Podcasts about Cocaine Blues

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Best podcasts about Cocaine Blues

Latest podcast episodes about Cocaine Blues

Countrykoorts
'Countryshows zitten muzikaal vaak steengoed in elkaar' | Hendrik Jan Bökkers | Countrykoorts

Countrykoorts

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2025 73:04


Drie kratjes bier en twee flessen spa blauw. Dat is de rider van deze bescheiden molenaarszoon uit Olst: Hendrik Jan Bökkers.  Als klein jochie met cowboyhoed en gefiguurzaagde gitaar speelt hij Normaal na en dat blijft hij doen totdat Bökkers op eigen benen staat. Tussendoor is hij ook nog gitarist bij de legendarische band Jovink en de Voederbietels. In het rurale Ruurlo vertelt hij over inspiratiebronnen als Johnny Cash, Brothers Osborne en Hayes Carll, kijkt hij regelmatig shows van countryartiesten als Dolly Parton en Kenny Rogers, omdat over elk detail wordt nagedacht en probeert hij daar voor zijn eigen band lering uit te trekken. Bökkers maakt zelfs een Nedersaksische versie van Cash' Cocaine Blues. Ook in deze aflevering: de cowboy song én muziek van Kip Moore, tekenend voor een donkere periode in het leven van Bökkers, die veel Nederlanders tegenwoordig kennen als Dinant Ottink uit Woeste Grond. 

Deadhead Cannabis Show
The Evolution of Grateful Dead Covers

Deadhead Cannabis Show

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2024 78:29


Exploring the Grateful Dead's LegacyIn this episode of the Deadhead Cannabis Show, Larry Mishkin takes listeners on a nostalgic journey through the Grateful Dead's music, focusing on a concert from September 30, 1993, at the Boston Garden. He discusses various songs, including 'Here Comes Sunshine' and 'Spoonful,' while also touching on the band's history and the contributions of key figures like Vince Wellnick and Candace Brightman. The episode also delves into current music news, including a review of Lake Street Dive's performance and updates on marijuana legislation in Ukraine and the U.S.Chapters00:00 Welcome to the Deadhead Cannabis Show03:39 Here Comes Sunshine: A Grateful Dead Classic09:47 Spoonful: The Blues Influence14:00 Music News: Rich Girl and Lake Street Dive24:09 Candace Brightman: The Unsung Hero of Lighting38:01 Broken Arrow: Phil Lesh's Moment to Shine42:19 Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: A Beatles Classic48:26 Marijuana News: Ukraine's Medical Cannabis Legislation54:32 Bipartisan Support for Clean Slate Act01:00:11 Pennsylvania's Push for Marijuana Legalization01:04:25 CBD as a Natural Insecticide01:10:26 Wave to the Wind: A Phil Lesh Tune01:13:18 The Other One: A Grateful Dead Epic Boston GardenSeptember 30, 1993  (31 years ago)Grateful Dead Live at Boston Garden on 1993-09-30 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet ArchiveINTRO:                                 Here Comes Sunshine                                                Track #1                                                0:08 – 1:48 Released on Wake of the Flood, October 15, 1973, the first album on the band's own “Grateful Dead Records” label. The song was first performed by the Grateful Dead in February 1973. It was played about 30 times through to February 1974 and then dropped from the repertoire. The song returned to the repertoire in December 1992, at the instigation of Vince Welnick, and was then played a few times each year until 1995. Played:  66 timesFirst:  February 9, 1973 at Maples Pavilion, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USALast:  July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, IN, USA But here's the thing:                         Played 32 times in 1973                        Played 1 time in 1974                        Not played again until December 6, 1992 at Compton Terrace in Chandler, AZ  - 18 years                        Then played a “few” more times in 1993, 94 and 95, never more than 11 times in any one year. I finally caught one in 1993 at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago with good buddies Marc and Alex. My favorite version is Feb. 15, 1973 at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, WI SHOW No. 1:                     Spoonful                                                Track #2                                                :50 – 2:35 "Spoonful" is a blues song written by Willie Dixon and first recorded in 1960 by Howlin' Wolf. Released in June, 1960 by Chess Records in Chicago.  Called "a stark and haunting work",[1] it is one of Dixon's best known and most interpreted songs.[2]Etta James and Harvey Fuqua had a pop and R&B record chart hit with their duet cover of "Spoonful" in 1961, and it was popularized in the late 1960s by the British rock group Cream. Dixon's "Spoonful" is loosely based on "A Spoonful Blues", a song recorded in 1929 by Charley Patton.[3] Earlier related songs include "All I Want Is a Spoonful" by Papa Charlie Jackson (1925) and "Cocaine Blues" by Luke Jordan (1927).The lyrics relate men's sometimes violent search to satisfy their cravings, with "a spoonful" used mostly as a metaphor for pleasures, which have been interpreted as sex, love, and drugs. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listed Howlin' Wolf's "Spoonful" as one of the "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll".[9] It is ranked number 154 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2021 list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time",[10] up from number 221 on its 2004 list. In 2010, the song was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame "Classics of Blues Recordings" category.[12] In a statement by the foundation, it was noted that "Otis Rush has stated that Dixon presented 'Spoonful' to him, but the song didn't suit Rush's tastes and so it ended up with Wolf, and soon thereafter with Etta James".[12] James' recording with Harvey Fuqua as "Etta & Harvey" reached number 12 on Billboard magazine's Hot R&B Sides chart and number 78 on its Hot 100 singles chart.[13] However, Wolf's original "was the one that inspired so many blues and rock bands in the years to come". The British rock group Cream recorded "Spoonful" for their 1966 UK debut album, Fresh Cream. They were part of a trend in the mid-1960s by rock artists to record a Willie Dixon song for their debut albums. Sung by Bob Weir, normally followed Truckin' in the second set.  This version is rare because it is the second song of the show and does not have a lead in.  Ended Here Comes Sunshine, stopped, and then went into this.  When it follows Truckin', just flows right into Spoonful. Played:  52 timesFirst:  October 15, 1981 at Melkweg, Amsterdam, NetherlandsLast:  December 8, 1994 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USA  MUSIC NEWS:                              Lead In Music                                                Rich Girl                                                Lake Street Dive                                                Lake Street Dive: Rich Girl [4K] 2018-05-09 - College Street Music Hall; New Haven, CT (youtube.com)                                                0:00 – 1:13 "Rich Girl" is a song by Daryl Hall & John Oates. It debuted on the Billboard Top 40 on February 5, 1977, at number 38 and on March 26, 1977, it became their first of six number-one singles on the BillboardHot 100. The single originally appeared on the 1976 album Bigger Than Both of Us. At the end of 1977, Billboard ranked it as the 23rd biggest hit of the year. The song was rumored to be about the then-scandalous newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. In fact, the title character in the song is based on a spoiled heir to a fast-food chain who was an ex-boyfriend of Daryl Hall's girlfriend, Sara Allen. "But you can't write, 'You're a rich boy' in a song, so I changed it to a girl," Hall told Rolling Stone. Hall elaborated on the song in an interview with American Songwriter: "Rich Girl" was written about an old boyfriend of Sara [Allen]'s from college that she was still friends with at the time. His name is Victor Walker. He came to our apartment, and he was acting sort of strange. His father was quite rich. I think he was involved with some kind of a fast-food chain. I said, "This guy is out of his mind, but he doesn't have to worry about it because his father's gonna bail him out of any problems he gets in." So I sat down and wrote that chorus. [Sings] "He can rely on the old man's money/he can rely on the old man's money/he's a rich guy." I thought that didn't sound right, so I changed it to "Rich Girl". He knows the song was written about him.  Lake Street Dive at Salt Shed Lake Street Dive is an American multi-genre band that was formed in 2004 at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.[1] The band's founding members are Rachael Price, Mike "McDuck" Olson, Bridget Kearney, and Mike Calabrese. Keyboardist Akie Bermiss joined the band on tour in 2017 and was first credited on their 2018 album Free Yourself Up; guitarist James Cornelison joined in 2021 after Olson left the band. The band is based in Brooklyn and frequently tours in North America, Australia, and Europe. The group was formed in 2004 as a "free country band"; they intended to play country music in an improvised, avant-garde style.[3] This concept was abandoned in favor of something that "actually sounded good", according to Mike Olson.[4] The band's name was inspired by the Bryant Lake Bowl, a frequent hang out in the band's early years, located on Lake Street in Minneapolis. Great show last Thursday night my wife and I went with good friends JT and Marni and Rick and Ben. Sitting in the back near the top of the bleachers with a killer view of the Chicago Sky line looking west to southeast and right along the north branch of the Chicago River.  Beautiful weather and a great night overall.  My first time seeing the band although good buddies Alex, Andy and Mike had seen the at Redrocks in July and all spoke very highly of the band which is a good enough endorsement for me. I don't know any of their songs, but they were very good and one of their encores was Rich Girl which made me smile because that too is a song from my high school and college days, that's basically 40+ years ago.  Combined with Goose's cover of the 1970's hit “Hollywood Nights” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band it was a trip down memory lane. I would recommend seeing this band to any fan of fun music.  They were all clearly having a great time. Katie Pruitt opened and came out to sing a song with LSD. In 2017, Pruitt was awarded the Buddy Holly Prize from the Songwriters Hall of Fame[4] and signed with Round Hill Records.[5] Her EP, OurVinyl Live Session EP was released in March 2018.[6] She was named by Rolling Stone as one of 10 new country artists you need to know[7] and by NPR as one of the 20 artists to watch, highlighting Pruitt as someone who "possesses a soaring, nuanced and expressive voice, and writes with devastating honesty".[8] On September 13, 2019, Pruitt released "Expectations", the title track from her full-length debut. Additional singles from this project were subsequently released: "Loving Her" on October 21, 2019,[9] and "Out of the Blue" on November 15, 2019.[10] On February 21, 2020, Pruitt's debut album, Expectations, was released by Rounder Records.[11][12] She earned a nomination for Emerging Act of the Year at the 2020 Americana Music Honors & Awards.[13] In the same year, she duetted with Canadian singer-songwriter Donovan Woods on "She Waits for Me to Come Back Down", a track from his album Without People.[14] In 2021 the artist was inter alia part of the Newport Folk Festival in July. Recommend her as well.  2.     Move Me Brightly: Grateful Dead Lighting Director Candace Brightman Candace Brightman (born 1944)[1] is an American lighting engineer, known for her longtime association with the Grateful Dead. She is the sister of author Carol Brightman. Brightman grew up in Illinois and studied set design at St John's College, Annapolis, Maryland.[1] She began working as a lighting technician in the Anderson Theater, New York City, and was recruited by Bill Graham to operate lighting at the Fillmore East.[3] In 1970, she operated the house lights at the Chicago Coliseum with Norol Tretiv.[4] She has also worked for Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker and Van Morrison. After serving as house lighting engineer for several Grateful Dead shows, including their 1971 residency at the Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, she was recruited by the band's Jerry Garcia to work for them full-time.[1] She started working regularly for the Dead on their 1972 tour of Europe (which was recorded and released as Europe 72), and remained their in-house lighting engineer for the remainder of their career.[1] One particular challenge that Brightman faced was having to alter lighting setups immediately in response to the Dead's improvisational style. By the band's final tours in the mid-1990s, she was operating a computer-controlled lighting system and managing a team of technicians.[5] Her work inspired Phish's resident lighting engineer Chris Kuroda, who regularly studied techniques in order to keep up with her standards. Brightman continued working in related spin-off projects until 2005.[1][7] She returned to direct the lighting for the Fare Thee Well concerts in 2015, where she used over 500 fixtures. Now facing significant financial and health related issues. 3.    Neil Young and New Band, The Chrome Hearts, Deliver 13-Minute “Down By The River” on Night One at The Capitol Theatre My buddies and I still can't believe Neil with Crazy Horse did not play their Chicago show back in May this year.  Thank god he's ok and still playing but we are bummed out at missing the shared experience opportunity that only comes along when seeing a rock legend like Neil and there aren't many.   SHOW No. 2:                     Broken Arrow                                                Track #5                                                1:10 – 3:00 Written by Robbie Robertson and released on his album Robbie Robertson released on October 27, 1987.  It reached number 29 on the RPM CanCon charts in 1988.[23]Rod Stewart recorded a version of "Broken Arrow" in 1991 for his album Vagabond Heart.[24] Stewart's version of the song was released as a single on August 26, 1991,[25] with an accompanying music video, reaching number 20 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and number two in Canada. This ballad is not to be confused either with Chuck Berry's 1959 single or Buffalo Springfield's 1967 song of the same name, written by Neil Young. "Broken Arrow" was also performed live by the Grateful Dead from 1993 to 1995 with Phil Lesh on vocals.[28] Grateful Dead spinoff groups The Dead, Phil Lesh and Friends, and The Other Ones have also performed the song, each time with Lesh on vocals.[29] Played:  35 timesFirst:  February 23, 1993 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USALast:  July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, IN, USA  SHOW No. 3:         Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds                                    Track #9                                    2:46 – 4:13 "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their May, 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Paul McCartney, and credited to the Lennon–McCartneysongwriting partnership.[2] Lennon's son Julian inspired the song with a nursery school drawing that he called "Lucy – in the sky with diamonds". Shortly before the album's release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the nouns in the title intentionally spelled "LSD", the initialism commonly used for the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide.[3] Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song,[3][4] and attributed the song's fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books.[3] The Beatles recorded "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" in March 1967. Adding to the song's ethereal qualities, the musical arrangement includes a Lowrey organ part heavily treated with studio effects, and a drone provided by an Indian tambura. The song has been recognised as a key work in the psychedelic genre. Among its many cover versions, a 1974 recording by Elton John – with a guest appearance by Lennon – was a number 1 hit in the US and Canada. John Lennon said that his inspiration for the song came when his three-year-old son Julian showed him a nursery school drawing that he called "Lucy – in the Sky with Diamonds",[4] depicting his classmate Lucy O'Donnell.[5] Julian later recalled: "I don't know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings, but I obviously had an affection for Lucy at that age. I used to show Dad everything I'd built or painted at school, and this one sparked off the idea."[5][6][7]Ringo Starr witnessed the moment and said that Julian first uttered the song's title on returning home from nursery school.[4][8][9] Lennon later said, "I thought that's beautiful. I immediately wrote a song about it." According to Lennon, the lyrics were largely derived from the literary style of Lewis Carroll's novel Alice in Wonderland.[3][10] Lennon had read and admired Carroll's works, and the title of Julian's drawing reminded him of the "Which Dreamed It?" chapter of Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice floats in a "boat beneath a sunny sky".[11] Lennon recalled in a 1980 interview: It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.[3] Paul McCartney remembered of the song's composition, "We did the whole thing like an Alice in Wonderland idea, being in a boat on the river ... Every so often it broke off and you saw Lucy in the sky with diamonds all over the sky. This Lucy was God, the Big Figure, the White Rabbit."[10] He later recalled helping Lennon finish the song at Lennon's Kenwood home, specifically claiming he contributed the "newspaper taxis" and "cellophane flowers" lyrics.[8][12] Lennon's 1968 interview with Rolling Stone magazine confirmed McCartney's contribution.[13] Lucy O'Donnell Vodden, who lived in Surbiton, Surrey, died 28 September 2009 of complications of lupus at the age of 46. Julian had been informed of her illness and renewed their friendship before her death. Rumours of the connection between the title of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and the initialism "LSD" began circulating shortly after the release of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP in June 1967.[24][25] McCartney gave two interviews in June admitting to having taken the drug.[26][27] Lennon later said he was surprised at the idea the title was a hidden reference to LSD,[3] countering that the song "wasn't about that at all,"[4] and it "was purely unconscious that it came out to be LSD. Until someone pointed it out, I never even thought of it. I mean, who would ever bother to look at initials of a title? ... It's not an acid song."[3] McCartney confirmed Lennon's claim on several occasions.[8][12] In 1968 he said: When you write a song and you mean it one way, and someone comes up and says something about it that you didn't think of – you can't deny it. Like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," people came up and said, cunningly, "Right, I get it. L-S-D," and it was when [news]papers were talking about LSD, but we never thought about it.[10] In a 2004 interview with Uncut magazine, McCartney confirmed it was "pretty obvious" drugs did influence some of the group's compositions at that time, including "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", though he tempered this statement by adding, "[I]t's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music." In 2009 Julian with James Scott Cook and Todd Meagher released "Lucy", a song that is a quasi-follow-up to the Beatles song. The cover of the EP showed four-year-old Julian's original drawing, that now is owned by David Gilmour from Pink Floyd.[59] Lennon's original handwritten lyrics sold at auction in 2011 for $230,000. A lot of fun to see this tune live.  Love that Jerry does the singing even though his voice is very rough and he stumble through some of the lyrics.  It is a Beatles tune, a legendary rock tune, and Jerry sings it like he wrote it at his kitchen table. Phil and Friends with the Quintent cover the tune as well and I believe Warren Haynes does the primary singing on that version.  Warren, Jimmy Herring and Phil really rock that tune like the rock veterans they are. The version is fun because it opens the second set, a place of real prominence even after having played it for six months by this point.  Gotta keep the Deadheads guessing. Played:  19 timesFirst:  March 17, 1993 at Capital Centre, Landover, MD, USALast: June 28, 1995 at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills, MI, USA  MJ NEWS: Ukrainian Officials Approve List Of Medical Marijuana Qualifying Conditions Under Country's New Legalization Law2.      Federal Marijuana And Drug Convictions Would Be Automatically Sealed Under New Bipartisan Senate Bill3.      Pennsylvania Police Arrest An Average Of 32 People For Marijuana Possession Every Day, New Data Shows As Lawmakers Weigh Legalization4.      CBD-Rich Hemp Extract Is An Effective Natural Insecticide Against Mosquitoes, New Research Shows   SHOW No. 4:         Wave To The Wind                                    Track #10                                    5:00 – 6:40 Hunter/Lesh tune that was never released.  In fact, the Dead archives say that there is no studio recording of the song.  Not a great song.  I have no real memory of it other than it shows up in song lists for a couple of shows I attended.  Even this version of the tune is really kind of flat and uninspiring but there are not a lot of Phil tunes to feature and you can only discuss Box of Rain so many times.  Just something different to talk about. Played:  21 timesFirst:  February 22, 1992 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USALast:  December 9, 1993 at Los Angeles Sports Arena, Los Angeles, CA, USA  OUTRO:                   The Other One                                    Track #16                                    2:30 – 4:22 "That's It for the Other One" is a song by American band the Grateful Dead. Released on the band's second studio album Anthem of the Sun (released on July 18, 1968) it is made up of four sections—"Cryptical Envelopment", "Quadlibet for Tenderfeet", "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get", and "We Leave the Castle". Like other tracks on the album, is a combination of studio and live performances mixed together to create the final product. While the "We Leave the Castle" portion of the song was never performed live by the band, the first three sections were all featured in concert to differing extents. "Cryptical Envelopment", written and sung by Jerry Garcia, was performed from 1967 to 1971, when it was then dropped aside from a select few performances in 1985. "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get", written by Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir and sung by Weir, became one of the band's most frequently performed songs in concert (usually denoted as simply "The Other One"). One of the few Grateful Dead songs to have lyrics written by Weir, "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get" became one of the Dead's most-played songs (being performed a known 586 times[2]) and most popular vehicles for improvisation, with some performances reaching 30+ minutes in length. The song's lyrics reference the influence of the Merry Pranksters and in particular Neal Cassady.[2] Additionally, the line "the heat came 'round and busted me for smilin' on a cloudy day"  - one of my favorite Grateful Dead lyrics  - refers to a time Weir was arrested for throwing a water balloon at a cop from the upstairs of 710 Ashbury, the Dead's communal home during the ‘60's and early ‘70's before the band moved its headquarters, and the band members moved, to Marin County just past the Golden Gate Bridge when driving out of the City. In my experience, almost always a second set tune.  Back in the late ‘60's and early ‘70's either a full That's It For The Other One suite or just The Other One, would be jammed out as long as Dark Star and sometimes longer.  During the Europe '72 tour, Dark Star and the full Other One Suite traded off every show as the second set psychedelic rock long jam piece.  Often preceded by a Phil bass bomb to bring the independent noodling into a full and tight jam with an energy all of its own. The Other One got its name because it was being written at the same time as Alligator, one of the Dead's very first tunes.  When discussing the tunes, there was Alligator and this other one. I always loved the Other One and was lucky enough to see the full That's It For The Other One suite twice in 1985 during its too brief comeback to celebrate the Dead's 20th anniversary. Played:  550 timesFirst:  October 31, 1967 at Winterland Arena, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago Birthday shout out: Nephew, Jacob Mishkin, star collegiate baseball player, turns 21and all I can say is “no effing way!”  Happy birthday dude! And a Happy and healthy New Year to those celebrating Rosh Hashanah which begins this week. .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

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The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast
"Furniture Man"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2024 3:48


A signature tune from the late David Peyton — the song he called “Furniture Man” — entered the Floodisphere 45 years ago as a wild and crazy sing-along for the folks who attended the latter years of the Bowen Bashes.In fact, the song helped to make memories at the very last of those semiannual music parties at which The Flood was born. Here, from that evening (Sept. 19, 1981), the rocking rendition by Dave, accompanied by his original Flood band mates, Charlie Bowen and Roger Samples, Joe Dobbs and Bill Hoke is The Flood's first recording of the song.Still with us two decades later, the song — which Dave knew had strong ties to his beloved Mountain State — also was featured on The Flood's first studio album in 2001, which you can hear it for free online in our Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to give the album a spin.We Started with Dick Justice …We learned this song from a 1929 recording by a West Virginia original, Dick Justice, a Logan County coal miner and a white blues singer who was heavily influenced by black musicians, especially Luke Jordan who was living at the same time in the hills of neighboring Virginia. Peyton found this great old tune on an anthology of little known recordings by West Virginians in the early 20th Century. Dick's single recording session took place at Brunswick's Chicago studio May 20 and 21, 1929. In addition to his six solo released numbers (plus two unreleased vocal songs), he also furnished guitar backup for Clendenin, WV, fiddler Reese Jarvis, who placed four traditional tunes on disc. (Ironically, the two West Virginians first met at the Chicago studio and never saw each other again afterward.)One of Justice's six sides recorded that spring was released the following April as "Cocaine,” though that isn't the name Dick usually gave it.In his web newsletter Old Friends: A Songobiography, Elijah Wald quotes one of Justice's old buddies as saying Dick “could get on the piano and play blues like crazy, you know. He used to do a song called ‘Cocaine,' but it had a verse in it about the furniture man, so he liked to the call it ‘The Furniture Man'. And he would just do it like a comedy skit, and just crack everybody up.”After his Chicago recording adventure, Justice resumed digging coal in the Eagle Mines in Logan County, where he died in 1962 at age 59.… But We Need to Give Luke Jordan His PropsWe wrote above that Justice was “heavily influenced” by black blues singers. Yeah, well, that's putting it mildly. If you listen to Luke Jordan's 1927 “Cocaine Blues” for Victor, it's clear that Justice copied — verse for verse — Jordan's work for his own Brunswick recording two years later.Some believe Jordan was also a West Virginian, born in Bluefield, WV, in 1892. However, the birthplace of the bluesman is something of a dispute. (Some folks will tell you he was from Virginia, perhaps Lynchburg or Appomattox County.) We do know that at the time of his World War I draft registration on June 5, 1917, the 25-year-old Jordan was living in Bluefield, working as a delivery man and janitor. Later he served as a private in the army's 7th Development Battalion.His gravestone — erected by the military following his death in 1952 at age 60 — lists West Virginia as his home. Recordings and AfterwardJordan's brief recording career — he waxxed 12 sides — started at age 35, when he was brought to Charlotte, NC, by Victor in 1927. The several records Jordan made sold moderately well, and Victor took him to New York in 1929 for two more sessions. The Depression ended his recording career, and Jordan eventually drifted to Lynchburg, where he was often found playing on the street outside the Craddock Terry Shoe Co. building. By the 1940s, Jordan had lost his voice and had stopped singing.Jordan is buried in Lynchburg's Forest Hill Cemetery. Today, through the help of the James River Blues Society, he is honored with a Virginia historical highway marker erected in 2000 on the corner of Lynchburg's Jefferson and Horseford streets, near an old apartment where he stayed.In Flood LoreIt probably isn't surprising for a song that has been with us so long to have deep roots in Flood lore. At a 2010 jam session at the Bowen House, for instance, Dave, Joe, Sam and Charlie stopped between tunes to share funny stories about the far-reaching impact of “Furniture Man.” Click the button below to hear them:And while we're at it, here from13 years earlier is another bit of conversation about the song, this one during a 1997 Flood visit to Joe's “Music from the Mountains” radio show on West Virginia Public Radio: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

In the Market with Janet Parshall
Hour 2: The Redemption Of An American Icon

In the Market with Janet Parshall

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2024 44:55 Transcription Available


At the peak of his career, Cash had done it all—living the ultimate rags-to-riches story of growing up on a cotton farm in the Deep South to becoming a Nashville and Hollywood sensation, singing alongside heroes like Elvis Presley and performing for several American presidents. But through all of this, Cash was troubled. By the time he released the iconic Man in Black album in 1971, the middle-aged icon was broken down, hollow-eyed, and wrung out. In his search for peace, Cash became embroiled in controversy. He was arrested five times in seven years. His drug- and alcohol-induced escapades led to car accidents and a forest fire that devastated 508 acres. His time was divided between Jesus and jail, gospel tunes and the "Cocaine Blues." But by the end of his life, Cash was speaking openly about his "unshakeable faith." What caused the superstar to turn from his conflicting passions to embrace a life in Christ? Join us to hear the rest of the story about this musical icon.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Blockbusters and Birdwalks
“Walk the Line” (2005), a Conversation about a Blockbuster

Blockbusters and Birdwalks

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 24, 2024 27:52


Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa consider Johnny Cash, a man with many chapters in his book of life, and wonder if they got to see the right one get made into a movie.***Referenced media:“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (James Cameron, 1991)“Ray” (Taylor Hackford, 2004)“Happy Days” (Garry Marshall, 1974-1984)“Bohemian Rhapsody” (Brian Singer, 2018)“A History of Violence” (David Cronenberg, 2005),“Brokeback Mountain” (Ang Lee, 2005)“Munich” (Steven Spielberg, 2005)“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (Mike Newell, 2005)“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (James Mangold, 2023)Audio quotation:“Walk the Line” (James Mangold, 2005), including the songs “Cocaine Blues” and “Long Legged Guitar Pickin' Man”“Hurt” by Johnny Cash (2003), written Trent Reznor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AHCfZTRGiI“Theme from ‘The Dukes of Hazard' (Good Ol' Boys)”, written by Waylon Jennings, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8Wqo3CvtUc“New York, 1969” from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (James Mangold, 20123), written by John Williams, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glf5KmRGvOk&list=PLxA687tYuMWiRzSL6tJxmPbIEinvT00AH&index=19

Mere Conservatism
Cocaine Blues at the White House

Mere Conservatism

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 11, 2023 29:25


Cleve and David discuss hard drugs at the White House, SCOTUS decisions, and a hit movie in theaters.

AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch
Cocaine Blues: 2-21-22

AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 23, 2023 35:33


A classic FIB episode from 2-21-22. Kate Moss, of all people, is disgusted by her half-sister's cocaine habit...Chris Rock is banging Rita Ora...My nights in South Beach reading Buckowski and hanging with Abel Ferrara...The Jackass Forever crew do insane stunts while not on drugs.

Poirot Pod
Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher Mystery #1) by Kerry Greenwood

Poirot Pod

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 25, 2022 133:03


We're back with a special episode discussing this Agatha Christie-inspired book: "OMG who's looking at my nipples?!"

Get Up in the Cool
Episode 307: Rollie Tussing (Pop Tunes From the 20's and 30's)

Get Up in the Cool

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 13, 2022 32:22


Welcome to Get Up in the Cool: Old Time Music with Cameron DeWhitt and Friends! This week's friend is Rollie Tussing. We recorded this back in June in Rodney, Michigan at Earful of Fiddle Music and Dance Camp. Tunes in this episode: * Ain't Gonna Worry No More (0:39) * Free Little Bird (13:06) * Cocaine Blues (20:03) * The Itsy Bitsy Spider (26:16) * I Lost My Gal From Memphis (28:19) * Bonus track: Ain't It Hard Visit Rolling Tussing's website: https://www.rollietussing.com/ Support Get Up in the Cool on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/getupinthecool Buy Get Up in the Cool merch like t-shirts, phone cases, and masks! https://get-up-in-the-cool-swag.creator-spring.com/ Sign up at https://www.pitchforkbanjo.com/ for my clawhammer instructional series! Check out Cameron's other podcast, Think Outside the Box Set: https://boxset.fireside.fm/ Check out Cameron's old time trio Tall Poppy String Band: https://www.tallpoppystringband.com/

The Classic Metal Show
CMS | When Billy Squier Stopped Making Guy Rock!

The Classic Metal Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2022


On this episode of THE CLASSIC METAL SHOW, Neeley and Chris talk about how masculine Billy Squier was prior to the "Rock Me Tonite" video. They also talk about how George Thorogood was average, but his muscular guitar sound elevated his ordinary songs. **NOTE: Everything said here, and on every episode of all of our shows are 100% the opinions of the hosts. Nothing is stated as fact. Do your own research to see if their opinions are true or not.**#theclassicmetalshow #comedy #parody #neeley #chrisakin #shockjocks #popculture #sex #hardrock #heavymetal #celebrities #socialjustice #socialmedia #woke #politics #humor #dating #relationships

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 414: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #493 JUNE 29, 2022.

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2022 59:00


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Jake Leg Jug Band  | 03 I Had to Give Up Gym  | Live At The Audley Theatre | Curley Weaver with Willie McTell  | Joker Man  | Curley Weaver (1933-1935) | Mississippi Fred McDowell & Hunter's Chapel Singers  | Back Back Train  | Amazing Grace  |  | Otis Rush  | I Can't Quit You Baby  | Total Blues - 100 Essential Songs | Doc Watson & Jack Lawrence  | Shady Grove  | Look A Yonder Coming | Mike Goudreau  | Tell Mama I'm Ok  | Acoustic Sessions  |  | Claire Hamlin  | Old Black Joanna  | Elbows Going Crazy  |  | Claire Hamlin  | Yakety Piano  | Elbows Going Crazy  |  | Claire Hamlin  | Suitcase Stroll  | Elbows Going Crazy  |  | Reverend Gary Davis  | Cocaine Blues  | Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964 | Rev Gary Davis  | Swingin' BLues  | Some People Who Play Guitar Like A Lot Of People Don't | Moonshine Society  | The One Who Got Away (Acoustic-Bonus)  | Sweet Thing (Special Edition) | Hannah Aldridge  | Lie Like You Love Me  | Razor Wire  |  | Half Deaf Clatch  | Pony Blues (Charley Patton)  | Borrowed Blues  |  | Dean Haitani  | Fairlight Walking  | RED DUST  | 

Sateli 3
Sateli 3 - Las músicas y músicos que inspiraron al primer Johnny Cash! - 04/05/22

Sateli 3

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2022 59:11


Sintonía: "The Wreck Of The Old ´97" - Johnny Cash "Can The Circle Be Unbroken?" - The Carter Family; "Rock With Me Baby" - Billy Lee Riley; "Dark Was The Night (Cold Was The Ground)" - Blind Willie Johnson; "Milk Cow Blues" - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys; "Defrost Your Heart" - Charlie Feathers; "Wildwood Flower" - The Carter Family; "Boogie Blues" - Earl Peterson; "That´s All Right" - Elvis Presley; "Feelin´Good" - Little Junior´s Blue Flames; "Time´s A-Wastin´" - June Carter & Carl Smith; "Candy Man" - Mississippi John Hurt; "Didn´t It Rain" - Sister Rosetta Tharpe; "On The Sea Of Galilee" - The Carter Family; "Bop Bop Baby" - Wade & Dick; "Try Me One More Time" - Ernest Tubb; "Cocaine Blues" - Roy Hogsed Todas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación "Johnny Cash And The Music That Inspired "Walk The Line" (3xCD, Big3 Records, 2008) Escuchar audio

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 147: “Hey Joe” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

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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Friday Night Karaoke
A Post-Valentine's Day FU Episode

Friday Night Karaoke

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2022 73:04


It's Season 2, Episode 8 of the Friday Night Karaoke Podcast, and the theme was #FNKFU! Valentine's Day is all about love, but what happens when it just doesn't work out? What happens when it's just a hot ugly mess of a break-up? That's what #FNKFU is all about - songs about breaking up, about sticking it to your Ex, about taking back your independence after burning down their (figurative and literal) house. So Love Yourself and Let It Go, because we know it Hurts Like Hell to Die From A Broken Heart. Switch Up because it will Be Alright, you'll be Happier if you Really Don't Care, so Before He Cheats drop that Heartless Stone Cold Heartbreaker and remember it's Ok Not To Be Ok. You're Stronger now that your Out Of Love, so sleep easy knowing that they are Somebody That You Used To Know. Featured in this episode alongside hosts Mike Wiston and Joe Rubin: - Nick Jackson with Crazy by Gnarles Barkley - Asthmabully Jones with Cocaine Blues by Johnny Cash - Dana LaValle with Jar of Hearts by Christina Perri - Karen Kolar with All Star by Smashmouth - Patti Usselman with Mama's Broken Heart by Miranda Lambert - Scott Berg with She Hates Me by Puddle of Mudd - Ed Cunard with One For My Baby by Bill Miller - Eric Dubrofsky with Hopelessly Devoted To You by Grease - Victor Tennant with Take Good Care Of My Baby by Elvis - Jennifer & Toni with Achy Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus Love what you hear? Join the official Friday Night Karaoke FB group, a completely negativity free karaoke destination, and be part of the action! www.facebook.com/groups/fridaynightkaraoke. Hope to see you there!

AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch
Cocaine Blues

AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2022 35:33


Kate Moss, of all people, is disgusted by her half-sister's cocaine habit...Chris Rock is banging Rita Ora...My nights in South Beach reading Buckowski and hanging with Abel Ferrara...The Jackass Forever crew do insane stunts while not on drugs.

AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch
Cocaine Blues

AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2022 35:33


Kate Moss, of all people, is disgusted by her half-sister's cocaine habit...Chris Rock is banging Rita Ora...My nights in South Beach reading Buckowski and hanging with Abel Ferrara...The Jackass Forever crew do insane stunts while not on drugs.

Lucio91.9FM Podcast
Candy Rock: Cocaine Blues

Lucio91.9FM Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 30, 2021 2:55


@Lucio91.9FM te cuenta la historia de esta canción de Johnny Cash, la cual trata acerca de un asesinato, drogas y alcohol. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lucio-morales/message

Outlaws After Dark
Stories n Stuff

Outlaws After Dark

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2021 42:01


This week we talk about Air Force stories, some local bands were into and who wrote the original Cocaine Blues! Don't miss it

AMERICAN GROOVES RADIO HOUR hosted by JOE LAURO
Joe Lauro's AMERICAN GROOVES RADIO HOUR "Noxious Substances"

AMERICAN GROOVES RADIO HOUR hosted by JOE LAURO

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2021 54:38


This episode focuses on drug songs of the 1920s-30s - From Louis Armstrong's "MUGGLES", Luke Jordan's 1927 COCAINE BLUES, Benny Moten's GOOFY DUST, to Victoria Spivey's DOPE HEAD BLUES tune in and indulge..and you will learn for sure that smoking reefer wasn't invented in the 1960's!

COSMO punktEU
Cocaine Blues

COSMO punktEU

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2021 27:03


Es schneit das ganze Jahr in Europa. Mit den Containerschiffen kommt das Kokain, mit dem Kokain kommt das Geld, mit dem Geld kommt die Gewalt. Die Niederlande sind zusammen mit Belgien Europas Einfallstor für harten Stoff, kriminelle Banden kontrollieren gnadenlos den Markt. Wie es so weit kommen konnte und was das für die Drogenpolitik in der EU bedeutet, besprechen Akin Gohlke, Jakob Mayr und Alexander Göbel.

Andrew's Daily Five
Andrew's Daily Five, Ep. 327

Andrew's Daily Five

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2021 16:05


#172-170Intro/Outro: Fancy Shoes by The Walters172. The Stranger by Billy Joel (Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) & Scenes From an Italian Restaurant & She's Always a Woman & Just the Way You Are & Vienna & Only the Good Die Young)171. At Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash (Folsom Prison Blues & 25 Minutes to Go & Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart & Cocaine Blues)170. L.A. Woman by The Doors (Love Her Madly & L.A. Woman & Riders on the Storm & The Changeling & Hyacinth House & Crawling King Snake)The Stranger album artAt Folsom Prison album artL.A. Woman album artVote on Today's Album ArtHave you voted on Week 5 Round 1 winners yet? If so, no further action needed. If not:Week 5 Round 1 Winners (episodes 321-325)Vote on Week 5 Round 2 Album ArtHave you voted on Weeks 1-4 Round 2 winners yet? If so, no further action needed. If not:Weeks 1-4 Round 2 Winners (episodes 301-320)Vote on Weeks 1-4 Round 3 Album Art

Suave es la Noche
109-Rapsodia sinfónica con Villagers, Tierra Santa, Bala, Rapsody of fire, Sierpe, Forraje, Uncle Acid…

Suave es la Noche

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 14, 2021 69:44


Bienvenidos a una nueva descarga de Suave es la Noche, Gervi Navío y Juani Domínguez os convocan para una hora prolongada de Rock, nada más y nada menos, desde Sevilla, en Radiopolis, a través de la 92.3 de la FM. Rapsodia de fuego y rock sinfónico, desde Villagers a Tierra Santa, pasando por Bala, Rapsody of fire, Forraje, Sierpe, Acid Uncle......un trago abrasador de licor y Rock and Roll. Lista de temas: 01-Running Wild. Airbourne 02-Again. Villagers 03-Caballo de Troya. Tierra Santa 04-Human Flesh. Bala 05-Down of Victory. Rapsody of fire 06-Cocaine Blues. Johnny Cash 07-Stormrider. Sierpe 08-Thanks God for Girls. Weezer 09-Entre el barro y las chabolas. Forraje 10-Death´s Door. Uncle Acid & the deadbeats 11-Teenegers. My Chemical Romance 12-The Vagrants. The Final Hour Nos marchamos aguantando la respiración hasta una nueva descarga de Rock & Roll….menos mal que Dios es Suave.

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

Hi Folks!  For this months full episode we listen to Johnny Cash's 1968 album "At Folsom Prison".  The first in a series of live albums from Cash all recorded in prisons.  "At Folsom Prison" came at a pivotal time in Cash's career as the singer/song writer was trying to turn his career around after several years of limited commercial success. With June Carter, Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three backing Cash "At Folsom Prison" became a huge success for both Cash and Columbia Records.  This album features the staple versions of songs such as "Folsom Prison Blues", "Cocaine Blues" and "Jackson". While also featuring country standards like "The Wall" and "Green Green Grass of Home".  "At Folsom Prison" shows a different side of Johnny Cash and is not to be missed by fans of Cash's more mainstream work.  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/

Screaming at a Wall Podcast - Punk Rock , Prison, Politics, Philosophy and Skateboarding
6. "Cocaine Blues" - Michael Santos, 26 Years in Prison who became a Millionaire.

Screaming at a Wall Podcast - Punk Rock , Prison, Politics, Philosophy and Skateboarding

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2021 53:32


We interview Michael Santos, a former Cocaine King Pin who served 26 years in Federal Prison. While in prison he turned his life around and wrote several successful books. After his release he managed to turn from a ex-convict to a millionaire. https://michaelsantos.com Everyone has a story to tell, but our stories involve street gangs, punk rock, prison, parole, bar fights, skateboarding, boxing, mediation, community activism, fatherhood, divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction, recovery, owning a skate shop, photography, filmmaking, angst, spiritual awakening, enlightenment and that's just scratching the surface. Join Kasper as we take you on the journey of our lives and share insights and our opinions along with interviewing ex-prisoners who have success in their own way and spotlighting people who make a difference in the scenes we love. Instagram: @stealyoursoul Website: www.stealyoursoul.com/screamingatawallpodcast Want to be on our show? Have you been to prison? Have you been successful in staying out? Do you have a story you would like to share? Send an email to info.screamingatawall@gmail.com You can support our channel by subscribing and sharing. You can also go to https://anchor.fm/screamingatawallpodcast sign up for a subscription or see all available platforms. Intro-Outro Music by Mr. Eds insta: @the_mr_eds

Screaming at a Wall Podcast - Punk Rock , Prison, Politics, Philosophy and Skateboarding
6. "Cocaine Blues" - Michael Santos, 26 Years in Prison who became a Millionaire.

Screaming at a Wall Podcast - Punk Rock , Prison, Politics, Philosophy and Skateboarding

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2021 53:32


We interview Michael Santos, a former Cocaine King Pin who served 26 years in Federal Prison. While in prison he turned his life around and wrote several successful books. After his release he managed to turn from a ex-convict to a millionaire. https://michaelsantos.com Everyone has a story to tell, but our stories involve street gangs, punk rock, prison, parole, bar fights, skateboarding, boxing, mediation, community activism, fatherhood, divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction, recovery, owning a skate shop, photography, filmmaking, angst, spiritual awakening, enlightenment and that's just scratching the surface. Join Kasper as we take you on the journey of our lives and share insights and our opinions along with interviewing ex-prisoners who have success in their own way and spotlighting people who make a difference in the scenes we love. Instagram: @stealyoursoul Website: www.stealyoursoul.com/screamingatawallpodcast Want to be on our show? Have you been to prison? Have you been successful in staying out? Do you have a story you would like to share? Send an email to info.screamingatawall@gmail.com You can support our channel by subscribing and sharing. You can also go to https://anchor.fm/screamingatawallpodcast sign up for a subscription or see all available platforms. Intro-Outro Music by Mr. Eds insta: @the_mr_eds

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
PLEDGE WEEK: “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2021


This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. Today we're going to look at one of the great one-hit wonders of all time -- a duo who made one fascinating single, made the top five with it, and then never managed to repeat their success. Today we're looking at "Mule Skinner Blues" by the Fendermen: [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Mule Skinner Blues", guitar solo] The Fendermen were originally from Wisconsin though both of them later moved to Minnesota, and were both born on the same date, November the 26th 1937. Jim Sundquist and Phil Humphrey started out in their own bands, but after meeting up at university decided to perform together without any other musicians, both playing Fender guitars through the same amp, with Humphrey singing and Sundquist playing lead guitar. They both liked Jimmie Rodgers, and in particular they enjoyed his song "Muleskinner Blues", also known as "Blue Yodel #8": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Muleskinner Blues (Blue Yodel #8)"] They recorded their own version of the song, and took it to a tiny label called Cuca Records, who put out a pressing of three hundred copies: [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Muleskinner Blues", Cuca version] That started to get some airplay, and people started wanting to buy the record, but Cuca Records weren't able to get any more copies pressed up for several weeks. So another label stepped in. Soma Records at first offered to lease the recording from Cuca, but when the two labels were unable to come to an agreement, Soma got the Fendermen in to rerecord their song, this time at a professional studio -- the same one that would later be used by the Trashmen to record "Surfin' Bird": [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Muleskinner Blues"] Soma released that with a different B-side from the one Cuca had used, an instrumental called "Torture", so that Soma could collect the publishing money: [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Torture"] Astonishingly, "Muleskinner Blues", a cover of an old country song, with falsetto leaps and only guitars for a backing, made number five on the pop charts, aided by an appearance on American Bandstand. They got a full backing band together, and started touring nationally. But then Cuca sued Soma. Eventually the two labels reached an out-of-court settlement, but the vast majority of the money from the hit ended up going to Cuca, rather than Soma. The next single featured the full band, rather than just the two guitarists, and was a cover version of Huey "Piano" Smith's "Don't You Just Know It": [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Don't You Just Know It"] That didn't make the Hot One Hundred, and after one more single, and an album featuring all their recordings, the band broke up. Sundquist went back to Cuca Records, where as "Jimmy Sun and the Radiants" he put out a version of "Cocaine Blues", an old Western Swing song that had recently been revived by Johnny Cash as "Transfusion Blues": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Transfusion Blues"] Sundquist's version restored the original lyrics, but was otherwise modelled on Cash's version: [Excerpt: Jimmy Sun and the Radiants, "Cocaine Blues"] The Radiants also backed a singer called Dick Hiorns, on another record in the style of "Muleskinner Blues", a surfed-up version of the old Hank Snow country song "I'm Movin' On": [Excerpt: Dick Hiorns, "I'm Movin' On"] Despite that being a surprisingly good record, it was out of step with musical trends by 1961, and was unsuccessful. The Radiants then renamed themselves The Muleskinners, and released a novelty record in the "Monster Mash" style, called "The Wolfman": [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "The Wolfman"] Phil Humphrey, meanwhile, remained on Soma Records, as Phil Humphrey and the Fendermen, and released another version of "Don't You Just Know It", coupled with his own novelty record, "Popeye": [Excerpt: Phil Humphrey and the Fendermen, "Popeye"] Both men eventually ended up running their own versions of the Fendermen, touring into the 2000s. Sundquist's version put out a handful of recordings, and he also guested with the Minnesotan rockabilly revival band The Vibro Champs on their remake of a Fendermen B-side, "Beach Party", in 2000: [Excerpt: The Vibro Champs, "Beach Party"] Sundquist also had a side career making gospel music, in a duo with his wife Sharrie, but I've been unable to find any recordings of them, though apparently they wrote over a hundred Christian songs together. The Fendermen did reunite, briefly, in 2005 for two shows backed by the Vibro Champs, and had something of a cult following after the Cramps recorded their own version of "Muleskinner Blues", based on the Fendermen's version: [Excerpt: The Cramps, "Muleskinner Blues"] They never had another hit, and left behind a tiny number of recordings, but the Fendermen are now regarded as one of the most important precursors to the surf and garage rock sounds of the sixties, and their few recordings are regularly repackaged. Sundquist died in 2013, and Humphrey in 2016.

MFM SPEAKS OUT
EP 27: A Professional Musician's Perspective on Drug and Alcohol Addiction

MFM SPEAKS OUT

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2021 62:13


"Music is service."This episode of MFM Speaks Out will be different from our usual format. Dawoud Kringle will be interviewing his guest; a professional musician and  recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Out of respect to our guest and the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous and other substance abuse recovery programs, we are protecting our guest’s anonymity and referring to him as Dave. Our discussion will center around alcoholism, drug abuse, and substance abuse recovery among musicians.Topics discussed: How did substance abuse and music enter Dave's life and how they intersected, the presence of drugs and alcohol, stigma of addiction among musicians, how it affected his life and career, the turning point where he decided he’d had enough, the difficulties of cleaning up and staying clean, and advice to musicians (and all others) who are suffering from drug and alcohol addiction.Music featured on this episode:"Cocaine Blues" (written by Porter Irving & Rev. Gary David [c. 1905], performed by Dave Van Ronk)"Heroin" (written by Lou Reed, performed by The Velvet Underground)"Master of Puppets" (written by James Hetfield, performed by Metallica)

Big Little Books
Ep 19: From Books to TV. February 27, 2021.

Big Little Books

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2021 84:44


“The book is better.”   Just like us over here at BLB, if you are a bibliophile, odds are you have said this before. Sometimes this statement is well-warranted, but often there is a power to TV adaptations through which the original material translates far better than it would to a movie. Book adaptations such as Game of Thrones, Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently The Queen’s Gambit, have all come to prominence achieving worldwide recognition. In episode 19 of BLB, we chat about book adaptations that become binge worthy television. Can they act as strong ambassadors for books in general? What about the fear of doing the material justice? Many fans are cautious about books being adapted for the small screen, but sometimes they get it right. BLB chats about the times it really worked, and the times it really worked until it didn’t. Did you develop an obsession with chess during lockdown after binge watching The Queen’s Gambit miniseries? After intermission we go into a deep discussion of the book by Walter Tevis, and what we think of the show that followed. It probably goes without saying for this episode, but be cautious dear listeners, spoilers ahead!   After tuning in, let us know if there are adaptations we neglected to mention in this episode and if you agree or disagree with our analysis of The Queen’s Gambit. Find us on Instagram @biglittlebookspod or email us at biglittlebookspod@gmail.com. Thank you, as always, for listening!   EPISODE GUIDE:   00:01:45 – A Discussion on Book Adaptations    00:22:37 – Times It Really Worked   00:22:45 – Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies – HBO (2017-2019)   00:26:17 – Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood (Phyrne Fisher Mystery Series), Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries – ABC (2012-2015)   00:27:29 – Gossip Girl: It Had to Be You by Cecily von Ziegesar, Gossip Girl – The CW (2007-2012)   00:30:17 – Times It Worked, Until it Didn’t   00:30:23 – Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris (The Southern Vampire Mysteries), True Blood – HBO (2008-2014)   00:32:13 – Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison by Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black – Netflix (2013-2019)    00:34:18 – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale – Hulu (2017-ongoing)   00:38:55 – A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire), Game of Thrones – HBO (2011-2019)   00:42:46 – The Ones We Have Heard Good Things About, but Have Yet to Watch   00:42:50 – American Gods by Neil Gaiman, American Gods – Starz (2017-ongoing)   00:44:42 – Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings, Killing Eve – BBC America (2018-ongoing)   00:45:33 – The Magicians by Lev Grossman, The Magicians – SYFY (2015-2020)   00:45:53 – QUIZ: What Queen’s Gambit Character Are You? https://www.zimbio.com/quiz/WjaI8veCF4v/Queen+Gambit+Character   00:48:30 – Intermission   00:48:30 – The Queen’s Gambit Discussion (1983 novel by Walter Tevis, 2020 Netflix miniseries)   01:13:30 – Literary TV Adaptations Coming Soon in 2021   01:13:51 – Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven   01:14:46 – Foundation by Isaac Asimov, Foundation   01:15:42 – Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Pachinko   01:16:50 – Grisha trilogy and Six of Crows duology, both by Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone   01:17:37 – The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings   01:19:32 – #CurrentlyReading

Blues You Should Know
John Henry & the Cocaine Blues

Blues You Should Know

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2021 32:18


Here's a look at American music's ultimate crossover song: John Henry. To African-Americans he was a symbol of racial pride; to unionists, he represented the power of the American worker and union solidarity; to poor whites; he was personification of rugged Americanism, and to Christians; a Christ-like figure who died for our sins. And, as a bonus, a look at two versions of one of the oddest songs in blues and folk music, the Cocaine Blues. Support the show (https://paypal.me/BFrank53?locale.x=en_US)

Hors-Champ
#18: Walk the Line

Hors-Champ

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2021 6:37


Cet épisode sera consacré au portrait de l'homme que l'on surnommait l'Homme en noir, du fait de ses vêtements sombres et de la guitare acoustique noire,  qui est devenu une véritable légende de la musique rock'n'roll et country. Une grande partie de son oeuvre musicale fait écho aux thèmes de la douleur, de l'affliction morale et de la rédemption. Il est également la seule personne à avoir été introduite à la fois au Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, au Country Music Hall of Fame, et Songwriters  Hall of Fame.    Si cet épisode vous a plu, n'hésitez pas à lui attribuer une note, à le partager et à venir en discuter avec moi sur mon Instagram Les Belles Fréquences.    Extraits audio disponibles dans le podcast :  - Walk the Line (2005) - Bande Annonce FR  - I walk the line ( stereo version) - Johnny Cash ( 1964)  - Cocaine Blues (version re-masterisée de 2005) - Johnny Cash    Ecrit, réalisé, monté et mixé par moi même, Alice KRIEF, ingénieur du son, Les Belles Fréquences 

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 97: “Song to Woody” by Bob Dylan

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2020


  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. 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 “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan’s first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we’re going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We’re going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we’re also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we’re going to look at Bob Dylan, and at “Song to Woody”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we’ve had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we’ve looked at only in passing before. We’ve barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we’re going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we’ve not touched on before. I’ll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them — in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we’ll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there’s a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray — and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and “Dylan has surely mixed up his names” and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because “Ray’s main period of chart success” was 1956-58. Heylin’s books are usually very, very well researched, but here he’s showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray’s biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray’s hits, like “Cry”, were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Cry”] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray’s music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams’ songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow’s son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard’s band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly’s head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn’t listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called “Suzy Baby”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] Dylan joined Vee’s band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I’ve read), and he didn’t stay in Vee’s band very long. But while he was in Vee’s band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn’t until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself — he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, “Muleskinner Blues”] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta’s repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly’s, with a friend, “Spider” John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, “Hangman”] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother’s apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner’s house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we’ve talked about before — he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, “It’s Alright, Baby”] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we’ve only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn’t really a distinction made between country music and folk — that distinction is one that only really came later — and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he’d bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he’d travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he’d hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don’t have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] Woody and Jack weren’t musically compatible — this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one — but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn’t successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as “Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou”. The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job — the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined — he wasn’t all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist’s fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer — a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like “Ida Red”, “Stackolee”, and “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?” – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics — and sometimes, but not always, the music — creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Talking Fishing Blues”] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm”] And of course, there was “This Land is Your Land”, a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land”] It’s not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day — he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren’t ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie’s songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie’s playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up — Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy — in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin’ Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers’ Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he’d recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan’s acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “1913 Massacre”] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot’s persona as well as Guthrie’s. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard — Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The lyrics were things like “Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how” Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name — she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn’t Mr. Gravy’s birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill — he had Huntington’s disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington’s causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend’s house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie’s own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this — Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records — all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier — but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith’s collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] To the Carter Family’s country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, “Black Jack Davey”] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, “Stand By Me”] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith’s Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers — many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn’t charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan’s first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin'”] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like “Hava Nagilah”. There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan — those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views — while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists — Seeger’s camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups — the narcissism of small differences — but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “Cocaine Blues”] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he’d started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk’s couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk’s wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around — but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was — the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn’t need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan’s talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”, he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour — one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin — and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan’s vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular — as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie — was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie’s friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan’s big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond’s son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan’s, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he’d played at Gerde’s Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo’s letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, “I’ll Fly Away”] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he’d been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he’d just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Today I Sing the Blues”] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia’s head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond’s track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn’t come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it’s almost impossible to give anyone who’s heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson’s place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is “How come you didn’t start with Robert Johnson?”, and if you don’t know about him, you’ll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There’s a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it’s simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential — but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who’ve listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson’s biographer Elijah Wald — a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson’s musicianship, has said “knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles.” I’d agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson’s reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier — they’d got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson’s records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy’s later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond’s friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson — he’d gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you’d asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we’ll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him — and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind — he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests — Ramblin’ Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson “a polka hound, man”. And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “They’re Red Hot”] But the music wasn’t the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed — musically, Johnson just didn’t seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn’t sound particularly original in that context — but he also didn’t care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson’s performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure — the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that’s a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there’s no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time — and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself — in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan’s version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson’s style into his own songwriting, and we’ll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn’t be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, “Talkin’ New York”, was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs. The other, “Song To Woody”, was a rewrite of his earlier “Song For Bonny”, which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan’s first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”, but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It’s a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it’s one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan’s artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we’ll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

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Umpire Pants
Episode 132: Three Stooges Style

Umpire Pants

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2020 65:36


We’re making this podcast a conference call. Bill suggests Cocaine Blues over New Cut Road. The Corona Virus. Three Stooges Style slapping. Seasoning cast iron. A focus group wants to know who Mary would have dinner with, alive or dead. Arby’s talk. Kelley emailed her local politicians. Meeting up with friends without cell phones. Dudley P. Nut vs. Chester P. Nut. Mary needs a witch’s cauldron. Bad jokes. Shit List of the Week: Driving your Lambo too slow. Mary gave strangers directions. Ice Cream Truck of the Week: Friday Night Dinners (it’s on Hulu). Beat You to the Punchline! Kelley’s Hint List! Cleaning gilt frames. Wash your clothespins in salt water. Cleaning your bookshelves. Getting sugar syrup out of your clothes. How to fix sticking waffles. Umpire Pants Out!

The Ash Holes
Juarez Cigar Review

The Ash Holes

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 25, 2020 36:54


Juarez by Crowned Heads is created at a small factory named Tabacalera Pirchardo which is headed up by Don Eradio Pichado, a third-generation farmer with Cuban roots. He was also mentored by Arsenio Ramos who rose to fame as a Master Blender with Aganorsa. Here Crowned Heads and Don Pichado show off their shared vision in a cigar that was inspired by the song Cocaine Blues which was performed by Johnny Cash. Is this cigar to put to a ring of fire or will it make you hurt? Tune in to The AshHoles and find out everything you need to know about Juarez. We will also have The Victor Sinclair 55 Top 5 List and all the madness you come to expect from The Ash Holes as we broadcast live on location from Studio 21 Podcast Cafe high above Two Guys Smoke Shop in Salem, New Hampshire on the United Podcast Network.

The Cigar Authority
Dave Returns With Insider Information From TPE '20

The Cigar Authority

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 8, 2020 119:55


This week Dave returned from Tobacco Plus Expo and on The Cigar Authority this week he will spill the beans and let us know what he saw and what he heard in Las Vegas. We know one thing, the show was packed. But what was the buzz? What was being discussed in hush tones? You won't want to miss out on the show as Dave pulls back the curtains. We will fire up Kristoff Criollo as we discuss that and more in the first hour. In the second hour we smoking something we picked up at the show from Crowned Heads as we smoke Juarez. The cigar is named after a town mentioned in Cocaine Blues which was made famous by Johnny Cash. Also a listener chimes in about not being happy about the performance of Barry & Mr. J last week. We will have this and all the usual suspects including Versus, Offer of the Day, Cigar News and a peek into the Asylum. The Cigar Authority is a member of the United Podcast Network and is recorded live in front of a studio audience at Studio 21 Podcast Cafe upstairs at Two Guys Smoke Shop in Salem, NH and as always you can find many of the cigars we discuss at http://www.2GuysCigars.com/. Never miss an episode by subscribing to the show via Apple Podcasts and Podbean.

Pothole Problem Podcast
Episode 15—Incivility, Anger, and Hostility

Pothole Problem Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2020 30:55


This week's guest is Jack Hoffman, former mayor of Lake Oswego, OR (2009-2013). Jack discusses his tumultuous experience working in local government, and with the perspective afforded by years of reflection and hindsight, he examines the sources of conflict and the reasons for the rising levels of animosity among the citizens and elected officials of Lake Oswego that pervaded his time in office. He also examines what he believes is necessary for these powerful feelings to be reduced and for local elected officials to establish trust and connection with the people they represent.This episode features "Cocaine Blues," an early-20th century song of uncertain origin, recorded by Craig Bradford.

Honky Tonk Radio Girl with Becky | WFMU
Cocaine Blues from Jan 1, 2020

Honky Tonk Radio Girl with Becky | WFMU

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 2, 2020


Music behind DJ: Audie Arliss - "Audies Melody" Roy Hogsed - "Cocaine Blues" Faron Young - "Hello Walls" Stonewall Jackson - "Don't Be Angry" Red Foley - "Milk Bucket Boogie" Hoyt Johnson - "I Bet You Didn't Know" Music behind DJ: B-B - "Scratchin'" Delbert Barker and the Gateway All-Stars - "Heartbreak Hotel" Jeff Daniels - "Switch Blade Sam" Lew Williams - "Cat Talk" Michael Clark - "None Of These Girls" Jimmy Elledge - "Gonna Turn My Voodoo On" Music behind DJ: Intruders - "Creepin'" Hank Williams - "Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do" Dick Ryan - "End Of A Love Affair" Gene Ross - "Endless Sleep" Buck Starr and the Country Outlaws - "Plaything In Your Life" Stan Jr. - "A City Boy's Dream" Wayne Ashley & The Good Weeds - "Hillbilly Harley" Music behind DJ: Audie Arliss - "Audies Theme" Chuck & Darlene - "Run Away Baby" Hershel Hamilton - "Is It Really Warm In Tampa" Ralph Ray - "Change The Record" Dewey Knight - "Haulin' My Last Load" Music behind DJ: B-B - "Tantrum" https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/90542

Honky Tonk Radio Girl with Becky | WFMU
Cocaine Blues from Jan 1, 2020

Honky Tonk Radio Girl with Becky | WFMU

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 2020


Music behind DJ: Audie Arliss - "Audies Melody" Roy Hogsed - "Cocaine Blues" Faron Young - "Hello Walls" Stonewall Jackson - "Don't Be Angry" Red Foley - "Milk Bucket Boogie" Hoyt Johnson - "I Bet You Didn't Know" Music behind DJ: B-B - "Scratchin'" Delbert Barker and the Gateway All-Stars - "Heartbreak Hotel" Jeff Daniels - "Switch Blade Sam" Lew Williams - "Cat Talk" Michael Clark - "None Of These Girls" Jimmy Elledge - "Gonna Turn My Voodoo On" Music behind DJ: Intruders - "Creepin'" Hank Williams - "Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do" Dick Ryan - "End Of A Love Affair" Gene Ross - "Endless Sleep" Buck Starr and the Country Outlaws - "Plaything In Your Life" Stan Jr. - "A City Boy's Dream" Wayne Ashley & The Good Weeds - "Hillbilly Harley" Music behind DJ: Audie Arliss - "Audies Theme" Chuck & Darlene - "Run Away Baby" Hershel Hamilton - "Is It Really Warm In Tampa" Ralph Ray - "Change The Record" Dewey Knight - "Haulin' My Last Load" Music behind DJ: B-B - "Tantrum" http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/90542

Wine & Murder Night
Tom Jones Cash (Psych s1e5)

Wine & Murder Night

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2019 81:06


Warning: This episode of psych deals with suicide, and so this episode of Wine & Murder Night discusses suicide as well. If this is a trigger for you, please skip this episode. If you are having suicidal thoughts, visit iasp.info to find a suicide helpline in your country. Episode: Psych s1e5 "9 Lives" Featuring: The world's worst cup of tea, American metaphors, practical sex advice, #travisfimmelfacts, Pete Wentz: cult leader, and good wine all around.  Carolyn's Wine: 2014 Sundae Pinot Noir, California 9.5/10 Sabrina's Wine: 2017 Allini Prosecco Treviso, Italy 8.5/9 Next Episode: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries s1e1 "Cocaine Blues"

The Mr. Pole Jangles' Big Disc Show - a podcast celebrating disc golf

Listen to Mr. Pole Jangles battles cedar trees in Sedalia, Missouri and struggle with who actually wrote Cocaine Blues. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mrpolejangles/message

ADHD
Cocaine Blues

ADHD

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2018 67:58


The ADHD crew members are dropping like flies and only Katie and Chet are left. They discuss some of their favorite things like drugs, lobster, and the future of the show. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/adhdcast/support

Attention Deficit Order
S14E20 Sheeple Annihilation

Attention Deficit Order

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 3, 2018 99:11


This week Chris, Skip, and M talk about the upcoming Oscar’s, the creation of actual Sheeple, and generally get silly, as usual. Thanks for listening! Enjoy. Deficit Pick of the Week: Three Amigos We rate and review: Annihilation Game Night Mortified Guide Mute We smoke: Black Jack Banana Diesel Green Lantern wax We open with Wait in the Care by The Breeders and close with Cocaine Blues by Johnny Cash. Follow us on Twitter @adoradio0 or @M_ADOradio or @Skip_ADO_Radio. We're a proud member of the BAT SQUAD network (www.batsquadnetwork.com). Make sure to check out the other great shows! What?

The BS Filter
War On Drugs 3.5

The BS Filter

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2018 62:43


Part five of War on Drugs series, still looking at the history of cocaine up until 1930, asking the cui bono – who benefited from the ban on cocaine? Show Notes: Johnny Cash's cover of the old T. J. “Red” Arnall song from 1947 Cocaine Blues from his live Folsom Prison album. So that's a song about a […] The post War On Drugs 3.5 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Conversations With My Dummy
CWMD 30 The Good And Evil Steve

Conversations With My Dummy

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2017 18:02


Cindy Cashdollar is a dobro player extraordinaire. She's played with Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, Willie Nelson, Leon Redbone, Peter Rowan, The Band, Paul Butterfield, and others. She won five Grammy awards when working with Asleep At The Wheel. Steve rewrote "Cocaine Blues" and made it "Caffeine Blues." She's helping him do it on this podcast. Also, there's a question whether the evil Steve and Harry have taken over the show and locked the good Steve and Harry in the closet. Did they? Stream this podcast and find out. Steve and Harry also sing a song on the piano "The Woodstock Strutter's Ball." All in all, a good time is had by all. 

Afoot!
10: Phryne with a Fringe on Top

Afoot!

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2017 72:59


Phryne Fisher Murder Mysteries - She’s smoothly sensual, a sharp dresser, and has a wicked uppercut. We travel to the Antipodes to visit with Phryne Fisher, the protagonist of a series of 20 murder mystery books and three seasons of an adaptation to television. We like the cut of her jib and the stab of her knife. If you’d like to prep before listening, we read three of the books: Cocaine Blues, our introduction to the cast, which grows and grows; Murder in Montparnasse, which fleshes out her backstory; and Murder in the Dark, which takes place on a rambly country estate and features a sex cult. We fire off the spoiler horn after our initial background discussion. Host Glenn Fleishman with Jean MacDonald, Katie Lane, Shannon Sudderth and Suzi Steffen.

Le Stream
Le Stream 547 – 1 homme sur 3

Le Stream

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2016 45:48


21 octobre 2016 Télécharger l’épisode ici Sujets: #8211; Faut pas dire présumée victime #8211; 1 homme sur trois violerait une femme#8230; Jukebox: Anabelle Thomas #8211; Johnny Cash #8211; Cocaine Blues#8230;

Bess & Erica's Rock 'N' Roll Music Hour
Episode 15 - JOHNNY CASH SPECIAL

Bess & Erica's Rock 'N' Roll Music Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2016 34:43


This month's episode is very special! 13 years ago from Sept. 12th the one and only Johnny Cash left this earth but left us with his legacy to cherish forever. This episode is dedicated to celebrating his life and music so it's all about the covers! 1. "I Still Miss Someone" 2. "Guess Things Happen That Way" 3. "Cocaine Blues" 4. "Green, Green Grass of Home" 5. "Dark as a Dungeon" 6. "Send a Picture of Mother" 7. "Egg Suckin' Dog" 8. "Ring of Fire" 9. "Jackson" and last but certainly not least, the cover song that started it all: 10. "Cry! Cry! Cry!" This is a photo of our past guest Nora Lee Hayter the oldest living relative to the Carter Family and her sister with Johnny Cash.   We sure covered a bunch of his amazing songs so we all hope you enjoyed this special show! Find ALL covers from the show on our Soundclouds and keep up with us all on my website: https://soundcloud.com/erica-case1/ https://soundcloud.com/bessielanningofficial https://www.ericacase.com

Las 6 de la mañana
Podcast: Las 6am episodio 1132, Johnny Cash

Las 6 de la mañana

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2016 21:16


Bienvenidos al milésimo centésimo trigésimo segundo episodio de “Las 6 de la mañana”, un podcast diario que trae 6 canciones, para que iniciemos el día con buena música. Nuestro invitado de hoy: «Johnny Cash» El listado para hoy es: Artista / Tema 01 – One 02 – Cocaine Blues 03 – Hurt 04 – Ring of…Continúa leyendo Podcast: Las 6am episodio 1132, Johnny Cash

White Tiger Radio
Summer Contest.

White Tiger Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2015 73:44


July was the White Tiger Radio Summer Contest. Listeners were challenged to find the hidden theme with the promise of winning a major prize. The listening audience made every effort to secure the major prize even as the hosts experienced technical difficulties which, despite promises made on the air, carried over into the podcast. No listener was able to guess the theme of the show, so the major prize remains unclaimed. "I Ain't Got No Life (I Got Life)" by Nina Simone "There's a Light" by Liz Vice "Silver & Gold (When I Get Like This)" by The Detroit Cobras "Honky Tonk Women" by Ike & Tina Turner "Lights Out" by Angel Olsen "Call It a Day" by The Raconteurs "Breakdown" by Tom Petty "I'm Out of Control" by the Milkshakes "Never Squeal" by Ween "Cocaine Blues" by the Brothers Bradford "The Big Three Killed My Baby" by The White Stripes "Tick" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon" by Queen "Crazy Ass Shit" by The Beastie Boys "Alphabet Pony" by the Kills "Breaking Glass" by David Bowie "Medication" by Queens of the Stone Age "Gin and Juice" by The Gourds

White Tiger Radio
Cover This.

White Tiger Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2015 64:29


A dozen cover songs produced specifically for this show. The artists were given a song title and two weeks to return a recording. Shanon and Jack talked about the songs, discussed the benefits of yoga and mediation, and revealed a few embarrassing facts from the past. "Little Room" by The Born Losers "To Love Somebody" by The Wayside Strangers "Love Is a Rose" by Stephanie Purtle and Chuck Masi "Whole Lotta Love" by Frankie Kimm "Nimrod's Son" by Greg Weinger "Whiskey Bar/Five to One" by Jack Miller "Cherry Bomb" by Erin Gately "Cocaine Blues" by Craig Bradford "Working Woman Blues" by Shanon Emerson "All That She Wants" by Brandon Emerson "After the Fire is Gone" by Oliver Elf Army "You Don't Miss Your Water" by Dan Blaker "Simple Man" by Erik Clampitt Individual tracks available on SoundCloud

The Church of What's Happening Now: With Joey Coco Diaz
#204 - Joey Diaz, Todd Lowe, Nick Papadakis and Lee Syatt

The Church of What's Happening Now: With Joey Coco Diaz

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2014 96:53


Joey Diaz and Lee Syatt are joined by Actor Todd Lowe of True Blood and Nick Papadakis live in studio. Both are also members of a band called LA Hottenany. This podcast is brought to you by: Onnit.com. Use Promo code CHURCH for a discount at checkout. Nature Box. Visit Naturebox.com and use promo code Joey for 50% off your first order. Naileditlife.com - Get 20% off a vapor pen by mentioning the Church. Meundies.com Go to meundies.com/joey before September 1 for 20% off. Recorded live on 08/13/2014. Music: Johnny Cash, Cocaine Blues

Caustic Soda

Kevin, Joe, and Toren cover cocaine-laced products with papal approval, cocaine intake options, some personal insight on cocaine addiction from a friend of the show, plus cocaine-centric songs and movies! In case you hadn't figured it out, this week's topic is cocaine! Music: "Cocaine Blues" by Luke Jordan Images Movies Blow Kevin: 7/10 Joe: 6/10 Toren: 7/10 True Romance Kevin: 9/10 Joe: 9/10 Toren: 8/10 Half Nelson Kevin: 10/10 Toren: 8/10 (would have been higher if I knew why it was called 'Half Nelson')

Gather Around Me
Episode 71: Cocaine Blues

Gather Around Me

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2011 29:50


Hello hello! Welcome to Episode 71 in a Series of 1000 Podvestigations by Senior Sergeant Ben Pobjie and Detective Inspector Cam Smith. In this episode: Fire Safety The French Musical Devices The Alphabet My First Joke Chickens vs. Pirates Face/Off Forrest Gump A Lovely Story About A Giraffe Enjoy it in your brain, please. 'Gards! iTunes?

Fezz
Fezz Vol.1 No.4

Fezz

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2011


Click to Play A Tribute to the Wild West.Playlist:Bonanza, Lorne GreeneMamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys, Willie Nelson & Waylon JenningsI’ll Go Riding Down, Gene Autry Cowboy Boogie, Red WoodwardYodellin’ Rambling Cowboy, Frank MarvinCowboy Stomp, Bob WillsCow Town Boogie, Ocie StockardOut on the Lone Prairie, Patsy MontanaSioux City Sue, Slim WhitmanA Little Log Cabin I Can Always Call Home, Wilf CarterAll Set And Saddled, Tex MortonCowpoke, Wylie & the Wild WestCocaine Blues, Billy HughesI Want to Be a Cowboy Sweetheart, Rosalie AllenThe Texas Cowboy, Hank SnowPanhandle Shuffle, Billy BriggsSteel Guitar Boogie, Tommy SargentGhost Riders in the Sky, Handsome NedDon’t take your guns to Town, Johnny CashMy Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, Willie NelsonRingo, Lorne GreeneTumbling Tumbleweed, Johnny BondBrimstone Rock, 16 HorsepowerOne Horse Town, Hank Williams IIIHangman’s Boogie, Caution HorseDreaming Cowboy, Sally TimmsThe Lone Rangers Got Married, Johnny RebbGhost Riders In the Sky, Slapping SuspendersCrazy Horses, Demented Are GoCowboy playing Dead, Man or Astro ManCowboy Bob, Butthole SurfersLonesome Cowboy Bill, The Velvet Underground