Who. Compuesto por Pete Townshend y grabado en febrero de 1969, obviamente en los estudios IBC de Londres: "Pinball wizard".Tracklist"You Really Got Me", The Kinks"I want to be Loved", The Rolling Stones"Speed King", Deep Purple"Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", Led Zeppelin"My generation", The Who"Shout", The Beatles (versión del especial "Around The Beatles")"Sha La La La Lee", Small Faces"Pinball wizard", The Who See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The 27 Club : Jimi Hendrix - Qui était Jimi Hendrix avant "Hey Joe", avant le Monterey Pop Festival, avant Woodstock ? - 10/07/2021

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2021 50:16

Quand on évoque son nom, on pense directement au Jimi Hendrix Experience, à " Hey Joe " qui cartonne dès sa sortie en fin 1966, au décollage de la carrière de Jimi Hendrix après son arrivée à Londres lorsque le manager Chas Chandler le découvre et le révèle au monde entier. Mais avant tout cela, qui était Jimi Hendrix et quelles autres expériences a-t-il tenté ? --- Gabrielle Davroy et Laurent Rieppi reviennent sur la carrière d'un musicien charismatique mort à 27 ans. Quel fut son influence et son apport artistique? Mythe ou simple coïncidence ? Le samedi de 12 à 13h sur Classic 21.

Side 2 - I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight

Vintage Rock Pod - Classic Rock Interviews

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2021 27:02

This weeks Side 2 features an interview with Cutting Crew frontman NICK VAN EEDE! (I Just) Died In Your Arms Tonight was a worldwide hit for the band and the man behind it has a great story to tell which includes touring behind the iron curtain with Slade, being championed by Chas Chandler of the Animals, being Richard Branson's first success with Virgin Records in America, Branson's famous parties, how he wrote the big hit and the excesses of the 80s too. It's another great interview! Plus hear some quirky stories from this week in classic rock thanks to music journalist Tim Peacock! See the viral video featuring Toto's STEVE LUKATHER and France footballer Paul Pogba: VIDEO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced

Songs of Our Own: A Marital Tour of the Music That Shaped Us.

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2021 67:22

There will only be one Jimi Hendrix. For this episode we look at Jimi's legacy and some of what he was able to accomplish with the release of this first album. Released in 1967 'Are You Experienced' took the world by storm. No one had every heard anything like what Jimi Hendrix and his band were playing. We will discuss Jimi, the writing and recording process and we will try our best to decipher the meanings of some of these rock and roll staples. Thanks for listening!Intro/Outro Music:Upbeat Forever by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5011-upbeat-foreverLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Hendrix / Hey Joe | Programa 145 - Ecos del Vinilo Radio

Ecos del Vinilo Radio

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2021 17:10

Jimi Hendrix, el mejor guitarrista de todos los tiempos, inició su camino a la fama con una versión, que fue lo que enganchó a Chas Chandler en aquel club en NYC en 1966 y le convenció que debía llevárselo a Londres para convertirlo en una estrella: Hey Joe. Les contamos su historia Escucharemos Hey Joe (Red Hot Chili Peppers, 2006), Hey Joe (versión oficial), Hey Joe (en vivo, Festival Pop de Monterrey, 1967) y Stone Free.

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Episode 115: “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2021

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. 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 “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 115: “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2021

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. 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 “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands’ surname as Land. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn’t actually their complete recordings — for that you’d also need to buy the Decca recordings — but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan’s first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we’re going to look at a song that, more than any other song we’ve looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We’re going to look at “House of the Rising Sun”, and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you’re not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it’s a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there’s a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it’s another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain’s culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you’re in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on “Louie, Louie” — a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we’re talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn’t be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon’s tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that’s often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is “Roll ‘Em Pete”, the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Roll ’em Pete”] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn’t like Price either as a person or for his taste in music — both Burdon and Steel regarded Price’s tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn’t that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel’s tastes intersected — musicians they’ve cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn’t turn up to a gig — he’d been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats — not the same band who backed Marty Wilde — and had even recorded an album with them, though I’ve been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities — Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, “Pretty Thing”] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn’t* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner’s band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn’t make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, “Wade in the Water”] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he’d heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they’d been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones’ old venues. A trade was agreed — the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo’s normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds’. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek’s footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, “Whole Lotta Woman”] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he’d had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, “Johnny B Goode”] He’d returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group’s blues purism and Most’s pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded “Don’t Tear My Clothes”: [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, “Don’t Tear My Clothes”] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as “Mama Let Me Lay It On You” in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, “Mama Let Me Lay it On You”] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Baby, Let Me Lay It On You”] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He’d heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand” and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land’s version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands’ track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns’ other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan’s version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it’s quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals’ version, and that they’d just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands’ version. They cut out Lands’ intro, and restored a lot of Dylan’s lyric, but musically it’s Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different — compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending — Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let me Hold Your Hand”] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] So whatever Valentine’s later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it’s still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals’ second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan’s first album. “House of the Rising Sun” has been argued by some, though I think it’s a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it’s that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name “Rising Sun Blues”, by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, “Rising Sun Blues”] The song has been described as about several things — about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling — depending on the precise version. It’s often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women’s Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk’s version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, “Rising Sun Blues”] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner’s in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, “House of the Rising Sun”] Van Ronk took Wood’s version of Turner’s version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is “a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers”. It’s actually something you’d get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that’s used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward — everything from “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks to “Go Now” by the Moody Blues to “Forever” by the Beach Boys — but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, “House of the Rising Sun”] “House of the Rising Sun” soon became the highlight of van Ronk’s live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk’s arrangement, but he wasn’t as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk’s bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It’s simpler, but it’s all from van Ronk’s arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk’s version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun”] As van Ronk later told the story (though I’m going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): “One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea.” van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan’s performance “it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby.” van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to “play that Dylan song”. The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out — and it instantly became the highlight of their act. The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan’s rearrangement of van Ronk’s rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord — the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song “Talking ‘Bout You”, to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o’clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night’s show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not “Talking ‘Bout You”, should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn’t ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn’t last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn’t play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger — which when you’re recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group’s manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had “explained” to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun (US edit)”] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals’ version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan’s new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of “House of the Rising Sun” from the sessions from Dylan’s first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)”] That wasn’t released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we’ll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he’d stolen it from the Animals. The Animals’ next single, “I’m Crying”, was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards — they just didn’t like each other by this point. The record after that, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] The Animals’ version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone’s original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don’t think it does. It’s a great record, and it’s deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone’s version, it’s lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals’ recording, which they didn’t understand given that she hadn’t written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel’s version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren’t “so bad for a bunch of white boys”, but that doesn’t sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn’t… “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring it on Home to Me”, which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn’t in the flat, and Chandler wouldn’t see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price’s first royalty cheque for arranging “House of the Rising Sun” had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn’t going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of “I Put A Spell On You”, in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put A Spell On You”] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals’ first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they’d decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann’s piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann’s was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever — though one suspects that’s partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband’s single — but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing “Oh girl, now you’re young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you’ll just grow old before your time” to “Now my girl, you’re so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you’ll be dead before your time is due”, and making subtler changes like changing “if it’s the last thing that we do” to “if it’s the last thing we ever do”, improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept — and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge — Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley’s low voice and Bobby Hatfield’s high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song’s momentum — it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] The Animals’ version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It’s one of the few times I’ve wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] From a creators’ rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn’t have messed with her song. But from a listener’s point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” was followed by another lesser but listenable single, “It’s My Life”, which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company — the group were getting sick of Most’s attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan’s sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, “Inside — Looking Out”, a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn’t even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, “All Night Long”] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off — there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We’ll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you’ll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as “The Animals and Friends”, with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I’ve seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show — though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, “That’s not Eric Clapton!”, before starting to sing along happily… And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon’s Animals after quitting Steel’s, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

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Episode 115: "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2021 49:51

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. 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 "Memphis" by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands' surname as Land. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn't actually their complete recordings -- for that you'd also need to buy the Decca recordings -- but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan's first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we're going to look at a song that, more than any other song we've looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We're going to look at "House of the Rising Sun", and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you're not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it's a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there's a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities -- Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it's another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain's culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you're in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on "Louie, Louie" -- a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we're talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn't be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon's tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that's often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is "Roll 'Em Pete", the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Roll 'em Pete"] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn't like Price either as a person or for his taste in music -- both Burdon and Steel regarded Price's tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn't that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel's tastes intersected -- musicians they've cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn't turn up to a gig -- he'd been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats -- not the same band who backed Marty Wilde -- and had even recorded an album with them, though I've been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities -- Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, "Pretty Thing"] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn't* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner's band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn't make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Wade in the Water"] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he'd heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they'd been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones' old venues. A trade was agreed -- the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo's normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds'. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek's footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, "Whole Lotta Woman"] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he'd had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, "Johnny B Goode"] He'd returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group's blues purism and Most's pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded "Don't Tear My Clothes": [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, "Don't Tear My Clothes"] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as "Mama Let Me Lay It On You" in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, "Mama Let Me Lay it On You"] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, "Baby, Let Me Lay It On You"] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as "Baby Let Me Follow You Down": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He'd heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand" and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land's version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands' track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns' other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan's version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it's quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals' version, and that they'd just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands' version. They cut out Lands' intro, and restored a lot of Dylan's lyric, but musically it's Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different -- compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending -- Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let me Hold Your Hand"] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] So whatever Valentine's later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it's still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals' second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan's first album. "House of the Rising Sun" has been argued by some, though I think it's a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard"] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it's that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name "Rising Sun Blues", by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, "Rising Sun Blues"] The song has been described as about several things -- about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling -- depending on the precise version. It's often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women's Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk's version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, "Rising Sun Blues"] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner's in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, "House of the Rising Sun"] Van Ronk took Wood's version of Turner's version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is "a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers". It's actually something you'd get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that's used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward -- everything from "Sunny Afternoon" by the Kinks to "Go Now" by the Moody Blues to "Forever" by the Beach Boys -- but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, "House of the Rising Sun"] "House of the Rising Sun" soon became the highlight of van Ronk's live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk's arrangement, but he wasn't as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk's bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It's simpler, but it's all from van Ronk's arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk's version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun"] As van Ronk later told the story (though I'm going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): "One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea." van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan's performance "it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby." van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to "play that Dylan song". The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out -- and it instantly became the highlight of their act. The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan's rearrangement of van Ronk's rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord -- the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song "Talking 'Bout You", to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o'clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night's show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not "Talking 'Bout You", should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn't ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn't last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn't play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger -- which when you're recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group's manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had "explained" to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun (US edit)"] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals' version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan's new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of "House of the Rising Sun" from the sessions from Dylan's first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)"] That wasn't released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we'll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he'd stolen it from the Animals. The Animals' next single, "I'm Crying", was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards -- they just didn't like each other by this point. The record after that, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] The Animals' version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone's original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don't think it does. It's a great record, and it's deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone's version, it's lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals' recording, which they didn't understand given that she hadn't written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel's version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren't "so bad for a bunch of white boys", but that doesn't sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn't... "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke's "Bring it on Home to Me", which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn't in the flat, and Chandler wouldn't see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price's first royalty cheque for arranging "House of the Rising Sun" had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn't going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of "I Put A Spell On You", in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, "I Put A Spell On You"] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals' first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they'd decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann's piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann's was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever -- though one suspects that's partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband's single -- but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing "Oh girl, now you're young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you'll just grow old before your time" to "Now my girl, you're so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you'll be dead before your time is due", and making subtler changes like changing "if it's the last thing that we do" to "if it's the last thing we ever do", improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept -- and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge -- Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley's low voice and Bobby Hatfield's high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song's momentum -- it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] The Animals' version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It's one of the few times I've wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] From a creators' rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn't have messed with her song. But from a listener's point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" was followed by another lesser but listenable single, "It's My Life", which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company -- the group were getting sick of Most's attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan's sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, "Inside -- Looking Out", a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn't even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, "All Night Long"] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off -- there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We'll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you'll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as "The Animals and Friends", with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I've seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show -- though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, "That's not Eric Clapton!", before starting to sing along happily... And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon's Animals after quitting Steel's, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

america tv american new york history friends english babies earth uk house england land british european home seattle local price forever revolution south africa north new orleans prison mayors massachusetts fish britain animals atlantic beatles bond kansas city columbia cd wood air manchester rolling stones liverpool latin scottish birmingham rock and roll clash steel stones crying bob dylan twist newcastle bahamas leeds great britain playboy bach schmidt lands richards sheffield vox my life southampton gallagher bradford beach boys hammond appalachian excerpt kinks farrell appalachia eric clapton wildcats nina simone tilt ray charles pale mccartney sunderland argent frank zappa neanderthals emi chuck berry rising sun sam cooke rock music kettle donald duck greenwich village tom wilson arrangements randy newman pagans jerry lee lewis zappa jeez minnesotan moody blues wrecking crew yardbirds suze korner john hammond john mclaughlin decca apple one ginger baker gateshead weill righteous brothers berns eric burdon jack bruce ian dury blockheads alan lomax shirelles middlesborough bill medley louis jordan baby let johnny rivers go now whiter shade mose allison gary davis big bill broonzy big joe turner sunny afternoon joe meek let me be misunderstood barry mann dave van ronk i put a spell on you burdon american r b alan price john steel elijah wald jimmy witherspoon ronk reverend gary davis marty wilde chas chandler bert berns blind boy fuller macdougal street andrew oldham procul harum animalism gwen foster clarence ashley georgia turner tilt araiza

MÚSICA DE CONTRABANDO T30C073 Santiago Campillo y Paula Molina nos presentan su proyecto SONORA, de auténtico rock sureño (02/02/2021)

Música de Contrabando

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2021 89:26

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es, 00,00h). Hilton Valentine, que fundó The Animals a principios de los años 60 en compañía de Eric Burdon, Chas Chandler, Alan Price y John Steel, fue el autor de ese arpegio famoso en ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Este finde nefasto para la música también se ha llevado a SOPHIE, una de las productoras fundamentales del siglo XXI. Pasó de nuevo con Glastonbury y ha vuelto a pasar con Coachella. El festival californiano, que tenía que acontecer en Indio Valley en dos fines de semana de abril de este 2021, se ha cancelado tal y como sucedió hace un año a causa de la pandemia. El alabado último trabajo de The Killers, Imploding The Mirage, ha recibido un tratamiento Deluxe. La colección Deluxe contiene versiones desnudas o live de temas tan queridos como “Blowback” y “Caution,” además de la nueva canción, “C’est La Vie”. Brighton 64 publican nuevo single, “Debo marchar”,aparece en la cara B, quedó fuera del álbum anterior por falta de espacio y lo han querido recuperar en esta ocasión. Maika Makovski ha regresado , tras cinco años de ausencia, con el estreno de un nuevo single titulado Reaching out to you, de ritmo frenético. Clap your hands say yeah estrenan, arropados por cuerdas, "cyhsy, 2005", otro adelanto de New fragility, su nuevo disco, Khruangbin estrenan vídeo para la relajante "dearest alfred", de su último disco Mordechai, y estrenan masajeante remezcla que Knwledge ha hecho para el mismo tema. The Feels firmaron una de las mejores canciones de 2020, "She's probably not thinkin' of me". Christian Migliorese es un orfebre del Power Pop, de la melodía, de la canción perfecta y este single es una prueba de ello. No teníamos noticias de Octubre Banda Octubre desde que en 2015 publicaran el sensacional “Mouseland”, Pero, por fin, podemos escuchar un adelanto de su nuevo EP, que provocará la admiración de los seguidores de Teenage Fanclub y el sonido Rickembacker. Love of Lesbian publicarán el próximo 16 de abril ‘V.E.H.N.’, un nuevo disco que responde también al nombre de ‘Viaje épico hacia la nada’. El tercer sencillo que se acaba de dar a conocer resulta el más interesante. ‘El mundo’ es además uno de los virales del momento en Youtube España. En " MARGARITA QUEBRADA (live)" están incluidos los tres temas que el trío valenciano interpretaron en directo en el concierto emitido en el Festival internacional virtual Luna Negra el pasado 19 de diciembre de 2020, junto a "Mis ojos", una nueva canción grabada en estudio. Celeste lanza su álbum de debut ‘NOT YOUR MUSE’. El lanzamiento de su primer álbum viene a completar un año relevante para una artista de éxito en 2020, ganadora del BBC Sound y del premio Rising Star en los BRITS. La banda británica Clean Bandit presenta su nuevo single 'Higher' junto al rapero Iann dior. Sidecars publican “Galaxia”, una canción sobre el miedo y el instinto de supervivencia con unos versos que calan rápido («Júrame que no hay ciencia cierta / Solo ciencia ficción»), que se encuentra dentro de su último álbum “Ruido de Fondo”. Santiago Campillo y Paula Molina Garcia-Mora Paula Molina nos presentan su proyecto SONORA, de auténtico rock sureño, del que estrenamos un par de canciones.

Will Ray, Hellecasters: “When I came back from Vietnam, I knew I’d never do anything I didn’t want to do, ever again...”

jam cream jimi hendrix eric clapton virtual tour chas chandler

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2021 108:18

Will was injured during the Vietnam war and once he came home, he attended college, took his GI Bill funds... and purchased a $5,000 stereo. He also practiced guitar no less than 8 hours a day. Will shares some amazing stories about the brilliance of Michael Nesmith, why Chas Chandler scheduled Hendrix to open for the Monkees, why Hendrix then got thrown off the gig (genius move, by the way)… how the Hellecasters were formed, finding your bliss, G&L Musical Instruments vs. Fender. Will has a simple and very practical way of living his life and it’s well worth your time to listen to it. AMAZING conversation Most people know Will as one of the founding members of the Hellecasters, but he was also a session player with artists like Michael Nesmith, Thomas Dolby, Joe Walsh, Carlene Carter, Steve Earle and Tom Jones. His songs have appeared on TV shows such as Oprah, the Tonight Show, and the NBA Basketball Championships. If you’d like to support this show: http://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/support Subscribe https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EveryoneLovesGuitar/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everyonelovesguitar/

tv vietnam oprah winfrey tonight show tom jones monkees came back fender joe walsh steve earle gi bill thomas dolby michael nesmith carlene carter chas chandler hellecasters

When Eric Clapton met Jimi Hendrix

London Walks

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 8, 2021 4:49

"Eric Clapton wet himself in fear"

Episode 578: Wild Thing Philip Norman

The Avid Reader Show

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 31, 2020 41:28

A shattering new biography of rock music’s most outrageous―and tragic―genius. Over fifty years after his death, Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) is celebrated as the greatest rock guitarist of all time. But before he was setting guitars and the world aflame, James Marshall Hendrix was a shy kid in Seattle, plucking at a broken ukulele and in fear of a father who would hit him for playing left-handed. Bringing Jimi’s story to vivid life against the backdrop of midcentury rock, and with a wealth of new information, acclaimed music biographer Philip Norman delivers a captivating and definitive portrait of a musical legend. Drawing from unprecedented access to Jimi’s brother, Leon Hendrix, who provides disturbing details about their childhood, as well as Kathy Etchingham and Linda Keith, the two women who played vital roles in Jimi’s rise to stardom, Norman traces Jimi’s life from playing in clubs on the segregated Chitlin’ Circuit, where he encountered daily racism, to barely surviving in New York’s Greenwich Village, where was taken up by the Animals’ bass player Chas Chandler in 1966 and exported to Swinging London and international stardom. For four staggering years, from 1966 to 1970, Jimi totally rewrote the rules of rock stardom, notably at Monterey and Woodstock (where he played his protest-infused rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner”), while becoming the highest-paid musician of his day. But it all abruptly ended in the shabby basement of a London hotel with Jimi’s too-early death. With remarkable detail, Wild Thing finally reveals the truth behind this long-shrouded tragedy. Norman’s exhaustive research reveals a young man who was as shy and polite in private as he was outrageous in public, whose insecurity about his singing voice could never be allayed by his instrumental genius, and whose unavailing efforts to please his father left him searching for the family he felt he never truly had. Filled with insights into the greatest moments in rock history, Wild Thing is a mesmerizing account of music’s most enduring and endearing figures.

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Episode 577: 1Q1A Wild Thing Philip Norman

The Avid Reader Show

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 31, 2020 0:36

A shattering new biography of rock music’s most outrageous―and tragic―genius. Over fifty years after his death, Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) is celebrated as the greatest rock guitarist of all time. But before he was setting guitars and the world aflame, James Marshall Hendrix was a shy kid in Seattle, plucking at a broken ukulele and in fear of a father who would hit him for playing left-handed. Bringing Jimi’s story to vivid life against the backdrop of midcentury rock, and with a wealth of new information, acclaimed music biographer Philip Norman delivers a captivating and definitive portrait of a musical legend. Drawing from unprecedented access to Jimi’s brother, Leon Hendrix, who provides disturbing details about their childhood, as well as Kathy Etchingham and Linda Keith, the two women who played vital roles in Jimi’s rise to stardom, Norman traces Jimi’s life from playing in clubs on the segregated Chitlin’ Circuit, where he encountered daily racism, to barely surviving in New York’s Greenwich Village, where was taken up by the Animals’ bass player Chas Chandler in 1966 and exported to Swinging London and international stardom. For four staggering years, from 1966 to 1970, Jimi totally rewrote the rules of rock stardom, notably at Monterey and Woodstock (where he played his protest-infused rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner”), while becoming the highest-paid musician of his day. But it all abruptly ended in the shabby basement of a London hotel with Jimi’s too-early death. With remarkable detail, Wild Thing finally reveals the truth behind this long-shrouded tragedy. Norman’s exhaustive research reveals a young man who was as shy and polite in private as he was outrageous in public, whose insecurity about his singing voice could never be allayed by his instrumental genius, and whose unavailing efforts to please his father left him searching for the family he felt he never truly had. Filled with insights into the greatest moments in rock history, Wild Thing is a mesmerizing account of music’s most enduring and endearing figures.

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The Day The Music Died: September 18th, 1970 - Jimi Hendrix

Rebel Without A Cause

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2020 32:07

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music". Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the Chitlin' Circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia on September 18, 1970, at the age of 27. © Radio Free Miami

The Day The Music Died: September 18th, 1970 - Jimi Hendrix

Radio Free Miami

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2020 32:07

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music". Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the Chitlin' Circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia on September 18, 1970, at the age of 27.

Jimi Hendrix, 50 ans déjà - épisode 12 - L'histoire d'une légende racontée par Walter De Paduwa - 15/09/2020

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2020 6:56

L’entente entre Jimi et Chas Chandler a toujours été correcte mais les premières tensions sont apparues durant l’enregistrement d’''Axis Bold As Love''. Jim a toujours écouté et tenu compte de l’avis de Chas sauf quand l’horloge tournait et que Jimi prenait de plus en plus de temps pour recommencer encore et encore un morceau. Il finissait toujours par en faire à sa tête et Chas commençait à trouver certaines prises superflues. C’est Chas qui payait les heures de studio. manque de professionnalisme de Jimi. PURPLE HAZE --- Vous pensiez tout connaître sur la vie de Jimi Hendrix, qui nous quittait le 18 septembre 1970. Walter De Paduwa vous invite à plonger dans les moindres détails du parcours de cette icône du rock en 20 épisodes. Rendez-vous tous les jours de la semaine à 17h45 dans On the Road Again du 31 août 25 septembre.

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Jimi Hendrix, 50 ans déjà - épisode 8 - L'histoire d'une légende racontée par Walter De Paduwa - 09/09/2020

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2020 6:58

La carrière de Jimi Hendrix n’a pas encore réellement commencé lorsqu’il débarque à Londres sur le tarmac de l’aéroport d’Heathrow, le 24 septembre 1966, avec un vol de la Pan-Am. Sa fender et quelques vêtements sont tout ce qu’il possède, accompagné par Chas Chandler, Terry Mc Vay, le roadie des Animals. Après quelques jours, Chas a tenu sa promesse de lui présenter Eric Clapton dont Hendrix avait entendu parler aux Etats-Unis. --- Vous pensiez tout connaître sur la vie de Jimi Hendrix, qui nous quittait le 18 septembre 1970. Walter De Paduwa vous invite à plonger dans les moindres détails du parcours de cette icône du rock en 20 épisodes. Rendez-vous tous les jours de la semaine à 17h45 dans On the Road Again du 31 août 25 septembre.

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Londres 26: IBC Studios

Rock is here: Londres

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2020 8:55

Hoy te invitamos a visitar un estudio muy famoso en las décadas de los 70s y ‘80s, por el que pasaron los principales artistas del momento, desde The Who a Elton John, pasando por Clapton, Rod Stewart, Hendrix, los Stones y, cuándo no, The Beatles. Son los IBC Recording Studios.El nombre completo era International Broadcasting Company, conocidos como los estudios IBC, que se hicieron famosos porque por esas consolas pasaron los artistas más importantes del rock. Por ejemplo, acá fue donde Deep Purple comenzaría a gestar una de las piedras fundamentales del Heavy: su álbum “In Rock” comenzó a ser registrado en los IBC en octubre de 1969 y continuaron en 1970: “Child In Time”, “Cry Free”, “Into The Fire”, “Living Wreck” y “Speed King” se perpetuaron en este histórico lugar.Por acá pasó también Cream, que grabó “Badge”, la canción compuesta por Eric Clapton y George Harrison. Grabaron Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page... The Kinks registraron “You Really Got Me”; también Rod Stewart, The Rolling Stones... y The Who, que grabó dos de los momentos más destacados de su carrera: su ópera rock “Tommy” y “My generation”.Antes te había mencionado que los Beatles habían pasado por los IBC Studios... En realidad, los Fab Four no grabaron acá ninguno de sus álbumes oficiales, sino el especial Around The Beatles, en abril de 1964, y que fue emitido por televisión al mes siguiente. Para este show interpretaron un medley con “Love Me Do/Please Please Me/From Me To You/She Loves You/I Want To Hold Your Hand”, reversiones de algunos de sus clásicos (como “Can’t Buy Me Love”) y un cover de la canción “Shout” que no incluyeron en ninguno de sus discos y figura solamente en este especial, por lo que toma aún más valor para los amantes y coleccionistas de la banda.En realidad, la historia cuenta que este especial fue grabado en los Wembley Park Studios y ésto es parcialmente cierto. Ahí grabaron el programa, pero en realidad las canciones fueron registradas previamente en los IBC, para luego hacer playback en el programa de televisión.Hacia el final de los ‘70s, Chas Chandler (exitoso manager, productor y también bajista original de The Animals) compró la compañía y la rebautizó Portland Recording Studios. El edificio está ubicado en el 35 de Portland Place, en la zona de Marylebone y a pocas cuadras del Regent's Park. De hecho, la estación de subte más cercana es, justamente, Regent's Park, de la línea Bakerloo. Actualmente, parte del edificio es ocupado por el consulado de Colombia en Londres.Vamos a despedirnos con el primer corte difusión de “Tommy”, ópera rock de la banda The Who. Compuesto por Pete Townshend y grabado en febrero de 1969, obviamente en los estudios IBC de Londres: “Pinball wizard”.Tracklist"You Really Got Me", The Kinks"I want to be Loved", The Rolling Stones"Speed King", Deep Purple"Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", Led Zeppelin"My generation", The Who"Shout", The Beatles (versión del especial "Around The Beatles")"Sha La La La Lee", Small Faces"Pinball wizard", The Who

Making Of 5/5 - Jimi Hendrix Experience ''Are you Experienced ?'' 1967 - 12/06/2020

Making Of

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 12, 2020 6:44

Produit par Chas Chandler et Michael Jeffery, enregistré dans 3 studios londoniens : CBS, De Lane Lea et Olympic, ''Are you Experienced ?'' est publié par Track Records. Jimi Hendrix y déploie toute sa créativité de compositeur, de parolier, mais également d’arrangeur aux nouvelles idées traduites en sons par Eddie Kramer. De janvier à avril 67, le trio alterne concerts et séances de studio. Les musiciens réalisent la prouesse d’enregistrer de la matière pour 3 singles ainsi qu'un album complet durant ce temps. Sorti le 12 mai 1967 en Grande-Bretagne, le premier album du Jimi Hendrix Experience restera 33 semaines dans les charts en grimpant jusqu’à la seconde place. Aux États-Unis, suite à la performance époustouflante du groupe au festival de Monterey, l’album sortira en août pour atteindre la 5e place du Billboard. Il demeurera dans les charts pendant plus de 106 semaines. ---Tous les jours de la semaine à 19h, dans ''On The Road Again'', Marc Ysaye retrace pour vous les meilleurs moments du ''Making Of'' : l’histoire de la création de grands albums de l’Histoire du Rock.

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Making Of 5/5 - Jimi Hendrix Experience ''Are you Experienced ?'' 1967 - 12/06/2020

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 12, 2020 6:44

Produit par Chas Chandler et Michael Jeffery, enregistré dans 3 studios londoniens : CBS, De Lane Lea et Olympic, ''Are you Experienced ?'' est publié par Track Records. Jimi Hendrix y déploie toute sa créativité de compositeur, de parolier, mais également d’arrangeur aux nouvelles idées traduites en sons par Eddie Kramer. De janvier à avril 67, le trio alterne concerts et séances de studio. Les musiciens réalisent la prouesse d’enregistrer de la matière pour 3 singles ainsi qu'un album complet durant ce temps. Sorti le 12 mai 1967 en Grande-Bretagne, le premier album du Jimi Hendrix Experience restera 33 semaines dans les charts en grimpant jusqu’à la seconde place. Aux États-Unis, suite à la performance époustouflante du groupe au festival de Monterey, l’album sortira en août pour atteindre la 5e place du Billboard. Il demeurera dans les charts pendant plus de 106 semaines. ---Tous les jours de la semaine à 19h, dans ''On The Road Again'', Marc Ysaye retrace pour vous les meilleurs moments du ''Making Of'' : l’histoire de la création de grands albums de l’Histoire du Rock.

rock olympic games cbs billboard experienced histoire jimi hendrix unis aux monterey produit grande bretagne sorti jimi hendrix experience on the road again eddie kramer track records chas chandler marc ysaye

Making Of 4/5 - Jimi Hendrix Experience ''Are you Experienced ?'' 1967 - 11/06/2020

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2020 5:32

Produit par Chas Chandler et Michael Jeffery, enregistré dans 3 studios londoniens : CBS, De Lane Lea et Olympic, ''Are you Experienced ?'' est publié par Track Records. Jimi Hendrix y déploie toute sa créativité de compositeur, de parolier, mais également d’arrangeur aux nouvelles idées traduites en sons par Eddie Kramer. De janvier à avril 67, le trio alterne concerts et séances de studio. Les musiciens réalisent la prouesse d’enregistrer de la matière pour 3 singles ainsi qu'un album complet durant ce temps. Sorti le 12 mai 1967 en Grande-Bretagne, le premier album du Jimi Hendrix Experience restera 33 semaines dans les charts en grimpant jusqu’à la seconde place. Aux États-Unis, suite à la performance époustouflante du groupe au festival de Monterey, l’album sortira en août pour atteindre la 5e place du Billboard. Il demeurera dans les charts pendant plus de 106 semaines. ---Tous les jours de la semaine à 19h, dans ''On The Road Again'', Marc Ysaye retrace pour vous les meilleurs moments du ''Making Of'' : l’histoire de la création de grands albums de l’Histoire du Rock.

rock olympic games cbs billboard experienced histoire jimi hendrix unis aux monterey produit grande bretagne sorti jimi hendrix experience on the road again eddie kramer track records chas chandler marc ysaye

Making Of 4/5 - Jimi Hendrix Experience ''Are you Experienced ?'' 1967 - 11/06/2020

Making Of

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2020 5:32

Produit par Chas Chandler et Michael Jeffery, enregistré dans 3 studios londoniens : CBS, De Lane Lea et Olympic, ''Are you Experienced ?'' est publié par Track Records. Jimi Hendrix y déploie toute sa créativité de compositeur, de parolier, mais également d’arrangeur aux nouvelles idées traduites en sons par Eddie Kramer. De janvier à avril 67, le trio alterne concerts et séances de studio. Les musiciens réalisent la prouesse d’enregistrer de la matière pour 3 singles ainsi qu'un album complet durant ce temps. Sorti le 12 mai 1967 en Grande-Bretagne, le premier album du Jimi Hendrix Experience restera 33 semaines dans les charts en grimpant jusqu’à la seconde place. Aux États-Unis, suite à la performance époustouflante du groupe au festival de Monterey, l’album sortira en août pour atteindre la 5e place du Billboard. Il demeurera dans les charts pendant plus de 106 semaines. ---Tous les jours de la semaine à 19h, dans ''On The Road Again'', Marc Ysaye retrace pour vous les meilleurs moments du ''Making Of'' : l’histoire de la création de grands albums de l’Histoire du Rock.

rock olympic games cbs billboard experienced histoire jimi hendrix unis aux monterey produit grande bretagne sorti jimi hendrix experience on the road again eddie kramer track records chas chandler marc ysaye

Making Of 3/5 - Jimi Hendrix Experience ''Are you Experienced ?'' 1967 - 10/06/2020

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2020 5:45

Produit par Chas Chandler et Michael Jeffery, enregistré dans 3 studios londoniens : CBS, De Lane Lea et Olympic, ''Are you Experienced ?'' est publié par Track Records. Jimi Hendrix y déploie toute sa créativité de compositeur, de parolier, mais également d’arrangeur aux nouvelles idées traduites en sons par Eddie Kramer. De janvier à avril 67, le trio alterne concerts et séances de studio. Les musiciens réalisent la prouesse d’enregistrer de la matière pour 3 singles ainsi qu'un album complet durant ce temps. Sorti le 12 mai 1967 en Grande-Bretagne, le premier album du Jimi Hendrix Experience restera 33 semaines dans les charts en grimpant jusqu’à la seconde place. Aux États-Unis, suite à la performance époustouflante du groupe au festival de Monterey, l’album sortira en août pour atteindre la 5e place du Billboard. Il demeurera dans les charts pendant plus de 106 semaines. ---Tous les jours de la semaine à 19h, dans ''On The Road Again'', Marc Ysaye retrace pour vous les meilleurs moments du ''Making Of'' : l’histoire de la création de grands albums de l’Histoire du Rock.

rock olympic games cbs billboard experienced histoire jimi hendrix unis aux monterey produit grande bretagne sorti jimi hendrix experience on the road again eddie kramer track records chas chandler marc ysaye

Making Of 3/5 - Jimi Hendrix Experience ''Are you Experienced ?'' 1967 - 10/06/2020

Making Of

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2020 5:45

Produit par Chas Chandler et Michael Jeffery, enregistré dans 3 studios londoniens : CBS, De Lane Lea et Olympic, ''Are you Experienced ?'' est publié par Track Records. Jimi Hendrix y déploie toute sa créativité de compositeur, de parolier, mais également d’arrangeur aux nouvelles idées traduites en sons par Eddie Kramer. De janvier à avril 67, le trio alterne concerts et séances de studio. Les musiciens réalisent la prouesse d’enregistrer de la matière pour 3 singles ainsi qu'un album complet durant ce temps. Sorti le 12 mai 1967 en Grande-Bretagne, le premier album du Jimi Hendrix Experience restera 33 semaines dans les charts en grimpant jusqu’à la seconde place. Aux États-Unis, suite à la performance époustouflante du groupe au festival de Monterey, l’album sortira en août pour atteindre la 5e place du Billboard. Il demeurera dans les charts pendant plus de 106 semaines. ---Tous les jours de la semaine à 19h, dans ''On The Road Again'', Marc Ysaye retrace pour vous les meilleurs moments du ''Making Of'' : l’histoire de la création de grands albums de l’Histoire du Rock.

rock olympic games cbs billboard experienced histoire jimi hendrix unis aux monterey produit grande bretagne sorti jimi hendrix experience on the road again eddie kramer track records chas chandler marc ysaye

Will Ray - Hellecasters

GENTE NON COMUNE di Andrea Carinato

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2020 107:44

Most people know Will as one of the founding members of the Hellecasters, but he was also a session player with artists like Michael Nesmith, Thomas Dolby, Joe Walsh, Carlene Carter, Steve Earle and Tom Jones. His songs have appeared on TV shows such as Oprah, the Tonight Show, and the NBA Basketball Championships. Will was injured during the Vietnam war and once he came home, he attended college, took his GI Bill funds and purchased a $5,000 stereo. He also practiced guitar no less than 8 hours a day. Will shares some amazing stories about the brilliance of Michael Nesmith, why Chas Chandler scheduled Hendrix to open for the Monkees, why Hendrix then got thrown off the gig (genius move, by the way)… how the Hellecasters were formed, finding your bliss, G&L Musical Instruments vs. Fender. Will has a simple and very practical way of living his life and it’s well worth your time to listen to it. AMAZING conversation, dig it: Support this Show: http://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/support Subscribe https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EveryoneLovesGuitar/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everyonelovesguitar/

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Chas Chandler, chi trova un amico trova un tesoro...

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 20, 2019 4:57

Chas Chandler cominciò la sua carriera musicale come bassista degli Animals, ma poi divenne il talent scout e manager di Jimi Hendrix...

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Buying, Growing, and Selling is The Family Business – An Interview with a Serial Consumer Products Operator and Investor

M&A Insights

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2019 9:31

Chas Chandler, a Partner in Amherst’s Investment Banking practice and leader of the firm’s Consumer Products Industry Group, engages former client and firm Operating Director Ray Dallavecchia, Jr. in a wide-ranging discussion covering his experiences as the architect behind the growth of iconic toy brand POOF®-Slinky®, his work leading consumer products businesses with both domestic and overseas production operations, and insights on what he’s looking for in investment opportunities now that he’s launched his own family office, Venetian Associates.

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Will Ray - Hellecasters - Everyone Loves Guitar

Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2019 111:50

Most people know Will as one of the founding members of the Hellecasters, but he was also a session player with artists like Michael Nesmith, Thomas Dolby, Joe Walsh, Carlene Carter, Steve Earle and Tom Jones. His songs have appeared on TV shows such as Oprah, the Tonight Show, and the NBA Basketball Championships. Will was injured during the Vietnam war and once he came home, he attended college, took his GI Bill funds and purchased a $5,000 stereo. He also practiced guitar no less than 8 hours a day. Will shares some amazing stories about the brilliance of Michael Nesmith, why Chas Chandler scheduled Hendrix to open for the Monkees, why Hendrix then got thrown off the gig (genius move, by the way)… how the Hellecasters were formed, finding your bliss, G&L Musical Instruments vs. Fender. Will has a simple and very practical way of living his life and it’s well worth your time to listen to it. AMAZING conversation, dig it: Subscribe https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EveryoneLovesGuitar/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everyonelovesguitar/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ELovesGuitar

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Nada más que música - Dylan - Hendrix - The Doors

NADA MÁS QUE MÚSICA

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2019 40:15

Durante nuestro recorrido a lo largo de esta década prodigiosa de los 60, hemos visto, de pasada, detalles de la actividad artística de algunos de los más influyentes actores del mundo de la música y la literatura. Entre ellos, el Sr. Robert Allen Zimmerman, o lo que es lo mismo: Bob Dylan. Talkin' New York, una de las dos canciones propias de su primer disco titulado Bob Dylan. Sus composiciones más celebres datan de la década de 1960, en la que se dio a conocer como cantautor folk con composiciones como «Blowin' in the Wind» y otras, todas ellas con un importante contenido de protesta social. Blowin' in the Wind» fue publicada en el álbum de estudio The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan en 1963. Aunque ha sido descrita como una canción protesta, posee una serie de preguntas retóricas sobre temas como la paz, la guerra y la libertad. El verso «The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind» —en español: «La respuesta, amigo mío, está soplando en el viento»— ha sido descrito como «impenetrable y ambiguo: o bien la respuesta es tan obvia que está justo en tu cara, o la respuesta es tan intangible como el viento». Tras dejar atrás la música folk, Dylan modificó la música popular en 1965 con el álbum Highway 61 Revisited, uno de los trabajos musicales más influyentes del siglo XX, en el que combinó la música rock con composiciones complejas y literarias influidas por imaginería surrealista. Su primer sencillo, «Like a Rolling Stone», fue elegido como la mejor canción de todos los tiempos por la revista Rolling Stone y alcanzó el segundo puesto en la lista estadounidense Billboard Hot 100. Tras Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan consolidó su interés por el rock y el blues con trabajos como Blonde on Blonde. Este disco es el séptimo álbum de estudio del músico, publicado por Columbia Records en mayo de 1966. Las sesiones de grabación del álbum comenzaron en Nueva York en 1965, con el respaldo de un elevado número de músicos, entre los que se incluyeron miembros de la banda The Hawks, que cuatro años después se convirtió en The Band. La grabación continuó hasta enero de 1966, pero solo pudieron cerrar una canción. Por sugerencia de los músicos, y con la compañía del teclista Al Kooper y el guitarrista Robbie Robertson, Dylan se trasladó a los CBS Studios de Nashville, Tennessee para continuar con la grabación. Estas sesiones, que contaron con la participación de músicos de sesión locales, fueron más fructíferas en comparación con las de Nueva York, y en dos meses se grabó el resto de las canciones. Ente ellas, ésta: Just Like a Woman. El álbum, uno de los primeros discos dobles en la historia de la música moderna, completó la trilogía de rock que Dylan comenzó con Bringing It All Back Home en 1965 y continuó con Highway 61 Revisited un año después, y gran parte de la crítica musical lo consideró de forma casi unánime como uno de los mejores álbumes de rock de todos los tiempos. Combinando la experiencia de los músicos de sesión de Nashville con la sensibilidad literaria modernista de Dylan, las canciones del álbum fueron descritas como una operación a gran escala musical, mientras que la lírica fue descrita como «una mezcla única entre lo visionario y lo coloquial». En términos comerciales, Blonde on Blonde alcanzó el puesto nueve en la lista estadounidense Billboard 200, y la RIAA lo certificó como doble disco de platino, mientras que en el Reino Unido entró en la posición tres de las listas UK. A lo largo de la década de 1970, después de sufrir un accidente de motocicleta en 1966 y no salir de gira durante ocho años, obtuvo un mayor éxito comercial con discos como Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks y Desire, todos números uno en EEUU. Del primero de estos discos, extraemos el corte Forever young A finales de la década, abrió una nueva etapa musical con la publicación de Slow Train Coming, con una profunda temática religiosa. Aunque el trasfondo religioso y su interés por la Biblia se mantuvo a lo largo de los años, después de Infidels comenzó a grabar discos con un mayor peso de temas seculares como Knocked Out Loaded y Down in the Groove, que obtuvieron peores resultados comerciales y de crítica. La carrera musical de Dylan resurgió a finales de la década de 1980 con el lanzamiento de Oh Mercy, producido por Daniel Lanois calificado por la prensa como el «regreso a la formalidad musical». De este álbum es Everything is Broken, que ya estamos escuchando. Entre los años 1988 y 1990, Bob Dylan formó parte de una super- banda, The Traveling Wilburys (Los Wilbury viajeros) integrada por el propio Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison y Tom Petty, junto con el acompañamiento a la batería de Jim Keltner. Solo sacaron dos discos al mercado: Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 y Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. Los músicos había disfrutaron mucho trabajando juntos en otros proyectos y decidieron grabar un álbum completo. Bajo el título de Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 y compuesto entre los cinco miembros del grupo, el álbum fue grabado en un periodo de diez días en mayo de 1988 en el jardín y la casa del miembro de Eurythmics Dave Stewart. Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 fue un éxito comercial y de crítica que alcanzó el estatus de triple disco de platino en Estados Unidos y fue nominado a los premios Grammy en la categoría de mejor interpretación rock. El 6 de diciembre de 1988, apenas dos meses después de la publicación de Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, Roy Orbison falleció de un ataque al corazón. En su homenaje, el videoclip de «End of the Line» incluyó la guitarra eléctrica de Orbison balanceándose sobre una mecedora mientras el resto del grupo tocaba la canción. Esta canción. Las letras de Dylan incorporan una variedad de temas sociales, políticos, filosóficos y literarios que desafiaron la música pop convencional existente y apelaron generalmente a la contracultura emergente en la época. Influido por gente como Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson y Hank Williams, Dylan amplió y personalizó géneros musicales a lo largo de cinco décadas de carrera musical, en las que exploró la tradición musical estadounidense con el folk, el blues, el country, el gospel, el rock and roll y el rockabilly, así como la música folk inglesa, escocesa e irlandesa, pasando por el jazz y el swing. Dylan toca la guitarra, la armónica y los teclados, y respaldado por una alineación de músicos cambiante, ha salido de gira anualmente desde finales de la década de 1980, en lo que se conoce como Never Ending Tour, en español: La gira interminable. A lo largo de su carrera, Dylan ha sido reconocido y honrado por sus composiciones, interpretaciones y grabaciones. Sus discos le han valido varios Grammys, Globos de Oro y premios de la Academia, y su nombre se halla en el Salón de la Fama del Rock and Roll, el Salón de la Fama de Compositores de Nashville y el Salón de la Fama de los Compositores. En enero de 1990, fue investido Caballero de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras por el Ministro de Cultura de Francia Jack Lang. En 1999, fue incluido en la lista de las cien personas más influyentes del siglo XX elaborada por la revista Time. En el año 2000, ganó el Premio de Música Popular de la Real Academia Sueca de Música, y en 2004 alcanzó el segundo puesto en la lista de los cien mejores artistas de todos los tiempos elaborada por la revista Rolling Stone, después de The Beatles. El 13 de junio de 2007 fue premiado con el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes, y un año después recibió un reconocimiento honorario del Premio Pulitzer por su «profundo impacto en la música popular y en la cultura norteamericana, marcado por sus composiciones líricas de extraordinario poder poético». Por último, el 13 de octubre de 2016, la Academia Sueca le otorgó el Premio Nobel de Literatura por «haber creado una nueva expresión poética dentro de la gran tradición de la canción estadounidense». Que más se puede decir de este artista? Larga vida a Bob Dylan. Y otro mito de la música en los 60, nada más y nada menos que Jimi Hendrix James Marshall «Jimi» Hendrix nació el 27 de noviembre de 1942. A pesar de que su carrera profesional solo duró cuatro años, es considerado uno de los guitarristas más influyentes de la historia del rock. El Salón de la Fama del Rock and Roll lo describe como «Indiscutiblemente uno de los músicos más grandes de la historia del rock». A finales del 66 se trasladó a Inglaterra. Alli conoció a Chas Chandler, bajista de The Animals que se convirtió en su mánager. En cuestión de meses, Hendrix ya había obtenido tres sencillos Top 10 en el Reino Unido con su banda The Jimi Hendrix Experience: «Hey Joe», «Purple Haze» y «The Wind Cries Mary». Saltó a la fama en Estados Unidos después de su actuación en el Monterrey Pop Festival de 1967. Al año siguiente, en 1968, su tercer disco de estudio, "Electric Ladyland", llegó al primer puesto de la lista estadounidense de éxitos; fue su éxito comercial más grande y único número uno en su país. En su momento fue el artista mejor pagado por su concierto en el Festival de Woodstock (1969) y el Festival de la Isla de Wight (1970)., Las influencias musicales de Hendrix se inspiraron en el rock and roll y blues eléctrico de Estados Unidos. Es conocido por usar amplificadores con distorsión, alto volumen y ganancia, además de que fue un innovador en aprovecharse de los acoples generados por la guitarra. También ayudó a popularizar el uso del pedal con wah-wah y fue el primero en utilizar efectos phaser estereofónicos en sus grabaciones. Holly George-Warren de la revista Rolling Stone comentó: «Hendrix fue pionero en el uso del instrumento como una fuente de sonido electrónico. Los guitarristas anteriores a él habían experimentado con acoples y distorsión, pero Hendrix convirtió esos efectos y otros en un vocabulario controlado y fluido igual de personal que el blues con el que comenzó». Su imagen también dio que hablar: plumas de colores, sombreros, ropa de fantasía, sedas, pañuelos, chaquetas con chorerras (a la moda de 1967). No solo fue su música, también el componente sexual y provocador que Hendrix daba a su vida pública. Fue el primer artista negro que se metió de lleno en la Inglaterra multiétnica. Vivió cinco años en la cima, Quemó su guitarra en el Festival de Monterrey y tocó un dramático himno americano en el de Woodstock. Recibió varios premios durante su vida y también de forma póstuma. En 1967, los lectores de Melody Maker le votaron como el mejor músico popular del año, en 1968, Rolling Stone lo nombró músico del año, Disc and Music Echo le distinguió con el título de mejor músico de 1969, mientras que, en 1970 Guitar Player le otorgó el voto de mejor guitarrista del año. Murió el 18 de septiembre de 1970, ahogado en su propio vómito, a los 27 años de edad. Una nueva alta en el desdichado club de los 27. The Doors, otro grupo genial y maldito en las mismas proporciones. Esta banda se formó en Los Ángeles (California), en julio del año 1965 y se disolvió el año 1973. Junto a Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead y Pink Floyd, se convirtió en uno de los exponentes de la psicodelia de los años 60. Su trayectoria empezó en 1965, cuando Jim Morrison se encontraba en la playa de Venice, California, y se encontró a un viejo compañero de la UCLA, Ray Manzarek. Hablando, hablando, Morrison aprovechó para leerle a su viejo amigo la letra de «Moonlight Drive», un poema que acababa de escribir. Impresionado por la calidad de estos versos, allí mismo decidieron formar un grupo. La banda quedo configurada definitivamente por cuatro músicos, los ya citados Morrison y Manzarek, voz y teclados respectivamente y Krieger, a la guitarra y Densmore a la batería. La banda tomó su nombre de un verso del poeta William Blake: (Si las puertas de la percepción fueran depuradas, todo aparecería ante el hombre tal cual es: infinito.) The Doors se diferenciaba de muchos grupos de rock de la época, porque no usaban un bajo en concierto, en vez de esto, Manzarek tocaba las melodías del bajo con la mano izquierda en su piano Fender, y las melodías del órgano con la mano derecha. Muchas de las canciones originales las hicieron en conjunto. Morrison aportaba las letras y parte de la melodía, y el resto contribuía con el ritmo y el sentimiento de la canción. Una de ellas fue la que acabamos de oir, Hello, I Love You y lo cierto es que, en este caso, la composición les dio unos buenos quebraderos de cabeza. La canción en cuestión es igualita a otra de The Kinks. Y claro, los demandaron. Aunque, ciertamente, este tipo de demandas, por lo menos a Morrison, les traían al fresco. Eran tantos los problemas que generaban a su paso que los escándalos pasaron a ser cotidianos. Como ejemplo, y para no regodearnos en el asunto, en 1966, el grupo tocaba en el club Whisky a Go Go. El 21 de agosto este año, el club despidió a la banda por un incidente en una presentación de "The End", que vendría a anunciar toda la controversia que seguiría al grupo en sus años de historia. Morrison, gritó, en la parte "edípica" de la canción: "Father? Yes son?, I want to kill you", "Mother? I want to fuck you" ("¿Padre? Sí hijo?, Quiero matarte", "¿Madre? Quiero follarte"). Y no sentó bien. Bueno, esta es esa canción The End en una versión especialmente editada para la película Apocalypse Now. El LP homónimo de The Doors, lanzado en enero de 1967, causó sensación en los círculos musicales. En este disco aparecían muchas de las grandes canciones de su repertorio, incluyendo el famoso "The End". Su segundo single, de este LP, "Light My Fire", puso al grupo junto con Jefferson Airplane y The Grateful Dead entre los mejores nuevos grupos estadounidenses de 1967. Rápidamente la banda ganó reputación. Con su buena pinta, presencia magnética y sus pantalones de cuero, Jim Morrison se volvió un ídolo del rock y un "sex symbol", aunque se veía limitado con las restricciones morales del estrellato. Antes de su presentación en el "Show de Ed Sullivan" , 15 minutos antes de empezar el programa, los censores de la CBS exigieron a Morrison que cambiara la letra de Light My Fire, en la línea (Nena, no podríamos habernos elevado más), por la posible referencia a las drogas. Morrison les preguntó qué es lo que debería decir , y le contestaron que él era el poeta y que algo se le ocurriría. Bueno, pues como cabía esperar, Morrison cantó la línea original y se presentó en la televisión en vivo, con una CBS sin capacidad de pararlo. Ed Sullivan, furioso, se negó a estrechar las manos a los miembros de la banda, y nunca más fueron invitados. Morrison siguió fomentando su fama de rebelde cuando fue arrestado en New Haven, por hablar mal sobre la policía al público. Morrison dijo que un celoso oficial le había lanzado gas lacrimógeno al sorprenderlo con una chica en los bastidores. En 1971, después de la grabación de L.A. Woman, Morrison decidió tomarse un tiempo libre y se mudó a París con su novia, Pamela Courson, en marzo. Lo había visitado el verano pasado y, por un tiempo, pareció contento con escribir y explorar la ciudad. Pero luego volvió al alcohol y hasta se cayó de un segundo piso en una ocasión. Morrison falleció en confusas circunstancias el 3 de julio; su cuerpo fue encontrado en la bañera. La conclusión fue que murió por un ataque al corazón, aunque se reveló que no se le había hecho la autopsia antes de ser enterrado en el Cementerio Père-Lachaise el 7 de julio. Una versión bastante difundida menciona que el deceso de Morrison se produjo por sobredosis en un bar Parisino llamado "Rock n' Roll Circus", concretamente en los baños del bar después de encerrarse para ingerir cocaína, y que su cuerpo había sido trasladado por algunos amigos a la bañera de su casa. Por añadidura, el forense, en su informe oficial, describió el cadáver del cantante como el de "alguien de más de 50 años y 1.90 m. de altura" (Jim en realidad tenía 27 años y su talla oscilaba entre 1.78 m. y 1.75 m, sin sus botas tejanas puestas), lo que nos plantea la duda de la capacidad profesional del forense. Jim Morrison murió a los 27 años. Otro a la lista. Por cierto, En 1974, tres años más tarde, la novia de Morrison, Pamela Courson, también murió a la edad de 27 años. Bueno, hoy si que hemos conocido un poco mejor a tres grandes estrellas. Sin ellos, y a pesar del poco tiempo que algunos estuvieron en el negocio de la música, los derroteros del rock and roll hubieran sido otros. Lo malo del asunto es que el talento no siempre viene unido al equilibrio mental, deberían ajustárnoslo de serie. A mi me hubiera venido muy bien, sobre todo en lo tocante al talento. En fin, gracias a todos por vuestra atención, espero os hayáis divertido oyendo el programa tanto como nosotros haciéndolo. Volvemos la próxima semana, con que haced lo que sea pero estad ahí, al otro lado del receptor. Hasta entonces… BUENAS VIBRACIONES.

new york time california father uk mother rock woman blood solo tennessee festival nashville sin grammy band wind desire cbs animals pero beatles tambi salt ucla popular durante rolling stones antes doors estados unidos sr highways rock and roll whiskey cultura hasta muchas bob dylan aunque academia billboard tras venice padre xx broken sus lp hawks disc junto otro woodstock groove quiero fue pink floyd morrison madre bajo inglaterra hablando nueva york blonde go go reino unido volvemos oro eeuu grateful dead biblia tom petty monterrey i love you orden kinks letras ministro new haven george harrison artes premio fama jim morrison caballero muri robert johnson apocalypse now wight larga asturias nena krieger billboard hot fender premio nobel roy orbison ente hank williams woody guthrie columbia records jefferson airplane globos riaa recibi blowin robbie robertson purple haze guitar players infidels ed sullivan nadam el sal jeff lynne compositores lachaise daniel lanois light my fire combinando melody maker ray manzarek freewheelin al kooper premio pulitzer electric ladyland jim keltner densmore orbison cbs studios premio pr oh mercy influido academia sueca roll circus bringing it all back home planet waves chas chandler robert allen zimmerman traveling wilburys vol manzarek moonlight drive pamela courson

Nada más que música - Dylan - Hendrix - The Doors

NADA MÁS QUE MÚSICA

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2019 40:15

Durante nuestro recorrido a lo largo de esta década prodigiosa de los 60, hemos visto, de pasada, detalles de la actividad artística de algunos de los más influyentes actores del mundo de la música y la literatura. Entre ellos, el Sr. Robert Allen Zimmerman, o lo que es lo mismo: Bob Dylan. Talkin' New York, una de las dos canciones propias de su primer disco titulado Bob Dylan. Sus composiciones más celebres datan de la década de 1960, en la que se dio a conocer como cantautor folk con composiciones como «Blowin' in the Wind» y otras, todas ellas con un importante contenido de protesta social. Blowin' in the Wind» fue publicada en el álbum de estudio The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan en 1963. Aunque ha sido descrita como una canción protesta, posee una serie de preguntas retóricas sobre temas como la paz, la guerra y la libertad. El verso «The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind» —en español: «La respuesta, amigo mío, está soplando en el viento»— ha sido descrito como «impenetrable y ambiguo: o bien la respuesta es tan obvia que está justo en tu cara, o la respuesta es tan intangible como el viento». Tras dejar atrás la música folk, Dylan modificó la música popular en 1965 con el álbum Highway 61 Revisited, uno de los trabajos musicales más influyentes del siglo XX, en el que combinó la música rock con composiciones complejas y literarias influidas por imaginería surrealista. Su primer sencillo, «Like a Rolling Stone», fue elegido como la mejor canción de todos los tiempos por la revista Rolling Stone y alcanzó el segundo puesto en la lista estadounidense Billboard Hot 100. Tras Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan consolidó su interés por el rock y el blues con trabajos como Blonde on Blonde. Este disco es el séptimo álbum de estudio del músico, publicado por Columbia Records en mayo de 1966. Las sesiones de grabación del álbum comenzaron en Nueva York en 1965, con el respaldo de un elevado número de músicos, entre los que se incluyeron miembros de la banda The Hawks, que cuatro años después se convirtió en The Band. La grabación continuó hasta enero de 1966, pero solo pudieron cerrar una canción. Por sugerencia de los músicos, y con la compañía del teclista Al Kooper y el guitarrista Robbie Robertson, Dylan se trasladó a los CBS Studios de Nashville, Tennessee para continuar con la grabación. Estas sesiones, que contaron con la participación de músicos de sesión locales, fueron más fructíferas en comparación con las de Nueva York, y en dos meses se grabó el resto de las canciones. Ente ellas, ésta: Just Like a Woman. El álbum, uno de los primeros discos dobles en la historia de la música moderna, completó la trilogía de rock que Dylan comenzó con Bringing It All Back Home en 1965 y continuó con Highway 61 Revisited un año después, y gran parte de la crítica musical lo consideró de forma casi unánime como uno de los mejores álbumes de rock de todos los tiempos. Combinando la experiencia de los músicos de sesión de Nashville con la sensibilidad literaria modernista de Dylan, las canciones del álbum fueron descritas como una operación a gran escala musical, mientras que la lírica fue descrita como «una mezcla única entre lo visionario y lo coloquial». En términos comerciales, Blonde on Blonde alcanzó el puesto nueve en la lista estadounidense Billboard 200, y la RIAA lo certificó como doble disco de platino, mientras que en el Reino Unido entró en la posición tres de las listas UK. A lo largo de la década de 1970, después de sufrir un accidente de motocicleta en 1966 y no salir de gira durante ocho años, obtuvo un mayor éxito comercial con discos como Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks y Desire, todos números uno en EEUU. Del primero de estos discos, extraemos el corte Forever young A finales de la década, abrió una nueva etapa musical con la publicación de Slow Train Coming, con una profunda temática religiosa. Aunque el trasfondo religioso y su interés por la Biblia se mantuvo a lo largo de los años, después de Infidels comenzó a grabar discos con un mayor peso de temas seculares como Knocked Out Loaded y Down in the Groove, que obtuvieron peores resultados comerciales y de crítica. La carrera musical de Dylan resurgió a finales de la década de 1980 con el lanzamiento de Oh Mercy, producido por Daniel Lanois calificado por la prensa como el «regreso a la formalidad musical». De este álbum es Everything is Broken, que ya estamos escuchando. Entre los años 1988 y 1990, Bob Dylan formó parte de una super- banda, The Traveling Wilburys (Los Wilbury viajeros) integrada por el propio Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison y Tom Petty, junto con el acompañamiento a la batería de Jim Keltner. Solo sacaron dos discos al mercado: Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 y Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. Los músicos había disfrutaron mucho trabajando juntos en otros proyectos y decidieron grabar un álbum completo. Bajo el título de Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 y compuesto entre los cinco miembros del grupo, el álbum fue grabado en un periodo de diez días en mayo de 1988 en el jardín y la casa del miembro de Eurythmics Dave Stewart. Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 fue un éxito comercial y de crítica que alcanzó el estatus de triple disco de platino en Estados Unidos y fue nominado a los premios Grammy en la categoría de mejor interpretación rock. El 6 de diciembre de 1988, apenas dos meses después de la publicación de Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, Roy Orbison falleció de un ataque al corazón. En su homenaje, el videoclip de «End of the Line» incluyó la guitarra eléctrica de Orbison balanceándose sobre una mecedora mientras el resto del grupo tocaba la canción. Esta canción. Las letras de Dylan incorporan una variedad de temas sociales, políticos, filosóficos y literarios que desafiaron la música pop convencional existente y apelaron generalmente a la contracultura emergente en la época. Influido por gente como Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson y Hank Williams, Dylan amplió y personalizó géneros musicales a lo largo de cinco décadas de carrera musical, en las que exploró la tradición musical estadounidense con el folk, el blues, el country, el gospel, el rock and roll y el rockabilly, así como la música folk inglesa, escocesa e irlandesa, pasando por el jazz y el swing. Dylan toca la guitarra, la armónica y los teclados, y respaldado por una alineación de músicos cambiante, ha salido de gira anualmente desde finales de la década de 1980, en lo que se conoce como Never Ending Tour, en español: La gira interminable. A lo largo de su carrera, Dylan ha sido reconocido y honrado por sus composiciones, interpretaciones y grabaciones. Sus discos le han valido varios Grammys, Globos de Oro y premios de la Academia, y su nombre se halla en el Salón de la Fama del Rock and Roll, el Salón de la Fama de Compositores de Nashville y el Salón de la Fama de los Compositores. En enero de 1990, fue investido Caballero de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras por el Ministro de Cultura de Francia Jack Lang. En 1999, fue incluido en la lista de las cien personas más influyentes del siglo XX elaborada por la revista Time. En el año 2000, ganó el Premio de Música Popular de la Real Academia Sueca de Música, y en 2004 alcanzó el segundo puesto en la lista de los cien mejores artistas de todos los tiempos elaborada por la revista Rolling Stone, después de The Beatles. El 13 de junio de 2007 fue premiado con el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes, y un año después recibió un reconocimiento honorario del Premio Pulitzer por su «profundo impacto en la música popular y en la cultura norteamericana, marcado por sus composiciones líricas de extraordinario poder poético». Por último, el 13 de octubre de 2016, la Academia Sueca le otorgó el Premio Nobel de Literatura por «haber creado una nueva expresión poética dentro de la gran tradición de la canción estadounidense». Que más se puede decir de este artista? Larga vida a Bob Dylan. Y otro mito de la música en los 60, nada más y nada menos que Jimi Hendrix James Marshall «Jimi» Hendrix nació el 27 de noviembre de 1942. A pesar de que su carrera profesional solo duró cuatro años, es considerado uno de los guitarristas más influyentes de la historia del rock. El Salón de la Fama del Rock and Roll lo describe como «Indiscutiblemente uno de los músicos más grandes de la historia del rock». A finales del 66 se trasladó a Inglaterra. Alli conoció a Chas Chandler, bajista de The Animals que se convirtió en su mánager. En cuestión de meses, Hendrix ya había obtenido tres sencillos Top 10 en el Reino Unido con su banda The Jimi Hendrix Experience: «Hey Joe», «Purple Haze» y «The Wind Cries Mary». Saltó a la fama en Estados Unidos después de su actuación en el Monterrey Pop Festival de 1967. Al año siguiente, en 1968, su tercer disco de estudio, "Electric Ladyland", llegó al primer puesto de la lista estadounidense de éxitos; fue su éxito comercial más grande y único número uno en su país. En su momento fue el artista mejor pagado por su concierto en el Festival de Woodstock (1969) y el Festival de la Isla de Wight (1970)., Las influencias musicales de Hendrix se inspiraron en el rock and roll y blues eléctrico de Estados Unidos. Es conocido por usar amplificadores con distorsión, alto volumen y ganancia, además de que fue un innovador en aprovecharse de los acoples generados por la guitarra. También ayudó a popularizar el uso del pedal con wah-wah y fue el primero en utilizar efectos phaser estereofónicos en sus grabaciones. Holly George-Warren de la revista Rolling Stone comentó: «Hendrix fue pionero en el uso del instrumento como una fuente de sonido electrónico. Los guitarristas anteriores a él habían experimentado con acoples y distorsión, pero Hendrix convirtió esos efectos y otros en un vocabulario controlado y fluido igual de personal que el blues con el que comenzó». Su imagen también dio que hablar: plumas de colores, sombreros, ropa de fantasía, sedas, pañuelos, chaquetas con chorerras (a la moda de 1967). No solo fue su música, también el componente sexual y provocador que Hendrix daba a su vida pública. Fue el primer artista negro que se metió de lleno en la Inglaterra multiétnica. Vivió cinco años en la cima, Quemó su guitarra en el Festival de Monterrey y tocó un dramático himno americano en el de Woodstock. Recibió varios premios durante su vida y también de forma póstuma. En 1967, los lectores de Melody Maker le votaron como el mejor músico popular del año, en 1968, Rolling Stone lo nombró músico del año, Disc and Music Echo le distinguió con el título de mejor músico de 1969, mientras que, en 1970 Guitar Player le otorgó el voto de mejor guitarrista del año. Murió el 18 de septiembre de 1970, ahogado en su propio vómito, a los 27 años de edad. Una nueva alta en el desdichado club de los 27. The Doors, otro grupo genial y maldito en las mismas proporciones. Esta banda se formó en Los Ángeles (California), en julio del año 1965 y se disolvió el año 1973. Junto a Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead y Pink Floyd, se convirtió en uno de los exponentes de la psicodelia de los años 60. Su trayectoria empezó en 1965, cuando Jim Morrison se encontraba en la playa de Venice, California, y se encontró a un viejo compañero de la UCLA, Ray Manzarek. Hablando, hablando, Morrison aprovechó para leerle a su viejo amigo la letra de «Moonlight Drive», un poema que acababa de escribir. Impresionado por la calidad de estos versos, allí mismo decidieron formar un grupo. La banda quedo configurada definitivamente por cuatro músicos, los ya citados Morrison y Manzarek, voz y teclados respectivamente y Krieger, a la guitarra y Densmore a la batería. La banda tomó su nombre de un verso del poeta William Blake: (Si las puertas de la percepción fueran depuradas, todo aparecería ante el hombre tal cual es: infinito.) The Doors se diferenciaba de muchos grupos de rock de la época, porque no usaban un bajo en concierto, en vez de esto, Manzarek tocaba las melodías del bajo con la mano izquierda en su piano Fender, y las melodías del órgano con la mano derecha. Muchas de las canciones originales las hicieron en conjunto. Morrison aportaba las letras y parte de la melodía, y el resto contribuía con el ritmo y el sentimiento de la canción. Una de ellas fue la que acabamos de oir, Hello, I Love You y lo cierto es que, en este caso, la composición les dio unos buenos quebraderos de cabeza. La canción en cuestión es igualita a otra de The Kinks. Y claro, los demandaron. Aunque, ciertamente, este tipo de demandas, por lo menos a Morrison, les traían al fresco. Eran tantos los problemas que generaban a su paso que los escándalos pasaron a ser cotidianos. Como ejemplo, y para no regodearnos en el asunto, en 1966, el grupo tocaba en el club Whisky a Go Go. El 21 de agosto este año, el club despidió a la banda por un incidente en una presentación de "The End", que vendría a anunciar toda la controversia que seguiría al grupo en sus años de historia. Morrison, gritó, en la parte "edípica" de la canción: "Father? Yes son?, I want to kill you", "Mother? I want to fuck you" ("¿Padre? Sí hijo?, Quiero matarte", "¿Madre? Quiero follarte"). Y no sentó bien. Bueno, esta es esa canción The End en una versión especialmente editada para la película Apocalypse Now. El LP homónimo de The Doors, lanzado en enero de 1967, causó sensación en los círculos musicales. En este disco aparecían muchas de las grandes canciones de su repertorio, incluyendo el famoso "The End". Su segundo single, de este LP, "Light My Fire", puso al grupo junto con Jefferson Airplane y The Grateful Dead entre los mejores nuevos grupos estadounidenses de 1967. Rápidamente la banda ganó reputación. Con su buena pinta, presencia magnética y sus pantalones de cuero, Jim Morrison se volvió un ídolo del rock y un "sex symbol", aunque se veía limitado con las restricciones morales del estrellato. Antes de su presentación en el "Show de Ed Sullivan" , 15 minutos antes de empezar el programa, los censores de la CBS exigieron a Morrison que cambiara la letra de Light My Fire, en la línea (Nena, no podríamos habernos elevado más), por la posible referencia a las drogas. Morrison les preguntó qué es lo que debería decir , y le contestaron que él era el poeta y que algo se le ocurriría. Bueno, pues como cabía esperar, Morrison cantó la línea original y se presentó en la televisión en vivo, con una CBS sin capacidad de pararlo. Ed Sullivan, furioso, se negó a estrechar las manos a los miembros de la banda, y nunca más fueron invitados. Morrison siguió fomentando su fama de rebelde cuando fue arrestado en New Haven, por hablar mal sobre la policía al público. Morrison dijo que un celoso oficial le había lanzado gas lacrimógeno al sorprenderlo con una chica en los bastidores. En 1971, después de la grabación de L.A. Woman, Morrison decidió tomarse un tiempo libre y se mudó a París con su novia, Pamela Courson, en marzo. Lo había visitado el verano pasado y, por un tiempo, pareció contento con escribir y explorar la ciudad. Pero luego volvió al alcohol y hasta se cayó de un segundo piso en una ocasión. Morrison falleció en confusas circunstancias el 3 de julio; su cuerpo fue encontrado en la bañera. La conclusión fue que murió por un ataque al corazón, aunque se reveló que no se le había hecho la autopsia antes de ser enterrado en el Cementerio Père-Lachaise el 7 de julio. Una versión bastante difundida menciona que el deceso de Morrison se produjo por sobredosis en un bar Parisino llamado "Rock n' Roll Circus", concretamente en los baños del bar después de encerrarse para ingerir cocaína, y que su cuerpo había sido trasladado por algunos amigos a la bañera de su casa. Por añadidura, el forense, en su informe oficial, describió el cadáver del cantante como el de "alguien de más de 50 años y 1.90 m. de altura" (Jim en realidad tenía 27 años y su talla oscilaba entre 1.78 m. y 1.75 m, sin sus botas tejanas puestas), lo que nos plantea la duda de la capacidad profesional del forense. Jim Morrison murió a los 27 años. Otro a la lista. Por cierto, En 1974, tres años más tarde, la novia de Morrison, Pamela Courson, también murió a la edad de 27 años. Bueno, hoy si que hemos conocido un poco mejor a tres grandes estrellas. Sin ellos, y a pesar del poco tiempo que algunos estuvieron en el negocio de la música, los derroteros del rock and roll hubieran sido otros. Lo malo del asunto es que el talento no siempre viene unido al equilibrio mental, deberían ajustárnoslo de serie. A mi me hubiera venido muy bien, sobre todo en lo tocante al talento. En fin, gracias a todos por vuestra atención, espero os hayáis divertido oyendo el programa tanto como nosotros haciéndolo. Volvemos la próxima semana, con que haced lo que sea pero estad ahí, al otro lado del receptor. Hasta entonces… BUENAS VIBRACIONES.

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Will Ray Interview, Hellecasters - Everyone Loves Guitar #302

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2018 106:33

Most people know Will as one of the founding members of the Hellecasters, but he was also a session player with artists like Michael Nesmith, Thomas Dolby, Joe Walsh, Carlene Carter, Steve Earle and Tom Jones. His songs have appeared on TV shows such as Oprah, the Tonight Show, and the NBA Basketball Championships. Will was injured during the Vietnam war and once he came home, he took is attended college, and then took his GI Bill funds and purchased a $5,000 and he did two things: he went to college and practiced guitar no less than 8 hours a day. Will has some amazing stories about the brilliance of Michael Nesmith, why Chas Chandler set Hendrix to open for the Monkees, and why Hendrix then got thrown off the gig (genius move, by the way)… how the Hellecasters was started… finding your bliss, G & L vs. Fender and why, plus more. Will has a simple and very practical way of living his life and it’s well worth your time to listen to it. AMAZING conversation, dig it: Subscribe https://www.EveryoneLovesGuitar.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EveryoneLovesGuitar/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everyonelovesguitar/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ELovesGuitar

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Angels and Ministers of Grace

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2015 85:26

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "Angels and Minsters of Grace", the twelfth episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2015, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and Harold Perrineau as Manny! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

A Whole World Out There

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2015 73:39

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "A Whole World Out There", the eleventh episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2015, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and the return of Jeremy Davies as Ritchie Simpson! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

Quid Pro Quo

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2015 76:25

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "Quid Pro Quo", the tenth episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2015, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and introducing Mark Margolis as Felix Faust! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

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The Saint of Last Resorts, Part 2

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2015 64:56

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "The Saint of Last Resorts, Part 2", the ninth episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2015, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and Claire van der Boom as Sister Anne-Marie! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

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The Saint of Last Resorts

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2014 94:50

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "The Saint of Last Resorts", the eighth episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2014, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and introducing Claire van der Boom as Sister Anne-Marie! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

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Blessed Are the Damned

tv dc blessed nbc television comics comic books dc comics manny damned ang vertigo matt ryan john constantine hellblazer celaya blessed are harold perrineau chas chandler

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2014 83:48

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "Blessed Are the Damned", the seventh episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2014, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and Harold Perrineau as Manny! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

Rage of Caliban

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2014 74:59

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "Rage of Caliban", the sixth episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2014, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and Harold Perrineau as Manny! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

The Devil's Vinyl

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2014 68:40

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "The Devil's Vinyl", the third episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2014, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin, and introducing Michael James Shaw as Papa Midnite! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

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The Darkness Beneath

tv dc darkness nbc television comics beneath ang matt ryan john constantine hellblazer celaya chas chandler

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2014 63:55

Karen Lindsay & Charles Skaggs discuss "The Darkness Beneath", the second episode of the NBC series Constantine from 2014, featuring Matt Ryan as John Constantine, Charles Halford as "Chas" Chandler, and introducing Angélica Celaya as Mary "Zed" Martin! Find us here:Twitter: @FandomZoneCast @CharlesSkaggs @Aleveria Facebook: Facebook.com/FandomZonePodcast Instagram: @FandomZonePodcast Email: FandomZoneCast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

Non Est Asylum